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0/2 resolved calls right
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companies · 805 data points
Metromile's lower prices for low-mileage and good drivers will force competing auto insurers to raise their rates.
What happened: Metromile’s lower pay‑per‑mile pricing did not trigger a widespread rate hike among competing insurers; many competitors either kept rates stable or introduced their own low‑mileage products instead of raising premiums.
Verify at source ↗Facebook will ban all political ads in 2020.
What happened: Facebook did not ban all political ads in 2020; it only introduced labeling, registration, and pre‑approval requirements, allowing political advertising to continue.
Verify at source ↗Cursor got sold for $60 billion. Andrew Wang's company, the one Scali, I got bought for $10, $11 billion. ... 14, 15. I mean, these are extraordinary. And if this company, what is it called? Instinct is the new. Instinct in town. Instinct in town.
And our way of getting to space is with the same guy we're competing against. So we have to pay him to get to space and then he's going to be meeting us up there with his data centers.
I, I, I told the founder, um, of, uh, hugging face publicly, like this is the greatest side quest ever
thanks to our partners over at google they are doing a great job with gemini i have to say i'm using gemini all the time you know they have code review and all this great stuff the api is fantastic i have to say you there was like two or three things that i had on my vacation that worked really well google local and google maps and gemini have all been tied together now so i was in france i was like i'm here right now i need the best croissant the best pan on chocolate the best hot chocolate wha
watching some of the large companies now embrace GLM five, two and Zuckerberg, which we'll get to in a moment, releasing really great open source models.
I will say on the demand side and on the pricing side, if you pull up this quick note I have here, I think Anthropics growth rate is going to slow considerably next year. And it's been obviously on a tarot. There's no way they get to a trillion in revenue next year. I think maybe they could, you know, triple get to three or 400 million. And the reason is watching startups and then also watching some of the large companies now embrace GLM five, two and Zuckerberg, which we'll get to in a moment,
maybe it's the third bucket which is if you're the board and the management you're having a debate about how to best deploy capital google has made a commitment to deploy 200 billion dollars in capex this year in ai infrastructure data center build out because of
obviously this is nothing to a company of the scale of Robin hood
2%, uh, annual management fee. And it says here, plus 20% of realized capital gains. Don't know if that's accurate or not.
they already hold stakes in 80 private companies
their focus explicitly, Y combinator startups. So competing with the folks on this call to a certain extent
they're targeting 200 million in the IPO, New York Stock Exchange, August 13th, maybe it'll go as high as 230 million.
This is a unique fund structure. It lets non accredited retail investors buy into private companies.
At Google in the early days, we would submit millions of search queries to Yahoo and Microsoft search engines to see what the results sets were. And we would compare our results against their results as a way of improving our search engine rankings and our algorithm. It was a very common technique. It doesn't mean we were stealing their algorithm. We didn't go into their servers and steal their software. We looked at the output of their software and use that to improve our software. It was bench
they created the category in 2023 dropped to 85 market share 2024 75 market share 2025
From a technical standpoint the architecture is genuinely differentiated, and that's what gives them durability. I think the criticism about margins misses the efficiency gains.
this is going to lower the prices on it
I think a really interesting way for you to expand this would be to do say skiing or biking or you know other kayaking whatever it happens to be and let people claim the water the mountain etc and then you could also do it based on I like not doing speed because again speed equals death in a lot of these pursuits like skiing but you could do completeness and so you know when I you ski a certain mountain let's say there's 50 runs how many of the runs and this might include some element of speed b
you're taking the competitive spirit you're taking the slot machine nature of apps and smartphones and you're using it for good fantastic
get away with the Apple tax for so long is because they don't compete with the app level. They're just very, very, very generous. Can I disagree here slightly, Jason,
You know who's the best company at not doing this, Turner? Is Apple. Every time Apple does their WWDC or they launch a couple of new apps, they're like, look, we have Notepad. And nobody who's using Evernote would say Notepad is an Evernote killer. It was like, they make Notepad from mom and dad, your cousin, your brother. It's the most basic thing ever. But if you look at Notepad today, 10 years in,
Great acquisition for everybody.
we don't think OpenAI or Anthropica are going to get to and interface and tools and user base.
the outcome is unknown or you get a guaranteed you know 10 20 30 million dollar package from open ai
Yeah, it became a commodity really quick.
Most AI devices are kind of chuggy. It's like, uh, an AI device. If, uh, Apple or Braun or BMW designed it, it's pretty, pretty, pretty beautiful.
I'll say like 10,000, but it's going to be a meaningless thing.
Now, April 30th, I would say zero percent chance. Polymarket Sharps say seven percent, Jason. But the thing that really caught my attention is this. June 30th, they're only handicapping a 28% chance, which means three to four times we won't have Mythos out in the market by the start of July.
today, Meta dropped their latest model and their new family. Shout out to them for pulling that off. And it looks pretty good compared to everything that came before Mythos, but it's not now state of the art.
What I will say though, about their decisions and product terms is that I think product market fit is the ultimate arbiter of entrepreneur success. And clearly no one has more PMF than Anthropic today.
A lot of folks, including YC, they don't want people, they don't want the investors to have ball control. They would rather see you do smaller rounds. They kind of advise against this.
I did something in 90 minutes. I was telling the guys about, replaced the whole software stack and like a whole bunch of workload, 90 minutes on Claude ran this agentic system, built the whole thing, deployed it.
people were like, you're going to lose your money on that one. They said that about Uber too. It's really interesting. The ideas that, and they said that about Calm, like the meditation app. Some of the greatest successes are also the weirdest non-consensus, right? So if you find yourself with 80% or 90% of people thinking your idea is dumb, it might be dumb. That's a possibility. I'm not saying that it's brilliant, but it could also be because it's so brilliant that people just are not thinking
Microsoft and Apple went out with 1,000 and 1,200 employees each and about $400 million in revenue in today's dollars, 120 million in those dollars.
the president and the administration have probably the biggest meetings of the term coming up in china in april my estimation based
the thing I've seen the, probably one of the hardest thing you had to deal with, with your employees and your team at Coinbase is the price of their housing. Like how many times did you try to recruit somebody to come to California? Yeah. And it's like a family of, you know, four and they need private school.
it's sort of like saying, oh, yeah, you know, if I were going to compete against UPS, all I need is a brown truck. You know, it's kind of obvious. Oh, actually, UPS is like a big, complicated logistics network. And same goes here. It's just that that logistics network needs to be fundamentally rethought, redesigned around autonomy. And so this is ultimately what Zipline's building. It's building an entirely new kind of logistics network with autonomy and AI and robotics at its core.
it's made a lot more sense for Zipline to be fully vertically integrated so we can own every single part of the problem and make sure that every part of the solution is ultimately designed for this next generation way of delivering.
one of the biggest thing we understood is actually kind of like a profound realization was that the aircraft was about 15% of the complexity of the solution.
It's amazing how quickly people go from like science fiction to completely normal, if not like entitled, you know, they're like, yeah, of course we have this.
most of these families are in Dallas because Dallas is where we did most of our scaling last year.
I was visiting a grandma a few weeks ago who has ordered 350 times from Zipline in the last year.
we're now delivering to public areas. So it's not just delivering to people's homes. Like you can be at a little league game and you can be like, oh, you know what? I want to get like cupcakes for the kids because we won. And people will just like place the order. And five minutes later, the product is being delivered to the GPS coordinates of your phone.
we're using something we call a droid. So the main aircraft stays 100 meters in the air, 300 feet up, so football field. And then we're using a droid secondary robot that can control its position in X and Y axis to deliver hyper accurately to any GPS coordinates.
when uber finally came to tokyo many people had heard of it before right so it's easier each city became easier
I too had Alphabet and Google. We were sitting here a year ago. Everybody thought they would absolutely get killed by ChatGPT and now we're having a discussion. Hey, ChatGPT is probably going to get killed by Google. Go Google Cloud, right?
Alphabet went from look into how crazy the year was for Alphabet from 2 trillion market cap to 4 trillion market cap this year. That's 170 billion gain, 10 billion market cap gain every day. They added 10 billion of value every day for the entire year. The pivot in AI, risk-taking, clouds growing 40%, YouTube's the number one media company in the world. It's all under one roof. I think they just crushed it, all cylinders, business of the earth.
YouTube's the number one media company in the world.
Your AI is only as good as the data it's learning from. Every huge leap we're seeing in AI development is based on refining better data sets. And guess who came up with the ideal solution for your company? That's right, my pals at Uber. Did you all know I was an early investor in Uber? Maybe you heard third or fourth. And I never talk about it, but it's true. And now Uber AI Solutions works with enterprises all over the world, helping them source, label, evaluate, and scale real world high quali
robotics was one that I think a lot of people said, that doesn't make any sense for me. $39 billion. They don't have a customer. And they said, oh, we have BMW. BMW said, oh, well, we're testing it. Then they became a customer. And you had that really good debate in the Wall Street Journal publicly and the founder coming out and showing the product to support the valuation. But that would be one where I would say, hey, maybe that valuation is supported by, you know, the revenue eventually, but i
I'm actually very happy for him and his team to be taking orders as opposed to, yeah, what the last 10 years of suffering might be like.
it might be for him after 10 years of pushing a boulder up a hill, it might be really nice to start pushing him down the hill and just releasing the spring water down the hill.
I suspect he's going to crush it with this business.
I'm guessing they couldn't get more funding for the supersonic jet and they could easily get funding for this.
I believe a lot of boom success is based on United pre-ordering some of these and paying for them.
one, he's a tremendous founder with a huge vision that's incredibly costly. That last part is the issue. We've got a lot of great founders. Not enough, but we've got a lot of great ones. And he's got a big vision. We need to see more big vision. But his vision was so big that funding it, I think, has turned out to be very challenging. And hardware takes longer than you think.
This is the seminal blog post on the subject from his above the crowd. And he's got a new book coming out. That's spectacular. But how to miss by a mile and alternative look at Uber's potential market size. This is in 2014, this, uh, NYU Business School Professor Aswath, who's, I think, goes on CNBC a whole bunch, kind of respected, but he did his whole Uber is not worth 17 billion. And we kind of all laughed at this because he estimated the value of Uber at 5.9 billion. Now we, all the smart pe
And I think for your education one, it might be people who are being displaced by AI, realizing they need to provide more value to their, for their employment opportunities. So therefore they take professional development
robotics was one that I think a lot of people said, that doesn't make any sense for me. $39 billion. They don't have a customer. And they said, oh, we have BMW. BMW said, oh, well, we're testing it. Then they became a customer. And you had that really good debate in the Wall Street Journal publicly and the founder coming out and showing the product to support the valuation. But that would be one where I would say, hey, maybe that valuation is supported by, you know, the revenue eventually, but i
I suspect he's going to crush it with this business.
one, he's a tremendous founder with a huge vision that's incredibly costly. That last part is the issue. We've got a lot of great founders. Not enough, but we've got a lot of great ones. And he's got a big vision. We need to see more big vision. But his vision was so big that funding it, I think, has turned out to be very challenging. And hardware takes longer than you think. There was another hardware company that was incredibly ambitious, that then started to do side projects and side hustles
It's incredibly low, but if it's low enough, you induce a market. And now people are like, Hey, I'm going to build a product because this is so cheap and so good, which is the inducing of a market. That's beyond product market fit. That's like gravity, you know, like, I don't want to say a black hole because that's got a negative connotation to it. Maybe it's a white hole where you create. Yeah, exactly. But you just to be able to pull people into something that the product is so good, they come
the fund that did the first round in Databricks is going to be in that plus category
one, he's a tremendous founder with a huge vision that's incredibly costly. That last part is the issue. We've got a lot of great founders. Not enough, but we've got a lot of great ones. And he's got a big vision. We need to see more big vision. But his vision was so big that funding it, I think, has turned out to be very challenging. And hardware takes longer than you think. ... So I suspect this was not done. This was done out of necessity and opportunity, but in that order.
he did his whole Uber is not worth 17 billion. And we kind of all laughed at this because he estimated the value of Uber at 5.9 billion. Now we, all the smart people who weren't in an Ivy League school or whatever, in the ivory tower teaching the course, we saw it on the inside. And here is where he basically guesses here that, you know, he would settle on 10% of the hundred billion dollar market for Lincoln town cars, as we talked about.
And I think for your education one, it might be people who are being displaced by AI, realizing they need to provide more value to their, for their employment opportunities. So therefore they take professional development
Brian was kind of grinding his teeth a little bit on the valuation I saw there. It was competitive, but that's what great founders do. They create a marketplace and then they wind up picking the investor they want anyway. So Brian probably gave him a term sheet. He created a marketplace. He got Brian to come up a little bit. Brian, you know, has to grind his teeth a little bit. But to David's point, we've never seen startups break the, you know, triple, triple, double, double, uh, SaaS revenue r
in evaluating this type of deal, it's got a lot of the things we look for at our fund. Number one, you have a serial founder, which is great. I'm assuming that some members of his previous team, Brian joined him for this adventure, taking a guess. That's absolutely right. That would be the, a team that has worked together before. So those are two of the factors we look for.
speculative valuations, you will see some, right? We had this figure, robotics was one that I think a lot of people said, that doesn't make any sense for me. $39 billion. They don't have a customer. And they said, oh, we have BMW. BMW said, oh, well, we're testing it. Then they became a customer. And you had that really good debate in the Wall Street Journal publicly and the founder coming out and showing the product to support the valuation. But that would be one where I would say, hey, maybe t
I'm sure after this announcement, 10 people called them and said, how do we get on the list? And so that's just going to be so nice for the founder.
I suspect he's going to crush it with this business.
Blake's very smart and very dogged.
I believe a lot of boom success is based on United pre-ordering some of these and paying for them.
one, he's a tremendous founder with a huge vision that's incredibly costly. That last part is the issue. We've got a lot of great founders. Not enough, but we've got a lot of great ones. And he's got a big vision. We need to see more big vision. But his vision was so big that funding it, I think, has turned out to be very challenging. And hardware takes longer than you think. There was another hardware company that was incredibly ambitious, that then started to do side projects and side hustles
But how to miss by a mile and alternative look at Uber's potential market size. This is in 2014, this, uh, NYU Business School Professor Aswath, who's, I think, goes on CNBC a whole bunch, kind of respected, but he did his whole Uber is not worth 17 billion. And we kind of all laughed at this because he estimated the value of Uber at 5.9 billion. Now we, all the smart people who weren't in an Ivy League school or whatever, in the ivory tower teaching the course, we saw it on the inside. And here
when I did the Uber investment, the late stage, you know, I wanted to sell some of my shares to Masayoshi-san.
in evaluating this type of deal, it's got a lot of the things we look for at our fund. Number one, you have a serial founder, which is great. I'm assuming that some members of his previous team, Brian joined him for this adventure, taking a guess. That's absolutely right. That would be the, a team that has worked together before. So those are two of the factors we look for. Third, this is big and ambitious, right? Like the total addressable market is anybody who wants to learn that's everybody,
ChatGPT was basically the market monopoly in AI or LLM chat interface. And it only had one way to go, which was down. Google, I think at this point has roughly 14%. So here you can see open AI is on the decline. Obviously, a little over a year ago, they were at 90% plus market share and generative AI traffic. And today, Gemini is at 14, 15%.
a startup like this needs to keep their burn low and have the right investors so you need to have like a Steve Jurvetson and I think his fund is future fund now and I think he told LPs be prepared for a 20-year whole period as opposed to the classic 10 to 15 years. Wow. So you just need to match the investor to the window and that would be what Zephyr used to do here.
The challenge with these is people aren't willing to pay for them. So, you know, with all of these you're going to really need to make sure that insurance companies are willing to pay for this kind of stuff and they tend to be a bit niche. So while it does impact everybody, the key to the success of this company is will insurance pay for it? What will they pay for it? And is it defensible? All that great stuff. So it does seem looking at their website, they do have a page about providers and the
as time goes on and you think about the efficiency of solar panels, how much they've changed in 15 years, efficiency of batteries, how much they've changed, and then autonomy and chip technology and AI. These things are going to be able to fly extremely high without pilots, without oxygen, without a bathroom, without safety concerns. You can just fly these things, you know, 50,000, 60,000 feet where there's less atmosphere and they could be real game changers and they could be flying all the tim
So a startup like this needs to keep their burn low and have the right investors so you need to have like a Steve Jurvetson and I think his fund is future fund now and I think he told LPs be prepared for a 20-year whole period as opposed to the classic 10 to 15 years. Wow. So you just need to match the investor to the window and that would be what Zephyr used to do here.
Oh, that's brilliant. Disney, when I am in charge, is going to buy the movie theaters or buy out the movie theaters.
Disney now has a clear path. Disney should buy the movie theaters. Disney. Anybody who owns Disney Plus should be able to go for $1 per seat to any Disney film.
Again, sometimes with a startup you want to skate to where the puck is going and you have five years of build time because this opportunity seems super crazy but if you can raise the money to do something super crazy like this as long as you don't run out of money. So a startup like this needs to keep their burn low and have the right investors so you need to have like a Steve Jurvetson and I think his fund is future fund now and I think he told LPs be prepared for a 20-year whole period as oppo
This is the thing, right? This is the idea that the prediction markets are so powerful is that the sharps, the people that have more information than the average person, can essentially tell the world what they think is going to happen.
I have a partnership with and I'm a shareholder in, full disclosure.
if they stop making theater releases or they do what Netflix does, which is like the token, you know, minimum to get Oscar consideration
Again, sometimes with a startup you want to skate to where the puck is going and you have five years of build time because this opportunity seems super crazy but if you can raise the money to do something super crazy like this as long as you don't run out of money. So a startup like this needs to keep their burn low and have the right investors so you need to have like a Steve Jurvetson and I think his fund is future fund now and I think he told LPs be prepared for a 20-year whole period as oppo
I think they're going to let it fly.
AMC is worth $1.2 billion. They're the largest U.S. chain by screens. And Disney's worth about $190 billion, Jason. So this would actually be a tiny deal that would be very easy to afford.
Dome, a unified API for prediction markets, great idea. They're going to need to have, if the information is public, they're going to be able to not scrape it but they'll be able to collect it but they're going to need probably permission from these markets if they want to have API access but a lot of times small ideas, things start as small ideas and it's a wedge and it opens up into something bigger. So I kind of like the idea actually. They're skating to where the puck is going.
employees need to know if you're putting aside the prediction markets, your employer, you've already signed documents that you're not going to share information.
Apple is very famous as well as Tesla and anybody who releases products on some cadence of explaining this explicitly to employees.
I have a partnership and I'm a shareholder in, full disclosure.
This would change the dynamics of everything. And then this would make Disney Plus catch up and then exceed Netflix.
Now we move over to Google. Infrastructure is taken care of and fundraising is taken care of. It's called profits. So that team over there now has but one thing to focus on. The output of their image and the output of their language models, which is spectacular.
I think he maybe thought he was part of a tighter, more narrow relationship set. And I think Sam just did, how many deals did Sam announce over from the summer till now? 574 deals.
I also think Jensen's a little pissed off at Sam Allman.
I also think Jensen's a little pissed off at Sam Allman. Okay. Tell me why. I think, you know, if you're going to offer to invest all this money and then the next week, you know, he's buying chips from AMD and, you know, dropping these other announcements. I think he maybe thought maybe he was part of a tighter, more narrow relationship set. And I think Sam just did, how many deals did Sam announce over from the summer till now? 574 deals. No, no, but it was, it was literally, I think, closer to
So Amazon brought it down a year.
So it's not that egregious.
That'd be like saying, oh yeah, that Corvette I'm talking about. You know what? We change the oil and we change the filters on it and we maintain the tires and we rotate the tires. So we think it can get another 20% of life out of it.
we had this amazing outcome, series of outcomes at a hollow. And it was a research project for several years. We put close to $40 million into this project before these results started to come in. And I'm like, holy sh**, this is the game-changing business of my career. This is the power law. And that's when I made the decision, I'm going to go all in on this and I'm going to run it as CEO.
Burry's point is incorrect on Twitter. He said the idea of a useful life for depreciation being longer because chips for more than three to four years ago are fully booked confuses physical utilization with value creation. That is incorrect. There is value creation because they are generating revenue from those chips this year, six years later. So there is, in fact, a useful life for that chip that has extended into year six. ... So it's not like they're cooking the books and recognizing some ma
Amazon is just going to be a machine they're not going to think collectively about anything other than faster deliveries at a cheaper price
going to know everything you shop on Amazon so then they could every time you're this would be super aggressive and probably trigger some antitrust stuff but imagine if they were studying your purchasing and then just taking that into account with an AI agent for like hey I can build your shopping cart for you for your groceries next week based on what I've seen you do in the past right
Microsoft investing 5 billion after just settling their open AI deal I worked out that they're going to go public and they have certain ownership and now this drops Microsoft investing 5 billion Anthropic will use 30 billion worth of Azure compute potentially so that's pretty amazing
they're very much don't want to compete on an application level with their customers they want to be a neutral third party although they do have a coding product I think they're not going to do what open AI is going to do which is try to you know invest in every single space
Microsoft investing 5 billion after just settling their open AI deal ... now this drops Microsoft investing 5 billion Anthropic will use 30 billion worth of Azure compute potentially so that's pretty amazing ... these companies want each other to succeed so I don't think they're going to be so hard nosed about individual contractual things that they're going to cause a ruckus like Microsoft doesn't want Anthropic to look weak nor does NVIDIA want Microsoft to look like it made a bad deal they wa
with them it just seemed like Google is going to run away with it for this year and they also have this massive advantage with their profit machine and the number of searches growing they can build out their CapEx yep off of profits and have from browsers gmail youtube I mean think about their data advantage gosh what is and have they come out with an agentic chrome browser yet has there been any rumor about them releasing an agentic chrome browser I
got rave reviews from some leaders who actually use it yeah at their major company so Aaron Levy likes it Stripe boys like it that's pretty good endorsement that they're seeing a difference
Based on the statement you just made, you're saying that a company is worth their historical sales numbers. And I don't think that that's how shareholders often do or perhaps should think about what they're buying, which is an ownership interest in the future of the enterprise that they're buying a piece of. When you invest in a startup, you're not saying, hey, that startup is worth what the employees did last year before they even started the company. You're making a bet on the future potential
yeah this is a uh a little bit of a complicated deal i saw bloomberg was like this is convoluted and i just read their story on it um we are going to underwrite this uh being the us government but we're going to be underwriting it with some amount of the um capital from japan uh and in return for their participation i'm unclear as to what they get but the us is going to get a 20 share in any dividends that come out of westinghouse above 17.5 billion yeah and then um if this does come to pass in
So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline. I don't think they want to chase the average return. No.
In the Series A, they do join the board. And that gives them two swings at bat. The seed fund can just make these 500K to $3 million checks. They can put 40 of those investments maybe into the $200 million fund for about $5 million on average.
So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline. I don't think they want to chase the average return. No.
In the Series A, they do join the board. And that gives them two swings at bat. The seed fund can just make these 500K to $3 million checks. They can put 40 of those investments maybe into the $200 million fund for about $5 million on average.
This could make you build a more even playing field.
It's a, I guess this is all the cameras on the car. Yeah. The new Tesla hardware stack is eight cars. And this looks incredibly real. If you showed this to a hundred people, a hundred people would say that's real. So they now have the ability to build situations for the car to navigate. And then test it over and over and over again, which is extraordinary because what are the chances that like, you know, a deer comes running out into the street in this or a dog, you know, it's like to capture th
So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline. I don't think they want to chase the average return.
In the Series A, they do join the board. And that gives them two swings at bat. The seed fund can just make these 500K to $3 million checks. They can put 40 of those investments maybe into the $200 million fund for about $5 million on average.
But WeRide and Uber have launched their robo-taxi in Riyadh.
They'll be with Grab in Malaysia and Singapore. They'll be with DD in China. They'll be with everybody.
Go check out Tonebase. It's a really great company, but I saw in their update, BFCM. So that's the time to really get a lot of sales in. So they prepare for this great rush, which is a great thing for startups to do.
In the Series A, they do join the board. And that gives them two swings at bat. The seed fund can just make these 500K to $3 million checks. They can put 40 of those investments maybe into the $200 million fund for about $5 million on average.
So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline. I don't think they want to chase the average return. No.
They'll be with Grab in Malaysia and Singapore. They'll be with DD in China. They'll be with everybody.
WeRide and Uber have launched their robo-taxi in Riyadh.
Yeah, Wave is probably under-reported on. They have tests going on in UK, which is where I think they're based.
And then, you know, your later stage investors, let's say you go to Founders Fund or Andreessen for your Series C. The first question, who's participating from the Series A and the Series B? Is Sequoia participating? Are Benchmark participating? How much is available in the C? Is that a negative signal? If they don't, if they have a growth fund. Now, the growth fund is looking at the seed fund. So, if the seed fund owned 6%, and they didn't do the Series A, now the growth fund is looking at Uber
In the Series A, they do join the board. And that gives them two swings at bat. The seed fund can just make these 500K to $3 million checks. They can put 40 of those investments maybe into the $200 million fund for about $5 million on average.
Some of the greats, you can do interactive stuff. Go check out Tonebase. It's a really great company, but I saw in their update, BFCM. So that's the time to really get a lot of sales in. So they prepare for this great rush, which is a great thing for startups to do.
So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline. I don't think they want to chase the average return. No.
Wave is probably under-reported on. They have tests going on in UK, which is where I think they're based.
So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline. I don't think they want to chase the average return.
In the Series A, they do join the board. And that gives them two swings at bat. The seed fund can just make these 500K to $3 million checks. They can put 40 of those investments maybe into the $200 million fund for about $5 million on average.
This could make you build a more even playing field.
Tesla is training on synthetic data in its FSD regime. This is a video that Tesla shared on X recently, Jason, you wanted to take a look at it. So here it is. And we'll talk about it on the other side. ... And this looks incredibly real. If you showed this to a hundred people, a hundred people would say that's real. So they now have the ability to build situations for the car to navigate. And then test it over and over and over again, which is extraordinary because what are the chances that like
So, you can look at those two, and you can see that they have discipline.
Uber teams up with NVIDIA to accelerate autonomous mobility.
Wave is probably under-reported on. They have tests going on in UK, which is where I think they're based.
Some of the greats, you can do interactive stuff. Go check out Tonebase. It's a really great company.
if it happens every two years i think it's kind of in the bucket of acceptable if you look at energy in california i would lose my energy in the peninsula gosh and you know san mateo palo alto you'd lose your electricity five times a year six times a year so i'm more worried about the electrical grid than i am about the data centers the data centers you know they've done really well at distributing and when something like this happens it's typically some router a human makes a stupid setting the
if your service is tied to one cloud that's no bueno just a good reminder for people i would say early stage startups shouldn't waste the time and money on this they should have backups but you know it is a lot to be multi-cloud you need to have a team doing that
wait a second you know we were basing it on you know the price earnings ratio what's the price earnings ratio of core weave at this point what's their debt you know you start looking at those aggressive neo clouds uh and hyperscalers yeah you just might have a come to jesus moment
i think it's kind of in the bucket of acceptable if you look at energy in california i would lose my energy in the peninsula gosh and you know san mateo palo alto you'd lose your electricity five times a year six times a year so i'm more worried about the electrical grid than i am about the data centers the data centers you know they've done really well at distributing and when something like this happens it's typically some router a human makes a stupid setting they have to roll it back but bec
wait a second you know we were basing it on you know the price earnings ratio what's the price earnings ratio of core weave at this point what's their debt you know you start looking at those aggressive neo clouds uh and hyperscalers yeah you just might have a come to jesus moment
seems acceptable i'll be totally honest like really you were okay yeah i was basing my once every six months across all clouds so it seems like they're having you know a major network outage every two years at amazon that to me seems acceptable i'll be totally honest like really you were okay yeah only because we're building this infrastructure out at such a significant pace and utilization is going up and we're still trying to keep up with uh to our first story the ai bubble all of this infrast
across multiple instances and then use you know essentially a smart router to send half the traffic to aws and a quarter of it to azure but this is infrastructure cost and it slows down your production to build this kind of resiliency into your systems but yeah it's a good warning for everybody and also warning for people to understand that um projects that seem like they're decentralized typically have a single point of failure so as much as people want to believe that things are decentralized
if you look at Sam Altman's strategy in just the last three to six months it's raise money from everyone for everything that would be a sign that we could be his his strategic approach the last six months is a sign that a bubble is building when you say i want to deploy one trillion dollars in infrastructure and then you do a deal with AMD with Nvidia and and did they do another one with another chip company yeah broad called with brockham so that those three to me with the round tripping nature
only because we're building this infrastructure out at such a significant pace and utilization is going up and we're still trying to keep up with uh to our first story the ai bubble all of this infrastructure being built out if it happens every two years i think it's kind of in the bucket of acceptable if you look at energy in california i would lose my energy in the peninsula gosh and you know san mateo palo alto you'd lose your electricity five times a year six times a year so i'm more worried
if your service is tied to one cloud that's no bueno
you could see somebody like core weave say hey we're going to take a pause
wait a second you know we were basing it on you know the price earnings ratio what's the price earnings ratio of core weave at this point what's their debt you know you start looking at those aggressive neo clouds uh and hyperscalers yeah you might have a come to jesus moment
seems acceptable i'll be totally honest like really you were okay yeah only because we're building this infrastructure out at such a significant pace and utilization is going up and we're still trying to keep up with uh to our first story the ai bubble all of this infrastructure being built out if it happens every two years i think it's kind of in the bucket of acceptable if you look at energy in california i would lose my energy in the peninsula gosh and you know san mateo palo alto you'd lose
if your service is tied to one cloud that's no bueno just a good reminder for people i would say early stage startups shouldn't waste the time and money on this they should have backups but you know it is a lot to be multi-cloud you need to have a team doing that
only because we're building out this infrastructure at such a significant pace and utilization is going up and we're still trying to keep up with uh to our first story the ai bubble all of this infrastructure being built out if it happens every two years i think it's kind of in the bucket of acceptable
projects that seem like they're decentralized typically have a single point of failure so as much as people want to believe that things are decentralized and in fact the internet is built to be decentralized that's why we're all still using the internet and zoom still worked and if zoom doesn't work you can go over to um you know google meetup or whatever they call google's product or slack huddles google media you can just move around the internet but if your service is tied to one cloud that's
if you average that out if there's been four of these in what looks like an eight-year period maybe once every six months yeah i was basing my once every six months across all clouds so it seems like they're having you know a major network outage every two years at amazon that to me seems acceptable
this happens to every provider every couple of years which means we experience these type of outages i would say on average every six months right now usually they're corrected so quickly that they fade from memory this one seems to have hit a decent swath of important services
even if people are exaggerating the numbers by a multiple uh of 2x or 3x it's still going to be a huge spend and that's a good thing for america
wait a second you know we were basing it on you know the price earnings ratio what's the price earnings ratio of core weave at this point what's their debt you know you start looking at those aggressive neo clouds uh and hyperscalers yeah you might just have a come to jesus moment
A large reason why mining and processing of the ores moved offshore was because of the regulatory environment in the United States, which made it difficult to compete with China.
Besant's comments on the price controls speak to what he calls a non-market economy, meaning that the Chinese government is intervening and creating artificial surplus in the market, which drives prices down and effectively eliminates competition. And so the Chinese push in the 90s, supported by the CCP, ultimately eradicated competition and made it non-competitive for U.S. companies. So they exited the market and now the United States finds itself completely dependent on Chinese suppliers, part
hosting their code for others to you hosting it yeah so you know just like wordpress like you could literally take the wordpress code put up a server and do all that but if you want the latest version you want faster servers you want somebody doing the security and the operations and upgrading it and installing the patches you just go with the hosted version and the cost of you uh managing your own reflection ai servers uh if you're doing something small to mid-size is greater than having the re
hosting their code for others to you hosting it yeah so you know just like wordpress like you could literally take the wordpress code put up a server and do all that but if you want the latest version you want faster servers you want somebody doing the security and the operations and upgrading it and installing the patches you just go with the hosted version and the cost of you uh managing your own reflection ai servers uh if you're doing something small to mid-size is greater than having the re
the investment in something like figure or something like open AI and then you put it into the mag 7 I don't think you'll see much difference in 10 years
they're going to be accepting 80% males
it seems like there's a younger generation who finds them to be very establishment and I think it's because they are very established right they've been around now for 20 years so it is the establishment and there's so many people applying which means more and more people don't get accepted and their best advice to you is oh we'll wait six months and apply again it's terrible
The reason I won't accept it before even hearing their next idea is three developers with an exit where I assume they're three developers. They look like developers or kind of acting like developers or dressed like developers and it's always at Y Combinator they want three people. They want two to be developers. They want multiple co-founders. They don't like idea people. They don't like pitchy people. They like hackers but they're also Indian and depending on what time period YC wasn't investin
It's pretty cold in space, as you know. And so you don't have the issue with having to cool down these. You won't have the same cooling issues that you have here. So that's pretty interesting combination. The combination of more efficient solar and you don't need to cool it down could be a big win. I'm not sure when this happens, but there are a number of startups with crazy visions like this and they're worth keeping an eye on.
the investment in something like figure or something like open AI and then you put it into the mag 7 I don't think you'll see much difference in 10 years
it seems like there's a lot of like anti YC vibes on X right now it seems like a younger generation who finds them to be very establishment and I think it's because they are very established right they've been around now for 20 years so it is the establishment and there's so many people applying which means more and more people don't get accepted and their best advice to you is oh we'll wait six months and apply again it's terrible
The reason I won't accept it before even hearing their next idea is three developers with an exit where I assume they're three developers. They look like developers or kind of acting like developers or dressed like developers and it's always at Y Combinator they want three people. They want two to be developers. They don't like idea people. They don't like pitchy people. But they're also Indian and depending on what time period YC wasn't investing in India all that often and then they started do
It's an exciting vision. I hope we live to see it.
So OpenAI is buying a lot of compute from AMD. Great. The money they're using to buy that is not AMD's money. AMD is just a supplier to them. AMD's not investing in OpenAI. Based on, yes. Unlike NVIDIA, which did invest in OpenAI, correct?
And so this is very non-traditional, to say the least.
And this deal comes on the heels of just two weeks ago or last week, Jensen putting $100 billion into OpenAI.
I saw OpenAI and AMD are doing a deal.
the investment in something like figure or something like open AI and then you put it into the mag 7 I don't think you'll see much difference in 10 years
it seems like there's a younger generation who finds them to be very establishment and I think it's because they are very established right they've been around now for 20 years so it is the establishment
but they're also Indian and depending on what time period YC wasn't investing in India all that often and then they started doing more investing in India.
The reason I won't accept it before even hearing their next idea is three developers with an exit where I assume they're three developers. They look like developers or kind of acting like developers or dressed like developers and it's always at Y Combinator they want three people. They want two to be developers. They want multiple co-founders. They don't like idea people. They don't like pitchy people. They like hackers
Well, obviously, NVIDIA and AMD are in competition. And so it's fine if you have a ton of money, and you go out and you start buying from two different suppliers. I wouldn't expect anything else, right? You want to have a competitive marketplace. So that makes total sense, right? You don't want all your eggs in one basket if you are OpenAI.
So OpenAI is buying a bunch of compute from AMD. Great. The money they're using to buy that is not AMD's money. AMD is just a supplier to them. AMD's not investing in OpenAI. Unlike NVIDIA, which did invest in OpenAI, correct?
the investment in something like figure or something like open AI and then you put it into the mag 7 I don't think you'll see much difference in 10 years
it seems like there's a younger generation who finds them to be very establishment and I think it's because they are very established right they've been around now for 20 years so it is the establishment and there's so many people applying which means more and more people don't get accepted and their best advice to you is oh we'll wait six months and apply again it's terrible
No reject it's social no.
So in 2018 SaaS was hot and sales and CRM stuff pretty hot. This seems like a small idea.
The reason I won't accept it before even hearing their next idea is three developers with an exit where I assume they're three developers. They look like developers or kind of acting like developers or dressed like developers and it's always at Y Combinator they want three people. They want two to be developers. They want multiple co-founders. They don't like idea people. They don't like pitchy people. But they're also Indian and depending on what time period YC wasn't investing in India all tha
Or maybe superintelligence, you know, takes off and we have so many jobs to run to cure cancer,
it's OpenAI securing quite a lot more compute capacity for the next couple of years.
So OpenAI is buying a bunch of compute from AMD. Great. The money they're using to buy that is not AMD's money. AMD is just a supplier to them. AMD's not investing in OpenAI.
And so this is very non-traditional, to say the least.
the investment in something like figure or something like open AI and then you put it into the mag 7 I don't think you'll see much difference in 10 years
it seems like there's a younger generation that finds them to be very establishment and I think it's because they are very established right they've been around for 20 years so it is the establishment and there's so many people applying which means more and more people don't get accepted and their best advice to you is oh we'll wait six months and apply again it's terrible
The reason I won't accept it before even hearing their next idea is three developers with an exit where I assume they're three developers. They look like developers or kind of acting like developers or dressed like developers and it's always at Y Combinator they want three people. They want two to be developers. They want multiple co-founders. They don't like idea people. They don't like pitchy people. But they're also Indian and depending on what time period YC wasn't investing in India all tha
So if, when I run Disney corporation, I'm going to give the ability for kids and their parents to write a Grogu bedtime adventure and publish it to the Disney plus site for other users to see, and then it would be a leaderboard of the best Grogu stories. And, you know, Disney would vet them and you have to be a paid user.
I said, here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features. So if you're at the chat GPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up, you click on the Mandalorian and you, it gives you prompts
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI.
that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100. And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You got a low 10 pages, you know, and so you can no longer hit their API and get a hundred pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you ca
So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time. And then getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor f
We are in the irrational exuberance era with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam.
And I said, here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features. So if you're at the chat GPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up, you click on the Mandalorian and you, it gives you pro
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI.
But another, you know, firm might have 400 people and make 125K per person, right? Or they 10X it, and they would have, yeah, if they had 400, they would have 1.25. So now you've got 400 engineers working on something, and the engineers are getting paid 500K, and they're each generating 1.25 million. It's like, this could be too profitable, right? You're not ambitious enough. Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an a
The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the browser windows. So since it's my browser and my IP address and the Mac address of, you know, my computer, it's not their scrapers going and doing things in the world.
So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them.
here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features. ... And can you imagine how much money this make and how sticky it would make your app
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. ... We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. ... If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have.
Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that money to work.
that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100. And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You got a low 10 pages, you know, and so you can no longer hit their API and get a hundred pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you ca
So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time. ... So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for
here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I l
Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.
that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100. And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You got a low 10 pages, you know, and so you can no longer hit their API and get a hundred pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you ca
So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the
if you are selling chat GPT subscriptions... I said, here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features. So if you're at the chat GPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up, you click on
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I l
Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.
So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time. ... So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for
here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features. So if you're at the chat GPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up
And you've been very cynical about this category, let's be honest. Sure. You felt it wasn't good at jokes. It wasn't good at that. So this is an honest assessment from you that it's crossing this chasm into... Absolutely. Contributing creatively.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I l
Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.
So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data.
We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have.
But another, you know, firm might have 400 people and make 125K per person, right? Or they 10X it, and they would have, yeah, if they had 400, they would have 1.25. So now you've got 400 engineers working on something, and the engineers are getting paid 500K, and they're each generating 1.25 million. It's like, this could be too profitable, right? You're not ambitious enough. Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an a
So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you can check the stock right now and pull up the stock price.
We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam.
So if you're at the chat GPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up, you click on the Mandalorian and you, it gives you prompts already.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI.
Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.
So I think the other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the browser windows. So since it's my browser and my IP address and the Mac address of, you know, my computer, it's not their scrapers going and doing things in the world.
if you are selling chat GPT subscriptions, there's two ways to go about this. ... if you're at the chat GPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up, you click on the Mandalorian and you, it gives you prompts already.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I l
It's like, this could be too profitable, right? You're not ambitious enough. Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.
that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100. And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You got a low 10 pages, you know, and so you can no longer hit their API and get a hundred pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you ca
So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data.
So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I l
But another, you know, firm might have 400 people and make 125K per person, right? Or they 10X it, and they would have, yeah, if they had 400, they would have 1.25. So now you've got 400 engineers working on something, and the engineers are getting paid 500K, and they're each generating 1.25 million. It's like, this could be too profitable, right? You're not ambitious enough. Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an a
that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100. And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You got a low 10 pages, you know, and so you can no longer hit their API and get a hundred pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you ca
So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the
I think this is the future of it. If you are selling chat GPT subscriptions, there's two ways to go about this. ... So it can go both ways, Alex. You see what I'm saying? This is why I need to be a studio head. I will be running the Disney corporation. And, uh, this will be one of the first things I do.
And you've been very cynical about this category, let's be honest. Sure. You felt it wasn't good at jokes. It wasn't good at that. So this is an honest assessment from you that it's crossing this chasm into... Absolutely. Contributing creatively.
I would sell every share you have, or I would sell 80%, get diversification for your family. Take that 80% if you believe in the category, and I would literally put it into the other players you're competing against if you really believe in that space. More likely than not, if you were to get the 10 million, spend $3 million on your house and then put the rest into index funds.
If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I literally, if I was an employee with 10 million shares, I would sell all 10 million. Why? If you have so much risk owning this stock that there could be a drawdown, there's competition. And reasonably, what's the largest comparable company here? Microsoft, Apple? Maybe it's Microsoft because they're a software company. Maybe it's Google.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares.
Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.
Midjourney was built by a bunch of rich people. And it was early, and they have a ton of revenue, and it looks like their annual revenue is 500 million, so they're making 12 million per employee. Obviously, that's not sustainable or real. It might be for them for some period of time.
The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the browser windows. So since it's my browser and my IP address and the Mac address of, you know, my computer, it's not their scrapers going and doing things in the world.
That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you can check the stock right now and pull up the stock price.
The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the browser windows. So since it's my browser and my IP address and the Mac address of, you know, my computer, it's not their scrapers going and doing things in the world.
So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them.
And can you imagine how much money this would make and how sticky it would make your app if you had a hundred photos in there of your kids doing Jedi stuff or Marvel stuff, whatever it is. Like now you unsubscribe and you lose that. No, and your kids are going to want to keep doing it. So this is the future of entertainment.
I think this is the future of it. If you are selling chat GPT subscriptions, there's two ways to go about this. ... I showed it, I think on the show, and I did it during my Nostracanis keynote. ... you're on the New York Times, you're authenticate with chat GPT. And now you have a chat GPT box. And you say, give me the earliest mentions of Putin. ... So it can go both ways, Alex. You see what I'm saying? This is why I need to be a studio head. I will be running the Disney corporation. And, uh, t
And you've been very cynical about this category, let's be honest. Sure. You felt it wasn't good at jokes. It wasn't good at that. So this is an honest assessment from you that it's crossing this chasm into... Absolutely. Contributing creatively.
If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I literally, if I was an employee with 10 million shares, I would sell all 10 million.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI.
But another, you know, firm might have 400 people and make 125K per person, right? Or they 10X it, and they would have, yeah, if they had 400, they would have 1.25. So now you've got 400 engineers working on something, and the engineers are getting paid 500K, and they're each generating 1.25 million. It's like, this could be too profitable, right? You're not ambitious enough. Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an a
The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the browser windows. So since it's my browser and my IP address and the Mac address of, you know, my computer, it's not their scrapers going and doing things in the world.
So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time. So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them.
We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam.
if you're at the chat GPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says connect your New York Times account, connect your Disney plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden those characters light up, you click on the Mandalorian and you, it gives you prompts already.
I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI.
Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.
So the cost of capital for AI companies is so cheap right now that it probably doesn't matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time. Getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training
When do you think it crosses over? Like if you were to give an honest assessment or if we were going to make a poly market and we were going to place a, you know, a bet on it, that lovable's security is twice as good as an expert, twice as good as an expert.
patients with these new platforms like Function, like Superpower, like Whoop, you can just take control of it.
And in the Whoop app, they have labs. So they're going to be adding that product. And this is the start of, you know, user-led healthcare.
I think Apple will show a competing product, not available for purchase, but a competing product to this, which is what I'll say is glasses that connect to your phone, not a big rig.
I feel like Meta did this to keep people in there and I guess spectacles to a certain extent to keep people into their ecosystem.
I think since Zuckerberg did it in a way to foster the covert recording, he put a very low LED light. And I think he did that on purpose or the team did so that you could covertly record.
I think that the TikTok deal and Ellison's role in TikTok is going to be instrumental in realizing potential future distribution.
I mean, what do you do when you're worth a couple hundred billion dollars and you're 81 years old and you're thinking about what legacy you want to leave behind, except to perhaps empower your kid to build the largest, most influential media company in history? And I think that's the story that's unfolding in front of us. Not to mention, I think that the TikTok deal and Ellison's role in TikTok is going to be instrumental in realizing potential future distribution.
Optimus is, I think, going to be the greatest product in the history of humanity.
They're installing three times as many as us per capita then. And why are they so effective at installing nuclear power plants?
Because it seems like you're looking backwards and China's looking forward.
I'm one of, you know, an early investor when it was public. I had IPO shares, literally, and I own the first Model S and I own the 16th Roadster. I'm as all in as you could get in Tesla. I have great exposure to it. I want to see everybody win.
I think the simplest way to make the bull case is if you look at the CAGR on their Maus and the conversion from Maus to DAOs, you essentially take a small minor percentage of the Facebook or Google terminal ARPU and apply it to some number of Maus DAOs three or four years from now. So if I had to guess, if you take four or 500 million Maus DAO growing at, I'm guessing, let's just be conservative. By the way, it's 700 million weekly active users, right? So then I would probably put that at like 5
The question is, is there a point at which these foundational model companies have invested too much money in LLMs where so many of their employees only understand that? And all of a sudden there are completely different ways of building these models. State space is one example, but then, you know, some new entrant decides to build a completely different kind of representation. They may also then build custom silicon for it. All of those things have yet to happen. And the reason is we're really
And if you look at the last big set of model updates, X of Grok, they didn't really meaningfully improve their separation from the last generation model on the big benchmarks that matter.
I appreciate BS. There's a lot going on. We're very busy. I actually had a really cool test tube here that we had a customer visit today. I'll go find it. The world's first true potato seed. And we are ramping up production. A lot going on. It's pretty exciting.
make hay while the sun shines
I think from a product experience point of view, this was actually a pretty big upgrade for chat GPT. And it'll give them a real advantage as people start to access it.
this market is closing on July 31st so there's no way for XAI to drop another model
So whatever's left of the WindSurf product is going to go to this Devon company. And then the talent goes to Google. But will they have a competitive product? I'm wondering.
How many of these, how many of these backdoor acquisitions have there been?
the original premise that they sold the world on with their non-profit status was we're going to make this free as a gift to humanity. It's too powerful for any one person to have therefore if everybody has it that's the way to go. Something changed along that way and people changed their mind and now we have this great paradox
the experience i had with gemini kind of gave me that impression relative even to the other ones where there were things that it couldn't do that the others were doing um but it felt like the inability was more a matter of willingness to go spend compute uh on on something that wasn't particularly complex than it was on the fundamental capabilities of the model
until we can truly simulate whole human biology in a way that is reliable enough that we would trust it to stand in for the real people it's not going to disrupt this fundamental bottleneck which is really what makes drug development a challenging endeavor so i'm more pessimistic maybe than some about the near-term prospects for this technology to transform biotech or drug development
alpha fold which was deep minds uh product that was able to computationally predict protein structures simply from knowing the sequences of those proteins and that was a true breakthrough it it built upon several decades of experimental discovery uh there was something called the protein data bank that that was trained on and so it was really an amazing tribute to 40 50 years of molecular biology and then some amazing new capabilities of ai models and demis hasabis and john jumper won the nobel
Apple, Apple being told to onshore and stop buying from China. So their supply chains being disrupted because of tariffs.
I think that Tesla probably has the, it is the best place to invest if you want to have a shot at a massive new industry. So they've got a baseline business in, in obviously the automobiles. But I think this humanoid robot opportunity is absolutely mind-blowingly ginormous. And I don't think that there's a better company on earth positioned to execute against this humanoid robotics opportunity than Tesla. So, you know, it's sort of like, I would call it a low probability, high upside, sort of ca
I think NVIDIA, to Thomas's point, I think the common thesis is it is the most protected, the durability of the business is there. But I would argue that there's actually a low probability, but very high severity risk to NVIDIA in China. There was just a demonstration last month of a one nanometer semiconductor manufacturing process out of China. I think the more that we continue to try and isolate China from a policy perspective, the more we are emboldening investment in China, meaning from the
It might be that Zuckerberg is so ambitious that he will keep everybody employed and just make his AI the best one.
You will pay 5X net net on the valuation to the ARR performance.
What Y Combinator has done is what Harvard has done. They've created incredible brands that people are willing to, um, pay for value or proceed value.
and then XAI right behind them in third place. So you put those three together. Now you're looking at 90, 90.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the next year or two, Sam Altman says, we now have an advertising product.
I think based on my firsthand knowledge, it's going to be either Gemini or open AI. I use this stuff every day and I know their release schedule.
companies like Google, companies that are making application tools like cursor, they are building in a lot of these checks and a lot of these multi model layers that resolve to a better output than you would get if you had just a single shot, single model, do a run for you.
today they're putting about two and a half tons per acre of leftover potatoes on the ground in order to grow 25 tons of potato. And with our system, you can put less than 10 grams of little tiny seed to replace that two and a half tons of potato. And it cuts out all the chemistry that's used, all the fumigants, all of the fungicides, all of the insecticides that are sprayed, that are toxic on the environment, on the potatoes that end up in our food supply deals, those all would go away by just u
And then in many crops that we work in, we're making seed for the first time, many crops, people don't realize this are not farmed by planting seed in the ground. They're farmed vegetatively. So you actually chop up leftover potatoes and put them back in the ground in order to grow potatoes... And so our system actually allows us to make seed and potato.
At the end of the day, the work we're doing at Ohalo is just trying to improve the yield and the disease resistance and the drought resistance, climate adaptation of the plants, make them more sustainable.
You take the whole genome of all those plants, and based on data, you know, about how those plants look and perform. The software would predict the series of crosses to make the specific plant that they ended up with. And you would do it all like right away. That's extraordinary. Because you're basically able to read all that software and understand what combination of genes or one way to think about is what sub programs are you putting together to make the plant that's going to have this kind o
we moved to greenhouses, now we're moving to lab, what we're calling in vitro breeding, where we actually accelerate breeding even more by doing the whole cycle in a petri dish, for example. It's really incredible. So now the predictability and the speed has gone significantly higher.
we're using tools like whole genome sequencing and these AI models to make more complicated predictions, not just about the plants, but also the crosses I want to make between two plants and the combination of genes that the AI is saying will unlock this particular feature and doing it more quickly.
that's a lot of the technology that we've developed and work on at Ohalo is trying to accelerate both the predictive power and the turnaround cycles in plant breeding, which unlocks a much more tremendous improvement in yield across many, many different crops.
We use it in production at Ohala. So we actually use it to look at the plants in our breeding system. We feed the whole DNA sequence of every plant in, and that model will tell us, hey, these genes are dysfunctional or may have issues, and that gives us a score for that plant before we've even phenotyped that plant.
I'm doing kind of a full day away and we're going to go through actually systematizing how we are going to work with individuals in the organization to try and make the organization more AI first. What are we going to ask of people? How are we going to demand outputs from them?
I really like this idea of challenging people when they ask for headcount about why they can't use AI to do the things that they are asking for the individual to do. That I think needs to be built in culturally into organizations to help managers, help leaders, and even help individuals figure out, hey, wait a second, I never thought about using AI to solve this problem, like designing a greenhouse or, you know, designing a new lab layout or things like that.
every employee at the company came and we did a sit down, taught him how to use cursor and then said, pick a business problem that you're dealing with at work, whether you work in the lab or whether you work in the greenhouse or whether you work at a desk and come up with an app, a web app, and then you're going to create and deploy that web app by tonight.
It was so important when we had these breakthroughs. I said, we can't mess this up. I'm really committed to making sure this company succeeds. I have to make sure it reaches its potential. So I stepped in in November of 23 as the full-time CEO.
Ohalo is just a very special company that had these very important breakthroughs where we changed how plants can be used for plant breeding using CRISPR-type tools. So that's created a new system for plant breeding, unlocks tremendous yield potential, which is the key driver for agriculture, and unlocks the ability to make seed in crops where you can't make seed. And so the general kind of storyline is this becomes a huge game changer for the entire key of agriculture.
It must be a weird experience to meet the bureaucracy in a company that you didn't hire.
And this will have a very deep impact on the bottom line. Uh, if we can show the markets, Hey, we're doing more with less. We're growing 10% a year or whatever they're growing while cutting 600K salaries.
They definitely have the best models in many domains. I would say that the Cogen models from Anthropic are really good, but in many other domains, including general information and chat, I think Gemini is exceptional. So what is the problem? The problem is that they were effectively at 99% share. And now we were always just waiting for that shoe to drop, which is where they started to go from 99 to something less than 99.
i'm going to take the other side of it i think it's like it is too clever in the same way the united states of america was too clever people are like what are you doing why do all these like states have these state rights and how are you going to divvy up rights between the states and you know it turns out like sometimes if you do things that are not efficient and then you gain some other other qualities like resilience or competition and so one of the great things about the united states is lik
I do think Perplexity is going to have a differentiation issue when, you know, you start to see people get into the habit of chat, GPT, uh, grok, when they're in Twitter, Facebook's, you know, AI, when you're in those things, it's, you know, standing up and getting a hundred million, 200, 300 million people to pay for a product. Other people are giving away for free. So it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard.
But Perplexity seems pretty good at these, um, deals.
Um, and I think because the stock went up over these two or three days, um, which probably has, you know, a lot to do with the overall market rally this week when Trump back down from tariffs.
You know, sometimes these things are more, um, sloppiness than intent, sometimes it's explicitly intent. So I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt because I found it really quick.
So I had found the unsubscribe button. And I found the Uber One area where it showed I'd save $1,600 on 87 Uber Eats orders and 154 rides. Now, that's what my savings were. So it looks like I'm saving five bucks on every ride and 10 bucks on every delivery.
You would invest in them. You would create the cursor venture arm of the company. Like there's all kinds of creative things you can do to just solidify your position. Cursor labs where you do like weird hackathons and you invest in companies.
TAM can expand two ways, horizontally, vertically. You get more users, you get more features.
You know, I guess there's a couple of different ways to look at this. They probably did a study of the space and they said it's worth buying either the number one, number two, or number three player. So let's open up discussions with those folks and, um, we'll just sequentially go through
If the founder tweets, you know, this is not a test and the BMW says it isn't, it is a test. Then the person who bought the shares at 39 billion can get a lawyer and then say, Hey, I want my money back because you said it wasn't a test. BMW said it is. That is the ultimate, ultimate way you can buy shares in a company with an option to get your money back.
Like BMW is their number one customer. Right. This raise is happening because of that BMW relationship. When you look at those SPVs, the people investing in the SPVs, are investing because they're seeing those tweets from the founder.
figure at 39 billion does not make a lot of sense to me. That's a pre revenue company, right? Yep. So that's the one that stands out.
Anthropic is at 61 billion. Is that the share price or is that the market cap?
You have proprietary language models. That's open AI. And I believe Claude and Brock are all closed. Right. And they're the top three and Gemini is closed. Those are your top four.
the reason some of these are famous, like SpaceX and Stripe is because they've been private for so long. Both of those have been private for well over 10 years now. Those two companies have been private for a long time, which means they have a large number of shareholders. They've got a large number of shareholders because they have so many employees. Employees vast over four years, typically. If a company like Stripe is 12 years old, you might have an employee who has had three different grants
it seems. I mean, they're a decade behind, but it's viable. It's nowhere near what SpaceX is doing,
google is not going to go down without a fight and i don't think google with their money printing machine needs to charge for these things i'm paying for gemini i don't actually know why they're charging me they should just make it free as part of google docs you know they should know i'm a high-end customer in terms of google ads and probably make it free so there's just going to be massive downward pressure to the point at which somebody will jump the gun like youtube did
Well, these things make you 20% better. I think we all know it's low double digits in terms of productivity might be 10 for some developers might be 30 or 40% might be different based on the project or the day of the week
the maps waymo tesla zoops ain't nobody gonna get that right in texas i can tell you that y'all
the maps waymo tesla zoops ain't nobody gonna get that right in texas i can tell you that y'all
having it stay in the lane and having it stop before a bicycle goes across it we we know it's going to do that 100 of the time so congratulations humanity tesla waymo everybody in between who's making self-driving technology people who are making breaking technology less people are going to die
if it's true it seems like that would be really great revenue growth i'm assuming this is not for the consumer product this is for the api and that they've seeded the consumer product race to chat gpt and gemini and grok
it's just a y combinator knockoff
xai is doing something interesting which is i think they get x's corpus which is a huge advantage so the huge advantage is what i was talking about on glenn back today the huge advantage is if you have a real-time data source giving you information and so whoever's got real-time data whether it's reddit or x or facebook they're going to have such a huge huge llm advantage
Okay. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is everywhere from self-driving cars, medicine, and just business efficiency, right? We're all using it all day long. And if it's not in your industry yet, it's obviously coming and it's coming fast. You need to get ahead of this giant wave of computing and innovation. But as you know, you're going to need a lot of compute power. You're going to need a lot of speed. So how are you going to compete without your costs spiraling out of control? Well,
And they're standing on the shoulders. I assume you would agree of SpaceX, which showed, you know, Hey, you can, you can have the government as a client and it will work out pretty well. And you can actually make things that kick ass that they didn't ask for that they will eventually buy from you. And all my friends who are SpaceX, venture capital, his investors, founder fund, et cetera, they're feeling pretty good about the investment now. So it's kind of a big unlock.
this is a 10 plus year old startup that basically if you're a startup company and you want to do transactions you use stripe for example the all-in startup uses stripe to pay for the tickets and then we give these guys for some reason a half million dollars every year no discount they don't sponsor the event and uh they're making a fortune they got 10 000 employees and uh the company changed the world
as we just saw at the beginning of the program with lovable so when you start using lovable.dev i wonder if it was it when it did mine it said i'm looking i'm using zero fasting as inspiration and i was like oh okay well that's interesting it basically did a search in its reasoning are there other fasting apps out there what can we learn from them what are their features and then it probably did a scrape of somebody at zdnet or cnet doing a review of zero fasting and what features they highlight
the best part of this is the fact that sam maltman was supposed to be doing open source he made it a closed source company he stole everybody's data got caught red-handed he's being sued by the new york times for all that and now the chinese have come and open sourced all the stuff he stole and he's got a real competitor on the original mission of what opening i was supposed to do so i have zero sympathy for him or the team over there i'm glad that this is all going open source it should have be
it's a boondoggle get it together guys it's ar it's all ar it's those um you know ray-band uh glasses they created what are they called again the um i forget the name of them but they look like ray-bans and they had the little camera in them and so you know actually looking at what consumers want to do take pictures of their kids feed their social media like that is the killer um use case for glasses right now and playing video games is not the killer use case and those glasses are becoming obta
dgi drones like the tick tock ban is a major issue that we should all be aware of because dgi drones are made in china and they could very easily be sending all the information they've got back and maybe there's like a zero a day exploit you know where all the drones could be controlled or taken over at a certain point
drones were a major investment category a major startup category that kind of died down when dgi took over the space and won all the hardware that you know consumers buy
when i had a board issue at founders fund and there were some board members that did not like my strategy they had issues with what i was doing with the company at climate corp at the time founders fund actually stepped up and protected me and they got the board the rest of the board together to protect me uh in a way that was like actually at a very kind of crucial moment for the for the business and as a result we had a massive exit within a year
founders fund they have this kind of mantra they find great founders and just get out of the way let them run and they don't want to be helpful that's not their objective they feel like if they have to be helpful it's not the kind of founder
microsoft has way more individual holders through index funds
meta would not be where it is right now facebook you know that well if they hadn't gotten instagram
meta would not be where it is right now facebook you know that well if they hadn't gotten instagram
i think it'll be more like salesforce or microsoft or google or amazon getting off the sidelines because they've looked at and said you know what the juice ain't worth the squeeze we might as well put our efforts and our capital into buying big hardware and building new products and services but if they think hey i got a chance of pulling this through i'm sitting on all this cash what if i hit another youtube and instagram
if they didn't get youtube it would be a completely different picture for that company right now
multiple i think it'll be more like salesforce or microsoft or google or amazon getting off the sidelines because they've looked at and said you know what the juice ain't worth the squeeze we might as well put our efforts and our capital into buying big hardware and building new products and services but if they think hey i got a chance of pulling this through i'm sitting on all this cash what if i hit another youtube and instagram you know really great acquisitions that were transformative for
i think it'll be more like salesforce or microsoft or google or amazon getting off the sidelines because they looked at and said you know what the juice ain't worth the squeeze we might as well put our efforts and our capital into buying big hardware and building new products and services but if they think hey i got a chance of pulling this through i'm sitting on all this cash what if i hit another youtube and instagram
NVIDIA's biggest risk right now to me isn't a lack of financial, not hygiene per se, but just like clarity, but it's the massive dependence it has on a couple of customers. So for example, customers A, B, C, D and E in its SEC filings, these are your alphabets, your Microsoft, your Amazons and so forth. Just the top four customers of the company in its last quarter were 25, 36, 46% of its, um, total revenue.
Now I do agree that core weave and Lambda and the other GPU clouds that are, you know, borrowing up to 11 billion, as the FT said are sending material money to NVIDIA. But NVIDIA is not underwriting the debt in question. So that's actually not a round tripping concern.
NVIDIA's biggest risk right now to me isn't a lack of financial, not hygiene per se, but just like clarity, but it's the massive dependence it has on a couple of customers. So for example, customers A, B, C, D and E in its SEC filings, these are your alphabets, your Microsoft, your Amazons and so forth. Just the top four customers of the company in its last quarter were 25, 36, 46% of its, um, total revenue.
I do agree. There is a hygienic point to be made about NVIDIA investing in smaller companies and then having those companies purchase its hardware. But I just don't think the sums in question scale to the point of being a concern to make NVIDIA a quote, quote, house of cards.
I do agree that core weave and Lambda and the other GPU clouds that are, you know, borrowing up to 11 billion, as the FT said are sending material money to NVIDIA. But NVIDIA is not underwriting the debt in question. So that's actually not a round tripping concern.
They were under a serious lawsuit. I think they would have shut down.
To be more specific, you don't want it to have feet.
And we can talk about why this is so important in this segment, but technically, the achievement of this skyscraper falling out of the sky and perfectly aligning itself to go into that chopstick catching device, it is an absolute marvel of human ingenuity. And the work and the effort that people put into this over several decades, it's just such an incredible feat.
We're going to go to Mars because of this
And, uh, I think this is the game changer. Yeah. That I've been waiting for. So. Yeah. Congratulations to the team over there and, you know, just using a one all the time and seeing it show its work of what it's doing has been extraordinary for me. I have been doing so many interesting, um,
And then I'm very excited about Oh, one I've been using chat GPT Oh, one version to the point at which it gives me like a warning about credits, you know, and says, Hey, you gotta take a pause. That's how often I'm using it. Uh, so it's really amazing.
And then they started using it for commuting where they might have previously taken a bus and they said, well, I'll go point to point because I can afford it because it's eight bucks.
However, you know, just doing back of the envelope math, there are a billion rides a day in the U.S., a billion rides a day in the U.S., a billion rides. Of those rides, about 12 million of them are Lyft and Uber. So, but 3%, 2% of rides in the U.S. are done by ride sharing. It is a minuscule amount of the overall rides. And we're not even taking into account when you do that math, of course, public transportation and other forms of transportation, bicycles, et cetera. So there's a big pie here.
I think he said he could have those cars being manufactured. He, he, he, it was interesting because he was like kind of 20 and I'll say 2026, but maybe 2027. He kind of hedged a little bit there, which kind of, and maybe that's why the stock went down a little bit because maybe people want everything yesterday. But the truth is you got to get this right. Right. And when you do, they have the ability to produce, I think they did 1.9 million cars last year. So he does have the ability to produce t
So it works in a controlled environment. So on a grid system, it's ready to go now, but you have regulators and regulators, you know, they like steering wheels.
needs somebody to be in the back you know with the safety harness on taking the packages and when it gets to a donation jumping out ringing the bell putting the package taking the picture and leaving
I don't think that these big companies are bad just because they're big... there is a tremendous benefit to be gained from the R&D dollars that they put into things that move the whole industry forward.
yeah yeah yeah no yeah back in the day he was like literally meeting with phone vendors about a facebook phone and if even if they had just done it and it had five percent market share right now i
the bull case would be that the moat in the business with respect to model performance and infrastructure gets extended with the large amount of capital that they're raising they aggressively deploy it they are very strategic and tactical with respect to how they deploy that infrastructure to continue to improve model performance and as a result continue to extend their advantage in both consumer and enterprise applications the api tools and so on that they offer and so they can maintain both ki
I think he was lamenting a little bit. They were early into robotics before AI was there.
It seems to me that open source has won so much of the problem space in computing that it's odd to me that all of the self-driving companies and projects are closed. Whether it's Tesla, cruise, Waymo, um, or any number of them.
I know that was like a big controversy for them when I had mentioned it previously, they seem a little bit upset about like people even discussing that there could be interventions or crews. And then what are the interventions that are occurring? I think some transparency there would be good.
It seems to me that open source has won so much of the problem space in computing that it's odd to me that all of the self-driving companies and projects are closed. Whether it's Tesla, cruise, Waymo, um, or, or any number of them.
The world's most trusted driver.
he's, he's done a decent job, solid job. Profitable.
can you imagine spacex if, if Elon went to aerojet rocket dine for engines? Yeah. Like Merlin's is like, how many do you want all of them? Right. It would take them five years to decide whether they wanted to do it, let alone to go invent and move with their speed.
Satya Nadella, Sundar, Nikesh, Tim Cook, a great example. There are some really great leaders that have run organizations that are already scaled and then taken them to an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude beyond where they were when they step in.
elon was an investor in tesla and trying to fix it because martin and the other guy were driving into a cliff and he had just started spacex
I do think that there's a lot of value unlock in YouTube. So if Google were to just generally spin out YouTube, that is probably a business that on its own would attract an investor base that might otherwise not want to get into the conglomerate. ... YouTube certainly seems like an unlock.
YouTube, 34 billion, growing 15%. A little volatile because it's advertising that doesn't include premium YouTube TV and that stuff. But oh my Lord, YouTube is up to 2.7 billion monthly active users. World population is 8.2. So quite significant. Netflix has 38 billion in revenue. They're worth almost 300 billion. So that's an interesting corollary.
Being big can be very good in the sense that it can drive an ability to invest in innovation that is not possible without the scale and the significant cash flow that's being generated by being that big.
And they will lose one third of their revenue to that new company. Now, of course, they'll get it back in the equity, but then they don't have it because about a third of searches are mobile now, and that's increasing.
So they were both created to avoid third parties blocking access to Google search. That's why they were both started. ... So Android was all about making sure that the handset manufacturers didn't basically default consumers to do search and use the internet in a way that would disadvantage Google. ... And Chrome, similarly, you know, Google originally supported Firefox and gave a lot of money to Firefox. And then Firefox just wasn't moving fast enough. So Google started hiring Firefox engineers
The challenge is the way YouTube's infrastructure operates, it operates on shared infrastructure with the rest of Google services. So does cloud, so does search, so does AdWords. So there's one common cloud infrastructure that everything runs on. And then there's one common advertiser pool, there are dedicated advertising salespeople within YouTube. But there's also dedicated shared infrastructure on advertising between YouTube and search and AdSense and so on. And there's ad sales teams that ac
I do think that there's a lot of value unlock in YouTube. So if Google were to just generally spin out YouTube, that is probably a business that on its own would attract an investor base that might otherwise not want to get into the conglomerate. And you know, there's always this notion of what's called a conglomerate discount. When you put a lot of different businesses together, the businesses in aggregate get valued less than the individual parts would be valued on their own, because different
Cloud, 40 billion in revenue, growing 30%. YouTube, 34 billion, growing 15%. A little volatile because it's advertising that doesn't include premium YouTube TV and that stuff. But oh my Lord, YouTube is up to 2.7 billion monthly active users. World population is 8.2. So quite significant. Netflix has 38 billion in revenue. They're worth almost 300 billion. So that's an interesting corollary. You got Waymo doing 50,000 paid trips a week now, 2.5 million a year, and that's growing quite nicely.
I'm obviously uh still a big shareholder at uber and believe in the company
The management in this company has not changed. The return profile on cash invested and cash returned has only improved since he put money in. They're generating more cash flow. They're offering more dividends. They're doing more stock buybacks.
with 80-90. It's been one of the joys of my career to actually start a company in the middle of what I think is the most important wave that I've ever seen professionally since social networking. And I jumped into the middle of that wave. And I kind of tried to ride the best wave I could there. I'm doing it here. But my honest takeaway, after being in this thing now for, you know, seven months intensely, and I'll be into it for as many years as it takes to build a successful company, is that AI
So, you know, what can I do to accelerate this cloud outcome, given the risks, the challenges, the slowdown with respect to the core consumer business, cloud and AI based tools really is where it's at. And so Google's asking this important strategic question, I would imagine, what can we do to accelerate outcomes in the cloud? And what can we do that is going to be big enough to matter? And what can we do that is going to pass antitrust muster, so we can actually get it through antitrust authori
Now, in the last year, if you kind of look at, or even if you look at the last quarter annualized, Google's generating currently about $60 billion a year in free cash flow as an overall organization, Alphabet is. And they have over 100 billion in cash.
Well, GCP in the last quarter did 10.3 billion in revenue, which is up from 8 billion in revenue the year before, in the same quarter the year before. And importantly, in this past quarter, they're running at a $1.2 billion operating profit out of GCP. So, you know, if you kind of think about what cloud margin should be over time, and kind of call it 20 to 30% margin, this cloud business could be generating 20 to $30 billion a year of free cash flow.
This is obviously an absurd premium
They're going to hit, gosh, in the first half, they did almost 20 billion. So they're on a run rate of $40 billion this year. Last year, they did 33. Back in 2017, they only did four.
Google's cloud revenue growth has been absolutely stunning.
you got my combinator over here doing 500 bets and then they've got like a little bit of like they put their extra 350 in at the note so they're kind of getting themselves 10 12 of a company it seems like
you know illegally against their terms of service you know and just having somebody show up and buy it and deliver it because there's demand pent up there yes but you're going to get a legal letter the second you get to the thousandth order you know you're going to get to the thousandth order real
They put the sensors in every car, whether you buy FSD full self-driving or not, the sensors are in there. So they could be in shadow mode.
a company like uber which i track a lot uh for obvious reasons they've had a flat number of employees for like three years while growing 30 percent right
GameStop finished the year, 2023 fiscal year, with sales of $5.3 billion down from $5.9 billion the year before. So sales declined by 12% in the year. Adjusted EBITDA for the year was $65 million. And they have about $1.2 billion in cash. Currently, as of today, the market cap is about $13.5 billion. So that makes it about a $12.5 billion enterprise value. $12.5 billion divided by $65 million of EBITDA means that this stock is currently trading at about 192 times EBITDA. A business that is profi
I think that the Cisco analogy, it's a pretty different situation, because Cisco evolved the business to become much more enterprise centric. And they were able to run an M&A process like we see with enterprise software, where they could acquire and roll up lots of different product companies and sell into their enterprise channels to do a lot of cross selling.
If you look at NVIDIA's revenue, they did $26 billion of total revenue in the quarter, 22 billion of which was data center, and about 40% of that was from the top four hyperscalers. So a full one third of NVIDIA's revenue in the quarter came from I believe it's Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. ... So I think that they're gonna have less maneuvering capability than Cisco had in the future. And obviously, there's this deep concentration risk, which is going to be deeply challenging.
with our system not only can we make potatoes higher yielding and make them disease resistant what we also make is perfect seed so farmers can now plant seed in the ground which saves them about 20 of revenue takes out all the disease risk and makes things much more affordable and easier to manage for farmers so it creates entirely new seed industries
fertilizer use per pound produced should go down significantly
is it more expensive no it's it's actually cheaper so higher yield lower cost
we're going to be applying this boosted technology that we've discovered across nearly every major crop worldwide it'll both increase yield but it will also have a massive impact on the ability to actually deliver seed and help farmers and make food prices lower
the boosted offspring had 682 grams of potato the yield gain was insane
the data is ridiculous like the yield on some of these plants goes up by 50 to 100 percent or more just to give you a sense like in the corn seed industry breeders that are breeding corn are spending three billion dollars a year on breeding and they're getting maybe one and a half percent yield gain per year with our system we are seeing 50 to 100 percent jump in the size of these plants it's pretty incredible
if we could do that then all the genes from the mother and all the genes from the father would combine in the offspring rather than just half the genes from the mother and half the genes from the father and this would radically transform crop yield and improve the health and the size of the plants which could have a huge impact on agriculture because yield the size of the plants ultimately drives productivity per acre revenue for farmers cost of food calorie production sustainability etc
we're going to be announcing what ohalo has been developing for the past five years and has had an incredible breakthrough in which is basically a new technology in agriculture and we call it boosted breeding
i think it's become quite apparent that there's an evolution underway in model architecture... we're moving away from these very big bulky models... towards a system of models... this multimodal system leverages several models at once... i think this is the first step of open ai taking that architectural approach with gpt4o... there was some criticism that gpt4o actually made the model worse but stanford's independent benchmark shows it outperforms gpt4... it still underperforms cloud3 opus
they made an overview but because they're in a very fragile relationship with publishers they gave a carousel at the bottom of their sources they didn't quote them
our deal flow is second only to y combinators we're getting 20 000 applications for funding now
it's not uber lyft waymo tesla versus each other and they're all fighting it out it's that group every year taking 10 billion rides from people driving themselves
waymo has decided they want to put their vehicles into the uber network
i don't think it's actually taking away from uber lyft i think it's just taking away from people driving any service driving themselves and that's what's going to go away as car ownership is going to go away to car rentals
i think he'll just get as many rides as uber over some period of time but i don't think it's actually taking away from uber lyft i think it's just taking away from people driving any service driving themselves and that's what's going to go away as car ownership is going to go away to car rentals
what's happening is it's not taking away from uber or lyft in my mind it's taking away from car ownership and public transportation as well as the dog fight between the ride sharing services
corporation yeah whatever they say whatever you think you should not trust them they can dump your search history
google has your search data instagram and tick tock have their algorithms watching what you look at what you like etc that could be very revealing people have complained before like oh my god i'm suffering from depression or i have cancer like the health stuff comes to prominence very quickly oh my god they have these searches i did etc that's why people should use things like the brave browser
there's this concern that i want to give my information to open ai or microsoft or some other third party that's no bueno for me
adding to it millions of cars a year yes but 10 of those decide to put in the network which seems like a pretty good number to start yeah 10 of a couple million cars three four five hundred thousand cars very significant put them into the network they start doing you know five rides a day we
if you can do your part to basically get off these grids use somebody like palmetto or somebody else and just get solar tesla and be done with it
i think the optimus has the highest alpha but the highest beta so you know more upside than anything else just unclear how you get there what the path is and the capital requirements and i think there's going to be a lot of commoditization in this space but the ride sharing is built in it's low beta and significant alpha
i think that google will open source their models
So while it might seem to be, in the short term, not wise to tell your competitors, like Google or Amazon, AWS, they're all watching the open computer project, they see some great innovation in maximizing storage or reducing heat, you know, in a server rack, and they take it, quote, unquote, steal it, and they leverage it. Well, that's a bummer, right? You just lost an advantage. But for every 10 things they give away, the concept here is they might get back 20, 30, 40, you know, a multiple of i
So they looked for tweets of people who on average were eight or ten year old accounts with decent follower accounts and two out of the first three citations. So I actually think they probably are using a really good algorithm. We'll ask Elon to do this.
And I think there was, um, and this is where the blue checks, uh, decision that Elon made. And I understand why he made that as well. It was like a two tier system of like, these are the elites. And then these are the P you know, the peasants. There was something beautiful about the blue check mark system, which at least you knew it was who you said it was gonna be. And the blue check mark system means, you know, it's a paid person. They have a credit card in the system or they're paying on thei
what Elon did going for free speech is the greatest mitzvah you could do for humanity and democracy, but there is a price for it. And the price is you have a lot of anonymous accounts.
the data on Twitter or X formerly known as Twitter has a huge advantage. It's real time, but it's going to take the model a long time to understand what's spam in that system, because Elon made a very brave decision.
Their mini Coke is better than the two liter bottle that OpenAI is.
Incredible. Yeah. Somewhere Atari, 80 year old Atari engineers are banging their heads on the wall.
I think you could look at this as being a culture of entitlement that let folks feel that our employees, that they have permission to stage sit-ins and behaviors like this because Google is so infinitely tolerant and giving employees the space and the room to do whatever they want to do. And all of their wishes and demands can be met and will be met if they demand it strongly enough.
this is a very natural fit into google's advertising business and taking all of the leads from advertising and better converting them and giving your sales team the tools they need to convert those leads into customers so it makes great strategic sense
impact they'll get from selling crm services not that impactful to the business
my guess is by going to Google, they're probably going to get paid instead of having to pay someone else for the technology. Because Google will realize some benefit from getting users over to search results and seeing ads. So Google will probably benefit and pay them instead of them having to go pay someone for access to some technology that consumers might want access to.
One's a mechanical engineer and one's a computer scientist. They're not fungible that way.
I think that they're being petty.
Or if they do, they shut that down immediately, get rid of the website, scrub as much information as possible.
ten thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars like tableau level stuff and it's all been cracked and it's available and uh it was kind of funny i bought a couple of cds there just to you know give them to the engadget folks and be like hey look you can just buy this stuff but yeah nobody pays for windows as an example in china windows is basically free there and i think that's why a lot of subscriptions are happening but it's a give and take right yeah
that may solve the lawsuit and Elon may drop the lawsuit, but it's opened a can of worms with respect to tax and structuring that's much bigger than just open AI. It's the entire nonprofit industry. It's a tax problem for every new company.
Those emails have already been leaked. There was this thing where in the OpenAI emails that were leaked, they talked about being able to swap this phantom equity in OpenAI into either YC equity. And then Elon said, oh, maybe SpaceX too, but I'll have to figure that out.
The real question for me still remains, what other nonprofit and charitable work does the OpenAI 501c3 actually do? And if the answer is nothing and it's just a shell nonprofit and under it, the only thing that it owns is a for-profit interest, then I think there's a real question on what's the activity.
So I think the test in the courts will likely end up being, look, it's totally reasonable to have a for-profit entity to fund a for-profit entity. Other non-profits have done it, particularly when you need to attract billions of dollars of outside capital to make it work. The real question is, does the non-profit still do non-profit stuff?
I think that this argument really kind of ties into what happened with OpenAI, and you can see it in the email exchanges with Elon, where he was so prescient, and I give Elon extraordinary credit for this, that he saw that this is going to take billions of dollars a year of investment to realize the pursuit that OpenAI was going after. And there was no way that Elon was going to be able to generate that cash himself or that Reed or others were going to just be able to pony up that money. They ne
I think we're all ignoring the documents that OpenAI put out yesterday showing emails and interactions with Elon, where Elon acknowledged and recognized the necessity of having a for-profit subsidiary that could pursue the interests of the foundation by raising billions of dollars of outside capital. I think it's a really interesting set of facts that provides a different light on the story, and it was really important that OpenAI released it.
all google needs to see is 300 500 basis points of change and the market cap of this company is going to get cut in half
internally employees are now banging the table a story i a story i heard this week was that someone stood up in a meeting and said a couple of weeks ago if i had stood up in this meeting and said we can't show black people in the image generation at the rate that we're showing i would have been cast a racist and i didn't have permission to do that inside of the organization but today and everyone's like you're right you would not have been able to stand up in the organization and say that but al
google stock which currently is trading at just 17 times 2025 consensus earnings which is cheaper than all the other big tech companies by far and it's still growing core business is growing cloud is growing 20 search is growing 15 all these other businesses youtube's growing 20 a year it's a growth business that's very profitable and um it's trading at a very cheap discount so there's you know of the bull case is now's a great time to buy because it's so cheap and there could be this moment whe
the real threat to google is more are they in a position to maintain their search monopoly or maintain the chunk of profits that that drive the business under the threat of ai are they adapting and less so about the anger around woke and dei because most of the investors i spoke with aren't angry about the woke dei search engine they're angry about the fact that such a blunder happened and that it indicates that google may not be able to compete effectively and isn't organized to compete effecti
there's you know three businesses inside of google there's you know search and ads there's youtube and there's cloud and the rest of it is kind of noise and to give you a sense of how big these businesses are right youtube did 10 billion a quarter roughly cloud did 10 billion a quarter they have this devices business and subscriptions business does about 10 billion a quarter and then search does about 50 billion a quarter and the margin on search is much higher than any of those other businesses
frankly i've spoken to a lot of folks who are investors in google over the last week and a lot of folks are just deeply frustrated and angry um on a number of fronts
it's largely not true for tesla and facebook because they don't have clouds
so here well i mean let me just start with this important point if you look at where that revenue is coming from to chamath's point it's coming from big cloud service providers so google and others are building out clouds that other application developers can build their ai tools and applications on top of so a lot of the build out is in these cloud data centers that are owned and operated by these big tech companies the 18 billion of data center revenue that nvidia realized is revenue to them b
there's a really great accounting and m a environment driver here that's causing the big cloud data center providers to step in and say this is a great time for us to build out the next generation of infrastructure that could generate profits for us in the future because we've got all this cash sitting around we don't have to take a p l hit we don't have to acquire a cash burning business and you know frankly we're not going to be able to grow through m a because of antitrust right now anyway so
the 18 billion of data center revenue that nvidia realized is revenue to them but it's not an operating expense to the companies that are building out so this is an important point on why this is happening at such an accelerated pace
i don't think anything's changed on the nvidia front there's this accelerated compute build out underway in data centers everyone's building infrastructure and then everyone's trying to build applications and tools and services on top of that infrastructure the infrastructure build out is kind of the first phase the real question ultimately will be does the initial cost of the infrastructure exceed the ultimate value that's going to be realized on the application layer in the early days of the i
10 trillion dollars potentially for people in the audience to understand what this context window
the compute build out is underway so this is going to continue for some time i think the real question that keeps getting asked is you know when do you really see the tides recede and what's what's there the compute build out is underway but are we seeing application and productivity gains associated with the capability of that compute some would say yes some would say no but you've got to build out the infrastructure if you're going to assume that there's going to be these productivity gains in
namespaces but like this is the same thing that happened with nest you know like you want to use google docs with nest you can't do or whatever google home yeah yeah it's just the interoperability
at google docs yeah and then i try to use google fi it's like no you have to have a gmail account use your personal gmail it's like you're taking your best customers and you're making us jump through goddamn hoops so now if i want to use google fi on my org you're making me tell everybody to use their personal ones and then i don't have control over it as the you know but i'm paying you for this like
versions of this and it feels like they're just not not getting it right enough yeah it's like it's
if you used like the meta Yeah, the Oculus Quest. It like makes me super dizzy makes my head hurt makes my eyes hurt like you're super disoriented.
training is incredible. There's spatial video recording on it. So it looks like you're living through the experience that someone else had. So you can train someone how to do a difficult task. And rather than have a human go spend hours training a workforce, the workforce can be trained by the goggles in a way that you cannot do a two dimensional video today.
I'm reasonably optimistic about where this goes. It's definitely v1. I feel like it's the iPad days, where no one's really sure where the applications are. But yeah, enterprise applications, unbelievable makes total sense.
literally every aspect of this job will be massively improved and productivity will go up by 10x with these goggles.
What Apple solved is that you're like still in reality. But then you get to interact with these three dimensional kind of objects in reality. And it's like really well done. It's definitely the one and there's going to be incredible changes in the next couple of generations. But it gets rid of all that dizziness disconnected kind of stuff that happens with the the full VR experience, which I thought was really incredible.
apple's never going to make the iphone in india and sure enough apple's making the iphone in india and they're making more recent versions of it from what i understand
I give it to Sam Altman because I don't think any individual has generated more attention on a private company and its effect on the world and the future. Then Sam Altman and OpenAI. And I think that he's been aggressive in raising capital. This guy can raise like he can raise and then he over bets on people. He finds talent. He gives them extraordinary comp packages, gets them to come and work on this extraordinary effort and then gets them to deliver results. He pushes the limits, he pushes th
The biggest surprise was Sam Altman's ouster and return all in a weekend.
I give it to Dara and Uber. When he took over that business, I think it was an $8 to $9 billion net loss in 2019. $5 billion EBITDA run rate right now. Incredible forecasting, incredible skill in forecasting the sensitivities in that business, by the way. Obviously, he's seen the market cap just this year grow from $50 billion to $126 billion as of today. So give it to Dara for the big turnaround. Product sucks, though.
Despite only seeing, I think, roughly 8% top line growth, the business saw its market cap grow by over a trillion dollars, 1.7 to 2.7 trillion this year. Just an incredible number. I mean, can you imagine if we ever said that 10 years ago, whether anyone would believe it? Consumer and enterprise strength and strategic strength, the fact that they were able to close the activation acquisition in this sort of regulatory environment. And then the strength that Sachs showed and the speed at which he
And I would imagine if I'm Adobe, and I'm looking at this Figma deal, do I keep fighting it? Or at this point, paying a billion dollars is probably net accretive to them, I think the stock price went up when they called the deal off. Which highlights that it was probably a better investment for them to say I'm going to pay a billion dollars to actually get out of this deal at this point.
Yeah, look, again, we didn't have any milestone or deadline for Starling to kick in until 2025.
Google's already said they're going to appeal this case, because fundamentally, again, if this really were true, and there really was deep antitrust issues with this, you would likely have seen a federal agency come after Google, not a private company suing them in a civil case, this would have been a much more significant action if there really was antitrust behavior. But it's a lot easier to win a jury trial party to party where Epic can go to a court and say, hey, let's go after Google, they'
is that a good bet or are these open source projects going to create downward pressure and the downward pressure would provide is the API calls. And what chat GPT for opening? I could charge for access to their language model is going to go down. And because you could just fire up your own open source solution on your own servers. ... Uh, but this could be, you know, a road to nowhere.
Amazon's been very clear that they would like to be a neutral third party in all of this. And so Amazon will make money no matter what they're going to have every language model on AWS. And their interest is in continuing to lower the costs continually and just make up for it in scale.
Is it going to be Microsoft who knows the, the idea that Amazon won cloud computing and it wasn't Microsoft or Oracle that won cloud computing or Google is crazy, right?
Is it going to be Microsoft who knows the, the idea that Amazon won cloud computing and it wasn't Microsoft or Oracle that won cloud computing or Google is crazy, right?
So they're acting pretty aggressively. I think even yesterday there was a leak of something where Meta's trying to really superpower LLAMA 2 and then create some high-performance cloud that they effectively want to give away. We talked about this a little bit on the pod, but the idea seems like the big companies want to scorch the earth on the foundational model side.
It's literally like anybody could become their own business person. It's really incredible.
I actually think it's quite similar because if you talk to Bernard Arnault and you see the infrastructure of what they've built and the abstractions, you've done that. It's just, you're 40 years separated and they're much more procedural, but they do the same things, which they plug in these great businesses. They, they empower them to run, et cetera.
fantastic so it's no longer reacting to what happens that customer a to protect the next 999 customers this is you know you've got patient zero here yes and you are doing experiments on them and you're seeing if they're inoculated or not and it's all happening in a virtual environment so there's you know no harm is coming to it um yeah but i think i think we're going to have to work hard
oh wow you're doing that in the lab right now so you're training it how to be the greatest black hat so that you can now be two steps ahead of the hackers using this so we are giving them the
smartphones the opposite of google ads versus facebook ads like the opposite of crm the opposite of hr
one of the most interesting things that could happen is somebody like Tesla decides to either open source their chip or actually starts to sell their platform because if FSD gets to a reasonable level of scale, that entire platform system is a learning and inference system for the physical world. And I think that has tremendous applications
is like let's get this going this is going to turn into if they if they start putting this money towards stock buybacks uh this company is going to start to look like apple and right now this is
just this morning the uk prime minister said they are investing 100 million pounds into in via amd and intel compute
yes you'll have x number of 52 year olds in america with my bmi and my height and nobody's going to have that information so and then there's a whole
threads is instagram facebook slash meta's competitor to twitter looks almost like a clone i mean it is so similar in features in interaction in everything
zuck this morning announced 30 million downloads of the app overnight
I said whoa if zuckerberg doesn't like to lose he's only won his whole life well it brad thinks that he can do this i'll just buy some shares that was at 91 a share or something and that one turned out to be exceptionally exceptionally correct again a non-consensus thought silicon valley could do more with less when we just lived in a culture of just keep spending it all works out in the end
it's that the exchange contains unregistered security.
Every time people search on Bard, it's a training exercise. So I give it the thumbs down. Hey, I'm looking for that video on YouTube of the English bulldog and the monkey playing the Japanese video. And it's like, ah, I got that wrong. And you gotta give it a thumbs down and say, nah, that's not exactly what I'm looking for. A human then can intervene on those instances and try to figure out what went wrong. Probably don't want that in somebody's Gmail, right? You gotta be really careful and tho
How does the barred team and the office team, the Gmail team and the YouTube team, how does in a big organization like this, this giant armada of, you know, aircraft carriers, you know, each one of them, those 2 billion users each, just like aircraft carriers, but you have this core platform technology.
Gmail was such a, you know, groundbreaking product because it was like, oh yeah, you just, you never have to worry about deleting your emails. They're just all there and you can search them. And it's like, whoa, yeah, you know, to do this with Eudora, whatever mail client you were using, was just really hard. Um, and all your mail was stored on your local drive.
when it puts in the thumbnail images, that's something very new, putting in the captions and linking directly to the source material. So now if my content was used, at least I can get a potential click. And of course, you know, this could be highly clickable stuff, but my Lord, you know, when you ask a followup question, I said, Hey, which of these is the most expensive and hard to get into is, Oh, sushi Ginza, which I've been to, and it is hard to get into. And it is very expensive. And then I
Google's in a different position than a, than a normal startup. You have a huge reputation on a global basis. You have six, seven products, uh, at Google that have over a billion users. Two million. Who's got it? Yeah. So some of them have two billion. Yeah. You got YouTube, you got Chrome, you got Android, you got Gmail, you got docs. I mean, there's a lot of products out there with a lot. And then of course search. Um, so you, you look at all these products and you have to be more thoughtful a
I trust Google for my searches. It's, you know, 98 times out of a hundred. The first link I click answers my question or the one box answers my question.
I started playing with this Google Bard and I was like, holy cow, Google's got some great product. And then they started dropping product. Boom, boom, boom. Lots of product, really fast.
i think one of the greatest things that's happening right now that you know could be a great benefit for this modern democracy is the sort of stuff that we've been doing on our podcast and rfk coming on board like last week and what sax did with twitter and i really hope that more politicians do that and that more people engage and consume that sort of content to make their decision
i don't think we're hiring people at facebook there'll be specific positions of course but it could be three four five years before they start hiring again
when you have so much money, what people were doing was they were getting office space, and employees, based on two years out, where did we think we're going to be in two years, and it, what happened was, there were people who were just at offices saying, I'm working on nothing, but I'm getting paid so much. And this is a money printing machine. What they didn't realize was, it was actually slowing them down. And they had managers managing managers.
the cab companies are the problem in this, we have to remove the cab companies, and then lower the prices and make it more accessible.
bard came out and we started playing with bard and it feels like okay bard is that you know chat gpt three or 3.5 right so the gaps will close and then ultimately the race
while our models hold a slight edge in terms of quality the gap is closing astonishingly quickly i started this model yeah open source models are faster more customizable private and pound for pound more capable they are doing things with a hundred dollars and 13 billion parameters that we struggle with at 10 million dollars and 540 billion right and they're doing so in weeks not months that has profound implications for us ... we have no secret sauce there is nothing proprietary there is nothin
we have no secret sauce there is nothing proprietary there is nothing owned by google um and then his second bullet point people will not pay for a restricted model when free unrestricted alternatives are comparable in quality and this is something i said on the all in pockets and i think here you know this lead that open ai has it feels tremendous until it doesn't right because if in a vacuum it's the only one you can use and the only one you can see other people using it feels like it's an ins
pressure on them to do it because they sam is so smart i would say sam is clever he's even which is better than smart in this instance he's clever and i think sam altman is going to be like you know being closed helped us because we could build in stealth but now that everybody's adopting this and all the best developers are spending time on this close is going to hurt them
so open ai open was the name of it elon funded it because he wanted it to be open then they closed it so it's really we should start i'm going to start referring to open ai as closed ai so closed ai their approach is to not share their work not share their data so if you use closed ai everything you do as a founder just keep this in mind they get the benefit of and they don't share back
yeah um i thought one of the most interesting things i saw in hugging face was they're just speaking to this uh exact you know impact of like who's going to win the open source or the closed proprietary
that elsa from frozen frozen in frozen three four five whatever it is is going to be a lesbian and i'm like who cares like yeah and they're like well there's no sexuality in these like disney movies there's no you know gender and you know this is something they're bringing up for the first time
And you watched Uber, you know, you guys had your media stuff you were doing for a little while, which you were passionate about. I remember, but like at a certain point, it's about the guests. It's about their experience and how many different projects could Uber do? They were doing micro mobility and that was interesting, but it was just such a minor, unprofitable piece of the business. They deprecated it, right?
So it's been an amazing journey with Uber as my best investment in history.
The average map see did 14 rides or food orders in the quarter, that's almost five per month, which is very impressive.
I think the really interesting part of all this is lifts demise. They are a shrinking amount of this industry and Uber... What they have is they have the majority now of app driven rides. And they have a strong presence. I think they're number two in the United States behind DoorDash in delivering groceries and food... So it's not quite a monopoly, but it's a strong position in those areas.
Record high free cash flow $549 million cash and cash equivalents and short term investments 4.2 billion for the team over at Uber.
Total gross bookings were 31.4 billion of 19% year over year. So you know, the revenue grew 29% year over year, but gross bookings grew only 19%, which means Uber's, you know, more profitable and charging more for their services.
Q1 revenue, 8.8 billion. That's up 29% year over year.
after Twitter reduced their headcount by 80% or so. Um, that was extreme, but that sort of got Zuckerberg on board with, you know, okay. I could go with 10% less. I could go with 20% less. And so now between Elon's 80%, you know, and Google six and Zuckerberg's 15, there, there is a consensus of we can do more with less
I do think it's going to go faster than self-driving is my long answer to your short question.
So you look at Google, not nimble, Microsoft, super nimble, Zuckerberg, most nimble. And so if you're gonna place a bet, you're gonna place a bet on Microsoft and Zuckerberg right now, and you're gonna move your money out of Google into those two companies.
you know, and Google six and Zuckerberg's 15, there, there is some consensus of we can do more with less
to be allowed to buy stuff so then you're right what is the growth here they're not able to innovate i think these companies are x growth which is why they use their cash flows to do what borrow money
this this could be a quick turnaround story for the stock and for this company
what was so striking about the earnings call is not necessarily what was presented but what was not presented which was a stronger voice and a strategic plan going forward for dealing with two major issues of the company one is the operating cost model and the second is the ai strategy
If they lost the Samsung one, it wouldn't be like a big deal. If they lost the Apple one, that would be a big deal.
there's no difference between the 1.5% they accept, and the next 15%. Probably the next 50%. If I'm being honest, nobody's that good of a picker. There's no difference between the 1% that get into Harvard and the top 50% that apply. We all know that, right? I mean, it's, we all can agree on that. Like the top 50% of people applying to Harvard, they're all excellent. They're all extraordinary. And they all deserve some investment and support.
So this is not true what Gary Tan is saying. Product market fit is the most important thing in startups. But it doesn't trump valuation.
If you raise 5 million on 25 million, aka a YC company, that's I'm adding that part, you have to smash it and really smash it to get 1.5x on that valuation within 18 months.
you should be thankful to YC for starting these companies. And then you should deploy strategies for investing in them when you think the price is appropriate. If the price is too high now, they're going to raise money five times more. So build a relationship with the founder, and then play the long game.
Whereas people who are normal startups, non YC startups, that don't do this high pressure tactic have the demo day thing, do the party round where there's no VC setting the price. So you don't know how the price discovery happened. If you're at five or 10 million, you get the product to market, you get to a couple 100,000 revenue, now you're gonna get 20 million. So you're, let's call it $7 million valuation, you get 500k revenue, now you command the $20 million valuation. So you tripled your va
if Y Combinator is bringing you pre vetted companies, remember, they only accept one and a half percent. That's like going and hiring people from Harvard Business School, or Stanford GSB, you've used Stanford or Harvard as a filtering mechanism. So you don't have to, but it's the person coming out of Harvard GSB or Stanford, I'm sorry, Stanford's GSB program, or Harvard's MBA program, are they the same price as somebody coming out of Fordham's MBA program, or an MBA program from a university in
you would be able to invest in five companies at, I would say, on average, half the valuation of a YC company, which means you would essentially be like investing in 10 companies. So you can invest in 10 companies for the price of five YC. And I can tell you, in that process, you would find companies that are equally good
And I'll be honest, a lot of neophytes, when I've gone to demo day, it would be like, maybe 20% people in the industry, and then 80% people who are somewhat new to the industry, and those folks are going to make bets in a pretty frisky way, I would say it's kind of like new poker players, they can play a lot of hands, they, you know, they're kind of predictable, they may not be as savvy.
they all put out the front that hates closing, and they do some unnatural acts in terms of getting people to close, they might do increasingly high valuation.
on demo day, they do this thing called a handshake protocol. It's kind of I wouldn't say high pressure, but it's high pressure.
In truth, the amount of work it takes to run accelerator is I kid you not 20 times the amount of work it takes to be a seed investor, an angel investor, or a venture firm 20x, the cost, the time, the effort, it is a massive amount of money.
the investment community resents Y Combinator because they get to invest at a $2 million valuation, right? They put in this money at a $2 million valuation. It's a great deal for YC.
Y Combinator has had an ethos of being a little adversarial on the margins with the investment community.
Y Combinator companies getting $20 million valuations when non-YC companies with the same amount of traction are commanding $5 or $10 million valuations.
right well i mean china and brazil are pretty sizable trade partners i think it's around 150
We build our iPhones there.
according to the chief legal officer at coinbase he says tell us the rules and we'll follow them give us an actual path to register and we will register the parts of our business that need registering that's a fine sentiment except that a lot of people lost their money and so you need to play by the rules unless you guarantee the betterment of society and people will forgive you in my experience
when crypto collapsed and there was a bunch of grift and fraud there whether it was coinbase employees front running the market
coinbase is a public company they tried to run the company you know as honestly as possible i actually believe that
better off buying treasuries for five percent instead of playing in the crypto space
coinbase has been issued a wells notice by the sec this meaning this basically means that the sec is about to take legal action against the crypto exchange
this makes total sense because i just explained it with developers sdrs and producers of podcasts right so what's going to happen is something like angel list or crunchbase or linkedin like will have their own built-in llms and you'll be able to say instead of using advanced search on crunchbase or linkedin like people are currently doing to find startups that have raised their seed funding that are based in new york city and that have founders who went to stanford or an ivy league school right
My understanding is I have my, uh, sources here. Snowflake you're hiring for enthusiasm and energy.
none of this is ready for prime time
amazon's ad business is booming right as jama pointed out earlier but so much more of consumer behavior is shifting where people are going direct to e-commerce sites and then the ads that are getting the highest click through and where advertisers are spending more and more money is on e-commerce sites i know this from experience on a couple boards i'm at where companies stopped spending on facebook and google and just started spending exclusively on amazon and that's where you get consumers tha
he turned that game around he turned that story right around he did the things that wall street wanted
Google's real lock in with publishers and the real reason they win in this marketplace is because they pay the publishers the most. And if you try and break this up, and if you actually do try and, you know, get into the weeds of this whole system and change it, the publishers ultimately will make less money.
And I was like, well, I think this gets commoditized real quick.
I think these things are stealing people's content. Um, and I think it's unfair
opening ai was started as a non-profit the stated philosophy was this technology is too powerful for any company to own therefore we're going to make it open source and then somewhere in the last couple years they said well you know what actually it's too powerful for it to be out there in the public we need to make this a private company and we need to get 10 billion dollars from microsoft that is the the disconnect i am trying to understand
over again, we're not performing people are not people are phoning it in, you know, the whole Hooli concept from Silicon Valley that show was people F off at Google, and they hang out on the roof. We all know that's true. Rest invest. And anybody who sells their company, Google is like, yeah, I'm going to take four year sabbatical at Google. Yeah, I'm gonna do my laundry.
This should be an existential moment for Google.
it's a business that obviously benefited greatly from the pandemic and the adoption of um you know the payment processing infrastructure that they've built across their across various kind of e-commerce platforms it's i've been i'm not an investor so i don't have any numbers but there are public reports that have highlighted that the revenue increased 66 this year they've indicated that they're probably going to experience significant revenue slow down with the recession ahead but it still seems
chapec said we're going to take away your pnls to each of the leaders that is like just neutering them he basically said everybody's under the cfo everybody's going to be on one pnl that infuriated
yeah man what a swing bob chapek uh in and then out and now bob eiger back so i feel like i got this one wrong and right at the same time i still believe in the company deeply i think they're going to have a big win
if a guy can land two rockets at a time and he can literally restart the electric car movement and he becomes the number one car in any category he releases a car in how on earth would you bet against him to build software you have to be idiotic
i have 50 000 views already which is uh 10 of my follower count so this is an extraordinary
for me it's obvious uh the twitter acquisition is the biggest surprise by far and away
elon musk's acquisition of twitter i think took everyone by surprise it kind of went i mean this is such an obvious one but it went from a whimsical fantasy and idea to suddenly you know cold-hearted reality with uh you know a huge kind of negotiating saga that took place and court battles and all the drama that ensued and here's what i think was most surprising about it it wasn't just the acquisition and the and the fact that the acquisition closed but it was the the incredible veracity of the
um the truth is uh coinbase and shopify i think you know both brian and toby said you know we're this is a business this is not the place for politics we you know we have like one mission you know uh cryptocurrency for the world to free the world and you know help people who want to build mom and pop shops like enough let's get focused and then i think what people are realizing is if you hire two years ahead well then you can cut half the staff or whatever it is and have uh more earnings while t
um but the truth is uh coinbase and shopify i think you know both brian and toby said you know we're this is a business this is not the place for politics we you know we have like one mission you know uh cryptocurrency for the world to free the world and you know help people who want to build mom and pop shops like enough let's get focused
to you know they were leaning they didn't expect them to pick a side do you think we
so he's using two different ai assistants which means these ai assistants could start talking to each other and then if we had robots it could start building it pretty much so this is kind of when it happens like this ai inside of a robot painting robot could actually paint this for you
66% of the cloud computer market together. Oh, all three together. Okay. All three together. Yeah.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are 66% of the cloud computer market together.
AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are 66% of the cloud computer market together.
they should not have come out of the gate at five thousand dollars they should have come out of the gate at more reasonable price they should have looked at the first year as an investment break even on it and they should have had a lottery and they should have just made it more accessible
they should have given their parlance very simple they should have said how many years out of the past 10 have you had a season pass we're going to start with people who are 10 out of 10 and we're going to grandfather you in for the next 10. we'll go with people who are 9 out of 10 we'll grandfather you in for the next 9 out of 10 you can still have a season pass but then we're going to start a season pass wait list and we're going to just work off the wait list and we're going to just give it t
the eq issue i like the uh p and l issue too i had forgotten about that that was a big one too
the modern day Disney corporation and what Amazon is doing with Amazon prime, what Google is doing with YouTube, that playbook was eventually figured out.
If you think about these subscription businesses and AOL subscription, ostensibly people were paying the subscription to hear the modem squeal and connect. But if you were to ask them why they were doing that, it was to get content and community on the other side. And that really has become why people subscribe to, you know, all these other services. So they just sometimes being early is an asset, I guess, and sometimes being early makes it impossible.
I think the problem was you, you had this incredibly innovative team at AOL who moved quickly, and then you had a media business that just wasn't ready to move quick. They were two different paces. You had people jogging and then you had sprinters and sprinters cannot, you know, hang with a bunch of people who are just jogging around a track at a leisurely pace.
This was unprecedented in the world for 30 million people. And the company was throwing off billions of dollars, quarter in revenue, but more importantly, just making a massive cultural impact in getting people online and introducing them to the modern web and the internet.
i don't think so i don't think anyone should have a lifetime ban on these platforms
elon is a reasonable person and he's going to be faced with unreasonable people on this platform and when that happens he's going to have very tough decisions to make about what kind of platform he wants to have what's the quality of that platform going to look like and then all of a sudden he's going to have to look in the mirror and say did i step on the wrong side and you know he's he's idealistic and it's great and it's wonderful and i hope that he's successful but to some degree some amount
what are all these human beings doing at these companies it doesn't make any sense they're fixed cost businesses you know they should be milking these things but i guess they have so much profits and so much cash they're going to thumb their nose at wall street let their stocks tank maybe start
if you really support your um when you support your early content creators like this and you do something nice for them like uh getting in their handles early making sure they have a good one it will increase usage that's the right that's huge
and other things in this net profit, but they're talking about doing a stock buyback,
and other things in this net profit, obviously, but they're talking about doing a stock buyback,
raised a bunch of funding it was like 2018
parlor so people know is a clunky version of twitter
I mean, Facebook had something called like, um, custom audiences, right? You upload your email list, and it kind of tries to find people, this would be like a better version of that. And if you think of Twitter as a platform for elite influential people, it has a smaller audience. So how do you take that audience and allow that smaller audience to be super
Those are some similar looking horns. And again, they, they look like they're perfectly in sync. So this is something the algorithms got to put a little variability into it.
It's just dumb. I just found like Apple is dumb for doing this.
well, yeah, but building on somebody else's network effects is a really straightforward path, which is not what a VC should say.
that die is sort of cast i think we're just debating the timeline in which it happens
and then there's jack uh third example uh with twitter and square and i think everybody believes that was a failure and twitter floundered and had chaos and according to all reports he might not have been in the building enough
so it was a little it was a little shaky actually you can read the book creativity inc we had ed catmull on this very podcast um and and steve's biography there were some shaky moments there so i he almost didn't pull it off but so it did it did work out after but i think it's because he had such deep benches at both places
i think the company would be worth 25 more today of travis zone because i
uber was a very bootstrapped company what people don't realize is it was only uber black and the uber black service was highly profitable taking 25 percent of a 50 or 100 ride from the airport is a pretty great way to print money as opposed to doing uber pool for four dollars or uber x for twelve dollars those eight dollar ubers were the ones where they were maybe uh losing two dollars a ride the black cars they were making ten dollars per ride and that is why they got so well funded
in fact uber was started right after the financial crisis and people looked at uber as a way to save money
You double your revenue or there's the door.
people at Snowflake are like literally taking the beach. You know, like they're just literally taking, invading other markets.
And then snowflake is firing on all cylinders.
with this Lena Khan, you know, anti conglomerate thing, I think you take a lot of the big, and I'm not saying I'm against that, you're taking a lot of the big acquirers out of the mix. So, you know, Google, Apple, Amazon, or like, if we're gonna go to bat on buying something, maybe we shouldn't go to bat on Peloton. And this is where like, hack, I think they said that, you know, the general rubric here is companies with over $500 billion market caps, or like monopoly positions are the ones who a
Amazon is the most convenient of any product ever made for humans.
I mean, the idea that you could avoid Amazon, in today's day and age as a retailer, like this is a fantasy. Yeah, that people who were, you know, had tons of venture money, you know, kind of believe they could go direct and, you know, capture all that margin. And then it turns out, you know, sometimes you need distribution. So I like magic spoon, we had them on the pod, you know, that protein cereal, magic spoon is on Amazon. So you don't have to buy a subscription. They mean, it's a hell of a l
with this Lena Khan, you know, anti conglomerate thing, I think you take a lot of the big, and I'm not saying I'm against that, you're taking a lot of the big acquirers out of the mix. So, you know, Google, Apple, Amazon, or like, if we're gonna go to bat on buying something, maybe we shouldn't go to bat on Peloton.
i think there's two tests one is the materiality of what they've reported so and really that comes down to just the um the mdow reported numbers so if there really is some misstatement knowing misstatement based on what he's saying that's an issue the other one is the the duty of care responsibility of the board meaning um did the information that he's providing actually find its way to the board if it was blocked by management you know it's it's it's a judgment call on you know whether or not m
being a very big business for amazon and what a great company to take this on this is where when you have big companies you know we have this whole fear of big companies but sometimes when a big company takes something on like this they can take a 20-year approach to it and everybody benefits if you look at cloud computing and the benefit that's provided to society that anybody can create a startup and have access to this giant computer network and then instantly scale it around the world it's p
Greatest example ever would be the Tesla Roadster and the Tesla Model Y huge deposits, you had to put down your full amount.
five or six years ago i approached twitter about what i would have called a friendly activist myself and a and another large fund and the reality is there's a lot of data that sits uh in the public domain that you can use to get a very clear view of twitter's advantages and disadvantages and so you know all of these issues that twitter is dealing with has been known for a long time to people that spent any time analyzing the stock comparing it to other social media stocks
i just have zero interest in doing anything in the metaverse and nobody i know does
and people fought this and said hey this is unfair google said okay sue us if you don't like it but we're doing it so they would sell your keyword for your company to your competitors
i think amazon is going to get broken up in the next five years yeah and i think that's going to double and every price of everything yeah exactly when they separate these businesses and aws is its own standalone business and then everything else is in the other company you know what's going to happen the other company the retail company is going to raise prices 10 we're all going to be addicted to it and they're going to be wildly profitable because they have to be they won't have the ability t
What this really is about is about drugs because you've now interviewed two of the online drug companies. Amazon has a pharmacy, I believe, and this is an important business.
I said on CNBC before Disney plus even existed. I said, Disney plus is going to catch up and then exceed the number of subscribers as Netflix. I believe that's still going to happen.
40% energy savings in Google standard data center cooling systems.
I like where this regulation is going, because this is putting, this is targeting a very specific group of companies and they're just saying, make it more fair.
I think that's a stupid, I mean, it's not stupid for them. It's that's a shell game for them. They're like, oh yeah, the ad business doesn't know the search results. They don't need to know the search results. The organic results come below the widgets. So that's them thinking regulators are dumb. Yes. And it's just stupid on Google's part.
Google should do the two things I'm saying. One, let you customize which services you use. So all the stuff that comes up top, you could, and then here's your second one, 10 bucks a month. There we go. No ad Google. Totally. That's $75 a year or 10 bucks a month. You could have no ads on Google. You just see organic results.
Now, Apple, how could they do it? Very simple. Apple says, would you like to load one of these other app stores? There are other app stores out there. If you load this app store on your phone, you are no longer under warranty. So your phone, if you bring it to the genius bar or you bring it back to Apple and it's not working, that's because you chose to use software that we didn't vet, which is your right. It's your device. So if you load this, you are no longer supported. You can't call custome
Do you think if Apple could make the App Store business problem go away for 1% of App Store sales, they would do it? Of course they would.
So if 1% of your sales creates an attack vector, what's the logical thing to do? Dump it. Dump it. Cut it loose. Shut it down.
the complaint about Amazon is that it has all of these third party sellers. And then what it does is collect data on what sells best on its platform from third party sellers and then copy it and make their own. And prioritize, in some cases, its own results then in its internal search and push those products first.
every percentage point of search is worth 10 billion dollars in market cap
but yeah it's a good read i have to be honest like he seems to be going all over the place and banging on every single aspect which i think is good i love that matthew exists right because he's basically like this crazy stress test on these companies
and so that is the question where i think there needs to be super transparency and so and perhaps where they started is not where they are now right i think that's partly what happens is where you start
So how many $10 billion unicorns are there? So this is what the major LPs are looking at, when they examine our funds or other people's funds, what are the chances of you hitting another Uber? What are the chances of you hitting Dropbox or Airbnb?
I would, it could be like a year or two of sideways. I mean, I, but I, again, I think in 10 year increments, if you, there's no way I don't see the company having 50 to 100 million active accounts 10 years from now.
I don't have many insights. I don't talk to management now that it's like a public company all that often. Um, but they should be, you know, releasing product fast. I think there's a lot of cleanup work that probably had to be done and a lot of management distraction, I would say.
It's very rare to be a product genius in the world and that might not be good enough though in a, in a brokerage industry.
Yeah. I mean, he's, I understand why he's not popular right now, but he's also a product genius and their product genius, genius is over there.
I do think the world of the, of the founders and their ability to make great product.
I am holding my position. I was, uh, an investor before they went public. I had, man, I wish I could have distributed to my LPs at 30 dollars a share. Um, but I do think the world of the, of the founders and their ability to make great product. I know there were like some issues with like this massive denial of service attack where everybody wanted to short the same stock. Like, this is what happens with successful companies. They become sometimes too successful, but I'm holding. I do think it's
You know, like Tesla sell themselves. They don't have to do any marketing. You get into Tesla. You're like, I want one, you know, it's that simple.
You layer on link baiting on top of that. You layer on their desire to get subscribers by picking a side. Like the New York Times, you know, felt like left moderate, but now it feels like it's MSNBC and then other people feel like they're going super far to the right to catch up to Fox. And it's just gross to even click on those links. Like every week here in Silicon Valley, we have another tech company when the New York Times is just dunking on them and trying to destroy them.
In fact, the people who sold Uber shares like I did to Masa and to some other people, that price was much higher than the current stock market price.
what they're saying is like this may not be the last of the layoffs and the crypto market could be coming apart i my i suspect people are not trading crypto in a moment like this i think people are hodling but i i can't imagine there are new entrants into the crypto market right now
And isn't the New York Times run by a family of four? That's not really that poor.
Has anybody stayed neutral, Matt? I mean, like, if you look at Reuters or AP, it's clear the New York Times, MSNBC, they've just gone full. Subscribe to us if you hate Trump. You know, we're going to give you what you want.
Uber is selectively hiring.
I think this Russia thing was probably really good for spacex.
And people also forget at the time that the first two rockets spacex sent up, uh, didn't exactly make it to orbit. Like the first three.
And Slack has got that similar DNA and then other things don't like, you know, some CRM system, Salesforce or whatever, like maybe the sales team loves it, but the CEO hates it or, you know, this group loves it, the marketers love it, but the, you know, creatives don't, you know, it is hard to get all those people correct.
whatever Stripe makes or Shopify makes very small percentages selling software, great business
i wish elon well in it and i hope it happens i i really hope it happens and yeah diligence is important
they need to make a lot of quick decisions here and and maybe well that's my question consolidate who's in charge maybe the ceo maybe parag wants to make these decisions and then isn't going to be gone like my question actually fundamentally is not about paternity leave at all it's like if you think you're about to be purchased and that you yourself ceo are gone do you make a bunch of changes or do you just like shut everything down and freeze it i mean they froze product releases like i just th
their shipping of spaces uh was done very fast uh in response to competitors and um twitter blue they got it out there it wasn't it didn't hit the right notes it didn't provide enough value but i think he knows the value it needs to provide and there were just too many cooks in the kitchen twitter blue was the perfect example of like somebody had a big vision and they're like yeah you can't do those three things because those are sacred cows but what else you got and they're like well here's lik
is the company worth three billion and yesterday it was worth seven billion before the bump so if you take out the six billion it was worth 1.2 with whatever it was
i think they hit a high watermark of 21 million active accounts maybe they're at 18 now because people have you know are not opening their accounts
this is just an opportunistic buy is my take on it by somebody who's in the know we did a little take the other day what is the market cap of the company minus the cash in the bank which gives you true enterprise value if the true enterprise value seems insanely low after you net out their cash because the cash could buy that equivalent of stock if you just think of it that way people are bargain hunting hunting and what did i say last week people were asked for earlier in the week i should say
when you get off a Mac and you're no longer having iMessage and iPhotos and, you know, email clients pop up and you're managing all these apps and you just manage Chrome, your life experience becomes very simple because it doesn't crash, it's fast, it's easy.
the prices have come down enough, the technology is getting there, the platform is, you know, you have some user base. So the idea that you would actually fund a VR startup today, you know, there was a lot being funded four or five years ago, people were losing their minds in the VC community, setting up oculuses and buying gaming PCs, and it was like, took two hours to set up and now your quest is on your face, and up and running without an iPhone, right? You can just use it with just the devic
He's been obsessed with Microsoft since he was a kid. I mean, he, he basically modeled his entire career on, um, Bill Gates is dropping out of Harvard, starting a company, having control over it, and then copying other people's features and never getting disrupted. That was his always obsession is to never be disrupted like Microsoft was. So it would play that he's always wanted to have an enterprise play, right?
you're gonna pop up Chrome windows. And when you look around, you'll have a multi monitor setup. And if you're at a cafe, you're gonna be sitting there looking like an idiot, moving things in the air, typing a virtual keyboard that doesn't actually exist.
if you're at Google or Apple or Amazon I bet you with your work issued laptop there might be some monitoring going on and it will be increasing 100%
pretty fully valued but a juggernaut of a business. And I think, you know, it's like one of these companies that again, in 10 years, can you picture a world in which Apple is not doesn't play a wider, bigger part in our lives.
it's pretty damn reasonable.
I would, if you're owning Amazon, I would be seriously not looking at quarter by quarter. I would be looking year over year, looking at each year, looking at their market share, and looking at the year over year growth. If you look at it that way and you start looking at it in a decade, you know, arc, I think this is the kind of company that there's no world in which AWS is not the leader in 10 years, in my mind, and Amazon delivery and e-commerce is not delighting people massively.
There's nothing that says they couldn't keep increasing the price of the commerce business, lose some growth, but have more margin. But why would you do that if Amazon Web Services prints money? I think their strategy is perfect.
Then you look at the AWS business, man. It's a juggernaut. It's high margin. They're the leader. You know, the profits accrue to the leader, and it's just a different style of business. I could see them being under massive pressure to spin AWS out without the founder, Jeff Bezos, running the company. There could be increasing pressure on this, but it's still a juggernaut of a business, and so is the commerce business.
let's just break even on it. Let's keep building out this infrastructure because it is still very early days for commerce. If you were to look at, put e-commerce aside, Amazon's total, you know, market share in commerce is very low. In e-commerce in the United States, it's growing significantly, but they want to be a global player, and it requires them to have massive logistics. It requires them to have trucks driving around, planes, warehouses.
because taxis suck. And then I expanded on that. But because taxis suck, three words was the reason I said Uber should exist. Now there were many reasons taxis suck. You couldn't get one. You didn't know where it was. You didn't know what the price was going to be of your ride. You had to handle money, you had to give a tip. They smelled bad, you couldn't rate the person they couldn't rate you. There was just all these issues with taxis, right? That we all had, there was a taxi line, there was a
Like the person who was watching, tragically decided, in the first version of it, he'd watch Harry Potter. Like, is this Tesla's fault? I don't think so.
communities take active management that's what i've learned is like and there's no active management on twitter there's just yeah this is anonymous anonymous names just causes chaos
it's their judgment at this point that they should get more for the stock given where they think the company's headed and where the stock price will eventually get to
elon put in a bid to buy twitter outright on thursday and take the company private in a deal worth 43 billion dollars
And so I think you'll have a series of people who would very much shareholders in Twitter would very much like it to be an Elon Musk back company.
So if Vanguard and BlackRock are roughly 13% of Twitter and have a hundred billion, they're obviously familiar with Elon's work.
if you look at Twitter's largest shareholders, obviously people talked about Elon owning 9.2% at this point, which he's basically said in the letter he would liquidate if he wasn't able to buy it, which I think would make sense. Why have him sitting around, um, on the cap table if he wasn't, uh, you know, um, gonna buy it.
Now you've got a revenue stream that I think would generate 300, 400, 500 million dollars out of the gate. Yep. But it wouldn't do the growth thing. It would inhibit growth.
If they made the very and obviously Elon is very supportive of the same idea. And I think he came to it himself. I don't think he's got it from me, which is verification should be available to everybody.
if you're under the pressure of make it grow, and bots are 20% of the growth, and spam accounts are 20% of the growth. And you're looking at 40% of the growth or accounts that you can't even account for.
I think Jack's vision of where he wanted to take Twitter is shared, because Jack is a radical free speech in his belief, and he is somebody who believes that more control should be given.
none of these platforms are an honest broker of information. Exactly. Yeah, they're all doing it for financial incentive.
I would take the opposite of that, which is, you know, if I'm willing to bet my own capital and take a big risk in order to see something, you know, that I think is important to society get better. And it's what, what is Twitter in terms of usage, the 10th or 20th largest, you know, site in this realm.
let's take it private and bring as many of the investors along as possible, because then that would lower his burden of having to come up with the cash and cover this. And obviously coming up with the cash to cover this, you know, might mean liquidating other shares or, you know, raising money against us.
I could see Twitter doubling or tripling in value, especially under Elon, who, you know, is a, a product genius, obviously, uh, and a great leader of companies.
it's been sideways in terms of like pro i mean they have increased the product velocity but as a company they haven't grown it's been very modest growth when compared to contemporaries they've always trailed all other internet companies i think they're trading still at a fraction of their peak valuation i think they probably hit 50 60 70 billion at some point i'm trying to remember what the peak was so just as a business it's been a slow growth i mean it hasn't declined which is good um but it c
i think he loves the product i honestly think that that's what it is he loves the product and cares about it and thinks it's important in terms of the world and you know as the big communication town square
i think it's a savvy purchase uh because twitter has gone sideways in terms of as a stock and most would argue as a company in terms of growth the only real growth they had over the past five six years i think was the trump bump ... so maybe a savvy purchase because i would say arguably there's few people who are as good at twitter as elon obviously through having 70 uh million members i think he gets it
Facebook hired a GOP public relations firm to trash TikTok.
aol bought engadget autoblog joystick and other blogs and they had also bought tech crunch and a couple of other brands and they were keeping it together then when jim bankoff left to start verge uh they started consolidating everything and doing this exact thing
there should be a ceo of whenever a unit hits some level of scale make a ceo
you want people to sink or swim there needs to be one person in charge the buck needs to stop so what they should be doing is naming the ceo of pixar
why should i put any work into this if it's just going to be the corporate overlords are gonna just roll me every time i want to do something interesting
founders they should play these uh programs off of each other you should try to get into techstar sequoia yc uh and launch accelerator
yc you know investing more money in these companies is going to be the future
people don't know this, perhaps not fully public information. They were I spoke to the founders, and there was a large late stage, let's call it Johnny come lately firm that was splashing cash around market was hot. They dragged him on for a year, couldn't get the deal closed. And the company DoorDash was facing the risk of ruin, you guys came in and saved the day with a pretty large round and a pretty risky bet.
And, you know, of course that fund hit calm and Robin Hood and, you know, a bunch of other, you know, corns and it did very well.
And, you know, that fund hit calm and Robin Hood and, you know, a bunch of other, you know, corns and it did very well. It will historically do very well.
which is what the Google's and Facebook's of the world do.
And why it just continues to have all of these little, you know, growth engines in there.
architected both ad networks yeah yeah all right it might work for her to stay but not be ceo
And like, as but one example, I'm a big Knickerbocker fan. I love my Knicks. And my fan CP, the franchise, a franchise, created Knicks fan TV on YouTube after every game. And then once a week, and when this breaking news, he talks about the Knicks. And you know, he has a community just like we do here on YouTube. And I've met all these friends. And they have this like super chat feature. We don't turn around here because we have advertising, we don't need the money. But where you can double clic
Anytime I have a problem with a device, I don't even like when I was just unpacking a humidifier because it's up in the mountains and it's dry air. And I was like, Okay, I'm going to try to set this up just, you know, by looking at it. And then I was just like, I typed the name of the company, you know, set up on YouTube. Boom, there's a video, I go to that video, I put it on 2x speed, I didn't even look at the manual. And then you have a problem with your dishwasher or whatever device it is, yo
That's great. We have seen this before. Zuckerberg had Mark Andreessen famously on the board, who is a founder who turned into a venture capitalist, Peter Thiel on the board, founder, you know, of PayPal, who turned into a venture capitalist. And then he also added the
And I have Apple games as a subscription service, which when you have kids is pretty cool. Because when they go to the App Store, it says Google or it says Apple Arcade. And all of those games have the ads and the mana and the upselling for coins taken out of them.
say you could pick a prime day? You can pick a delivery day and then you get a credit. Amazon's doing that.
I mean, it does make you wonder if these are going to be platform exclusives going forward, or if Microsoft and Sony will take the approach that Microsoft had, which is like, we'll make Office for Mac, we'll make it for PC, we'll make it for Android. And, you know, Steve Bomber tried to stop or I guess he held back Office for iOS and Office for Android so that they could try to do their own operating system. And Satya Nadell, I guess coming on the show soon. Definitely. He released Office on And
If Tick Tock had the same partnership with creators that YouTube has, Tick Tockers would be making at minimum 16 cents per thousand views.
I think if Bitcoin and Ethereum and this, this basket of crypto is actually real, you'll see a lot of money market, uh, or money managers be able to just say, you want to be 1% in crypto, you want to be 4% in crypto, we can manage that for you. And just like they manage, like we have a way for you to get access to bonds or real estate through these various funds that, you know, balance them out and so you abstract it from you having to manage it. So, yeah, it does, you know, but obviously they'r
And there's nothing fundamentally monopolistic about what would happen if you let Microsoft and Activision come together.
I had a series of conversations with Larry Page from Alphabet about doing something together. I wasn't interested in working at Alphabet again, he was really interested in the kinds of things I was working on. And so I agreed to set up this holding company, where I would contribute these investments in these companies I'd started into it. And Alphabet became a minority shareholder by putting capital in.
youtube meta reddit and twitter did not provide proper information and records on the spread of misinformation efforts to overturn the 2020 election domestic violent extremism and foreign influence in the the 2020 election
it sounds like they're going for a direct listing and we could see that become the highest valuation tech ipo ever and then they will become kind of the golden child next year
we are hearing rumors that stripe might you know kind of or think that they bankers think that they might be able to break that and so stripes ipo could be the biggest tech ipo ever
stripe is a payment technology company based in san francisco uh stripe raised money earlier this year at a 95 billion dollar valuation
Number one priority is, let's go build the best product we can possibly build. And then priority number two is, let's make some revenue so that we can do more of priority number one. And then actually priority number three is never mix one and two.
if you had a, if you're using Slack for $15 a month. Okay. It's a high, what is that per year? 180 bucks a year, thousand people, 180,000 a year. You're like, eh, maybe we should have our own server. Or maybe if you had 10,000 people, it's 1.8 million. When you start getting to eight figures, I'm sorry, when you get to seven figures, it does become hard for SaaS companies to justify the cost, uh, in a big enterprise. And it's kind of silly, but, um, they do hide the pricing and they make a call
YouTube grew revenue almost a hundred percent year over year, 80% year over year growth is just extraordinary for a large business. Let's break down how YouTube compares to Netflix, two seemingly very different businesses, but who line up kind of interestingly, their ad revenue was 7 billion up 83% year over year. The 7 billion is pretty close to Netflix's Q2 revenue, which was 7.3 billion. I think it's great for us to look at these two businesses. Netflix has 10 times less users than YouTube. T
what i liked about jack and elon jack in particular in the last day is um you know having a voice and going direct and being inspiring i think that leadership is all about defining where you're headed and then creating religion in the troops to follow you to go there and i think the way that both of these folks speak directly to people and the way that they speak authentically and that they tell a big story about where they believe the world should go and why you should follow them to get there
the fleets experiment was like okay people are just putting their tweets in fleets it doesn't make any sense and that space up there works so much better when you see spaces there
company and i think you're a key piece of the twitter blue experience correct
amazon we strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices the best available selection and the utmost convenience love it easy cheaper better is kind of what they're saying amazon is the ultimate and just being blunt when their value proposition like
if you said i want to compete with doordash uber eats postmates today well they've got all the restaurants online does a restaurant want the seventh ipad the eighth ipad that
now for calm what was the market for a meditation app before calm existed uh and headspace their competitor there really was no market for it meditation was this weird thing you did if you lived in santa monica and like some churches and basements or rec centers or a yoga studio on the weekends might have one or two meditation classes or there were you know five thousand dollar you know courses you could take it wasn't something that was in the general perception of the public and sure you could
coinbase and robin hood have real customers and revenue ... these are millions of customers
i think that's a great opportunity for robin hood to add users
robin hood has 17 million monthly users so you're seeing the difference between the crypto and the trading of stocks
robin hood offers something similar with robin hood gold that's five bucks a month and that lets you have bigger instant deposits professional research from morningstar level 2 market data from nasdaq access to margin investing all kinds of like premium stuff
not dissimilar to robin hood's story but in their year-over-year numbers they were still up huge so if you remember robin hood's earnings on episode 13 13 two weeks ago revenue is down 35 percent quarter of a quarter but up 35 percent year-over-year
like coinbase and robin hood have real customers and revenue and nikola and maybe this ev toll company maybe they don't have customers or revenue yet maybe put 80 percent into the company with the customers and 20 percent into the speculative one there's some reasonable betting strategy here and it is gambling when you are investing in pre-product market fit companies uh coinbase and robin hood are not that these are millions of customers
five uh coinbase went public via direct listing in april at 381 dollars a share popped up to 421 they hit 100 billion in july the stock bottomed out at almost half 221 so this has been a lot of swings we
coinbase is trying to diversify away from transaction-based revenue
monthly transacting users 7.4 million again up massively 3.5 x year over year but down quarter over quarter that's a good number to uh look at
i do think that robin hood and coinbase and all these financial services companies are going to have great subscription revenue
total revenue 1.3 billion that's up four times year over year 4x year over year that is extraordinary we've been talking about high growth companies being 20 30 40 50 growth 4x 400 growth it's down 40 quarter quarter there's going to be bumps in the road in these high growth companies so i think that's to be expected
transaction-based revenues will swing wildly depending on market conditions that that's the truth about these things
google decided we're not just gonna collect your data in this in your search results and from your visit we're we're gonna monitor you everywhere you go even if it's not on our sites is that what google's doing with their chrome browser they're basically building my profile based on everything i do
google has decided to be incredibly sharp elbowed and they're just like we're gonna monetize the heck out of it you do a travel search now uh you know you see on the bottom like partnership partnership partnership i mean they are monetizing every click above the fold it seems how many organic results does google actually give you today in the travel search i don't above the fall maybe none maybe one
all right the craziest thing you could do in the last decade or so would be to create a search engine and take on google how do i know this i tried with mahalo it didn't work out
And make it shareable around the world like Google did at the time, or even Facebook to connect the world with big, audacious goals.
But what they really want is meaningful work and a large opportunity. They want a big, audacious goal. And that's why, you know, going to work at Uber or going to work at Tesla or, you know, some portfolio companies like mine, like Blockable or Calm, they really have an easier time recruiting people because they're like, Oh, we're taking on housing. Oh, we're taking on people's anxiety and mental health. These things feel great for people, right? It feels great. Oh, we're going to allow people.
in Europe that have hit a million miles now they've changed their battery packs i think in the one i read about that hit a million or close to it they had changed the battery pack three times
I think at Apple, a lot of it is, you know, the supremacy of industrial design and this idea that the Apple product that arrived on your doorstep is, you know, perfect form, and you should never attempt to, you know, adjust it or open it or modify in any way that it's, it's done. It's Apple's. It's not yours. Don't touch it. ... And so, you know, across the industry as a whole, we have notebooks that where the expectation is basically that everything's soldered down, you can't replace any part o
So how do you say it's a monopoly if you've got one that's bigger and you're up against Google, IBM and Microsoft for Amazon Web Services? It makes no sense.
These, these deals are so outrageous that if they lost 20 bucks on everyone who was a non prime member, who showed up that day, that means your acquisition costs for a lifetime value of an Amazon prime customer is. Well, it's even better.
they're going to cover people's bachelor's degrees, right? They pay double minimum wage, the federal minimum wage, they didn't have to be, you know, harangued into doing that, they just did it. They're fighting to get workers there. I don't hear the workers of Amazon complaining at all. And then you had that New York Times story, where they said, Oh, all these people had the worst possible traumatic PTSD experience at Amazon, but you know more Amazon workers and Amazon executives than anybody in
this is why you see intel i mean for any like any second when you guys hear an intel press release that says they're investing 90 billion dollars do you not think where does intel come up with 90 billion dollars right this is a pull through from us government because it allows us to start to rebuild an enormous amount of critical infrastructure that we've left to other people
I always thought I, this is a very weird thing about Apple, you know, like for them to do content always seemed like strange to me because they're not willing to do the content that a lot of people would want, which is adult fare, FX, HBO, Sopranos, Game of Thrones just wouldn't work on their platform because they're unwilling to show sex or violence to that level, right?
The DeepMind crew has been trying unsuccessfully to spin themselves out from Google. And I think they had like a little bit of a revolt in there. Um, and I know Elon has been very public about, he wanted them to, uh, keep going independently.
And then you can have this mixture that occurs in an up market because there's so much liquidity where people will conflate one with the other or the potential of the reality of a Tesla because they see Tesla's everywhere. And they'll conflate that with the speculation of a Lucid or a Nikola and they're not thinking straight.
And then I think after that, it was, you know, multiple billions. So when you look at that trajectory, they skipped multiple rounds of financing, which means the founders own a lot more of the company and my original six or 7%. My 6% ownership or whatever was didn't get diluted all that much. So I still own four or 5% of that company. It's amazing.
Amazon is expanding its educational benefits to include a bachelor's degree program. ... This is incredible.
Amazon is including educational benefits to their part time workers to get them their bachelor's degree. Great job, Jeff Bezos.
The solar powered supercharging network, there are solar powered superchargers, but the supercharger network has grown so quickly, there's no way to power it by solar standing next to them.
As I said, you know, they have so many miles driven with their robotic cars and their AI driven cars that this is actually easier. And all the factories that Elon are running to build these cars have tons of robotics in it.
So, from the same article in The New York Times, Disney said it has no plans to replace human performers. Winnie the Pooh, Cruella Deville, Peter Pan, Princess Jasmine, and other beloved walk-around characters will continue to be played by people wearing costumes.
So, a Buzz Lightyear that walks around, hopefully not with a real ray gun, is pretty interesting.
Okay, if this has been too dystopian for you, some good news. Disney is getting into sentient robots. Westworld is coming, hopefully without the same outcome.
rolling out quote a system for checking photos for child abuse imagery on a country-by-country basis depending on local laws according to reuters this means apple is joining facebook microsoft and google
Yeah. So, I mean, but just looking at the run rate of 443 billion is insane. And then you just compare that to, you know, GDP, they would be the 27th in the world.
And you look at Amazon, 113 billion in revenue for the quarter.
It's brutal. I use an ad blocker. And the only time I feel guilty about it is what I'm on, like a journalist site.
It's brutal. I use an ad blocker. And the only time I feel guilty about it is what I'm on, like a journalist site.
This is why a lot of people feel the journalists at the New York Times shouldn't be on Twitter, because it creates this murky relationship.
So much ado about nothing in a way, but it does speak to just how lost the New York Times is in their ability to just be objective and cover a story.
this is where Kevin Roos makes the cardinal sin of making himself the story. And I think that that's the big angle here is that the New York Times is writing a story about themselves and their relationship with Facebook, which is incredibly complicated because Facebook is also giving millions of dollars to the New York Times, I believe cynically in an attempt to curry favor with them.
still have to this day because non-black people couldn't understand what was going on on twitter and they were afraid that people white people primarily would not understand what twitter was and leave so they basically throttled black culture on twitter this is a story i was told
correctly they watched all this money being made by those otas they watched where they got their data from then they bought their data source and then they decided you know what we won't take your cost per click money we'll just take your entire business
hbo and netflix and amazon prime oh that's the other one i have and disney are on it they are on it trying to make incredible content and that is good for consumers on a global basis this is why
hbo and netflix and amazon prime oh that's the other one i have and disney are on it they are on it trying to make incredible content and that is good for consumers on a global basis
gamestop recently launched nft.gamestop.com unclear what the purpose of this yet but it seems like they're getting into nft non-fungible tokens
somebody becomes a meme stock which translation means they're very popular amongst retail investors they issue more shares to raise money and then they hire incredibly talented management teams and say here's an incredible brand with incredible shareholders and a pile of cash go doesn't mean that it's going to work but it does mean that these retail investors have now become venture capitalists in a way they're putting money into a company they're getting attention for it and then they're recrui
it'll take many other companies to do what coinbase is doing and recent us in this podcast us with our tweets and our memos and our posts i think it's it's all in the good positive direction
i think the spillover effects to other companies can be really positive ... the fact that coinbase will have a place that says here are the facts and we're gonna put it on chain permanently on the record that's i think a really powerful idea
this memo is excellent and if you haven't had a chance to read it we'll put it in the show notes but brian's essay is super
what strikes me though is um a failure of leadership at these organizations you know you guys think back to brian armstrong's kind of purging of the woke mob and the political discourse that was happening at coinbase a few months ago he took a point of strong leadership um to a new level and i think it highlighted when the leader steps up and says this is how we're going to operate these are how we're going to make decisions and puts his foot down um people will leave and you evolve the culture
There was the chance that coinbase could collapse now coinbase became one of the greatest successes in the history of Silicon Valley and certainly one of the top five successes of the last super cycle in tech. In other words, Airbnb, Uber, Coinbase are the three most valuable companies, I think, in the last 10 years. We probably include Zoom in that. And, yeah, Snowflake. So there's been, you know, five companies worth over $50 billion from the last super cycle of tech. 10-year sort of super cyc
so and then Benchmark or Sequoia being the Tiffany, like, you know, or Founders Fund or Founders Fund.
My third best investment in my career, Robinhood, is about retail. For sure.
Well, Rippling, which I use for my fully remote team over at Inside, can answer those questions for you. They make it super easy to manage all of your local and remote employees and contractors, whether they work from HQ or Timbuktu. When you hire people in new states, Rippling can automatically register your startup with each state tax agency and keep you compliant with all the different local labor laws. You know, the stuff that no one likes to deal with, all that headache, they're there for y
The debrief for my opinion is that, um, I, I think that there have, they have to really tighten two things. One is they need to make a decision. How do they want to make money? Um, because I think this is the third time these issues have come up. It's probably not going to be the last then because there's going to be more market volatility, not less. And so you just got to decide how you want to make money because there is no amount of money that's possible. If you're going to build a successful
you guys, for economic reasons, decided to take that responsibility on yourselves. But when you do that, you take on the full fledged liability of the value of every single trade on behalf of your customers.
Like there's there's no point calling the New York Times to figure out what the hell is going on in the world. Really what they should be doing is deep analysis.
already know about it i don't need to tell you it's the best way to get to know and talk to your customers
But if you look at a company like Uber, when they were deploying, they took a, and I think Netflix had a similar approach, which is the general manager in this city, this geo location is in charge, here's their budget innovate, you got your you're the CEO of, you know, Uber or Netflix, Norway, Las Vegas, whatever the geo is, and go for it, spend the money how you want to spend it.
the accuracy of their predictive model now is within the range of error of the microscopes that are being used to actually scan and measure those proteins so that's incredible because now theoretically you could come up with a design for a protein and you could actually build that protein by writing the amino acid sequence and that protein can do any number of things you want to do and this has been a difficult problem that's been intractable by humanity and we've been challenged by it for decad
What Chamath is pointing out is that today, Twitter and Facebook make a choice about, and, and YouTube make a choice about what content to show.
YouTube realized that if they showed you videos that they think that you'll click on, they'll keep you on YouTube longer and make more money from ads. So it keeps the cycle going. And so they optimize con and it turns out that the content that you need to optimize for, to get people to keep clicking is content that is somewhat activating to the amygdala on your brain. It's like stuff that makes you angry or makes you super pleasured and not just boring, ordinary stuff. And so this sort of conten
Aaron used LinkedIn jobs to hire a machine learning engineer who started back in July and he received over 110 relevant applications in only four days with a very small, modest budget. He got amazing value and from job posts to offer accepted in only a few days.
LinkedIn has over 690 million members worldwide and they screen candidates for both hard skills and the soft skills that you're looking for.
It is the best hiring platform in the world.
google spent 2.6 billion dollars to buy looker buying looker for 2.6 billion dollars does not advantage google's advertisers it does not advantage i mean to some degree it might it does not advantage google's users and it is not about platform dominance in their traditional ad business it's about vertical expansion into a new market
the acts that people had to grind were kind of pointed at google and facebook and amazon in different ways
it was weird it didn't feel like tim cook should have been there it was like kind of a random thing that he was there because everyone had an axe to grind and the axe that everyone had to grind was a little bit different it wasn't like this was a true objective discussion about you know antitrust and so the the axes that people had to grind were kind of pointed at google and facebook and amazon in different ways uh tim cook was kind of you know hey this is cool you guys go ahead and give your re
Of a large team, right? There's probably a dozen people. It's literally, like, seven or eight out of ten, in my experience.
Twitter had absolutely no technical ability to do anything. They were bloggers, and they were really web designers, but they didn't know how to use a database, so the thing was crashing constantly, so they couldn't even build a search engine, image hosting, or a client, so you used a third-party client in the App Store, a third-party client on your desktop. Surmise to search it, and TweetPick, and TweetVid, and LongTweet.
And the popular theory is right now that it's a Twitch Patreon-style subscription, which would be quite nice, actually. So you could subscribe to individual accounts, and that would be amazing for people to be able to monetize themselves. I talked to Evan Williams about that a decade ago. Or power users could pay for access to new analytics, breaking news alerts, stuff like that. But Twitter's share price jumped 12%, which is pretty amazing since people have kind of lost faith in that company ev
I don't think so. Yeah, look, I mean, it's such a slippery slope and there's too much room for interpretation. I'm just saying the obvious. But, you know, if you're a platform, you're a platform. You know, you let the things get built on top of you. Sure, you can have some rules around what can be built. But as soon as you start, you know, saying what is true and what is not true, and you become the arbiter of truth, you're no longer an agnostic platform. And I think that, you know, that that is
I don't think so. Yeah, look, I mean, it's such a slippery slope and there's too much room for interpretation. I'm just saying the obvious. But, you know, if you're a platform, you're a platform. You know, you let the things get built on top of you. Sure, you can have some rules around what can be built. But as soon as you start, you know, saying what is true and what is not true, and you become the arbiter of truth, you're no longer an agnostic platform. And I think that, you know, that that is
in the first post IPO, they asked us, would we be featured as the independent publisher alongside the New York Times in the first post public quarterly report? And so they published Engadget in New York Times. They had quotes from me and Martin Isleholtz. But I was like, Kim was my rabbi at Google and she was like, do you know, I said, what percentage am I getting? She said, well, don't disclose it.
And Google doesn't do that.
Would never have happened under Steve Jobs.