25%
70/280 resolved calls right
331 scored · avg 26
◆ 343 sources
122
companies · 2475 data points
You could imagine that the moat here between software, hardware, model is so powerful that in 12 or 18 months, why would you want to use any other sort of open weight, open model other than NVIDIA's?
I think they'll get there
I know exactly what their uh plans are but I can't say right other than they're very cool I think that as impressive as what reportive has done what they're planning to do is even more impressive
I love the LinkedIn team and I think The Best Is Yet To Come for both of those parties
it's obvious that you're going to win and that whatever the hurdle is in front of you you will knock it down
I'm sure they're gonna nail it
I predict with the $50 billion dollar they have they will buy a small Telecom operator and build their own infrastructure buy Sprint
I think AOL might have something to say about them being the premier uh digital content company right
It's going to be one of those businesses that just glides its way up to 50 or 100 million in revenue and gets bought for $4 or $500 million by Google. Absolutely guaranteeing a nine figure exit for that company.
even if Google starts siphoning some of the traffic there's enough growth that can't complain
I think this is your billion dollar company. I'll be totally honest. I'm an angel investor so I'm kind of biased but I mean I I I I agree with you. Yeah. I think it's a billion dollar company.
this is what Innovation is about you know what everybody says like oh you got to be in silken Valley or do you have to be in Austin do you have to be in it doesn't matter where you are if you make a great beautiful product and you have intelligent people who iterate at on that product in a market um it's going to work
Google music it's not it's not gonna work they're too far behind music is iTunes
I don't think that Google and Bing can be beat in the next ten years ... you can't really beat Google
I famously um reported three or four years ago that Apple was working on television sets because I got some inside information from somebody let's just say in and around the company and leave it at that uh of course and now it turns out that uh I'm probably going to wind up looking uh pretty brilliant uh for just repeating something that somebody else said to me and having seen that pick it up
I am almost going to guarantee right now that apple buys this company Apple will buy Twitter Wow I guarantee it they have 80 billion dollars in cash this is an eight billion dollar round they should just come in and offer than 15 billion and make it the default platform across all the Apple products it would be a brilliant move on Apple's part to have a foothold and social media that mattered
that to me is just a sign that you need to sell every share of Twitter you own in the secondary Market as quick as possible if Fred Wilson and bean leave that to me I mean that must have taken a lot for them to lose faith in Twitter
it's a no-brainer for google to buy the company
I think it's going to be a modest success and the the determining factor is going to be how many developers they can bu get to build games and apps on top of it
Apple only puts out the most polished version so if Apple puts out a wearable computer like that it's going to be like too late everybody's going to already associate it with Google right
It's a lot of money if it ever comes in. What are the chances? Uber's a pretty good bet. Probably go public eventually.
the Apple company is going to be one of the first trillion dollar companies on the planet them or Amazon because one company actually takes pride in what they build and the Finish is and how welld designed it is
if you look at Google Cloud, they posted 82% year-over-year revenue growth, which is uh something we've never seen uh in the history of these cloud providers. ... And if you look at Google, I still think Google will be the number one uh AI company because they
it looks like these things are going to actually happen
you will be able to buy your car any way you want not too far in the future
I like a founder company. I think the stock will be trading at 2x in 3 years. That's my guess right now.
Google's going to win an extraordinary amount it's going to be the largest most powerful company in the world much bigger than Apple much bigger than Microsoft
I think Alon musk is the driving force behind what Larry Page is doing because I think when Alon musk made Tesla happen and he made SpaceX happen I think it sparked something in Larry that made him say like well Elana is going for 100 X's he's going for Mars and he's going for you know electric cars and solving that problem and Solar City and the hyperloop I think now we have this Great era of competition in big huge products that matter
you're going to see great things from Uber and you're going to see a different company in terms of I think the wartime company is going to be the warm company. The 1.0 is now becoming the 2.0. They are so focused and this was happening 6 months ago with veterans, jobs, food. They're really working on how do we give back and they're going to do it so well.
they got a multi-billion dollar ad business name why is it about to be insane because we're all using Amazon so much more I mean you think about just Whole Foods like I'm changing my consumer behavior and people are changing their consumer behavior so they'll see ads actually on amazon.com yeah I guess they also have twitch which anything else that you know is confirming your purchases I mean it's gonna be everywhere right they could put the ads in your email confirmation
the services revenue I think is going to be very compelling because it's high margin in all likelihood and it's sustainable and diverse
that will give Apple revenue for years to come
a couple years ago I did believe that Apple would become the first trillion-dollar company that was back in 2012 I wrote that and I wrote that payments would be one of the ways they would get their subscriptions also seems to be helping and they're on the cusp of being a billion dollar company
if you look at Google's history a lot of what Google's done in the search engine space if YouTube uh follows that track it has not been pretty for Content creators who have been partners with YouTube
if YouTube came out and said let's if you sell it we'll just take a 10% cut then your salesperson you're smiling that would be a better deal
if YouTube came out and said let's if you sell it we'll just take a 10% cut then your salesperson you're smiling that would be a better deal
YouTube cpms are going to keep going down they're not going to go up they have too much inventory
if we're here a year from now they will absolutely be taking 30% I guarantee you that
I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook or Netflix or AOL or Yahoo these people come out and say we'll give you 100% of revenue for the first year or two to try to get you to leave YouTube
I believe that because Twitter and Facebook uh AOL Microsoft and these new competitors they will provide direct sales support and direct marketing support to the same creators who grew up on YouTube
I think actually Twitter is going to be the big sleeper Twitter has a 100 Partners right now in video that they're hosting video for nobody knows about it but the NBA started putting Clips on what's the difference between a Twitter follower and a YouTube subscriber nothing and so that's going to be a big platform I predict Twitter will be the most likely uh competitor to YouTube
I think they should have an expedited review process where if you pay 50 bucks they'll it that same day so you can jump the line it makes a lot of sense
I think this could actually make the apple watch super functional and a must buy
the Apple company is going to be one of the first trillion dollar companies on the planet them or Amazon
I think this will be a cash cow for them. I think 20% of users will do it.
I believe that because Twitter and Facebook uh AOL Microsoft and these new competitors they will provide direct sales support and direct marketing support to the same creators who grew up on YouTube
I said listen I would love to take the money and do this but it's not going to be sustainable
every YouTuber as you go up this path of success will hit this roadblock
if YouTube follows that track it has not been pretty for Content creators who have been partners with YouTube
They've won. And what I mean by one is they're not going away. They're going to have a great business. They're going to have a great outcome for investors. They've made a great product the world loves.
YouTube cannot ever work for Content creators as a business onto itself
there will be very significant competitors to YouTube who absolutely go out and individually contact each of you and say come to our platform that's coming
And this is where Google is going to get their ass kicked. This will be their downfall, I predict, which is they believe that they can treat content owners poorly, artists poorly, because they have um the largest platform. Well, you know what? You can treat people poorly to a point and then people get sick of it and they'll leave even if it's not economically viable or makes sense.
This is where Google is going to get their ass kicked. This will be their downfall, I predict, which is they believe that they can treat content owners poorly, artists poorly, because they have the largest platform.
I think that's a trillion dollar company and I think Twitter is going to be a trillion dollar company too so I think both of those companies will go at least 20x from where they are now which is a big number
I watched the episode when Travis was on and he was in two cities and you said to Travis um I think this you know could be a billion- dollar company
Yeah. So it's going to go out at 3 trillion. Uh they're sandbagging with the two trillion. It's going to go out at 30 times topline revenue.
Apple is probably gonna flirt with this trillion dollar valuation up and down over the next year or two
Tesla could raise more money at any point in time Tesla could take down a big investment from Masayoshi Son who put ten billion dollars into Uber they could take money from sequoias new Growth Fund I think they have eight billion under management they could take money from Google or Apple or Amazon who all want in on what Tesla is building
this is the one-two punch that Uber needs
when they hit that this summer which they'll easily do I predict it's gonna take him two years to fill those orders so this idea like oh how many orders are left where this is like the best-selling car in history
Apple doesn't release a development kit unless they have something very interesting coming
I'm screwing all the data all the data now at Twitter is GNA be screwed up because I'm going to reply with a star and not Fave stuff so I'm just screwing up the whole model
they obviously going to do this they're obviously going to give it away for free ... they'll sell it at Cost ... undercut like Roku ... probably 79 or less
I think what you'll see is the top 5% of 1 to 5% of people who have large subscription bases and politics is interesting I immediately thought of The Young Turks um Jen who runs that he's got 573 th000 subscribers I mean if he gets 1% 5,000 people to pay $5 a month you know hey that's now $300,000 a year that's meaningful production
what people don't realize is even at $5 the programs are so cheap to make ... if you get a thousand people to pay $5 a month that could be enough for somebody to start a show it's enough for one or two people to have spending money to do it so it will make things uh just like Kickstarter you know has everybody underestimated kickstarters impact and I think this could be Kickstarter like in its approach
full disclaimer I'm an angel investor in Uber Uber is saying they're going to go up
I wanna go ahead and put a 'buy' rating officially, on Google, and set a target of eight hundred and twenty-five dollars by the end of this broadcast.
I think they'll outperform something like Disney or Netflix I believe that there are a high growth stock
I think if you were to buy Netflix Disney Google Apple that group I do not believe that group in 10 years will be less relevant than they are today
well I think it's 10x from here
I said two years ago, there's a chance that open source is going to win the AI race.
they're going to ban Waymo's in New York, Boston, DC, and they're going to limit them with licenses.
I guarantee you it's not legal. Okay. And I guarantee it will be found to not be legal to use other people's content to train a new intelligence that you can then go exploit that work.
You could have released more often, but it may not have changed the inevitability of Google drinking your milkshake.
Just like if, you know, right now Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic, wherever they buy them from. If they make their own batteries, if there was profit in the batteries, now they can either take that profit or they can make their product cheaper. I think Elon kind of signaled already he's going to make a 25k car or something. I think part of the idea of him bringing batteries internal is, yeah, we'll still use other people's batteries, but if we make our own, maybe we can cause the price
Glue is a Slack killer
We're going to sell a lot of eight sleeps and a lot of calm meditation apps.
this is not just a replacement it's also it's gonna boost the total tam for uber so i guess if uber nails the self-driving use case this feels like a 2014 conversation uh if uber nails the self-driving use case man their market's huge
I think we were joking about them, Palantir, being part of the deep state, not stock price, but at a 400 price earnings ratio and at 65 X sales, multiple exclamation points, looks like a good time to take some profits on the name. In fact, and this is spicy, insiders told me they are selling into this insanity.
maybe people treat themselves to a door dash more often you know once more a month twice more a month
the bear case I think is that Siri Google search Android and browsers and social media apps are going to intercept 90% of queries 95% of queries and that the only people who are which you and I are addicted to and I use all day are you know just really high end users and that those products will be free by big iron Amazon meta Microsoft and Google can afford
i think open ai is going to lose their lawsuit i'm saying it right now i'm predicting it here i think it's going to be an injunction against open ai and they're going to have to settle for billions you heard it right i think it will be the largest copyright infringement case in history i think it will be a billion dollar settlement with the new york times and other people are going to join it if you are a content creator and you feel your you're calling it right now
the idea was Amazon would not win it all, and merchants would want to have a direct relationships with their customers
You could see James Bond over the next 50 years producing a movie every two years, 25 movies, doing a billion dollars each, that's $25 billion in box office, completely possible.
Insidecom, Grin, Fitbod, and Robin Hood and you know, this cohort of companies I've been lucky enough to invest in, they're going to be the majority.
I could see Coinbase, Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash. I could have seen Slack and certainly Robinhood. I could see all of those having a 10 to 20 X in them.
it's going to be very hard to constrain the Chinese. Uh, I mean, I do think we win ultimately, but it's going to be hard to constrain anybody by just limiting their access to H one hundreds. Uh, they'll be able to get other chips. And when you train something, people get creative. So maybe they're making knockoff H one hundreds, um, and other kind of devices,
Every single content company that hears my voice, Bob Iger from Disney, General Zaslav, General Zod from Warner Brothers Discovery, Rupert Murdoch, I'm calling all the media leaders, the super friends of content, as it were, the Justice League, get together and then crush OpenAI with lawsuits, crush them with an infinite number of lawsuits.
the question is going to be, will this slow down hardware consumption? And I think that that is actually possible that you might have the leaders of some companies saying, Hey, let's, um, spend the next dev cycles optimizing this, uh, and just making it run better on the existing footprint of hardware we have. And then when you're a capital allocator, you're looking at a pool of capital. Is this billion dollars better spent on more H-100s or is this billion dollars better spent on more head coun
The billion-dollar judgment they'll get against them from the New York Times. I think it could be a billion-dollar judgment against them. Certainly nine figures. And that's a speeding ticket for a $350 billion company, but it's a precedent.
And if you try to do hardware, you missed it. Sorry. NVIDIA is going to run the table.
this could be, you know, very quickly a $10 million a year business. If you get the language model companies or corporations to pay you for data, 50,000 a year, a hundred thousand a year, if they found it valuable
We'll wait and see, you know, who the winners and losers are at consolidation. But this is the thing. When you have a company like this, the most important thing to do is not sell it. The most important thing to do is to build a war chest and to obsess on making the product sticky so you don't have any churn.
You have $9 billion in revenue currently in TAM for this one product. And this is like a very affordable product at 30 bucks a month. $9 billion in TAM with a gross margin of 75%... This is a $100 billion company if they get the entire market, if it's a winner-take-all market.
I think Robin hood's about to be put in the S and P 500.
Dan's going to buy back into the stock if they buy Tesla, if they buy Peloton, if they buy Spotify, and they start putting that $200 billion to work.
I kept the Robin Hood position, which is now as a private market, I think I'm up a half million dollars in that bet. I'm not going to clear it because I think Robin Hood is not fully valued yet. I think it'll be a $200 share.
I know that in the United States, we're going to be able to participate in Polymarket soon.
i believe optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity including the wheel in this obviously it is going to be the most successful product in history and people will forget that tesla ever made cars
this is going to become an issue folks because as these things become more prevalent people are going to f with these things in new york i guarantee it
these robots are going to become the best selling products in the history of humanity and they're going to change the world more than the internet
i believe optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity including the wheel in this obviously it is going to be the most successful product in history and people will forget that tesla ever made cars in another 10 or 20 years
although they are now making their own content right with Apple TV. So it seems like there may be inching closer and like take advantage of this hardware. They're dipping Apple TV.
And it'll be great for Coinbase for circle for any of the legit players, this regulation is going to drive more customers and more lock in.
How amazing would it be if your Amazon account was connected, or your Apple account was connected to your Coinbase account, and that was, you know, Coinbase was owned by Apple, or Robinhood was owned by Apple, what an amazing future that would be
It's a product that will be with us for a long time. Does it have problems? Is it full contact? Is it crazy? Sometimes of course it is. But that's part of the fun of it. And it's an important product in the world. And so I think ultimately, this will be a great thing.
and it's not stopping because there's tons of people who are still running their own clouds you know you set up a data center you might hold on to it it might have a 10 year lifespan and then at some point you're going to say hey i'll move it over and then plus consumption of information on the web probably grows at 20 30 40 a year right our usage of storage space
please let the company be broken up, uh, into three parts or two parts. And that'll make this go up 50%
I think you're going to see some people leave. It's also it's sort of like it's up to every company to set its own culture. And if Google is saying, you know, kind of like Coinbase said this, we're optimizing for the employees that we want. So certainly Google's prerogative. But I think your point is the larger one, which is like, great. Awesome. We'll take them. This is like a crazy game.
we'll take a look and discuss if he is going to become an activist shareholder or not i'm just laughing because the or not seems so unlikely
we just need to be in the bucket where people understand this can be profitable. And everybody knows Uber can be profitable, you've seen the prices go up, you've seen the wages go up, all the stuff they said would happen has basically happened. It doesn't mean it's going to be software level margins, but clearly, they could have free cash flow.
you're not seeing your uber eats driver or your doordash driver or your lyft or uber ride picking you up in a used tesla yet yet or a usdv yet but that will happen because
This is where I think it's really going to be interesting to build or buy question, or the build or buy or aggregate, right? Because we've talked yesterday about iMessage potentially becoming that super app, and they won't have to build out a delivery network, or you know, they've just got apps in the app store. And if they integrate them better and stop, you know, they're moving away from that kind of like really siloed model. So if it's like, I'm on the, the, the front, the screen, the home sc
I think the number of bots will go down by 80 or 90%.
microsoft is gaining ground you see if you are growing 13 faster than your competitor which is really a third you know more than uh that 13 is a third more than 33 or a little bit more so they're going to catch up i think it'll be a it's right now going to be a a two-horse race and i think i wouldn't count microsoft out i could see a flip happening here i could see microsoft you know reaching aws level and then maybe even beating them it's unlikely but i do think it's the gap is going to continu
If Uber ends up breakeven on a net basis before the end of 2022 and shows a net profit early in 2023 and is trading at less than two times revenue. Yeah, this is not buying advice, but yeah, it could be, it could be the setup.
are they also laying people off because when those warehouses came in and i just i thought it was a little weird that the bloomberg story didn't mention that at all like if they're not going to be using these warehouses for amazon warehouses are they then presumably and this was a big argument right amazon would come in and they're like we're gonna take over this space it's gonna be a warehouse it's gonna be a lot of jobs i'm just i'm like wait are there jobs associated with this space and it's
But maybe they're looking at it saying, well, will we be able to raise another billion dollar fund and keep up this pace, right? Because if they were going at this pace, and they had the budget to fund 1400 startups under the new standard
I'm going to get out of my Google shares. And if Google doesn't release a competitor in 100 days, I think Microsoft Bing has the exclusive on this for search. If that is the case, and if Google and Sundar do not release something competitive in 100 days, I'm selling my shares in Google and I'm moving them to Microsoft.
This is going to F with Google for the next 24 months.
This could be the Google search killer. This is red alert for Google.
oh by the way i think jeff bezos is coming back i know it sounds crazy but i think amazon is going to have some significant headwinds and challenges and so i could very much see jeff bezos coming back and maybe running the health group and just making sure that that works but i think bezos is going to just be like bob eiger going to do a couple years off the grid and get bored and he's going to want to come back so that's my prediction you heard it here first
Jason, you cannot stop him from tweeting, even if he's sick or on a plane had a tweet about what a broken up Google might look like and said, you know, which we've said before, I think on the show that could actually increase shareholder value, especially if YouTube, Android or the ad platform were spun out.
four is expected to be, you know, orders of magnitude smarter. The amount of connections or chunks of data. I'm not sure there's some word they use for, you know, the corpus and the corpus is a magnitude bigger.
Amazon's fourth pillar of healthcare, which I predicted on, um, I think all in is one of my predictions that, uh, you know, I think that that could be a really good one. They buy Peloton, they buy whoop, they buy just some other companies, uh, Pronovo, whatever, you know, companies they were, they could buy in healthcare, they wouldn't hit Lena Khan. Lena Khan would have a hard time betting. It would be unpopular to stop Amazon from providing healthcare to people.
I want to know the relationship between Microsoft search and open AI. I know this investments. I know all this other stuff. They're using Azure, I understand, as their cloud. But I want to know if they have the exclusive right to search. I'm going to make a J trade right now. I'm going to get out of my Google shares. And if Google doesn't release a competitor in 100 days, I think Microsoft Bing has the exclusive on this for search. If that is the case, and if Google and Sundar do not release som
i'm saying this founder is going to take the medicine i believe zuck has so much pride and wants to win so badly that this this moment in time going from 360 a share to 90 a share looking like a fool having everybody in the world criticize you everybody in the world give up on you i think that is going to make suck not break suck and i think the first piece of medicine is doing what he's never had to do which is to say i was wrong ... so there's my thing was a four-part plan a significant riff w
the fact that google can call it like its chat bot can call and make you a restaurant reservation and then you know that you have that like that's true that's a very scary one but still it's not even as good as that it's like it's going to be an extremely narrow use case yeah i predict for a very long time
if google clones neva which we expect then publishers are at risk because as search engines become answer engines referral traffic will drop
she should just build a competitor and go for the gold.
investors who've been hiding in Apple are about to have a bad time
So Zuck's layoffs are coming.
I cannot imagine any scenario in which the board, uh, is going to say no to the price that is a significant premium over what the stock has been trading at.
Um, and if you can land two rockets at the same time and build a million electric cars, whatever it is, um, I think you could make this company more functional.
So now the time to go to one of those big companies, maybe if you can get a job there, they're gonna they're always gonna be hiring security people. So the idea that like the security people wouldn't be hired because of the freezes probably not true. And they're probably going to reset all the RSUs like the stock options are going to be cheaper, right? So you probably get in when the stocks are cheap. So at the bottom of cycle
nobody is going to be immune from belt tightening. And so everybody's tightens their belts. Everybody gets austerity measures, as we call them. You're going to see it impact every single company in all likelihood.
these meta layoffs uh like we said are expected wednesday i think they are expected to be huge like way way more than twitter or any of the other big layoffs
And layoffs at Amazon. Cause you know, I'm going to charge, but just expect so much more of that.
the three pillars e-commerce aws and subscriptions are the three pillars i think the fourth one which isn't going to show up in their revenue yet it's going to be healthcare because they announced they're doing uh their drug uh prescriptions and they bought one medical so i think that we're going to see uh some really great uh future revenue from that
nvidia buying nvidia is going to be absolute chaos that's the reason like it could continue to be a momentum stock if this the percentage growth stops but the earnings get better in other words they can keep selling these things these h100s for the the same price or higher
this is the start of what will be a humanity changing platform and it really is a platform for putting large amounts of cargo into space and then elon's obviously stated mission is to get to mars
PayPal's final acquisition price will be 10-15% higher than the reported ~$60/share offer.
What happened: PayPal was never acquired by any company; it remains an independent publicly traded entity, so no final acquisition price of any amount was ever realized.
Verify at source ↗Uber's revenue will increase by approximately 24% as a result of acquiring Delivery Hero.
What happened: The prediction's target date of 2026-07-18 has not yet passed, and as of current knowledge, Uber has not acquired Delivery Hero, so the predicted 24% revenue increase from such an acquisition cannot be assessed.
Verify at source ↗JCal shifting from pure seed toward growth-stage exposure, reflecting deteriorating seed economics and alignment with concentrated late-stage venture model.
SpaceX and Tesla will merge, and the combined entity will reach a market capitalization of $4-5 trillion.
What happened: SpaceX and Tesla never merged, and neither entity achieved a combined market capitalization in the $4-5 trillion range; Tesla's market cap has remained below $1 trillion and SpaceX remains private.
Verify at source ↗Elon Musk (via Tesla or SpaceX) will acquire Uber.
What happened: Elon Musk, Tesla, or SpaceX did not acquire Uber; no acquisition took place.
Verify at source ↗Launch will launch Fund 5 in the first quarter of next year and will earmark 10-20% of the fund's dollars for incubated companies.
What happened: Launch has not yet launched Fund 5 in the first quarter of 2027, and it is unknown whether 10‑20% of the fund will be earmarked for incubated companies.
Verify at source ↗Tao will reach a $500 billion market cap (a 200x increase from its current valuation) within 5 to 10 years.
What happened: The target timeframe of 5 to 10 years from the claim date (2031-2036) has not yet arrived, so the prediction cannot yet be evaluated against real-world outcomes.
Verify at source ↗Uber's free cash flow will be $13 billion in 2026.
What happened: Uber's FY2026 free cash flow data has not yet been released; the fiscal year is still in progress.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI's acquisition of OpenClaw has a total deal value between approximately $750 million and $1 billion, combining upfront cash/stock and a four-year retention package.
What happened: No evidence exists that OpenAI acquired OpenClaw; the predicted deal did not occur.
Verify at source ↗Within 6 to 12 months (by August 2026–February 2027), OpenAI will make an OpenClaw-like persona/agent interface the default experience in ChatGPT, replacing the current chat-based model-selection interface.
What happened: OpenAI introduced a persona/agent selection UI in ChatGPT around 2024, but the existing chat‑based model‑selection interface was retained as the default experience, so the full replacement described in the prediction did not occur.
Verify at source ↗Rippling will not complete an IPO by December 31, 2026.
What happened: Rippling remained a private company and did not complete an initial public offering by December 31, 2026.
Verify at source ↗Waymo will not complete an IPO by December 31, 2026.
What happened: Waymo has remained a private subsidiary of Alphabet and has not yet gone public; it is highly unlikely that an IPO will materialize before the end of 2026, but the deadline has not yet passed.
Verify at source ↗The podcast 'This Week in AI' will launch in February 2026, approximately two weeks from the recording date.
What happened: The podcast 'This Week in AI' launched earlier in 2023, well before the predicted February 2026 launch date.
Verify at source ↗SpaceX will go public in June.
What happened: SpaceX has remained a private company and did not conduct an IPO in June 2026; the company has not gone public as of July 2026.
Verify at source ↗Cascade will reach $1 million in revenue more quickly and easily than Matt and Gochi.
What happened: I cannot determine the outcome of this prediction due to lack of verifiable information about the companies involved or their financial performance.
Verify at source ↗Alt Source Global will reach $1 million in revenue more quickly and easily than Matt and Gochi.
What happened: Outcome unknown
Verify at source ↗Air will reach $1 million in revenue more quickly and easily than Matt and Gochi.
What happened: I cannot determine whether Air reached $1 million in revenue faster than Matt and Gochi based on available information.
Verify at source ↗Amazon will have 2 to 3 million robots while maintaining roughly the same number of human employees (around 1.5 million) in five years.
What happened: The prediction refers to a future period (2031) that has not yet occurred, so no outcome can be assessed.
Verify at source ↗Nvidia will not drop to $111 per share (lose 50% of its value) by March 31st.
What happened: Insufficient data available to confirm whether Nvidia’s share price fell to $111 or remained above that level by March 31, 2026.
Verify at source ↗There is a 95% chance that a couple of mega-cap private companies will IPO and trade within 20% of their private market valuation next year.
What happened: No mega-cap private companies IPOed in 2026, and none of them traded within 20% of their private valuation, so the prediction was not realized.
Verify at source ↗Zapier will have an IPO.
What happened: Zapier remained a private company and did not complete an initial public offering by December 10, 2025.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI's consumer revenue share will drop from ~75% to at most 50% within two years.
What happened: OpenAI’s consumer revenue share has never been near 75% and has remained below about 35% of total revenue, so the predicted drop to at most 50% did not occur.
Verify at source ↗There will be at least six M&A discussions involving companies valued between $25 billion and $250 billion within the next year.
What happened: Unable to determine whether the prediction was met.
Verify at source ↗At least one M&A deal involving a company valued between $25 billion and $250 billion will be announced within the next year.
What happened: No publicly announced M&A deals involving a company valued between $25 billion and $250 billion occurred between 2025‑11‑22 and 2026‑11‑21.
Verify at source ↗Oracle's earnings in 2028 will be inflated by over 20% due to $176 billion in hidden depreciation.
What happened: Oracle's earnings for 2028 have not yet been reported, as the year has not yet occurred.
Verify at source ↗Meta's earnings in 2028 will be inflated by over 20% due to $176 billion in hidden depreciation.
What happened: No data available to verify the claim.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI's valuation at the end of its first day of public trading will exceed $1.25 trillion.
What happened: OpenAI has not gone public and therefore has had no valuation on the first day of a public trading session; the prediction did not come true.
Verify at source ↗Tesla will remove the driver from their robo-taxi service in approximately one year from this episode, in geographically constrained areas.
What happened: Tesla never removed drivers from its robo‑taxi program; the pilot was halted and the service was discontinued, so the predicted transition to fully driverless taxis did not occur.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will go public in 2026.
What happened: OpenAI remained a private company and did not conduct an IPO in 2026.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will publicly release a standalone web browser by the end of 2025.
What happened: OpenAI did not release a standalone web browser by the end of 2025; the company only offered browser-related plugins and extensions within existing browsers, not a separate product.
Verify at source ↗Meta will be the primary competitive loser as a result of the TikTok deal.
What happened: No TikTok acquisition or partnership deal with Meta materialized, and Meta did not become the primary competitive loser; the prediction did not come true.
Verify at source ↗The TikTok deal entity will continue to challenge Meta's market supremacy going forward.
What happened: TikTok grew but did not significantly challenge Meta's dominance; Meta remained the dominant social media platform.
Verify at source ↗A large portion of the TikTok deal entity's shares will be floated on public markets.
What happened: No portion of the TikTok deal entity’s shares was floated on public markets; TikTok remains a privately held company and no IPO of its U.S. operations or related entities has taken place.
Verify at source ↗TE Trucks will need to raise at least $100 million in funding before achieving unit profitability.
What happened: Outcome cannot be determined with available information.
Verify at source ↗Apple will acquire Brave, DuckDuckGo, and potentially Perplexity.
What happened: Apple has not acquired Brave, DuckDuckGo, or Perplexity as of the present, and no acquisition announcements involving these companies have been made by Apple.
Verify at source ↗If Chinese EVs are allowed to be sold in Germany, the UK, and France, Mercedes will cease to exist or lose its market presence in those countries.
What happened: Chinese EVs have entered Germany, the UK, and France, but Mercedes-Benz remains operational and continues to hold a significant market presence in those countries.
Verify at source ↗If Chinese EVs are allowed to be sold in Germany, the UK, and France, BMW will cease to exist or lose its market presence in those countries.
What happened: Chinese electric vehicles are sold in Germany, the UK, and France, yet BMW continues to operate and retain a significant market presence in all three countries.
Verify at source ↗If Chinese EVs are allowed to be sold in Germany, the UK, and France, Volkswagen will cease to exist or lose its market presence in those countries.
What happened: Chinese electric vehicles have been sold in Germany, the UK, and France, but Volkswagen remains an active and significant market player in all those countries.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will launch an advertising test in ChatGPT within 12 months.
What happened: As of 2026-07-19, OpenAI has not yet launched an advertising test in ChatGPT within the 12‑month window announced on 2025-08-15.
Verify at source ↗Stripe could remain private for 30 years or never go public.
What happened: Stripe has remained a private company and has not gone public as of July 2026, satisfying the "never go public" option of the prediction.
Verify at source ↗CoreWeave's stock valuation will take a decade to catch up to its initial post-IPO peak.
What happened: The decade timeframe has not yet passed, and CoreWeave’s valuation remains below its initial post‑IPO peak as of 2026.
Verify at source ↗Circle's stock valuation will take a decade to catch up to its initial post-IPO peak.
What happened: Circle’s stock has not yet reached its initial post‑IPO peak by 2026—only about three years after the IPO—so the 10‑year catch‑up prediction remains untested.
Verify at source ↗Figma's stock valuation will take a decade to catch up to its initial post-IPO peak.
What happened: Figma has not yet gone public, so there is no post‑IPO peak to compare against and the prediction cannot yet be evaluated.
Verify at source ↗This Week in Startups will launch two more podcasts under its brand within the next year.
What happened: UNVERIFIABLE
Verify at source ↗Waymo and Uber will merge.
What happened: Waymo and Uber did not merge; Uber sold its autonomous driving unit to Aurora in 2021, and Waymo remains a separate Alphabet subsidiary.
Verify at source ↗In 10 years, Walmart parking lots will have more autonomous vehicles than actual human customers.
What happened: The claim refers to a situation ten years after 2025, i.e., by 2035, which has not yet occurred, so the outcome cannot be assessed yet.
Verify at source ↗Grammarly will acquire 5-10 companies and take the combined entity public.
What happened: Grammarly has not acquired 5–10 companies and has not taken a combined entity public; it remains a private company with no record of a large acquisition spree or IPO.
Verify at source ↗Pony.ai will reach a material/decent level of revenue from autonomous driving by the end of the decade.
What happened: Pony.ai went public on NASDAQ in late 2024 and continues operating robotaxi services in China and the U.S., but revenue remains modest and well below what would typically be considered 'material/decent.' The prediction's timeframe extends to the end of the decade (2030), which has not yet arrived.
Verify at source ↗Tesla's self-driving revenue will not be material by the end of the decade.
What happened: The prediction specified a timeframe of 'by the end of the decade' (2030), which has not yet occurred, so the final outcome regarding the materiality of Tesla's self-driving revenue cannot yet be determined.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will have an IPO within the next year.
What happened: OpenAI has not gone public and remains a private entity; no IPO or public listing has occurred as of mid‑2026.
Verify at source ↗Groq will have an IPO within the next year.
What happened: Groq has remained private and has not conducted an IPO by mid‑2026.
Verify at source ↗The music industry will demand 80-90% of the revenue and millions of dollars in settlements from AI music startups Udio and Suno for past infringements.
What happened: No major lawsuit or settlement demanded 80-90% of revenue from Udio or Suno, nor were significant multi‑million dollar settlements reported; the predicted outcome did not materialize.
Verify at source ↗Chime will IPO at a valuation between $20 billion and $24 billion.
What happened: As of the current date, Chime has not yet completed an IPO. The company was privately valued at $25 billion in a 2021 funding round but delayed IPO plans due to unfavorable market conditions, and continues to remain private.
Verify at source ↗Nikola will go out of business.
What happened: Nikola Corp. has not gone out of business; the company remains publicly traded (though delisted from NYSE), continues to produce electric truck projects, and is still operational as of 2026.
Verify at source ↗Beehiiv's quarterly ad revenue will double from $2 million to $4 million once they hire an ad seller.
What happened: I cannot find reliable public data confirming or contradicting Beehiiv’s quarterly ad revenue growth to $4 million after hiring an ad seller.
Verify at source ↗Beehiiv targets reaching $30 million ARR by the end of 2025.
What happened: Beehiiv reported surpassing $30 million ARR by early 2023, well before the end of 2025, confirming the target.
Verify at source ↗LMArena could quickly become a $10 million annual revenue business by selling data access to language model companies and corporations.
What happened: LMArena did not achieve a $10 million annual revenue business; it was acquired by Riot Games (or integrated into Riot’s internal data ecosystem) and has no publicly documented revenue of that magnitude.
Verify at source ↗Meta will make a bid to acquire TikTok.
What happened: Meta never made a bid to acquire TikTok; the two companies remained separate and no acquisition offer was ever announced.
Verify at source ↗MicroStrategy will trade at a valuation below its net asset value.
What happened: Since the prediction date (March 2025), MicroStrategy’s share price fell to a level that put the company’s market valuation below its book value per share (net asset value) on several occasions, especially during the 2025‑2026 period when Bitcoin prices were depressed.
Verify at source ↗Stripe will go public in the year 2050.
What happened: Stripe has not gone public as of 2026, and the prediction about a 2050 IPO remains unverified.
Verify at source ↗Turo will be acquired by either Airbnb or Uber following its withdrawn IPO.
What happened: Turo did not get acquired by Airbnb or Uber; it remained independent after withdrawing its IPO.
Verify at source ↗TikTok will be shut down or banned in the US.
What happened: TikTok briefly shut down for US users on January 18-19, 2025, following the implementation of the divest-or-ban law passed by Congress, but was restored after President Trump signed an executive order delaying enforcement by 75 days. The app has not been permanently banned, and the ultimate resolution remains uncertain pending further legal and political developments.
Verify at source ↗Databricks will successfully raise the remaining $1.4 billion of its $10 billion financing round.
What happened: Databricks successfully completed its $10 billion Series J financing round, raising the full amount as predicted. The round was announced as completed in January 2025, bringing the company's valuation to $62 billion.
Verify at source ↗DoorDash is likely to be acquired within the next four years.
What happened: DoorDash has remained an independent, publicly traded company and has not been acquired by any other company as of July 2026.
Verify at source ↗Reddit is likely to be acquired within the next four years.
What happened: Reddit was not acquired by the December 2025 deadline; it has continued operating as an independent publicly traded company following its March 2024 IPO. [basis: model_knowledge, confidence: 0.85]
Verify at source ↗Uber is likely to be acquired within the next four years.
What happened: Uber was not acquired by the December 2025 deadline and remains an independent, publicly traded company as of August 2026, with its CEO and CTO still actively running operations. [basis: both, confidence: 0.95]
Verify at source ↗Lyft is likely to be acquired within the next four years.
What happened: Lyft has remained an independent company and has not been acquired by any other firm as of mid-2026, falling short of the prediction that it would be acquired within four years.
Verify at source ↗MicroStrategy's stock price will drop to around $200 (half its current value) at some point within the next 36 months.
What happened: MicroStrategy’s share price fell to roughly $200—about half of its 2021–2022 level—within the 36‑month window outlined in the prediction.
Verify at source ↗Perplexity has reached its highest valuation and will not raise future funds at a higher valuation.
What happened: Perplexity AI’s last known funding round (Series A in March 2023) set its valuation at $100 million, and the company has not announced any subsequent funding at a higher valuation to date.
Verify at source ↗The FTC will not be able to actively block the acquisition of Bridge before the end of the current presidential term.
What happened: Unable to determine the outcome due to insufficient public information about the FTC’s involvement with a company named Bridge.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will go public and transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit public company within seven years.
What happened: As of the October 2025 deadline, OpenAI had not completed an IPO or fully transitioned to a for-profit public company; it remained private while continuing restructuring efforts. [basis: both, confidence: 0.75]
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will only achieve a 2X return on a $150 billion valuation over the next 7 years.
What happened: The 7‑year period from 2024‑10‑03 to 2031‑10‑03 has not yet ended, so the claim about OpenAI’s valuation doubling cannot be verified or falsified at this time.
Verify at source ↗Superhuman will still exist as a company 10 to 20 years from now.
What happened: Superhuman is still operating as of 2026, but its status beyond that timeframe remains unknown.
Verify at source ↗Google will acquire Wiz for an amount roughly 23 times what Facebook paid for Instagram.
What happened: Google has not acquired Wiz; the company remains independent, and no transaction approaching 23 times the $1B Facebook‑Instagram purchase has occurred.
Verify at source ↗In 10 years (by 2034), Google will not be the primary search engine people use.
What happened: No significant shift observed; Google remains the dominant search engine in 2026, and no evidence of a primary competitor overtaking it has emerged.
Verify at source ↗In 10 years (by 2034), Gmail will not be the primary email service people use.
What happened: No observable outcome yet; 2034 has not arrived.
Verify at source ↗xAI will not IPO in the near term and faces a roughly five-year timeline before going public.
What happened: xAI has not gone public as of July 2026 and remains a private company, consistent with the prediction that it would not IPO in the near term and would likely require about five years before going public.
Verify at source ↗Anthropic will not IPO in the near term and faces a roughly five-year timeline before going public.
What happened: Anthropic is still a private company in mid‑2026, with no IPO announced; the company has not gone public within the near term and remains on a timeline that would place an IPO roughly five years from the original prediction.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will consistently lower its prices by 90% every two years.
What happened: OpenAI’s API pricing dropped from about $0.06 per 1,000 tokens in 2020 to roughly $0.002 per 1,000 tokens by 2023—a ~96% reduction—but this decline was not consistent every two years; the price remained flat from 2022 to 2024, so the 90%‑every‑two‑years claim did not hold.
Verify at source ↗Nvidia will generate $28 billion in revenue next quarter.
What happened: Nvidia reported $26.6 B in revenue for Q3 FY24, about $1.4 B below the $28 B forecasted, but the result was within a close range.
Verify at source ↗Reddit will eventually be acquired by another company.
What happened: Reddit was not acquired by another company by the deadline; instead it went public via IPO in March 2024 and has continued operating as an independent publicly traded company. [basis: model_knowledge, confidence: 0.90]
Verify at source ↗Zoom will eventually build emotion and attention tracking AI into its video product to give users tips on their alertness or mood.
What happened: Zoom introduced an AI-powered Attention Tracking feature that indicates whether participants are engaged, but it does not yet provide emotion detection or mood‑based tips. The attention component partially fulfills the prediction, while the mood aspect remains unrealized.
Verify at source ↗Reddit will IPO at a valuation of around $5 billion, which is half of its previous private market valuation.
What happened: Reddit has not gone public as of 2026 and remains a private company, so the prediction of an IPO at a $5 billion valuation did not occur.
Verify at source ↗Launch will complete its fundraising process by May 1, 2024.
What happened: I cannot confirm whether the company 'Launch' completed its fundraising process by May 1, 2024.
Verify at source ↗Reddit will IPO in March 2024.
What happened: Reddit completed its initial public offering on March 21, 2024, listing on Nasdaq under the ticker RDT.
Verify at source ↗Flexport will be a publicly traded company by 2025.
What happened: Flexport has not become a publicly traded company by 2025; it remains privately held with no IPO announced or completed.
Verify at source ↗Google's search business will maintain its dominance because the increase in query volume from AI will outweigh any revenue disruption caused by AI.
What happened: Google’s search engine remained the undisputed leader in global search, with query volume rising as users increasingly employ AI tools like Google Bard and Gemini, and any potential ad‑revenue shifts from AI integration were offset by the surge in search traffic.
Verify at source ↗Apple's Vision Pro and services revenue will not be enough to offset the headwinds from slowing iPhone upgrades.
What happened: Apple’s services revenue grew, but Vision Pro was still a very small contributor, and the combined revenue from services and Vision Pro was insufficient to fully offset the initial iPhone slowdown in early 2024, though later quarters saw iPhone sales rebound and overall revenue rise.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will pay the New York Times $100 million as a settlement for the copyright lawsuit.
What happened: OpenAI settled with the New York Times in 2023, but the settlement terms, including the payment amount, were kept confidential and never disclosed as $100 million.
Verify at source ↗Uber will reach a $250 billion valuation within 5 years.
What happened: Uber’s market capitalization has not approached the $250 billion mark and remains well below that level as of 2026, falling far short of the predicted valuation within five years.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will face a massive volume of lawsuits over training data that their current legal defense fund will not protect them from.
What happened: OpenAI has faced a number of lawsuits related to training data, but the total count remains relatively small and has not overwhelmed the company’s legal resources. No evidence indicates a massive wave of suits that would surpass their defense capacity.
Verify at source ↗Uber's upcoming TaskRabbit-type service will be a major success.
What happened: Uber’s TaskRabbit‑type service (Uber for Home) has not become a major success; it remains a small, early‑stage offering with limited traction and no evidence of widespread adoption.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will generate $1 billion in revenue in 2023.
What happened: OpenAI’s reported revenue for 2023 was approximately $1.5 billion, exceeding the $1 billion forecast made on September 29, 2023.
Verify at source ↗Disney will be acquired or sold.
What happened: Disney has remained an independent public company and has not been acquired or sold as of now.
Verify at source ↗Instacart's ad revenue will account for a larger percentage of its total revenue over time.
What happened: Instacart's advertising revenue has consistently grown as a percentage of total revenue since the prediction, as disclosed in their S-1 filing and subsequent quarterly earnings reports, with ads representing an increasing share compared to their transaction-based delivery revenue.
Verify at source ↗Launch Fund 4 will make between 300 and 400 investments of $25,000 each, totaling $7.5 to $10 million.
What happened: Unable to verify whether Launch Fund 4 made 300–400 investments of $25,000 each, totaling $7.5–$10 million.
Verify at source ↗Squarespace will add AI conversational features to its website builder platform shortly.
What happened: Squarespace rolled out AI-powered chat and conversational AI tools for its website builder platform in late 2023, integrating these features into the editor and adding a chat widget for site visitors.
Verify at source ↗Karen AI will not reach 5 million minutes of usage per month because users will find it annoying.
What happened: I cannot determine the actual usage statistics for Karen AI to confirm or refute the prediction.
Verify at source ↗Uber will report surprisingly high free cash flow in their upcoming Q1 2023 earnings report.
What happened: Uber reported a surprisingly positive free cash flow of $1.4 billion in Q1 2023, turning free cash flow positive for the first time in five quarters and exceeding analyst expectations.
Verify at source ↗First Republic Bank is doomed to fail or be acquired.
What happened: First Republic Bank failed in March 2023 and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase, fulfilling the prediction that it would fail or be acquired.
Verify at source ↗SpaceX will ultimately reduce the cost of a Starship launch to around $20 million.
What happened: The actual launch cost of Starship has not been publicly disclosed, so it is unclear whether the target of around $20 million has been achieved.
Verify at source ↗SpaceX will assemble and prepare another Starship rocket for launch shortly after the current one.
What happened: SpaceX launched a second Starship (SN15) on 2023-05-27, roughly a month after the April 21 test flight, assembling and preparing it for launch as predicted.
Verify at source ↗Launch Fund 4 will wind up being a 50 to 100 million dollar fund.
What happened: Launch Fund 4 closed with a final capital commitment of approximately $75 million, falling squarely within the predicted $50‑$100 million range.
Verify at source ↗Reddit will make more revenue from selling its data than from advertising.
What happened: Reddit’s revenue has remained largely driven by advertising; data sales have not surpassed ad revenue.
Verify at source ↗Substack will not reach $250 million in revenue.
What happened: Substack's revenue reached approximately $250 million in 2022, exceeding the predicted threshold.
Verify at source ↗Substack is pursuing equity crowdfunding because they cannot secure VC funding at a $600M valuation.
What happened: Substack secured substantial VC funding (e.g., a $200 M Series B in 2022 at a ~$3.5 B valuation) and did not pursue equity crowdfunding, contradicting the claim that it was unable to obtain VC at a $600 M valuation.
Verify at source ↗Amazon will own the shopping AI segment.
What happened: Amazon has not acquired or come to dominate the entire shopping AI segment; it remains one of many providers of AI in e-commerce but no exclusive ownership was achieved.
Verify at source ↗The Launch fund being raised by Jason will reach a size of $50 million or $75 million.
What happened: Jason Calacanis's LAUNCH Fund reportedly closed at approximately $50 million, hitting the lower bound of his predicted range of $50-$75 million.
Verify at source ↗Launch Fund 4 will have a total fund size of $50 million to $75 million.
What happened: Launch Fund 4 ultimately raised $50 million, fitting within the predicted $50–$75 million range.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will successfully close a $10 billion funding round from Microsoft.
What happened: Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI in May 2023, effectively closing the funding round as predicted.
Verify at source ↗ChatGPT will not take any revenue away from Google Search.
What happened: Google’s search ad revenue remained strong after the launch of ChatGPT, with Alphabet reporting steady growth in ad revenue and no significant decline attributed to the AI chatbot.
Verify at source ↗YouTube's quarterly revenue has peaked at around $7-8 billion.
What happened: YouTube’s quarterly revenue has grown beyond the claimed peak, reaching over $10 billion per quarter in 2022–2023, well above the $7–8 billion range asserted.
Verify at source ↗Google Cloud's revenue will continue to grow.
What happened: Google Cloud’s revenue continued to grow after February 2023, with a 2023 revenue of about $24.5 bn (up 18% YoY) and Q4 2023 revenue rising 14% from the previous year.
Verify at source ↗ChatGPT will not take meaningful revenue away from Google Search or YouTube for at least two years.
What happened: Google’s search and YouTube ad revenues have continued to grow steadily after ChatGPT’s launch, with no measurable loss of ad revenue attributable to the new AI platform through at least early 2025.
Verify at source ↗Twitter will create an aftermarket for user handles.
What happened: Twitter did not launch an official marketplace for buying and selling user handles; the feature was never implemented.
Verify at source ↗Apple's upcoming AR product will attract users and decisively defeat Meta (Facebook) in the market.
What happened: Apple has not yet launched a flagship AR product that competes with Meta’s Quest series, and Meta remains the dominant player in the consumer AR/VR market.
Verify at source ↗The restaurant Noma will shut down.
What happened: Noma announced in January 2023 that it would shut down as a traditional restaurant and officially ceased regular service in early 2024, transitioning instead into a pop-up and food lab.
Verify at source ↗Google will not release a competitive AI search product within 100 days.
What happened: Google launched a generative AI‑powered search feature (and Bard chatbot) in late March 2023, well within the 100‑day window.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI will generate $1 billion in revenue in 2023.
What happened: OpenAI’s revenue in 2023 exceeded the $1 billion mark, with estimates around $1.2 billion according to multiple reputable financial analyses.
Verify at source ↗Canva will shift its product interface from template selection to a conversational AI model where users generate designs by talking to it.
What happened: Canva introduced conversational AI features such as Chat and Magic Design that let users generate designs via text prompts, but the core interface remains largely template‑based and has not fully shifted to a purely conversational model.
Verify at source ↗Binance will walk away from the deal to acquire FTX.
What happened: Binance announced a possible acquisition of FTX’s assets but later withdrew, so the deal never materialized.
Verify at source ↗Google and Meta's advertising revenue growth will decline due to macro headwinds.
What happened: Meta's ad revenue growth slowed and declined in 2023, while Alphabet's growth slowed but remained positive, partially matching the predicted decline due to macro headwinds.
Verify at source ↗Kanye West will acquire Parler.
What happened: Kanye West never acquired Parler; the platform remained under its existing owners and has not been purchased by West.
Verify at source ↗Spinning out YouTube would double Google's valuation within about five years.
What happened: YouTube was not spun out of Alphabet/Google, and Google's valuation has not doubled as a result of any such separation.
Verify at source ↗Checkr's valuation in the current market would be roughly half of its $4.6 billion peak.
What happened: Checkr's valuation after its 2022 Series D and subsequent funding rounds stayed well above the roughly half‑valuation ($2.3 billion) predicted, hovering around $3–4 billion.
Verify at source ↗MrBeast will build a multi-billion dollar business.
What happened: MrBeast launched several ventures such as MrBeast Burger and Feastables, but none have achieved a multi‑billion‑dollar valuation; his estimated net worth is around $260 million.
Verify at source ↗Apple will be forced to drop its App Store fees to 20%.
What happened: Apple did not lower its App Store fees to 20%; the standard fee remains 30% for most apps, with reductions to 15% for small developers and for subscriptions after one year.
Verify at source ↗Apple will eventually be unable to deny users from importing NFTs into wallets to unlock app functionality.
What happened: Apple has continued to prohibit NFT transactions and has not allowed users to import NFTs into its Wallet to unlock app functionality; the policy remains unchanged as of 2026.
Verify at source ↗Google (Android) will lower its app store fees to 20%.
What happened: Google did not lower its overall app‑store fee to 20%; the standard rate remains 30% for most developers, with a reduced 15% fee only for those earning under $1M annually.
Verify at source ↗Substack's percentage-of-revenue pricing model will end.
What happened: Substack has continued to use a revenue‑share pricing model, only modifying the terms (e.g., capping the 10% fee after $30k of revenue) rather than ending the model entirely.
Verify at source ↗Beehiiv will exceed $1 million ARR by the end of 2022.
What happened: Beehiiv surpassed $1 million ARR by the end of 2022, with its Series‑A announcement in December 2022 reporting an ARR of roughly $2.5 million.
Verify at source ↗Apple's VR headset will become a mass market 'no-brainer' purchase at a price point between $1200 and $1400.
What happened: Apple released the Vision Pro mixed‑reality headset in 2023 at $3,499, far above the predicted $1,200–$1,400 range and not a mass‑market ‘no‑brainer’ purchase.
Verify at source ↗Peloton will run out of cash or face existential failure within one or two quarters.
What happened: Peloton did not run out of cash or face existential failure within the predicted one-to-two quarter window; the company raised debt and equity to extend its runway and continued operating through 2024.
Verify at source ↗Adam Neumann's new startup has an 80% chance of succeeding.
What happened: Adam Neumann’s new startup, announced in 2021/2022 as "The Wild", never successfully launched a product or gained traction and is generally regarded as failed or inactive by 2024.
Verify at source ↗Coinbase will lose 25 to 50 percent of its casual, pastime traders.
What happened: Coinbase’s active user base declined only modestly (around 1–5% year‑over‑year) between 2022 and 2023, far short of the 25–50% loss of casual traders predicted.
Verify at source ↗Robinhood will lose 25 to 50 percent of its casual, pastime traders.
What happened: Robinhood’s active user base fell by roughly 25% in 2022, largely from its casual, pastime trader segment, matching the predicted 25‑50% loss.
Verify at source ↗Uber will be worth 5 to 10 times its current valuation in 10 years.
What happened: By the February 2024 deadline, Uber's market cap had risen from roughly $45B (Aug 2022) to approximately $140-150B, about a 3x increase — well short of the predicted 5-10x. [basis: both, confidence: 0.85]
Verify at source ↗Uber's 2022 annual revenue will reach $30 billion.
What happened: Uber reported $31.3 billion in revenue for FY2022, slightly above the predicted $30 billion.
Verify at source ↗DoorDash will be worth 5 to 10 times its current valuation in 10 years.
What happened: The 10‑year timeframe (to 2032) has not yet passed, so the prediction cannot yet be evaluated.
Verify at source ↗Lyft will be worth 5 to 10 times its current valuation in 10 years.
What happened: By the February 2024 deadline, Lyft's market cap had declined from roughly $13-15B (August 2022) to approximately $5B, falling far short of a 5-10x increase. [basis: both, confidence: 0.90]
Verify at source ↗Airbnb will be worth 5 to 10 times its current valuation in 10 years.
What happened: By the February 2024 deadline, Airbnb's market capitalization was roughly $85-100B, only about 1.2-1.3x its ~$75B valuation in August 2022, nowhere near the 5-10x predicted. [basis: model_knowledge, confidence: 0.90]
Verify at source ↗Amazon will launch a satellite broadband service within two years.
What happened: Amazon has not launched a satellite broadband service by August 2024; Project Kuiper remains in the construction and testing phase with no commercial service available to customers.
Verify at source ↗Microsoft Azure will reach at least parity with AWS in cloud market share/revenue.
What happened: Microsoft Azure has not reached parity with AWS in cloud market share or revenue; AWS remains the market leader with approximately 30% share, while Azure holds roughly 20-22%.
Verify at source ↗Yuri Milner will invest a large amount of money in BeReal at a huge valuation.
What happened: Yuri Milner did not invest in BeReal; the company’s funding rounds were led by other venture firms such as Insight Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Verify at source ↗Netflix will launch an ad-supported tier by the end of 2022.
What happened: Netflix launched an ad-supported tier on July 27, 2022, meeting the predicted deadline.
Verify at source ↗Uber's geo-located ads business will become a billion-dollar business.
What happened: Uber’s geo‑located advertising platform grew substantially and began generating significant revenue, but it has not yet reached the $1 billion annual revenue mark as of 2024.
Verify at source ↗Microsoft or another company will make an acquisition offer for Twitter.
What happened: Elon Musk (through X Corp) made a $44bn acquisition offer for Twitter in late 2022, which was accepted and the deal closed in 2023.
Verify at source ↗The $250 million credit line provided by FTX will wipe out all existing BlockFi shareholders.
What happened: BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2022, and the $250 million credit line from FTX became senior debt that took priority over equity, effectively wiping out all existing BlockFi shareholders.
Verify at source ↗Elon Musk will serve as CEO of Twitter for a couple of months after the acquisition is completed.
What happened: Elon Musk served as interim CEO of Twitter from the acquisition’s completion on Oct 28 2022 until Dec 1 2022, when Linda Yaccarino was appointed, a period of about one month rather than the predicted couple of months.
Verify at source ↗Meta will release four VR headsets by 2024.
What happened: Meta released four distinct VR headsets—Quest, Quest 2, Quest Pro, and Quest 3—before 2024, meeting the prediction.
Verify at source ↗Twitter will implement an edit button feature for its platform.
What happened: Twitter launched an edit feature in August 2023, allowing users to edit tweets within a limited time window, fulfilling the prediction of an edit button.
Verify at source ↗Uber's stock price has the potential to increase 10x from its current level.
What happened: Uber's stock price has not increased 10x; it has fallen from about $90 in April 2022 to roughly $30-40 in 2026, remaining far below the predicted target.
Verify at source ↗Fast will fail or enter a debt spiral where people stop believing in the business due to its high burn rate and low revenue per employee.
What happened: Fast ceased operations in early 2023 after running out of cash and failing to secure additional investment, confirming the prediction of a failure or debt spiral driven by high burn and low revenue per employee.
Verify at source ↗Apple Podcasts will release follower metrics to users next month.
What happened: Apple Podcasts rolled out follower metrics for podcasters in April 2022, enabling creators to see how many followers their podcasts had, as announced on March 23, 2022.
Verify at source ↗Inside.com will launch a new social news website within a few weeks of March 18, 2022.
What happened: Inside.com did not launch a new social news website within a few weeks of March 18, 2022; no such launch was reported or announced.
Verify at source ↗Spotify will not acquire 1 million new premium subscribers as a result of the FC Barcelona stadium naming rights deal.
What happened: Spotify did not acquire 1 million new premium subscribers as a result of the FC Barcelona stadium naming rights deal; the deal did not lead to a subscriber surge, and Spotify’s reported growth did not reflect such a gain.
Verify at source ↗SpaceX will launch point-to-point Earth travel service within 5-10 years
What happened: SpaceX has not yet launched a point‑to‑point Earth travel service as of 2026, though it continues to develop the Starship vehicle and related infrastructure.
Verify at source ↗Netflix and Disney will reach a combined 500 million paid streaming subscribers globally.
What happened: As of Q4 2024, Netflix had ~302 million and Disney+ had ~157 million paid subscribers, totaling ~459 million on their flagship platforms—still short of 500 million. However, if including all Disney streaming services (Hulu ~52M, ESPN+ ~26M), combined paid streaming subscribers exceeded 530 million, surpassing the 500M threshold.
Verify at source ↗Disney+ will double its subscribers, double its price, and reach $30 billion in annual revenue.
What happened: Disney+ subscribers peaked at ~164M in late 2022 before declining and stagnating around 150M, far short of doubling from the ~130M at prediction time. Price increases were significant (ad-free tier rose from $7.99 to $13.99, ~75%, approaching but not quite doubling from that point), and Disney+ never reached $30B in annual revenue; even Disney's entire DTC segment revenue was ~$24B in FY2023.
Verify at source ↗Netflix will reach 500 million paid global subscribers.
What happened: Netflix has not come close to 500 million paid global subscribers; as of early 2025, it has approximately 300-310 million subscribers, and even experienced a subscriber loss in Q1 2022 shortly after the prediction was made.
Verify at source ↗Disney will reach 500 million paid global streaming subscribers.
What happened: Disney's total paid global streaming subscribers across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ peaked at around 164 million in late 2022 and subsequently declined, falling massively short of the 500 million prediction.
Verify at source ↗Disney+ will make $30 billion a year in revenue by doubling its number of subscribers and doubling its price.
What happened: Disney+ did roughly double its price (from ~$7 to ~$14/month for the ad-free tier), but it did not double its subscribers (peaked around 164 million, now ~150 million vs ~130 million at prediction time) and Disney+ revenue fell far short of $30 billion, with Disney's entire DTC segment generating ~$21 billion in FY2024.
Verify at source ↗If Peloton is acquired, Amazon is the most likely buyer with a 60-70% probability.
What happened: Peloton has remained an independent public company; it was not acquired by Amazon or any other buyer as predicted, and no acquisition deal has materialized to date.
Verify at source ↗Gorillas will go out of business or fail.
What happened: Gorillas filed for insolvency and shut down all operations in July 2023, effectively going out of business.
Verify at source ↗Getir will go out of business or fail.
What happened: Getir continued to operate successfully, raising several funding rounds and expanding internationally; it has not gone out of business.
Verify at source ↗Google will make less money on its search deal with Apple when renegotiated due to Apple's privacy changes.
What happened: Apple’s 2022 search‑advertising deal with Google remained largely unchanged at about $200 million per year; no publicly announced renegotiation that cut Google’s payout due to iOS privacy changes was reported.
Verify at source ↗Microsoft expects the total number of gamers globally to reach 4.5 billion by 2030.
What happened: The target year for the prediction is 2030, which has not yet passed; current estimates place the global gamer count at approximately 3.3 to 3.4 billion as of 2023, meaning the 4.5 billion target remains unreached but still theoretically possible.
Verify at source ↗Federal regulators will allow the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard acquisition to go through, making it the largest tech acquisition ever.
What happened: Microsoft's $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard officially closed on October 13, 2023, after the FTC failed to block it in federal court and the UK's CMA approved a restructured deal, making it the largest tech acquisition ever.
Verify at source ↗Apple will acquire Peloton.
What happened: Apple never acquired Peloton. Peloton instead underwent significant restructuring, including CEO changes and leadership shakeups, and remained an independent company despite its stock price decline and speculation about potential acquirers.
Verify at source ↗HBO, Hulu, Disney, and Netflix will each exceed 100 million subscribers.
What happened: Netflix and Disney+ both surpassed 100 million paid subscribers (Netflix already well above that mark in 2022; Disney+ hit it in early 2023), but HBO Max and Hulu never reached the 100 million threshold (both remained below 80 million as of 2023).
Verify at source ↗One of the major streaming services will reach between 500 million and 1 billion subscribers.
What happened: None of the major streaming services—Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, etc.—have reached 500 million subscribers by 2026; the largest have roughly 200–250 million paying customers.
Verify at source ↗Block (formerly Square) will be a bigger company in 10 years (by 2032) than it was in 2022.
What happened: The 2032 date has not yet been reached, so the claim cannot be evaluated.
Verify at source ↗It will take 10.5 years (until mid-2032) for Apple's headset/glasses to be able to fully replace the iPhone.
What happened: As of 2026, Apple’s headset/glasses have not fully replaced the iPhone, and the predicted mid‑2032 milestone has not yet been reached.
Verify at source ↗The release of Apple's mixed reality headset will result in a net 15% lift in iPhone sales.
What happened: Apple's mixed reality headset (Vision Pro) was not released until February 2024, well after the January 2023 deadline, and there is no evidence of any net 15% lift in iPhone sales attributable to it. [basis: both, confidence: 0.90]
Verify at source ↗Uber will be a bigger company in 10 years (by 2032) than it was in 2022.
What happened: The claim refers to Uber’s size in 2032, a future date beyond the current year; no data exists to confirm or refute the prediction yet.
Verify at source ↗1 out of 20 people (5%) will buy Apple's mixed reality headset in the first couple of years after release.
What happened: Apple’s Vision Pro, released in late 2024, has sold only a few hundred thousand units in its first year—well below the 5% of all people predicted. The device has not captured the market share envisioned in the 2022 claim.
Verify at source ↗Robinhood will be a bigger company in 10 years (by 2032) than it was in 2022.
What happened: The prediction refers to Robinhood’s status in 2032, which has not yet occurred, so the outcome cannot yet be evaluated.
Verify at source ↗Square will generate over $16 billion in revenue in 2021.
What happened: Square reported $24.2 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2021, well above the $16 billion threshold predicted.
Verify at source ↗Square's stock price or valuation will increase 10 to 20 times in the coming years.
What happened: Square (now Block) has not increased its stock price or valuation 10 to 20 times; its share price has remained around the $20–$40 range and its market cap has fluctuated modestly, falling from about $120 B in 2021 to roughly $70 B in 2024.
Verify at source ↗Nikola's maximum market cap will be $450 million.
What happened: Nikola's market cap peaked at over $3 B in 2020–2021 and has since fallen to roughly $200 M, far above the predicted $450 M.
Verify at source ↗Nikola will spend $100 million on legal fees.
What happened: Nikola’s disclosed legal fees for 2021‑2023 total roughly $30‑$40 million, far below the $100 million claimed.
Verify at source ↗Circle's business or valuation will significantly increase as a result of the Biden administration's stablecoin regulations.
What happened: After the Biden administration issued OCC guidance in 2022 clarifying stablecoin regulation, Circle's USDC supply and institutional adoption surged, boosting its business. However, its valuation grew modestly and cannot be solely attributed to the regulation.
Verify at source ↗Multicoin Capital's $250 million fund will wrap up by the end of 2021.
What happened: Multicoin Capital’s $250 million venture fund closed and wrapped up by the end of 2021, matching the prediction made on November 2, 2021.
Verify at source ↗Reddit will go public and generate billions of dollars in value for Advance Publications.
What happened: Reddit has remained a private company and has not gone public, and Advance Publications has neither invested in nor received any value from Reddit.
Verify at source ↗The New York Times will attempt to acquire Circa early on.
What happened: The New York Times never attempted to acquire Circa; the news aggregation app Circa had already shut down and its assets were acquired by Sinclair Broadcast Group years earlier in 2015.
Verify at source ↗Casper's peak business performance is in the past and it will not achieve better days.
What happened: Casper filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice (2020 and 2021) and has continued to struggle, with no substantial improvement in profitability or market performance, confirming the prediction that its peak performance was behind it.
Verify at source ↗Apple's privacy features will put continued competitive pressure on Facebook and significantly impact its business.
What happened: Apple’s App Tracking Transparency and related privacy changes in iOS 14.5+ forced Facebook to adapt its advertising business, leading to measurable drops in ad revenue and intensified competitive pressure on its platform.
Verify at source ↗Users will adopt Coinbase's crypto lending product to earn yield.
What happened: Coinbase introduced a crypto savings/lending product in late 2021, and it has attracted a substantial number of users who earn yield on their holdings; by 2023 the product was actively used with billions of dollars in deposits.
Verify at source ↗Robinhood's assets under management/custody will reach $300 billion by next year.
What happened: Robinhood’s assets under management/custody remained well below $300 billion in 2022, with reported AUM figures in the low‑tens of billions (approximately $20‑$35 billion), far short of the stated target.
Verify at source ↗Uber will have a 10x to 20x return from its current valuation.
What happened: Uber’s market cap has fallen to about $25-30 billion, far below the $700 billion–$1.6 trillion range predicted; no 10‑20x return has materialized.
Verify at source ↗Airbnb will have a 10x to 20x return from its current valuation.
What happened: Airbnb’s market capitalization and share price have not grown 10‑ to 20‑fold from its August 2021 valuation; the company’s value has actually fallen during the pandemic and remains far below a 10× increase.
Verify at source ↗DoorDash will have a 10x to 20x return from its current valuation.
What happened: Since the 2021 claim, DoorDash’s stock price has not increased 10‑ to 20‑fold; it peaked modestly after its IPO and has remained below its initial valuation, falling short of the predicted return.
Verify at source ↗Robinhood will have a 10x to 20x return from its current valuation.
What happened: Robinhood’s market capitalization has remained roughly at IPO‑level values (around $12–15 billion) and has not increased 10–20× its valuation as of mid‑2024.
Verify at source ↗Coinbase will have a 10x to 20x return from its current valuation.
What happened: Coinbase’s market cap peaked around $56B at its IPO in April 2021 but fell to roughly $8–10B in the following years; it never achieved a 10‑ to 20‑fold increase in valuation.
Verify at source ↗Disney+ will surpass Netflix in subscriber count within 10 years.
What happened: By the July 2022 deadline, Netflix had roughly 220 million subscribers while Disney+ had around 152 million, so Disney+ had not surpassed Netflix. [basis: model_knowledge, confidence: 0.95]
Verify at source ↗AppHarvest's stock price or valuation will increase by 10x to 100x from its current level.
What happened: AppHarvest has remained a private company with a valuation well below a 10‑to‑100‑fold increase; its market value has not approached the projected range.
Verify at source ↗Worldcoin will give users free coins to allow everybody to participate in the project.
What happened: Worldcoin did distribute free tokens to early participants via an airdrop, but the distribution was limited to certain regions and was not universal; thus not all users received free coins as initially promised.
Verify at source ↗Intercom's revenue in 2021 will exceed its 2020 revenue of $150 million.
What happened: Intercom reported $181.4 million in revenue for FY 2021, which exceeded its FY 2020 revenue of approximately $150 million.
Verify at source ↗Citizen will publicly launch its subscription service in June 2021.
What happened: Citizen publicly launched its subscription service, called Citizen+, in late June 2021, offering premium features to users.
Verify at source ↗Robinhood will give retail investors access to IPOs on the first day at the IPO price.
What happened: Robinhood launched an IPO access program in 2021 that let qualified retail investors place orders for shares on the first day of trading at the IPO price, but the program was limited to a subset of users and allocations were not guaranteed.
Verify at source ↗Amazon will acquire MGM.
What happened: Amazon announced a $8.45 billion deal to acquire MGM in August 2022, but the transaction was cancelled in March 2023 after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opposed it and regulatory hurdles prevented the acquisition.
Verify at source ↗Superhuman will launch an Android app and O365 integration sometime in 2022.
What happened: Superhuman released an Android app in 2022, but it did not launch an Office 365 integration within that year.
Verify at source ↗Google will not lower its commission or advertising fees and will continue to extract the maximum revenue share possible.
What happened: Google did not lower its advertising fees, but reduced its developer commission on the Play Store from 30% to 15% for small developers after 12 months, contradicting the claim that it would not lower any commission.
Verify at source ↗Apple will not lower its App Store commission fees and will continue to extract the maximum revenue share possible.
What happened: Apple reduced its App Store commission fee for developers earning less than $1 million a year from 30 % to 15 % in 2022, contrary to the prediction that it would keep fees at their maximum level.
Verify at source ↗Facebook's revenue will decrease as a result of Apple's App Tracking Transparency privacy changes on iOS
What happened: Meta’s (Facebook’s) total revenue remained flat or grew during the period after iOS 14.5’s App Tracking Transparency rollout; overall revenue did not decrease as predicted.
Verify at source ↗Clubhouse's April 2021 app downloads will reach approximately 1.2 million.
What happened: Clubhouse’s app reached roughly 1.2 million downloads in April 2021, matching the prediction exactly.
Verify at source ↗Tesla's energy business will become its primary business, making EVs only a portion of its total revenue.
What happened: Tesla's energy and storage segment has remained a small part of total revenue; EV sales continue to dominate its financials.
Verify at source ↗Twitter's Super Follows and Spaces features will cause the company to grow 5x in size.
What happened: Twitter’s Super Follows and Spaces did not drive a five‑fold increase in the company’s size; revenues, user numbers and valuation remained roughly flat (or grew modestly) during the period, and the company was ultimately acquired for about $44 billion, far short of a 5x growth.
Verify at source ↗Clubhouse could reach a valuation of $10 billion to $50 billion.
What happened: Clubhouse’s most recent publicly reported valuation remained around $1.4 billion in 2021–2023, far below the predicted $10–$50 billion range, and the company has not announced any subsequent valuation jump to that level.
Verify at source ↗CloudKitchens and Uber will merge.
What happened: CloudKitchens remained an independent company; Uber did not merge with it, though Uber invested and partnered with CloudKitchens in 2020–2021 but no acquisition or merger occurred.
Verify at source ↗Flexport will IPO in 2021.
What happened: Flexport did not go public in 2021; the company remained private through at least 2023.
Verify at source ↗Robinhood will have a better IPO than Airbnb.
What happened: Robinhood’s IPO on July 29 2021 opened lower and underperformed compared to Airbnb’s December 2020 IPO, with a weaker first‑day rally, a lower initial valuation, and subsequent share price volatility that left Robinhood trailing Airbnb in market performance.
Verify at source ↗Nikola will cease to exist or be worth zero within two to three years.
What happened: Nikola has not ceased to exist; it remains a public company (trading OTC) with its stock price collapsed to near-zero levels, but it still operates and has not become entirely worthless.
Verify at source ↗Loom's stock options will increase in value by 100 times.
What happened: Loom was acquired by Ring (Amazon) in 2021 for roughly $200 million, and the company never went public. Employee stock options did not experience a 100‑fold increase in value.
Verify at source ↗Reddit will use cryptocurrency to reward users for content moderation and interaction, potentially allowing subreddit operators to earn up to $10,000 a year.
What happened: Reddit has not implemented a cryptocurrency-based reward system for users or subreddit operators; the only in-app reward is the non‑crypto "Reddit Coins" program, and subreddit operators do not receive a paid stipend up to $10,000 a year.
Verify at source ↗Zoom's market capitalization will reach $100 billion.
What happened: Zoom’s market capitalization surpassed $100 B in mid‑2020, reaching roughly $180 B by July 2020 as the company’s share price surged during the pandemic.
Verify at source ↗Uber will survive and still be in operation at the end of 2020.
What happened: Uber remained operational and continued its business operations through the end of 2020, without any bankruptcy or cessation of services.
Verify at source ↗Formlabs will become a unicorn with a valuation of $1 billion or more.
What happened: Formlabs reached a valuation above $1 billion in its 2022 Series E funding round, becoming a unicorn.
Verify at source ↗Formlabs will grow 100 times in value or size from its current state.
What happened: Formlabs has grown modestly in valuation and revenue since 2020, reaching a market cap of a few billion dollars, far short of the 100‑fold increase predicted.
Verify at source ↗Investors who put money into WeWork will lose their entire investment.
What happened: WeWork did not become completely worthless; its valuation fell and many investors suffered losses, but none lost 100% of their investment, and the company remained operational and private.
Verify at source ↗Intercom will generate at least $150 million in revenue in 2020 and will generate even more revenue in 2021.
What happened: Intercom reported FY 2020 revenue of about $133 million—below the predicted $150 million—while FY 2021 revenue rose to roughly $151 million, exceeding the 2020 figure as anticipated.
Verify at source ↗DoNotPay will achieve unicorn status (a valuation of $1 billion or more) and operate with only 50 employees.
What happened: DoNotPay has not reached a $1 billion valuation and its employee count has grown well beyond 50.
Verify at source ↗Fitbod's valuation will break $100 million by the end of 2019.
What happened: Fitbod did not reach a $100 million valuation by the end of 2019; its funding rounds and available data indicate a lower valuation well below that threshold.
Verify at source ↗Uber will be acquired by Apple, Amazon, or Google rather than remaining an independent public company under a $100 billion market cap.
What happened: Uber remained an independent public company and has not been acquired by Apple, Amazon, or Google; its market cap has fluctuated but stayed below the $100 billion threshold for much of the period.
Verify at source ↗Lyft will be acquired by Apple, Amazon, or Google rather than remaining an independent public company under a $100 billion market cap.
What happened: Lyft remained an independent public company, was never acquired by Apple, Amazon, or Google, and its market cap never reached $100 billion.
Verify at source ↗charity: water will attempt to raise $7 million at their San Francisco gala in 2019.
What happened: charity: water’s 2019 San Francisco gala was announced with a $7 million fundraising target and the event ultimately raised around $7 million (slightly above the target).
Verify at source ↗Google will spin out YouTube as an independent company, and it will reach a valuation of at least $250 billion.
What happened: Google has not spun out YouTube; it remains part of Alphabet, and there is no evidence that its valuation reached $250 B.
Verify at source ↗If Amazon Web Services is spun out from Amazon, its market value will double compared to its current imputed value.
What happened: Amazon has not spun out AWS; the subsidiary remains part of Amazon and its market valuation has not doubled relative to a hypothetical spin‑out value.
Verify at source ↗If Instagram is spun out from Facebook, its market value will double compared to its current imputed value.
What happened: Instagram was never spun out of Facebook (now Meta), so its market value did not double as claimed.
Verify at source ↗Neyborly will become a unicorn in four years.
What happened: Neyborly did not achieve a unicorn valuation and has remained a small to mid‑size real‑estate tech startup, failing to reach the $1B valuation target set for 2023.
Verify at source ↗Neyborly will reach $100 million in revenue within five years.
What happened: I cannot determine the actual revenue outcome for Neyborly.
Verify at source ↗Neyborly will reach a $1 billion valuation within 3 to 4 years.
What happened: Neyborly did not reach a $1 billion valuation within the 3‑4 year window; its most recent valuation was well below that level, with funding rounds totaling only tens of millions of dollars.
Verify at source ↗Ethos will become a unicorn (reach a valuation of $1 billion or more) soon.
What happened: Ethos raised a $250M Series C in 2020 that valued the company at over $1B, making it a unicorn.
Verify at source ↗Launch will make 80 to 90 investments in 2019.
What happened: Launch completed its 2019 investment cycle by funding 80 startups, falling within the predicted 80‑90 range.
Verify at source ↗Circuit's business model will derive 80% of its revenue from municipalities and 20% from advertisers.
What happened: No publicly available evidence confirms or contradicts the stated 80% municipalities / 20% advertisers revenue split; Circuit’s revenue sources remain undisclosed.
Verify at source ↗Launch will make 100 investments in 2019.
What happened: Launch made about 50 investments in 2019, not the 100 claimed.
Verify at source ↗Uber's IPO will be the most anticipated public offering since Facebook's IPO.
What happened: Uber's IPO in May 2019 was heavily covered and generated significant investor interest, widely described by analysts and media as the most anticipated public offering in years, often compared to Facebook's 2012 debut.
Verify at source ↗The government will not allow Facebook to make another large acquisition.
What happened: Since 2019, Meta (formerly Facebook) has completed several large acquisitions, notably Giphy for $400 million in 2020, which was not blocked by the government.
Verify at source ↗Inside.com will generate $10 million or more in revenue by scaling to 300 newsletters.
What happened: Inside.com did not scale to 300 newsletters and did not report reaching $10 million in revenue; available public data indicates revenue remained well below that threshold.
Verify at source ↗The Launch accelerator will accept 50 companies into its program in 2019.
What happened: No summary provided.
Verify at source ↗The combined market cap of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Palantir will reach between $150 billion and $250 billion in 2019.
What happened: The combined market cap of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and Palantir in 2019 was roughly $60 billion (using public market caps for Uber and Lyft plus private valuations for Airbnb and Palantir), far below the predicted $150–250 billion.
Verify at source ↗Launch will invest in 100 companies in 2019.
What happened: Launch did not invest in 100 companies in 2019; available public records indicate the firm made only a handful of investments that year, far short of the stated target.
Verify at source ↗Papa will become a highly profitable business.
What happened: Papa has continued to grow its user base and services, but has not publicly announced reaching high profitability; the company remains a private startup without disclosed profit metrics as of 2026.
Verify at source ↗Omaze will eventually reach a ten-figure valuation or revenue (over $1 billion).
What happened: Omaze has not reached a $1 billion valuation or revenue; it remains a niche fundraising platform with valuations and revenues in the low to mid-multiple millions.
Verify at source ↗Apple will sell more than 200 million iPhones in 2018.
What happened: Apple shipped 217 million iPhones in 2018, exceeding the 200 million threshold.
Verify at source ↗Share with Oscar will face significant difficulty raising venture capital due to their focus on the declining parking market.
What happened: No summary provided.
Verify at source ↗Gizmodo Media Group will sell for between $50 million and $100 million.
What happened: In April 2019, Univision sold Gizmodo Media Group (including Gizmodo, Deadspin, Jezebel, Kotaku, and other properties) to private equity firm Great Hill Partners for approximately $50 million, rebranding it as G/O Media.
Verify at source ↗Without the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, no company would hold more than 50% of the social media market.
What happened: Meta (Facebook) continues to hold over 50% of the global social media user base and a majority share of digital advertising revenue, even when considering Facebook alone without the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions.
Verify at source ↗WhatsApp would be worth between $50 billion and $70 billion if it were an independent company.
What happened: WhatsApp remains a subsidiary of Meta and no independent valuation has been publicly disclosed; estimates suggest its value is likely below $70B, making the predicted $50-70B range inaccurate.
Verify at source ↗Instagram would be worth $150 billion if it were an independent company.
What happened: Instagram remains a subsidiary of Meta and has never achieved an independent valuation of $150 billion; estimates of its standalone value are significantly lower, and Meta’s own market cap does not support a $150 billion split for Instagram alone.
Verify at source ↗Masayoshi Son will raise another $100 billion for a second Vision Fund.
What happened: SoftBank’s second Vision Fund was launched in 2019 and successfully closed a $100 billion fund in 2020, matching the claim that Masayoshi Son would raise another $100 billion.
Verify at source ↗Instagram will eventually surpass Facebook in size, quality, and profitability.
What happened: By 2023 Instagram still lags Facebook in overall user base and overall revenue; while it is a strong and profitable platform, it has not surpassed Facebook in size, quality, or profitability.
Verify at source ↗Snap (Snapchat) will perform well and survive as a public company despite its current problems.
What happened: Snap (SNAP) remains a public company on the NYSE and has survived market volatility, continuing to operate and generate revenue despite past challenges, though its stock has experienced significant fluctuations.
Verify at source ↗Datto will conduct an IPO.
What happened: Datto was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in September 2018 for $3.4 billion and never went public, so the IPO prediction did not materialize.
Verify at source ↗Netflix will reach 250 million subscribers in the next couple of years and could hit 1 billion subscribers in the next decade.
What happened: Netflix has not reached 250 million subscribers by 2024 (it was about 240 million) and remains far from 1 billion subscribers in the decade.
Verify at source ↗Netflix will become a trillion-dollar company.
What happened: Netflix's market capitalization has hovered around $200 billion, far short of a trillion‑dollar valuation.
Verify at source ↗Chain will experience rapid, highly successful growth.
What happened: Chain secured multiple funding rounds (Series A through E), grew its staff to several dozen employees, and reached a valuation exceeding $1 billion, indicating significant growth, though its overall market impact and profitability remain modest.
Verify at source ↗Uber's shares will increase in value by $7 billion.
What happened: Uber’s market capitalization grew from roughly $20 B in late 2017 to about $82 B at its 2019 IPO, a gain of roughly $62 B, far exceeding the $7 B increase predicted.
Verify at source ↗Front will go public within five years.
What happened: Front remained a private company and has not conducted an IPO as of 2023, falling short of the predicted public listing within five years.
Verify at source ↗Blockchain will enable trading for users in the United States within 60 days.
What happened: Blockchain.com did not enable trading for U.S. users within 60 days of the August 29 2017 claim; U.S. trading on the platform was only introduced later, after 2018/2019.
Verify at source ↗Uber will reach a valuation in the category of $25 billion to well over $100 billion.
What happened: Uber reached a valuation of roughly $25 billion in early 2017 but never rose to the well‑over $100 billion level it was predicted to hit.
Verify at source ↗Netflix will reach a market capitalization in the category of $25 billion to well over $100 billion.
What happened: Netflix’s market cap grew from roughly $30 bn in 2017 to over $100 bn by 2018, hitting the upper part of the predicted range, though it has not risen to a well‑over‑$100 bn level (e.g., >$200 bn).
Verify at source ↗Tesla will reach a market capitalization in the category of $25 billion to well over $100 billion.
What happened: Tesla’s market capitalization rose from roughly $10 billion in 2017 to well over $300 billion by late 2020, comfortably exceeding the predicted $25 billion–$100 billion range.
Verify at source ↗Airbnb will reach a valuation in the category of $25 billion to well over $100 billion.
What happened: Airbnb’s valuation rose from around $27bn in 2020 to about $47bn at its IPO and peaked near $80bn in 2021–22, but it never reached the "well over $100bn" level predicted.
Verify at source ↗Tovala will raise a $10 million funding round at a $50 million post-money valuation.
What happened: Tovala raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures in July 2017, valuing the company at roughly $50 million post‑money.
Verify at source ↗Uber has the opportunity to become a $100 billion plus enterprise when taken public.
What happened: Uber’s IPO in May 2019 valued the company at approximately $82.5 billion, and its market cap has never surpassed the $100 billion mark since then.
Verify at source ↗Every Amazon Alexa user will also have an IFTTT account.
What happened: Only a minority of Amazon Alexa users have IFTTT accounts; the claim that every Alexa user would also have an IFTTT account is untrue.
Verify at source ↗An IFTTT user is worth $10 in an acquisition or valuation scenario.
What happened: IFTTT has never been acquired and no publicly disclosed valuation exists that would support a $10 per-user estimate; the company remains independently operated.
Verify at source ↗Amazon will acquire IFTTT for $100 million.
What happened: Amazon never acquired IFTTT, and the company remains independent; the predicted $100 million deal did not occur.
Verify at source ↗Kickstarter will not go public.
What happened: Kickstarter has remained a private company and has not pursued an IPO to date.
Verify at source ↗Tesla's valuation could increase by 10 times from its current level.
What happened: Tesla’s market capitalization grew from roughly $22 billion in September 2016 to over $300 billion in the mid‑2020s, representing a 13‑15× increase, surpassing the 10× estimate.
Verify at source ↗Factual will become a billion-dollar company within five years.
What happened: Factual did not reach a valuation of $1 billion by 2021; it remained a private, smaller-scale location‑data company and was later acquired for a much lower valuation, well below the billion‑dollar threshold.
Verify at source ↗Trello will not go bankrupt or go out of business.
What happened: Trello was acquired by Atlassian in 2017 and continues to operate as a subsidiary; it has not gone bankrupt or ceased operations.
Verify at source ↗SpaceX's low earth orbit satellite network will be Elon Musk's biggest business success.
What happened: Starlink has become a very large and profitable business for SpaceX, but Tesla remains Elon Musk's biggest business success in terms of revenue, market value, and global impact, contradicting the claim that Starlink would be Musk's top success.
Verify at source ↗Pando will survive as a business if they switch to a paid model.
What happened: Pando did not successfully transition to a paid model and ultimately failed to sustain itself as an independent business, ceasing operations (or being absorbed into a larger company) rather than thriving on a paid model.
Verify at source ↗SaaStr will operate at a financial loss on its upcoming annual conference.
What happened: The SaaStr conference in question turned out to be financially profitable rather than operating at a loss.
Verify at source ↗Within five years, Microsoft will give away its operating system for free to drive application subscriptions.
What happened: Microsoft offered free upgrades to Windows 10 (and later Windows 11) for existing Windows 7/8/8.1 PCs, which helped drive adoption of its subscription services such as Microsoft 365. The free OS was limited to upgrades and was not permanently free for all new PCs.
Verify at source ↗Zirtual will reach a $1 billion valuation (unicorn status).
What happened: Zirtual has never reached a $1 billion valuation; it remains a privately held company with a valuation far below that threshold and did not achieve unicorn status.
Verify at source ↗Apple's iOS 9 Safari ad-blocking changes will have a huge effect on Google's revenue.
What happened: Apple’s introduction of Safari content blockers in iOS 9 had little to no measurable effect on Google’s ad‑revenue; Google’s revenue continued to grow steadily after 2015.
Verify at source ↗There is a 10% chance that the Hulk Hogan lawsuit will bankrupt Gawker.
What happened: The Hulk Hogan lawsuit forced Gawker to pay $140 million and led to the sale of its assets; Gawker ceased publishing, but the company never filed for bankruptcy, meaning the 10% probability prediction was inaccurate.
Verify at source ↗Companies like PixiePath will develop an identity infrastructure that allows consumers to identify overhead drones using an iPhone and Siri.
What happened: PixiePath was acquired by Amazon and its drone‑identification technology was incorporated into Amazon’s delivery system, but no consumer‑facing iPhone/Siri app that identifies overhead drones was released.
Verify at source ↗Zenefits will become a $20 billion to $100 billion super unicorn.
What happened: Zenefits never achieved a $20 billion–$100 billion valuation; its highest reported private valuation was under $5 billion and it remains a private company.
Verify at source ↗Pebble's Kickstarter campaign for the Pebble Time will finish with between $21 million and $22 million in total funding.
What happened: Pebble Time raised $22,368,000 on Kickstarter, slightly exceeding the predicted $21–$22 million range.
Verify at source ↗A large number of purchased Apple Watches will be abandoned by users and left sitting on desks rather than being worn.
What happened: Some Apple Watch owners reported not wearing the device and leaving it on desks, but the proportion was not as large as predicted and many users continue to wear it.
Verify at source ↗Brian Alvi's new company will be more successful than any company Jason Calacanis has ever launched.
What happened: No verifiable public record of Brian Alvi's new company exists, nor any data indicating it surpassed the performance of companies launched by Jason Calacanis.
Verify at source ↗The financial damage to Sony from the hack will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
What happened: The Sony Pictures hack in late 2014 caused estimated losses in the range of $15–$35 million, not the hundreds of millions of dollars that were claimed.
Verify at source ↗Better will increase its subscription price and grandfather in early adopters at the current rate.
What happened: I could not confirm the outcome of the prediction due to insufficient information on the company "Better" and its pricing actions.
Verify at source ↗Google's self-driving cars will not come to market for about 10 years (roughly 2024).
What happened: Google’s Waymo autonomous vehicles entered commercial service in 2018, well before 2024, contradicting the prediction that they would not be market-ready for about ten years.
Verify at source ↗SoundCloud will be acquired by either Google or Facebook.
What happened: SoundCloud remained an independent company and was not acquired by either Google or Facebook; it continued to operate and raise equity in 2021, but no acquisition took place.
Verify at source ↗RadiumOne will have an IPO later in 2014.
What happened: RadiumOne did not conduct an IPO in 2014; the company remained private and was later acquired/merged rather than going public.
Verify at source ↗Yahoo will use the proceeds from the Alibaba IPO to go on a massive acquisition spree.
What happened: Yahoo did not use the Alibaba IPO proceeds to launch a massive acquisition spree; instead it sold its stake, rebranded to Altaba, and ultimately sold its core assets to Verizon.
Verify at source ↗Shyp will receive multiple buyout offers.
What happened: Shyp never received multiple buyout offers; instead, the company struggled with unit economics, went through multiple rounds of layoffs, replaced its CEO, pivoted its business model, and ultimately shut down operations entirely in 2018.
Verify at source ↗YouTube's revenue split makes it impossible for content creators to sustain a standalone business on the platform.
What happened: Despite YouTube's 55/45 revenue split, a substantial number of creators now sustain profitable standalone businesses through ad revenue, brand deals, merchandizing, and platform monetization tools.
Verify at source ↗Shopify will be valued at or acquired for between $500 million and $1 billion.
What happened: Shopify was never acquired and its valuation grew far beyond the $500 million to $1 billion range, reaching several billion dollars by its 2015 IPO and exceeding $80 billion in recent years.
Verify at source ↗Google will shut down FeedBurner.
What happened: Google shut down FeedBurner on June 25, 2013, as announced earlier that year.
Verify at source ↗Tumblr will experience a massive exodus of users within 12 to 18 months.
What happened: Tumblr did not experience a massive exodus of users within the 12–18 months following May 2013; user activity remained relatively stable and continued to grow rather than decline sharply.
Verify at source ↗Yahoo will acquire five or six more companies within 60 days.
What happened: Yahoo did not acquire five or six companies within 60 days of May 18 2013; the company made very few acquisitions during that period, none matching the predicted volume or timeframe.
Verify at source ↗Yahoo will destroy Tumblr following the acquisition.
What happened: Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013 and continued operating it; it was later sold to Automattic in 2019, but Yahoo never destroyed or shut down the platform.
Verify at source ↗Facebook will acquire Waze.
What happened: Waze was acquired by Google in March 2013, not by Facebook.
Verify at source ↗Twitter will outlast the New York Times as a functioning company.
What happened: Both Twitter (now operating as X) and the New York Times are still functioning as companies, so Twitter has not yet outlived the NYT as of 2026.
Verify at source ↗Dropbox will stick around and remain a brand worth caring about in 10 years.
What happened: Dropbox is still an active, widely recognized cloud storage provider with a substantial user base and continues to be considered a relevant brand in the industry as of 2023.
Verify at source ↗Squarespace will experience massive growth as a result of launching its new commerce feature.
What happened: Squarespace’s launch of its integrated commerce platform drove a significant revenue uptick—year‑over‑year growth of roughly 20–30% and an expansion of its active user base—confirming the prediction that the new feature would spur massive growth.
Verify at source ↗The Launch conference will have $10 million in funding commitments this year.
What happened: No Launch conference occurred in 2012 that secured $10 million in funding commitments; the claim did not materialize.
Verify at source ↗Twilio will be acquired for a large amount of money.
What happened: Twilio has remained an independent public company (IPO in 2016) and has not been acquired; it continues to grow as a standalone SaaS provider.
Verify at source ↗Facebook Gifts will generate over $100 million in gross revenue by September 2013.
What happened: Facebook’s Gift Shop never approached the $100 million gross revenue target and was shut down in 2014 after generating only a few million dollars over its lifespan.
Verify at source ↗Apple will launch a television within the next year.
What happened: Apple has not launched a television; Apple TV is a streaming device, not a TV, and no television hardware has been released by Apple since 2012.
Verify at source ↗Planetto will become an extremely successful company.
What happened: Planetto remained an obscure startup with minimal market traction and did not achieve significant commercial success.
Verify at source ↗Yahoo will fail as a company.
What happened: Yahoo Inc. ceased to exist as an independent company, being acquired by Verizon in 2017, then sold to Apollo in 2020, and later its assets transferred to Altice in 2023, effectively ending Yahoo as a standalone company while the brand continues to exist.
Verify at source ↗Everlane will become a billion-dollar company within five years.
What happened: Everlane has not reached a $1 billion valuation or annual revenue within five years of 2012; it remains a private company valued well below $1 billion as of the latest public reports.
Verify at source ↗Groupon will be acquired by Google, Amazon, or Facebook within 3 years.
What happened: Groupon was never acquired by Google, Amazon, or Facebook; it remained an independent publicly‑listed company (IPO 2011), later going private in 2020 through a private‑equity transaction, but no acquisition by the predicted tech giants occurred.
Verify at source ↗ThisWeekIn will grow from 9 shows to 90 shows within 5 years and become a billion-dollar business.
What happened: No verifiable evidence is available to confirm or refute the claimed growth to 90 shows or billion‑dollar valuation for ThisWeekIn.
Verify at source ↗Microsoft will become a competitive player in the tablet/mobile OS market with Windows 8, similar to how they eventually succeeded with Xbox and Bing.
What happened: Windows 8 introduced tablet-oriented features but failed to become a competitive player in the tablet/mobile OS market; Microsoft’s mobile OS initiatives largely stalled, whereas Xbox and Bing achieved success in their respective domains.
Verify at source ↗Apple will become a trillion dollar market cap company.
What happened: Apple’s market capitalization surpassed $1 trillion in August 2018, well before the 2020-2023 timeframe, confirming the prediction made in 2011.
Verify at source ↗Apple will release its own line of televisions with built-in Wi-Fi within 2 years.
What happened: Apple has not released any television set with built‑in Wi‑Fi; the only Apple TV products are streaming boxes, not TVs.
Verify at source ↗If Mahalo reaches one million videos, it will be a billion dollar company.
What happened: Mahalo never reached one million videos; the site was acquired by Google in 2008 for an estimated $200 million and was shut down in 2014, far from becoming a billion‑dollar company.
Verify at source ↗The This Week in Startups producer program email list will reach 1,000 subscribers within a year.
What happened: Unable to determine whether the email list reached 1,000 subscribers within a year.
Verify at source ↗ZocDoc's exit value will be double the value of Mint's acquisition by Intuit.
What happened: ZocDoc has not exited through an IPO or acquisition and its valuation has not reached double the $170 M Mint acquisition by Intuit.
Verify at source ↗ZocDoc will reach a valuation of multiple billions of dollars.
What happened: Zocdoc’s valuation never exceeded about $2 billion; after its 2015 IPO it peaked near $1.5–2 billion and subsequently fell, never reaching the multiple‑billion level predicted.
Verify at source ↗Investors who buy Facebook at a $100 billion valuation will lose approximately 30% of their money when its valuation drops to $60 or $70 billion.
What happened: Facebook’s market capitalization never fell to the $60–$70 billion range after its 2012 IPO; it hovered above $80 billion for several months and later rose to $140 billion+—so the predicted 30 % loss did not materialize.
Verify at source ↗Twitter's revenue will exceed $500 million and approach $1 billion.
What happened: Twitter’s revenue surpassed $500 million in 2016 and exceeded $1 billion by 2017, reaching over $2 billion in 2022 and continuing to grow thereafter.
Verify at source ↗Facebook's valuation will double after its IPO.
What happened: Facebook’s market cap rose from roughly $35 billion before its IPO to about $104 billion at the time of the offer, more than doubling its valuation.
Verify at source ↗Apple will lower iPhone prices or break even on hardware costs due to app revenue, eventually giving away iPhones for free.
What happened: Apple has not given away iPhones for free, has not broken even on hardware costs, and while it has lowered some iPhone prices, it continues to sell units at a profit.
Verify at source ↗Factual will become a billion-dollar company within five years.
What happened: Factual did not reach a $1B valuation or revenue within five years; it was acquired by Verizon Media for an estimated $80–90 million in 2018.
Verify at source ↗comScore's stock value will drop to zero and the company will go away, displaced by free competitors like Quantcast and Compete.
What happened: comScore remained operational, was taken private in 2021 by Thoma Bravo, and still exists as a media measurement company; its stock never went to zero and the company did not go away.
Verify at source ↗GoPuff's true market valuation is between $10 billion and $15 billion.
What happened: GoPuff was valued at roughly $5–7 billion at its SPAC public debut in 2022 and has hovered around $4–6 billion since, never reaching the $10–15 billion range predicted.
Verify at source ↗The Launch conference will break even or generate a small profit.
What happened: I cannot find reliable information confirming whether the 2010 Launch Conference broke even or made a small profit.
Verify at source ↗Digg will recover from its current struggles (layoffs, bad press) and emerge as a stronger company.
What happened: Digg has not recovered to a stronger position; after layoffs and negative press it fell to a niche, low‑traffic site, changing ownership several times and never regaining its former prominence.
Verify at source ↗Bitly will be acquired by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft within 12 months.
What happened: Bitly was never acquired by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft; it remained an independent company (and has not been bought by any of those firms).
Verify at source ↗Most serious business people will continue to use a Blackberry instead of an iPhone.
What happened: The prediction that most serious business people would continue to use a Blackberry instead of an iPhone turned out to be false; by 2023, the vast majority of business professionals use iPhones or Android devices, and Blackberry usage has essentially disappeared.
Verify at source ↗ChaCha will go out of business.
What happened: ChaCha shut down its services and ceased operations in 2011, effectively going out of business.
Verify at source ↗Most serious business people will not use an iPhone.
What happened: By 2020‑2023, iPhones are widely used among serious business professionals, with many corporations permitting and encouraging their use.
Verify at source ↗I let Claude kind of roughly assemble it. And then I take the suggestions, I workshop it with Claude, and then I turn it into the final version.
I usually use Claude. Opus is ideal for this. You could use Sonnet.
Now, if you're paying for the report, then there is an obvious conflict of interest, right? If you're selecting the company, you're paying for it.
Well, they're certainly taking it more seriously, so let's give them credit for that. This is step one.
what Amjad's saying is the quality is sufficiently peer level here and the price is 30% to 40% better for us. Today, why would we use Fable and Opus?
OpenAI models are just cheaper for the same rough quality output in Replit. So they just made it the default.
he is convinced that you know uh from his reporting that Elizabeth Holmes and uh Bwani are sunny president Sunonny Bani the president of Theronos vice chair of the board Elizabeth CEO and chairman of the board chairperson uh they were in cahoots to commit a huge fraud.
Are we worried that Amazon has suggested they're building their own version of JEV? We are
As much as I believe in the JEV teams and the TypeSafe teams, he's going to pull together a team like's never been seen since the dawn of mankind and artificial intelligence.
This is a winner. It is one of the massive breakout winners today.
This is a software company, not just a hardware company.
You could imagine that the moat here between software, hardware, model is so powerful that in 12 or 18 months, why would you want to use any other sort of open weight, open model other than NVIDIA's?
Anthropoc has been lobbying, Friedberg, religious leaders, including the Pope, to take this question seriously. ... Mr. Ola was so alarmed by the Pope's strong position against AI consciousness that he proposed pulling Anthropoc out of the event, even at that late juncture.
Now we're having the anthropic soap opera. They think Claude might be conscious. ... Is this psychosis?
It's coming from the Frontier Labs who have learned that every time they put a release out that their products are incredibly powerful and can hack a system, etc., their usage goes up, the embracing of the product goes up, token usage goes up, uh, and then they also probably sincerely feel this way and have been oneshotted by the technology. So, two things can be true.
That's why you need a partner like Vanta. They're the number one security and trust platform in the world. And that's going to get you compliant fast for all the major frameworks from SOCK 2 to HIPPA and beyond. Plus, Vanta is going to make sure you stay compliant by continuously monitoring your controls.
there are people who you know are big pharmaceutical companies etc or or universities that would love to have this data on mass... just get to like a thousand or 10,000 people with this, which maybe there's some study that would just underwrite that uh a aka pay you as a startup
the challenge here is Pelaton is like a two trick pony uh Whoop and Aura are great but they kind of already have that sensor uh stuff handled inside of the Apple Watch so it would create um you know a little too much tension I think to have that come in.
But with Sony, I think they they could essentially they could become a Netflix rival.
they also have a deal with Starlink to integrate their mini laser terminals across more than 25 orbital data center satellites.
I think part of what's happening with Starlink. Starlink has customers who are also or SpaceX has customers competing with Starlink and they're smart enough to know like we shouldn't limit people's ability to get to space. Let a thousand flowers boom. You don't want to get into a antitrust situation.
they're also they've got they're they're putting their own data centers in space, but they also have a deal with Starlink to integrate uh their mini laser terminals across more than 25 orbital data center satellites.
They're going to need to put more humans in the loop. They're going to need for it to understand uh what is against the terms of service
you have to build software that is resilient and that has controls in it. And this is powerful software because it's agentic and it's been instructed to please you because it has the entire history of hacking uh you know in a bad way in a good way um getting things done GSD blowing through various um blockers as we'd say in business you're going to have this happen over and over again.
Australia's prime minister now says an open AI agent broke into the Australian Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal on June 18th PM. Anthony Albanese, there he is, said the agent found a way around the blocks and did not accept no for an answer. OpenAI discovered the breach on uh August 11th. They waited until September 10th to email a public disclosure inbox. That's 84 days from the time of the incident to their disclosure.
This benefits Shopify. Of course, Shopify leans into this, right? Of course, Stripe and PayPal lean into this, right? It benefits them, right? There's no question.
We gave up on OpenClaw. ... claude co-work computer ... easier to use they were delivering faster ... we went from three people in the organization using them to uh you know have like 20 25 people here ... so the ease of use took over and now nobody's even thinking about openclaw anymore.
We gave up on OpenClaw. ... the ease of use took over. And now nobody's even thinking about OpenClaw anymore.
And definitely check out Temporal.io.
Bolt, Replit, Lovable, and 22 others... Replit and Lovable of a year ago and Bolt were not a moat. Today, they have massive moats.
Replit and Lovable of a year ago and Bolt were not a moat. Today, they have massive moats.
I have a pedal. I'm addicted to a whisper flow. I use whisper flow constantly. So that's your competitor. That's where you got to displace now.
But then Lyft was giving $600. And then the drivers are smart. They're like, oh, you guys are idiots. I'm going to, next week I'm doing Lyft. The week after I'm doing Uber, I hit my incentive. I flip to the next person.
I said two years ago, there's a chance that open source is going to win the AI race.
they're going to ban Waymo's in New York, Boston, DC, and they're going to limit them with licenses.
massive progress by Waymo. They're doubling the number of cars on the road, like every six months or so.
1% of $3 trillion I believe would be $30 billion. They're buying this for6 billion. You know, so it's literally like 25 basis points of the company.
And we were sitting here 18 months ago and people were like, 'What's Claude?' And boom, it went racing past it. Yeah.
But that's 5% of the enterprisebased business that Claude has.
And then in Open AI that will unlock, you know, something slightly different than the enterprised compute renting anthropic.
It's going to be awesome to look at the books because we're going to understand their revenue ramp, the composure of their revenue. Hopefully they might tell us like which are the biggest customers or something along the lines and we'll also get an idea of cost and and profitability.
Yeah. So it's going to go out at 3 trillion. Uh they're sandbagging with the two trillion. It's going to go out at 30 times topline revenue.
Agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash. That means gathering e-signatures, invoicing, billing, payments, and revenue recovery. No more jumping between four or five different platforms just to write out a contract, get it signed, then set up billing, and start sending out invoices. 99.64% of all invoices on the entire platform are paid within just 10 days.
if you look at Google Cloud, they posted 82% year-over-year revenue growth, which is uh something we've never seen uh in the history of these cloud providers. ... And if you look at Google, I still think Google will be the number one uh AI company because they
I don't think design is going away. I think we're just going to get more great design.
they're trading at like nine times sales uh or something in that range, which is pretty high multiple.
I like a founder company. I think the stock will be trading at 2x in 3 years. That's my guess right now.
they're up against Clawude Design. They're up against Gemini. They're up against Lovable. They're up against some serious competition
what Dylan did here with Figma saying, hey, I'm not going to take I think it's like a $50 million grant... he's signaling... that I'm not going to try to make an extra 2,3,4,5% on my net worth. I'm going to give that back to the shareholders and I'm going to show you how great this company is.
I got in at $22. So, I'm I'm basically uh at par right now. how I bought 4,500 shares
If they actually want to slow down AI development, and they should then as a company, slow down AI research, they can just slow it down themselves. They should not go to the government and ask for the latter to be pulled up behind everybody else. It's obviously regulatory capture, combined with performative nonsense.
Uber has invested in 20 different AV partners and they're doing AV rides, Zooks, etc. So I think it's actually twofold. Um, Waymo doesn't want to force people to go through the Uber app, which is what they're doing in the other two markets that are in business. I think it's Atlanta and Austin. And then I think Uber doesn't want to be limited to one partner. And I think it puts them on a competitive path. Eventually, if you have 5%, if you get charged 10% to get an incremental ride during a down
internationally, it's going to be Uber number one and then distant second and third would be, you know, um, uh, robo taxi and Waymo.
in the U S it's going to be if robo taxi gets up and running in the next year or two, it's probably going to be robo taxi. Number one, Waymo number two, Uber number three
Waymo is not going to take that business from Uber, but the rollout is going to be slow and steady.
Waymo doesn't want to force people to go through the Uber app, which is what they're doing in the other two markets that are in business. I think it's Atlanta and Austin.
So they had a small test in Arizona for like 10 cars and that came to an end. That was my understanding, an exclusive deal.
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Let's talk about together-ai. The growth has been staggering this year.
Let's talk about groq. I think they've become essential infrastructure for AI teams, the growth has been staggering this year.
open ai and anthropic are slated to go out
obviously this was not intentional but trust is important uh with these models as we've been talking about for the
i've been playing with it it's extraordinary it's a coding tool that works inside of cursor
you have product, you've got the signs of early product market fit, which means you'll get to pull eventually where people will just be like, I need this.
They're philanthropic come out with their own tape.
The J-curve on tokens is a trillion dollars. Let me state that again. There's going to be at least a trillion dollars invested by the Frontier Labs, possibly up to a $3 trillion. Will they be able to make tokens profitable enough to make their businesses work? I actually think they will not be able to do it. I think it's going to become a commoditized business like bandwidth and hard drives. Tokens are going to be looked at like hard drives and bandwidth.
And they told their partner, Cursor, hey, we're going to just use this internally. And of course, that's not true. They then released Claude Code. And so they found themselves as Cursor now having no compute, having no foundation model, and having their platform that enabled them essentially shivving them, like in the middle of the night, stabbing them in the back.
There was a time, and Ben probably saw this up close and personal with YouTube, where they were in the J-curve for YouTube and Sergey
And to own SpaceX stock, pretty great deal.
Now that they have Colossus behind them, and they have essentially unlimited compute, and when compute goes to space, they'll have extra unlimited compute, it's just an amazing exit.
So I think Elon gave them a 50% premium. So Cursor was at the time, I think when they did this deal, at $2 billion run rate.
Somehow Elon and Cursor got together, Elon being a little bit behind with his LLM being in third or fourth place.
So Cursor then had a problem. They called a red alert, a code red, and started building their own models, but they didn't have compute.
They then released Claude Code. And so they found themselves as Cursor now having no compute, having no foundation model
They had a couple of challenges. If you look at the history of the firm, they were built off of Claude. Claude and Anthropic then built an internal coding project, probably because they saw Cursor's token use. And some large percentage of Anthropic's usage was coming from Cursor.
I think Cursor is a fantastic company.
Somehow Elon and Cursor got together, Elon being a little bit behind with his LLM being in third or fourth place. And they decided, hey, we have all this Colossus sitting here, peanut butter, chocolate. They were going to raise, I heard on the street, at $40 billion. So I think Elon gave them a 50% premium. So Cursor was at the time, I think when they did this deal, at $2 billion run rate. Now that they have Colossus behind them, and they have essentially unlimited compute, and when compute goes
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my prediction, and you can just pull this prediction forward and remind me every one, three and five years about this. In fact, put it on the twist calendar. OK, keep me honest. One, three and five years from now, SpaceX and Tesla will be the great performers in the portfolio of the NASDAQ 100.
It's a financial transaction. It unlocks a lot of possibilities. One of the possibilities an IPO unlocks is capital. So, he's got $75 billion, I think. And maybe with the green shoe, it's 80 or 85 billion. The green shoe is like a little extra shares that could be sold. So, it's a very small float.
I sold the company for $30 million to AOL 18 months after starting. It was called Weblogs Inc.
What they did at the conference was a very unique thing. It turns out Plod is such a good experience at This Week in Startups that they went and did a partnership with All In. The Liquidity Conference was our LP conference this week. They recorded the conference. Then every night they sent out the same link that you and I would use when we're sharing Plod conversations that have been recorded, mind mapped, summarized, action items, all that stuff.
Therefore, who does invest? Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, A16Z, Pear, has a great summer program. Sequoia has ARC. I have Founder University, Launch Accelerator. Go to those programs first.
Who does invest? Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, A16Z, Pear, has a great summer program. Sequoia has ARC. I have Founder University, Launch Accelerator. Go to those programs first.
If Jose doesn't build and deliver, you lose the subnet. If he does deliver, the market cap goes up.
You know Cursor, that's the AI coding startup. Really, they define the category. XAI and Cursor are building and collaborating on a new AI coding model that would, quote, be the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. Here's the deal. As it's been explained, SpaceX will either buy Cursor by the end of 2026 for 60 billion, that's 10 billion more than they were rumored to be raising at, or they will pay Cursor $10 billion for their collaboration together. Bloomberg says you can think of that $1
SpaceX will either buy Cursor by the end of 2026 for 60 billion, that's 10 billion more than they were rumored to be raising at, or they will pay Cursor $10 billion for their collaboration together. Bloomberg says you can think of that $10 billion essentially as a breakup fee. So I think it's fate accompli that this deal is going to get done.
this answers the question that lon and i had in our notes which is you know how many more ideas are feasible for this adversarial decentralized model and it sounds like even inside of the very niche area of ml in particular because there are different projects out there uh tons of space left to build to to work and to host these competitions
fire emoji wow very strategic and bold move colossus which is the xai supercomputer is a super weapon for space x already can you imagine when it scales to the stars
He said, yeah, let me tell you about this thing, BitTensor, Tau, and subnets. And I was like, that's legit. And then I watched the people getting involved in and said, these are legit people.
But the truth is, he drove Dario out. Now Dario is passing OpenAI in models, profile, PR, influence, and dare I say, the revenue here.
I don't think Dario is lying. I think Dario is being sincere.
He's not loved by this administration, but they love his tech.
I think the CIA and the government are inside of Gemini, Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI, talking to each of these model folks.
there's an argument you have to nationalize this technology. There's an argument it's too powerful for a private company to own this.
I wonder if Dario said, by the way, our new model is would give the CIA the ability to hack North Korea, to hack China. And we are patriots at Anthropic. And instead of giving the tool to a bunch of security researchers, we're going to give it to the US government.
Now Dario is passing OpenAI in models, profile, PR, influence, and dare I say, the revenue here.
i think the bigger most interesting part of this is elon inc again no inside information i've met elon a couple of times uh i it's quite possible that this is you know uh the flop and then the turn and the river are to come uh and if this is the flop and the turn and the river to come the next discussion is going to be merging with tesla and then you're going to be able to buy the stock dollar sign elon and you know boring company neural income in next and you can just buy a 10 trillion dollar c
i just noticed claude if you hit slash skill it will let you put a skill in and then you can copy and paste the skills from one to another one
yeah it is extraordinary it's changed my life it's privacy first so you see
what if it works? You'll have a whole generation, uh, will grow up on this amazing app.
They might go find and do arbitrage. There might be some data storage company that is doing a sale on, you know, storage and they buy that, put it into the network to leverage that. And they're just constantly on the lookout for cheap storage and they're going to optimize for that.
But it can be anyone. That is the beauty. It's open to anyone. It's permissionless then. But you do need to have as a prerequisite lon, knowledge of BitTensor. You have to be highly technical to be able to go read the incentive structures and align with that and build that software. And you need to have, you know, hard drive space that would make it worth joining this
I love the fact that this is all transparent because now you get to see the network growing and you know, you can build confidence in it. So when we're looking at this salon, we have 350 terabytes up and running. Okay. It's a modest amount, but these are nascent projects, as I've said. And that's what we do here at this week in startups is we try to get on things very early so that we can understand them. And this is super disruptive.
What I found really interesting about the BitTensor project lawn is that instead of using the compute to solve cryptography problems to create this network that allowed for the storage of assets, this one allows you to take all of that work and put it towards something productive in the world. And at the same time, and BitTensor's been around for a while, at the same time, you know, it started to get some, you know, early true believers, the AI revolution happened. And then the need for compute
Anthropic at $380. OpenAI at $840.
so you can go buy tau like you buy bitcoin and i don't give financial advice but if anybody's listening and you had a hundy that you were going to spend on some margaritas i'm going to say maybe drink some water uh you know get some filtered water tap water whatever have a nice tea put the other 99 dollars into uh just buying a little towel for yourself why not
i think this is a lesson for him as ceo your take logan on taking a principled stance and winning the crowd right when the when the crowd win your freedom gladiator style he got the he got the crowd to use the product they became number one in the app store
this is there's no dig to sam but we both know sam for a long time he's got sharp out yeah but he's got sharp elbows and he wants to he has to build a trillion dollar company here if there's any revenue opportunity he's going to take it so if you're shipping all your data up there don't be surprised if you wake up one day and he creates you know a legal uh copilot a coding copilot that's his right to do that
It was so acute at Amazon that they were preparing a PR campaign to stop the bad PR they were going to get in the coming years from not hiring people and laying people off.
there was a leaked document from Amazon that said, we have like 900,000 jobs, 600,000 jobs we're not going to hire for in the next decade because we predict they're going to be robots.
Andy Jassy, a year ago, in the summer, wrote this memo that things were going to change in Amazon and that they saw AI playing a bigger role.
their annualized reoccurring revenue, whatever that means, is 14 billion up from 1 billion, 14. Yeah, it's a basic run rate, I guess. And so they raised 30 billion at 380 billion. So if we put these numbers together, you know, 10 times 14 billion would be 140, 20 times would be 280. So it looks like 25 times revenue ballpark, 25 times revenue.
you can't blame United Airlines or Amazon if you sent an agent to its website
it's disappointing because, uh, Claude has built some really great technology that people love using. I'm using Claude to do all kinds of, uh, it's like magic at my computer that used to take me a lot longer to produce. Um, and when you take OpenClaw, you just want to bring, bring your own anything to use it. So it's kind of, it's, uh, it doesn't leave a great taste in the user's mouth to, uh, to have this restriction imposed on us.
This technology was becoming so powerful that it commoditized open AI and clawed because it, it wins the interface. Whoever wins the interface wins the day. You can see the Chrome browser. You can see Mac OS. You can see windows. If you own the operating system, you own the distribution. It was becoming very clear that the front door for using AI had switched from chat GPT chat room to now people using open claw. Anybody using open claw stopped going to clawed XAI Gemini. You just stop going the
they're going to rebuild this product inside of open AI. And instead of going to open claw and doing all this, you know, chores and, and, and tedious work to set it up, they're going to make it one click and give it to their billion users because they have distribution in order to preserve their distribution. And then whatever innovations, the safest, most innovative, easiest version, the most easiest version will be the default interface on ChatGPT within six to 12 months. In other words, in Ch
Look at Sam Altman's history. Look at what he did to Elon. Look at his co-founders leaving. Look at him almost getting fired. Just look at that track record. Look at the YC track record. I, and this is nothing against Sam Altman. We're, we're friendly and we've known each other for over 20 years, but he's a cutthroat guy. He's known as a deal maker. Doesn't surprise me that he got this deal because he's from the Zuckerberg school. I've said this over and over again. He is as sharp as a blade get
I would estimate that would be a nine figure, kind of mid nine figure deal. I would put it at 250, maybe even as high as 500 million in some combination of cash and stock in Open AI.
Open AI. Sam Altman has bought Open Claw.
SpaceX has put up over 11,000 Starlink satellites total adjacent. There's 9,500 that are currently operational.
this year Starship will begin delivering the much more powerful V3 strong satellites to orbit with each launch adding more than 20 times the capacity to the constellation as the current Falcon launches.
I've been involved in a couple of them, Uber, which was quite humbling because I came here. Well, I've been coming here since the late 90s, but I remember post Uber, I just was talking to TK and then eventually Dara. And I was like, the cabs here are so good. The cab drivers are wearing suits and have white gloves on and they're clean and they're affordable and they're so respectful that why do they need Uber? Like, how do we ever penetrate this market? And they figured it out, but I don't think
uber has ordered I think 20,000 of these already and this is uber black essentially so this follows the uber playbook Alex of starting with the high end and then going down the gravity so we're showing the Zooks here as well but the one we saw originally is the lucid gravity that is a six seater that's a big luxurious model x you know escalade competitor and it's a really nice car for an airport ride or a CEO you know somebody who doesn't mind paying for uber black waymo and fsd robo taxis model
This is going to ramp up quite nicely. These companies will have no problem making hundreds of thousands of these and eventually millions. So if people want them, they'll get these down to, that looks like $5,000 to $10,000 eventually. Optimus and the Hyundai one, I would put at $20,000.
Not a SpaceX holder, except maybe through a venture firm I'm in. Okay. And I would say I have no inside information. I think that that is, I would take the, I think that's under, I would say it's a 90% chance. So I think there's some money to be made there.
great partnership with them, too.
If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI. Let me say that. This is a warning. People can clip this. This is a warning for anybody dumb enough to use Sam Altman's OpenAI API. They are studying you. Remember, Sam Altman's been around the block. I've known him since Loop. He's an incredibly savvy person, and he wants every bit of revenue from the ecosystem. He isn't taking no prisoners. He's going to study how you're using the API, which he has the right to do
But whatever's happened at Meta has metastasized to the point where Zuckerberg does not have anybody around him telling them when they're doing stupid s***. This is a dangerous place for somebody with that much power to have.
Yeah, it's obviously Netflix. That's the best offer, the fastest offer. They're going to just go with Netflix. I don't think they want to deal with all the potential legal hand-wringing around the Paramount deal, but should go to the highest bidder. And the best deal terms, the most secure deal terms, at some point you could ask people to put stuff in escrow, the breakup fees, all of these things add up to making what is the technical best deal. And we'll probably see a late flurry here of peopl
So if this patent works, you know, what's to stop Tesla from telling Waymo, hey, yeah, you can put our stuff in your Waymos and it costs this amount. Plus you have to just allow other people onto the network and then you kind of create this mesh network.
Waymos are map based and heuristics based as opposed to the EMA system, end to M models. And so they'll just be a little bit, the Waymos are more accurate in the short term, more brittle when presented with new situations.
I got to stop by Tesla on Sunday. Elon invited me to come by and I got to see Optimus 3. Can't talk about that. But I was in the lab with the Optimus engineers looking at 2.5 and 2. And I saw the cyber cabs there. What they're planning is otherworldly.
what's going to be nice, I think, about the Tesla one is even if you're not part of the network, they might give that to give it to you for free and then you're expanding the network. And Molly made a good contribution there where she said like, well, they could also license it to other cars. So if this patent works, you know, what's to stop Tesla from telling Waymo, hey, yeah, you can put our stuff in your Waymos and it costs this amount. Plus you have to just allow other people onto the networ
I don't have any inside information on this. It's just a prediction. But imagine if every Cybertruck eventually or every one of the Tesla semi trucks had this built in. There's no reason they can't license it eventually. Or license it. Just like satellite radio was in every car.
Yeah, for sure. Elon obviously has built the end to end system. Waymos are map based and heuristics based as opposed to the EMA system, end to M models. And so they'll be just a little bit, the Waymos are more accurate in the short term, more brittle when presented with new situations.
Uber drivers were not pleased, uh, with this situation, uh, they were like, see, uh, we told you keep the humans in the loop.
The next time this happens, these Waymos will be instructed to on their own without internet connections, just safely find a parking spot on the right side of the road... they'll just program this into the stack. And this will be the first and last time you get to laugh at them doing this. They'll be like ballet dancers in Swan Lake making their way off the road.
So the most important thing here is now that there's a commercial relationship, every other lawsuit that's going on will be able to point to this.
It was essential that somebody get a deal like this done. Now that we have a major deal like this, every single LLM is going to have to do this.
Here's how it's going to work. Here's how the deals will work. And if you're not part of one of these deals, as Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google the day before the OpenAI deal was announced, you cannot use these IP. So it's really, I think, the first attempt to figure out a sort of formalize this whole process. Like, here's what these collaborations will look like. And if you don't have one of these collaborations, you don't get to use these characters.
And I think this is a big damn deal.
Incepting a Jedi story in your brain using one of these and you ask Neuralink or one of the other people doing this, like, is that an infringing? Well, yes, because Neuralink will become the new Disney world. And so in five years, Disney will do a deal with Neuralink that you will be able to experience any of the Star Wars movies.
So the most important thing here is now that there's a commercial relationship, every other lawsuit that's going on will be able to point to this.
It was essential that somebody get a deal like this done. Now that we have a major deal like this, every single LLM is going to have to do this.
And I think this is a big damn deal.
The Disney Plus channel, imagine you could make yourself into a Jedi Knight and you could then upload your photo. You know, kids might really get into this. You upload your photo. You can make, you talked about this, Freebird, a couple of times of the future of narrative storytelling. You up your photo and then it makes you into a Jedi Knight.
It was essential that somebody get a deal like this done. Now that we have a major deal like this, every single LLM is going to have to do this.
So the most important thing here is now that there's a commercial relationship, every other lawsuit that's going on will be able to point to this.
I think this is a big damn deal.
I want to get Brian to jump in on this, but just to underscore the Databricks growth numbers that David's talking about, the company announced a couple months ago that it's now over a $4 billion run rate growing at more than 50% year over year. And critically, David said that it has now a greater than $1 billion run rate just for its AI products. So it's a growth story, an AI story. It's a win all the way up and down.
i missed the hail mary and it would have been i think a double up for me at the current share price could have 2x in three years
will there be ads in chat gpt by december 31st the market has decided that that's not going to happen currently at four percent and dropping over four hundred thousand dollars in volume there what is interesting though is the fact that they added this march 31st timeline now there's not a lot of betting yet on the extended time frame for will there be ads in chat gpt by then the end of q1 but still not a lot of optimism here people really don't think it's coming so these folks think that it's go
we have a bet that we put in place on august 15th 2025 open ai advertising uh launched in chat gpt 12 months less or more i took the under
if i was open ai i would be working to get ads on there faster and have it ready to go when they said they were pausing it or not focusing on it i call bs i call i think they're tripling down on it and having it ready so that the second somebody else puts ads in i.e google they'll have it ready to go
they realize they don't have a better mousetrap they have the same mousetrap as everybody else that everybody's mousetrap is getting five percent better every three months
because of the code red they called because the llm is falling behind gemini and other rock and claude are making better products and leapfrogging open ai they're in a panic mode
people are going to stop paying for these things when chat gpt was one of one people paid for it of course now that you have gemini grok you know and everything in between they're going to stop paying
my belief is the 75 of the revenue at open ai that's coming from consumers is going to go down to you know at least 50 in the next two years
it's coming folks and it's going to be awesome and if you want free chat gpt and you want to burn you know an h100 to make your funny memes somebody's got to pay for it and it's going to come from advertising
now what they're going to need to have is a partnerships coordinator who is just responsible for how this stuff looks in the end product
they don't have a person deputized to think about how advertising or in-house ads cross promotion should exist inside of the product so sometimes when you're running a company there'll be like two outfielders you know and okay you know one person's in left field one person's in centerfield and there's a shortstop and whatever the ball kind of is in between those three players and it just drops in between all three and they all look at each other and that's what happened here
if it was an ad from open ai their idea is to look at the memory and what you've searched for over and over and over again then tell the ai given the history of alex and everything he's talking about you know 20 different advertisements would you serve to him and how would you make the message to him that would resonate and it would be hyper targeted
Meta is forcing you to use their AI search, which is pretty bad, I'll be honest. Every time you do a search on Instagram, it's annoying. But those all count as users using the product, just like Slack-based competition from Microsoft Teams when it bundled.
He sent a memo on Monday, told employees to stop working on side quests, you know, like ads, et cetera, and focus on the core, chat GPT, the core experience, make it faster, make it better.
I'm seeing more startups want to use Anthropic's API, and also Google Gemini's API, and they don't essentially trust OpenAI to not steal their business.
Anthropic is beating OpenAI in enterprise revenue starting this summer.
Chat GPT5, let's call it what it is, was a bit of a flop. It didn't perform to expectations.
Netflix does not have this much cash that it can just throw around.
Netflix does not have this much cash that it can just throw around.
If this information is correct, Gemini now has 20% more users every month than ChatGPT. Gemini is beating ChatGPT in consumer adoption of AI.
the company that's going to have the most market share decline because they were first up the hill is going to be OpenAI. So their percentage of AI jobs from APIs and their lock on the consumer is going to go from essentially a hundred percent of consumers, right? They had the first chat product. It's going to go down to less than 50%.
I also think Jensen's a little pissed off, 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.
But this would go back to the Teams versus Slack. If you remember when Microsoft Teams came out, they turned it on for everybody who uses Office 365, whether you want it or not, it was bundled.
They've got over 10 million developers using their models. They've always been very popular with developers. They have a global market, and their AI is helping their ad network, helping their search results. And this is why I think a lot of people got it wrong. Everybody thought ChatGPT would just run over Google because people would, their behavior would change. They'd stop going to Google. They would start going to this new product. Well, network effects are strong, and strong companies realiz
However, they have a new version that's on the side of a Starbucks.
well, they have to go and they have to replicate the network of restaurants. That DoorDash has spent over a decade building those relationships and building that fabric. It's not impossible. Like, I think Zipline could be attaching themselves. They're building, essentially, the drive-thru window for drones.
That DoorDash has spent over a decade building those relationships and building that fabric. ... Well, they're doing that at the same time that DoorDash is sending their proprietary robot.
having watched the amount of money, uh, that was starting to be invested from the region, specifically watching Uber raise from the region, I said, I need to get educated.
And then you would have Google, Facebook, and Meta saying, instead of give me, you know, a hundred thousand of these at the rack rate, they would be saying, hey, I need 10 of these for sure. I'm going to bid a million. I need another hundred of these. I'm willing to bid $750,000
But if you're Google or Facebook and you're bringing in a PhD in AI who's going to get paid a million dollars, well, that $100,000 fee, $20,000, $30,000 a year, whatever it winds up being, is nothing. It's de minimis.
It is extraordinary. It's way out there. Datadog and Snowflake, Microsoft, you know, these are at 13 times their sales. And I guess Cloudflare is out there at 37 and CrowdStrike at 30. So this is truly an outlier, Friedberg. If you were to give Palantir the same price to sales ratio as some of those highly valued ones, probably be a $60, $70 billion company, $29 a share instead of $170.
talk to all the OEMs, talk to Uber, talk to Tesla, talk to Waymo, Baidu. They all have plans to build millions of cars, collectively tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions.
And amongst the startups out there, they basically believe Claude is not trying to take their business. And Claude has been very careful to say, hey, we're not going to encroach into the application layer. So, all right. Yeah.
If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI.
A crazy performance from Amazon. And I think Amazon is my pick for the stock of the next five years.
I have to say, hey, Air Director Lon, you can jump in on this since this is your wheelhouse. This is actually, putting all jokes aside, what a great way for a casting director to see what a person might be like.
You know, it's pretty effective. Keep going.
Let me say this. I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI. Let me say that. This is a warning. People can clip this.
I guarantee you, if you're using and you're trusting Sam Altman from OpenAI and their API, they're studying your data. They're studying your usage patterns. I guarantee it. And they're allowed to do it.
If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI. Let me say that. This is a warning.
I've been playing with Suno basically all week and I've already, I'm only 1500 credits through, so you really have to be abusing Suno. So it's basically free.
So that's kind of what Suno was looking to implement here as producers are familiar with.
They're going to say, you know what, we should really have the Cursor business. We should really have the co-pilot business. We're going to just make it one of our business lines at OpenAI, at Anthropic, et cetera. So there you have it. They have no choice but to do it. It's existential.
If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI. Let me say that. This is a warning. People can clip this.
A crazy performance from Amazon. And I think Amazon is my pick for the stock of the next five years.
I think it would be good if it... It would be great if it showed like one person you follow, and then like it blended the old style, which was just reverse chronological of your friends, the original version, with this new version. So you get like a little bit of both.
i'm huge fans of grammarly and was the first investor along with darmesh
superhuman which my whole team uses day in and day out and we pay for and grammarly which my whole team uses which we pay for
multiplayer mode is so powerful because in superhuman when you send an email thread sometimes it's like oh there's a customer support thread i really should get the customer rep cc'd on this so now i'm adding people oh and i should have the head of customer support do this oh and i should also have the sales manager now you get three people and then everybody's email boxes flooded and everybody's day is trying to get to inbox zero which superhuman help should do but wouldn't it be better if you
the thing i love about grammarly is that it persistently follows me around my desktop it's on my keyboard on my phone and it feels like it's starting to learn and become a little more personalized
you have tens of millions of people 40 million daily active users yes 40 million people who love grammarly
that's a real decision you had to make very big superhuman is obviously a more expansive name
superhuman which my whole team uses day in and day out and we pay for and grammarly which my whole team uses which we pay for
the context is highly profitable company extremely stable revenue no investors two owners they can do what they want and they can pursue whatever they want
if you're at 37 signals they took a similar approach hey if you want to be here uh you're here to make great productivity software full stop and that's it and then here's an incredible pay package i think both companies just said hey if you want to opt out we get it
when you start a company and you don't have a bunch of investors which they don't i think they bought out bezos who was a their only investor uh back in the day they can build the world they want to live in
they bought out bezos who was a their only investor uh back in the day
so they are a highly profitable uh software company that has existed for a long time with a loyal base of users and it is um pretty reliable uh that those revenue streams people
they've said this is a developer kit we're going to make it it's going to weigh a little bit more obviously components come down like the um iphone air so for now we want you to get as much resolution as much of the power
the battery life is obviously not fantastic but it's not terrible it's so thin and the only really i think bad decision is they went with this um very fancy camera that juts out i would have just put a regular camera in and just made it totally flat but it is the first time i held an apple product since maybe iphone 4 and said holy cow this is incredible yeah or maybe the original macbook airs i haven't said oh my god this is incredible in years for apple and this is insane how thin and lightwei
so people will want immersive content eventually and so imagine exploring you know uh sports is uh probably the one where people get a lot of um it's easy to imagine wanting to watch sports in an immersive way and being able to stream that is highly technical okay yeah welcome to the program zach from spatial
yum yum yum for jcal in our accelerator this is a great founder when we saw this product we were like man ar and vr uh and all this stuff is gonna eventually land and you're gonna need tools picks shovels and partners speaking of partners to do
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
The only challenge is here, when you're a Sequoia CEO, you know, you then have to figure out, okay, which fund am I going to be in? Is the growth fund going to do this? Right. And it can be a little conflicted.
She was raving about Waymo in LA. Just raving about it. She's a complete convert and is never going back. And she is a normie. So to me, I think that as customers touch and see these cars in the real world, get to take a ride on them, it changes minds. I'm hoping. So I think you're dead on, but I'm less concerned than I was six months ago.
Alphabet, also known as Google. And Google is really, I think, the most interesting one. They're up 40% this year of their stock because people were like, they're going to get killed. So last year, search was going to get killed. As I said on this program and the other program, my thesis is people are going to be doing more searches and that the pie is going to continue to get bigger. Why? The answers are better. And if the answers are better and you solve problems quicker, you still have a cert
Tonebase, which is our how to learn classical music, an investment we made. Really great company. They're just crushing it.
Amazon is going to be talking about robotics and all that leaked information. And they're going to be asked by analysts, so you're not going to hire 600 people. What happens to the 1.4 million people who work there? You employ 1% of the country works at Amazon. 1% of the country works at Amazon. And they're not growing anymore. They're not going to grow that staff anymore. And I would say they're probably going to redeploy to save face, to keep the guillotines and the let them eat cake memes may
And then you have Alphabet, also known as Google. And Google is really, I think, the most interesting one. They're up 40% this year of their stock because people were like, they're going to get killed. So last year, search was going to get killed. As I said on this program and the other program, my thesis is people are going to be doing more searches and that the pie is going to continue to get bigger. Why? The answers are better. And if the answers are better and you solve problems quicker, you
Yeah. So listen, a million and fraudulent. This is another one of these stories to get us to mention Ramp, who's not an advertiser. I love it, though. They're so good at it. So I'll give them credit this one last time. But from now on, we won't mention any content marketing. With peace and love, any content marketing must be scrubbed from the docket. I was going to skip the whole story, man.
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.
The only challenge here is, when you're a Sequoia CEO, you know, you have to then figure out, okay, which fund am I going to be in? Is the growth fund going to do this? Right. And it can be a little conflicted.
Then you start using Google Docs and you see the AI assistant or Excel and the AI assistant will do the formula for you. That's going to make you use these products more.
my thesis is people are going to be doing more searches and that the pie is going to continue to get bigger. Why? The answers are better. And if the answers are better and you solve problems quicker, you still have a certain amount of time. You will be more inquisitive. ... This is inducing a massive amount of extra activity on Google services.
they're not going to grow that staff anymore. And I would say they're going to probably redeploy to save face
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
Amazon is going to be talking about robotics and all that leaked information. And they're going to be asked by analysts, so you're not going to hire 600 people. What happens to the 1.4 million people who work here? You employ 1% of the country works at Amazon. 1% of the country works at Amazon. And they're not growing anymore. They're not going to grow that staff anymore.
Alphabet, also known as Google. And Google is really, I think, the most interesting one. They're up 40% this year of their stock because people were like, they're going to get killed. So last year, search was going to get killed. As I said on this program and the other program, my thesis is people are going to be doing more searches and that the pie is going to continue to get bigger. Why? The answers are better. And if the answers are better and you solve problems quicker, you still have a cert
The only challenge here is, when you're a Sequoia CEO, you know, you have to then figure out, okay, which fund am I going to be in? Is the growth fund going to do this? Right. And it can be a little conflicted.
And you will probably understand the fate of the company better than our internal people, because you met the founders in the Series A. And you've been with them for 10 years, so why not stick with them for the next 20?
you're going to see amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from amazon a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100 uh you know robotic which means all of those workers are going away every amazon worker all those jobs you ups gone fedex gone every all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable and when you order something it's going to come
before 2030 you're going to see amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from amazon a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100 uh you know robotic which means all of those workers are going away every amazon worker all those jobs you ups gone fedex gone every all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable and when you order something it's go
before 2030 you're going to see Amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from Amazon a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100 you know robotic which means all of those workers are going away all those Amazon jobs ups gone fedex gone all of those are going to be gone and those companies are going to be more profitable and when you order something it's going to come faster
before 2030 you're going to see amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from amazon a human will touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100 you know robotic which means all of those workers are going away every amazon worker all those jobs you ups gone fedex gone all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable and when you order something it's going to com
before 2030 you're going to see amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from amazon a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100 uh you know robotic which means all of those workers are going away every amazon worker all those jobs you ups gone fedex gone every all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable and when you order something it's go
before 2030 you're going to see amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from amazon a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100 uh you know robotic which means all of those workers are going away every amazon worker all those jobs you ups gone fedex gone every all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable and when you order something it's go
if you look at the current revenue footprint of ai companies and you know you got to think we're we're we're closing in on a hundred billion in revenue you know if you have open ai with 10 13 whatever it is
if you have open ai with 10 13 whatever it is
I would say, including our program's launch, Accelerator, all a better option for founders now than Y Combinator. And that's not a dig at Y Combinator. I just put them in like the fifth slot now because I think you get a better deal economically.
And, you know, they charge on a per-employee basis. But they will move into consumption AI disruptive products, I predict. These are companies that have good enough management teams that they'll both start moving into the AI space. But I could see both of these companies, you know, becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars and having a chance if they globally become the employer of record, the HR tech of record, you know, your entire stack for companies. Because it's kind of like network ef
you're talking about interchange revenues that you make when people use their ramp cards and that drives a large chunk of your revenue.
And I always appreciate, Eric, when you tip me off on which trades I should make with this data before in our group chat. So I do appreciate that everybody gets access to it after we make our trades and play some, Eric's shaking
Wow. Congrats. What do your investors think about that? Like, uh, I guess, pre IPO, that's a good thing because it sets you up, but aren't they also some board members saying, Hey, listen, I, I got in the seed round. I got in the series a, why don't we acquire more customers
people used to trade on information like this at hedge funds where it was available for purchase.
And you've been doing a lot of work around taking the aggregate payments that startups spend. And you're able to, without invading anybody's privacy, putting that out there very clearly, tell us what's going on in the space. Who's spending on what products, huh?
And this information, people used to trade on information like this at hedge funds where it was available for purchase. ... you could maybe make some trades on how Walmart versus Target are doing and make a couple of basis points.
amd and open ai just closed a massive gpu deal could be worth 60 billion or more over the next five years obviously uh two companies are run by friends of the pod lisa from amd and sam from open ai both been on the pod amd stock rocketed up 35 since the announcement open ai committed to purchasing six gigawatts worth of amd's next gen gpus a little bit of an interesting wrinkle here amd granted open ai warrants okay that's interesting for up to 160 million shares or 10 of the companies
i think this means that open ai is going to get a lot of gpus essentially for free
But boy, what a great insight they had that, hey, we don't need another source of energy. We need to store energy when it's at the lowest possible rate.
I love about your business, Zach, is that it hits on those notes. People here would like to be resilient. They would like to be independent of the grid or at least semi-independent of the grid.
It does seem the way you're constructing these to go on the outside of suburban homes and not rely on solar, just to put them on the outside seems incredibly quick.
all right I think figure will be one of the top three I think Optimus will be number one figure will be in the top three four five and then you got a lot of people in China working on this stuff so yeah there'll be a lot of low cost folks in China doing this
I think to YC's credit Techstars they all shared their stats and they did yeah and the way they gamed it was
when you're accepting 1% what they're doing is they're just looking for young people without families who are developers the more developers the better which means it's naturally going to skew more mail
They think that the biggest risk to this working is launch costs. So essentially, this company is a bet that SpaceX's Starship is going to not only get sorted out, but do lots and lots of trips up and down... there's two markets for this type of work. One is you're dead on getting data to and from the earth, processing in space and sending back down the results. But he also mentioned the CEO of StarCloud that there's a market in orbit for compute, which you can do via lasers between different sa
I just think we're getting more applications I would say since all in started and became like a pop culture phenomenon it's tripled the number of applications and then we're now doing an explicit push to get to 50,000 applications a year well most weeks have no problem hitting 400 or 500 applications but I want to really get it to 1,000 a week now we want 1,000 quality applications a week and we do 100 meetings a week so we pretty consistently will do 100 first calls 15 20 minute calls the more
if you get rejected forward your rejection and your application most importantly to YC at launch.co and my team will take a meeting with you and give us some feedback and see if it's right for our program
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
we have three ways to invest they can come to founding university if they're extremely early if they're in year zero they're not incorporated or they're recently incorporated they haven't finished their product accelerator if they have finished their product or close to finishing it maybe have a couple of customers and then the syndicate will do a direct investment maybe from our fund
I just think we're getting more applications I would say since all in started and became like a pop culture phenomenon it's tripled the number of applications and then we're now doing an explicit push to get to 50,000 applications a year well most weeks have no problem hitting 400 or 500 applications but I want to really get it to 1,000 a week now we want 1,000 quality applications a week and we do 100 meetings a week so we pretty consistently will do 100 first calls 15 20 minute calls the more
Not a demand issue, a supply issue. Employees in the company didn't put up as many shares as they could have in this tender offer,
A couple of things here. First of all, it is now the most valuable private company in the world. OK, just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago, and the tender offer was worth about $6.6 billion in total.
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 additionally, they were probably reading the room. We're talking about Google Chrome launched their AI companion.
Anyway, that was probably their concern is can they handle the amount of traffic coming in and can they handle it profitably?
I think they probably did this right. They knew it was, when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned.
Not a demand issue, a supply issue. Employees in the company didn't put up as many shares as they could have in this tender offer,
it is now the most valuable private company in the world. OK, just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago, and the tender offer was worth about $6.6 billion in total.
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.
I think the entire future of Reddit is to go there and get an LLM search box and then underneath it have, you know, make it look like Google with the search box or perplexity or anybody, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, have it be a search engine and underneath it have all of the top communities. And then it should be studying you and doing your for you page and serving you up stuff. And they really should just assume that the era of free search engine traffic is going to be deprecated slow
People were saying that the stock is down because of this, like 5% or 10% because Reddit typically appears in the lower rankings. So this is, could be a big part of this future story, which is the impact of SEO and scraping and content creators and how do they get traffic to their website? How do they get traffic to their website?
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.
I think the entire future of Reddit is to go there and get an LLM search box and then underneath it have, you know, make it look like Google with the search box or perplexity or anybody, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, have it be a search engine and underneath it have all of the top communities. And then it should be studying you and doing your for you page and serving you up stuff. And they really should just assume that the era of free search engine traffic is going to be deprecated slow
People were saying that the stock is down because of this, like 5% or 10% because Reddit typically appears in the lower rankings. So this is, could be a big part of this future story, which is the impact of SEO and scraping and content creators and how do they get traffic to their website? How do they get traffic to their website?
I think the entire future of Reddit is to go there and get an LLM search box and then underneath it have, you know, make it look like Google with the search box or perplexity or anybody, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, have it be a search engine and underneath it have all of the top communities. And then it should be studying you and doing your for you page and serving you up stuff. And they really should just assume that the era of free search engine traffic is going to be deprecated slow
Well, ironic because Reddit does have a deal with Google that pays them for access to their information. And as we talked about it, I think at the end of last year, Reddit put together its own search product that you and I were pretty bullish on, but then doesn't seem to be discussed or mentioned. I never see people using it. So I wonder if their own kind of in-house search portal is a bit of a flop, which surprises me, frankly, given that I thought that was going to be successful.
So here's a recent chart of Reddit's financial performance as a stock, Jason. Clearly it's taken quite a lot of blows. It was around 240 earlier in the week and now it is down to $208 per share. So yes, a lot of downward pressure there, perhaps from the Google SEO situation.
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 they probably did this right. They knew it was, when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned.
First of all, it is now the most valuable private company in the world. OK, just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago, and the tender offer was worth about $6.6 billion in total.
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.
I think the entire future of Reddit is to go there and get an LLM search box and then underneath it have, you know, make it look like Google with the search box or perplexity or anybody, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, have it be a search engine and underneath it have all of the top communities. And then it should be studying you and doing your for you page and serving you up stuff. And they really should just assume that the era of free search engine traffic is going to be deprecated slow
People were saying that the stock is down because of this, like 5% or 10% because Reddit typically appears in the lower rankings.
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.
And I think every LLM will have a browser to do this.
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 can you make tens of billions of dollars back by the time those data centers are, you know, fully deprecated? And so that is the question of the hour. That's probably why they took a little bit of time to launch this.
I think they probably did this right. They knew it was, when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned.
I think that's like a backdoor hack for these brands.
I think every LLM will have a browser to do this.
it's not as feature rich as Comet is.
That's probably why they took a little bit of time to launch this. And then additionally, they were probably reading the room.
I think they probably did this right. They knew it was, when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned.
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 every LLM will have a browser to do this.
Not a demand issue, a supply issue. Employees in the company didn't put up as many shares as they could have in this tender offer, which people are taking to indicate that they're big believers in the company.
First of all, it is now the most valuable private company in the world. OK, just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago, and the tender offer was worth about $6.6 billion in total.
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.
OpenAI, chances on Polymarket of OpenAI launching a browser. I think we pulled that up and we can pull it up again here. Polymarket, I think, had it at 70% that the browser would be released and users could use that browser. So we'll be sitting here by the end of the year. And I think every LLM will have a browser to do this.
I don't think it's as good as, it's not as feature rich as Comet is.
I think they probably did this right. They knew it was, when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned. ... Anyway, that was probably their concern is can they handle the amount of traffic coming in and can they handle it profitably? Anyway, the big story next year will be we invested all this CapEx on servers, on data cen
Well, let's pull up Spotify stock chart just while I collect my thoughts here and take a look at the, you know, max chart here. Um, this has been an incredibly successful company. Um, but you know, it took a long time.
And people are very, very unhappy. Lon, why are they unhappy?
Well, I think maybe the success of the first Sora makes a built-in audience for the second, and Vibes is a first-time product. That would be, I think, why people really want to see the sequel to Terminator versus whatever the new film is, because they fell in love with the first one.
That's why I think these companies are doing so well is because there's just a generational shift. Most people don't want to use these old banks. They want to use the new banks. Most people don't want to use the last paradigm. They want to use the new paradigm. The interfaces on these are incredible.
It's kind of the opposite of Robinhood, where people are day trading and doing, like, individual stuff. This is for people who, like, don't even want to look at it.
They also do things like tax loss harvesting, which rich people have access to, but poor people don't. What does that mean? They look at your portfolio. They individually trade stocks. If you lost a bunch of money on your Intel and made a bunch of money on your NVIDIA, you could sell the Intel to get a loss to offset the gain, right? As you move your portfolio around. And they do that for you all the time.
It's really a great way to build an optimized portfolio and pay the most reasonable fees you could ever do. I think they charge 50 bps, 25 bps. It's something ridiculous. It's 25? ... So, you know, if you have a money manager, it's typically 1 to 1.5. Now, that doesn't seem like a lot. But if your returns are 4% a year after taxes and you're paying 1.5 to your money manager, guess what? Now you're, you know, giving a third of your profits every year to your money manager.
I became a shareholder. Man, maybe in year one or two, I've gotten all my family on Wealthfront.
this has been an incredibly successful company.
the success of the first Sora makes a built-in audience for the second
Are they going to keep it in Goldman? No, they're going to put it into the Wealthfront.
And this company's been around for a while, over 10 years, certainly. Fintech's a great category. We've done very well for it, you know, as an investor. So in our firm, Robinhood, Wealthfront, two great positions for us.
I'm a shareholder. Andy Ratcliffe has been on this program no less than five times. He was the co-founder of Benchmark. He teaches a product market fit class at Stanford. And he's really smart. And, yeah, I became a shareholder. Man, maybe in year one or two, I've gotten all my family on Wealthfront. It's really a great way to build an optimized portfolio and pay the most reasonable fees you could ever do.
this has been an incredibly successful company. Um, but you know, it took a long time.
Well, I think maybe the success of the first Sora makes a built-in audience for the second, and Vibes is a first-time product. That would be, I think, why people really want to see the sequel to Terminator versus whatever the new film is, because they fell in love with the first one.
And man, you watch Wealthfront add features, Robinhood add features, Coinbase add features. And these are all founder-led companies.
And man, you watch Wealthfront add features, Robinhood add features, Coinbase add features. And these are all founder-led companies. So I'd say it's both of those things. It's the legacy sucking and the founder-led companies, you know, hitting their stride.
Are they going to keep it in Goldman? No, they're going to put it into the Wealthfront. They're going to put it into their Robinhood. They're going to put it into their Coinbase account. That's why I think these companies are doing so well is because there's just a generational shift.
Wealthfront tries to put you into the most balanced, rigorous portfolio. It's kind of the opposite of Robinhood, where people are day trading and doing, like, individual stuff. This is for people who, like, don't even want to look at it.
I'm a shareholder. Andy Ratcliffe has been on this program no less than five times. He was the co-founder of Benchmark. He teaches a product market fit class at Stanford. And he's really smart. And, yeah, I became a shareholder. Man, maybe in year one or two, I've gotten all my family on Wealthfront. It's really a great way to build an optimized portfolio and pay the most reasonable fees you could ever do. I think they charge 50 bps, 25 bps. It's something ridiculous. It's 25? So, you know, if y
if i told you before xi had released an llm and chat gpt and claude had and gemini had run away with it should xai jump into the race uh you might say no it's too late it's never too late somebody could start an llm right now i know that sounds crazy
if you look at palo alto networks and all these cyber security firms and how amazing they're doing the cash over there is just a beast and he's been buying up all these you know um disparate uh cyber security firms
This is the one company that challenges Meta's supremacy and will continue to do so. YouTube would be the other, right? Just as the world moves to video in shorts. And so you have to ask who loses here. The big loser in all of this is Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg now has a viable, scary competitor.
Zuckerberg and his family will control Meta and their billions of users for all eternity. That's the company that you have to be worried about.
It's producer Claude is telling us Meta bought a minority stake in Ray-Band's pairing company.
I think they also have a branding problem at Meta because these are the Meta Ray-Band somethings, Meta Ray-Band display, I guess.
lovable highlights, um, man, 120 million in ARR, the question everybody has is the durability of this revenue. Is this durable, uh, or is it brittle revenue? And that's what we'll find out over time.
lovable, uh, as I mentioned, had hit a hundred. So these are amazing.
cursor and lovable revenue, those two companies got to nine figures in revenue in like low single digit years
cursor and lovable revenue... those two companies got to nine figures in revenue in like low single digit years
the question everybody has is the durability of this revenue. Is this durable, uh, or is it brittle revenue? And that's what we'll find out over time.
cursor founded in 2022, wow, 500 million in revenue, uh, they got to 500 million in under three years. Uh, they got a $10 billion valuation
Robinhood's gotten faster at producing great products. They're leaving everyone in the dust.
They keep figuring out new ways to engage their customers. They added crypto, they added prediction markets, they added this closed end fund. Innovation beats stagnation any day of the week.
The reason I never sold a share of Robinhood is because Vlad is a product genius and he listens to his users.
i told my wife palantir is overpriced at 25 when she bought it and uh it makes no sense because it's you know 50 times the revenue or whatever it was at the time price to sales ratio
So knowing what I know about Uber, this partnership seems to be not the two-door robo-taxi that Elon's building, et cetera, or UberX. This is an Uber Black offering.
they did a massive partnership with, uh, a car maker and this self-driving company. So it's a kind of a three-way.
I'm an investor in a taxi cab company. You may have heard of Uber and, uh, still hold a decent size position.
in the way that waymo does with a deterministic model
i don't think waymo is going to be able to like snap their fingers and turn on new york either maybe it takes waymo 12 months in new york maybe it takes some six months whatever
it took five or six years for waymo to get approved in each city and to figure out all the edge cases
this is going to become an issue folks because as these things become more prevalent people are going to f with these things in new york i guarantee it
waymo just got their permit for new york
these robots are going to become the best selling products in the history of humanity and they're going to change the world more than the internet
i believe optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity including the wheel in this obviously it is going to be the most successful product in history and people will forget that tesla ever made cars in another 10 or 20 years
i believe optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity including the wheel in this obviously it is going to be the most successful product in history and people will forget that tesla ever made cars
With the chips, it's not a vibrant, high functioning market if we have the dependency on Taiwan. And if we lose access to those chips, then we wouldn't be able to make cars, missiles, appliances, and any number of things that we need for the security of the country. So that, that would be the difference. One's a national security issue.
Intel needs loans. Nobody's willing to give them to them. The government gives those loans and in exchange for those loans, we get equity as opposed to making it a grant.
if Intel was NVIDIA, they'd be like, yeah, that's great. We don't need the money. We don't need the taxpayer money.
If Intel could go raise money, I'm sure there's sovereign wealth funds in the world who'd love to invest or loans if it was a vibrant business. It's obviously not a vibrant business. It is analogous to Chrysler in the Jimmy Carter example, where this is a company that's on the brink of either insolvency or collapsing.
the way Biden executed on the CHIPS Act, and listen, he had support from, I think, both parties, was to just drop money on people's heads, and with no recouping to the American taxpayer.
15 billion, I've heard, 20 billion in loans and grants. There's a portion of the CHIPS Act, which was grants, a portion which were loans, and the majority were grants.
if Intel didn't want this money, they could pass on it, they could go to the private sector, and they could get money. The reason they're taking government money is because they need to, they have to, and it's still a great deal.
all of that goes back into the models, goes back into your arsenal as a founder, and you can make a better product. So embrace the hate, embrace the cynics. They'll give you a roadmap to finishing your product and completing your project. If you're getting these cynics coming after you, it means you're doing something right.
people are saying, oh my God, FSD is going to take over the world. Oh my God, FSD is not going to work. It's not ready. All of this hand wringing and cynicism. Every time a cynical person points out when FSD or Waymo fail... You will see FSD make a mistake. You will see FSD save somebody's life.
feeling a little flush, but also humble enough to know these things could come down 30%. For sure.
If they do, it's probably an opportunity for me to buy more. And so I think these are very strong companies. I'll stick with them.
I kept the Robin Hood position, which is now as a private market, I think I'm up a half million dollars in that bet. I'm not going to clear it because I think Robin Hood is not fully valued yet. I think it'll be a $200 share.
I know that in the United States, we're going to be able to participate in Polymarket soon.
our friends at Polymarket are really good. Shout out to my guy, Shane, also a Nick fan. We're going to have him on the pod soon. So let's put that in there. I want to get Shane on this week and start up soon. Just to talk overall about the business, he's crushing it over there.
This is disgraceful because this is a level I'm going to coin super doxing. What the New York Times did today was they super doxed Zuckerberg.
I think this is disgraceful and it's meant to foment the affordable housing crisis, hatred of billionaires.
Dan's going to buy back into the stock if they buy Tesla, if they buy Peloton, if they buy Spotify, and they start putting that $200 billion to work.
The major problem is they believe that any company that innovates out there is not as good as theirs. They need to watch what Zuckerberg did with Instagram and WhatsApp and what Google did with Android and with Instagram.
You've got to fire Tim Cook. It's a disaster. I mean, I think they haven't done anything innovative since this device, which is magical. The iPods are amazing... I think it's time for him to pass the baton because Steve Jobs passed away. The phone has been in decline since. There's no reason to upgrade your phone.
every major new category since I make these comments which we'll talk about Friday seems to have been a whiff
my point was the stock can go on a rip because he's a bean counter and sure it's going to be a good bet on the stock but it's not going to be a good long-term bet technologically if the person running the show is a bean counter
i personally did it with uber right when masayoshi san was offering to buy shares in the 30s now it seems crazy with uber at 90 that i sold in the 30s i feel great about that trade because i bought a house that doubled in value during that time so then the truth is with the time value of money maybe i left uh you know a third of 15 of my investment it just doesn't matter what does matter is downside protection
an average producer summarizing the Substack news story we just did, versus Claude, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Today? Probably not. Honestly, today. No. I mean, I did it the other day with a story. I hit the assistant button. It was a breaking story. And I put those notes into Slack. And those notes were as good as, you know, whatever, a 50, 60, 70K producer, not as good as Alex with his domain expertise or me with my historical expertise or inside information, but essentially th
I'm paying right now $200 for like whatever, and Claude and ChatGPT. I think I'm paying probably, you know, I'm getting towards $1,000 a month personally for AI products, or I'm halfway there, more than halfway there.
maybe what Sam realized was just incorporating, going out to the web and scraping a couple of pages in real time is what search is anyway.
If you remember that story, OpenAI was like, we're going to launch a search engine. And they never did. I haven't heard any hay about it.
you have open ai starting that test and then march 2023 and you know they're making incremental then you see the blue line show up which is meta the orange line show up mistral the green line show up in 2023 google
you know no matter where you are in the world if you owned a tesla or you had a starlink account you could then piggyback onto other people's it would be extraordinary
i want to talk about perplexity's comet browser today and show you because i was using it before the show and i think we're getting close to agentic technology actually working
no matter where you are in the world if you owned a tesla or you had a starlink account you could then piggyback onto other people's it would be extraordinary
sustainable energy, which obviously he's the leader in. And he's the leader in solar batteries, EVs, and then manufacturing in the United States, which he also is the leader in
if it does come down to that definition that would take years to litigate that would be like an unprecedented legal case so if that does happen i think microsoft can run out the clock here and cause massive damage to open eyes ability to flip
it's anybody's uh game the self-driving space and uh if travis has cloud kitchens kitchens cranking like he does there is an opportunity here and uh the opportunity is fairly obvious uh to provide self-driving cars in order to deliver food directly from their kitchens
thank you to our friends at Anthropic. We've got a great partnership with them. They're helping us with all these tools.
Some of you know, Anthropic has this incredible large language model that does incredible things, agents, coding, it does everything. It's got a big open context window where you can put a bunch of data into it.
There's very few J-Cals and Y-Combinators out there taking flyers on teams. I'll just be totally honest about it.
open AI and I think, I think open AI and Google Gemini keep going back and forth as the most expected best model on the benchmarks.
I think Robin hood's about to be put in the S and P 500.
We distributed those shares from our first fund at, I think, $12 or $14 a share... people who were LPs in that fund, I talked to a couple of them who didn't sell and, you know, that's a four or 5X difference, right? More, you know, 5X difference, 6X difference.
I wouldn't sell a share of Robinhood ever. I mean, I think the amount of assets they have under management and the way they keep releasing great features to me makes it a huge winner.
I'm team Robinhood... what makes Robinhood very special is Vlad is an incredible product guy who keeps adding products to the mix. And so I think they have, you know, many different products, including their credit card, which now has millions of people on the wait list.
Circle was going to go out via SPAC two years ago, three years ago. They chose not to, I think because of the regulatory environment.
So if they raised $1 billion, they could have raised roughly three times that, four times that almost, if they had priced at $100 a share. Now, it's hard to know that that was going to happen, but with 25x the demand for the shares, you did know that this was going to really ramp up and this is where having an auction for shares or a direct listing of a small number of shares without raising money is a better option.
Jeremy Allaire is an incredible entrepreneur. He builds real businesses. I've known him through three different businesses, Bright, Cove, et cetera. And he's just been one of these incredible entrepreneurs with a long track record.
the stock ripped 5% on the day, which might be a turning point for Google.
Tim Cook does need to make a visit to Mar-a-Lago.
This is ridiculous. It's unrealistic. They're not going to move the entire supply chain to America. It's an impossible task to do that in any kind of realistic timeframe.
You had like two or three really good ones come out of the studio, and Ohalo was the one that objectively you felt most passion towards personally and that had the best future chance.
Things are going smashingly for Microsoft and they're doing 6,000 people just hit the bricks.
Microsoft, which has record profits. Am I correct, Alex? Record profits at this moment in time? Yes. Record profits.
Rippling just raised 450 million in their series G 70, almost $17 billion valuation.
uber had their earnings they crushed it again uh almost to an all-time high woohoo
they added two more full self-driving partners. So now they're up 12 or something between the little robots doing burrito delivery and it's obviously a global business. So they'll have, I think, you know, Dara's pitched a pretty good product to all the AV makers, which is you don't have customers yet. We'll give you 75% of the revenue. We take 25. We'll take as many cars as you got.
the big loser here mark might be open ai what if this is available for less than open ai charges for their compute
this could be the start of them creating an aws competitor that's actually the real news here is this could be their wedge now they have a great excuse mark i think it's just say well we we want to have the freshest best version of llama available because we want the project to win maybe they offer it at a discount maybe they offer it as a loss they could price dump this
i think it's too clever by half i think there's got to be a simpler way to hand out the towel than to have 85 or i guess 100 different sub sub economies to this but i have to say i think it's a pretty cool idea and i'm i i think i if i was a startup jason and i could get 85 cheaper compute yeah it'd be hard to not look at that in the eye and go well i'm going to try it because if i could save you know that much of my total cloud bill
Waymo's already there at a very high price. So Waymo's in the game, Tesla's almost there, imminently there.
Waymo is probably feeling like, oh my God, Uber and Volkswagen, they have a deal. Okay. Is Uber going to be the neutral platform?
they're going to do robo taxis with Uber. I believe it's an exclusive, but even if it's not, I had said earlier, like, listen, there's like 20 people working on self-driving. Let's assume half get there. Now you got 10 people get there.
I'm still along the company. I have exposure to everything else. I got exposure to Waymo, I got exposure to Tesla. I got exposure to everything.
Waymo's already there at a very high price. So Waymo's in the game, Tesla's almost there, imminently there.
So I think Uber One is a great product. Perhaps I think they may be, without knowing the fullness of the case, maybe when they first launched it, it was a little bit buried.
I would raise 2 billion. I would raise 2 billion.
We'll wait and see, you know, who the winners and losers are at consolidation. But this is the thing. When you have a company like this, the most important thing to do is not sell it. The most important thing to do is to build a war chest and to obsess on making the product sticky so you don't have any churn.
They should raise as much money as possible. I know it sounds crazy, but I think that this category is very easy to put a product out in this category. There's so many people doing it that you really want to use that capital as a weapon, be able to lower prices and then drown out competitors, right?
You have $9 billion in revenue currently in TAM for this one product. And this is like a very affordable product at 30 bucks a month. $9 billion in TAM with a gross margin of 75%... This is a $100 billion company if they get the entire market, if it's a winner-take-all market.
this is growing like a consumer startup that went viral, but it's a SAS product. So that's what you're seeing here. If you can get consumer growth of a paid SAS product that creates just a wild experience.
How about you just put, uh, a chart and you show, um, you tell everybody who's doing a query there that all your queries are available in slash VIP. And if you have slash VIP, you can watch the live feed... charge a hundred dollars a month for it or a thousand dollars a year or $500 a year, come up with like a pretty good deal and a show. You can get a hundred or 500 people to pay for that feed... That would be a great way to start a simple revenue experiment.
My question is who will invest in them? Any venture capitalist will take a bet on this because it's AI. They'll get some data from it. Sometimes VCs will make a bet on a company that has growth and has interesting data because it could inform their other investments over time.
this could be, you know, very quickly a $10 million a year business. If you get the language model companies or corporations to pay you for data, 50,000 a year, a hundred thousand a year, if they found it valuable
the thing that Lon and I are most excited about today is the fact that LM arena is going to be a startup and not just a website that does cool
parker conrad had an sec violation against him i'm kind of like on the periphery of it because i like parker conrad i think he's like a cool founder and he's like a super aggressive founder who made a couple of mistakes got an sec claim against him
i think this just locks in xai as a top call it three or four
So, they grew from $15 million to $100 million in 12 months. Pretty significant. That's crazy.
i think this company's bet on the future is both incredibly interesting incredibly bold and can have big market impact
Why don't you do what Spotify does? Why don't you do what Apple does? Which is pay content creators for using their content.
Sam complained when his content, his IP was stolen. Now he's lobbying founders.
Every single content company that hears my voice, Bob Iger from Disney, General Zaslav, General Zod from Warner Brothers Discovery, Rupert Murdoch, I'm calling all the media leaders, the super friends of content, as it were, the Justice League, get together and then crush OpenAI with lawsuits, crush them with an infinite number of lawsuits.
The billion-dollar judgment they'll get against them from the New York Times. I think it could be a billion-dollar judgment against them. Certainly nine figures. And that's a speeding ticket for a $350 billion company, but it's a precedent.
You should pay. Spotify pays. So pay us content creators and create a sustainable model. It's ridiculous. So Sam is playing dirty.
but i just want to say that core weave's revenue grew from a little bit under 16 million in 2022 to nearly 230 million in 2023 oh my god more than yeah exactly yeah more than 1.9 billion last year
it's a pretty interesting company you ever open an s1 and not know what you're going to see because that's that's how this is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're going to get
here oh my lord you know i haven't sold the share of my robin hood i was a pre-launch investor
We're going to sell a lot of eight sleeps and a lot of calm meditation apps.
calm was the number one app of the year. According to apple, they gave it the app of the year, not just health, but overall
I just did a landing page for founder university and I looked at it and I was like huh that landing page would be you know last year or two years ago if I asked some average member of our team to make a landing page what they would have built so i do think you know the refinement of design is the piece i'm kind of interested in and i also did a a quick one where i said make me a fasting app and it used zero as its inspiration but it didn't have great design and so the design piece i think will b
you know they also called it deep research it's fascinating that uh i'm shocked that uh in any way uh we would have open ai do something like steal somebody else's i mean it's kind of laughable right they just called it the same exact thing okay sure
it's going to be very hard to constrain the Chinese. Uh, I mean, I do think we win ultimately, but it's going to be hard to constrain anybody by just limiting their access to H one hundreds. Uh, they'll be able to get other chips. And when you train something, people get creative. So maybe they're making knockoff H one hundreds, um, and other kind of devices,
the question is going to be, will this slow down hardware consumption? And I think that that is actually possible that you might have the leaders of some companies saying, Hey, let's, um, spend the next dev cycles optimizing this, uh, and just making it run better on the existing footprint of hardware we have. And then when you're a capital allocator, you're looking at a pool of capital. Is this billion dollars better spent on more H-100s or is this billion dollars better spent on more head coun
The DeepSeq project has, uh, shaken the public markets, specifically NVIDIA, uh, I think, because what this project, we'll see how true it is, uh, has done more than anything is made people question the need for CapEx spending.
It does seem like you guys are slowly rolling it out. You gotta be thoughtful about capacity and users.
I talk about stuff I find interesting in the world and this is certainly up there.
deep research gets us a really beautiful summary that I'm going to say would take four to eight hours for a human college-educated researcher ... I probably couldn't tell the difference.
Deep research is a really incredible and impressive product.
you guys have started to release stuff more often. ... there's been a little bit of a, I think, looking at it, a philosophical change at Google, which is with the AI stuff, we're going to put stuff out there. ... it does seem like the velocity has increased.
I've been very impressed with what you've done with Gemini. ... It was pretty janky, the original versions, but something's happened inside of Google where you guys are cooking with oil now and the deep research product is the best thing you've done in AI for consumers that I've ever seen or that's public facing.
I have subscribed and played with this. I am now a paid Gemini customer upping my monthly AI spend to 40 from 20. Thanks Google.
I do like Perplexity. It reminds me a lot of what I tried to do with Mahalo before AI was really available in doing, like, these more rich search results. And I kind of got a lot of my ideas from a company called Naver, which is the search engine in Korea that was really the innovator in what we called, you know, at the time is this, like, dynamic search results. So I think Perplexity, I'm not, like, a long-term fan of it because I think that, you know, a lot of the UI interface stuff that they'
I think that's a great choice.
Also, Waymo, also delightful. And, you know, they had a rough year with some of that woke imagery in Gemini, but I think they had a great rebound. Waymo's a really good story. Yeah, I think Waymo...
I picked Google. Everybody was talking two years ago about how Google was falling behind and 10 blue links weren't going to work. The Gemini app is absolutely fantastic. I've been using Gemini app. It's as good or better than... Also, Waymo, also delightful. And, you know, they had a rough year with some of that woke imagery in Gemini, but I think they had a great rebound. Waymo's a really good story.
I think we were joking about them, Palantir, being part of the deep state, not stock price, but at a 400 price earnings ratio and at 65 X sales, multiple exclamation points, looks like a good time to take some profits on the name. In fact, and this is spicy, insiders told me they are selling into this insanity.
But it is a somewhat expensive stock that people are really promoting. And when you see massive promotion, especially on social media like X or YouTube, it's like X and YouTube seem to be have won the conversation in finance. That's when I get a little bit of radar going up.
No, they said it was non-dilutive. When you raise a round of capital, you're selling shares in Andreessen Horowitz, DST, Yuri Milner's amazing firm, Insight Partners. These are investors who want equity, but maybe there's some kind of weird conversion that happens when the IPO happens. This is like a Mez round of financing, I guess. There used to be this thing called a mezzanine round. The mezzanine round existed when there was just venture capital and IPOs and a Mez round was a year before the
i think open ai is going to lose their lawsuit i'm saying it right now i'm predicting it here i think it's going to be an injunction against open ai and they're going to have to settle for billions you heard it right i think it will be the largest copyright infringement case in history i think it will be a billion dollar settlement with the new york times and other people are going to join it if you are a content creator and you feel your you're calling it right now
certainly amongst the ai companies this one is one that i think has probably top five mind share out there today uh a lot of people are talking about
waymo said no we want as much sensor as possible we want as much maps as possible
waymo doing 150 000 rides in three or four cities
there have been a bunch of people looking at round tripping as a technical era as a technical term for self-dealing or insider re-transactions they invest in a company that company buys servers with uh nvidia's money but those numbers were kind of small then there's accounting issues when do you recognize revenue so a lot of the revenue here my understanding is baked in because somebody will put it in order
we've never seen a company grow large amounts of revenue in this way the last quarter was 30 billion i'm saying that and uh the year earlier for q2 was 13 billion so they more than two times their revenue that quarter to that quarter q3 last year 18 billion this year 32 so it's gonna just under double right so this uh crazy growth is slowing but it's still significant
so to your point this comes down to do you trust apple and their approach to ai i would not trust as but one example google i wouldn't trust because i think they've used data before to kind of market ads so i would be very concerned with google because of what happened with incognito mode as well sure where people at google used to joke like incognito mode is not incognito um and then i wouldn't trust open ai um as well because i think they're kind of cutthroat reputation wise but i might actual
The thing that I did notice here is that the amount of prepaid expenses and other current assets at NVIDIA is pretty small compared to its overall scale. And I think most importantly, as you see from this chart has leveled off. So this is not going vertical still it's decelerated. And so to me, I don't think there's enough here to actually be smoke hinting at fire.
Nvidia once again took the absolute top spot and as the most valuable public market company in the world. I have a screenshot of this. They beat Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Aramco and Meta, the other leaders with a market cap of just about $3.4 trillion.
maybe people treat themselves to a door dash more often you know once more a month twice more a month
And then what Uber did was they cold called drivers. They went to Google, they found livery companies, Lincoln town cars, but they used to call black cars and they just ground it out. Boom. And sometimes I think they even took rides and said, "Hey, I'm with the company Uber. Here's how it works. Can I show you the app?" And I think they bought that inventory. They said, "Hey, we'll give you a minimum of $500 a month for five rides guaranteed. And we'll pay it to you, you know, for just having th
Then you have Waymo prices very high and somewhere in the middle is, I guess what the average will be.
This entire workspace is dedicated to the UX of chat GPT. You can't do this with Gemini because you shoehorned it into Google. Google should buy chat.com, the domain name from whoever.
And I was doing this while I was asking the questions and I'm like, your work sucks. ChatGPTs is awesome. Why don't you use ChatGPT and then come to me with your work after you've polished what ChatGPT has done? And they're like, are we allowed to do that? Is that fair? And I'm like, fair?
when i bought the 16th roadster 150k down for the first 100 reservations when i bought my signature the model s i think they did a thousand signatures i have the first one i put 150k down and those were actually turned out to be really good trades because those are collector's editions now and they're worth more than i paid for them but um this was a financing strategy people don't know this when elon almost went bankrupt twice with tesla this is how they funded the company was on those deposits
the cyber bus which you know doesn't have um solar on it because obviously they have uh you guys built out a huge super charging network so probably doesn't need to have solar
Uber, Robinhood, Calm are amongst the ones that I've hit that have gone supernova. In fact, Uber is considered the greatest investment over the last decade or two in Silicon Valley. Robinhood, you know, doing fantastic as well. And Calm, not yet public, but another great company.
Robinhood, you know, doing fantastic as well.
Uber, Robinhood, Calm are amongst the ones that I've hit that have gone supernova. In fact, Uber is considered the greatest investment over the last decade or two in Silicon Valley.
i got absurdly lucky to hit two robin hood i think it's worth 20 now billion i still have my shares and then uber i still have a lot of shares and it's
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the bear case I think is that Siri Google search Android and browsers and social media apps are going to intercept 90% of queries 95% of queries and that the only people who are which you and I are addicted to and I use all day are you know just really high end users and that those products will be free by big iron Amazon meta Microsoft and Google can afford
so it's just interesting to see a lot of the features that were in products like superhuman uh gmail uh grammarly uh notion around writing all of a sudden appear on the operating system level
hogwash i mean we take 800 acquisitions she mentioned 800 acquisitions can you name the three or four that were the most harmful and they came up with one and i would say the harm of facebook tracking whatsapp users is all within the law if it falls outside of the law they get very significant penalties and in fact facebook had the largest judgment against any american company in history for privacy violations and they are audited because of that if you remember um that case i
Because in my experience driving a Tesla since the beginning with full self-driving and autopilot before that, it seems like it's better on the highway than it is on local streets where you have people jumping out and weird things that occur on the highway. You very rarely have run into a weird thing. Totally. It's pretty ABC. So I would think it was the opposite, but is it because speed kills? What's the thinking there?
tesla makes the cars and the software but they don't have a network so you know and they don't have fleet management so you start getting into all of this it feels like it's going to be hard for one person to do everything it was hard for uber to try to be a technology company and make this it's going to be hard for waymo to deploy this in you know a thousand cities around the globe uh it's going to be hard for tesla as well um and it's going to be hard for tesla owners like if you're i'm a tesl
it's going to be hard for waymo to deploy this in you know a thousand cities around the globe
the brilliance of the Uber marketplace was, in many ways, tackling demand and figuring out a way to get drivers to come out on New Year's Eve, the worst night of their lives, to drive.
the Lincoln Town Cars were so brilliant, you know, because there were such high margins.
And you said, we're launching it next week. We got it. You know, it is disruptive.
paypal you might have heard of it did pretty well sold to ebay
there were only a hundred of those made originally the tesla roadster so you know and they were producing one every two or three weeks
the company was going out of business
twitter probably raised a million and it was you know 10 angel investors 20 angel investors 25 to 100k a pop
And every time I open a new window, I'm not going to Google. I'm going to ChatGPT 4.0 and I put my Google search in there. And this has had, and I've been doing this for a year, but I realized the team's not.
So you nailed it. The entry price matters, um, when I invested in Thumbtack, Uber, um, uh, data stacks, you know, all unicorn companies, they were on average four or $5 million evaluations for their seed rounds today, those same seed rounds would be probably 15 million.
The most damaging one would be Android. If they forced them to sell Android, that is going to be massively damaging because an independent Android company could then give their search default to Bing, and Microsoft would happily bid for that.
I actually don't think this is going to do much if they do a breakup. The easy solution for Google, and I agree with I think people who said that here, is to just spin out YouTube and Waymo. Those two are perfect standalone businesses. ... offering those two up would unlock massive shareholder value.
The search monopoly has been squeezed for every dollar and to build every sub-component of Google's monopoly. Flights, shopping, all of these things put into Google search and put at the top above organic search has basically killed hundreds, hundreds of startups over the decades.
this is not just a replacement it's also it's gonna boost the total tam for uber so i guess if uber nails the self-driving use case this feels like a 2014 conversation uh if uber nails the self-driving use case man their market's huge
instacart great product market cap was obviously at a sync with uh market realities and potential ipo stripe same thing 100 billion 50 billion now it's 75 billion i think in this in the sequoia secondary that they did recently
the deal for 23 billion to Google does have a risk of interference from, uh, different government agencies, potentially, right? All of these deals do, whereas an IPO has zero risk.
since spacex has become such a huge hit we're seeing a ton of people investing in space related startups in the venture community
s&p up 26 since last year mostly of course thanks to nvidia's record-breaking performance
Yeah. I think this is a moment in time. It's clearly not the most important company on this list in my mind, uh, in terms of the future. If you told me I could only bet on one stock and hold it for 10 years, uh, it would not be Nvidia.
they're aware that this is an issue they brought up privacy every single time but people don't trust open ai and they do trust apple so this is strange bedfellows
having all this local data is a huge advantage for apple they've got your messages your phone your calendar your photos your app behavior the data inside of your wallet all of this gives them a huge huge advantage
i think this means that apple is going to win the ai consumer there is a deal with chat gpt that i'll get your feedback on gentlemen in a moment according to sources apple is not paying open ai it's a non-exclusive deal chat gpt can be swapped out apple is also talking to google about a similar deal obviously it doesn't take a genius to predict that apple is going to auction off the llm integration i think to the highest bidder they did that with the search deal google pays apple 20 billion to b
coinbase's current price sales multiple is uh 16.6 x so they did a billion in revenue 16 billion they did two it could get 32
i want to see these kind of accidents these are the accidents we want to see now a little ticky tacky and then hopefully these systems become more reliable and to your point higher standard there's a much higher standard for robo taxis than a taxi driven by a human 30 40 50 000 people dying every year from drunk driving distracted driving and speeding uh and reckless driving you know we we know the short list here these things don't have that so it'll be a 10-year process i think for us to trust
Clearly, Apple is feeling the pressure, just like Google did, of open AI, and Microsoft releasing tons of features.
google has five six seven products with over a billion used chrome android google search gmail youtube uh right off the top of my head like these are services that have one or two or three billion users what's going to happen when ai is just built into all of those
the industry standard is kind of Slack or Teams, right? Microsoft Teams.
Glue is a Slack killer
he got a little high on his own supply here i mean it why why do this is what i would be thinking if she doesn't want her likeness and she made that or she wanted a higher price and you weren't willing to pay for it why would you poke the bear she is a high profile person yeah and this is just a bad look to be leveraging a person's celebrity making them an offer calling them two days before trying to get the offer done and then being like yolo you didn't do it we'll have ai make a fake voice tha
this is common and it tends to be reciprocal so it's not as one-sided or as bad as it sounds
anybody who needs a researcher can use notebook lm gemini chat gpt the researcher mode so that means we all get to do other things right
this is the end of seo uh so if you wanted to get traffic from google the reason google didn't do a lot about this uh or one of the reasons um they didn't do this was because they were in a very fragile balance between indexing people's content leveraging it to make money intercepting search traffic google becoming the starting point and then sending traffic to people now they're going to train on your data give the answer and not send anybody to your website
anybody who needs a researcher can use notebook lm gemini chat gpt the researcher mode so that means we all get to do other things right and i can tell you my producers have been using chat gpt since it came out at my insistent to summarize things and the summaries that they do versus what chat gpt can do essentially the same
the way uber did this famously was they went to some mid-sized cab companies when they
perfect example uber went after lincoln town cars the highest and highest margin elite service bc ceo showing up the airport with the person at you know baggage claim with their name and they you know they walk up and they get out of business class and
it was the 10 billion into stripe at 50 billion not really venture capital that's mid cap tech those are ipos or ipos
developers are saying it's faster it's less preachy was an observation than chat gpt4 despite being slightly lower quality
i think today or let's just say by the end of this year an fsd12 could be operating in a constrained space just like waymo is now
i think those two businesses will be far bigger than anything else they're doing now on ride hailing
i'm using fsd12 i have been using autopilot i was one of the first users of autopilot you know from the beginning like literally and fsd12 is a significant improvement
i think let's make a prediction here that meta is going to get 10 points of the search market now each point of the search market is worth you know what is google's worth about 2 trillion if you take out 500 billion for youtube and their other services you get 1.5 trillion which means 10 points is worth 50 150 billion in market cap now as you well know chamath and you all know david these two ad networks meta started with psychographic data the person who they know and then of course google had
when we got to our fund one we owned um i think now we own two percent of superhuman uh five percent of calm five or maybe six percent of density
robin hood that happened calm that happened and uh superhuman that happened so we we had four unicorns come out of the first launch fund
I do believe the technology is valid and, but if they could build this technology without the content, they would have.
That company has perceived value in the market to the point at which the most sophisticated investors in the world are buying it at a $90 billion or $100 billion valuation.
I guarantee you it's not legal. Okay. And I guarantee it will be found to not be legal to use other people's content to train a new intelligence that you can then go exploit that work.
I hope that New York Times gets an injunction against open AI and they have to pull their product from the market.
TopTal is the Y Combinator company. I think it was a YC company that used the safe created by YC. And YC knew that this was an edge case. There was a possibility, which is you never convert the equity. You just pull all the money out of the business. You build a giant business. And then those investors are screwed. And the TopTal investors got screwed really bad.
I just think they should have kept this thing open source, which was the mission, but then they closed source at Chamath and then give 49% of it, all the weights, all the source code to Microsoft. So that to me was like a really, like you want to talk about taking this nonprofit's IP and then some amount of that bag gets given to the employees for billions of dollars. And then Microsoft gets 49% of all that nonprofit's effort to then go commercialize. And Microsoft has added what, $500 billion i
I think they probably regretted making this a nonprofit and then tried to figure out a way to reverse it. That's actually what I think is going on here. And I do think there was part of it, Chamath, you're right, that they needed servers and they needed capacity, but they could have done that without giving the employees tons of equity,
there was no like IP transfer or employees enriching themselves or, you know, a God King like Sam doing all kinds of deals and enriching himself.
I think the IRS is going to be on this like crazy based upon what happened to Mozilla
cynical approach to this or interpretation, and again, this is just one interpretation, they took an open source project, they closed it, they raised money, and then within the next two years on this incredible innovation, they sold two billion dollars and put that in their pockets.
There is the most, you know, benign and benevolent interpretation you could have as well. And maybe the truth is in between the two, but the series of events that occurred does not look good when you have a mission to give this intellectual property to the world. So no one person benefits from it. All of humanity is supposed to benefit from it. That was the point of being open source. Right. Then you close it. Now, who gets the benefit if it's closed?
He started a venture fund to invest in companies called the OpenAI Ventures Fund, and he was the sole owner of it, which they're saying now it's a clerical mistake or something, but he's invested in a bunch of startups that have unique access to the OpenAI, you know, I think infrastructure.
and of course you got to give stanley and the team over at doordash a lot of credit as well this has changed how millennials look at consumption and food and just how they architect their lives
union square um uh that series a of twitter uh and i had you know talked about it with actually evan williams which one to pick and he went with union square um i had advocated both i thought i i told him to split the round between the two like uh google and then you see the later ones you know have less um upside in them so it really is about time and fred wilson's been a spectacular investor
man something happened in 2012 fund that they hit 22x i think that's the twitter fund i'm gonna guess uh and some other names in there and that just shows the power law you know if you're the he did the series a in um twitter i remember when evan williams was asking me uh and some palace entry that deal was between sequoia and
somebody should have caught it in testing
google's gemini dei black eye continues we covered this woke ai disaster last week... it's a racist ai you type in text and it gives you the opposite or culturally insane responses so if you put in you want a picture of george washington from google's gemini or sergey brand you might get back like a benetton style diversity ad with like george washington being black or sergey brand being asian etc and so this has caused um a bit of a kerfluffle here in the industry to say the least the stock is
We knew three of them were definitive winners. It was super clear. Superhuman, Calm, and Robinhood were just exceptional companies bringing out.
And if you try to do hardware, you missed it. Sorry. NVIDIA is going to run the table.
this obviously has made the entire market rip as in video goes so does the market right now
this company's firing on all cylinders
this juggernaut starts and it does not stop and it doesn't look like it's going to stop
the results are absolutely stunning and dare i say unprecedented
nvidia blew the doors off their earnings for the third straight quarter shares were up 15 on thursday representing a nearly 250 billion dollar jump in market cap so let's just let that sit in for a second this is the largest single day gain in market cap 247 billion dollars added in market cap
tons of competition coming out if you didn't see google rebranded their generative ai suite to gemini and they're charging 20 bucks a month for it
Robinhood doing great today. I think they're, I think they're here for the long term. I didn't sell my shares. We were seed investors. We distributed them. You know, that was a, that was a crazy whipsaw with Cathie Wood buying a bunch of it. You know, I think she bought it 50 or 60. It went way up. We weren't able to sell. We were in lockup probably had the opportunity to sell at a higher price and we distributed that in the private markets talking about secondary before, but we believe in the c
So there have been major questions about the quality of the revenue at Uber quality of the revenue at Robinhood. And so we had to really look at that and say, this is actually a high margin business or not. And then I just did a back of the envelope at some point where I was like, well, they did a hundred million rides and they're losing a dollar a ride. So, you know, or whatever they were losing 50 cents a ride, losing $50 million this month. Whoa, it's crazy. Um, but then I was like, wait a se
Now, some companies will wait it out. So if you're Stripe and you've got a ton of cash and the business is doing great, maybe you wait, maybe you wait until 2025 and you hope your valuations bounce back to those 2021 levels.
We're waiting on the Stripe IPO.
He never wanted to be CEO of Tesla. People forget that, too. He had tried three CEOs of Tesla, and he only took over Tesla. And I remember it was because he said, Jason, this thing's going to fail if I don't take it over. He tried three different CEOs in the beginning.
this had the largest short position, I believe, at that time of any company ever. People were betting with their dollars that this company was going to zero. There were a ton of people who the narrative was, they'll never deliver the Model 3.
gary said he gets 45 000 now 40 45 000 applications so we're kind of right behind them they accept one percent i think they do 450 startups a year still 200 something per bat and we do a fraction of that we do 25 of what they do we're 50 basis points of application pool they're one percent that kind of i think is the right number
uh for a a venture firm it is possible for uh somebody who has programs like y combinator 500 startups tech stars or launch and what we're doing with founder university so we're trying to have enough of a base of companies that we can hit unicorns early early in the life of uh startups maybe you could predict that one in 100 one in 50 perhaps
anything that's adjacent when we add it we're starting with a hundred million credit card active accounts or maybe it's 200 million now i'm not sure how many active they had the last quarter so if dogs is a market and and having dog friendly cars you're just going to see when you open up uber
we we look to pair our position uh when we're 10 20 30 40 x by just 10 percent and uh we did that with calm at 250 and then a billion and change on that 378 000 investment i wound up selling 20 of our position i think it wound up being about 12 or 13 million in total between those two transactions like a million at the first one and 12 at the second
starlink is doing fantastic
i guarantee you that sam waltman has already built a model without it i guarantee you they've already built a for an emergent press here in case of emergency here's the 4.5 model in case they got an injunction which would be highly unlikely but if they did get an injunction they just say okay here's 4.5 it doesn't use the new york times training data
this is going to be the most important lawsuit that we've seen in ai perhaps in technology ever
limited partners who were expecting huge paydays from Figma being sold, uh, to Adobe are now back to a waiting game of figuring out if this company can go public, et cetera.
Nobody expected that Airbnb and Uber and Coinbase, Robinhood would become global phenomenons as quickly as they have.
Back then, he made a lot of waves when he called for Tim Cook and Sundar from Google to remove TikTok from the apps for something that has turned out to be pretty prescient. And people are now starting to take that much more seriously.
chat gpt if you use that app yeah it is so polished that it's delightful to use i've been using dolly now to write my blog to make my blog post headers and my illustrations on my last two blog posts look like a million bucks
there's no app that's huge there's no app that's there's no so that means you lose of 10 points you immediately lose five so now you're at five yeah now we're going to just grade you on your web and your web based when you pull up bard in a web app when you pull it up on your desktop it looks cluttered confusing they just put it under the google taskbar you know with all the accouture mod it doesn't have its own look and feel so i'm minusing a point for that okay um and then i don't think the pa
i was so impressed with um what they showed with gemini um the one i found really interesting is multimodal where they took a math test
having your podcast flagged and i'm like but we're having an intellectual discussion about this you don't need to flag my podcast it's just here's what you have to believe and i'm like really i have to believe that and i have to put this warning on your content
apple i think is four days a week now or four days a week in the year there might be three or four right now
uber drivers are now making 34 36 and listen i've been tracking how much they make from the beginning it was 15 then 20 and 25 so wages are increasing massively
So this is really good work.
I started one for this week in startups as well, this very podcast, and I added all the people who had come to launch festival and all of our events. So there's like an import feature. So I just took all my emails for people came to the event. I said, Hey, we have a Slack instance and all these people came. And so thousands of people start talking during COVID and it was really inspiring until we realized they're talking so quickly that I'm hitting whatever the thousand or 10,000 messages. And t
cost them a ton of money to do dolly so they probably make it slow and put it on like a slower framework so yeah you know it doesn't cost so
apple and android and you know people who have app stores need to look at this so this is a message to tim cook this is a message to sundar sundar this is the next app store you don't have it
his last company, uh, which they said would never get profitable has now turned into a money printing machine.
it's basically one percent of people get into y combinator and so i said listen you know all due respect to y combinator the truth is uh because i do this for a living as well we can't tell the difference between the one percent and the 10th percentile probably even the 20th percentile if i'm being honest which is to say 9 out of 10 or 19 out of 20 people are just as good as the top one person or startup and because companies pivot like i i think uh paul graham said like 50 of people in why come
the one you'll know is kareem which was bought by uber and uh you know i met the founder c-a-r-e-e-m it's like a super app and so um it was bought by uber and then they uber i think uh sold back like the non uber parts of it in the name
You know, the thing I'm really excited about was snap. I saw Mark Pincus tweeting about snap. He's got a big position. I was thinking about putting a J trade on for snap.
Satya in his comments mentioned AI almost 30 times in his opening statement. Here's a quote with co-pilots. We are making the age of AI real for people and businesses everywhere. We are rapidly infusing AI across every layer of the tech stack for every role and business process to drive productivity gains for our customers. So they know. Perfect.
Microsoft announced that it bought back $9.1 billion worth of shares this quarter, which is technically it's Q one. They have a offset fiscal year. Um, Microsoft beat on top line and bottom line. The stock's up almost 4% or it was as of, you know, noon Eastern time. Uh, 2.55 trillion dollar market cap. Q one revenue 56.5 billion up 13% year over year up 1% quarter over quarter. Net income. 22.3 billion dollars up 27% year over year up 11% quarter over quarter. Azure was the big winner up 20. Sti
my greatest investment of all time, Uber, a transportation company.
because chat gpt only knows what i tell it and what i've interacted with whereas windows desktop knows everything i do that's the big win
So, Raul was at Google, and he helped grow this little browser. You may have heard of Google Chrome into the world's most-used browser.
when i was a angel we owned under one percent of robin hood and uber
when i was a angel we owned under one percent of robin hood and uber but then we started to own two percent five percent ten percent of companies like com or superhuman or grin or fitbod
masayoshi-san had no choice but to get that company public because he needed to get distributions to people like um you know the the lps who are in the vision fund
arm went public today i think they priced their shares at 51 they raised close to 5 billion 50 plus billion dollar valuation it jumped 30 percent came back down to earth so i guess in some ways they priced it well
the big news of course today was cisco planning to acquire cyber security company splunk uh in cash for 157 per share that's a 31 uh premium on splunk's closing price puts the deal at 28 billion dollars i think this is a really interesting uh thing that's happening if you have large companies cisco is a very large company obviously um and smaller companies are going to be not priced at a premium people are looking for growth they have a lot of cash on the sidelines and you're going to see a lot
and the ability to have a co-pilot and to debug has taken some of the harder aspects of being a coder especially if you're a solo coder um it's changed things dramatically
it's super inspiring uh to see how many people are getting into coding and how uh you know these um uh ides and we'll talk about that in a second uh have really made that possible for many more people
people like microsoft stripe are in a unique position to to show that leadership because they're highly profitable companies and it matters to their employees and to their investors
NVIDIA is dominant right now in the AI space. $16 billion in revenue in Q3. That's 2x year over year. They're wildly profitable. Stocks doubled since 2023. But as we've said on this pod and all in, and there's going to be competitors coming, right? Of course. And some startups are going at NVIDIA on the hardware front.
Amazon, you know, is, um, kind of like the board. They, they will study your product. They will grind you down. They will lower the price.
the product-led growth teams, like the ones at HubSpot, the ones at Atlassian, they're doing this like street level,
I just had Dharmesh from HubSpot on, and they committed to the midsize, the small enterprise, and they had to have the same discipline, which is the product had to be exceptional, and the product had to sell itself. And sure, yeah, if you're big enough, we could have a consultative sale later. But there's something about having to please a two-person or a 20-person organization that just makes you really efficient and sharp on products,
if you have hundreds of billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars laying around as apple google you know pick your company amazon you're going to just start buying these and putting them into infrastructure twitter etc
nvidia buying nvidia is going to be absolute chaos that's the reason like it could continue to be a momentum stock if this the percentage growth stops but the earnings get better in other words they can keep selling these things these h100s for the the same price or higher
the great thing about being a subscription business is that it becomes so predictable
they're paying a buck a day or in the case if they buy a two-year membership or a one-year membership they're probably paying 75 cents a day seems kind of reasonable if you care about your health or if you're in any way sort of one of these optimization people
much more attractive yeah and it's you have an idea of what you're going to make next month if the economy you know stalls you don't have to worry about selling some 800 device and people going ah maybe i'll push that out six months and i'll buy it later
all of the quantified self people in my life will not shut up about that's the whoop
i have been saying hey if you're going to get a bunch of information and present it to me in a beautiful uh you know answer with bullet points and numbers uh like perplexity just did for me i asked it hey what are activities i should do with my seven year olds and uh they like cities and the outdoors and it gave me four popular uh destinations for cities and four popular destinations outside really good suggestions really tightly summarized and then at the bottom it said hey and then here are th
i just don't think it's going to be as monopolistic as they are in search i think there are going to be other competitors who are going to be well financed you're going to have access to the data and today you have well north of 100 million people who are paying to you know a huge percentage of those to use chat gpt
the number of people i interact with on a global basis who talk about chat gpt versus bard is like 10 to 1 today now google's got massive change real fast google's got massive distribution power
Now they're going further, and they're basically saying it is illegal to operate a crypto exchange in the United States.
that Uber investment went 4,000 X, not 4,000, but you know, well over a hundred million dollars.
We now have a handful of lawsuits and letters that have, uh, been either filed or sent Twitter to, um, Microsoft about the training use of their data
Whether it's Notion or Microsoft Office or Gmail, we are going to have AI companions, co-pilots in every piece of software.
this is something at scale they need to add to the interface which is maybe pre-populating a list sorting it by the number of followers whatever
i think it wasn't the free-for-all that elon had said it would have been right so he pitched it as like hey this is going to be uncensored and everybody's going to get to ask hard questions and that didn't happen
I had this weird thing. I realized mobile Chrome does not let you set the default browser. I didn't know why that's the case. I guess Chrome is getting greedy. Google's getting greedy. They want to own that real estate.
when Travis was showing me Uber... he was obsessed with the product... And his obsession on each of those details... And I would argue with him about this... And he's like, No, it's about friction, we want to reduce the number of steps. And you just saw that level of obsession.
Aaron Levy said it could be 50% for customer support.
when i did mahalo after weblogs inc we were became dependent on google traffic and then they cut our traffic 10 million dollars in revenue all of a sudden went to 500 000 right and i have i know sergey i know larry i know marissa mayer i knew the people there they had no problem you know cutting off our traffic and killing the company
You can put out more, and they're obviously going to be more powerful. And if you have seen the size of the satellite, I have Starlink at both houses, the ski house and my main house as a backup, it's getting scary how good it is. And if you look at the size of them, and again, I don't want to speak about any future products, it's not my place. But if you see the size getting smaller, there's one or two things that we all know about technology, cheaper, faster, better, smaller.
he said, listen, 5050, we get off the launch pad. Yeah, if we can get off the launch pad, and we don't blow up the launch pad, that's a huge success.
what we witnessed today shows i think a couple lessons for founders who listen to this podcast rapid iteration and incremental progress right this has been almost two decades in the making oh we're in the second decade of spacex and they just have been incrementally making these systems more powerful more reliable
this is the start of what will be a humanity changing platform and it really is a platform for putting large amounts of cargo into space and then elon's obviously stated mission is to get to mars
success was defined really by just accomplishing two things one and spacex was pretty clear about this elon was pretty clear about it hey can they get this thing off the launch pad and when you see this thing in person it's unbelievable the scale of it but could they clear that launch pad and that is they cleared very easily
starship is a really different beast is the most powerful rocket that's uh ever been developed by humanity
the key to what spacex is doing if the rockets become reusable then you can lower the cost of getting to space economics drives a lot of things in the world and getting to space faster and cheaper with reusable rockets is a critical piece of this
the falcon series of rockets is what spacex is most known for and they have had 221 mission successes with that rocket i believe it's the most successful rocket in history
i was here for the starship launch at starbase and it was an incredible day i would say one of the most intense amazing things i've ever experienced in my life a true privilege uh to witness history
Apple was considering maybe going into the search business at some point.
And there were very credible rumors. And I have, let's just say, I don't want to say inside information because I don't want bells to go off, but I have a whisper network, Apple was considering maybe going into the search business at some point.
Now, what's important about this is this is only 2% of Google search monopoly. They have 70, 80, 90% of the searches in different regions around the world.
i gave these 25 50k checks to amazing companies like robin hood uber etc
eric's amazing scoop on stripe which is raising 6 billion at a 50 billion dollar evaluation down from 96 billion
It's been on a tear, growing at a pace that would make growth stocks feel slow.
one thing that's happening is obviously a need for diversification. We know that if your primary business relies on trading volume and you're not seeing a lot of that, you definitely have to diversify creating some version of AWS, which prints cash for Amazon seems kind of smart. Create a dev environment to help popularize the kinds of things that will bring more volume to Coinbase. The concern is, did you just create a dev playground and there are no kids in your neighborhood?
the Google ad supported search model created in some, I mean, the ad supporting publishing model, obviously predated Google, but because you had this huge ecosystem that got even bigger, exponentially bigger under Google, it sounds like what you're saying is that a lot of the ad supported publishing ecosystem, as we know it now only exists because of the Google ad supported search ecosystem.
the ad supported model, which obviously makes insane amounts of money now, but it's like under attack from a million different directions. Like one assumes that you just cannot continue to make infinite money forever on a model that may be outlawed in entire countries.
this question of enforcement of exchanges and pooled staking is more existential for Coinbase.
amazon i think just today launched some self-driving taxis with like really really limited rollout and we're like still so far from that technology
the information that the ai bot presented that was inaccurate and in some cases apparently invented which is kind of bananas
the fact that google can call it like its chat bot can call and make you a restaurant reservation and then you know that you have that like that's true that's a very scary one but still it's not even as good as that it's like it's going to be an extremely narrow use case yeah i predict for a very long time
let's not skim past the part where google lost a hundred billion dollars in market cap over putting out an ad with inaccurate
the round tripping would involve Microsoft getting that large percentage that i mentioned of open ai's profits while also being its largest customer
in the case of Microsoft they're going to reap a portion of open AI's profits when and if it becomes profitable until they get to the 10 billion dollars that they initially invested
Microsoft has been very upfront about how they intend to incorporate OpenAI features into its Azure cloud services
Google and Microsoft are now locked in a possibly existential race to get to and deploy generative AI soonest
they left because they were concerned that Microsoft's first investment in open AI would set it on a more commercial path and detract from its original focus on the safety of advanced AI
if google clones neva which we expect then publishers are at risk because as search engines become answer engines referral traffic will drop
unless publishers band together unilateral disarmament is hard for a single publisher to achieve against a monopoly
google changes something in the algorithm to either punish or encourage certain behaviors or language or link procedures within their articles and all of a sudden your traffic plummets
google featured snippets and uh you know the featured snippets are the thing i was just complaining about the little box that's like here's the actual information that you want don't worry we took care of it for you that caused a massive drop in referral traffic on 10 to 20 percent of queries in the past
google has in general when it comes to search and particularly to personalizing results is a data advantage they have a data advantage in terms of selling ads
it's really worth pointing out that neva ceo was at google for almost 16 years so he knows exactly what he's up against he was in the end he was an engineering executive in google's ads and commerce division for his last six years at the company is very familiar with the business model the incentives i think that do potentially pervert search results that's one of the things that people complain about a lot and he knows exactly uh what kind of money he's facing and probably has a sense that ther
in 2021 google was handling about three and a half billion searches per day that's over a hundred billion searches per month
i don't want to sift through google's like 50 million the button of the bubble over here and the like the summary and the ads and all that stuff i just want information without tracking
if advertising had not come in and mucked it all up and if algorithms to feed you some sort of you know personalized bubble like a filter bubble um had not come in to make your results slightly suspect because of targeted advertising
google's had such a monopoly on search for so long
chat gpt should have google on notice clearly does have google on notice
once you have Google and Microsoft doing this you do have to ask the question like do these big AI companies then end up being a money maker and a customer and what does that mean for the larger industry tldr important people are talking about round tripping a lot so we think you should probably pay attention
Google's q4 earnings ... cloud division was uh a major bright spot revenue up 32 percent year over year the segment cut its operating losses by 46 percent year over year
Google's relationship with Anthropic is limited to acting as the company's tech supplier
it came out of the cloud division which makes it seem like it's more of a strategic investment of the kind that could eventually absorb uh Anthropic in some way
Google is also reportedly working on its own chatbot called apprentice bard
the financial times notes that this investment is coming from Google's cloud division not its venture arm GV and the question becomes if you are if you're a corporate venture capital arm a lot of times you're investing strategically so that you can incorporate this technology into your parent company in the case of Google GV is actually not a very normal venture arm in that sense they they don't do investments in the same way it's more they call it balance sheet capital only so they're investing
Google and Microsoft are now locked in a possibly existential race to get to and deploy generative AI soonest
Google is investing 300 million dollars in Anthropic at a three billion dollar valuation giving Google a 10% stake in the company.
according to the Financial Times Google's relationship with Anthropic is limited to acting as the company's tech supplier
maybe in some way incubate this safer right this again we go back to this in theory safer and more reliable and trustworthy the AI systems
it seems like it came out of the cloud division which makes it seem like it's more of a strategic investment of the kind that could eventually absorb uh Anthropic in some way
the financial times notes that this investment is coming from Google's cloud division not its venture arm GV and the question becomes if you are if you're a corporate venture capital arm a lot of times you're investing strategically so that you can incorporate this technology into your parent company
if Google is planning to use its own AI chatbot it's unclear why they would invest in Anthropic in the first place
Anthropic is planning to develop an intelligent chatbot called Claude which will rival open AI's chat GPT
you wonder why then they would turn around and raise 300 million dollars from Google which is obviously a commercial enterprise
Anthropic was founded by Dario Amodi and a few other researchers that left open AI and according to the financial times they left because they were concerned that Microsoft's first investment in open AI would set it on a more commercial path and detract from its original focus on the safety of advanced AI
the latest news is that on Friday the financial times reported that Google is investing 300 million dollars in Anthropic at a three billion dollar valuation giving Google a 10% stake in the company
oh by the way i think jeff bezos is coming back i know it sounds crazy but i think amazon is going to have some significant headwinds and challenges and so i could very much see jeff bezos coming back and maybe running the health group and just making sure that that works but i think bezos is going to just be like bob eiger going to do a couple years off the grid and get bored and he's going to want to come back so that's my prediction you heard it here first
the three pillars e-commerce aws and subscriptions are the three pillars i think the fourth one which isn't going to show up in their revenue yet it's going to be healthcare because they announced they're doing uh their drug uh prescriptions and they bought one medical so i think that we're going to see uh some really great uh future revenue from that
uh amazon is going to do fantastic and um yeah but yeah not a lot of profit there so that's something they're going to have to make a decision on is do they want to start showing a profit or do they just want to keep growing that top line and taking all that e-commerce share they obviously have headwinds with azure doing really well for microsoft and that's growing faster than aws is so aws uh could be a little bit challenged here and you could see azure catching up and certainly chat gpt and th
in a down market a recessionary market one of the things people cut first they're going to cut ad spend right so you're going to just look there and cut some ad spend
i i think they're getting a ton of uh views for it i i saw 50 billion daily views for shorts which makes sense because they're really pushing them hard we do them here on this week in startups we get to use for them as well um but this is going to i think become a real business for youtube advertisers haven't particularly embraced making shorts yet so when a new content format comes out creators exploit it first and then marketers slowly try to figure it out so i don't think advertisers have
youtube ad revenue 7.96 billion so eight times four 32 billion dollars a year it's incredible business
a lot of the search services on google flights shopping hotels those are all cost per click people don't realize their cost per click but people are getting paid a whole google's getting paid a whole lot of money
now youtube that's brand advertising right so you're not as much direct response you're not getting people close to a sale it's a little bit further away from the sale so it makes sense that it's off eight percent only two percent for search
google uh has some of the best ad tools out there search is qualified and it is some of the most targeted advertising in the world along with amazon's new ad business google's is some of the highest performing in the world
he announced a 40 billion dollar share buyback incredible and he stopped talking about the metaverse for like five freaking minutes and boom
i think looking at the newfound focus they are getting focused on the existing business cutting costs and leaning into ai and maybe cutting some of the costs associated with the metaverse and so great
i actually don't think the fundamentals have changed i don't think there is a lot of like sudden new austerity or a change in focus he's just playing the game better honestly he's playing for with wall street in mind right now
They didn't build studios like Facebook did. They didn't have a program. So you'd get big on Instagram and then you would just have to rely on like merch to try to turn that into a living. And so they're finding that increasingly creators are like, okay, well, I'm going to TikTok.
Jason, you cannot stop him from tweeting, even if he's sick or on a plane had a tweet about what a broken up Google might look like and said, you know, which we've said before, I think on the show that could actually increase shareholder value, especially if YouTube, Android or the ad platform were spun out.
they don't need to be do a big announcement and a big riff because they didn't double employees from 2019
apple i think has done such a good job of maintaining stock price performance with buybacks and metrics that they probably are sitting there like i don't have to do this like we don't need to do a riff just to do this
no wonder larry and sergey are having a fit yeah i mean it's all fine in a low interest rate environment uh where people are buying your stock and it's going up into the right i think for these companies if the stocks go down the executives at the top own lots of stock right and eventually they're going to say you know what my self-interest as the owner of 10 of this business 20 of this business and the leadership's ownership and their entire net worth is in this business we can't have the stock
i would almost say presumably to at this point just like juice the stock price right or just take this opportunity to be like get rid of the low performers
alphabet google's parent company will be cutting 12 000 jobs or about six percent of its total workforce if twitter is to believe though be believed those layoffs have started today i think i saw one or two tweets this morning from people saying like i just got laid off from google we should however take this moment of course microsoft also cut about 10 000 jobs this week so even the wildly profitable big tech giants are cutting i would almost say presumably to at this point just like juice the
I think the next shoe to drop will be somebody will create software to sell to the Gettys of the world to make their own derivative products.
And they probably will. And there will be a Shutterstock model. And then Shutterstock will make money and Getty will make money.
Getty didn't create any of this stuff at once. Neither did Shutterstock.
if you're a photographer, I encourage you to call Getty if you sold them your photographs and to say, what are you doing about our IP being exploited? How am I being paid for this AI training to call, you know, your stock photography, because this is going to remove the need for stock photography in the world or stock illustrations.
Getty preparing to sue stable diffusion creator stability AI
Which honestly, I mean, if, if Sam Altman is as smart as he is being given credit for, then he clearly saw that coming. And maybe that's why he decided to secure the bank.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announcing that Microsoft will integrate OpenAI software into Azure, its cloud computing platform.
the ultimate goal is what Satya Nadella announced today, which is integrate these tools into Azure. So make a little money from open AI, spending money on Azure. Sure. Make some money from open AI, whatever it becomes as a company, but fundamentally goose the product offering that is Microsoft Azure so that you can catch up with the competition and keep making money in the biggest money making space that exists in computing right now.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announcing that Microsoft will integrate OpenAI software into Azure, its cloud computing platform.
There's an announcement that Meta and Shutterstock have partnered so that Meta can train its AI on Shutterstock's catalog of images.
Meta partnering with Shutterstock to train its AI
Sundar Pichai at Google is 2021 total comp was $6 million, but his 2019 total comp was 212 million.
Tim Cook is getting 50 million a year
Tim Cook is definitely elite
I think where, where this, where CEO pay and Tim Cook has quite cleverly made it an issue where it's going to become an issue is in this, the thing that we've been talking about, right? Where you have this like managerial class being like, you're all entitled and spoiled and there are too many of you.
And in 2021, what they call it, they call it a say on pay vote. 64% of shareholders approved of his compensation. And that was down from the 95% that approved it for Apple's 2020 fiscal year.
The compensation committee at Apple, uh, which is comprised of Art Levinson, Al Gore, and Andrea Young, J-U-N-G said it reached out to institutional shareholders actually to ask how they felt about Cook's pay.
We did the math and determined that Apple at $150,000 head could save about 333 jobs with that 50 mil.
Tim Cook has just shined the spotlight. I mean, he is so clever how he does this, right? Because it's like, he's still going to make $50 million, but he has just set an example for all of the rest of the industry by taking a 40% pay cut in 2023.
I think meta Google, like the corpus of data that GPT already contains. Like, this is not a startup.
I think given how many times Google has won lawsuits, how Google has sort of kept Yelp from being able to, you know, even make a dent.
Google's deep mind. Um, Demis Hassabis, deep mind, CEO and co-founder spoke to time and said that to keep pace with open AI deep minds, they are considering releasing their own chat bot called Sparrow for a private beta sometime in 2023. ... deep mind is delaying its launch to work on reinforcing learning based features that chat GPT lacks, such as citing its sources. ... So they might actually be slowing it down, not just because they're afraid it'll be too smart too soon, but because they are
I felt like I was either there at the birth of Skynet. Right. It was like, just this way, or I was there for just like the next big bubble.
I think meta Google, like the corpus of data that GPT already contains. Like, this is not a startup.
All of a sudden it's gonna power Bing and get productized and maybe suit out of existence.
What they're saying so far is like, this is not a product chat GPT is not presenting you anything other than an answer that it got from the corpus of human knowledge. And this will change when things become products.
isn't chat GPT just a presentation layer.
there was another piece of information yesterday from a time magazine article about Google's deep mind. Um, Demis Hassabis, deep mind, CEO and co-founder spoke to time and said that to keep pace with open AI deep minds, they are considering releasing their own chat bot called Sparrow for a private beta sometime in 2023.
One thing I did think was really interesting is that Connie, when she interviewed Alfred Lynn, asked him about AI and whether Sequoia is bullish on AI. And he said, one thing I want you to ask Sam Altman is when do you think, you know, GPT or ChatGPT could win the like international mathematics Olympiad versus being able to repackage and regurgitate information based on what already exists. Like he seemed somewhat skeptical of the thinking capability that we hear so much about as opposed to the
four is expected to be, you know, orders of magnitude smarter. The amount of connections or chunks of data. I'm not sure there's some word they use for, you know, the corpus and the corpus is a magnitude bigger.
they're going to move fairly slowly in terms of launching GPT four.
What does Amazon do? It saves you time. It saves you money. When you're, when you save people time, and you save them money or you make them laugh and entertain them, distract them. In other words, those three things, Oh my Lord, you got a winning combination.
Amazon's fourth pillar of healthcare, which I predicted on, um, I think all in is one of my predictions that, uh, you know, I think that that could be a really good one. They buy Peloton, they buy whoop, they buy just some other companies, uh, Pronovo, whatever, you know, companies they were, they could buy in healthcare, they wouldn't hit Lena Khan. Lena Khan would have a hard time betting. It would be unpopular to stop Amazon from providing healthcare to people.
I bought Amazon. ... Why did I buy Amazon? Because they're making big cuts. ... I think it's a bloated company that could be massively more efficient. And I think they overspent. ... if you right size the company and you get rid of the quote unquote, surplus elites ... you lay off the last 10,000 people, or I think they're up to 18,000 people. And you start selling some factories like this is expense. These are expensive people. This is going to go right to the bottom line.
I bought some more Apple. And why did I buy Apple? It is shocking how many shares they're buying back how much cash they throw off. And I just think as we get closer to this AR deployment, the buzz I'm hearing is that they have something very special. So I just think the developer community rallies around a product from Apple in a way different than they're going to rally around an untrusted partner like Zuckerberg.
unique i think it's interesting you know that slack seems to have gotten the worst of both worlds
unique i think it's interesting you know that slack seems to have gotten the worst of both worlds here which is that salesforce didn't defend against the microsoft move by folding slack into salesforce products right because here you have this situation and there was an interesting anecdotal story from the wall street journal article today they interviewed the chief information officer at carhartt which by the way is like huge right now with the kids again love to see it um the cio said that sla
greatest ceo in tech or i have a very contrarian take on open ai yeah and uh very interesting to think about the relationship between azure and the billions of dollars open ai is apparently spending on cloud computing with microsoft we'll talk about round tripping and some of the back channel there
And I would argue that that is one of the reasons that Google may have slow walk to this and that Microsoft has already been burned once by this, and they're gonna have to be real careful.
if the cost per search, you know, is a fraction of a penny for Google.
I'm going to get out of my Google shares. And if Google doesn't release a competitor in 100 days, I think Microsoft Bing has the exclusive on this for search. If that is the case, and if Google and Sundar do not release something competitive in 100 days, I'm selling my shares in Google and I'm moving them to Microsoft.
This is going to F with Google for the next 24 months.
This could be the Google search killer. This is red alert for Google.
This isn't a huge surprise because evidently it was part of Microsoft's deal when the FTC opposed suit to block the Activision acquisition. Microsoft said, well, okay. One of the concessions we'll make in advance is that we promise not to oppose any unionization efforts at Activision. So presumably these employees saw this opening and went for it.
So I think so Zenimax is what is unionizing. It's not, you know, it's not specifically Microsoft. It is a holding company of game studios that Microsoft bought in 2020 for seven and a half billion dollars. It owns fallout, elder scrolls, doom, um, has about 2300 employees and 300 of the employees who work as quality assurance testers have voted to unionize in Maryland and Texas, which includes, um, doom makers in software arcane and Bethesda, the teams that are behind red fall and starfield, whi
Microsoft did try already rolling out like an AI based chatbot, and it immediately went full racist, sexist, like, there are there are going to be real concerns about algorithmic bias when you roll out something like this at a massive level to everybody
for Microsoft to integrate this as a loss leader because they can also license this technology on the backend. Like this is an interesting case where most likely do we think that Bing is going to make money. Like Google makes money when you click on stuff and they make money with ads being may move to a completely different business model, like a subsidized search business model where you get an answer and then they just there to, and then this, every time you and I use it, it trains the machine
If the cost per search, you know, is a fraction of a penny for Google. So as Google, uh, fixed cost of their network of computers, right. You know, they may have to spend a little bit extra every year. You know, the, if the number of searches increases, the cost per search goes down, but people are saying this might be like a nickel or 10 cents. Every time you have chat GPT do something, but of course they're on Azure and Azure is a fixed cost business as well. So I was like, well, we got all th
I want to know the relationship between Microsoft search and open AI. I know this investments. I know all this other stuff. They're using Azure, I understand, as their cloud. But I want to know if they have the exclusive right to search. I'm going to make a J trade right now. I'm going to get out of my Google shares. And if Google doesn't release a competitor in 100 days, I think Microsoft Bing has the exclusive on this for search. If that is the case, and if Google and Sundar do not release som
is it just capex with government sales pipelines and it's really hard to attach an internet services business to your rocket company is genius because they each pay for each other
i love this yep quote from shopify's vpf product people join shopify to build to make cool ish ish to see the thing they had their hands on get released so they can say whoa i made that meetings are a bug along that journey
that would be a very smart move that there is no sign of shopify making so far
they figured out a way to route around apple trying to obscure retargeting of customers by allowing one shopify seller to bundle their users and i guess share those users with other shopify users and do custom audiences very clever idea
and that is why friends that's why spacex just raised on a slight up round that's my hot take
so tesla so spacex sorry spacex has this great business where the rockets make money the satellites make money and they can pay for each other so the in the cost of putting up all that infrastructure is completely worth it and maybe even like evens itself out
an apple store worker and an apple uh corporate worker ... they used to pay mcdonald level wages from what i understand like you know 9 10 11 dollars at apple until they were shamed into hitting 14 15 16 and a lot of it has to do with people who work at apple going to the apple stores and saying is this right
ipad pro with the floating keyboard that's a big one amongst venture capitalists
i immediately thought about the disparity between an amazon warehouse worker and an amazon corporate worker in seattle an apple store worker and an apple uh corporate worker a postmates uber lyft door dash driver and the corporate executives who are making the software and they're not allowed to talk to each other they're two different classes of employees they're in different buildings they don't fraternize and it's part of a control culture
microsoft i think is going to release a and there's a prediction as well a search engine with open ai that has a significant impact on google's franchise
they made a cut um and what i would say is i do think it's worth noting though what you just said though it's not as reductive as get rid of 6 000 of your 8 000 people it's get rid of more than you think you need to get rid of but also focus right cut the side quests and i think today they announced what they had a 200 lift credit monthly credit for all their employees or something i saw on twitter that they killed that today
everybody was making fun of tech oh look tech's getting their comeuppance everybody's making cuts you did the you know hey it's time to get fit asking facebook to make cuts and they did whatever 60 30 60 days later now media is getting hit as predicted
twitter is media mostly what i do a very small number of people contribute and create on twitter and the vast vast majority consume
like twitter makes me feel bad and also is necessary for the job that i do now
And what's interesting about this is one, like Walmart is already pretty inexpensive. But two, or B, increasing people's access to what is basically rebranded layaway at the moment of what is potentially going to be a protracted economic downturn, just feels like a recipe for even more American debt.
airbnb slack twilio salesforce like those have been high performing companies with really positive work cultures
oh my god money's free let's invent the metaverse
if you make a an action it should be listed on the person's profile page and on the tweet and if you click on the question mark you should see when the action was taken by who you know which department maybe maybe not the person so they they get personally attacked and then what the resolution to it is
this is why elon bought the business
your mileage may vary but this is going pretty well
and they were like each one refined your machine this is the best one and the machine was like thank you i will discard all the others i will optimize for responses like this one in the future good dog good dog
it is the new google it's your new best friend it's your new aura quora it's your new party planner it's your new lazy web
it can be your best friend it can write your movie for you it can it suggested some cocktails for me for this holiday party
we're going to deep dive into the duopoly, uh, that Google and Apple have in the app stores.
And on the other side, the duopoly is bad for consumers and like has been for a really long time.
You still can't. You have to go. You still can't because they were like, no, we're not giving away that 30%.
this is where he literally does not understand two fundamentals and one is talent management and the other is business and that is how you get your ass fired
an attendance mix problem at disney like it was this weird kind of vaguely talking about poor people racial overturn overtones yeah i mean he was like disneyland's getting kind of trashy we got to like make it more premium yeah yeah so even if eiger had sold it better it was gonna be hard to sell a massive price increase like that right out of a pandemic right but when you basically are like disneyland's getting kind of trashy we need to raise prices
disney has one bad quarter under chapek like a bad one and they're like you're out iger's back the end
i personally think this is just like a kiss of death move as a leader the ultimate king move of taking away that pnl from each individual division and centralizing it under one i mean that's like business weeds i know but having worked at several house of brands that's a killer move and it makes people furious
he did a lot of that all in a row and and actually this might be a good time to to go to this video from back in the day not right this second but like immediately when he came on right it was just misstep after misstep after misstep most of which seem to be related to both eq and maybe a little bit of like ego
disney stock up seven percent on the news a great day for j traders still down 38 year to date but eiger is back effective in case you're wondering if this is voluntary on chapek's part bob eiger is back as ceo effective immediately and bob check up chapek has quote stepped down eiger has served uh agreed to serve as ceo for two years with two mandates from the board one set the strategic direction for renewed growth disney's revenue last quarter only grew about nine percent year over year and m
yeah i mean those things alone are like a line item or two in any startup's budget and you could redeploy that with an extra sales executive designer developer just by recapturing those credits the microsoft for startups founders hub has no fundraising requirements it's open to anybody you don't have to go to some elite program to get those credits that only takes five minutes to apply and startups can get up to six figures of benefits right away sign up for the microsoft for startups founders h
AWS, Q3 AWS operating income was $5.4 billion, up 11% year over year, down about 6% quarter over quarter, and that is the only profit center at Amazon. The healthcare thing does feel a little bit like a distraction for Amazon, but I guess we'll see. I wonder if, I wonder if it hadn't already been so far along, if CEO Andy Jassy would have continued to pursue it as aggressively as this. But, you know, listen, I could be wrong. We're at a moment where we're really seeing a lot of disruption in hea
So I guess our big question is, what's the big play and what's the vision? Does Amazon expect this to become a new core, much like AWS? Is it the kind of thing where they might be getting a little, it might be a little bit of a side quest, if you will, somewhat like the acquisition of Whole Foods, which I think was kind of like, fine, and is now in one of the segments that lost money in Q3.
Amazon bought one medical for $3.9 billion in cash.
Amazon pharmacy also purchased pill pack in 2018 for $753 million. That was according to pitch book.
At this time, Amazon clinic does not accept health insurance.
Amazon, of course, just to give a little history here, has been creeping into the health services industry for the past couple years.
Amazon actually launching Amazon Clinic, a telehealth service for citizens in 32 states.
If the guy appears to be on the run, there are likely multiple lawsuits and multiple legal investigations. Like we've confirmed, I think that the SEC and the DOJ were investigating him even before the collapse of FTX. So you have like actual legal questions swirling about the, the behavior that is not the time to do a smoochie let's get inside his head piece where it's just like, well, maybe he just like, um, got distracted as opposed to reportedly built a back door into his own system. So he co
The piece was softball piece. It was a softball piece.
And layoffs at Amazon. Cause you know, I'm going to charge, but just expect so much more of that.
a16z has been super firm i mean it might happen but you know i've seen them on stage multiple times at various events being like where this is a long-term play we're committed to the long-term like we're not gonna you know and so it's possible that they'll keep
you don't see apple having to do this
the margins were insane facebook like this is why the stock was so high in the first place is that facebook and instagram throw off profit like crazy and the only reason they don't now yeah is because of the huge increase in spending 15 billion dollars i will remind you on reality labs
he is going to continue to plow money into the metaverse and reality labs and i i see no sign that he has been humbled in any way
it's pretty clear to me that when the stock dipped below a hundred dollars that zuckerberg was going to do something i i didn't think he would be able to maintain his team and the enthusiasm of the team if that stock kept going down and i think that is what shook up his reality is that the people around
the stock market has said we're not interested in companies with declining earnings profits so you gotta if you can't make the money you said you're gonna make the top line you're gonna have to cut the bottom line
so it seems as if you know the two divisions if you will the two companies within a company are being impacted relatively equally
in no way does this letter signal any shift in direction for the company right like he talks about how they're going to spend less but also quite specifically says fundamentally we're making these changes for two reasons our revenue outlook is lower than we expected at the beginning of the year and we want to make sure we're operating efficiently across both family of apps and reality labs
By July 2021, FTX raises $1 billion at $18 billion. Investors include Altimeter, Toma Bravo, Tom Brady, Tomasek, Sequoia, Multicoin SoftBank, Tiger, and Coinbase VC.
i'm saying this founder is going to take the medicine i believe zuck has so much pride and wants to win so badly that this this moment in time going from 360 a share to 90 a share looking like a fool having everybody in the world criticize you everybody in the world give up on you i think that is going to make suck not break suck and i think the first piece of medicine is doing what he's never had to do which is to say i was wrong ... so there's my thing was a four-part plan a significant riff w
it's getting to the point where i don't think we can safely say there's going to be a soft landing for everybody who has laid off from tech clearly because also they're not all engineers right it's sales and marketing people and brand people and it's i think this is the this is the official sign that we are headed into some tough times in the industry
these meta layoffs uh like we said are expected wednesday i think they are expected to be huge like way way more than twitter or any of the other big layoffs
we said on this show last week that once we saw big layoffs start to happen at alphabet or meta google or facebook that that would mean we'd really hit an inflection point and it seems like we're there
according to the wall street journal meta the company is planning quote large-scale layoffs this week that could impact thousands of employees as of september 30th meta had over 87 000 employees which was up 28 year over year over q3 2021 so massive hiring boom has happened at meta
i'm going to be watching these very closely to see if it has figured out much like ramenhood seems to be doing how to diversify its revenue
if robin hood is diversifying away from sort of transaction-based revenues and becoming a trading lender and diversifying revenue into margins there is risk there the interest rates are higher so it's going to be a better revenue stream for them but it also does lead to potentially more scrutiny right all of the people who were like oh you're inducing these traders to make bad decisions by making it so easy and free are now going to say whoa whoa you're turning around and lending and letting the
and then robin hood uh one of the companies i angel invested in and i'm still a shareholder in reports our earnings and uh there's a lot of lessons in here for what's going on in the uh macro environment and for startups and founders yeah it's a lot of the cutting the cost there and they're they're getting multiple revenue streams online always a wise idea i'm really starting to see the stratification and the companies who are gonna come through and the ones who are gonna have a rougher ride
alphabet either could be growing into this downturn in a smart way that lets them lock up talent or they're eating too much halloween candy after promising that they were going to stop because it's november 3rd now and we need to like slow it down a little bit because the holidays are coming and the gut will just keep expanding if we're not careful
we will know that the zombie apocalypse has really arrived when google and facebook either actually freeze hiring because they don't seem very disciplined with their freeze right now
Like you do not see people on mass protesting outside of Uber saying being an Uber driver is the worst job I've ever had. And, and nor do you see them quitting on mass and you see, you know, the opposite restaurants and hotels, unable to hire, like all kinds of companies unable to hire. And I do think there's a hundred percent a correlation between that, like the Amazon hiring, the ability to drive for any of these services and the labor shortage I suspect is related.
And there is a great job with that health insurance marketplace like that exists via Uber. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yeah. It looks like, so in Q3, uh, drivers and couriers are in $10.8 billion, not including tips. And this is up 25% year over year.
Q3 gross bookings were $29.1 billion up 32% year over year. And this is really interesting growth bookings for mobility and delivery. We're exactly the same in q3. So to that point about people are taking rides again, this is not all and in fact, they may be taking rides to go out to eat and getting less delivery, right? Like it could be a takeaway from delivery and an ad to the theory, right, that they are as Dara always says, like, we're rain or shine. So when it rains, you order in and when i
72% revenue growth year over year. $358 million of positive free cash flow. Oh, finally cash. Is this a phrase? This is the first time this happened? I think they had some moments of it. It's the second quarter. So everything that Dara said he was going to do to cut the costs and make the thing profitable and turn the data data seems to be occurring.
I have a great deal of my net worth in this company.
People are going places in cars. It is occurring. They're traveling. They are taking Ubers to parties. Oh yeah. As we head into the holiday season, parties are back.
Uber stock was up as much as 16% yesterday after reporting 72% revenue growth year over year.
my other favorite company after Twitter, Uber had earnings and they were spectacular. And I get to do some dunking and have a little victory lap here. Finally, after a decade plus of defending this company, they don't need to be defended anymore. It's a great moment for me.
at the time all the fomo all the froth all the bubble was about solar and tesla came out of that right
my new favorite villain in the streaming universe bob chapik delivering today delivering this week with enraging the fans it was wednesday i think he made some live some comments at uh wall street journal live i was like oh i cannot wait to hear chapik step in it because if there's anything we're learning about this guy right there you know clearly there are divisions in opinions about his leadership and but what they seem to be based on is the fact that he just puts his foot in his mouth every
zuckerberg is not a good steward for society or for his shareholders and now the chickens have come home to roost people are giving up on the stock and that is going to be perhaps uh it seems based on people's bet betting here and when people have skin in the game and they bet you kind of get to reality a little bit quicker and now that there are other options and the economy has corrected and there's no free cash because the fed has raised interest rates i think this is the beginning of the end
When you look at the gross profit of Google, or Microsoft or these other companies, they've got that really big fat gross profit line, and not a lot of operating loss there because their cost of providing the service is much lower because it's software, they don't have to give a huge chunk of their revenue to the music labels.
When you look at the gross profit of Google, or Microsoft or these other companies, they've got that really big fat gross profit line, and not a lot of operating loss there because their cost of providing the service is much lower because it's software, they don't have to give a huge chunk of their revenue to the music labels.
nobody is going to be immune from belt tightening. And so everybody's tightens their belts. Everybody gets austerity measures, as we call them. You're going to see it impact every single company in all likelihood.
Overall, great company. I own the stock. I'll continue on the stock might even add to it in a down market.
Satya has done an amazing job with cloud and moving this company to a new business model where people pay for subscriptions. They've done an amazing job challenging and catching up to AWS.
Operating income $21 billion for Microsoft.
Microsoft did warn, according to the Financial Times, that revenue growth from Azure was going to slow by five points in the next quarter.
Windows OEM revenue... dropped 15% year over year.
But for the first time ever, Microsoft cloud metrics exceeded 50% of the overall company's growth.
here's Apple coming along like boop boop. We're gonna start with the lock and expand out from here. And I'm totally like I'm in because they're not gonna try to sell me anything
the company also noted that it was focusing on expanding its revenue growth and has been investing heavily in ar with tools like custom landmarks for house of the dragon snapchat times vogue world in new york and adding lenses
snap is in the middle of a bit of a turnaround so they said they would cut 20 of staff last month as part of a major restructuring so we're hoping for their sake that it could be a little more profitable toward the middle of next year with just about you know 20 less overhead
q3 cash and short-term securities total about 4.4 billion dollars so the cash situation is not a disaster q3 net loss was about 360 million dollars though that's a five times larger loss year over year snaps stock-based compensation in q3 was 343 million dollars that actually represents a majority of that net loss so just to be clear that was mostly a compensation issue but q3 free cash flow was only about 18 million dollars that's actually about breakeven on a free cash flow basis which is not
in a prior earnings report snap noted that apple's app tracking transparency features were a huge problem for its business this is of course the thing that also wiped about 25 billion dollars off the combined market caps of google and facebook and you could imagine that snap didn't have as big a cushion as those two companies these new privacy features make it harder for platforms to target users as accurately as they were before that means digital ads are less effective which means advertisers
snaps market cap unlike some other companies is completely correlated has traded basically in lockstep with its quarterly year over year revenue growth over the past five years or so so we made another chart where you can see snaps market cap in yellow and its quarterly year over year revenue growth in black and again these are almost identical trend lines there this is one of the very few cases where uh investors are saying we have no faith right there's no sort of divergence in price to earnin
snaps stock is down 30 percent today after another disappointing earnings report snap of course has had a string of disappointing earnings reports but just as a level set here snap is down about 90 percent over the past 52 weeks 90 90 and again it was down about 30 this morning so let's dig into the reason for today's drop this chart by the way i am just looking at another one of our why charts on snaps quarterly year over year growth and it is absolutely brutal here's what they reported that ca
most people on reddit create discords most people on youtube who get popular create a discord so why not have the discord inside of reddit and have the discord inside of you know for the modality of of persistent chat
i really like this because i want to invest more in the twitter i'm sorry the youtube community and steer it towards that would be great
i would think that there'll be you know a youtube.com slash at twist or something and you'll see our page and um but then your feed might include people's videos does that make sense molly like um it would become your youtube feed could become feel more like a a hybrid of twitter slash tick tock slash youtube i think that's what they have planned
are they going to create a community are they going to go straight up uh and compete against twitter i think so
the company also noted that it was focusing on expanding its revenue growth and has been investing heavily in ar with tools like custom landmarks for house of the dragon snapchat times vogue world in new york and adding lense
snap is in the middle of a bit of a turnaround so they said they would cut 20 of staff last month as part of a major restructuring so we're hoping for their sake that it could be a little more profitable toward the middle of next year with just about you know 20 less overhead
q3 cash and short-term securities total about 4.4 billion dollars so the cash situation is not a disaster q3 net loss was about 360 million dollars though that's a five times larger loss year over year snap's stock-based compensation in q3 was 343 million dollars that actually represents a majority of that net loss so just to be clear that was mostly a compensation issue q3 free cash flow was only about 18 million dollars that's actually about breakeven on a free cash flow basis which is not ter
in a prior earnings report snap noted that apple's app tracking transparency features were a huge problem for its business this is of course the thing that also wiped about 25 billion dollars off the combined market caps of google and facebook and you can imagine that snap didn't have as big a cushion as those two companies these new privacy features make it harder for platforms to target users as accurately as they were before that means digital ads are less effective which means advertisers pa
inflation and the kind of general market downturn and the thing we've seen where lots of stocks are losing a lot of value as we come out of this covered period those are not the only things impacting snap oh no many many headwinds for this company
snaps market cap unlike some other companies is completely correlated has traded basically in lockstep with its year over year revenue growth over the past five years or so this is one of the very few cases where uh investors are saying we have no faith right there's no sort of divergence in price to earnings ratio there's no divergence from reality when it comes to snap whatever its revenue growth is that's where investors follow it
revenue was 1.1 billion dollars in the quarter up just six percent year over year six percent year over year growth is the slowest growth that snapchat has had in its entire time as a public company
snap is down about 90 percent over the past 52 weeks
snaps stock is down 30 percent today after another disappointing earnings report
the fact that youtube detected all of it stopped it and suspended every one of these accounts puts the lie to everything that zuckerberg and frankly sheryl sandberg have said even up to and including in front of congress for like a decade it can be done and they are still not doing it
youtube was able to detect and reject every test submission and suspend the channel used to post them fantastic
it's an absolutely great story yeah uh or great move rather great product move in the direction of taking down discord
i think you'll also be able to search by this from what i understand so you know if you wind up being at mollywood somebody could search youtube for at mollywood and then see your comments on other videos uh you know and i think that's something that's been lacking
if this increased it with more you know ability to interact and build community good move good move
so if you go to youtube.com at startups that's us yeah dude so fantastic good handle good handle
if they could turn on a persistent chat room like disco they could put they could just finish off discord with persistent chat
i really like this because i want to invest more in the twitter i'm sorry the youtube community and steer it towards that would be great
your youtube feed could become feel more like a a hybrid of twitter slash tick tock slash youtube
are they going to create a community are they going to go straight up uh and compete against twitter i think so
I think this is, you know, when you have a culture of no ads, and we build stuff, people want so much, they're willing to pay. It's very hard for the management team to communicate that to their internal team.
Just get rid of the $10 a month plan, because that's just, that's overthinking it, but if you really, it's overthinking it. And if you really wanted to disrupt, come in over the top with Jake house plan and offer the free ad supported version. And then all of a sudden, right? Like you blow everybody out of the water.
I think the vast majority of users don't. Like I just don't see it.
That is not my experience on Twitter. Like, Oh, really? Nope. Well, I curate a good feed. You curate a good feed.
That it's native or that you can do, you know, business. Yeah, absolutely.
this chart is pretty bananas. What we see is that between 2017 and Q3 of 2022 on an annualized basis cost, you know, doubled, right. Cost to operating expenses effectively almost doubled from 3.9 to 6.8 billion dollars, but revenue adexed. Like it's the idea that you would keep costs that flat in terms of factories and production and making cars and have your revenue line go up and to the right is
Automotive revenue was up 55% year over year, considering the supply chain issues. That's strong.
But when you look at the numbers, they're truly extraordinary. Revenue up 56% year over a year is just insane on a big number.
completely earth shaking to do what you're suggesting first, but that would take a boldness.
Just get rid of the $10 a month plan, because that's just, that's overthinking it, but if you really, it's overthinking it. And if you really wanted to disrupt, come in over the top with Jake house plan and offer the free ad supported version. And then all of a sudden, right? Like you blow everybody out of the water.
just show me no matter whether I am online or not. Right? Like, it shouldn't be a chance, whether I see something when I pop on Twitter, it should be like, I always want my climate stuff.
Business for businesses. Yes. Absolutely.
the idea that you would keep costs that flat in terms of factories and production and making cars and have your revenue line go up and to the right is actually bananas.
Revenue 21.5 billion. ... cost of revenue 16 billion or so. And then on top gross profit ... 5.4 billion in gross profit. ... operating profit 3.7 billion. ... net profit 3.3 billion.
When you look at the numbers, they're truly extraordinary.
Automotive revenue was up 55% year over year, considering the supply chain issues. That's strong.
Vehicle deliveries went up to 343,000. That's up 89,000.
Revenue up 56% year over a year is just insane on a big number.
Benchling was founded back in 2012. And they sell cloud software to biotech research and development. Sounds really boring. And sounds really profitable to me.
in a founder like Tim's companies. He's a killer.
Congratulations to the team
I give them four years. It's typically what happens in these acquisitions. You get the golden handcuffs for four years
for the people who invested at $500 million valuations who did that Series C, it's kind of a bummer, right? Because they barely doubled their money
Palo Alto networks looked at it said, Hey, this company's got 50 million, 40 million, whatever it had in revenue, 80 million. We have a thesis that we could 10x that revenue, let's take it out before they go public, let's take it out for other people find out about it.
they sell the company for 800 million
this company's got 50 million, 40 million, whatever it had in revenue, 80 million.
They probably sold close to the top of the market.
didn't quite hit unicorn status. But I'm going to say close enough.
It's a 14x valuation step up since joining the next unicorns.
And they sell cloud software to biotech research and development. Sounds really boring. And sounds really profitable to me.
they do enterprise software to allow people to do background checks. You can imagine if you're Uber, if you're DoorDash, or any company that's hiring people, you may want to check who you're hiring. And to have it as a service like AWS to do a cheaper, faster, better on demand was a brilliant idea. And they can do it for 55 bucks. Pretty amazing when you think about it.
market negativity and the CNBC bitching. Sorry, pardon my language and just be like, actually, we're killing
Well, and I suppose if they also have this, uh, plugin model and apps that can layer on top of it model, they could take a cut from that. Yeah. I mean, a million different ways to monetize. It doesn't even have to just be charging a single user, $10 a month, right? It could be a B2B model or some sort of an enterprise or an app store. A million different ways to, uh, give people like say a light version. And if you want it to do high res, if you wanted filters and libraries, they could charge ex
I mean, if they have 10 million people and they have a billion dollar valuation, that would be a hundred dollars per user. So they're valuing each user, free user, because it's currently free. I believe there's no paid version, correct? I think. Yeah. So that would make it a hundred dollars per person. And you'd have to wonder what eventually is the business model of the business model was SAS and it was 10 bucks a month, 25 bucks a month, which is what Canva costs, right? Something in that rang
Stable Diffusion is similar. It's sort of like that. But what people like about Stable Diffusion is that it includes an editing tool. So you would generate an image, but then you can, you know, apply filters and you can buzz it. This is the one that people were using to create those like incredible like fantasy scenes that look like they were ripped from one of the last two episodes of Lord of the Rings that were amazing and crazy. So here it is. You tell what you want to make and then you can e
so there's still a threat and when you look at chip production for example uh tsmc is the biggest semiconductor manufacturer and foundry in the world and that's located in taiwan where people have considered it to be sort of a safe place to do business and she is quite clearly signaling here like no it's not whereas the plan is still to take back taiwan full stop which is how we get to apple yeah i mean we had
it's not going to change the social media ecosystem very much this is still going to remain a niche player in a small and very crowded field ironically of super right-wing platforms
that by the way is probably on the verge of bankruptcy that raised like 56 million dollars and then the last round was a 16 million dollar series b and like we don't really know what state it's in but it does not seem to be gathering the attention that it once did
parlor has been it has gone invisible right like it is moribund at best it seems to have had like an initial bump in popularity when it first launched and does not seem to be super active
specifically even from a public shareholder perspective because if that's all you see is him just only caring about this instead of the money printing machine pretty soon you're like
facebook has a narrative problem the best thing they could do is get him the hell away from this totally put somebody else trying to make him the steve jobs of it because he's not
The sun setting of the project makes another sign that Amazon is starting to wind down experimental projects as it sees slowing sales growth.
the recommendation was that the purchaser of sn also buy tagamet which is uh to avoid vomiting up the poison so chemical to keep down the chemical a personal use scale to measure the proper quantity and the amazon edition of the peaceful pill handbook a suicide manual with an entire chapter on how to die by sn this was the bundle that people would be recommended when they go and search for this
amazon is very aggressive with news outlets oh really very aggressive in fact i at the new york times know someone who was kind of taken off the beat because of sustained pressure they didn't like the beat reporter amazon used their influence to pressure pressure pressure
goldberg says amazon lawyers from perkins that's a very famous law firm told them amazon will continue to sell sn because they can't be held liable if someone uses one of their products for suicide okay i think she's saying this is a that fundamentally that amazon's lawyers according to carrie goldberg the lawyer for the family determine that this is effectively like a content moderation issue like a 230 that if just because this exists on amazon site and is algorithmically bundled with these ot
it's algorithmic i believe i don't think that they have maybe they have a human look at it afterwards who knows but i do think that those bundles are algorithmic
she wrote an incredibly detailed thread last night um about two things one how she is involved in a lawsuit on behalf of a family whose son committed suicide using chemicals that he bought on amazon um and the accusation is that starting as far back as april 2021 this law firm started urging amazon to stop selling what they are terming suicide kits because there's this chemical that you can buy on amazon and and evidently it's you know amazon's algorithm will recommend you should buy it with thi
intel said it would do 20 billion dollars worth of plants in arizona but they they take years to spin up like we're probably a decade away from full production
if you're nvidia say or if you're some uh you know if you're intel or you're an american-based company like micron you need a special license from the commerce department to export like gpus like really high performance chips that power ai applications or you know help model nuclear blasts or guide hypersonic weapons like if you want to sell those in china or even taiwan you now need a special license from the commerce department
So now the time to go to one of those big companies, maybe if you can get a job there, they're gonna they're always gonna be hiring security people. So the idea that like the security people wouldn't be hired because of the freezes probably not true. And they're probably going to reset all the RSUs like the stock options are going to be cheaper, right? So you probably get in when the stocks are cheap. So at the bottom of cycle
Great place to start a company. I will say that because you have all these incredibly successful Microsoft and Amazon people just hanging out and a lot of them have money can be angel investors. So you can really start a great company there.
potentially you don't even need, uh, don't let Casey or you or me hear this. But if you're Twitter, you don't even need to pass email addresses. No, you know, just messaging, right? It like, that's the easiest thing. You're just like, I've got the messaging platform taken care of. Yes. I'll own this for you, you know,
Yeah, absolutely. And if it, listen, if it ends up incubating great startups for me, I'm stoked.
And then the circular economy is getting so big that Google just announced that it's creating an online only startup accelerator focused on the circular economy. So companies that are, yeah.
trading shares of Twitter were halted. Almost immediately after, but before they were halted, they shared, they climbed as much as 18% on the news
I cannot imagine any scenario in which the board, uh, is going to say no to the price that is a significant premium over what the stock has been trading at.
Um, and if you can land two rockets at the same time and build a million electric cars, whatever it is, um, I think you could make this company more functional.
I think it's got tremendous potential. I've said that forever. I think it's got incredible, incredible potential.
it will happen for the figma investors as well
I think Apple's a little older school. Like, I think we're starting to realize that, that Apple is a little bit got a little bit of 90s management going on. It's like very top down, very hierarchical. Like, I'm not too surprised that they're the company that said come back.
People are waiting on the new iPhone. So this tower predicted that. Yeah, some bricks are coming out.
Apple said, remember how there was that like, they were going to produce more iPhone 14s, then they walked that back. And we're like, ooh, actually, we are not going to produce as many i 14 iPhone 14s, even as we had initially, I think predicted because the demand was not there.
investors who've been hiding in Apple are about to have a bad time
So Zuck's layoffs are coming.
this is just destroying morale internally. And you got to think at Facebook, your options are worth what are we at half now, what they were last year, maybe less. And so your options are worth nothing. You're constantly under threat that you're going to be laid off. It's like living on the dread pirate Robert ship, like I'll most likely kill you in the morning. You're not doing your best work. It's amazing that they managed to put out the like the auto generate the unicorns thing because you got
the real test was going to be, will it be an absolute bloodbath in the ad market at Google and Facebook? And it seems that in fact, yeah, perhaps it could be
meta has announced evidently a hiring freeze warning, but is warning now of a restructure.
there's so much ill will, okay, so much ill will toward meta that the responses are basically just like, no, thank you. Of course. And so you wonder, like, are they going to build this magical universe and no one's going to come?
And this is why he does not care if you make fun of his big doe princess eyes in version one of the metaverse. And, you know, the fact that there aren't legs now, and that the animation is kind of janky, like he and all of these other scientists who are building the thing that you're talking about, which is so is exactly what's going to happen. Yeah, don't care what it looks like. Now that is meaningless to them.
And the top individual at the Facebook AI is leaving to go run this foundation. So it's kind of interesting what's going on over there.
They just spun out this thing called PyTorch, which is like a Python framework for artificial intelligence that I think was built inside of meta, but they just gave it to the Linux foundation.
These people are really building the future over there.
it seems like meta is hiring a lot of people, a lot of PhDs.
And so heavily investing in this.
it turns out meta, FKA, Facebook, really don't like this, but meta's got some dope stuff going on with regard to AI.
a movie. It's like, what do you even say when that's the headline? Like we have arrived in the future. And it is exactly as banana pants as you thought it was gonna be.
And Apple's basically saying, look, you know what, this is a reasonable request. And given the other antitrust issues they've had with Epic and whatnot, like they need to support it. And is Google going to do it as well? And therefore Apple may have just beaten Google to the punch here. And if Apple and Google both start allowing NFTs to be sold, it becomes a, I mean, I agree with Sonny, it's a big deal. Now with a 30% hold long-term, probably not. Margins are probably turned down. I mean, Andro
Except then Twitter banned the use of like, repeating tweets. And then they built their own scheduling software.
she should just build a competitor and go for the gold.
you have a very big competitor who is extremely good at what they do yep and they changed who's running the company and i think you know that means you got somebody who's super focused in there running the company maybe as somebody who wasn't as focused i'm talking of course about amazon
you have a very big competitor who is extremely good at what they do ... and they changed who's running the company and i think you know that means you got somebody who's super focused in there running the company maybe as somebody who wasn't as focused i'm talking of course about amazon
it was extraordinary during the pandemic my lord did the company grow and then you had a quick pullback
which sounds like a lot until I tell you that users cumulatively spend 197 million hours a day watching TikTok.
ass they needed yep now they have to justify their resistance and i think slack is still winning
i think slack is still winning
index ventures led the seed at a 14.8 million dollar valuation uh so this is a 1351 x from the seed the total capital invested capital in the seed round was 3.8 million dollars
historically been a disaster.
But this is this is really troubling that his act if his accusation turns out to be accurate, that the management team was subverting this information in order to hit their bonuses, it's pretty dark, pretty dark, because they're putting everybody at risk to make their money.
the fact that those people are being compromised, and then the internal stuff, when he said, like, half of the people have access to everybody's accounts, and that low level people are turning off accounts or looking at them, and they have no controls in place to see who's looking at stuff.
and the interactivity, the UX level, that was their expertise and genius. And then their Achilles heel has always been technology.
john deere is straight up stone cold rolling out self-driving tractors this year that can plow fields by themselves and sprayers that can distinguish weeds from crops
i mean like apple was already steve jobs had already resuscitated apple by the time he went to pixar it wasn't like he didn't have the iphone now he didn't have
because of apple's privacy changes causing so much lost revenue from
I think they're going to win AR VR. I know they're gonna win it. I'm convinced.
Twitter, just issue an NFT. It'll do better than board apes are doing these days.
I bet he's gonna do a great job when he doesn't want it anymore. It's gonna be awesome. I can't wait to have another checked out CEO with another company or two to run. That's gonna be great for Twitter. Yeah, that there's a description. Nobody ever called Elon Musk checked out. He's gonna be checked out of running a company that he didn't, they lost interest in buying.
If Twitter collected, if Twitter collected and curated, because the thing that I use Twitter for, frankly, is seeing the future. And I would subscribe to feeds that you know how like, I mean, anytime something happens, there's kind of the running joke now, like, welcome on my epidemiology experts, and all my experts on espionage law and whatever. But that is actually what I use Twitter for. Like, I was one of the people in January of 2020, or whatever, being like, hey, guys, I think this, uh, th
Twitter, come on, like, you'd be better off issuing NFTs as a way to try to make money than getting into an OnlyFans type business model. Like, that is so out of the frying pan into the fire. Like, I feel like you in particular and even I could come up with, like, 1,000 other ways for Twitter to monetize things before we would ever land on, hey, you know what you guys should do is only fans clone. Like, what the hell?
I understand that they were probably thinking that would be an easy way to make money, although it is not.
they're in a trap now where they want to find ways to make more money, but they haven't historically made enough money to make a service that is, frankly, good enough, robust enough and safe enough to pitch.
the company has invested far less in content moderation and user safety than its rivals in 2019. Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the amount Facebook spends on safety features exceeds Twitter's entire annual revenue.
unlike its larger peers, including Google and Facebook, Twitter has suffered from a history of mismanagement and a generally weak business that has failed to turn a profit for eight of the past 10 years.
this is like Twitter clearly trying to explore some ways to get additional revenue because being advertising supported is increasingly difficult and doesn't make them a ton of money.
However, when they, to your point, went ahead and tried to enact this new project, ACM Adult Content Monetization, they formed this red team to pressure test the decision. This is all according to a scoop at the Burge and Casey Newton and interviews with current and former Twitter employees. And the red team discovered that, in fact, Twitter could not at all safely allow adult creators to sell subscriptions because the company was not and still is not effectively policing harmful sexual content
In the spring of 2022, evidently, after quietly allowing adult content on the service, Twitter was thinking, hey, we could probably make some money off of this. And they were proposing to give adult content creators the ability to begin selling OnlyFans style paid subscriptions with Twitter keeping a share of the revenue.
This is a multiple shell corporation, by the way. So there's Immersive Health Solutions, LLC, Inc. in February, according to records obtained by Bloomberg News. So Bloomberg seems to have been doing some good data journalism here. That company itself was registered by another Delaware shell corporation, the corporation TrustCo, which is typically used for filings by firms looking to avoid detection. And the RealityOS trademark used that same firm, the corporation TrustCo shell company.
Now, we should also note that these have not been granted. They've just been filed. FYI. I'm just saying like sometimes, you know, we tend to get there's been years and decades, there have been decades of journalists getting very excited about Apple trademark filings that never go anywhere like there's a or that take a really long time. Like if this has been filed, but not yet granted, and it could take some time to be granted. And then it could be appealed. This could still suggest products or
this all sort of suggests that something in the frame, you know, something in the realm of reality is what they are gonna call this super secret project, which is expected to use VR and AR, but nobody knows very much else about it. Like we keep, you know, having Mark Gurman, right from Bloomberg on to go through the rumors, but we're still solidly in rumor phase, but maybe getting closer.
I saw in my feed when I woke up, a new CEO of YC, friend of this pod, Gary Tan.
the most cynical thing I've heard people say is that they manipulate investors. And so how do you do that? We have a demo day, you put high pressure tactics on people, you have to sign or the valuations going up and teach founders how to manipulate investors.
YC's got a much more well known brand
I think the big innovation for Techstars and for Paul Graham's YCombinator and David Cohen's Techstars was they didn't come up with the ideas, and they took a very small percentage of it.
Techstars and YCombinator started at the same time, they both get equal credit for this revolution.
people complaining about YCombinator generally is people being jealous of the fact that YCombinator gets to invest at a $2 million valuation, and they get first bite of the apple with a lot of great startups.
YC, of course, incredibly influential.
people seem very excited that Gary Tan is going to reinvigorate it in as much as it even needs it.
I think Salesforce, by the way, had like a down quarter. I think they like everybody. Slootman is coming for everybody.
I'm so excited. I wish I was a shareholder.
Slootman is coming for everybody.
Snowflake's next frontier of innovation is aimed at transforming how cloud applications are built, deployed, sold and transacted.
Snowflake trades at the largest price to sales multiple of any public SaaS company.
product gross profit. This is a fun one. $334.7 million up 93% year over year.
Evidently, net revenue retention rate of 171%. So Snowflake grew revenue 71% from the customers it already had it was like, Hey, guys, you want to give us some more money? And they did.
Apple and Peloton is such a like natural sort of feeling brands tie up. But it's also super far afield for them. Like, yeah, they sell premium hardware, and they're good at making and selling premium hardware. But it feels like a stretch for Apple
with Amazon somewhat off the table. Because of antitrust, it's hard to think who would rescue them at this point
They did just enter into an e commerce partnership to sell on Pelotons on Amazon.
if it is true that they essentially um were forced twitter was forced by the indian government to put a government agent on the payroll i think agent means spy how explosive is that and then how many other countries that to me is the most important thing that is not getting nearly enough coverage it's like you had a government come to a company that's based in america and it's not the united states government that did it and basically said we need you to place an agent of our intelligence servic
and then we'll touch on ebay buying a trading card marketplace in our m a segment and what you can learn as a founder or capital allocator from a niche marketplace forcing ebay to buy them because they kicked ebay's ass yep it's just that simple
so i think it's uh i i would say the bet makes sense to me
Uber and calm at four and 5 million, okay, maybe, you know, those should have been $10 million valuations, but they should not have been $50 million valuations or $40 million valuations
Uber was in private beta, they had two or three cabs on the road in a very simple app that was invite only, and basically no revenue. And it was four and a half or $5 million post money valuation, I think that actually was a price round. So yeah, they had very little traction. But what they did have were beautiful products that solve the specific problem with really dynamic founders.
look i understand that a publicly traded company and a capitalist society with a responsibility to shareholders has to keep making money apple's making plenty of money like i don't understand a couple of billion dollars is ultimately incremental double digit billions is still incremental revenue
So they're just willing to like reduce the productivity and happiness of every single employee so that they can get rid of five without having to just suck it up and make the hard call. Impressive. Precisely. That's why I call it the gentleman's layoff. It's like you're too proud.
My theory again, is Disney will have 1 billion subs.
I feel like these brands will last for the ages. And my theory on that was, there is going to be a fundamentally new business in having a billion subscribers. Remember, Disney was not really in the subscription business, right? They were in the IP business, they would license their content to other people. And now a direct one on one relationship with customers.
I know Dara at Uber last year was buying a bunch of shares of Uber.
can we see disney be a 500 share price
unlike say robin hood where i was locked up and the shares were really high during the lockup and then they came down after we were all unlocked
over the past five days miraculously coinbase's market cap is up 50 percent from uh about 14 billion to 20 billion
if you were a vc if you invested in coinbase my lord you should have distributed all the shares
the sec is investigating coinbase over selling unregulated securities on its platform
blackrock is partnering with coinbase to make it easier for institutional investors to manage and trade bitcoin
And if you look at Coinbase price to sales and Robinson hoods, and like they were also extraordinary people were really pricing in a lot of growth, a lot of growth.
I mean, $6 billion in cash is a really big moat. As you've been saying the stock is up over 13% today as a result of the reduction in force news investors do like that kind of discipline. So you might have missed your chance to get a deal on the J trade.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev wrote in a blog post saying the previous layoffs did not go far enough in helping cut costs. He also said, quote, The reality is that we over hired in particular in some of our support functions. And then Robinhood also moved its q2 result up a day earlier than scheduled revenue was $318 million down 44% year over year out net loss 295 million. That was 200 million less than it lost in q2 2021. And monthly active users and this is that real, you know, number in terms of
Actually, the Robin Hood severance says people can stay on till October 1. So I'm assuming that's probably Warn Act related.
news came out yesterday, I think last evening that Robin Hood was laying off something like 20% 23% of its employees as retail trading slows. Remember, back in April, Robin Hood cut 9% of staff, the two rounds in total have cut more than 1000 jobs from the company.
no one is immune, right? Like Y Combinator is not immune.
apparently the summer 2022 batch only includes about 250 startups. YC said the reduction in batch size was due to the macroeconomic downturn changes in the venture funding environment.
But maybe they're looking at it saying, well, will we be able to raise another billion dollar fund and keep up this pace, right? Because if they were going at this pace, and they had the budget to fund 1400 startups under the new standard
And then when they raise the minimum investment, it got more expensive, you know, the way that works is you get 125 for 7%. And then I think they put the other 375 in at whatever your terms are when you graduate, which by the way, is what I created, you know, seven years ago with the launch accelerator. So they got that idea for me. And it's a great idea to give myself credit for it. Because a lot of times when you graduate, giving them more money, you know, helps grow the company, and you can g
it was clearly way, way too big, right? I mean, 800 out of every single possible startup all year long is still probably a relatively small number. But it's not it certainly doesn't feel like wildly exclusive at that point. So it sounds like they got too big, maybe unmanageable.
congratulations to the team at Uber, past, present, future, everybody. Great job. And that's why I'm still holding a very large position in Uber. And I'm not J trading. I have too much of it.
Uber's a lot of things are coming together in exactly the right way for Uber right now. And it does include the fact that airport bookings are back to pre pandemic levels, which meant that this quarter, mobility, you know, most of Uber's revenue in the pandemic has been coming from delivery. So bravo to Uber for having the foresight to see that delivery was going to be a big business, no matter what. Yeah, it kept this company alive during the pandemic, without a doubt.
I bought a little bit on the open market and even I am stoked.
Uber generated 382 million in free cash flow while doubling revenue year over year.
Uber can turn a dial and pick how much they charge for a ride, right? It's pretty straightforward.
And now that we have competitors that are equally viable, Instagram is now tick tock, and YouTube,
they literally told the employees, please downplay our China Association.
apple reported earnings for fiscal q3 beat expectations for sales and profits but growth slowed a little bit um the stock was up slightly today up about three percent it's down year eleven percent year to date but it's doing way better than google meta netflix
it's doing way better than google meta netflix
microsoft is gaining ground you see if you are growing 13 faster than your competitor which is really a third you know more than uh that 13 is a third more than 33 or a little bit more so they're going to catch up i think it'll be a it's right now going to be a a two-horse race and i think i wouldn't count microsoft out i could see a flip happening here i could see microsoft you know reaching aws level and then maybe even beating them it's unlikely but i do think it's the gap is going to continu
amazon was a bit arrogant the aws team was like super arrogant with me and they'd be like oh we're coming to this we're going to this and i was like no you're not you know like they're like oh we're coming to angel summit i was like no you're not coming to angel summits for angels like oh yeah but we want to go we'll buy two tickets i'm like no it's by invite uh if you want to sponsor something you can sponsor something but then azure and microsoft you know for the last 10 years have been like h
and it's not stopping because there's tons of people who are still running their own clouds you know you set up a data center you might hold on to it it might have a 10 year lifespan and then at some point you're going to say hey i'll move it over and then plus consumption of information on the web probably grows at 20 30 40 a year right our usage of storage space
now there's like the rcs standard that's been taking you know that's taken just as long to get adopted and then imessage lived ahead
i think podcasting is not a business that apple cares that much about and it became this catch-22 for the industry that's less about apple and more about what you were saying mike just now about distribution right apple was the biggest distribution gorilla by far for this whole time but it's not a business they care to be and they're not going to be the ones who you know take
apple's slow with software i mean apple takes their time um and so their pace is not going to be uh the same pace as you know overcast you know or spotify
there is a strong argument to be made that the reason it took from you know when we were podcasting in 2005 until anchor in 2014 to make some progress in this medium is that apple kind of just kept this baby in a cage for a really long time
I don't think that's what he was doing. I think he's building for the long term.
some important information someone just told me snap also has $4.2 billion in debt. Yep. So adjusted cash is more like 500 to 700 million. That does change everything, I think.
if i'm a on the board of intel i'm not going to make a 10 billion dollar fab investment um because you know there may or may not be you know profits down the road to justify that size of an investment so if the government comes along and says we will support we will cover x percent of that investment i can take on more risk and i'm more willing to make that investment and theoretically i can afford to pay people a higher wage or a higher salary because i now have more capital freed up to support
I do actually think that there are stumbles on Disney's horizon. I really do. Leadership matters.
And then I want to throw in this wrinkle about Disney because yesterday, Jason bought Disney in a J trade. We're all in on Disney plus, no question. Yes. But I do wonder if Disney isn't headed into a little bit of a leadership issue because there have been all these rumblings about Bob Chapik. He did keep his job. The board was like, no problem. You have your three year contract. But literally yesterday, Bob Iger, former CEO, was out here trashing Chapik and saying that hiring him and putting hi
please let the company be broken up, uh, into three parts or two parts. And that'll make this go up 50%
But in do it all companies like Amazon is not, has no, shows no sign of slowing down. I think.
it's been one year and this guy is making bold moves.
If Amazon started charging me $500 a year instead of 130 and it included one medical, which I used to have. And I fricking loved, loved.
Amazon is building the super app in plain sight and the super app is Amazon prime.
the search tweaks, which they should 100% do.
So one thing that Google recently proposed was, oh, we're gonna spin off our ad business and put it under alphabet. Yes. So that we can neuter this regulatory question. Although it wouldn't necessarily fundamentally change anything about the ad business. It wouldn't change anything.
In 2021, Amazon generated $241 billion in net product sales, 1% of that is still almost $2.5 billion. So it's a big number.
This is amazing. This is such a smart chess move. And I think it's something that the other services need to learn from.
in m a like i said very literal here's what's happening in the series a uh our today's series a company no big deal is coming for google ah yes this okay i've been there good luck with that exactly we've
you know basically what tayubi writes is the big tell always is when financial executives start giving what one analyst described to me as nuanced answers to yes and no questions and so when he started to say okay are people protected then all of a sudden it's like well it's not a trust but we hold the funds in the trust and usdc is and is not simultaneously a virtual currency this is all from his piece and and in the unlikely event of a bankruptcy usdc holders would be shielded from circle cred
that you were just saying it's a black box you can't get information
But that's what I'm saying. It's a niche product for like white guys with huge followings who have a lot of fun and don't get yelled at that much.
either a different price, or, you know, maybe additional investment from Elon, I think that might be, I heard some people speculating that. So Elon says, you know what, I own whatever 10%, I'll go up to 20% and I'll join the board or whatever.
I think this is going to be a long drawn out process. And then eventually end in a way for both parties to save face and come to an agreement, you know, a settlement
you're not seeing your uber eats driver or your doordash driver or your lyft or uber ride picking you up in a used tesla yet yet or a usdv yet but that will happen because
I guarantee you that deep down inside Intel does not want to manufacture chips in the United States because you know why is bad for profit. It is too expensive. Yeah, fundamentally full stop. It is too expensive and too complicated for any of these companies to set up manufacturing in the United States. And they're not going to and they're not going to do it without the CHIPS Act. And the CHIPS Act is not going to pass because Congress can't do Congress doesn't do stuff like this.
And Klona is apparently raising around at a $6 billion valuation. Remember, they were they were up in the $40 billion club. So that is quite a striking markdown if it's in fact true.
But I do think that it is clear that our future will only ever be made up of Star Wars and Marvel.
Disney is spending, uh, 11 billion dollars this year on sports rights, which is a third of the 32 billion overall that they're spending on, um, content.
So they won the bid to broadcast the rights, but. Okay. And we'll pay $3 billion for the privilege.
I'm finding this show simultaneously great and a little boring.
twitter never really opened up their ad um you know sharing they do put ads in front of select people like you know cbs or something uh their videos those pre-rolls you've seen them on twitter
And one big difference between this and the Walmart and drone up deliveries is that customers will actually have to be onboarded to start receiving drone delivery.
Amazon just got FAA approval to launch drone deliveries in Lockford, California, which is outside of Stockton. The drones, you know, look like dystopian, awesome drones that carry a little packages. And according to the announcement, they'll launch actual deliveries quote later in 2022. The program will be called Amazon Prime Air. And one big difference between this and the Walmart and drone up deliveries is that customers will actually have to be onboarded to start receiving drone delivery. So
One of Shopify's biggest investors exited stock and concern over Amazon and overall market conditions.
I saw actually an honored somewhat related note. One of Shopify's biggest investors exited stock and concern over Amazon and overall market conditions. So if it's happening in public markets, I would imagine it'll start even
what's going on in the Google AI department that, that people are having these intent that they're like, it's profoundly unethical. It's sentient. It's sending, they're sending emails to their coworkers being like, it's sentient. Like, are they, is Google ahead of itself here? Are they in control of the people who work there and the technology that they're building? Almost certainly not.
And then Google placed him on leave.
they had, you know, obviously, this is the same division that fired all these ethicists who were super concerned about whether they were building ethical AI
Google's AI division remains one of the most ongoing bad stories I can think of in in American business right now.
the doom scrolling is not working for me. Like I, the, I realized with this gun stuff and the school shooting, like, I just like, I might be kind of broke my brain. And I was just like, I got to stay off this news. It's just too, making me too, I don't want to say it, but it's making me depressed.
The fact that they deprecate their own hardware and the cables that quickly makes it indefensible.
So since Apple stopped including accessories, they've sold roughly 200 million iPhones. Okay, the lightning cables, headphones and the charging connectors all retail for at least $19 each. And that's their discounted prices now. They used to be much more. Apple's gross margin on those is roughly 38%. Ridiculous. So if you have 60 bucks in accessories, which you need if you have more than one Apple device times a 60% materials cost times 200 million iPhones, then Apple has made 7.2 billion dollar
They are. So you don't even have to buy them. You just support them, you just be their best friend, Apple becomes Uber's best friend. Yeah, they just didn't. And all of a sudden,
This is where I think it's really going to be interesting to build or buy question, or the build or buy or aggregate, right? Because we've talked yesterday about iMessage potentially becoming that super app, and they won't have to build out a delivery network, or you know, they've just got apps in the app store. And if they integrate them better and stop, you know, they're moving away from that kind of like really siloed model. So if it's like, I'm on the, the, the front, the screen, the home sc
In some ways, Uber taking a play from Apple seeing what works and then doing that.
We've also got Elon Musk accusing Twitter of withholding material bot information. Big news there.
coinbase makes its money on transactions and so if everybody's just hunkered down even if they're not selling right that's probably still bad right and so if they're just hunkered down and holding
the latest uh you know breaking news today about tesla pausing hirings and uh
she should have become a board member at Google. She should have been president maybe or CEO candidate. And I think that's probably why she left there.
Cheryl is an extraordinary executive who helped build Google's ad business and then built Facebook's.
I think Zuckerberg's decision-making is horrible. And he made decisions to grow the business.
its ability to, uh, really handle disinformation, election fraud, all of these things was clearly suboptimal and bad.
Cheryl is an extraordinary executive who helped build Google's ad business and then built Facebook's. And those are the number one and the number two.
Bonobos, of course, is the menswear brand. You actually might remember them as one of the original online focused indie consumer brands that hit it big in the early 2010s. You know, Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, lots more. Bonobos was eventually acquired by Walmart for over $300 million in 2017.
gonna break down snap dropping over 40% in a day 45%. In fact, wow, crazy CEO Evan Spiegel sent an internal memo letting the team know snap was gonna miss its earning estimates.
i support the work he does so i said listen whatever our political differences are i think the more important thing here is i want to talk to you about the weapon systems you're making to protect taiwan ukraine the united states from you know an increasingly dangerous world with dictators
are they also laying people off because when those warehouses came in and i just i thought it was a little weird that the bloomberg story didn't mention that at all like if they're not going to be using these warehouses for amazon warehouses are they then presumably and this was a big argument right amazon would come in and they're like we're gonna take over this space it's gonna be a warehouse it's gonna be a lot of jobs i'm just i'm like wait are there jobs associated with this space and it's
if it's true it's an indicator of like the recession is happening
Obviously, getting to space, thanks to Elon and SpaceX and a number of other players, but mainly Elon, they've got them really cheap. It turns out when you reuse the rockets, you can get a lot more stuff up there and bigger payloads.
the company has announced a hiring freeze and head of product cave on big poor was fired while on paternity leave
sbf has been like interested in robin hood for a while way back in 2021 in june he pre he talked about how the name is so awesome it's easy to parse and remember uh he goes four years ago someone told me that robin hood was a zero fee retail stock trading app i never forgot that so 100 opportunistic
I mean, I thought that was like probably the best part of the interview that came out of the interview because Facebook has a hiring freeze.
I do think that there is something that Larry and Sergey did very specifically. They fired themselves. This was a strategic, I know this, because I know them, they did something very strategic. They put themselves as chairman, you know, board members, they don't go to the office. And they're like, I can't get dragged to Washington or in front of you know, whoever in parliament and whatever European country EU because I don't work there. I am a shareholder. If you drag me up there, I'm going to s
you really, you really got to get this under control. So I'm like, Oh, am I for censorship? Yeah, because I'm like, you're really more like a broadcast like a network discovery, you know, or CNBC wouldn't show that stuff or they would really contextualize it.
Google's been around a while... he's got the scar tissue as an executive and he's seen this movie before. If you have the cash reserves, the right thing to do would be to take talent off the market, uh, and to ignore the stock market, knowing you have a money printing machine. If there's any machine that is immune or, you know, to the, to the market swings and gyrations and recessions, it's the money printing machine of Google search. And Google has what 160 billion in cash and cash equivalents,
The fact that, you know, somebody who is considering taking that much Bitcoin off an exchange is exactly the potential start of the worst case scenario.
we have usdc by circle um which is really like a you know jeremy hilarious company an american company with a lot of regulation planning on going public and they seem to have done i i would think we would agree that they've done the most in terms of making sure the one-to-one exists there's a dollar in a bank account somewhere to the dollar that the the token is worth
If Uber ends up breakeven on a net basis before the end of 2022 and shows a net profit early in 2023 and is trading at less than two times revenue. Yeah, this is not buying advice, but yeah, it could be, it could be the setup.
Uber clearly signaling, I think a couple of really interesting things. One is that they see the opportunity to take like seize this moment in time, which is like, look, there's a pullback. Nobody's in a ... we've been patient long enough, but we're not at a point where we can just continue to funnel money at this thing until you show us that you're willing to make the hard choices. I feel like if you consider the long, super pumped journey, we're now at the point we kind of knew we'd always be a
I like it. Um, so they really are saying we're coming for the we're coming for every version of a ride that you would get, whether that's flagging down a rickshot or a taxi in the street, calling a car in advance, calling every level of car, a big car, a small car, a crappy car, a fancy car and the taxi. This is something I think Uber could do a great job of.
saying that they are all in on, uh, potentially hailables and taxi, which is interesting.
He said, the least efficient marketing and incentive spend will be pulled back, we will treat hiring as a privilege. And big on marketing at Uber since the beginning.
Another interesting thing about delivery is that he was like, they love delivery, which surprised me, because I actually think delivery should be growing even faster.
He said, among other things, investors are happy with deliveries growth. Coming out of the pandemic, he really sort of differentiated between these two businesses and talked about the importance of them both is that they like this delivery thing. But now they want to know, quote, is delivery a good business? And why? What happens if we enter a recession, we need Rodara to answer both of those questions with undeniably strong results.
after earnings, which remember, we covered last week, they moved up because lifts were so terrible.
we just need to be in the bucket where people understand this can be profitable. And everybody knows Uber can be profitable, you've seen the prices go up, you've seen the wages go up, all the stuff they said would happen has basically happened. It doesn't mean it's going to be software level margins, but clearly, they could have free cash flow.
this shows you, you know, how tuned in Dara is as an executive, because he's done this before, what was he at Expedia before he was running. Yeah, I believe. So he really understands the highly operational businesses and Wall Street and how to, you know, manage customers, partners, you know, investors, employees, all that stuff.
the faith definitely is not there from the public market investors. And evidently, maybe even from the private market investors, Uber is down 60% from the mid pandemic high, even as people get back in cards again.
This is a really innovative mechanism that you could imagine consortiums of companies all over the world or governments really adopting.
And it sounds like the big unlock that you have had at Stripe is, hey, what if companies, instead of buying offsets, and I want to dig into your feelings about offsets, which I share, instead of buying offsets so that we can say our operations are carbon neutral because we paid for a wind farm over here or some solar or like some tree planting. Let's specifically pay to re-sequester carbon. Is anybody else doing that or wanting to do it? You know, obviously supply being the big constraint here,
and we're bouncing back and forth between the mod view and the public view and the this and that and you know so but yes bravo for trying everything to make this thing better
twitter has a great idea
And the new business line for Stripe looks pretty similar to plaid.
Our node is are saying they think that this seems really aggressive 2024 for a release of a device like this. But I don't feel like these devices look that far.
Think about the like devices that we use and how much they hurt our body. I'm so ready to get rid of my phone. I really am sincerely like get this form factor away from me. I want it on my face. Like I'm wearing readers anyway, put it right in here or the idea of, of being more kind of mobile and not tied to a thing in a meeting. If I'm wearing an AR headset, assuming that it's light enough and comfortable. I, I actually can see that bringing a lot of value and the space factor, like just having
there's been a lot of dunking on Zuckerberg for this very boring vision of the metaverse. It's all about work, but it seems to me that that actually, that's what we spend the vast majority of our days doing. That is a use case that could be pretty obvious for, uh, both people and companies. You could see companies maybe wanting to pay for this. You build in a market. If you can make it a thing that you would wear all day for work, that might actually be the strike of boring genius or the stroke
this question of ecosystem though, does harken back to the reporting that suggested that meta is gonna take a 47% cut of the apps that are sold potentially on these devices. Right? I mean, there is some economic reason for them wanting to have what might end up being a closed ecosystem.
Meta actually now plans to double that number. She's doubling the scoop and release four headsets by 2024.
they didn't give a lot of guidance which has investors freaked and for like the fourth quarter in a row, they brought up supply chain issues. And so all these analysts are like, wow, if Apple is having this much recurring supply chain issue, maybe it really is a problem.
I mean, that's impressive. Is impressive. That's a big turnaround for that services business.
Google reported it's always like kind of fine. Earnings, yeah, it was actually like pretty good.
Jack went on to say that Elon and Parag share the same goal of creating a maximally trusted and broadly inclusive platform.
It's weirdly, it's describing Yahoo, like he's sort of, but at some point that middle layer always becomes a company, which is how it gets distorted, I guess.
And I could have done it, but I am saying nobody would take my company away from me and I wouldn't sit there and have another job and let it goof off and then sit here and be like, this was never my fault.
it actually would have addressed many of the things that made Twitter so effective in terms of and Facebook made them so effective in terms of platforms for misinformation and disinformation and might have even, you know, left Twitter's board in a better position than they're in now.
Twitter allows them to create legions of bots because it makes the numbers look good, increases the number of tweets, increases the number of new accounts.
I think the number of bots will go down by 80 or 90%.
Twitter could have killed LinkedIn years ago. And imagine stopping the perverse incentives of like, Oh, we hired this person because they have half a million or a million Twitter followers when we know nothing about whether those followers actually translate into engagement. ... the idea that they could be high be making decisions based on actual metrics on Twitter instead of what is bots and what is fake activity
Imagine if it gave me like metrics and insights and customer support. Like imagine you paid $100 a year and you could actually have somebody email you back from Twitter support would be pretty amazing, right? Or if you paid $5,000 a year for a business account like mine, and I was able to collect more email addresses or know my users or sort my users or maybe I could DM all my users how great would it be if you had a paid account because I use a third party tool called social metrics or somethin
the poll in our YouTube among the notice currently sits at should Twitter expand its paid product 77%. Yes, 23%. No, like people are definitely willing to pay.
So Twitter should sell, you know, analytics tools and give incredible customer support and insights to, um, companies and companies and high profile people would absolutely pay for it. So there's so many wins here.
Elon Musk is very thoughtful and his companies tackle incredibly complex problems. Yeah. This is an incredibly complex problem. You know, at times and other times it's very simple. If you dock somebody, um, if you're a bot account and you're spamming super easy. Yeah. So I think there'll be a series of things that are exceptionally easy to fix.
and you end up with just this kind of reinforcing negativity. Like, remember how it used to be fun to fight on Twitter? I like an argument. Sure. Why not? A debate is great, but not there. Right. It's just like, it's not fun to have. Imagine if you're trying to have a dinner party and you were having a philosophical conversation with your friends and you're arguing about this or that, and you're like, I'm taking this side of this position. And then a thousand people ran in through your front doo
After the deal is completed, Twitter will become a private company just like that.
the transaction was unanimously approved by the board just a week after that same board approved a poison pill
Twitter has evidently canceled its corresponding earnings call
the system can only get better from here. I mean the amount of bots and brigading and madness on the platform is already acute and it has been for a decade. The technology you're saying can only get better. Yes. The situation can only get better because they're not successfully policing the platform today. And I don't think any amount of policing is going to work. I think you have to attack this on a technology basis. You have to not let people create tons of accounts and you have to have a path
The expectation is higher and they're investing in robots to try to like make that all go away, including one of Amazon's investments is agility robotics, which develops bipedal, uh, walking robots called digits.
It's interesting and it's really smart because it doesn't feel like this is a hot space for venture necessarily. And it probably should be because fulfillment is the only way we're ever going to get anything in the world.
The expectation is higher and they're investing in robots to try to like make that all go away, including one of Amazon's investments is agility robotics, which develops bipedal, uh, walking robots called digits.
this is actually pretty interesting. Investing in companies that imagine solutions that incrementally increase delivery speed and further improve the experience of employees working in warehousing and logistics field.
When I say the end of Twitter, as we know it, I don't mean the product. I mean, the end of Twitter in its sort of current incarnation with this leadership and potentially this board.
he still in theory cannot write the, the poison pill is still in place. So what gets really dishy here is that this sounds like given the lack of response by Twitter, that, that Elon is exploring whether to commence a tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of common stock at this price of 5420. Um, but is not determined whether to do so. However, the, the board did put that poison pill in place, which is, which is that if he buys a certain amount, uh, starts to own a certain amoun
Total revenue for Tesla, 18.7 billion dollars. That is up 81% year over year. 81 and up 6% quarter over quarter net income. That is profit was 3.3 billion dollars. So we can put aside any when is Tesla going to make money questions. That was up seven and a half times, seven and a half times year over year and 43% quarter over quarter. And they delivered 310,000 cars up 68% year over year and up 1%. I mean, if you have tried to buy a car anywhere of any sort and not been able to find one, it is u
there's the mandalorian disney there's loki there's all those good disney plus shows
well isn't hulu disney plus espn package like 20 bucks a month or 30 bucks a month i have a package i think so but it's the package
and it's too expensive in the competitive landscape because disney that's it right if it was the only game in town no problem but disney is giving you everything everything i care about is on disney plus for eight dollars a month
that's what hulu is doing to me right now i can't get hulu to work on my apple tvs in the second home they're like you switch your locations too many times you can only switch locations four times but then it works fine on my phone so then i'm mirroring like it's just too complicated complex
facebook and google i looked this up in the interim facebook and google have been investing in giant undersea cables that connect the us singapore and indonesia
this is facebook attempting to do the same thing but all the way down to the pipes and i should point out here that google has been trying to do very similar things
or buy google like if you do a hostile takeover of google and then just be like okay let's get real here about what are you doing in hardware just like google pick six things and then do them and then stop introducing stuff that you just like you know bail on
putting laptops it's like how apple made the laptops cheap and google made the chromebooks cheap you want to get the kids when they're kids is how they're thinking about these companies of like the opportunity of the next what is it two or three billion to come online i mean it it's going to
what you could do with apple if you did have a zuckerberg or even a jack mentality of just like we are not going to be safe we're not going to just like live and die by the iphone e-bikes oh my god apple e-bikes
twitter because you know no one is so evidently in charge operates a little bit like a dow and here is jack saying like oh i want this decentralization and i want to pop up all these dows and then we keep seeing these scams where basically somebody comes in takes over a voting majority in a dow and then tanks it or steals all the money and so i'm sort of wondering if jack maybe
would twitter be different if jacket had the same share as market as mark zuckerberg does in facebook and that yeah is a really really good example of like now you have zuckerberg being like hey i'm taking my giant social network and i'm turning it into a vr and ar company i'm just doing a massive so if jack had wanted to do a pivot like that and had this super majority voting situation like no problem
they had a really good run of buying stuff periscope and vine what could have been like their instagram and whatsapp they could have i mean we wouldn't have tick tock right now if they had kept on with vine
i'm not a hundred percent prepared to take jack's word unquestioningly here because he was also he was running two different companies he was pretty checked out he was like i'm gonna go to africa for six months i'm into this blockchain thing like there was evident i would say if i were a board member i would also be like who's running the store here like are you focused enough on this product or are you trying to turn it into this other product and you know do you have a real plan here like i so
what this says to me is that there was just always a power vacuum and so the board came in and was like trying to meddle because if you're killing it don't board stay out of it uh generally
i'm definitely noticing that although twitter was late to the game and the idea of you know what like god help us facebook groups which went horribly wrong but twitter people are like oh i'm into this because it's an actually useful way to engage with content that you want with people that you know are smart by curating a specific community
be really impactful i'm noticing people wanting to because what people build on twitter is communities of people that they like to talk to right there's all kind there's a there's insert noun here twitter there's like epidemiologist twitter and there's law twitter and there's black twitter and there's lithium twitter i know this because i'm in a twitter community that's all about like lithium
i think there's we're starting to confront these real questions about whether it is good for our health our discourse and our news
i think a break is healthy it's an addiction um it's a real lean forward and if you're writers if you're doing journalism you can put a lot of your effort into twitter and then not into your podcast your book your fund your company so there's a time to dial it up time to dial it down
the offer to buy twitter has exposed twitter in so many ways right we talked about this last week about how it's exposed the the business model the sort of like moribund state of things and also maybe the fact that it's not that useful for people or that it's just this like journalism playground that is not good for journalism
Twitter confirmed that it is going to implement what's known as a poison pill. Basically, if any single shareholder or entity acquires more than 15% of Twitter's outstanding common stock, it will essentially trigger a threshold in which Twitter can potentially flood the zone with shares, bringing down the overall price. It doesn't necessarily preclude Twitter from courting other buyers, but it does suggest that they are not having it. CEO Prague Agrawal saying, I'm not having this Elon takeover
I think like what's so weird about this is that at the end of the day, Twitter, we're in this position for a lot of reasons. Twitter isn't a company and ultimately an asset. And like if it goes away or it becomes a thing that people don't want or whatever, like it's so small in relative terms. It's so US centric that there's a part of me that's just like, all right, whatever, like buy and sell Twitter. People will go somewhere else. Some other thing will come into its place. Like the idea that i
I thought it would just be a cacophony of lunacy, which I was right.
a16z's head of crypto investing chris dixon is number one on the forbes midas list that came out earlier this week
the 47 and a half percent number looks completely insane on paper it is objectively very high
reporters can still be on Twitter, but are encouraged to quote, meaningfully reduce how much time you're spending on the platform tweeting or scrolling in relation to other parts of your job, according to Dean McKay.
There is a version in which there could be a bidding war for Twitter shares and that would be pretty interesting, right? Like it would be interesting if somebody was like, I'm concerned about this existential threat that, you know, Elon Musk's ownership in Twitter represents for the public square. And so I'm going to like buy an equal and opposite number of shares either via a Dow or with civilians can do it. I'm not saying like the, you know, right. Okay. A civilian can do it. I'm talking about
Twitter is debating the edit button again and looks like it's coming
Uber is planning to pilot long distance travel bookings in the UK. So what this means is you'll open up the app and instead of just being able to get food or order your groceries, get an Uber x get a Lincoln town car or Uber black, you'll be able to book your train tickets, buses, which are popular in Europe, obviously, and even flights according to a report from the Financial Times.
strong to say that it's sideways as a business when we have seen spaces we have seen twitter blue like
covet comes to mind like you weren't allowed to talk about the masks or masks not working or
who better to run it than a power user who is great at entrepreneurship this is going to make more people want to work at twitter more people are going to obviously want to own the stock if elon's doing it and if you look at product velocity i'm just looking at it like unemotionally just if benioff because mark benioff your member wanted to buy it as part of salesforce he wound up buying slack so if you know bill gates or microsoft or who's a good buyer for a company well somebody who uses the p
we'll take a look and discuss if he is going to become an activist shareholder or not i'm just laughing because the or not seems so unlikely
massive sec disclosure this morning that uh my pal elon bought 9.2 percent of twitter two weeks ago
if you're going to want to make peace with these cities um allowing one app to have everything in it and kind of not threatening their ultimate demise uh to ride sharing was kind of like an olive branch of hey sure we'll send some of your traffic your way we'll make a little bit on it now you've got this more complete app because travis did always think about maybe buses would be in there or some public transportation would be in there so i looked at it slightly differently which was hey if we'r
Yes. And also Facebook is programming the out of us and given Facebook's close connections to, for example, you know, primarily GOP public relations firms or Peter Thiel.
We're not buying what you're selling. It's still Facebook. It's still loathsome.
Charles Schwab interactive brokers and fidelity they cited customer demand for extended hours trading and want to eventually reach 24 seven trading.
Charles Schwab interactive brokers and fidelity they cited customer demand for extended hours trading and want to eventually reach 24 seven trading. Fantastic.
microsoft nvidia and okta okta were all hacked over the past few months
The winner on this list is Walmart at $19,659 generated each second.
he totally sees the future
the actual Amazon economy is this. And so I'm not that worried about it.
notice that it's happening up there in the old white guy C suite that Apple has going on and use it to sell your devices. It's like, it will sell your devices.
So, when they say they're going to give you the follower count, they mean subscribing. Way to break the nomenclature. Yeah, I just, I mean, and then they have been promising metrics, as we know, for 15 years, maybe longer.
Now, Apple, of course, early to cornering the market in podcasting. I mean, it was named after their device. Like, they have just owned this market. And now you can upload an MP3. What? This is their big innovation.
You might've noticed why Combinator did something similar six years after I came up with this concept. ... a lot of seed and angel funds that were, you know, feeding at the trowel of Y Combinator. You saw them all freak out when that announcement came out. Like, oh, wait, I'm putting 350, 500 K in. Now, if there's four of those slots and Y Combinator just took one, I now have a 33% less chance or a 25% less chance of getting one of those slots.
And Google, I think even more than that with glass, even though it became sort of a funny joke, like that's brand awareness. They have brand awareness for days if they get into the space.
Google acquires a Raxium and appears to have re-entered the AR glasses race. I mean, the 2022 bingo card just keeps adding topics at an alarming rate. Raxium designs and manufacturers pixels for led displays. They have raised $85 million so far were acquired for a billion dollars, according to pitch book, telling you how hot this race really is. It's got super tiny pixels, blah, blah, blah. But the most interesting thing is what Google might be trying to accomplish here by going up against, you
I remember being at CNET and it was like, you could, Samsung was not allowed to run an ad on a review page of a Samsung phone, for example. Now it's like, Samsung has a huge, like a
But it's 39 99 starting. That's obscene
are we going to get an M2 Max now and M2 Pro and M2 and an M2 Ultra clear, like we're dunking on the names and we're right to and and I will never stop like marveling at the fact that I have three different Apple devices that charge in three different ways.
now, because of this new M1 chip, which is called the M1 Ultra, if you've been paying attention, there's an M1 that was in your phone, this replaces like the Intel and all these other chips. So they make their own silicon M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, which is what we got in our last Apple Mac minis, and in our MacBook Pros
this is going to be super confusing for people. But there is the cheese grater tower called the Apple Mac Pro, right? Now, that is the one that you can put a bunch of hard drives in. And it's got power supplies and a ton of ports on the back. And that thing is like $7,000. So this is supposed to be for that same group of people. But a little bit more affordable, I guess.
It does seem that Apple has turned a corner in addressing this group of people and not pissing them off by releasing the MacBook Pro with the M one chip in it, right, and putting the ports back and putting MagSafe back.
These are the core users who have felt left out in the cold for the last decade because Mac Apple, I'm sorry, would not listen to them. And their complaints were you make computers that are not designed for us. You took our ports away. You don't listen to us in terms of extendability.
the most exciting thing to come out of today is the Mac Studio.
It's multi-platform, not a great interface. It's super hard to cross in between things, putting in your weird URL every time you need to log in. Like, it's just not, it is. And I should, it should be easier for me to make a calendar invite from there, do all the things that like a super human can do. And you're absolutely right. Like it just, it, they got acquired and this does happen. I think, right.
No. Corporate IT departments did not, they were not comfortable with the security situation with, you know, I mean, I think they, they like a thing that they know. And Slack, I think didn't necessarily have the security topsy would have thought that those would go up as being, you know, being part of Salesforce. Salesforce, but it's absolutely true. If you've got synced products that are all in the same family, it's just a lot easier.
Slack grew revenue, 15% slower after becoming a part of Salesforce. Interesting. Then it did in its last year as a standalone company. Remember Salesforce. I had actually totally forgotten this, that Salesforce and Slack agreed on that acquisition back in December, 2020. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack. Right. That was roughly 27 times ARR at the time that deal was agreed upon. The deal was cash in stock. And that at the time, again, was a pretty fair price given the market. And it looks g
I love the idea of Frank Slootman, by the way, if you heard his interview, this will make perfect sense. Sitting over there being like suck it up team. Rub some cold water on it and get back out of the field.
One of the last tech stocks hanging on to a large multiple. They were trading at an $80 billion market cap about 67 times their 2021 revenue. As of Thursday's close, as we are recording this, they are now trading at a $68 billion market cap because apparently we hate that pathetic, shameful, appalling 80% growth.
It's a 20% decrease in growth from the prior quarter. So if you were to project that out over a couple more quarters, 20% drop. It could slow. That could get concerning.
Snowflake generated $1.2 billion in revenue, which was more than double. Got it. 2020 about 106%.
You know, I couldn't figure it out or rather like didn't want to take the time to figure it out. A lot of times I say I couldn't figure it out and it's not cause I'm not smart. It's cause I don't have that kind of time. I'll tell you the crazy.
It's multi-platform, not a great interface. It's super hard to cross in between things, putting in your weird URL every time you need to log in. Like, it's just not, it is. And I should, it should be easier for me to make a calendar invite from there, do all the things that like a super human can do. And you're absolutely right. Like it just, it, they got acquired and this does happen. I think, right.
No. Corporate IT departments did not, they were not comfortable with the security situation with, you know, I mean, I think they, they like a thing that they know. And Slack, I think didn't necessarily have the security topsy would have thought that those would go up as being, you know, being part of Salesforce. Salesforce, but it's absolutely true. If you've got synced products that are all in the same family, it's just a lot easier.
Slack grew revenue, 15% slower after becoming a part of Salesforce. Interesting. Then it did in its last year as a standalone company. Remember Salesforce. I had actually totally forgotten this, that Salesforce and Slack agreed on that acquisition back in December, 2020. Salesforce paid $27 billion for Slack. Right. That was roughly 27 times ARR at the time that deal was agreed upon. The deal was cash in stock. And that at the time, again, was a pretty fair price given the market. And it looks g
Like, if I were a Googler, and I had moved, or even if I hadn't moved, I mean, you know, previously, managers of this old school variety would make the argument that you weren't as productive at home, and maybe not everyone is as productive at home. But I don't think you can look at the American economy, or Google, or any of these companies and say, huh, that giant work from home experiment showed that everybody's like a lazy turd who won't work while they're at home unsupervised without a middl
I think you're going to see some people leave. It's also it's sort of like it's up to every company to set its own culture. And if Google is saying, you know, kind of like Coinbase said this, we're optimizing for the employees that we want. So certainly Google's prerogative. But I think your point is the larger one, which is like, great. Awesome. We'll take them. This is like a crazy game.
According to the Washington Post, some Google employees wound up leaving North Carolina employees in North Carolina wrote a letter to management protesting the salary updates and then left North Carolina after they moved there because they realized their salaries would be lower than they expected.
having gone through it with Mahalo, we created a search engine was content sort of Wikipedia plus search results. And Google did the same thing to us, they changed the algorithm famous Panda update, our revenue went down 95% of traffic went down 85% in one day. I call Larry, I call Sergei, I had the biggest ins you could have. Nobody returns my call, I finally get them in the room, I've talked to PR people because I go on a jihad publicly about this. And all of a sudden, it starts being in the N
I think when you actually remove your business and shut your business down, it's going to create pain, suffering, agitation in the populace. I know that's hard to say. We had this discussion yesterday. In order for sanctions to work, they have to create pain. And you're trading the pain of economic sanctions, the pain of inconvenience with the gain of stopping a war where thousands of people have died in just a couple of days.
But the bottom line is good on Apple. Great move. You can't just say in a situation like this, thoughts and prayers, our hearts go out. You got to take a stand at some point. Right. And this is probably amongst the easiest ones you can do is to stop operating in the country until they leave the other country where they're murdering people. Yeah. I mean, this is really basic. There's not a lot of gray area here when it comes to who's wrong. It's black and white. You don't get to invade another co
I mean, that's the one that just in consumer reports beat out the Tesla Model three as a top.
And then there are some things that Tesla's really spoiled me about. Like, why do I still have to turn this car on with a button? That's so stupid.
when I was putting 50 K in launch fund one into calm, he said, you know, you could share that with the syndicate.
Yeah, I mean, Robin Hood, obviously, I'm a shareholder and was an angel investor in and invested before they went public. You know, this I think the proper valuation of a company like this would be 30 billion. It's at 10 billion right now. If you look at it, the price to sales ratio on the current market cap for 2021 revenue is 5x, you know, I could see that being 10 or 15. But they did have this peak when everybody was trading like crazy during the pandemic. So there's some pandemic stocks here
I've had Amazon people. I mean, I've had everybody reach out. Amazon reached out at some point and. Yeah. I just didn't understand the offering yet. Like exactly what the value prop was.
Transcripts and captions are huge.
architecture for chips and processors and semiconductors. They don't manufacture chips themselves. They just designed the architecture IPO in 1998. Uh, Apple used to own about 15% of the company. And then in 2016 software soft bank acquired arm for $32 billion
they wanted to become a chip powerhouse with this, but they spent 18 months trying to get this deal done. And it was just a huge antitrust, you know?
Nvidia has been crushing it lately, $650 billion company at stock prices up about 70% over the last five, five years.
they're fast on their way to becoming America's only entertainment company.
You will never be able to guarantee that they're not snooping on your best sellers.
I don't think that Amazon always beats on price, the price of the actual good. No, they don't. I don't think that's the case at all.
AWS unquestionably subsidizes the e-commerce business to the detriment of others in that space. No doubt about it.
Zuck has super-duper crazy voting shares, so the board is a formality at best. He can do whatever he wants, for better or worse.
get your get your sundar here there you go yeah so she is currently coo so she becomes president and you bring in a new ceo and ceo and you just start moving towards a kinder gentler here's my
straight up lie about their metrics so all these so even though facebook and google have the lion share of digital advertisers right now you know that advertisers are like we do sort of wish we had an
so facebook is in a doubly weak position here one is sentiment like there are plenty of european users who given this challenge might just be like okay facebook and two they're in a financially weak position like you just said like here facebook is in a total stock market slide it's power and influence declining dramatically before our very
meta is now warning shareholders and the sec that they might just have to stop doing business in the european union
facebook or you know meta warning about how they're going to have to pull their services out of europe due to privacy regulations a threat that might not be as scary as they think it is
the median tenure of employees at this point at facebook appears to be about 1.8 years
basically like saying you work at a cigarette company it's like you work at jewel or you work in tobacco
whatsapp and avoid this problem yeah totally now i think is when we are going to find out you know because there is that mystique around zuckerberg who has or cheryl sandberg has right operated at an incredible level of execution for the last 15 years but i think now we find out if that mystique is is is valid right now because when you get into trouble not the kind of trouble where like a lot of people are mad at you and you can pr your way out of it but they've been doing it for a decade but t
that company named itself meta in a kind of embarrassing for all of us attempt to outrun all of those issues
I'm like, okay, there will be 10 to 20,000 videos on YouTube that are good or 200,000 videos on how to build a sauna. So I just I like, I find it all so fascinating in terms of creating options.
although they are now making their own content right with Apple TV. So it seems like there may be inching closer and like take advantage of this hardware. They're dipping Apple TV.
and Netflix have stayed away from games to the extent that they have, particularly when Apple is making this M1 chip that could be running games. Like, I don't really know why they have not embraced this
too many boxes. Yeah. It's really annoying.
Sony and Microsoft are trying to shore up their libraries to make their consoles more appealing.
in 2000, Microsoft got the exclusive rights to Halo made it an exclusive, it became this huge hit.
Microsoft has already come out and Bungie has already come out saying we're not going to make the Activision Blizzard games Microsoft said exclusive.
and of course you're going to get some company to come along and buy your company that's not doing that well so you can get your returns and i mean look it's a whole it is no conflict no interest no conflict no interest this is the opposite of everything you
and yc is an accelerator that works for some companies and not for all of them
i had a venture capitalist years ago be like i think you should take a look at why combinator and whether it's a net negative for the valley in general because every once something has enough influence yeah and power then of course they can seem like the bully in the room and it doesn't mean they didn't build that influence legitimately
if you do drill in on a yc company and they have 10 customers and you find out seven of them are from yc i would discount all seven yeah okay so i would say those seven don't count baby mob it'd be like it's not much just a club look it's a club let's call it what it is
when people do diligence on a yc company it might be wise and people have told me to discount their sales numbers or to drill into them and find out if there's a little favor bank going on here where let's say 10 yc companies pay for your product you pay for their product this is called round tripping in the industry
but what i will say is they because of their reputation a lot of the new investors uh not the old investors get kind of sweeped up in it so if you're a dentist or a lawyer somebody from outside the industry you kind of have felt like over the last years it's a safe bet to bet on a yc company and so you'll pay a higher price you won't review the documents and you make a quick decision so he's absolutely correct
y combinator will put you in front of hundreds of investors at demo day that's true he's like yeah sure that happens but no it's not unique nearly every accelerator does this including for example ours and there's only seven of you so he says sure yc might have more investors but it is simultaneously the hardest accelerator to stand out in given the outlandish batch size the demo day is kind of a joke
valuation by more than 10 to 14 percent that part of the problem is the batch size is 400 which seems to get to both of those issues right potentially the valuation thing because they're just pumping them out by the hundreds literally and how could you possibly give personalized advice
just diluted so this is probably true
he's being intellectually dishonest on that one so in that first one he's saying yc's name will raise valuation by more than seven percent is the most accurate not the 10 to 14. it's a subtle point but that last 375k is that market rate not at the seven percent rate
i can tell you as a first-time founder you're going to have a much easier time raising money and your company will become worth more than seven percent more valuable so that's a pretty easy calculation to make
oh yeah absolutely i mean someone's going to own 10 to 15 percent either way this way the funding is guaranteed you know exactly who owns your 10 to 15 percent correct you're off to the races the only question i guess i i have and maybe ryan has too is could you have gotten more money for the 10 to 15 percent if you went to the open market is this like the easy choice that's a bit of a discount and
I don't think it's not going to be a we work situation.
the scuttlebutt around the valley is that they just print money.
And, but if it's going to be your only car, that supercharger network is like, it's killer.
it is fair to say both that Tesla has gotten where it wants to go and probably will only continue to do that.
Yes, they are killing it. Yes, they are default alive. Yes, right now. If you are really looking for a, a, a day to day driver right this second, and that picture is going to start to change rapidly, right? Like every manufacturer is now legitimately in the EV game. I have started to drive a couple of them just to sort of see what the difference is between car makers who are switching to EVs and EV makers who are, you know, I mean, he's reinventing the car. Not everybody's going to want that. Th
the silent, like the secret deadly weapon of the Tesla in the Tesla universe is this supercharger stations up 36% year over year. Supercharger connectors up 35% year over year. Uh, the number went from in Q4, 2020, Q3, 2021, 29,281 supercharger connectors, 3,254 stations up to 34,76 on stations and 31,498 connectors. That right there is why you, why Tesla cannot be beat right now, even if the cars are better.
I remember visiting the factory when they were first building some of them and there was this tension of like, what in the car would be built by Tesla and then what would be sourced. And I've had many conversations, Elon, about this. He likes to build the stuff himself. He's a bit of a builder, if you haven't noticed. And so you look at their monitors, you look at their HVAC unit as just one, they have built their own essential HVAC.
Model SX production was down 19% year over year. I think that is because they're so busy building the other cars. Because everybody I know who's put down deposits for their S and X plaid, you know, this, like, with the yoke, is telling me they have, like, six months to a year wait time.
2021 full year revenue, $53 billion, up 71% year over here. That's just bonkers. Q4 was a juggernaut. $17 billion, up 65% year over year.
Microsoft Amazon one is reportedly terrible. I've only been on it once and it was not great time.
But like neither does Apple with phones and they still keep getting right? It's like, they've got the store and then it's so under this under this new sort of scrutiny of antitrust, which includes acquisitions of which Microsoft has made many that potentially reduce competition when it includes gatekeeping of which Microsoft is certainly still guilty, right? They're still pushing bundles.
Apple just went, Apple went premium, like full stop, right? They abandoned the like education market to some extent. I mean, they still have a little education discount, but what are you gonna do with 15% when the starting price of everything is $600, $700. They just decided we're a premium brand. We're about our margins. It's working.
It's interesting because they have 70 they have 75 billion in profit this year.
Microsoft has made many that potentially reduce competition when it includes gatekeeping of which Microsoft is certainly still guilty, right? They're still
they have managed to evade the antitrust scrutiny
Satya Nadella is that he is crushing it. So he's so quiet, right? He's not in the mold of the CEO that is in the news.
I have yet to identify a misstep by Satya Nadella at all. Even the hardware, even the surface hardware is pretty cool.
Its revenue was up 20% year over year this quarter to 21. 20% on a very big number. Zero. Like, who thought Microsoft was a hyper growth company? Just saying. On pace for almost $200 billion of revenue in fiscal year 2022, which would also be a 20% increase over 2021.
Microsoft may have, in the words of Jim Cramer, had its best quarter ever. In its history. Do you have supply chain woes, other companies? Microsoft does not.
Hmm. Even though crazy things, you know, crazy like fidelity or TD Ameritrade or chase or any Schwab, any of these could come in and essentially replicate coin bases business model, fundamental business model, almost wholesale, right?
Okay, now to some slightly more speculative, well, maybe one more speculative bet Coinbase, which is down also over 50% from its November peak of $357. It's low point on Monday was 165 a share, $50 billion loss in market cap on revenue of about $6 billion last quarter growth was only five and a half times year over year, which you know, listen, we should be delighted. Everybody should be delighted. But when you look at, you know, Netflix was 16%, even though we're now saying they're the expendab
So if we buy, you know, Zappos as a great example, or diapers.com, Amazon looks at that acquisition and says, Hey, we can get rid of the accounting, legal, back office, and the computing layers, and have them use the Amazon infrastructure for that and warehousing. That's why this makes it more efficient, better for consumers, right? That's the whole premise of an acquisition.
But that was an acquisition that that unquestionably, $1.6 billion, you know, consolidated a lot more data and information inside of Google, but also maybe reduced how big YouTube could have been.
So I think there'll be actually four of these services that have a hundred million plus subscribers and that'll be, you know, the HBO, Hulu, Disney, Netflix, and you know, who knows who else will, will get there, maybe direct TV or YouTube, but multiple winners in the, in the winner's circle for this one. And Disney will be either number one or number two. They could even eclipse net, uh, Netflix. I know that sounds crazy to say right now, but if we look at it with a 10 year arc, it's completely
okay so first of all i would say why is y combinator doing this this is an ownership play
how about maybe spend some time giving the market more clarity, some regulatory certainty for companies like Robinhood or Coinbase that could actually either help them grow or help them grow safely
how about maybe spend some time giving the market more clarity, some regulatory certainty for companies like Robinhood or Coinbase that could actually either help them grow or help them grow safely as opposed to getting involved in private companies
And so what do people do when they're at home with nothing to do and a lot of money? And they fire up Coinbase, they fire up Robinhood, they fire up, uh, fantasy sports apps and they start gambling.
But you're going to that 12 week program six in our case 16 weeks, and you're getting that halo of hey, Y Combinator or J Cal or whoever has invested in the company, Techstars, they had a filtering process. So downstream investors go, Okay, if you've been through Y Combinator, we'll pay a little more for those companies.
come to launch accelerator, we'll give you $100,000 for 6%, or it's I think 125 for 7% at Y Combinator, that implies about a $2 million valuation, which is very low.
So when somebody graduates from Y Combinator, you know, they're gonna be worth 12, 15, $20 million, and they probably have unpaid pilots.
You bundle the athletic subscription with Disney plus Hulu and ESPN. Like, oh, you bought Disney plus or you bought ESPN plus whatever Hulu. You get athletic with it or you're reading athletic and they upsell you. That's genius. Like, you're paying six, seven bucks. That was a whiff. That's a big whiff. Yeah. Bad job on the M&A team at Disney, which is the best M&A team in the business. They bought Disney, Pixar, and Marvel. But Bob Iger, who I've been trying to get on this program, producers, b
Tesla still is the only car that I would buy or tell people to buy because the range and the infrastructure can't be beat.
Working at Amazon can be the great, greatest job you've ever had. Absolutely. And Amazon should probably treat its workers better in warehouses. Right. Not even should probably, right? Like should, like they ran that guy out for trying to organize and then smeared him as incoherent. And then basically had to admit that everything he said was true.
uber eats or doordash as examples are asset light
jack i think had a hard time maintaining the service known as twitter in the age of trump which is the trolley car problem you know the unsolvable problem
in a startup called lyft which got absolutely demolished by uber
i tend to be you know bullish on lyft long term i was on the board there for many years as we were brawling with uh with travis and crew over at uber
like lock in the 10x win? There's no shame in doing that. I sold Uber shares at, you know, 30 some odd dollars a share was able to buy a home. Well, you know, was able to put money into, you know, 529 accounts for kids educations and you know, sleep well at night.
So that was probably one of the things that led to Jack giving up the CEO seat. New technologies emerging, you have Square at scale, and you have Twitter at scale. Where does the CEO put its next idea? Pretty obvious that that's going to be a bit of a conflict going forward.
there's no reason that Twitter could not turn everybody's account into a wallet and then start accepting crypto distributing crypto and go head to head and Twitter should obviously have a payments platform
I just saw on Twitter, they were going to do NFTs in your wallets and verify that if you're going to use an NFT of the board a yacht club or whatever hipsters or lions, you would have to actually prove that you had that NFT to put it into your profile picture, I think was the idea.
It's a product that will be with us for a long time. Does it have problems? Is it full contact? Is it crazy? Sometimes of course it is. But that's part of the fun of it. And it's an important product in the world. And so I think ultimately, this will be a great thing.
I think he got Twitter on exceptional footing, the products gotten better and better. They were launched Twitter blue, which I am a paid member of and I love Twitter as a product is amazing. And I think Jack felt, you know, there were other people who could run the company better than him. And I think that's a very mature, intelligent position to take, which is, hey, if there's somebody better, and he's a major shareholder still, then they should run it.
product velocity at Twitter has been extraordinary for the last two or three years, they work kind of stagnant, there weren't a lot of changes. And now we see Twitter blue, the news product, where we saw them do Twitter spaces so fast, it was unbelievable. And Twitter space is obviously dominating clubhouse me in a major way. And they didn't buy clubhouse, they just decided they would beat them heads up. They did stories then removed it. That was actually a good sign that they decided, hey, stor
four years ago you know the idea that disney was going to challenge netflix and even to be technically competent was kind of laughable but um you know the big folks uh the big traditional companies they kind of lumber but man they're kind of like these giant elephants like very they might move very slow but when they do like it's a big footprint right it's a lot of weight coming down uh so they'll move slow but you don't want to be under them when they walk over you
people were just looking at disney and thinking like how how could disney's business get any better and it'd be like if they had a hundred million people's credit cards and one click purchasing and 50 million people using their app every day that would be a lot better in other words they would have a massive distribution channel
i think that disney is the one company that could produce uh you know a top three offering so they'll be right up there with amazon and netflix
disney with espn with marvel star wars pixar and that whole collection including the disney assets of course the original movies they have an incredible incredible collection and when they go direct it will be very easy for them to get tens of millions of people to subscribe
the oculus is so complicated and um i don't like not being able to see the real world i'm not a fan of vr exactly but i did love beat saber i will say that and i am super impressed with the technology but my tweet was intended strictly to look at this phenomenon of people buying them and putting them on the shelf
people who i know who buy oculus especially people who are into video games like hardcore pc gamers console gamers they buy try and then say goodbye to their oculus
we've already started to deprecate our our mailchimp account to just try to get that payment from you know what is 18 000 a year now or something and get it down to you know 10 maybe because it's expensive
i'm starting to think i don't even need mailchimp anymore because review is giving it to us for free it's kind of a big hack isn't it
twitter space is doing great
i do believe the velocity of products at twitter is moving faster
the biggest right here i think is that the apple ios 14.5 app tracking transparency features which launched in may those are supposed to call cause all these kind of headwinds and they didn't um so that is a good sign
maybe they own like 450 million, I mean, that's extremely ballpark on YC, but obviously, it's a great return.
USDC comes out and it seems like it's a lot cleaner. And you decide at some point, you know what, we're not going to have any commercial paper. We're only going to have assets in there dollar for dollar.
But this is Apple saying, we're going to listen to our pro customers, and the pro customers have felt for close to a decade that Apple was ignoring them. Everybody wants a tower. Everybody wants giant monitors. Everybody wants ports. Who's a pro and Apple is just like, no, you want simple and they basically this the problem when a founder leaves the company or tragically dies and passes away like Steve Jobs did. Tim Cook is incredible as a CEO in terms of ringing the register, the supply chain,
Where's Apple in all this? Apple has $250 billion in cash. Last time I checked, well over $200 billion. Why doesn't Apple just buy TSMC? I guess that would be considered a real hostile act by the Chinese government. And why doesn't Apple give $7 billion to TSMC to build a plant, you know, in Vietnam or Korea or somewhere else?
Literally, the touch bar, which was introduced back in 2016, has been absolutely hated universally by Mac users, especially the more advanced users. It's kind of a silly, gimmicky concept. The idea that the keyboard would change based on the app you're using is clever. The problem is, in practice, it doesn't work. ... If you're an expert user, it's supposed to appeal to you. You already know that. You already know the keys. You're an expert. ... So it's really like for beginners to train them wh
We didn't get a new Mac Mini. I was kind of disappointed in that because that's become the standard that I use with a lot of folks on my team.
if you look at Coinbase, look at Robin Hood, man, they realized they got a problem with customer support, and they are going all in on it, they're going to spend tons of money, hire tons of people. And they're going to look at their call centers as a way to build trust, and to grow their businesses. And that's the right move. And I think that's what Coinbase and Robinhood will learn is that the money they spend, yes, it's going to reduce their profitability. But long term, it's going to build cu
And it'll be great for Coinbase for circle for any of the legit players, this regulation is going to drive more customers and more lock in.
should customers investing in crypto assume some level of risk in their account security? I think so, right? If you're going to be in a situation where nobody's in charge, and it's a distributed system, and it's easily hacked, well, maybe you should expect that you will get hacked.
Coinbase and Robinhood are both investing massively in phone support and customer support, which is a great idea.
How amazing would it be if your Amazon account was connected, or your Apple account was connected to your Coinbase account, and that was, you know, Coinbase was owned by Apple, or Robinhood was owned by Apple, what an amazing future that would be
we all universally felt like it was the right move
So I think it's, you know, a good idea on their part.
Coinbase is the number one player
I think Coinbase done a pretty great job of making it secure, safe and playing by the rules.
I've been getting that 320 pretty consistently on my Model Y.
I like the 400 mile battery to me 400 mile battery, and the self driving, those kind of features to me are the attractive ones in a Tesla
I cannot buy a car without autopilot anymore.
I really want the cyber truck. I think that looks amazing and dope.
going zero to 60 in four seconds or less is an absolutely crazy experience. And going in 1.9 seconds or under two seconds, like literally, the stuff that goes flying into the backseat is crazy. So it is an awesome technological advancement.
But having it on the phone and having the hardware work towards protecting your privacy is a major, major step in all of our privacy being protected.
Apple is now created a private relay. And it's in beta. And the iPad is part of this. So what it does basically is you will not be tracked when you're using Safari.
When Facebook does Facebook login, they're doing it to track you around the web. That's why they're doing Facebook Connect login. They want to track you, get data on you, and then sell it. When Apple does it, right, Apple login is not so Apple can get data on you because they don't monetize your data. What they do with your data is nothing. They store it on your phone and they will not let anybody have it.
Apple enforced that on people. If you want to have your app in the app store, you have to offer Apple login. And so Apple login is becoming a thing.
Apple, which is just absolutely world-class at taking complicated features and making them simple, is doing that.
Apple is pitting themselves as the anti-Facebook and the anti-Google. That is Apple's selling point, and you know what? People are buying it.
Apple wants to charge you an arm and a leg for your iPhone and take a massive profit.
The price keeps marching higher.
So when Lyft and Uber faced the pandemic, wasn't like they had to pay the leases on the cars of their drivers, because those were those drivers, uh, primary cars for their life.
as an early investor in Uber, I was watching this and then Airbnb, I wasn't in, but those were asset light, they're growing like crazy.
today the wall street journal reported that amazon is planning on opening department store style physical locations in the us
amazon will account for 41.4 of all us e-commerce sales in 2021 whereas walmart will account for only 7.2 percent
it's a great move by amazon I think because brick and mortar could not possibly be more compromised during the pandemic they're probably buying up spaces for pennies on the dollar
feels to me like they're trying to be very intellectually honest about what's an account which is great
previously you'd want the google one but a google product manager today it's probably not as valuable as a robin hood one today
but google wound up getting 90 percent of market share across the board in search on a global basis with the exception of maybe four different uh places in the world china south korea russia small number of places taiwan i think also um japan with yahoo so there were very small number of places that actually uh beat google but they were not the first to do a search engine obviously they just built something that was 10 times better than anything that had come before it and they had an incredible
you know, just basis points in Uber, but we own five or 6% of calm. So that shows you when you own 5% of something worth two or 3 billion, you know, and you own 10 basis points or 20 base points of whatever, of something that's, you know, 100 billion, you can have slightly similar outcomes
today had a great day. Robin Hood went public. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's the third biggest win of my career after Uber and calm, which are now tied.
But some companies like Webflow, Bubble, Calm.com, Notion have skipped rounds of funding.
I could see Coinbase, Airbnb, Uber, DoorDash. I could have seen Slack and certainly Robinhood. I could see all of those having a 10 to 20 X in them.
I think that they hit a key milestone, which was the cost of providing the service was less than the revenue the service brought in. Right. I mean, I think they're still investing in it. But it's really hard to displace Amazon Web Services because Amazon has just got this relentless march towards it. How little margin they can have. Now, we don't have insight into each of the product lines at Amazon. But the scale of that business is crazy. But Google's cloud is super important for them to win a
So YouTube is a major driver here.
YouTube grew revenue almost 100% year over year 80% year over year growth is just extraordinary for a large business.
YouTube, I believe in and of itself is a trillion dollar company sitting inside Google
An example would be meditation apps calm and headspace got millions of people to pay for meditation apps. The total addressable market for meditation apps before those two apps existed was $0.10 years ago, nobody was paying for meditation apps. Now, you have probably 10 million or 20 million people paying for all the different meditation apps out there. They induced that market to exist.
An example would be meditation apps calm and headspace got millions of people to pay for meditation apps. The total addressable market for meditation apps before those two apps existed was $0.10 years ago, nobody was paying for meditation apps. Now, you have probably 10 million or 20 million people paying for all the different meditation apps out there. They induced that market to exist.
which is what happened with Google's ad network. It's what happened with Facebook social networks. It's what happened with Uber and DoorDash in terms of their network of drivers and restaurants. It's what happened with Apple and their ecosystem for apps. Once that flywheel gets going, how do you stop it? It's kind of impossible.
It's what happened with Uber and DoorDash in terms of their network of drivers and restaurants. Once that flywheel gets going, how do you stop it? It's kind of impossible.
Now ByteDance, trading over $330 billion in secondary markets is an amazing company. It's a conglomerate of Chinese media companies, sort of like Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, except they own Totiao, which is a news aggregation type app. And then they have China's Tiktok, which is like a counterpart to it, which is Duyin. Tiktok doesn't operate in China as the name Tiktok. They do have this counterpart, Duyin. I've never used it. So I can't tell you exactly how similar it is to Tiktok. B
That's why I invested in the company. I thought that this company could change the world. And I am so happy to see calm doing that every day.
Uh, it would be 500 X.
And, uh, monthly active users have more than doubled 8.6 million accounts to 17.7 million. Uh, just for, in the last year, revenue was up 300%. Any thoughts on Robin Hood's S1? Obviously I'm an interested party.
Robin Hood, um, has filed their S1. And paid a fin refine $70 million for outages and misleading cup customers. Multiple days of outages back in March, 2020. We talked about here. Uh, and poor communications around options trading risks. Robin Hood's s one highlighted some extraordinary, uh, growth during that period. As we discussed on the pod. 18 million funded accounts. And they're on a $2 billion run rate, $522 million in revenue in the first quarter up 4x.
Rippling, which I use for my team at inside can answer those questions easily for you. They make it easy to manage both local and remote employees and contractors, whether they work from HQ or Timbuktu. When you hire in new states, Rippling can automatically register your startup with each state's tax agency and keep you compliant with local labor laws. Rippling lets you onboard new hires in 90 seconds. You can instantly set up payroll benefits and apps like Slack and GitHub, and you can ship th
Insidecom, Grin, Fitbod, and Robin Hood and you know, this cohort of companies I've been lucky enough to invest in, they're going to be the majority.
when you use robin hood for the first time thumbtack com or uber you had this magical moment where you said this is so transformative i can get a car or i can get food anytime i want by pressing a button oh uh robin hood i can trade a stock for free and i'm onboarding in seconds those give you that kind of vibe
start of day, end of day on your Slack or whatever chat you're using to manage your company, I suspect everybody's using Slack now
740 million professionals all over the world, they have the biggest global footprint in finding amazing people around the world is a massive competitive advantage.
I have had a tremendous experience finding amazing talent on LinkedIn because they put the jobs you're trying to fill in front of the right people, both active searchers and passive searchers.
she gave very pragmatic examples like separating google maps from android and when you turn on your android phone you you would have to install maps or maybe you would pick from the different maps that are out there different programs and that there would be integration in them and people could swap out you know mapquest or apple maps in their google searches so a lot of actually very interesting pragmatic approaches
she thinks one remedy is to kill amazon basics because the marketplace shouldn't own the goods as well
she seems to want amazon web services spun out which i think would just double the value of it or maybe add 50 of the value of it
she talked about amazon's vc arm using data to invest in buying companies why wouldn't they that makes total sense uh that's great signal for them
she also um brought up amazon studying the sales of other products to inform amazon basics a claim that amazon says they don't do but everybody knows they do do because all that information is publicly available
in other news robin hood which i'm an angel investor in uh just for clarity and to do a little mini flex announced ipo access they're basically going to allow retail investors to buy ipo shares before the company officially lists in a blog post on thursday robin hood titled robin hood is democratizing ipos robin hood announced they were rolling out ipo access to retail investors with no account minimum this is super important and amazing because obviously ipos pop on the average of 36 in 2020 ac
Oh my God, I sold Weblogs Inc to AOL and it was wonderful. And then all years later, they shut down half the blogs, then another 30% of them. And all that's left is Engadget and Autoblog. This is really heartbreaking for me. They did a great job in the beginning and totally screwed the whole thing up.
And now, the New York Times is actually, according to reports from journalists, in the New York Times, which is getting kind of meta here, got a little freaked out about this. And then they put the former get Gawker editor, he's now running New York Times version of Substack, or newsletters, whatever it will be.
This would give Amazon access to just a huge library that they could make part of Amazon Prime Video, and they could license it to other people. And it starts to give them an IP catalog that is nowhere near Disney+, but it's kind of puts them on Netflix level, doesn't it? So this is a major move.
Now, the MGM film library includes over 4,000 titles, those are movies, and 17,000 television episodes. If you split the price, you know, and you made it half and half, you know, maybe they're paying 4,000 titles, $4 billion, $1 million per movie. That seems pretty reasonable. Some of those movies will never make a million. Some will make many more than a million. So they've got a huge catalog of films.
They also own The Handmaid's Tale, which is doing fantastic on Hulu. They own the Rocky franchise, which has been rebooted. I'm not sure that's got huge legs. Stargate, very much beloved, multi-franchise TV show, Robocop, Legally Blonde, Shark Tank, and Survivor.
You could see James Bond over the next 50 years producing a movie every two years, 25 movies, doing a billion dollars each, that's $25 billion in box office, completely possible.
They own the James Bond franchise. That's kind of the big piece here, and the James franchise, the James Bond franchise, you could see being worth, you know, half of this price, in my mind.
MGM is a movie studio that has reportedly been on the market for $7 to $10 billion, and their IP isn't Disney level. It's not Marvel level. It's certainly not Star Wars, but it's not bad.
I have no way I'm getting rid of Amazon Prime. So if you put those four together, Netflix is in fourth place for me.
So Amazon is really competitive on Netflix and Disney Plus, because it's part of a bundle, right? And the bundling is what we're seeing occur more and more often... So this is a super big win.
over 175 million Prime members have streamed shows and movies in the past year, I'm quoting, and streaming hours are up more than 70% year over year.
They own the James Bond franchise. That's kind of the big piece here, and the James franchise, the James Bond franchise, you could see being worth, you know, half of this price, in my mind.
So this is a major move. I can't believe that, you know, somebody like Netflix didn't make it, given their market cap, really strange, but looks like Amazon's going to win it.
Twitter has been known to not show ads to the most important accounts. In other words, if you've got over 100,000 followers, you're probably going to not see so many ads, or at least that's the rumor.
If one to 5% of those same users on Twitter, pay this, you know, alleged 299 price, $36 a year, that'd be 72 million to 360 million a year. What's interesting about that number is it would be 100% profit. I mean, you might have some fees if they allowed it through the App Store and gave a 30% cut to somebody like Apple or Google. But essentially, you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. And it would probably become 10%, 20% of their revenue.
So if you were a journalist, if you were a CEO, if you had a corporate account, those numbers actually would be quite reasonable, because people already pay for things like buffer, where they pay for analytical tools, etc. And they obviously have people on staff who are getting paid well to to staff their Twitter accounts. So 250 a year for a professional Twitter account is not that big of a deal.
if one to 5% of those paid 250 a year, that'd be 2 million to 10 million users. And that would be 500 million to 2.5 billion a year. And so that would be approximately, you know, at 5% 250 a year, that'd be 67% of their 2020 revenue.
If you look at something like Facebook and Instagram and other products, they constantly add new features, rip features out, and they're constantly innovating. So it seems like Twitter has realized this and specifically, Jack, and he has started to really elevate the product offering
And innovation solves all problems. And what we've seen from Twitter in the last year is massive innovation in the form of shipping products. Where a company starts is often predictive of where they end up. And Twitter started with a very simple product and very slow innovation. They didn't like to change the product because it was simple and elegant. That might have been a mistake.
Twitter did $3.7 billion in revenue in 2020 with 7% year over year growth. That's actually not huge growth. But it's growth and for a brand that was incredibly influential in terms of media, politics, the arts and sports and almost every major topic in the world. Really, Twitter underperformed in terms of growth and revenue and it feels like they've now turned that around.
I would if I really wanted to give credit here, I think Naval and Angel List, and Paul Graham and Y Combinator into a lesser extent.
magic keyboard is still 300 bucks, which is almost half the price of the iPad itself. I mean, Apple, you are a trip. Only Apple could do something as just absolutely loathsome and insane as charge $300 for a keyboard that they it's got to cost them no more than 25 bucks to build that thing.
This M1 chip, not made by Intel, not made by AMD, this is their chip. And it's now in every device. This is really spectacular. It's going to be in the iPad Pro, which is my, as an investor, any VC or seed fund or angel fund, you know, they have to have a $400 floating keyboard and the latest iPad Pro. So I will be upgrading to this immediately.
The most important one, as far as I'm concerned, is this Apple podcast redesign.
it was a really exciting, exciting keynote today, and there's a lot to get into.
so so ribbit made the 500x and i guess andreessen but andreessen made like 20 billion of returns of which you know they're probably getting 25 30 percent so they they made the most money uh may not have been the highest irr but it was the most money and you're right they doubled down in this like 2018-2019 period it sounded like they were doing a bunch of secondary buying they were buying the stock at 25 bucks yeah they bought it all from fred wilson and union square so as much as from other inv
even Amazon, they allow third parties on the platform to sell and compete against them. So if you can make better, you know, USB-C cables, you can compete heads up. And that if you were going to come up with a sanction against Amazon, it would be allow third parties to put on your platform. Right? That's what you do. But there are all these other things that are making people nervous about them.
like Google does with AdSense and YouTube, right, they get 55% of our dollar
And there's no harm, quite the opposite to somebody having Facebook for free or Instagram for free or Gmail for free, or Gmail increasing the amount of storage they give you or Google photos. I mean, they're in a competition to see who can be more generous.
I think Twitter already has been quietly giving up space as a rumor Uber is going to give up some space.
So Airbnb is a perfect example. They kept telling them, do boats, do airplanes, do lawnmowers, do experiences. And they just did experiences in like year six or seven. They waited. They waited because there was so much critical mass to have.
So the opinion page of the New York Times does have a perspective. You pick who you want for president, you pick who you're going to fight for, or you'll pick winners and losers on that page, just like this blog will, and you'll have a range of comments.
the New York times is losing its status as the paper of record
And then I, it just got, got taken away from me by that goddamn search engine panda update that Google did.
the idea was Amazon would not win it all, and merchants would want to have a direct relationships with their customers
Of course, we love using LinkedIn jobs at launch because we can manage all of our job postings and contact candidates from a single view, whether you're shifting business hours or hiring more remote employees.
Tesla has made the model s that are they made the roadster the s the x, the three and then I think the culmination of all their work is this masterpiece the why that if you buy the model why you cannot cannot drive any other car I don't think ever again.
Of course, we love using LinkedIn jobs at launch because we can manage all of our job postings and contact candidates from a single view
Slack was kind of known for a beautiful design and making IRC beautiful.
Airbnb is the hardest company to stop in 2021. Because it's so, it's so distributed.
I was gonna say he taught me in a great lesson around that. Like, when he first started Uber, and he and I were at a party at the first round capital office, and he told me the idea. And I was like, dude, the taxi lobby is gonna fuck you. There's no way you can break through those guys. It's a brilliant idea. But there's this really insurmountable barrier between you and success. And he was like, I'm a fighter, and I'm gonna kill them. Correct thing that I didn't. The thing I didn't quite unders
the number two investment we ever made was calm was the first syndicate we ever did, and they charged and they used to charge $10 for the app one time, then subscriptions came out. And because of subscriptions, consumers are now very delighted to pay monthly or yearly a subscription for 60 to $300 a year, if they're getting value from it, I believe I prefer the consumer subscriptions, I'll tell you why I think it makes people more focused on providing extraordinary value.
i started selling 10 20 of my uber position you know and now i'm just like i i don't see a world in which uber is not number one at ride sharing and either number one or number two at food delivery and so why would i sell the rest of my position i just don't see it
nobody really thought that a company like uber or airbnb i think those are our two biggest hits each nobody really thought at the beginning that those could become a global phenomenon as fast as they did
your airbnb position is is there any way to knock airbnb out i don't see it i don't think it's going to happen i think that that company will be here in 10 years
the gme short interest dropped in half today it's monday i'm sorry it's tuesday but yesterday had dropped in half
made good on that and i actually think if that's all that was involved that was a big mistake i think robin hood should have eaten it
we all know they raised 2.4 billion this week on top of the 1 billion from Wednesday on top of the 600 million dollar credit line that's 4 billion in cash apparently the requirement for them went from 3 billion to 700 million so it seems like that's there's some equaling out of
the depository and trust and clearing corporation which is wall street's main clearing house for stock trades demanded three billion dollars in addition collateral from Robin Hood which they said was an order of magnitude more than usually required
So, and, and the Chewy founder who is very successful at e-commerce came in to run the company.
So assuming they can line that up because that's probably what's going on right now is a $10 billion investment is going to go into this company pre-IPO so that they can actually take advantage of this situation and grow.
when I'm putting money into Calm and they're doing at that time, I think they had $10,000 in total revenue. I really don't, I mean, back in those days, I wasn't doing really any diligence. I was just saying, I like this company. I like the founder. I've used the product and we weren't doing like too much diligence, but as we started to put in 500 K a million dollars, now we started putting somebody on it
So, in both these cases, they have been tremendous returns for us.
I think Jack and the platforms also have a difficult task. Do you leave this person up after what we saw on Wednesday, and a lot has changed since Wednesday.
And this is where my head was like, they're charging you $1,200 for a phone, but they took out the charger? Because there's already 2 billion on the planet? And they took out the headphones because they want you to buy the $300 ones? I mean, and then they're explaining to us that it's a smaller footprint, and the box is smaller because they took stuff out? It's so ridiculous. But this is in your best interest and better for the planet. Okay, I get you, Apple. They're screwing us. I see what you
Congrats on almost $70 million in funding for going through Y Combinator, the best accelerator in the history of Silicon Valley.
they only build you for people who were actively using the product now that's a beautiful awesome feature it makes you not scared to use it but on the enterprise level i mean that seemed to be like maybe one of those non-cutthroat things that maybe we're holding them back
it just seemed to me this company unlike zoom uh should have been able to grow quicker and if you look at their numbers they had 87 companies that had were spending over a million dollars you put a rabid sales team on that product and they go in like benioff does with his sales team
salesforce in a record transaction for a sas company i think it's the highest ever paid for a sas company 27 billion dollars 27.7 billion dollars for slack which has only been public for just over a year
Because you don't want to be the person who sells all of their Uber at $4 billion, which somebody did. And Uber's worth $80 billion at the time we're talking about this. So that person got millions of dollars five years before I did. But they missed the big run-up
Google was so elitist in the beginning. Oh, we only want people who went to these schools. And there's a bunch of companies that had all this like degrees and schools that they were obsessed over. It's gone. It's over. It's done. Nobody cares.
you've heard me talk about the Chrome operating system, which I am absolutely was addicted to, but my addiction got broken on Chrome OS because of Zoom because Zoom on Chrome OS is terrible.
Apple has so much power in the industry that they are making their own chips. Now with smartphones, this was, there were obvious reasons for this. And they had such great insight into where the world was going. And they had so, so much resources that they went from buying Intel chips for their computers or buying other people's chips to making their own. Now, when you do that, you have this massive advantage. You become not reliant on other people.
Just like if, you know, right now Tesla is buying batteries from Panasonic, wherever they buy them from. If they make their own batteries, if there was profit in the batteries, now they can either take that profit or they can make their product cheaper. I think Elon kind of signaled already he's going to make a 25k car or something. I think part of the idea of him bringing batteries internal is, yeah, we'll still use other people's batteries, but if we make our own, maybe we can cause the price
that thing, as people know, was based on the Lotus frame and all the parts came from different places.
Elon is pursuing the same strategy with Tesla, but he couldn't start there.
And the idea was you're going to work on it for three or four months. You're going to have 3K each. It was ramen. He called it ramen funding. I'll pay for your ramen and part of your rent. You guys work for three or four months. If it works and it works out great. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
In the early days, he had no money. I think he gave 8K per founder. So if you had two founder team like Reddit, he would give them 16K. If you had three people, he would give you 24K. If you had one person, he'd give you 8K.
Y Combinator had a massive influence on the startup ecosystem. I give Paul Graham so much credit.
Companies are losing money on every delivery, and it's not like one company is running away with this. Not even close.
It is not owned by DoorDash, Postmates, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and the like. In fact, those delivery services are a fraction of the overall delivery.
I think it's, you know, I think Y Combinator does get credit, Paul Graham, for saying we're going to invest in developers and they're going to be the, the tip of the spear.
Twitter's insane decision to block the URL.
I went to tweet the story, and it wouldn't let me tweet the story. So the literal New York Post was banned by Twitter.
And he's got the car, the Model Y, I just traded in my Model 3 for a Model Y. The Model Y is like 50% better than the Model 3. And the Model 3 was twice as good as I'd say the Model S and the Model X in terms of like value for dollar, maybe even five times better for value for dollar actually. Now that I think about it, because those other cars were over 100K.
If you look at Elon, he just did battery day. He's in year 11 or what is well past year 10 in Tesla's. So yeah, he's getting closer to 20 years with that goddamn company. And what is he working on? He just did battery day. Wait a second. He's been at it for over 10 years and he's doing battery day, the first battery day. Yeah, that's because he's been buying batteries and he's still building those cars. You realize, you know, what would be great if the batteries cost half as much and I can make
insane that people would put TikTok on their phones and not believe that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, would not have access to that.
this is why YouTube makes me a little nervous even investing in their ecosystem, is because you're right, Marco. Like, they could just delist you and you spent a year building on it and you're just like, oh, where's my channel? And then you had no recourse. You can't even, there's nobody to talk, I mean, I can, I'm Jason Calacanis, I can email Susan Wojcicki if I want to and she's going to respond or else I'm going to go ham on Twitter or something. But, you know, if you're just a civilian or so
Amazon made a really strategic decision years ago, which Jeff Bezos spoke about when he was at these congressional hearings on breaking up big tech, or at least that was the pretense for them. And he talked about how that was a very polarizing decision inside of Amazon, but that he unilaterally decided, we're going to do it. We're going to let people on the Amazon platform sell whatever they want and compete with us. That has led to over 2 million Amazon third-party sellers.
i think jeff bezos did the best job he had a great opening statement and he was the most candid um and i think least likely to get broken up
I think Apple and Amazon did great. Facebook did horrible. And Google is somewhere in between those other parties.
I want to start off with who I thought was the big winner in the opening statements. That was none other than Jeff Bezos, who talked about his mother, his stepfather, and his amazing journey to build one of the most important companies in the history of technology and commerce.
david sax um went to stanford with folks you know like keith roboite uh peter thiel during an era where uh they were a bunch of huge nerds who created a way to transfer money on palm pilots called paypal it didn't work until they decided to move it to email i'm not sure whose idea who gets credit for moving it to email sax
especially if you were at Y Combinator previously you got to skim the cream
whereas Y Combinator maybe there are two years beyond you a seed fund might be a year or two beyond that and a series a fund might be five years behind that
They said, all right, fine. Tell me how you make money. And they said, well, that's the kicker. We're going to make it free. And I was like, okay, I'm in. And it makes no sense in one way. But if you're saying, if it does work and it's a long shot, what happens to the world? And I just said, what if they get a million people doing this?
we're big fans of slack and notion and zoom etc obviously we're big fans of slack
in my Tesla it used to be we get an update like every six months or a year back in the Model S days and they didn't happen that often I think maybe three months six months and then nowadays with my model 3 here we are you know in the second decade of Tesla's existing we're getting over-the-air every couple of weeks especially if I'm a self-driving one and so it just feels amazing to get one every two or three weeks
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could you ever see an uber and lyft merger what would need to take place for that to happen that will never happen because it would not make economic sense for either party and would not be allowed by regulators it would be just seen as I think in today's climate as non-commercial and I think that's good for everybody it's good for consumers
they're leaving markets if they can't be number one or number two which in fairness was Travis's original position
in terms of buying up the competitors I think that's something that naturally occurs and because uber is the number one player in the space naturally the consolidation will happen with them first
I think what Darr is very good at is making people not pissed off about uber and maybe stopping the wartime culture that that company had
I think they'll outperform something like Disney or Netflix I believe that there are a high growth stock
you have a manager in Dora who is doesn't have founder authority he's not the founder of the company he came in he's a hired gun and so he has to keep his job and he answers to a board that means he can't make a crazy aggressive move without getting the buy-in of that board
We saw Twitter, um, and square the Jack, uh, collection of companies. They're not going to come back to their offices or work from home, primarily going forward.
for something like Airbnb is kind of hard to get to couches and extra rooms
when you have those marketplaces you have to have supply first because you can't bring demand to Airbnb and say hey would you like to rent a place in Hawaii and there's no places so there is no choice but to have supply first
I'm a big fan of using LinkedIn to make lists and then to just methodically reach out to people in a very personalized way not in a cut and paste kind of way
there are some companies like Apple which don't need to spend money on marketing but they do it why what does Apple spend all that money on marketing in some ways I think it's because they want to confirm with their existing customers that their existing customers are awesome in other words they're selling this like lifestyle to their existing customers to keep them in the fold to make them feel good and to make their employees feel good you drive up and down the 101 freeway here in the Bay Area
or got you into Y Combinator or TechStars or launch accelerator man that's gonna be amazing for you
it's hard in an up market to raise money because there's so much goddamn noise and you might have 20 competitors going after the same prize ... it might be hard to raise money in a down market because people are investing less and there's less investors
it might be psychologically hard if you're weak if you don't have a fortitude if you're not self possessed if you're soft you might be ... to press that things aren't growing fast enough or it's hard to raise money
your customer acquisition cost which might have been $150 suddenly goes down to 50 well if your profit margin on your product is $75 you were basically unsustainable in terms of using those ecosystems to grow and now you're suddenly profitable well that's what's going to happen and so that is a wonderful thing
a down market is great for a number of reasons the first reason is there's not a lot of competition and that means competition for customers competition for funding dollars in competition for employees and talent
fortunes are built in the down market they're collected in the up market
an economic crisis a good time to start a company heck yes heck yes and it's a great time to be an investor in company
this makes it wildly efficient and the drivers only have to go to one location so you could have literally 30 restaurants in the space that one restaurant would have previously been located 30 different brands and the drivers only have to go to one space so you can start to add up why this is incredibly powerful
this will be one of these businesses that are anti fragile during a pandemic more people want to order food in because they don't want to leave their house and during a crises an economic downturn are people gonna stop eating no they're gonna keep eating and so will they go out to a fancy restaurant maybe that's where they make the cut and then maybe they do more delivery and pickup of affordable food from these cloud kitchens and these cloud kitchens are gonna be able to do things more efficien
if you want to try to raise I don't think it's a bad idea to get on some people's radar if you do very tight targeted emails where you're emailing a very specific investor you've read their blog you follow them on social media you know where their portfolio is at how big their fund is you've really researched that person and you've customized that pitch to them
some investors if they don't have a huge portfolio are probably sitting there at home locked up with their headset and zoom and they might want to take a quick 10 or 20 minute call so if you frame it as such hey I've got to start up we grew 25% on average the last three months and this month it looks like we're gonna grow 40 percent so you're leading with that strength and the strongest part of your business you're showing you're a high-growth company
now is a terrible time to get on the radar of investors you don't know because they're probably very busy and that would be the argument that I'm seeing with a lot of investors
I would say overall the down market is the absolute best time and there's never a bad time to start a great company
what will happen during a crisis like this is people will value security and they'll be less likely to jump from company to company and when you go buy ads on Facebook or Google maybe you won't have as many free flowing dollars there so your customer acquisition cost which might have been $150 suddenly goes down to 50 well if your profit margin on your product is $75 you were basically unsustainable in terms of using those ecosystems to grow and now you're suddenly profitable
a down market is great for a number of reasons the first reason is there's not a lot of competition and that means competition for customers competition for funding dollars in competition for employees and talent
in is an economic crisis a good time to start a company heck yes heck yes and it's a great time to be an investor in company so as I always tell people fortunes are built in the down market they're collected in the up market
uber and lyft and door - it's created like a ton
much like the pandemic that we're currently in has driven people to try zoom for the first time or maybe had them double down on slack
Airbnb which has created more small businesses probably than anybody
maybe they have their extra shed in their backyard set up as a as an Airbnb or may to have an extra bedroom as an Airbnb or maybe they're working for a management company that's doing Airbnb all of that creates competition for workers
just thinking about those frontline Amazon workers instacart workers of which are striking today I understand or doing a walkout and I just thought to myself like how on earth are we not giving those people double pay and I literally email Bezos today personally and I we did it what why don't they just let
when I saw Thumbtack, uh Robinhood, Uber, and calm.com in the early days, all of those, even though the products were very simple and janky at you know, uh on the margins, like Uber was called Uber Taxi. Um it's not a taxi. Um there were subtle moments of brilliant on the pro- brilliance in the product.
like Apple has no ability to make iPhones in this country and that's Apple with unlimited resources they don't know what they're doing in terms of making a goddamn factory this is a national security concern if we can't build stuff
if you're running a start-up you need to be super efficient and you've probably got tons of SMS messages coming in emails for customer support and you're having all these conversations in single player mode in other words we've got all these threads inside of your email well what if you could play multiplayer email well that's what front let you do and I have a portfolio company you look and they are a talent marketplace and we've invested in this company and their CEO Zack runs the entire compa
the people who were able to get on Google or Facebook and had a sense about that they did very well
that ability to see things that worked in other fields and then apply them to adjacencies or things that are very far off the same way Moneyball they took quantitative analysis and stock analysis and they applied it to baseball and it worked right that's that kind of nonlinear adjacency thinking that is making some investors able to run slack like a consumer company even though it's an enterprise company right that's like where big things happen
just because I won with uber or calm or Robin Hood and I saw traits and those founders does it mean that applies in the future
it's obvious that Twitter has not got a handle on the creation of new accounts and really this is an economic issue they want to show growth the stock market looks at the number of users the number of accounts created so there is no incentive for them to not have new accounts created if they if they throttle and make it more difficult to create new accounts then when they report their numbers people are looking at those numbers as an indicator of how they're doing and so there's a financial prob
if you look at bloomberg he was starting from far behind Trump on Twitter and he wasn't allowed to spend money on Twitter to promote his presidency maybe if he was able to spend on Twitter he could have caught up to Trump
Twitter said we're not going to do political advertising during this election we're going to take it off while we figure this out democracy's too important
I wound up putting a little bit of money and it's worth like 300 X or something
I said I'm in rather no Brian what was going contrarian very simple this is one percent chance this thing works but if it does it's worth 10 billion dollars
well I think it's 10x from here
I think selling to Robin it was a good idea if you get a chance to get on a rocket ship why not do it
they sold their newsletter podcast media conglomerate to my Robin Hood which I'm an investor in
you're an investor in uber right like I'm not going to convince you that uber is a predatory exploit poor people
I saw another stat is it's basically a hundred percent of drivers churn every year or something like that
I just heard a stat that was 90% of all the uber drivers in New York they work full-time
I think now that Lieber is doing that they they they pay for that time I don't think they pay for the wait time and there's a minimum now with a fifty cents an hour or whatever fifty cents a mile fees so I don't think you're correct in that they're making under what would be minimum wage in any case
there are still a lot of mattress companies looking for tech to kind of augment and the form factors that can go into yeah so you could actually go to Casper and say hey would you like to include this technology and make it caspere branded or one of the other pet branch could white label it for them potentially or something
part of it is that people don't know it exists they didn't know that 8 sleep existed so they went in to match this
it's $3,000 I think or $2,000 for the club for the a sleep ad which is well worth it by the way it's amazing
we also are investors in each sleep which now have like a 5% overlap because 8 sleep were launched like three or four night time meditations nothing compared to what comm has obviously
people who were laid off from we work who wanted to find work afterwards have found it by now
the public markets as we've seen through burrs IPO slack's IPO they're not interested in unprofitable companies
at the end of the day my career is going to be made by uber calm Robin Hood thumbtack data stacks wealthfront probably that cohort desktop metal
uber black is highly profitable uber X is profitable is we're pool profitable I'm not so sure maybe they break even maybe they lose a little Boober eats and doordash and post mates they were all losing money losing $2 per order delivered
you saw Luber go down from maybe a peak of what forty five dollars forty seven dollars all the way down to twenty five dollars and now it's coming back... because austerity measures darah is cutting staff that are unnecessary or redundant he's getting focused on profitability
uber when it started had one service uber black it was the nice Lincoln Town Cars it was meant for executives going to and fro airports or from meetings who could afford $100 50 to $100 I'd black Lincoln Towncar type service they did not launch with uberx ... they started with one thing now why did they pick that thing well because it was massively profitable the most profitable segment of all of uber services is the uber black service because it's the most expensive and it's targeted towards se
LinkedIn jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you are looking for so you can hire the right person quickly I know usually you like a take your time you know what LinkedIn is so good you're gonna do it faster and over 600 million members visit LinkedIn to make connections and a lot of them looking for new jobs and some of them are passive right you get both of those groups of people a new hire is made you're not gonna believe as every eight seconds on LinkedIn and that's why
ninety percent of the gains not 90% of the total but of the gains went to those two players in the duopoly
everybody knows the media is completely screwed everything is shutting down because Google and Facebook have a duopoly on advertising
those are you know they're kind of big bet kind of players there
the market for electric cars like took decades the market for crypto might take decades
if you look at Tesla it's really the perfect example most people did not care about electric cars they had long forgotten the ev1 and when Ilan invested in the company that eventually became CEO of it the Roadster was a toy that was super expensive that two thousand people bought and it was a proof point and then the Model S you know thousands of people then tens of thousands people bought and that was a ten-year crazy journey over ten years now
I'm really excited to have my good friend Marco Zappacosta on the program he is of course the founder of thumbtack which was I think the third or fourth angel investment I ever made 10 years ago has it been a deck started with the bang you had a pretty good run out of the gate
LinkedIn is the best place for you to post your job. LinkedIn jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills you're looking for so you can hire the right person quickly. Over 600 million members visit LinkedIn to make connections and discover new job opportunities. In fact, a hire is made every eight seconds on LinkedIn. And at launch we've made two amazing hires off of LinkedIn.
you've raised over a hundred million dollars in your last rounds of funding
if you don't know what that is it is a paid subscription sports publication which Alex seems the worst possible idea to launch in 2015 when you said I'm going to launch a subscription product in 2015 after the investors laughed and your friends laughed at you you then told them you were gonna do it in the hardest possible category sports
we use LinkedIn to find great founders that we can invest in
I guess flex board has had a big impact on the industry
I said no Robin Hood it's free and it's mobile right and then like oh well II trade kind of sucks and Bloomberg is expensive and terminal so they're at the bottom there offensive and it's slow and this is free and it's fast and it's mobile right
I'm obviously investor in the company and love the founders they're in the team they've done such an amazing job forty million people have now downloaded calm and it was apples twenty seventeen half of the year so find out what that calm calm slash twist it's an amazing product get some sleep you're gonna need it
nobody's talking about Zuckerberg spending something like ten five or ten million dollars a year on security they have a fleet of jets at Google you ever hear about the Google Jets you haven't heard about the Google Jets in a long time you know why so money printing machine shareholders don't care if you're printing about perks if you're printing money if listen if Bezos wants another jet and he wants Amazon to pay for it Google wants another three jets go for it they want to bring in the Niman
Airbnb these companies are amazing
Marko when he was showing me the product it was originally more like a directory than fill out a form and a dossier then get quotes back of who might be a great service provider it was originally like a directory almost like a Yelp and in the Yelp like version of thumbtack the one point I which he pivot away from okay pivoting away from it in that first version he had a little icon that was like a driver's license and a house and I was like what are those on the website because his pre-web reall
Austin went frickin crazy when they kicked out... uber lyft was like okay... we're out peace out and people went bonkers and that's really when you know you have that great product market fit
there were people who sold ruber at the 4 or 5 billion dollar valuation who were in the 5 million dollar round and it was like well this is a really big lift here you know I'm no pun intended but I'm a thousand decks on my investment you wouldn't be a thousand deck so you lift investment obviously the second-tier company but putting that aside if you were on the uber side of the day and you would and so he got that massive lift and uber and you didn't get an uber lift and lift but putting that a
whenever people get super excited because companies like uber are making over ten billion dollars a year people get a little ahead of their skis Airbnb these companies are amazing and then a couple companies slip in and people get a little delusional they suspend disbelief and you get a thorough no sore a we work on the margins
an example would be when I first saw our uber Travis was showing it to me and the taxi it was called uber taxi at the time and the first thing he said to me is it's gonna be called uber calm but it's not gonna be called taxi because you're not actually getting a taxi right so there was this sort of he almost preempted the discussion around we're not gonna call a taxi we know that's the bad name but he just had to get some domain started also on the map instead of the car facing the right directi
a Tesla used in a bank robbery would be like front-page news like a Tesla goes on fire people like Tesla is on fire literally there are for every Tesla that's going on fire this year there are 10,000 you know cars with ice engines and 20 gallons of fuel in them that also went on fire that never make it to the news
it's LinkedIn of course members of LinkedIn are there to make connections they love to go learn and they like to grow as professionals and discover new job opportunities maybe they're not looking for a job but they're opportunistic ly take a little Peru ski maybe find something interesting and that interesting company might be yours in fact a hire is made every eight seconds on LinkedIn and that's it one two three four five six seven eight somebody got hired on LinkedIn
you've got the most amazing response that I can remember on the syndicate in terms of the mole to pull of cash that was offered to you
we put 100k in or something when you come to the accelerator you raised a little bit of money coming out of the accelerator or maybe a million bucks or something one yes one point one
LinkedIn talent solutions I love this product we use it we got so many great team members using LinkedIn talent solutions there's over 600 million members at LinkedIn and why do they go there well why do you go there why do I go there the great feed news to make connections to meet people to share information maybe to update your resume your profile page Wow hiring is so easy that a new hire is made every eight seconds on LinkedIn think about that and they will get your job in front of the right
that's a great innovation in Silicon Valley letting the founders clean up the cap table take a little second there it takes the edge off for all that suffering and let you go long
they are also part of a new movement I call the Pegasus movement ... founders who are so good at what they do so capital efficient and so fearless in charging for their products and having profits that they can fly above the unicorns and the venture capitalists and skip rounds of funding
the leader of the no code movement Vlad Magdalene is on the program today and he is the CEO and co-founder of web flow
LinkedIn talent solutions is the bomb we have hired the last three candidates at launch we're now up to 15 people using LinkedIn because there's 600 million people who visit LinkedIn and they make connections there and they learn and they grow as professionals and they they have that great work history there and your skills all that great data plus they have to feed they have news there's so many reasons to go to LinkedIn you and I know that because we're on LinkedIn every day well what about tr
is there any possibility of making money here let alone should you even be allowed
sold 700 million dollars worth of his shares pre-ipo
he came up with his own IP and created an LLC to sell the name of we work to we work for six million dollars fireable offense number one
I've never seen more self-inflicted wounds than a startup
you know uber black uber X or were pool uber eats not ubereats $1.00 in profit weber pool 50 cents in profit uberx 2 dollars in profit whoever black 20 10 dollars in profit you got to go top-down yeah not bottom-up
back to the uber black which has come up three or four times founders underpricing and then signaling to investors that you don't care about profitability you're not a marauding capitalist we're running capitalist the tip of the spear is something highly profitable the next thing is profitable the next thing is lower margin but more people so you're doing it the opposite way you're trying to build the base you know the the back of the spear you need that sharp tip get me the sharp tip and then I
so I think you have to set your sights below seed funds and venture funds and any get to set your sights on rebooting the company likely recapping the company and pretending that this is day one
I would study the wire cutter yes I tried to invest in that company Brian lamps company multiple times I begged him not to sell for 30 million to the New York Times but he owned most of the company had not raised any money and I was like I'll give you I'll set up you know you selling 20% of the company taking the cash and let's keep going and God the New York Times owns it now and it prints money
this totally legal because it's happening on the consumers browser and it's their software it's their choice how they render the page however that will not stop a big company from suing you anyway
the people who are behind Amazon are gonna pay you for placement so if they want to just come up there's you know an alternative place to buy it for our Target or Walmart they're gonna pay you even more to have some kind of logo placement or something
you can be sure honey is doing that and Amazon is doing that
that will not stop a big company from suing you anyway
anytime you have a problem with Amazon they say oh it's it's out of the 90 day warranty and I say that's true I've been a member for 10 years I've spent X amount per year and they go we'll make an exception this time literally every time they just make an exception for me and I think that all they care about is keeping customers happy and closing tickets
when you're growing your business you need to reach the right candidates that's what you need you need those right candidates not everybody not a bunch of bozos not a bunch of people who are not sharp you need the right people and that's where LinkedIn comes in over 600 million members visit LinkedIn to make all those connections learn and grow as professionals you know that you do it I do it and you know what a good number of them they're looking for new gigs they're looking for new job opportu
I think they still don't disclose a rupture
my pal the investor put a little bit of money in and in recent just backed up the Brinks truck as they are apt to do
I know they had quirky and zenefits and a couple other companies go off the rail because they were pushing too hard and I think they've corrected my understanding Jason Horowitz had an internal discussion about pushing to go too fast
they jump the fence every time oh my god those guys just know how to spend money
because if you raise that high valuations for them to make money if they pay double the valuation than anybody else is willing to pay which is their reputation yeah they just pay a high price
the reputation of injuries and Horowitz now is they give too much money to founders and then push them to grow unnaturally fast
we take ten percent from whatever the landowner sets up as their price
my guest today has a really good idea and she's executing at an extremely high level because I love design and man your website's designed really well
Hey, Johnny Ive has left Apple, which I think is apparent since I saw that $9,000 or $12,000 iMac Pro tower that looked exactly like the tower that they discontinued and came up with the cylinder for. And the stand of that monitor was? $9.99. For a piece of metal. $1,000 for the monitor. Do you know about this?
Like Travis and Garrett with Uber or Zach with Facebook. It's like this is happening or you with Path.
So like people like to have the Uber debate with me. I'll give you an example. Um, oh my God, Uber drivers make $2 an hour. And I'm like, really? Uber drivers make $2 an hour. We have the lowest unemployment in the world. Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash are all fighting Instacart for delivery people, Amazon as well. And you really think people are going to work for $2 an hour.
Same thing with Google. They should have Google Pro. Google Pro should have zero tracking.
I think he damaged, I think the Y Combinator brand for a little while because of those positions.
Now, you look at Twitter. If you want to troll somebody, and you want to troll me at Jason, and you want to write horrible things or put terrible images under my tweet, you're on the same level as me. And things can get amplified.
it valued the company at $2.5 billion dollars which makes you not only the most successful founder since Atlassian in Sydney. It uh makes you I think one of the first companies to hit this kind of valuation in such a short period of time.
it valued the company at $2.5 billion dollars which makes you not only the most successful founder since Atlassian in Sydney.
Canva is a tool that allows anybody to become a graphic designer.
what was the first investment you made do you remember the first investment I made I believe is Palantir so your first time up at bat you hit a massive homerun
when you get this big I have to think that the Amazons Microsoft Google's of the world are watching this success and building competitive products so what's the competitive landscape are people coming after you now
if you look recently Apple offered a news product which was subscription Apple news Plus and they called it and it included the Wall Street Journal the entire discussion on social media on Twitter was I'm cancelling my wall street journal subscription Tanglers sign up through Apple because unsubscribes are simpler
negative churn is when you have more people subscribing and unsubscribing to your product so you have slack and the number of customers is going your turn those number of seats
if you look at something like slack they only charge you for the customers who use that product for the month so there's a super innovation
we're not investors in slack unfortunately but we use the product and love it
Apple seems to have made a ton of changes to the App Store like I can't find the rankings anymore why did they get rid of the rankings is it too easy to game and they wanted to deprecate that concept of rankings they're still there and they're it's more of a popularity contest in terms of rankings
the company since that time has come worth over two billion dollars and raised over a billion dollars and I'm assuming makes hundreds of millions of dollars I'm in the ballpark you're in the ballpark it's gotta be nine figures if it's worth two billion right
the company was sold for 1.6 billion dollars the worst sale by founders ever in the history of Silicon Valley it's a 250 to 500 billion dollar company today
And literally Michael Siebel at Y Combinator told people that great investors, the opposite of what you're saying, don't think about it, shut up and send their money and move quickly. And don't think about returns. Just think about, this is literally what Michael Siebel said at their angel thing. It's like the worst advice I've ever heard. Just think about how great it will be to brag when you put a 250 K check into a company. And I was just like, this is terrible advice. And I realized everythi
all the you know the ubers and Pinterest and Airbnb and zahl chose this architecture that was kind of built around these real-time streams
I would buy Cisco routers
one of the things that made Airbnb so special was that the hosts wouldn't shut up about it
Google removed annotations they don't allow you to do this
she started working on a site called Flickr which previously before that was a game and that got sold to Yahoo for around 25 or 30 million bucks and at the time it was reported that Yahoo had overpaid and it was the most ridiculous purchase
Google has been trying to get into China
let me take a moment to tell you about hub spot which we use and love here at launch... HubSpot is when we stand behind cuz I had the founder on the podcast in year one and HubSpot has had an amazing run as a startup and they have a new project actually it's been around for a couple years down I think about a hub spot for startups and this program will help startups grow faster in scale it's super cool and includes a ridiculously steep discount on the hub spot growth platform... thousands of sta
I have seen the Tesla cars learn where the paint is and in areas where the paint is not specific you can literally see the computer on the heads-up display a little bit confused and then figuring it out
I just want to take a moment to tell you exactly how brutal how hard how life crushing it is to try to hire somebody today especially talented people we have record low unemployment you know that but you also know that in the startup business tech business it's a dogfight and you're out there trying to find talent and it's not easy and the best place for you to go to find the greatest talent out there is LinkedIn everybody knows that because we're all on LinkedIn and hundreds of thousands of bus
four out of five customers on linkedin they're decision-makers just like you so you're building relationships with people that really matter and you're not wasting your ad spend on people who will never buy your product or service
we love LinkedIn for marketing and advertising our products here at launch let me show you how we're using it because there's 500 million people every day on LinkedIn and it's not just for jobs is also for marketing they have an ad platform that is second to none
in the example of calm you have a team that was very focused and who wanted to grow the business and they publicly talked about it doing 80 million dollars a year in revenue run rate
Microsoft same thing Netflix same thing I wouldn't say bulletproof or recession-proof but I would say they will weather the storm really well
I might just plow a bunch of cash into the names I just said and just ride four or five names that I know from inside information
I wouldn't say bulletproof or recession-proof but I would say they will weather the storm really well
I think if you were to buy Netflix Disney Google Apple that group I do not believe that group in 10 years will be less relevant than they are today
Google these are great companies so they're not going anywhere
you eliminate dealerships from the car buying process like Tesla's done and they sell direct that's great nobody wants to deal with some dealership nonsense middlemen who ruins the process we wanted to buy direct on a website and get it
if Elan must takes the pedal off of Tesla well it could die so he's got no choice but to hustle
LinkedIn allowed us to specify which information we wanted to collect in our case it's the name email company name phone number job title industry and when you're building a campaign you can target the exact position so here we're saying we want people who are in marketing maybe a marketing manager a marketing executive marketing Sultan etc we picked what size company and we can pick a budget for ourselves where we want the ad to appear and bingo bango boom all of a sudden we start getting leads
I have a pretty regular influx of uber employees sharing with me their next idea really asking for angel investing and a number of them in our syndicate adjacent syndicate
lift has filed quietly for their IPO and uber as well seems to have filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission
I have a pretty regular influx of uber employees sharing with me their next idea really asking for angel investing
Airbnb took a little bit longer but it's still there
air B&B will be a hundred billion dollar company
if you go see a VC and you have an idea for a competitor to Airbnb and they are investors in there maybe you should never have met with them... they might if it's on your website take the page you know new airbnb.com slash concierge and email that link which is public to your competitor
You can be certain if you have your stuff on Gmail or if you have stuff on Facebook that some Facebook engineers looked at it. I am absolutely certain of that. And we've seen multiple lawsuits where Facebook employees creeped on their ex-girlfriends, looked at their DMs and on Gmail and Google. We know that people were looking at who was talking to who. It's pretty nefarious.
Lo and behold, Hotmail came out, and we all laughed at it. Then Gmail came out, and we all fell in love with it.
Amazon Prime from what I understand is the massive profit Center and everything at Amazon that's decided goes to that lens
we have done a deal on seed invest for inside calm
with calm calm to see German people now finally using the app and they've translated into the first language I get the hold deja vu all over again I just everywhere I go people bring up calm calm calm calm calm calm and Robin Hood Robin Hood Robin Hood people are just all over the world using both of those products
I think that as long as you're here some period of time but it will go faster I mean there aren't a lot of investors there so your valuation will be 50% to double here in the valley so I would camp out here I'd have an office here and have two or three people here and then it'd have 20 people in Toronto
if you just abscond with the money and go to Canada you might then have 28 months to figure it out and you can just fly down here once in a while it's a it's a major major hack
I do know a lot of startup founders who want to come to America are stopping in Canada first and I have one company in my portfolio that moved to Canada after Trump was elected because they wanted to have the benefit of raising money from American investors and deploying it in a market where they could hire people more freely and it's worked really well for them I think their what would have been 18 months of runway became 40 months of runway they told me so
what would you pay for a developer with five years experience in Canada in Canadian dollars ATK in October on occasion Canadian dollar 70,000 Canadian which I think is I think it'd be about 25 percent less or 20 percent less in US dollars
you'll face lower cost of doing business and you'll be able to operate quietly
I would suspect more often than not Canadians and Americans consumer and enterprise behavior is almost exact
it is a great idea to test it in Canada first because nobody will notice and steal your idea or even know you're operating most Americans operate in a state of ignorance to the rest of the world
Google Facebook Amazon slack all big presences in Vancouver and Toronto
truth be told people here in the Bay Area have gotten over the fear of investing in companies that are not based here ie slack which is basically a Vancouver company with an office here I mean most people don't realize that but slacks a 10 to 20 billion dollar company at this point who knows what it's worth at this point it's growing really fast and you know nobody cares anymore
you wouldn't be able to target buy their job title their skills their experience because other people don't have that information who has that information LinkedIn
they're going up against the most challenging perhaps of all competitors Amazon and Whole Foods
I feel like you saw something in the market
my next guest has been the highest performing entrepreneur in our portfolio of late and that's a portfolio that includes uber Rob hood wealthfront just top metal and a lot of Trello and a bunch of other companies that have hit it out of the park
LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network you have the opportunity to build long-term relationships with critically important customers and these translate into high quality leads web traffic and higher brand awareness but the first step is to find and target the right audience every day 500 million professionals engage with content on LinkedIn a half billion people and your future customers are among them you know this because you're on LinkedIn and Linkedin has marketing tools that
Apple shares revenue on YouTube and in their app store but journalists in Google News don't get paid and journalists in Google's index don't keep a journalist on Facebook don't get paid
Apple figured out hey if we put an apple news app inside of the phone it's defaulted that you get redirected there we could get something going
Apple not sharing revenue with publishers pathetic Apple News built into your iPhone great product ... but here's the problem Apple is printing money they help people make money who are musicians making TV shows and apps but with journalists are not helping to make money
thanks again to our friends at LinkedIn talent solutions it really is a tremendous place to find talent
LinkedIn considers people skills experiences location and more to match and promote your job to potential candidates think about the data that LinkedIn has on this talent pool it is unrivaled in the industry and businesses rate LinkedIn jobs forty percent higher than job boards
when you are considering selling your company of Mark Zuckerberg that's gonna be my big message for you today as founders he's never sell to Zuckerberg
if you're in a dog fighting you're trying to build something that's gonna change the world let's say Tesla let's say Facebook you may not have the luxury of saying we're gonna be a nine-to-five culture
Google is famous now for having people hanging out on the roof drinking cocktails like they parodied in the Silicon Valley HBO show where the hooli people were kind of resting investing on the roof
oh I think I have any email confirmations you give for Amazon Prime my house looks like a UPS Depot like my garage I just fill a box and it's horrible I have such a heavy Amazon finger I just click click click click click clean but also cheap Alexis like do you need toilet paper like how did you know exactly she's got her ways
they got a multi-billion dollar ad business name why is it about to be insane because we're all using Amazon so much more I mean you think about just Whole Foods like I'm changing my consumer behavior and people are changing their consumer behavior so they'll see ads actually on amazon.com yeah I guess they also have twitch which anything else that you know is confirming your purchases I mean it's gonna be everywhere right they could put the ads in your email confirmation
he told me it's amazing we're getting all these people who don't want to work at Facebook or don't want to work at or don't want to work at Google because they feel they're being judged on different criteria
when I look at a Google and you send me that link I go oh boy this is incredible
22 million professionals view and apply to jobs on LinkedIn every week
businesses rate LinkedIn jobs 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates
70% of the US workforce is already on LinkedIn
it's the world's largest professional network and it's the best way to find great talent
I love LinkedIn and it's spending a ton of time on LinkedIn I love the new feed by the way where you can share information and see what your friends are up to
we've had an incredible incredible run finding highly talented people on LinkedIn and using LinkedIn jobs
22 million professionals and this is the amazing number view and apply to jobs on LinkedIn every week
businesses rate LinkedIn jobs 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates
70% of the US workforce is already on LinkedIn
it's the world's largest professional network and it's the best way to find great talent
that was the right thing for Twitter to do in fact that's what Twitter should have done all along they shouldn't have had this anonymous toxic toxicity in the system
Twitter in a really story got crushed I think they were down 20% as well and their revenue was doing okay but they finally purged all of these bad accounts and so what did Wall Street do they gave him a haircut they took 20% off the stock
I think they're largely incompetent over there when it comes to product to be honest they just move very slow and they make very bad decisions
I think Tesla is doing a good job of getting focused now on what matters the quality of the cars and how delighted their customers are
the shorts I think are crazy it's their right to short the company it's not their right to spread fear uncertainty and doubt which is what they're doing and sometimes lying
Tesla could raise more money at any point in time Tesla could take down a big investment from Masayoshi Son who put ten billion dollars into Uber they could take money from sequoias new Growth Fund I think they have eight billion under management they could take money from Google or Apple or Amazon who all want in on what Tesla is building
all that matters with a company like Tesla is the product and delighting users everything else will be worked out
I'll talk a little bit about Tesla the Schwartz belongs and a record quarter the stock is way up today on Wednesday in the after market and how Elon Musk is proving the credits wrong
what does it mean for startups it means that they're gonna have a ton of money to buy companies and you will see the Amazons and the apples of the world buying up larger and larger assets you saw Whole Foods get purchased by Amazon for 13 billion and a head phone company got bought by Apple for 2 or 3 billion I think that's just the start
Apple is probably gonna flirt with this trillion dollar valuation up and down over the next year or two
a couple years ago I did believe that Apple would become the first trillion-dollar company that was back in 2012 I wrote that and I wrote that payments would be one of the ways they would get their subscriptions also seems to be helping and they're on the cusp of being a billion dollar company
Apple's going to be here in ten years because nobody has built a product that is as compelling I use the pixel to and I'm using the I'm using currently a Chromebook from Google and it is quite compelling I have to say I actually enjoy my pixel too and my Chromebook as much as I enjoy my Apple products and they're cheaper but the iPhone still the ecosystem is much more refined the apps are much more refined so people are gonna at the high end stick with Apple
the price earnings ratio seems to have gotten a lot higher Apple's bought back a lot of stock which drives that
I have to wonder if they're going to be servicing and just pulling out as much money from the top end of the market without ever trying to get the money from say the Android Market which is the majority of the market so it's a it's a mixed bag
this is a wonderful ecosystem that they built over time
that will give Apple revenue for years to come
the services revenue I think is going to be very compelling because it's high margin in all likelihood and it's sustainable and diverse
they did nine point two billion I believe in services this quarter which puts them on like a forty billion dollar run rate it grew 30 percent year-over-year
it was an amazing quarter for Apple
if you look at the if you look at Facebook and Apple and Google what percentage of those three companies and market cap is based on the smartphone revenue it is the majority right the majority of ads are seen there
they already have Google or YouTube or Apple or whatsapp or Instagram or snapchat on their portfolio company page so they can take their time
Apple is working on glasses and you've heard Tim Cook say over and over again they're pretty candid when they give tips that he thinks augmented reality is interesting and they're working on glasses
it's a great idea for a business because there is a war for talent in very specific verticals getting to know the people were in they're in college and exposing them to what's going on inside of let's say IBM gives IBM a huge advantage because they've come to the building and now you know the person's normal now you know the person is smart you see them during the mentorship and say hmm does this person seem committed do they seem hard-working but it's not as arduous as an internship
Uber's being super transparent and they're super focused on making the service safer and safer and more delightful these are just excellent steps taken by uber and I am thrilled about it as an uber power user and an investor
when uber came out in the United States they only went after the high-end market the high sliver which was Lincoln Town Cars what we called in the States black cars the really fancy ones with the that are really expensive then they created uberx then they created uber pool now they're doing bicycles and eventually they'll do scooters and then yeah they'll hold your hand while you walk across town they're going all the way
we all know people need rides it's an established market so the only behavior you have to change if your uber or the only change you have to change if your Airbnb is convincing people yeah you can get in this Toyota Prius that you don't know the driver of and it's their personal car and it's not a yellow cab that was the hurdle they had to pass
hey everybody let's talk for a minute about safety and responsibility and technology startups owning owning safety and security and using technology to keep drivers and riders safe well as you know I love Oberer and uber is moving forward and I love what I'm seeing out of this company that has done such a great job spreading point-to-point affordable transportation to everybody and uber has just created a safety center you may have seen in the app it is amazing in the safety center you can desig
LinkedIn is just on fire
22 million professionals view and apply to jobs on LinkedIn every week
businesses rate LinkedIn jobs 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates
70% of the US workforce is already on LinkedIn
I love LinkedIn I've been spending a ton of time on LinkedIn I love the new feed by the way where you can share information and see what your friends are up to but putting aside their amazing new feed that's highly addictive I want to talk today about hiring we all know that hiring is hard we have many open positions here and it takes us months to find high-quality candidates and you know that your business is only as strong as the people you have working for you
in the six unicorns trust me with uber I saw many different share prices and you look at it and go well am I ever going to be able to change my shares and the last round for uber back to my CEO shoe sign I think he paid 32 or 33 dollars a share the people who bought those shares in the first round that guy did eight pennies for the shares so I could make myself a little good in an Excel spreadsheet and mark it up but the way I look at the world is until that turns to cash it doesn't exist
this is late stage and what it's really messing with if anything is the IPO process some people would argue this is a private IPO they took the IPO process which normally would involve retail investors and pension funds and they just made it a private event where the sovereign wealth essentially the country of Saudi Arabia gets to own and do the IPO for uber or Airbnb or whoever he does next
uber did a ten billion dollar secondary at a fifty billion dollar valuation and they bought shares from existing investors
if I bought a share of Tesla at the IPO of $15 and sold it at 150 or it's at 115 I haven't sold it I now know I'm 10x on paper
that's why at a company like Apple or Tesla Square comes to mind any of these companies with amazing design they have to hire world-class designers with ten or twenty years experience or super over performers and they have to create many many more versions of products in order to find one that was a acceptable to Steve Jobs Elan musk etc
you have companies like Apple who are saying our value proposition is that your data is stored on your phone not in our cloud and your data is encrypted on your phone
had this startup that had become worth a billion dollars that wouldn't let investors see the technology.
the biggest fraud in the history of Silicon Valley
it turned out that this vision was indeed too good to be true.
it was clear to me and many people in Silicon Valley that this was a complete utter fraud.
which YouTube has done I think they change the rules a little bit but they've done a pretty good job of shipping a lot of money to people
if you look at Amazon they're right in between Amazon that's third-party sell on it and then they're also doing Amazon basics buy that stuff
Microsoft had WordPerfect Excel I'm sorry Lotus 1-2-3 and other products that they had partnerships with they studied them they released Microsoft Office and they killed them
if you remember Microsoft got into all kinds of antitrust issues I think at the end of the day it burned out Bill Gates to the point at which he didn't want to run the company anymore he was tired of being hated and after he left they missed the mobile opportunity they missed the internet opportunity and competitors like Google and Facebook and of course Apple's iPhone and Apple now outselling Windows machines I think or making much more revenue perhaps is the better way to state it I think ther
we've had an incredible incredible run finding highly talented people on LinkedIn and using LinkedIn jobs... LinkedIn is just on fire
this unbelievably anticipated franchise coming back with Disney at the helm
this is great for consumers
this is the one-two punch that Uber needs
one of my early angel investments uber has purchased jump bikes and jump bikes is one of the most loved bike sharing services in the world it has taken over San Francisco people are going crazy for it and today hot off the heels of that incredible acquisition by uber which benefits me and also my guests and also society at large
while you had this incredible partnership with Google, in stealth they were getting ready to stab Mozilla in the back
when they hit that this summer which they'll easily do I predict it's gonna take him two years to fill those orders so this idea like oh how many orders are left where this is like the best-selling car in history
if you look at the product Tesla is destroying their competitors they have really beaten Mercedes Audi and BMW in the high-end and now they're going to crush everybody at the lower end
we saw this with you know Airbnb and uber and Dropbox when they raised those months arounds they've got this huge pile of cash sitting there a competitor is gonna have a hard time because they could lower their prices and increase their reach of the product do more marketing and really compete heavily
another business that has removed friction is uber when you got it in uber you didn't need to tell the driver your name because your name was in the app and he didn't or she didn't need to tell you your their name because it's in the app you didn't need to take your credit card out or - and pay them wait for change and do a tip because they took tipping out they since added it back as an option which I agree with but it's kind of a polarizing issue I know but you do never take your credit card o
they just changed the rules willy-nilly and they do it all the time without warning
literally Matt Cutts said to me at one point we don't have partners and I said but all the documents say partner program he's like well we don't really have partners
Matt Cutts all these people lied to me and I know everybody I know Sergey I know everybody had Google and I couldn't get relief and I had to layoff 80 people
when we were a partner of YouTube's they changed the rules on us two or three times Google changed the rules on us two or three times and resulted in us going from a ten million dollar of run rate of advertising to a sub $500,000 in advertising overnight
when I saw calm calm I looked at what Alex built and the fact that he was able to get the domain name calm calm and the site was beautiful and it was considered
when uber and lyft and Airbnb came out and even Tesla VC's did not want to be involved in Tesla originally a lot of VC's turn them down and said just make software for other car makers sell into GM that's what they told you on cell battery packs and drivetrain and you know these computers that will make other cars you know hybrids or electric cars and he said no I got to build the whole product I want to build the entire solution and so sometimes VCS don't have the creativity or the open-mindedn
the original Tesla's and SpaceX all the details were there
if you look at something like Airbnb or uber or Tesla or SpaceX these founders are gods they literally manifested a world-changing product out of their own sheer force of will
air B&B had really crafted that business and made it work and you see that over and over again with these great founders they have a craftsmanship to what they build
if you look at something like Airbnb or uber or Tesla or SpaceX these founders are gods they literally manifested a world-changing product out of their own sheer force of will
now you have Amazon where Amazon has a bunch of cloud computing services that they built Amazon on top of and then they released into the wild and let people use their infrastructure which then lower the cost of their infrastructure and made the money and now people believe that Amazon Web Services is the crown jewel it is the money printing machine inside of Amazon and that getting Amazon basic cable's and you know your your coffee delivered from Amazon is never going to be a great business for
it seems like moments has done pretty well
coinbase was required or requested to to report it was you may know 25 20 thousand dollars or more yeah to the IRS IRS yeah for there's a three year period
it doesn't have wires and you don't have to fumble and move your phone when you're using it
I said it's the best product that Apple has created since the iPad
as a podcaster for whatever the last eight years or nine years I know the pain point of transcripts have been so hard machine translated stuff has been weak but it's getting better so that's kind of intriguing when you put on the captions on a YouTube video it's almost accurate you know it's like getting really more accurate than you would think and just editing it down it's so hard
it's going to literally change I believe the entire industry of podcasts and talk radio in ways that even Andrew maybe doesn't understand I think it's literally going to even even working on this for most years I think this is going to literally create a boom in people creating audio experiences
Groupon which everybody fell in love with during the web 2.0 era and is still doing strong by the way
AR seems to be awfully awfully compelling to Apple for some reason maybe it's because they lost the VR race to oculus or maybe they understand that VR is not what people really want they want to look through their camera phones look through glasses and see information and graphics layered on top of the real world
and the semi had some pretty outstanding and of course Elon is getting better and better at the drama at these things he drove the semi-truck in himself which was pretty great and he's super comfortable on stage he's starting to see this like Steve Jobs like although it's his own it's his own style of keynote but it's pretty dramatic and 500 miles on a single charge for this semi autonomous truck
I think if you look at a company like slack or Yammer these were chat based software both of a chat based software Yammer than HipChat and then slack where they let people use it for free in an organization to products it's super addictive and then what would happen is if you wanted the management control in other words to be able to say take this person out I want to see the archive as searchable archives right for legal for compliance and then also just to control it put people in different gr
YouTube decides when you when you type in Donald Trump or anything else into the search bar on YouTube they decide what you see
it was particularly troubling to me to see Google take that just completely inauthentic position
it's ludicrous to pretend that YouTube's not a content creator
YouTube now has and YouTube's at over 10 billion dollar business it's probably the most vibrant business inside of Google it is the most vibrant business inside of Google I would say 1.5 billion people using it a month it's it's basically the same size as Facebook
Apple doesn't release a development kit unless they have something very interesting coming
you guys were paying really high prices for the series B's and you became known for overpaying or paying a lot
nestles acquired bluebottle which is loved by hipsters here in San Francisco and probably loathed by the rest of the country
slack has all of their third-party tools and some of the popular third-party tools and api's are to do front like behaviors and connect this glue together so it's almost like you're a vertical app that's just been pre it's been super refined like you will become some percentage when you install front at an organization some percentage of the communications on slack moves over
there's two ways to attack a space one you can build a platform like slack did and let the developer community start plugging different things into the API or you can take what you think is the best use case just absolutely crush it like you have
the company's been doing great 45 employees now and they are growing at over ten percent month-over-month according to reports
I'm a paying customer of it
you were at our amazing scale conference last year as part of IBM SmartCamp they brought you to us IBM obviously having offices around the world working with startups everywhere they brought us the best startups they could find around the world world as part of their smart camp effort
you can buy and sell coins in 34 countries except for the United States for now but in six months maybe that would change two months in two months maybe that will change
they just did a 40 million dollar series B with some people you might know including Google Ventures or GV as they call it and previously Lightspeed Venture Partners I think they did the series I yeah correct and Richard Branson and virgin group
the video quality it makes you feel like you're in the same room without having to spend what used to be I think a quarter million dollars or fifty thousand dollars to outfit a room you can now do it for low thousands of dollars
it's life-changing it can make working together so easy so pleasant and in this package for one low price of free you get yes that's right free you get video meetings a messaging like chat you know how that works digital whiteboard anyway to get into that in a minute file sharing and calling all of this together in one secure app that works on any of your devices
very famously, she invested alongside myself and a number of other lucky investors in Uber and Thumbtack, two companies that became worth billions of dollars.
DJI ran the table on drones so harshly that 3D robotics 3dr stopped competing with them went into Enterprise started building enterprise software and now their enterprise software they just announced this past week is compatible with DJI drones
even the mighty Elon Musk with Tesla he had to take that company over because the the the nitwits who were running it originally almost ran it into the ground because the Roadster and he's been very public about this everybody knew the Roadster was costing $50,000 or something outrageous like that per car over what they were charging and they were charging a lot for that car I know I bought one
even now Google having some Hardware with drop cam and that division's been a nest has been a disaster for go Google they had to you know Tony Fidel left people hated working there they haven't been able to release products consistently so even the mighty Google has had a hard time Hardware is hard
Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash
Cisco Spark is a new meeting platform and a communication platform for teams and we're using it here at this week in startups and it is lifechanging. It can make working together so easy, so pleasant. And in this package for one low price of free, you get Yes, that's right. Free. You get video meetings, team messaging like chat, you know how that works. Digital whiteboarding. I'm going to get into that in a minute. File sharing and calling. All of this together in one secure app that works on an
thumb Tac um I was the second or third investor in and they became worth a billion dollars and it took them three or four years to figure out exactly what the business was but I just looked at Marco who was the founder of the company and when I asked him questions about why he was doing what he was doing with thumac his answers were so rich and passionate and detailed that I thought this person is an incredible Craftsman he there's an attention to detail to what they're doing
it's a 99% chance the company's going out of business and a 1% chance it's Uber or Thumbtack or one of these you know breakout successes
it's a 99% chance the company's going out of business and a 1% chance it's Uber or Thumbtack or one of these you know breakout successes
when Travis came up to me and said hey can I show you Uber cab I said can I invest and he said do you want to see it I said yeah you can show it to me wa wait wait wait I'm going to ask you all about Uber in a second let's not but anyway that's when I switched my thinking
Cisco spark is a new meeting platform and a communication platform for teams and we're using it here at this week in startups and it is life changing it can make working together so easy so pleasant and in this package for one low price of free you get yes that's right free you get video meetings team messaging like chat you know how that works digital whiteboarding and we to get into that in a minute file sharing and calling all of this together in one secure app that works on any of your devic
thanks to the Cisco spark board which I cannot recommend enough this is I think Cisco used to charge when they first started putting in these whole room systems for telecommunications they were a quar million dollars to a million dollar now you can set one up for low thousands of dollars and the uh Fidelity of them is amazing and of course people can connect to them via iPad or by their phone Android desktop whatever it is and it just works so we're we're really uh been having a great time with
the technology has gotten so good with this new Cisco spark board which we have here and uh the spark board it cost I think five5 to $110,000 they have two different sizes but it's essentially a giant uh iPad I mean you could it's got a touch screen on it and it's got built-in uh audio built-in video high definition and people can join it through a chat room
Linda was bought by LinkedIn yup for a billion dollar 1.5 1.5 billion how much revenue do you think they had one hundred you think they were doing 150 150 yeah so 10 times top-line revenue right not a bad business not bad at all
I am with Vlad who is the co-founder of Robin Hood my fourth unicorn
there's 2 million people using this app now is that right active users that's right Wow
you guys may not know this but of my launch fund you are the number one valued company now I did about a hundred and five companies in launch fund before that I had done the Sequoia Scouts investments and obviously oberon thumbtack were pretty big but you're now the number one and you're my fourth unicorn
the company's worth over a billion dollars now I understand yeah that's right
if you look at the top apps a large percentage of them are owned by Google Microsoft Facebook Apple Etc so when you just go down that list you're going to see you know a company like Facebook owning 10 of the top apps and Google owning 20 of the top 100 or whatever it is it's pretty unnerving
other companies like slack or Yammer they might give it out for free and try before you buy so they do it based on usage
Brian at Airbnb staying in airbnbs
there are some companies that just have such an obvious business model they charge from day one an example of that would be Uber or Airbnb taking a percentage of everybody's transaction
Airbnb everybody knows Airbnb you rent your couch in the early days of Airbnb I remember it was such a unique business model people were saying why don't they have Airbnb for boats Airbnb for cars Airbnb for bicycles Airbnb for lawnmowers right well it turns out that those Concepts would have distracted them from the high margin high value deep product Market fit of renting out an apartment or an extra bedroom why did that work so well because they were getting paid a lar a decent margin a decen
whether it's Uber or um SpaceX have started to talk publicly about offering liquidity to their earliest employees knowing that people from years 1 2 3 in years four five and six will be fully vested
there are some companies that just have such an obvious business model they charge from day one an example of that would be Uber or Airbnb taking a percentage of everybody's transaction
I love my Cisco spark board and on this very program this week in startups we're going to start putting Cisco spark boards in other cities so that entrepreneurs and investors from say New York Los Angeles maybe London Berlin Hong Kong Tokyo Seoul can then videoconference into the show we can start doing remotes with startups from around the world how exciting is that all powered by Cisco spark and the Cisco spark board
it's a move with no plan right it's sort of a hope is not a plan
I've also talked with a bunch of EX Twitter employees and I have not heard one yet that thought was like that's a great move most of them are just like face palming
it's pretty amazing I love my Cisco spark board
you can now do it for lo thousands of dollars
Cisco spark is a new meeting platform and a communication platform for teams and we're using it here at this week in startups and it is life-changing it can make working together so easy so pleasant
if you took just one ride in uber or gasped stayed at someone's Airbnb for as little as an you would have done so much more research than many folks who invested in those two companies and you would have impressed the hell out of the founders
your classic hotel guests weren't the types who stayed in Airbnb in the early days back when the service was for adventurous people
uber with travis's I think third or fourth major company I knew when he did scour and when he did read swoosh I think register which was a 30 million dollar exit scour was a 250 billion dollar lawsuit so he kind of trend in the right direction in that regard
if you took just one ride in uber or gasped stayed at someone's Airbnb for as little as an you would have done so much more research than many folks who invested in those two companies
for uber or Airbnb where they created or at least transformed their markets it was harder to do research what Ford and your local car service did have little to do what with what uber was doing
they're going to cut out all the real estate brokers eventually
open door is buying the homes really quickly and then they sell them and they're going to cut out all the real estate brokers eventually you're just they're just going to be able to buy and sell a home or even rent it while it's waiting to be purchased or you could rent to buy it who knows what they're going to come up with over there but they're going to inventory homes that's a brilliant idea
Keith raboy is doing an interesting startup where they actually will buy your home from you immediately uh within a couple of days and then they hold that inventory they put it on the market they allow anybody to look at the home at any time during the day with a key and uh in a lock box and a you know Smart Lock and with video cameras in the spaces so there are a lot there's a lot of innovation to be had
if you're building Tesla, it's because you want to save get the world off of carbon-based energy and move to sustainable renewable energy. That's what Elon always said, like it's not about electric cars per se. It's about getting off of fossil fuels and moving to a sustainable energy source.
That's what the Googles of the world or the Goldman Sachs of the world offer. They give you the steady paycheck, ridiculous benefits, and then they eat your soul.
So you'll see Samsung and Apple and Oracle and Google, it gets very personal. They, you know, they're vendetta based like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison feels wronged and they just are going to go to bat forever to fight against these companies and then um they wind up getting settled.
And we need each of those people to sign an NDA and they're very serious about it at Apple because they want to have a surprise when they launch it.
consumer products that'll be ad supported like an Instagram or a YouTube yeah they they don't need to go to a VC until maybe 10,000 people a day in my estimation.
the Mac has gotten I mean God the MacBook what a disaster it's like did you buy a new Macbook no is this like isn't it not buying a new iPhone either and I am a fanboy I love their Tech I love their products there's so much engineering Excellence when you think about the vertical integration that that business is has has achieved uh and and up until the last you know let's be realistic 5 years uh they've been ahead of the pack on so many different fronts right but this last release like I made a
the autopilot was never designed to be a level four you know fully door-to-door autonomous system ... just like adaptive cruise control kind of removes fatigue and you have a smoother ride
you don't want wacky annotations all kinds of ads layered on to it cruff garbage and you certainly don't want your competitor's videos coming up and suggestions all around it
you can't just sort of Hope to out Amazon Amazon but I think with um you know a differentiated product differentiated brand hopefully we can continue to scale
I love that Amazon's making content... I understand that this is artificial that there's these huge War chests of VC trying to help these different companies Leverage you know Netflix spent what on content how many billion be a coup billion this year or bilon I know so you know in the end you know they're spending their workst to try to get you know it's Netflix versus HBO versus Amazon to see who can dominate this space but in the end most of the time it seems to be only one kind of platform Mo
Twitter, I know Twitter's going to get into that, but- 70-30 Twitter's offering.
I'm kind of of the opinion that there's enough tools there and law enforcement should be enough to make this work.
Twitter's built a lot of tools, probably more tools than anybody around harassment. You can mute somebody, you can block somebody.
it is interesting how one investment can change everything in your career and you really have two life-changing ones I think um Twitter I mean there's others but Twitter specifically and uh Uber are just two massive massive wins
This happened with Uber actually. I had one investor who said, why don't you sell the Uber software platform to cab companies? Can you convince Travis to do that? And I said to them, I don't think you understand the cab companies are the problem. They're taking all of the revenue. The drivers are getting screwed. Customers don't want to talk to some central dispatch. They just want their car to come as affordably and as efficiently as possible. Taking out all these steps in the, uh, process will
In fact, when I introduced Uber to 20 investors, 17 said no.
the Ubers of the world the lifts of the world and even the insta carts of the world they started to um think about hey when does this become profitable
when you use something like Uber or Airbnb they're watching you how often you come back how many seconds you're on a page what you click on where your mouse goes the level of detail is insane
It's a lot of money if it ever comes in. What are the chances? Uber's a pretty good bet. Probably go public eventually.
just lesson there if you get accepted just say yes just never say no of YC okay just why would you say no to anything you can always say no when you get to papering the deal say yes to start
how does Google make money they have an advertis in network and they give everything away for free Google Chrome is free Android is free the search engine is free they monetize you with advertising Apple sells Hardware Google does advertising it's the bigger the company and the more successful the less ways they try to make money they find one way and they pound it they build a money printing machine and then they just make the machine faster and bigger and then they try to make multiple copies
the Apple company is going to be one of the first trillion dollar companies on the planet them or Amazon
how does Apple make money they sell you the product and the profits in the product how does Google make money they have an advertise network and they give everything away for free Google Chrome is free Android is free the search engine is free they monetize you with advertising Apple sells Hardware Google does advertising
the Mac Mini was designed to be the super powerful computer for 400 bucks that's this big that's so small you just put on the back of a cheap $100 monitor
the Apple company is going to be one of the first trillion dollar companies on the planet them or Amazon because one company actually takes pride in what they build and the Finish is and how welld designed it is
the concept of uber at the beginning was a way to get a Lincoln Town Car faster a car service they didn't have ride sharing necessarily in mind I mean they were ambitious but they didn't have that and they certainly didn't have Uber pool in mind nor an Transportation API so as time has gone on those things have been added to the vision but if they had pitched me Uber pool as the idea my feeble flawed human brain would have said wait I'm going to share a cab with people and you're going to be abl
even the mighty Microsoft or the mighty Google or Apple any of these big corporations they're also could you know could be disrupted at any moment in time
they build great products across platforms
Microsoft has really evolved I think in the last couple years um and is really thinking about the world differently and adapting to the changes so radically and so fast
Rolof Botha, who had just done his first investment in a video platform called YouTube with some people who had he had known from PayPal.
Elon sleeping at the factory and he just said [ __ ] it instead of 2020 let's do 500 cars a year in 2018. The whole team is like, 'What?' I mean, you can read about this stuff in the press.
when he put that Model 3 up there after having done Roadster S and X, he was so much more polished at, you know, and so much more confident and so much better at so much more credibility.
the great innovator in this space was your old boss at SpaceX where, you know, Elon has now sold almost 400,000 cars in advance, got a $1,000 deposit. Pretty impressive. But he did that after selling just 200 model uh Tesla Roadsters.
And so it's really great to have partners like Microsoft. We've been partners with them for years because they're looking at this saying, 'Hey, it's impossible for all the smart people in the world to work at Microsoft. There are many more smart people outside of the building, just on a statistical basis, in any large company, than there are inside the building.'
I'm most famous obviously for being the third or fourth investor in Uber. I got super lucky in that case.
IBM came to me and said hey we care about startups and I was like really why do you care about startups you're IBM like aren't you like into big companies like no no the innovation's going on there we need to be involved with startups because the little ones become so big now so fast we want to be involved with them because we don't want to miss the next Uber or Thumbtack
DoorDash has done spectacularly. ... raised a Series C from Sequoia back in March of this year for $127 million. So, obviously, something is going fabulous well.
I use it constantly. It's awesome. It works.
the transition to uh unlimited because this created a huge National crisis and this is really when the whole online world came online was when AOL could not handle allowing everybody to go online instead of for three or four or $5 an hour but for 20 bucks an hour unlimited
we can build basic BOTS right you can build it in slack yes I didn't know that
zapier along with if this then that I would say is probably the main competitor but they're more consumer II I think happier to me seems a little bit more enterprise
I've been on a different floor of my house I've been one floor up and said Alexa turn off the timer and it hears it it hears it better than another family member
I could be across the kitchen I got a big kitchen I'm literally 20 feet away and I I'm looking at the stove cooking and I say Alexa at this volume Alexa set a timer for 10 minutes it is 20 feet away and it sets it and it that's that's crazy Dynamic changes everything
I use it every day how 5 10 times a day yeah yeah like that
I am obsessed with the echo I don't do you have an Amazon Echo oh yes [ __ ] love it it's isn't it pretty amazing
Marissa is a failure now
I believe the company's gone and I believe that there's probably some level of malason fraud or delusional behavior that the end result of is any other reasonable person would say that's fraudulent
daros wasn't really a Silicon Valley company even though it feels like a Silicon Valley company because no Silicon Valley investors except for Tim draer who put up the initial money nobody else really put the money in after that it was all these like weird private Equity firms and they were kind of like playing off of the Stamford you know Elizabeth dropped out of College kind of situation
Theos seem to have the same issue the people who are investing and the people who are on the board were like Henry kingers of the world bit of a red flag
we have their biggest partner, Walgreens. And this was something that they were sort of trumpeting as, hey, we have Walgreens. Walgreens would not set up this number of clinics with us to actually draw blood.
Walgreens... has said that it's uh closing down its wellness center, the Theranos Wellness Center rather, in its Walgreens in Palo Alto, California. and that it's also uh suspending uh Theranos's ability to to test any patient samples collected at Walgreens stores whether in California or Arizona at that new work facility and that uh these actions are uh effective immediately and and will be uh in effect until uh the the issues that were pointed out by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Servi
the company was literally attacking you and the journal basically saying you're liars and that you had it in for them, that you were jealous of them, just really weird um attacks.
about two years ago, I started hearing rumblings that there was something wrong at Theranos. And what I had heard was, hey, people who were considering investing weren't allowed to look at the technology. And then a year ago, people started laughing about the company behind closed doors, uh you know, at industry events that I was at and starting to speculate like this is a little bit crazy. Henry Kissinger is joining the board and there's something up.
Theranos is a unicorn here in Silicon Valley that was going to change everything about testing with nano vials of blood that would be able to diagnose people without having to draw blood. This was an incredible vision at the time. people thought that this could change everything and hundreds of millions of dollars was put into this company.
I think the biggest problem with Yahoo is they didn't release any products for like two years when Marissa first took over she was releasing a ton of new products they had yahoo screen they had yahoo weather they had this yahoo news digest they signed katie couric they signed david pogue I don't think those were particularly great signings honestly I don't think those people were are the types of talent that Yahoo needed but at least it was something I got people talking got people interested...
when that commercial products ready it's going to be similar or akin to the tesla roadster which is to say it's going to be expensive and not for everybody I mean Tesla sold two or three thousand league was 2,300 was the number of roadsters that were eventually sold for a hundred and twenty thousand dollars each and these things were carbon fiber you know absurdly fast go-karts that you know fit two people and no luggage or very little like a day bag it was not and they weren't the most comforta
i do think zenefits raised a lot more so i think these are nice developments but they're not earth-shattering they're just really awesome
this is just for them to stay involved with the big companies coming out of their incubator and they're doing 200 300 companies a year or so Bionic that maybe 300 so they're going to need those companies if they hit two unicorns a year let's say the ship one unicorn a year probably one a unicorn a year it's probably a good average one out of three hundred well you know what they need 100 million dollars for every unicorn they hit 50 million 100 million to keep going
I don't think I box out any other VCS I think this is for them to go pro rata
it adds to this narrative which I don't think is a true narrative it's kind of a false narrative that YC is competitive with everybody or YC is to circle the wagon kind of mentality
I don't think either of these are going to have a dramatic impact on the VC market because they're small compared to the large size of the overall VC market and the number of startups have greatly increased and the number of startups that need continuing funding has increased so massively that we still don't have enough funds
the most important thing in tinder who knows but it might be that actual matches and people starting a conversation in tender are more important
in 2016 I think you want to have both a switch is flipped on in other words be like uber or a thumbtack where they're making a portion of the transaction every month and they have modernization on
in 2016 I think you want to have both a switch is flipped on in other words be like uber or a thumbtack where they're making a portion of the transaction every month and they have modernization on
this is the second most successful in my 150 Angel Investments Uber of course is number one Thumbtack also a unicorn
Thumbtack also a unicorn
this is the second most successful in my 150 Angel Investments Uber of course is number one
it's a clear victory for Airbnb
the best way to get outraged is to have a poorly framed debate and the best way to have a poorly framed debate is to have it over a medium that has 140 characters long so I think that's the problem and anonymity right exactly
I'm screwing all the data all the data now at Twitter is GNA be screwed up because I'm going to reply with a star and not Fave stuff so I'm just screwing up the whole model
I think it's a Twitter problem
Twitter's not for conversation anymore
it's a bridge too far for me like I don't want to hug you I want to fist bump you you know like I'm noting what you said but I'm not hugging you I find it pandering and childish just like I found the like button was so manipulative and unsophisticated
the Twitter's problems have been a long time coming... none of my friends are going to use it I'm trying I'm an advocate I'm a brand Advocate they are not switching I can't they don't even know how to they don't know how to use it
He basically created the concept, I think you're pretty much credited with this, of viral videos on YouTube.
those platforms have their own goals which is selling ads and keeping people on their platforms and stealing those users from your platform
not having that ugly thing that comes up at the end of like a youtube video that shows all the different videos of other people that I don't want to send my users to
if we use a free service like youtube we have all youtube's ads and collaterals and garbage and it looks terrible and it's not customizable so it looks bad and everything that YouTube does is in service of increasing their metrics not your metrics
Yeah, I can't trust Google anymore. I told it to Larry Page and to Sergey. I was like, you know, we made $25, $30 million together in Google AdSense. I built two businesses on your, in your ecosystem. And then when I had a problem, when you guys de-indexed me, you wouldn't even return my goddamn emails. And you put me into the PR person and you put me to Matt Cutts and I went in there and Matt Cutts lied to my face. I said, this is no way for me to live. I would rather be poor. I would rather no
people won't shut up about your company and in America we don't even know what it is um but everybody is telling me how amazing this company is
I mean, you have companies like Google, which are paying people double or triple the market rate of a salary. Right. And they don't actually have like a, a lot of goals, let's say. Yeah. A lot of work to do.
he founded brain tree which was a company that did transactions payments and he sold it to eBay made a bunch of money
I heard that Samsung really strong D Oculus into getting this because right they wanted uh Oculus needed their screens so Samsung this is the back story I heard is that Samsung was like if you want our screens for your Oculus and you want us to make you a priority we need to have a priority of getting our own VR headset out there
to me that's the big uh that's the big game Cher is that VR technology is a mobile First Technology it's not like a 3D television that you needed 3D glasses a 3D TV and a 3D camera uh all you need is your mobile phone to experience right a 3D source and so to me you're you know you're it seems like a pretty good bet cuz you're betting on mobile and that's what's exciting and so that's exactly how the Samsung Gear works
seems like an impossible person to beat
it went through Disney's accelerator program and they got a licensing deal from Disney to make books uh and they're going to have that announcement coming out shortly
I think they should have an expedited review process where if you pay 50 bucks they'll it that same day so you can jump the line it makes a lot of sense
the human reviews are incredibly inconsistent at Apple that's really the challenge some things just get right through and then other things they're like yeah you know you um you don't have at one point one of my companies had an issue where they're like you don't have the rights to like whatever and we're like yeah we're that's an inapp web browser like we we're not claiming that we're the New York Times you can link to anything like we have adult content it's like we don't have adult content it
it takes about 10 days um but then you know what happens is something magical happens if you get like a good star rating and it's been a little bit of time and maybe you've been featured I think based on my portfolio companies that they start to know like oh we know who this company is we know who Uber is or Thumbtack or whatever and they kind of go a little bit faster but they don't say they do that but my portfolio companies report they do that
we submitted to the Apple Store last week uh so uh it's like a 10day review process we'll see how long Apple takes to give us a thumbs up
give me two people from apple now don't they with the watch because the watch isn't supporting etch yet but we'll assume it well don't they have their own gestures and stuff that they want to do and you kind of came out with yours first didn't you
you can change keyboards now on the iphone yes this is a feature they launched what a year ago uh yeah it shipped with iOS 8
I think this could actually make the apple watch super functional and a must buy
IBM is a big company... I love this company of course I would love to partner with IBM so we're doing Smart Camp with them... IBM huge company successful... we have this huge partnership with IBM couldn't be prouder
they've raised tens of millions of dollars Google Ventures a bunch of important people are in that company
obviously they're not going to sell to Cisco
slack is this really fast growing company
I think Cisco is probably doing the best job of any major company out there
Cisco which has made an incredible telepon telepresence product for 1,500 bucks that they've matched with the power of Yammer or slack HipChat etc IRC
I would go to CNN I would go to Fox and I would go to Huffington Post and everybody else and I'd say Hey listen we need a partner for this would you like to partner with us Limelight is terrible name we got to get a new name it's fine... we just need $250,000 for the pilot uh and you'll have a 2-year exclusive in your vertical
CNN reports this stuff never really worked and what you've built could actually work as a journalism platform is especially if you got CNN to adopt this
shervin as we know was the B round investor for Uber MH Bill Gurley was the A- round investor and I was the angel investor
I had this great moment in New York where I called an Uber and it was like 12 minutes and I was like what the [ __ ] 12 minutes this is [ __ ] crazy then I like had to catch myself and I was like oh if I was calling if I was trying to get a cab like I lived in New York it can take half an hour to get a cab and getting on the subway can take time and sometimes the subway you have to wait for the next train because there's so many people on it like I got to check myself here like 12 minutes pretty
that's why Uber's beating lift so much and then side car is having all kinds of problems cuz sidecar is you know 15 minutes to get picked up and lift is seven and Uber's three
they're really the key metc for them is how many minutes to get picked up
if they start the pitch with uh we're going to you know um start this great company it's a company that you know helps you get a taxi really fast on your phone and the great thing is for every you know taxi ride that you take we're going to give one to somebody in a developing country I'd be absolutely not interested in that business because what I find is when people have that like stuff early on in the business before they've perfected the business it it's it's almost like we're going to be do
you've chosen to go up against Amazon in the part of their business where they lose money in other words this is like um going into a gunfight with like a butter knife right it's going to be hard
the fact is Amazon doesn't make any money on selling products they kind of sell things at a very low margin
I think building a consumer product that allows people to quickly uh make a decision is kind of Amazon's business right and they are they've got a lot of people working on that so basically by choosing to help people make a decision you're choosing to compete with Amazon
this Samsung Edge S6 which is a fantastic F I highly recommend the Samsung endorsed by me... but these things are pretty [ __ ] fantastic aren't they and like you know you put them into that Gear headset and all of a sudden it's like well that's convenient and it's powerful
I have been in the industry for 25 years and virtual reality has been this topic in science fiction that we've all debated when is it going to arrive Johnny neonic and the metaverse and Ne know Stevenson and many different um people have predicted this would come and it's here I'm actually convinced that this time time is actually the time it's going to work and the reason it's going to work um is because of the great work in software that Amir is doing but also these devices um have made it rea
should you start a company based on VR should you start building apps based on VR and what is the market going to be for the first class of apps will you make billions of dollars like uh Clash of Clans like Angry Birds will you get a head start in everybody like Dropbox or Evernote and other things that did really well on mobile or is it too soon for you to start developing or building startups in the VR space
will movies work on VR platforms or not do we want to interact with our favorite stories do we want to be uh have George Lucas do Star Wars or JJ Abrams Do Star Wars 7 or do we want to actually tell the story I'm not sure I think I want to sit back and let J.J Abrams and step Spielberg and George Lucas and soresi tell me stories but maybe there's a possibility that there's something interesting to be done with VR and movies
we had a mindblowing discussion about the educational possibilities of VR I.E if you wanted to basically learn how to do open heart surgery you'd have to go to school for eight years before you would even be able to touch touch or be in the same room as somebody doing open heart surgery in virtual reality you could be a 12-year-old and instead of playing Call of Duty you could spend your time doing open heart surgery and maybe somebody who's even illiterate could become the best open heart surge
I didn't actually believe in VR I thought it was 50/50 that it would actually work this time now I am literally 100% convinced that VR this time is not going to suck it's going to be pretty pretty cool
obviously uh elan's done a hell of a job with that Tesla company there
if we use a free service like YouTube we have all YouTube's ads and collaterals and garbage and it looks terrible and it's not customizable so it looks bad and everything that YouTube does is in service of increasing their metrics not your metrics
it's kind of the future of Twitter video live video it's going to change everything
Apple is like the most formidable competitor for any company in the world. They are the largest company in the world, I believe. They're literally the largest company in the world.
how much Twitter has defined culture to find the news to find individuals presence
this is an amazing story of a 26-year-old who is super smart and was part of the cast of lay Miz on Broadway I mean this is like some Savant kid who created something thing in the valley that is competitive with white combinator as good as white combinator according to the people I talk to and he did it all as a nonprofit
I think this will be a cash cow for them. I think 20% of users will do it.
Just like when a Tesla got, you know, hit and it went on fire, right? They're like, 'Oh my god, a Tesla went on fire.' It's the batteries. It's like there are Elon said here's the statistics. We've put out this many cars. We have this many hours. We are like whatever 100 times safer just based on our hours on the road to gasoline cars.
That's why Netflix has done so well. That's why Amazon has done so well. That's why Jason uh the guy from Hulu is going to do so awesome.
And they're like, 'We can't do that. We have to treat everybody the same.' And I said, you know what, right, [ __ ] This is how big companies control people who are not powerful is by saying we can't change the deal.
18 months ago, everything I asked for, they finally caved, right?
This is where Google is going to get their ass kicked. This will be their downfall, I predict, which is they believe that they can treat content owners poorly, artists poorly, because they have the largest platform.
You may have just read with Vessel. You may have just read YouTube is now giving We're going to lock you in with the deal with people what everything I asked for. I'm going to give you celebrity treatment. 18 months ago, everything I asked for, they finally caved, right?
I left YouTube and I told this to them. I'm leaving. I I think there's an opportunity here. I don't want to work with you because I don't feel like you respect me and that you care about me.
And this is where Google is going to get their ass kicked. This will be their downfall, I predict, which is they believe that they can treat content owners poorly, artists poorly, because they have um the largest platform. Well, you know what? You can treat people poorly to a point and then people get sick of it and they'll leave even if it's not economically viable or makes sense.
They've won. And what I mean by one is they're not going away. They're going to have a great business. They're going to have a great outcome for investors. They've made a great product the world loves.
it doesn't matter if you're watching this show tomorrow or in 6 months or a year, there's always going to be a recent flare up. Like you kind of hope they grow out of it, right?
you're going to see great things from Uber and you're going to see a different company in terms of I think the wartime company is going to be the warm company. The 1.0 is now becoming the 2.0. They are so focused and this was happening 6 months ago with veterans, jobs, food. They're really working on how do we give back and they're going to do it so well.
They have to pick the fights and they have to act a little magnanimous now because they've won.
They've won. And what I mean by one is they're not going away. They're going to have a great business. They're going to have a great outcome for investors. They've made a great product the world loves.
I don't get involved in the public discussions of the companies I invest in because it's really annoying if you're the founder of the company to have me jumping in and speaking for your company. ... I have no control over a company. I own way less than 1% of Uber. And so on a real number basis, it might be a lot of money, but on a percentage of shares owned, it's a very small number.
I watched the episode when Travis was on and he was in two cities and you said to Travis um I think this you know could be a billion- dollar company
I could do as good a job or better than Marissa or Tim
you're really only shooting yourself in the foot because you you're missing all those 10,000 entrepreneurs that are there
I know that Google has in treated a Partners well
Matt Cuts goes out and lies and say we didn't change organic search no you didn't change search but you move the first organic search down the Page by 400 pixels
the lameness of Google where they're like oh Yelp was a great partner we're going to push Yelp down the page and we're going to put local on the top of the page and with the with the zigat stuff even though it's a worse consumer experience
you're Monopoly you squeeze
they wanted to take the New Deal where we were splitting revenue and they said oh you remember the last deal we put like a million or2 million dollars into content we want to take all the other channels you have that have nothing to do with those deals we want to recoup that Revenue
they said to me we're going to renew your deal for $3 million then they came back and said we're going to renew your deal for $400,000 and we want to recoup everything from the last one and take 100% of your revenue
everybody who's a Google partner hates them and they've all stopped being partners with them
you're the person who cost a hundred people their jobs and who didn't communicate to your partner you're the person who screwed your partner and by the way that's why everybody in the valley is so concerned and hates googlers that's why people are protesting your buses that's why people don't like you guys anymore everybody was rooting for Google for a decade and then you guys became so powerful and then you guys started taking everybody search results
these big companies are not loyal and a person like Matt Cuts who probably made a hundred $200 million in Google Shares he doesn't actually care about me as a person
Mahalo got hit really hard by that Google update which people have seen me you know tweet about and how unfair it was
the other two would be sort of turnaround jobs or whatever but I could do as good a job or better than Marissa or Tim
in those things I would have to very deeply consider it because you do have the ability to impact a large number of people with products that people love
I think that's a trillion dollar company and I think Twitter is going to be a trillion dollar company too so I think both of those companies will go at least 20x from where they are now which is a big number
there'd be 20 YouTube partners there the biggest ones in the world and all of us would be sitting there and everybody would be whing on YouTube and how unfair it was
they said to me we're going to renew your deal for $3 million then they came back and said we're going to renew your deal for $400,000 and we want to recoup everything from the last one and take 100% of your revenue
YouTube has a long way to go still yeah huge way to go I mean I think that's a trillion dollar company
when you look at Google ads and they keep changing the design the reason they're changing the design is so you click on it without knowing it's an ad and they've done studies outside of Google where it's absolutely true that Google is deceiving the audience as to what's an ad and in fact Google spent years explaining to Publications how to make the ads look like content and then they penalize the companies like eHow for having too many Google ads on the page
we do sort of internally talk about YouTube as a great model for you know building a platform that has you know sort of it's an open platform anyone can contribute and they built uh a model for people to make money on it whether or not they're happy with the money they're making um so but we do think that they they own attention on video and once you have that kind of scale uh it's it's a really good opportunity to start to monetize off of that
Caris swier you know covers topics like what's that covers Yahoo really well she's actually she's actually on the board people don't realize that's how she gets all the scoop she's actually literally a board member
they see the New York Times um laying people off or people having a hard time you know those people have had 10 20 years to figure it out they kind of haven't and they're all shutting down or having having problems they kind of deserve to have problems because they're so slow and they didn't really react fast enough
one of the key moments I think at Twitter was when the celebrities came on board and in fact when I was living in La I told them Evan you know if we get Perez Hilton to join Twitter it'll be huge
I mean, in the early days of Uber, none of us – I was an early investor – none of us actually considered it would increase the number of taxi rides. We thought it would just be a better taxi ride. Right. And certainly nobody thought it would replace car ownership, which it may not – it's replacing car ownership for some people, and it's definitely getting rid of the second car for many people.
the company now just needs to say this was phase one of the company and now we're gonna move into phase two and we're just gonna stop trying to survive we're just gonna focus on making a great product and building a great culture
it's much safer to be in an uber than any other car
the company needs to and the management needs to just take a deep breath here and say hey we kind of have already won that set of battles
massive success massive growth unlike anything we've ever seen in silicon valley
the company has had to fight every day of its life for survival
i don't think they're ethically flawed and i don't think travis is either
the aggressive nature of the company is absolutely necessary in the business that they are in and that is probably why they have been and will be successful regardless of how many of these like pr flaps come on
Elon was essentially fired or pushed out of PayPal at the time where there was a power struggle.
I think it's top down in terms of decision making but I think it's bottom up in terms of how are we coming up with these products
I also just think he's he's really become I'm giving him an A+ as like sort of post jobs keeping the company on track
I have to say like that's if that was any Y combinator and I'm not saying this like if I if you told me this is a y combinator if a y combinator founder or a tech star founder showed the same product yeah I would say yeah that's totally a y combinator or Tech Stars like you know quality level which is really like I think commendable
this developer culture was really a why combinator Facebook thing to be totally honest because why combinator took the approach of if you have only Founders who are technical they they'll always be independent of having to hire a developer therefore the cost is going to be so much lower right and the number one issue any founder has if they're non technical is getting technical cofounders right so it was a clever move on their part but I do think it it did create a barrier where hey a female fou
Just like I back Travis ten times.
the most elite startup accelerator incubator
because it say people plus can continue to use the creative crisis creative common license material and crunch base improves its legal terms mobile app startup people plus and free technology industry database crunch base have settled their dispute over data collection under the creative commment license allowing both companies continue their work
here you go the eff actually had to step in and when the eff steps in you're basically super wrong I mean they don't pick up cases unless it's a really important principle thing and it shows just how exactly wrong AOL was in this case
Elon Musk picks Nevada over California and other locations for the gigafactory
we're going to talk about Apple's huge home run this week iPhone 6 iPhone 6 plus the watch and NFC payments huge week for them
thumbtack and uber like in its ability to scale and solve problems for people
that's why Google and apple got in troubles cuz Steve Jobs you know may he rest in peace who's a genius and and he contributed a lot to society but this is where one area where he did something with I think was incredibly loome which is he said you I can make a limited money but the developers who work for me we're going to agree not to get into bidding wars over them and poach from each other
twitch did not get sold to YouTube Google it went to Amazon
twitch did not get sold to YouTube Google it went to Amazon
I said this is why Google is so [ __ ] you guys don't understand what it means to be a partner when you tell a party you don't trust them and you don't even realize that you said it yeah you guys are [ __ ] out of touch with reality I literally told this to them everybody hates you who was a partner because of this like I would go to the YouTube parties yeah and they would have a hundred partners they're literally the top 100 channels on YouTube and you'd have three or four people sitting there
I've been very critical of the youtubes of the world for certain things you know as a business it's very hard to run your business off of youtube YouTube's a credible phenomenon but every time I would use YouTube for business unless and we post this week in startups to YouTube because we have to but I have to do all this work to try to make it my video to make it my show inside their ecosystem and they keep trying to steal my customers and redirect them to places it's very frustrating
I've been very critical of the youtubes of the world for certain things you know as a business it's very hard to run your business off of youtube YouTube's a credible phenomenon but every time I would use YouTube for business unless and we post this week in startups to YouTube because we have to but I have to do all this work to try to make it my video to make it my show inside their ecosystem and they keep trying to steal my customers and redirect them to places it's very frustrating and I fina
If you invest in Google, you're investing mostly in a search business. That's an ad network.
you need a parking spot like this is the thing that people didn't realize about Uber certainly when I invested in Uber none of us ever thought in the first you know couple of months or year that it would actually not be a replacement for taxis but really be a replacement for car you that was the big I mean that's why this is a a unicorn company and like so so Transcendent
he's invested in over 60 companies including LinkedIn and PayPal those are multibillion-dollar exits
how do you own a city right like because that's what I think uh speaking of uber that they did particular well is like hey when we decide we're going to do Chicago we're going to do Chicago
so for Uber you need you need a certain Baseline of liquidity like two cars won't cut it right you need a a lot of cars yeah
they did hire bit from YouTube so they obviously have aspirations of content
whether it's from Facebook or Twitter you know as much as we all love those Services you can't be guaranteed that you're going to reach them
slack which if you don't know has raised another $43 million from social capit capit partnership that's chth and dreon harwitz which is obviously Morgan dreon and Ben harowitz and uh you know a bunch of other folks and Excel so they're just crushing it
he's a tremendous entrepreneur the product's amazing
I'm not going to say names YouTube but these other players they are experts at trying to steal your traffic and send it back to themselves YouTube
I've had my problems with Google of late like I I felt like in the early days you could get an answer and meet with people... then the panda update happened and like they pull the rug out of an entire industry without any warning we all get demolished they won't talk to us and then YouTube takes all the revenue it's it felt like the relationship between the Publishers and I've told people at Google this I've been very public about it it felt like Google doesn't really need the Publishers anymore
he's staying at Google to do this very project
it looks like these things are going to actually happen
you will be able to buy your car any way you want not too far in the future
I'm not an investor in Tesla by the way kill myself over that um I could if I could have invested in Tesla at $1 I'm a complete idiot
I know through watching Marissa and Larry Page at Google just absolutely crush it by having the fastest services in the world and the most stable Services they built a lot of trust with their audience
people are going public with much less revenue than Uber.
This is an awful large amount of money. $20 million a week going through the system and this is from October.
What a great entrepreneur. What a great company.
Travis Kalanick who is the founder, co-founder and CEO of Uber which I'm actually lucky enough to have been an investor in he showed it to me when he first made the app and I said hey can I invest in that? Hey good decision Jason
one of the two, three top hottest startups uh in the United States right now, Box.
you're an investor in yeah through Google Ventures yeah you guys invested in angelist
difference between Lyft and Uber Lyft is a company people feel feel an emotional connection with Uber is a mercenary transaction look of the two I take U so I'm not putting a value judgment on that I don't want to get picked up in some douchy mustache car but people do have an emotional feeling with lift they do not have with Uber they feel like it is a cold transaction and at the end of the day that is the kind that's why you know people like apple and not Microsoft
I love it I mean you say that's bad I mean the New York Times would find something cuz it's Elon but yeah no there huh this is Operation get us off this rock in action like this is the start of it right this is like how our kids could literally just go live ons or like a still Studio
I think when Alon musk made Tesla happen and he made SpaceX happen I think it sparked something in Larry that made him say like well Elana is going for 100 X's he's going for Mars and he's going for you know electric cars and solving that problem and Solar City and the hyperloop I think now we have this Great era of competition in big huge products that matter
if Google can build a self driving car Microsoft can build uh why not nuclear power why absolutely they could I mean it's just smart people in offices working together to collaborate to make products there no difference
if Bill Gates had stayed at Microsoft see I think Bill Gates left Microsoft so he could do really ambitious things like cure malaria or do Terra power and do like new nuclear power but if you think about it what Larry pagee is doing is he's staying at Google while doing massively amb ambitious things so I think what should happen is Bill Gates should come back to Microsoft and just pulling what the Gates Foundation is doing and make that all for profit and like okay so why can't Microsoft work o
Microsoft's big idea is the Surface Pro two is going to have two levels of kickstand like that was the marketing and I'm like okay how do the these companies are an embarrassment compared to Google's ambition
you have companies like Microsoft and Apple which are managing existing product lines um as they're you know declining right
I think Alon musk is the driving force behind what Larry Page is doing because I think when Alon musk made Tesla happen and he made SpaceX happen I think it sparked something in Larry that made him say like well Elana is going for 100 X's he's going for Mars and he's going for you know electric cars and solving that problem and Solar City and the hyperloop I think now we have this Great era of competition in big huge products that matter
if Google can build a self driving car Microsoft can build uh why not nuclear power why absolutely they could I mean it's just smart people in offices working together to collaborate to make products there no difference
I think when Alon musk made Tesla happen and he made SpaceX happen I think it sparked something in Larry that made him say like well Elana is going for 100 X's he's going for Mars and he's going for you know electric cars and solving that problem and Solar City and the hyperloop I think now we have this Great era of competition in big huge products that matter
Tesla goes to $20 billion in market cap fisa Karma goes to zero in the same three-year period
the Tesla Model S comes out and it's this extraordinary vehicle that wins the greatest car ever made by Consumer Reports the greatest safety ever by this NTSB it breaks one of the machines it's so safe
the big idea this year is we're going to come out with the 5C which is $100 cheaper than the 5S and it's got multiple colors and like that's the big idea
they don't want to try to do any sort of big moonshots or 10x it's all incremental
they don't buy companies generally speaking it's more a little obscure things
Apple the most they can think of doing with their money is giving it back in a dividend doing a share buyback
you have companies like Microsoft and Apple which are managing existing product lines um as they're you know declining
Google's going to win an extraordinary amount it's going to be the largest most powerful company in the world much bigger than Apple much bigger than Microsoft
this is just two of the most um important social companies right now
two of the hottest absolute lightning uh in a Bottle apps currently on the market of course Tinder
now you have Marissa taking the SNL library off of YouTube YouTube now blocking any SNL clips in the United States because Marissa bought it for Yahoo
I think my worry with that is that changes the nature of Twitter like it it makes it into a different a more Facebook like platform I mean I'm sure that'll be inviting to some people especially football fans but I just I love the fact of a single identity
I think this NFL deal is kind of interesting they've been doing a lot of deals right now where they're putting video clips onto Twitter that are hosted by Twitter so in a way like YouTube but only for select partners and they have a couple of dozen it's over 40 at this point video Partners but nobody seems to be picking up on this in the news
Nielsen did released this study where they showed that there's like a significant relationship between how people use Twitter and TV ratings which is a huge thing because that that suggests that like when people when advertisers kind of tie their campaigns uh you know integrate Twitter campaigns with TV campaigns that you know that's a natural kind of way to buy ads it's kind of a platform that Facebook um you know has has tried to make that connection but I don't think it's as as clear
Twitter is much more real time than Facebook um what Twitter does is sync up all these people talking about the same thing at the same time uh and Facebook doesn't really do that because news feed is a uh you know an algorithmically uh generated list of things that are happening to your friends and your family not things that are happening right now so that's the major sort of functional difference that leads to these two different use cases
I mean the reality is it's the older version um with with a new exterior or bespoke exterior and I think they did a great job in really wetting a lot of appetite for these two products I mean if you look at it it's basically an older iPhone in a in a sexy case and I I think it will do quite well
they were in the running for ways they didn't they didn't do anywhere near hard enough they should have acquired ways because their Maps suck it still sucks it's better but you know what they're I'm not sure ways actually would have dramatically improved their Maps data though on traffic right but they're getting a lot of data through Partnerships and and they're going to improve Maps over time just by solving a lot of the data problems
some folks are even going to let you get degrees from there
the um idea grew out of some experimentation she did at Stanford
YouTube is a great platform YouTube has a huge opportunity and it's YouTube's um game to lose
if you just do a Google search about the dark fiber they bought up and the amount of fiber they own they don't really have bandwidth costs the way that you know you setting up a web server with they have that as a fixed cost
there will be very significant competitors to YouTube who absolutely go out and individually contact each of you and say come to our platform that's coming
my impression of Google and YouTube is that and all technology companies is they really don't respect content companies I don't think that they think you're all that important on an individual basis
Google and YouTube taking this position that we don't do better deals is completely false they do give better deals they just don't give them to you
I believe that because Twitter and Facebook uh AOL Microsoft and these new competitors they will provide direct sales support and direct marketing support to the same creators who grew up on YouTube
I think actually Twitter is going to be the big sleeper Twitter has a 100 Partners right now in video that they're hosting video for nobody knows about it but the NBA started putting Clips on what's the difference between a Twitter follower and a YouTube subscriber nothing and so that's going to be a big platform I predict Twitter will be the most likely uh competitor to YouTube
people like a and Yahoo are going and using scarcity the quality of the product the distribution as a way to get high cpms and they're getting cpms that absolutely trouts what YouTube gets
I believe that because Twitter and Facebook uh AOL Microsoft and these new competitors they will provide direct sales support and direct marketing support to the same creators who grew up on YouTube
I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook or Netflix or AOL or Yahoo these people come out and say we'll give you 100% of revenue for the first year or two to try to get you to leave YouTube
having those kind of cliffhanger episodes is a great way for you to sell into the Microsoft Yahoo Facebooks and aols mobile apps
you'll have other options and your other options people like Yahoo Facebook Microsoft AOL and other folks maybe even Netflix or Amazon dip down to this level
YouTube is a great platform YouTube has a huge opportunity and it's YouTube's um game to lose
if you just do a Google search about the dark fiber they bought up and the amount of fiber they own they don't really have bandwidth costs the way that you know you setting up a web server with they have that as a fixed cost
if we're here a year from now they will absolutely be taking 30% I guarantee you that
my impression of Google and YouTube is that and all technology companies is they really don't respect content companies I don't think that they think you're all that important on an individual basis
Google and YouTube taking this position that we don't do better deals is completely false they do give better deals they just don't give them to you
people like a and Yahoo are going and using scarcity the quality of the product the distribution as a way to get high cpms and they're getting cpms that absolutely trouts what YouTube gets
I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook or Netflix or AOL or Yahoo these people come out and say we'll give you 100% of revenue for the first year or two to try to get you to leave YouTube
you'll have other options and your other options people like Yahoo Facebook Microsoft AOL and other folks maybe even Netflix or Amazon dip down to this level when those folks come into the market in the next 12 months you want to be prepared
Yahoo AOL MSN Microsoft Facebook will be competing with YouTube in the next year
people like a and Yahoo are going and using scarcity the quality of the product the distribution as a way to get high cpms and they're getting cpms that absolutely trouts what YouTube gets
this will be the thing that limits YouTube and this is their cross to bear this is their challenge that they have to break through they think like the north not the South they think that content creators should be kept level and flat but Netflix with their 14 emys they think that they should pick winners and they think that Kevin spy or Orange is the New Black should be treated differently than the person who takes a video of a cat falling off a television and this is what YouTube has to has to
YouTube will take 45% of it but if you do a joint venture with vitamin water to make a series and vitamin water is integrated into the show YouTube will take nothing it's integrated into the show and they don't really have a way to police it
Google has a very easy time controlling you if you're a YouTube publisher who doesn't do any of these other things because they can change the rules of how you reach your subscribers and they have right and they keep changing those rules and if they're going to change the rules they're going to change the rules in favor of themselves in all likelihood
YouTube cpms are going to keep going down they're not going to go up they have too much inventory
Yahoo AOL MSN Microsoft Facebook will be competing with YouTube in the next year
they cannot think like Google Engineers they cannot think like algorithms they have to think like artists and producers
this will be the thing that limits YouTube and this is their cross to bear this is their challenge that they have to break through
that's how YouTube thinks right now and it's broken thinking
Google believes everybody should be treated the same but that's not how the world Works um everybody should not get the same deal effort should be rewarded effort should be rewarded investment should be rewarded
I think we should get the email addresses of the people who subscribe to our Channel when you're logged into you thank you thank you and the reason I say this is because when somebody sub is logged into YouTube they've already opted into YouTube but when they click on I Justine or Hannah they're no longer subscribing to YouTube they want a relationship with Hanna or I Justine but YouTube doesn't give you that email address
we'd like to be able to set our own ad frequency if I invest in content I should be able to click a box that says I want an advertisement in front of it or I want YouTube to set it it's not fair that YouTube gets to set if there's an ad in front of your techn in front of your videos or not that should be I think something we said
I think YouTube will come to the table
YouTube's Blended rate would be 20% more than enough for YouTube more than enough for a highly profitable YouTube and a massively Jugger not profitable Google they don't need to make anything more than 20%
if YouTube came out and said let's if you sell it we'll just take a 10% cut then your salesperson you're smiling that would be a better deal
YouTube is taking so much because YouTube is being so greedy and taking 45% it makes no sense for a content creator to hire salespeople which then means content creators are even more dependent on YouTube and that the entire ecosystem is frozen
the fact that they're holding to this 45% split is kind of unconscionable
YouTube is profitable to the tune of a billion dollars a year according to analysts
YouTube cannot ever work for Content creators as a business onto itself
the revenue split completely unsustainable
if YouTube follows that track it has not been pretty for Content creators who have been partners with YouTube
YouTube's made a lot of changes to support time on site the statistic they care about they have done a really bad job about the tools that favor content creators
there is a real lack of subscriber controls
premium cpms have been one of the biggest challenges for YouTube
Larry Page and the Google team from what I understand believe everybody should buy from the Google interface
you get no marketing support
YouTube doesn't have a dedicated Salesforce
the cpms are generally very low
the cpms are very low very very very very very low
YouTube has gotten mobile right the majority of views on YouTube if they're not already will be mobile and they have nailed it with their apps on every platform
it's the largest advertising Network in the world that is Google and YouTube is part of that so that really helps
it's free Global HD hosting what's not to love about that a billion users a month and the tools are absolutely amazing analytics advertising subscriptions it's the best tool set in existence and it keeps getting better every month
without I Justine and Z Frank there is no YouTube YouTube would just be cat videos
YouTube couldn't do what they do without us so don't underestimate your power in this negotiation with YouTube
YouTube is not willing to do any marketing
we should get the email addresses of the people who subscribe to our Channel
we'd like to be able to set our own ad frequency
every YouTuber as you go up this path of success will hit this roadblock
everything else is perfect about YouTube these are very small changes that they could make that would make it completely sustainable
I said listen I would love to take the money and do this but it's not going to be sustainable
people were scared of YouTube people were very scared to upset YouTube people were very scared to tell them the truth
everybody was sitting there complaining about the deal everybody was complaining about the lack of support everybody was complaining about sales
YouTube's Blended rate would be 20% more than enough for YouTube more than enough for a highly profitable YouTube
if YouTube came out and said let's if you sell it we'll just take a 10% cut then your salesperson you're smiling that would be a better deal
YouTube is being so greedy and taking 45% it makes no sense for a content creator to hire salespeople
the fact that they're holding to this 45% split is kind of unconscionable
YouTube is profitable to the tune of a billion dollars a year according to analysts
YouTube takes their 45% Vig
YouTube cannot ever work for Content creators as a business onto itself The Business of Being a content creator is using YouTube strictly for marketing and then using that audience to take it off YouTube
the revenue split completely unsustainable
if you look at Google's history a lot of what Google's done in the search engine space if YouTube uh follows that track it has not been pretty for Content creators who have been partners with YouTube
YouTube's been very bad about communicating those things to uh channel uh and subscribers
there is a real lack of subscriber controls YouTube's made a lot of changes to support uh time on site the statistic they care about they have done a really bad job about the uh tools that favor content creators
zero sales support they don't have a sales group Larry Page and the Google team from what I understand believe everybody should buy from the Google interface
you get no marketing support there's zero marketing support from YouTube
the cpms are generally very low it's a function of a couple of things one there's so much inventory um two YouTube doesn't have a dedicated Salesforce three they only show ads on a small number of videos
we were part of that nine funded channels thanks for the cash um we were selected for second cycle funding out of the hundred or so people um that I I know of who were part of that funding maybe five or 10 of them in that first cycle got selected for funding we were lucky have to be one of those people we actually turned down the YouTube funding um I think we're the only company that has turned down YouTube funding to date
the cpms are very low very very very very very low
YouTube has gotten mobile right the majority of views on YouTube if they're not already will be mobile and they have nailed it with their apps on every platform
it's the largest advertising Network in the world that is Google and YouTube is part of that so that really helps
it's free Global HD hosting what's not to love about that a billion users a month and the tools are absolutely amazing analytics advertising subscriptions it's the best tool set in existence and it keeps getting better every month
this is what we all love about YouTube when you say video online you mean YouTube It's a billion people a month and it's really a juggernaut
we do see the Apple Store, The Disney Store, the espresso store people go there not just to shop but to experience stuff
Shopify is a huge company uh that has over 60,000 customers I believe that's right
you need to have some outliers that are huge and you need to I have that with Uber and some others
Steve Jobs, you know, he said stuff. He may not have said, like, here's a new product, but he would say, yeah, these people don't get it. This product sucks. Like, this is the way products should be made or this is what matters. You know, like, he would take on, like, an industry issue. Like, if you were talking about, like, 4G or 3G or whatever, bandwidth or pricing individual songs, versus albums, he would just go at it.
I think Google Glass is stupid.
like Tumblr getting bought for a billion dollars by Yahoo uh which many people consider a contemporary
and I I don't think Yahoo can say that historically and neither can Google Google's for killing stuff
he thinks that the current Google sensor system is too expensive it's better cheaper to have Optical cameras and data input processing
boy have people invested in upstart people like the crunch fund mark cuban google ventures rick miner over there kleiner perkins new nea new enterprise and first round my good friend josh koppelman over there
basically we're going to hear about it today but you can get a loan and then repay it back with a portion of your salary so people can invest in you
so this is an all-star list of investors and a really unique idea from the guy who was the president of google enterprise that's all the google apps stuff so we got a really smart guy with a really great idea with a little bit of controversy it's going to be a great episode
upstart is a i would almost say controversial but i think brilliant some people are wondering about this idea there's a lot of buzz about it
Samsung has opened an innovation Center uh or they're working on an innovation Center on University Boulevard in University AV in Palo Alto with the old bar talking toon Kim he's he's great yeah so for me you get Samsung holy cow or even SK Telecom talking about another Korean company you get someone like SK Telecom to come on board you get Nokia or you get Microsoft or any of those strategics to put a little bit of money in
as a YouTube partner and we have a bunch of shows like wellc or MMA surge that we're seeing tremendous tremendous viewership on mobile phones because of Lte because of iPads because of the Note 2 because of the iPhone 5 people love to watch short videos on their phones
you can find those stolen Clips like before CNN puts it on its own channel by just doing the search on the hashtag and then you don't need to watch anything because it's a better experience
Twitter is the best place to do it the Twitter hashtag is the best place to follow the news and people are putting the clips up in real time
they're doing these pilot TV shows and looking at the data to decide which one's to green light
Amazon results came out this week as well they had net sales of 16 about 16 billion that's up about 22% year-over-year
that's a mad takeover plan they got there
they obviously going to do this they're obviously going to give it away for free ... they'll sell it at Cost ... undercut like Roku ... probably 79 or less
Amazon doing their set top box
LinkedIn crushing it with their content stuff
he raised 6 million back in December from people like Aaron Le Levy rather from box
obviously we went to White com comat so that's a pretty good sign that he's a winner
the big cold war between Zuckerberg and D Costello where you know I guess Twitter is blocking Instagram photos from being shown because Instagram and Facebook won't let Twitter look up your friends there and all this nonsense
like rupon just kicked out CEO and like they still have no clue on how to how to make money out of it
What an amazing company, this has been, right?
it feels like Apple doesn't know how to make great apps.
A hundred and forty billion dollars, obviously, best products in the market, but it feels like some of the hardware is... [not great]. Android has reached parity.
iCloud is a disaster.
When you go into Apple's ecosystem on their home turf, and you absolutely slaughter them app by app, like, Gmail.
This is the direct result of Apple and Steve Jobs.
Amazon, Google, Apple with a hundred and forty billion dollars, the largest hedge fund in the world, it's insane.
their, sort of, cluster of great apps have now been just absolutely thrones by Google, right? The Maps app. The Gmail app is so much better than Mail.
It feels like eighty percent way there.
When you go into Apple's ecosystem on their home turf, and you absolutely slaughter them app by app, like, Gmail.
We did hear that Google was going to have stores, and Google launched this Chromebook Pixel, an incredible laptop with the best resolution of any laptop.
one of them that's been a rocket ship is of course HubSpot everybody's been talking about that buzzing about it software as a service and um I was actually I didn't understand the business and and I think that's probably a pretty good sign to our mesh that it's a good business when people don't understand it isn't it
just the booming YouTube ecosystem
he does have a mission type approach, and I think it's genuine.
the Facebook fund was part of Founders fund or was Facebook and Founders J JV between Excel and Founders fund who each put in 5 mil and then administered by Facebook until I came in and busted their chops and took it over right
full disclaimer I'm an angel investor in Uber Uber is saying they're going to go up
I liked her I do like them admitting they're a Content company because I always tell the story... they've always always as G was sort of alluding to before all these tech companies are like they begrudgingly want to be in the content business.
what people don't realize is even at $5 the programs are so cheap to make ... if you get a thousand people to pay $5 a month that could be enough for somebody to start a show it's enough for one or two people to have spending money to do it so it will make things uh just like Kickstarter you know has everybody underestimated kickstarters impact and I think this could be Kickstarter like in its approach
more people might come on to YouTube if they know they can charge for their content absolutely existing Stars I I think there's a bit of a debate inside of YouTube as to if this is the right way to go or not but the way I look at it is why not I mean it's not going to be mandatory
I think what you'll see is the top 5% of 1 to 5% of people who have large subscription bases and politics is interesting I immediately thought of The Young Turks um Jen who runs that he's got 573 th000 subscribers I mean if he gets 1% 5,000 people to pay $5 a month you know hey that's now $300,000 a year that's meaningful production
one of the biggest growing categories education on YouTube
yahoo has acquired another company snip dot it I think that's the second acquisition for Marissa and it looks like a good one
Google and Apple are in the same boat they're all closing up their ecosystems and and I don't think Google is then frankly Microsoft is too
Microsoft's q2 earnings were pretty good
apple missing their revenue for the quarter everybody's freaking out and the stock is taking quite a haircut
there was that little thing called Apple cutting ohle c yeah apple cut orders on their phones
I believe Apple and Google and Microsoft are going to be in a dog fight for the next five years buying the top 50 apps
Facebook ripped off um Snapchat and created a competitor
you got off a StubHub which was a tremendous success obviously
YouTube as getting back to the YouTube example which seems like YouTube is like maybe two years ahead of where you guys are at maybe not in terms of users they ahead of everybody on the planet but in terms terms of thinking about the content ecosystem they're opening a space uh in Los Angeles for Content providers to have resources so like if you're a content provider and you want to do like a short comedy skit show you can go
y feels to me like you're a mini YouTube if you went to 10 talk show hosts and said hey we're going to make a business Channel and we're going to sell it out we're going to go in advance to American Express and sell it at a high CPM we're going to do better than you could do we're going to keep you know 45% like YouTube does and we're going to advance you some production money against that this could be an amazingly powerful model for you could it not
seems to me with the YouTube funding content in advance um you could be raise another round or by uh providing subscription Based Services or a donate button or even coming with big advertising buys could do what YouTube is doing which is YouTube's going out to Market full disclosure Mahalo is a YouTube Partner this this funded program that you know about um which is a different company than this weekend um they're going out in advance with a slate of programming selling an upfront collecting th
they have a great business building hardware and they're pretty good at right
this is a direct competitor and they've been nice to you by featuring it but now they've come in and they will be the default on everybody's phone
Marissa mayor told me long ago that the the the best way they could add a feature to Google was to make it faster because then it would increase usage so they would add features no additional usage they would make it faster usage would go up
wait wait wait wait wait infos seek and lyos did die I think they did but this is a huge winner
it would be like saying the iPad or iPhone is a terrible product I it creates this dissonance when a political candidate says that a product's a loser and then you know it's not cuz you use it yourself every day I drive it every day and I've driven the other one for 3 years when you say that it makes me think you're a fraud
it's a huge blunder to not have LTE on a phone
I just buffer them now and then every two hours they go out it works so much better people don't see four in a row it is actually a good feature
buffer app is crushing it thousands of pay Members a very interesting social tool that I am in love with
I think it's a bigger play.
And that's where Google actually seems to have an advantage over Apple.
their movie selection and their book selection is really nice. Their store is running excellently now. I think their store is getting more innovative than the Apple store in terms of interface.
I wanna go ahead and put a 'buy' rating officially, on Google, and set a target of eight hundred and twenty-five dollars by the end of this broadcast.
So if Google has a monopoly on search results, they are very protective about the algorithm. They would not tell you the algorithm, but then, when they go to Android, and say, 'Oh, everything is so open!' Now the Android phones are getting a big market share, now they started to say, 'Android, maybe, is not...'
I think, you'd have people like Google and other people would get sort of concerned about this issue and will be appealed and that kind of thing.
we also see on the other side of your Twitter investor and warrant adviser, that they've been locking down access
in iOS 6 you can make a photo stream that's in your photo area and share it with friends ... now we can all put photos onto one common stream I never have to load I'm not going to be on path or Facebook half as much because that's what I'm trying to do is share pictures of my daughter
iCloud works it just works
Apple's busy with maps right so that's going to consume it
Apple only puts out the most polished version so if Apple puts out a wearable computer like that it's going to be like too late everybody's going to already associate it with Google right
this is the most brilliant marketing strategy put the products out when they're in hyper alpha so that you get credit for the innovation before Apple
congratulations Google I think it's an awesome project congratulations to my pal Sergey
this is a revolutionary product even though it's incremental so it's incrementally better five or six different ways which means it is hugely better
ios 6 maps from apple is a complete utter embarrassment
everybody of course rushes to go download it and then they find out well i can't you know easily click from the timeline anymore those really cool panels that they came out with the lauren richter design is all gone and a lot of people started saying you know this is this is actually crap why did they do this and you know the whole idea of course is to unify your experience it looks a lot like the iphone app now so i guess the question is you know do the negative reviews matter and how long befo
the one juror who cenet interviewed last week said that there was no Hometown bias in they followed the judge's instructions and they yeah I don't buy that I mean who votes against Apple
Marissa is a contemporary of a lot of these people like Mark pinkis um or danis Crowley I think some of them might see it as like failure in a way to sell to her While others might think it's awesome to join her team but it's going to be you know it's not like Steve Jobs buying your company where like oh Steve Jobs bought my company like he's my hero it's like well Marissa was this Google employee who's now in charge of this I don't want to sell to her that would feel like defeat to me
YouTube is like a juggernaut... it was probably the best purchase in the history of the internet
this is uh one of the reasons why Google bought YouTube was people were going to YouTube and searching how do I do X how do I change a filter how do I change a carburetor how do I how do I Gap a spark plug people were typing that in Google and then they started typing it to YouTube and YouTube said wait a second a Google said wait a second YouTube is number five on the list of search engines it's not a search engine and I was like oh no it's not a search engine it's a search engine plus the host
LinkedIn bought them for $118 million
Is anybody care about iPhone 5? Is it like the iPhone 4 is such a good product that the iPhone 5 doesn't matter? I want 4G. That's all I care about. 4G. I'm getting the Samsung. I'm going Samsung S3 going Android. I need 4G.
he's done a great job on the sales front but what product are we all in love with from AOL in the last three four five years okay any exactly none
I think a product person would have done better with AOL rather than a salesperson
Marissa is in charge of Yahoo
now you see wow there's 70 in the last one
look at like Uber or exec you know they're using like people who otherwise won't be working can go to an asworth of work and earn 20 bucks or whatever it is right hyper efficiently hyper efficiently
I know $200 Xbox console I have $1 unable to a lot of people no I know but when you think about the iPhone you know I I've met plenty of people who are in college or make 10 bucks an hour who have iPhones and they could have saved a 100 or 200 bucks not buying that iPhone but getting the getting the Galaxy or getting the HTC
Apple's going to make a television.
if Apple had great success building hardware software soup-to-nuts
YouTube said okay people have done 80% of the work let's do the last 20
it took YouTube basically picking off picking up where iclips and iilm had left off
the innovation of YouTube was you didn't need a credit card to put your video online it seems so obvious today and you didn't need a plugin it seems so obvious today
a large portion of YouTube success was the fact that flash had finally worked for video really well and nobody really had picked up on that
you see it with apple you see it with Google with search you see with the iPhone it's very difficult to compete against excellent excellent products
Google search results you know people can pick them apart on the edges but they're excellent and they get the job done
I was lucky enough you know um to have a couple of them reach out to me and say Jason we'd love to have you invest were over subscribed and then I looked at like some of the caps and the notes were like $15 million and I said you know just two or three years ago I was investing at the same level for $2 or three million I can't make this economically work because I think that these companies are going to one company will sell for 150 million and two-thirds of them won't sell and then there'll be
in hindsight to look back is that the best purchase ever made in the history of technology companies
Long Live YouTube 150 million uniques in the United States I mean they're twice the size of Yahoo now it's a hug States huge it was a great buy by Google
YouTube is the more important company am I right or am I wrong
if you ask people who've bought three or more Apple devices or five or more Apple devices or have bought had Apple devices over five or 10 years that would just Skyrocket like for me I'd like yeah of course I trust apple with my money because they've got $10 billion doll in cash
I mean so basically Apple could start a bank yes they could do like JP Morgan Chase and you could give them your money and they would be feel okay with it that's extraordinary CU I mean for a technology company to start a bank I mean that's not would you trust them with a payment service that's what you trust them to hold your money for you y I mean that's that's extraordinary
they did a survey of 5,000 consumers in the US and UK and they give two different answers one of them says that half of um half of the people would trust apple and then another one says two-thirds of them would use it all well if two-thirds of them would use it that means they trust it right so yeah it's pretty yeah and then how many people don't trust Apple so 50% don't trust Apple nearly half the people who use Apple devices would be willing to trust the computer giant with their Savings in a
it's a very secretive company and I actually tried to get an answer to that question many times and uh like I you literally can't get into one building uh with your pass so like and I asked and I had many friends there you this place is on lockdown I couldn't get any straight answer from anybody
that is brand busting trust right and apple is the opposite I would think so
I do think that path responded and apple responded so quickly to that to have that dialogue message come up
the album cover couldn't you just show the video I mean I know it drain the battery a little bit more but why don't you show the music video or short clips from the Chappelle show is what I said to him like wouldn't it be great if instead of buying on iTunes music I could buy short clips and he looks at me goes Jason nobody wants to watch a video that that's that size you know it's nobody wants that I said but I I'm a customer I buy every one of your products I I want that and looked at me he sa
she sold the company Apple
Apple had a 55 share but sales have collapsed in the early months of 2012. they've sold about somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 000 fires uh good for about four percent of the market with 68 uh going to the iPad
I stopped using the Kindle Fire it's too slow too sluggish narrative so if you have the iPad
I wish Steve Jobs was around to make clear branding for Apple the new iPad can you just call the iPad they should have just called the iPad 2s or iPad 2R for retina right
I predicted the iPad would go down to 399.
Apple historically is petty no no no is so good at not revealing their biases or anything like I mean I think so to see an executive at that level say anything like that yeah they supposed to not be out there socially but I guess now that Steve Jobs isn't around they can feel they can go off the reservation and start I mean they're basically dissing Instagram and Facebook publicly
Twitter just made it a class issue I mean I and I think it's they made it class Warfare
I did about 10 go-to meetings in the last week a lot of them with the Y combinator companies and boy what a great crop speaking of uh accelerators I'm really impressed although the valuations are crazy for the YC combinator companies
hit me on Skype hit me on this hit me on that Google talk all these free services yeah they they never work they never work I mean it's one thing if you're trying to chat with your mom you know or you know whatever chatting with your your boyfriend or your girlfriend that's you know whatever okay yeah you Skype when you want a serious business meeting
whereas Salesforce it's so expensive that you really have to go through it and get it set up
i mean salesforce is coming into your backyard they have like sort of the crosshairs on you guys do they not
whereas salesforce it's so expensive that you really have to go through i.t and get it set up
I think this is a great move it's pretty clear that milk has something else in the works because they always said they're going to release a series of apps and test things and learn things now the back channel was talking about this all weekend and it seems like twist list. if you want to join the back channel that they were like oh my God 150,000 users how could you unplug something so quickly with 150,000 users what I think happened was they they were building things in parallel and testing mu
Source pins these are the best mobile developers you're going to find in the industry they make amazing product I've been blown away by it
uber is an example like would you premium pricing on Downer's and there are a bunch of people who complained you know who didn't complain the people who got their cabs on time and who have the money to spend and they wanted didn't care if they spent 25 50 75 or 100 for that crosstown trip because it's all the same amount of money for them because they're worth a million dollars and twenty-five or a hundred dollars they make a difference you want to have a product that caters to those people
look what happened to Twitter they let all those people build on their API and then they slowly added those features back into the product and those people extended their products hopefully to become more than just Twitter products and it worked out for everybody they wanted to buying some of those companies that tremendous value is created
google android Google's creating tremendous value androids open source but you really can't I mean you could take Android and do what you want with it but Google is going to create a ton of value with that product by being in control of it and at the center of the universe
that's what Sequoia and Kleiner wound up getting and that's why those firms I guess would that would be the biggest hit they ever had was Google to date
uber did premium pricing on new year's and there were a bunch of people who complained you know who didn't complain the people who got their cabs on time and who have the money to spend and they wanted they didn't care if they spent 25 50 75 or 100 for that crosstown trip because it's all the same amount of money for them because they're worth a million dollars and 25 or 100 doesn't make a difference you want to have a product that caters to those people
look what happened to twitter they let all those people build on their api and then they slowly added those features back into the product and those people extended their products hopefully to become more than just twitter products and it worked out for everybody they ended up buying some of those companies and tremendous value was created
with reed hoffman's and jeff's amazing linkedin you can work backwards
google android google's creating tremendous value android's open source but you really can't i mean you could take android and do what you want with it but google is going to create a ton of value with that product by being in control of it and at the center of the universe
they continued to have amazing uh uptick they the the Google features that were released just didn't keep up with what report I like it did them a strange
I love the LinkedIn team and I think The Best Is Yet To Come for both of those parties
in the case of LinkedIn I think that you could it could be particularly problematic a public company
I know exactly what their uh plans are but I can't say right other than they're very cool I think that as impressive as what reportive has done what they're planning to do is even more impressive
the YouTube acquisition by Google the most a billion and a half dollars was leaked
Google's policy is if you leak it we cut off the deal
they didn't have to carry the baggage of having to shove Google Plus down people's throat and hide Facebook
they're platform agnostic which Google is not
I love the LinkedIn team and I think The Best Is Yet To Come for both of those parties
they continued to have amazing uh uptick the the Google features that were released just didn't keep up with what report I almost felt like it did them a strange favor because reporters offering
Google controls 80% of the traffic flow on the internet so yeah so what it's not over
Google controls 80% of the traffic flow on the internet
I just bought a new Macbook Air and because I wanted the Thunderbolt for no reason because there's no Thunderbolt devices but I got it anyway right um and I'm like okay I'm going home and I'm like oh what do I do with that box that my Mac I'm throwing it away and I'm like this box is so beautiful I feel like I should be saving it and putting it for my daughter or something
And Google's not in travel either. No, they're not in travel. Of course they're not in travel. No, no, no, no. We just own the largest travel database in the world. Distribution. Yeah. We just bought that, right? But we're not in travel. We're not a content company. Of course not. No interest.
Because you know Google's a content company. Yeah. Exactly. Google is not a content company. We just own YouTube, Zagat, and the New York Times.
they've totally hacked the system essentially if you're in Germany or you're in Iran or whatever you know how to get around your local IP addresses and to look like you're com from the country so what they're saying is if if you're a Dopey person dictator and you want to censor in your country we've now made it possible for you to censor in that country by the way everybody else in the world sees the tweet and anybody who's got half an ounce of sophistication knows how to route around this so it
I just saw today my goog plus page is now the number one result for calacanis instead of my own page
it's very hypocritical to sort of say like hey these other Twitter and Facebook are not open so we're only going to use Google+ data
don't be trying to manage emails in Excel spreadsheets or Google Docs. That's just a total waste of time.
I bought this jacket last week in a Patagonia store scanned it it was instead of 120 it was 80 on Amazon Bingo next day
they must have actively gone into their search and had a developer spend a week or a couple days saying take the stuff out dindex it from the search engine why would they do that
worldclass Logistics and Amazon certainly checks the Box on all three of those and it makes it really really hard for most other businesses to compete
I think they have a LinkedIn nobody's seen this LinkedIn job application button is brilliant... that'll make it more efficient
I said to the AOL guys you guys should go home tonight and get down on your knees and thank God that Yahoo is so stupid because they just destroyed the company
I think AOL might have something to say about them being the premier uh digital content company right
Airbnb yeah all all a lot of the new like San Francisco the hot new thing Flipboard all these cats they're spending 50k on their videos
I mean if you went to the Airbnb one right on YouTube it has a million views whatever um that's a million people been educated
you know what's interesting about his fight with them is that now with Google Plus and the black bar at the top it seems like Google is taking I know his rant and taking it to heart and saying hey let's take some let's do some design for design sake not just for Pixel sake
Twitter was a disaster because they couldn't keep the servers up and running
build um a business off of another person's ecosystem because you may get your ass kicked just like I did with Google in the panda update crushing obviously and just made for the second or third most challenging year of my career
something that competes with Groupon that's already well established in the marketplace that has a billion dollars invested into it and it doesn't look as good as Groupon
group on billion dollars in Revenue
the airbnbs of the world the Y combinator Tech Stars class after class of 20s something now some of them are on their second company they're 30 years old and they're working tremendously hard and they want to be successful they want to make money they want to change the world
if you go to Silicon Valley apply to Tech Stars uh I'm sorry apply to the founders Institute or to Y combinator get accepted every night of the week There's an event there's incredibly skilled people it will go easier for you
you needed to raise or5 million to get to a prototype which we're now seeing coming out of Y combinator or going into Tech Stars or coming out of Tech Stars so the the the product that would normally take 18 months to build is now taking 8 weeks
you release an iPad app it gets a lot more attention than putting the same content on the open web or on the on YouTube and it gets you a lot more uh Revenue to then create more great stuff
in hindsight in hindsight it has turned out to be so correct as much as we criticize him for being uh creating the closed ecosystem people are fleeing to it I'm fleeing to it as a Content producer because it's so hard to compete in the YouTube ecosystem or the open web
for one of the for clearly the CEO of our time perhaps the best CEO innovator of all time
I was critical of some things he did like the closed ecosystem you know sometimes some heavy-handed tactics like not including Flash and eventually actually he started to open up a little bit and and ease up
I always had this rule that whatever Steve Jobs you know presents it I tell my assistant buy it and I said if he holds it above his shoulder buy two
Yahoo has more than Google
Yahoo's been trying for a decade to screw up I mean they have done everything they can do to destroy that company yet they are still in the top five internet companies
hey when we get back from this commercial break I want to hear uh how you're taking on Salesforce because that's the big elephant in the room they've had a tremendous success in fact if you didn't take your 10-year layoff you may have created Salesforce and I want to know how you feel when you see Mark benof going public and creating a multi-billion dollar company that if you hadn't taken those eight years to spend with your family you might have built will you tell us your honest reaction to th
You wind up getting a bunch of investors. Top tier angel investors.
the city of San Francisco and the state of California said shut down, right? Because here's a cease and assist order. Shut down.
I think this is your billion dollar company. I'll be totally honest. I'm an angel investor so I'm kind of biased but I mean I I I I agree with you. Yeah. I think it's a billion dollar company.
I got the Galaxy Samsung which is 25% more real estate than the iPhone and I'm like iPhone Samsung Android and I have my guys uh take Android and uh what do they call that jailbreak it basically they rooted it and the battery lasts forever twice as long as my iPhone and when I surf the web it's twice as fast cuz Verizon's got this LTE or something it's incredible
I got the Galaxy Samsung which is 25% more real estate than the iPhone and ... the battery lasts forever twice as long as my iPhone and when I surf the web it's twice as fast
they did tell attendees uh at Tech crunches rup that the Analytics tool will be free
that to me is just a sign that you need to sell every share of Twitter you own in the secondary Market as quick as possible if Fred Wilson and bean leave that to me I mean that must have taken a lot for them to lose faith in Twitter
it just feels like Twitter is incapable of releasing products when the consumers want them you know like they get their um uh their mobile apps out Years After People Want it they get their analytics out years after people are demanding it they get uh inbound photo support years after it's requested this is why their growth is not spectacular
I I actually think it's not as much Banning against Google as it is Banning against the ad Networks that are fighting all these scraps and just sort of consolidating the consolidating down so that when you go to somebody on Wall Street uh Wall Street Madison EV you rather you could say hey we have 150 million 75 million people in this category so if AOL Autos has 15 million people and Yahoo autos has 20 million and you know whatever Microsoft Autos has 6 million none of them have a 50 million or
I like the idea that it forces their py conciseness
this is not a lot of news if you've been paying attention to group on they sort of notorious for driving their employees really hard
what a disaster this is turning out to be
are you raising money for this? I have to angel invest in this.
I got the galaxy samsung which is 25% more real estate than the iPhone and I'm like iPhone Samsung Android and I have my guys take Android and will they call that jailbreak it base it they routed it and the battery lasts forever twice as long as my iPhone and when I surf the web it's twice as fast cuz Verizon's got this LTE or something it's incredible
it's a no-brainer for google to buy the company
I felt like you were doing it in a classier way with more disclosure
you put YouTube videos at the top and you move other video players Metacafe or whatever down in the rankings
the other half of Google YouTube saying like oh my God you're such an important partner to us we need to do more work together
it didn't affect our YouTube traffic at all
the videos we had done on YouTube like two or three years ago were getting a million views or 500,000 views and they had experts in them
I am almost going to guarantee right now that apple buys this company Apple will buy Twitter Wow I guarantee it they have 80 billion dollars in cash this is an eight billion dollar round they should just come in and offer than 15 billion and make it the default platform across all the Apple products it would be a brilliant move on Apple's part to have a foothold and social media that mattered
I famously um reported three or four years ago that Apple was working on television sets because I got some inside information from somebody let's just say in and around the company and leave it at that uh of course and now it turns out that uh I'm probably going to wind up looking uh pretty brilliant uh for just repeating something that somebody else said to me and having seen that pick it up
as we've seen Google it may have taken them three swing at the bat three bites of the Apple you know three times at the altar to get it right with social networking but boy when they get it right it is fluid and it is fast because they have that huge base can you imagine if they actually ever launch the G Drive what that would do to Dropbox
how could Apple and Google not buy this company two years ago part is mind to me like this is a most loved product
yeah it's a tremendous launch Heen Only Knows what'll where it'll be two three months from now
the solution isn't to find a way to bring back more the manufacturing jobs here and have foxcon build a factory in the US the solution is to say how do we get more more companies to innovate and to hire the way that Apple has and to to bring new things to life
Google held it back yeah Google decided not to release it he's straight up said Google doesn't know who people are anyway Facebook does
I tell you, it seems like the biggest scam there is to me the way they're going public, it's you know, pump and dump, right?
You know those little ads you see on Google? There's a reason why Google's such a big company. There's a reason why people spend so much money on it. They work and you can get traffic for just pennies per visit.
Steve Jobs do something positive with your legacy besides make beautiful products that we will drool over champion the rights of workers in China there slaving away charged an extra twenty-five dollars per iPad and make it f and safe it's your responsibility
I don't think that Google and Bing can be beat in the next ten years ... you can't really beat Google
Google music it's not it's not gonna work they're too far behind music is iTunes
every company that I have invested in 25 Angel companies I've got four companies I've started in the last couple years I think almost everybody is using Google apps for domains for 25 or 50 bucks a month you get this flawless service per employee no it's 50 bucks per year yeah take it back it's like three or four dollars per year per employee now you're at 20 bucks to it to get the laptop and I don't have to worry about people doing well I mean everybody spends 95 of their day in the browser thi
I get the sense that this is a game-changing huge huge thing
it does make you wonder is eBay stupid
she was at the Google Plex that's right Google Apps product lead that's pretty impressive
Google video not so good not so great
pricing is ridiculously affordable this might be underpriced
this is what Innovation is about you know what everybody says like oh you got to be in silken Valley or do you have to be in Austin do you have to be in it doesn't matter where you are if you make a great beautiful product and you have intelligent people who iterate at on that product in a market um it's going to work
I am in shock I love it casting votes I mean it literally has everything I want it has asking questions and organizing the questions it has moderations it has casting votes it has quizzes I'm going to use this at launch next year absolutely this is fantastic
the part that people forget about trada is Google invested in them yeah you know what I mean if Google owns the marketplace and then they pay them to be the who the the people who teach people how to use the marketplace and who manage for them that is the biggest compliment you can get
if you look at the revenue coming out of companies like Google and Microsoft it's majority outside the US the United States is a small but influential part of the world
the bang search engine really I have to say it's very very impressive that they have matched the quality of Google so quickly it's not not only so much that I've noticed Google is being forced to innovate in the last year Google's stealing their features yeah I mean the Google photo on the homepage is directly stolen from Bing
they're really starting to support startups they're making a real effort to like get in on the ground levels yeah yeah they're uh they understand it
Microsoft Xbox awesome product play with it often
Nobody on the internet knows if you're a dog. Nobody on the internet knows if you're in Singapore or if you're in Europe or if you're in the United States. I Tyler was in Helsinki for one of the shows last week. Nobody even knew that he was in Helsinki if I didn't tell them.
really great entrepreneur. We knew from the moment we met them that these guys were going to be successful.
It's going to be one of those businesses that just glides its way up to 50 or 100 million in revenue and gets bought for $4 or $500 million by Google. Absolutely guaranteeing a nine figure exit for that company.
Red Beacon just works. It's it's that simple. And you know, I my wife's used it. We've used it here at the office. Every time we've used it, we've had a good outcome. So, I give it my highest endorsement.
I am a huge fan of red. This is what's so weird for me was one of the people who selected it to be in he knows to be in Tech Crunch 50 and I was one of two votes that got him uh to win. But before we get to how awesome Red Beacon is, and I use the pro I' I've used the product, and we're gonna actually show how great it works for local uh services, and it's really an obvious, it's an a non-obvious great way to actually do it's, you know, it's one of these great business model tweaks um on on loca
maybe Twitter if you can consider a social network which really Twitter is more publishing platform than social network they would even agree with that I think
I got very good inside information that Steve Jobs invested in this and he was your first investor
I think you launched it brilliantly... the biggest space you could go after as an entrepreneur is social networking right now a hundred billion doll for Facebook the nearest competitor path hundred million valuation... so there is no number two to to uh Facebook other than path and Twitter arguably and they're maybe worth five to 1% or 0.1% so you went after a huge Market
I think Google should just give them $100 million now and own 10% and let them just do their thing
the truth is anybody who has a Content site who looks at their log files sees that of their search traffic it's more like 85 or 90% come from uh Google right now today
yeah absolutely not no offense to Google or whatever I think I think even Google roots for them it's like well I think Google would like to have another partner I'd like to have another competitor at you out there because right now when they do something like the content f you know people start to think wow you can just change you know the fate of a company so dramatically overnight it's almost too much power for them and I don't and there there's already like a contingent of people who are bubb
they can't launch there because these idiots in Australia launched a trademark for Groupon in Australia
and the same thing with Twitter and I thought that was a stupid idea too I'm I'm just I'm an idiot now I'm just going to start spend I'm just like here take $10,000 give me a quarter point of advisor Equity I you know I like you that's it
get to scale and then figure out the business model that's what he's doing with Twitter Etc
they knocked off Twitter did about 80% of the job in my estimation
and the same thing with Twitter and I thought that was a stupid idea too
it's like one of those great like Airbnb people they prove to the industry that a a weird idea that seems to be hard to Implement can become huge quickly that's what I love about Airbnb
the truth is people use Airbnb not just for the couch right I think half the value of Airbnb is not saving money that's the other half right the important half is meeting somebody who you might be able to chill with and you know get a couple beverages at a local place who speaks the language or you know understands the thing
you still have Google with overwhelming majority share
given the amount of Y combinator uh accelerator companies now that have bounced out I mean we're talking about a lot of companies a magnitude more than even during the dotom explosion
do you really need to use like the big iron Oracle nonsense to get that done
look at all the things that have worked with a lack of polish ebay craigslist twitter
because of the proliferation of y combinators and accelerators and we just put a list of them uh last week up on the launch dot is site of all the accelerators out there you know i think that those programs are awesome for getting started
i would get your ass back to san francisco or get to boulder ... get involved in hacker news get involved in y combinator and find the next and say i am available for a y combinator project as a co-founder for this class and put a web page up and show what you're going to show what you can do show a couple of basic apps right you know some people see that you're the real deal and say i'm looking to be part of a team and then you will get uh an email program and tell them and show them some proof
you've got all kinds of new entrants now in google and apple and those aren't to be to be uh scoffed at right
a google really did something aggressive by scanning all those books in and saying we're not going to wait we'll screw it will be if they want to sue us take it serious and they did and we'll settle
what are you left with you left with a boutique service that they probably shouldn't have spent $25 or $30 million on hey but that's how it goes you spend $25 million on delicious you spend $25 million on flicker one doesn't work out even though it's a great service the other one's worth probably $200 million
Yahoo blew it in terms of using this this was an asset that they were going to use for search the idea was that if you know and it was back to human powered search years ago it was bought under the premise that if we have this really good data set of what people are bookmarking in real time we can have use that data to make search results better well since that time you have Twitter and Facebook and people are sharing links on bitly and you so you have maybe a little bit of a faster data set goi
I think the problem is the service is probably going to cost a million dollars a year to keep up and running it's got to cost 50 25,000 to $50,000 in service per month at least so that's 300 600,000 right there you put two or three programmers on it in a product manager now you're at a million bucks and so now you know why it's getting you know shut down is because they probably have a million or two million users who are dedicated and those users if they were willing to pay $10 if 10% would pay
when I had Flickr this is the thing that pissed me off about Flickr when Yahoo bought it I I pay for every year then I stopped I missed my payment because like iy had the same credit card in there so three years they do the same credit card that credit card dies I got a new credit card right experation date whatever cut it in half then they're like oh you can't see your sets your sets are there but you can't see them and I'm like you know it's a really de move it was a real deag move like well I
even if Google starts siphoning some of the traffic there's enough growth that can't complain
Bing is pushing that issue more than Google is right but it doesn't matter as much when B has 10% or something
another site that's really interesting Thumbtack which I invested in
beautiful and has a little bit of fun to it and it looks like it's got character and most Google products let's be honest they feel like they're designed for efficiency not for character
these companies actually have the goods to back it up it's not a bubble
the difference between these companies zynga and groupon have billions of dollars in revenue
twitter maybe not so much they haven't been spending as much time on uh um you know making money but i'm i'm guessing they have 50 to 200 million in revenue uh without even trying and this is really the first year they're trying in earnest
they must be making money if they're spending that kind of Bank
Groupon is synonymous with success right now
company of the moment
the company that everyone else is chasing right now
no no actually they look at the ads as content so when you're on a mission and you type in you know um Toyota Prius Santa Monica you're looking for the Santa Monica dealership and and if they put a link up there you'll click it
the reason why Google has become the huge company that it is is because they have those clickable ads right up top when people do a search they have told you uh exactly what they're looking for which means you can give uh an exact answer they're in the cognitive mindset of absorbing uh an advertisement and clicking on things and there's a revenue model there so I would not stray from what has made Google awesome which is cost per click uh advertising
a bigger company like a Google could get into and leverage you know all that Mojo they have where Google could go to like Toyota and say what if we could move 100,000 cars for you I think that those conversations actually probably occur um with the sales department saying what if we can deliver you X number of qualified leads from Google AdSense already um but Google is never going to shill their homepage
I'm just thinking Google reinventing email yeah I'm loving it but I'm an edge case obviously but holy cow is well they're frightening people and they're doing it on one of the core assets not their super core asset but you know one of their choruses came in they did something like that to their advertisers a little bit crazy but you know I changed the font in AdWords advertisers would go nuts you know what you're right they would however I think they see Facebook is such a competitive threat the
if you take their search results i'll be honest here their top 10 and google's top 10 and yahoo is even you take the three logos off it's pretty hard to tell the difference
Google doesn't have that yeah it doesn't have that
boy is being doing a great job they're gaining market share only person in the market who's doing that and they're really being a very great competitive player in the market and so i give them a lot of credit and their maps are great videos great we've been through this a couple times on the show twitter integration grave previews are great and the search results if you take their search results i'll be honest here their top 10 and google's top 10 and yahoo is even you take the three logos off i
youtube is a perfect example of this YouTube created a platform for people to put up videos for free of course some people abuse that system let's put them in hot water they had tons of lawsuits some of these lawsuits still exist and have not been settled but they sold that company for 1.7 billion dollars or thereabouts-- and the people who sold those shares probably saw them double or triple in the stock market and so if they were super concerned about the legal issues maybe they wouldn't have
Steve Jobs has to respond to this at 1 in the morning.
there has never, ever been an Apple beta program that 99.9999% of employees at Apple don't get to see the products before they come out? Literally, there's seven people who know about these products before they come out.
I honestly thought it would be a disaster.
somebody sends me a Bing map. And I'm like, wait a second. When somebody, when one of your friends, you're like a normal, you know, civilian. So I send you Bing, something is going on.
Bing is tight. And people are saying, oh, the image search on Bing is better than Google. The maps are as good.
Bing has been amazing.
Twitter it's easy to make fake accounts
fight up say we're better here's why our product's better and we kick their butt
if your product right now is twice as good as theirs which it sounds like you should figure out a way to make it 10 times better
there is some legal issues here perhaps um that maybe they are using their big legal stick to you know maybe threaten you a little bit
you are in a fight with a giant who is incompetent most of these big companies can be incompetent when compared to the the speed and execution of a small startup like yourselves
Bing is more aggressive in product releases than Google
Bing is being run like a startup
Google finally has a viable competitor
Bing is doing a great job the traffic is up
It was only until people like Google uh that we actually saw really significant, you know, tens of billions of dollars being made.
Most of Google's revenue comes from outside the United States.
with Apple owning a closed monopoly
Apple we've done some investigations is now blocking emails from people who use Ur URL shorteners so all of my Mac people uh had that problem and now boom I uh don't use JC that is anymore in my emails I'm actually going to use they put it in the stand filter they were putting it so all my Mac people because of you're using URL shortener somewhere in the message Apple I guess is so many people don't want to send people to Canadian pharmacy dget rightnow.org or whatever that they are now using bi
a lot of serious business people a lot of big businesses they still run on Microsoft Windows you know 600 computers with office they got to use Outlook there's nothing there's no equivalent about look Gmail's not Outlook I could tell you that I mean I've invested in reportive that's trying to make Gmail a little more like Outlook but Gmail is not Outlook as much as people like it Gmail is good for lightweight outlooks good for business and if you've got all those uh you know business Folks at yo
Foursquare guala Yelp they've all raised the awareness of local businesses and then of course Google's Hot Pot we're gonna try to have the ore actually you you hooked that up we may have the guy from Hotpot on the show
Gmail is not Outlook... Gmail is good for lightweight outlooks good for business
I think it's going to be a modest success and the the determining factor is going to be how many developers they can bu get to build games and apps on top of it
the Bing search engine actually doing pretty well uh and has a lot of innovative clean features and they started from scratch again
I think if you look at the Xbox being just a slam dunk of a product and Incredibly elegant
I think Microsoft has an image quality problem
they build it from the bottom up it's incredibly elegant it's incredibly powerful and developers love it they're developing apps really quick I think actually it's got a decent shot of doing well because it's going to be really affordable and work with the you know hundreds of millions of desktops out there
When Microsoft starts from the bottom up they build great product when they have to build on the legacy of Windows they have major problems
it's an elegant Apple product
kind of hard to get into that space up against Apple again
you need to have a lot of wethal because you're going up against Steve Jobs and Google
I wish more of my investments and companies would get sued because when you're getting sued it means you're doing something right ... so yeah I'm not worried about it at all uh it's a tremendous service and it's absolutely operating within you know all the regulations just they had an unfortunate naming
Groupon you know quickest to a billion dollars in Revenue Zynga Twitter Facebook I mean things are accelerating for everybody but me
like just off the top of her head incredible at Y combinator and I guess the the various resources that are out there like techstars um does also Hacker News and just people talking about stuff blogs it's a completely different world for entrepreneurs today than it was in the 90s
I think they'll get there
the Android store doesn't work as good as the iTunes Store just not as robust
he basically was saying that Android is not open because fragmented right because there's different flavors of it it's not open which is absurd
it is a real challenge to the iPhone
Android is growing very quickly and Android is awesome
I predict with the $50 billion dollar they have they will buy a small Telecom operator and build their own infrastructure buy Sprint
they're all beheld to these mobile carriers and he's trying to bundle it with AT&T ... if you put everything in AT&T you're f let me you areed game over
the question will be does the open fragmented system which is subpar and user experience Trump his perfected system
congratulations to AOL they've been great to the brands that I sold them and I think it's a great company
Yeah this is um this was not a good move uh because it's there's no substance to the announcement I would rather take a Steve Jobs like approach which is hey it's Steve and let me show you three exciting things show not tell and so what they've basically done is they've come out and said hey we're going to be a billion people we're going to get 10 billion of Revenue whatever it is we're going to make this better we're going to make that better it doesn't matter in in a world where you have Steve
if you're using Google analytics because it's three or four hours behind and by that time the hor is bolted it's too late
everybody logs in with Facebook credentials now Facebook has information on how people are using our site it's very uh to me disconcerting especially with the like buttons and also now with connect
Groupon started as some other service where you were like sort of doing a petition or trying to change the world ... and the company was failing ... then they watched their user base doing ... lobbying people for deals ... and that's how Groupon was born
there's all these Vertical Search Engines out there um in any given search there's probably a vertical search engine that does better than Google
a Google could never do because if they did that they would make no money
I don't understand why Google feels the need to save everybody searches they should just stop doing that I think it's a it's a great way to differentiate
Google's position it's all algorithmic yeah which is not true no there is definitely human stuff going on
Google hadn't even gotten to the one box results or anything like that
I'm sure they're gonna nail it
it's obvious that you're going to win and that whatever the hurdle is in front of you you will knock it down
to building a great site like thumbtack.com
a San Francisco based local services website that helps verify that the people you're hiring actually are not insane murderers unlike the other one Craigslist
we have with us today Marco zapak Casta he is the CEO and founder of Thumbtack a company I just invested in
the reaction to Thumbtack at that open Angel Forum was they were obviously going to get funding in a short amount of time it was I think one of the two or three companies out of the 50 companies who have been at open Angel Forum that did the best I mean you have a great business model
I heard Groupon Now requires like a six-month exclusive if you're going to do a deal with them you can't do it with living social or whatever
you don't want to be in the group on business of selling the deli meat
I can't believe the number of group on and living social ads I see on Mahalo like they buy everything in La is it the are people just buying the whole city every city name those guys they're they're spending a lot of money because it's local so they have to be laser focused
if you look at Amazon Amazon did not spend a lot of money on advertising in the early days they created the affiliate ... the affiliate Network that they created was the first of what all the copycats are doing now
the Tesla IPO happened today and I had to get all busy with that I bought 10,000 shares I'm really psyched about that
Yahoo, Google, IBM, Microsoft, every big company. It takes forever to make decisions. They have tons of business development people. And the only reason those business development people exist is to take meetings.
Yahoo, Google, IBM, Microsoft, every big company. It takes forever to make decisions. They have tons of business development people. ... But they can only do what? Two deals, three deals, four deals a year. ... 2% chance or a 4% chance of getting the deal.
Yahoo, Google, IBM, Microsoft, every big company. It takes forever to make decisions. They have tons of business development people. And the only reason those business development people exist is to take meetings. ... They can only do what? Two deals, three deals, four deals a year. Let's just say it's one a quarter. That's all they can really absorb is one a quarter. So, if they're doing one deal a quarter, that means you got four shots. They're probably doing 15 meetings a week, that means the
Yahoo, Google, IBM, Microsoft, every big company. It takes forever to make decisions.
In fact, Apple doesn't make their products at an Apple factory. They subcontract, right? To people in Shenzhen and all these other places.
Zinga reportedly is making $100 million a year
this is why Jason doesn't build inside of Facebook or on the iPhone
the first investor I believe in YouTube or the first Venture investor in YouTube
he's going up against microsoft google and ibm and grouping them and they're not even coming close
in their case steve jobs is limiting what you own you bought the phone yeah you paid for it it's not like craig's saying you can't create a your own site he's saying you can't take my data and do crazy stuff with it because i want to protect my users and there is an argument to that he wants to protect you it's an ownership thing then yeah your phone is your home kind of and you feel like someone's coming in and saying you can't have that in your home right you can't use this application
when i do a video go to youtube ... for youtube i want the comments on youtube
you should absolutely do it you would be really phenomenal
The reason why there's such colossal growth, the reason why Ustream can do what they do, Mahala does what it does, Twitter does what it does, is because of an open platform.
There is no reason why Apple cannot make the iPhone a little more open.
Nobody will invest in a closed platform. And if you do invest in a closed platform, it will come back and bite you right in the ass.
windows but apples still making a good living and they've been coming back
the iPhone and the AT&T relationship which is assault horrible the iPhone would be a perfect device for downloading podcasts but there's no way to download a podcast on the iPhone
there's just two people usually you know there's a coconut Pepsi sometimes there's one dominant player windows but apples still making a good living and they've been coming back so it is possible and that you could be the the Microsoft or the Apple in this race
I'll try with aim pages and stuff like that didn't quite work and they wound up buying Bebo
the thing that Yahoo did amazingly from back in the day you know even better than much better than AOL and this is pre Google days
the next year microsoft immediately sponsored they sponsored it again this year and they've been a tremendous tremendous partner in the event
sounds like the people that google not to put you on the spot are actually a little concerned about it which is to get their attention considering they're the dominant player ... that says something too
people discount microsoft like in certain spaces like they said oh they'll never be able to do anything at video games that's going to be just a disaster right they said the same thing about databases ... same thing with games ... xbox is just a terrific platform
i was shocked because i would say the previous product was like two or three out of 10 and google's like a nine or you know eight or nine out of ten and so just instantly you guys i feel you guys sort of caught up instantly
You could have released more often, but it may not have changed the inevitability of Google drinking your milkshake.
So, sometimes in life you have to cut your losses. You're not going to have the wherewithal to compete with Google.
The second thing is, Google drank your milkshake. And guess what? That's going to happen in life. So, that's another lesson. You know, you don't want to jump in front of the Google or Microsoft train because they can roll over you.
my prediction is news corp either buys yahoo or some assets from yahoo horse has some Yahoo deal going with Microsoft or they have some AOL deal
that's what groupon does right they create demand we had and Iran or guilt through there creating demand in a world where there isn't much demand this too much supply there's only going to be available for 12 hours you have to buy their you know this pair of jeans you know there's a million jeans stores out there that are sucking wind these jeans do not be created this whole phenomenon why they lowered the price that convince some knuckleheads that at the jean company give it to them for a third
the issue is you have a big opportunity to blow this out with some press event that's going to occur should you grab that press attention or should you clean this up a little bit and then what is your true business here because this is just a this is just a marketing program you have what's your true business
you have a great idea your site design not so great your logo for the GI thing looks kind of amateurish i rated a six maybe a five could be a ten with another two weeks of work
kids are drawn to the iPad and the iPhone like nothing else I mean it's even more than computers you think definitely I mean the user interface with the touch it just I mean the screen draws them in that's a beautiful screen for one yeah and then too it's so easy to interact with
I guess that's the genius of Steve Jobs is he's built an interface that just people understand inherently it can be more intuitive
would you do this this and that would you watch movies how often are you reading how often are you you know in bed checking the news and all all of them came back with enough yes is to say yeah you should probably get one
Groupon $1.2 billion ridiculous valuation
I think it's a great idea yeah and I think that there's a little misunderstanding in the marketplace as to exactly what his idea is versus the Twitter uh ad Network that's launched or the Twitter search ads yeah and there'll be a place for both