10 Startups w/ Stock Grants That’ll Make You A Millionaire | Sara’s List 2024

AI transcript
0:00:02 All right, today is everybody’s favorite episode.
0:00:04 It is the Sarah’s List episode.
0:00:07 So we’re talking about 10 companies that you can become wealthy with
0:00:11 without having started it or invested in it or joined early.
0:00:13 I feel like I can rule the world.
0:00:19 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like days off on a road.
0:00:21 Let’s travel serious list.
0:00:23 And I get a little presentation for you if you’re on audio.
0:00:27 Get over to YouTube right now because I have slides that are going to be fun.
0:00:29 So it’s called Sarah’s List.
0:00:31 This is Sam’s wife, Sarah.
0:00:33 That’s hilarious.
0:00:35 She is on the cover of My First Million.
0:00:40 And the reason why is because she has an unlikely story, a story that I hadn’t
0:00:42 really heard. And when I heard it for the first time, it kind of shocked me,
0:00:45 which is I think when I heard this, she was about 30 years old at the time.
0:00:49 She was a self-made millionaire, but she didn’t start a company.
0:00:53 She wasn’t, you know, killing herself, working 100 hours a week like we were.
0:00:55 She wasn’t paying herself scraps.
0:00:57 She was getting paid a nice salary with nice benefits.
0:01:00 She worked at a great company that had good culture.
0:01:04 She didn’t have to make risky angel investments and get lucky.
0:01:08 She was not a high profile exec that just got, you know, some huge pay package.
0:01:11 And she wasn’t lucky like the Facebook graffiti guy that just got a bunch of
0:01:14 stock from from Facebook and made 70 million dollars.
0:01:18 And so her story was almost incredibly boring.
0:01:19 It was incredibly simple.
0:01:20 And I just couldn’t believe it.
0:01:23 I was like, I’m trying so hard to make make a million bucks here.
0:01:25 That was such a better path.
0:01:28 And so just to recap, she, you know, self-made millionaire didn’t start,
0:01:30 didn’t have to start the business, didn’t have to do risk angel investing.
0:01:32 It wasn’t a high profile exec, wasn’t the graffiti guy.
0:01:35 What she did was she joined Airbnb.
0:01:37 And so if you look at this chart, this is Airbnb’s valuation over time.
0:01:42 And there was a period when Airbnb started, that was the high risk period.
0:01:43 That’s the flat part of this curve.
0:01:48 And to join Airbnb, then you had to see something that was not obvious.
0:01:51 You had to believe something that took a huge leap of faith.
0:01:53 You had to work like crazy in a tiny apartment.
0:01:57 There’s a fun video, by the way, of them taking like midday dance breaks
0:02:00 where they just played a bunch of everyone stands up for the desk and they’re dancing.
0:02:01 You had to do weird startup stuff.
0:02:03 There’s a guy with stinky feet, probably.
0:02:05 That’s not even what we’re talking about, right?
0:02:09 She joined after it had crossed, you know, a 10 even, right, Sam?
0:02:11 Twenty billion dollar valuation.
0:02:15 Yeah. And if I remember, like they already had that huge office.
0:02:17 Do you remember that huge office at eight at eight, Brandon?
0:02:21 And I imagine there was like a thousand people plus working there.
0:02:22 Like it wasn’t small.
0:02:24 And you and I were living in San Francisco at the time.
0:02:27 And it was stupidly obvious that you could have slapped me in the face
0:02:30 and said, what’s a company that’s a winner?
0:02:31 And I would have been like, Airbnb is a company that’s a winner.
0:02:33 It was like obvious at the time.
0:02:37 I had friends at Uber, same thing, where it was obviously a winner at the time
0:02:41 where they were already multi-billion dollar companies, but because of the space
0:02:45 that they were in and how dominant they were, it was clear that they still had room to run.
0:02:51 And what we call Sarah’s List is basically a function of using your time as your investment.
0:02:55 Most people don’t think of their job as an investment decision, but your time,
0:02:59 your talent, where you’re going to spend four years working is an investment decision.
0:03:02 You should be thinking about it like a venture capitalist,
0:03:04 and especially if you’re working in the tech scene.
0:03:08 And so these are all venture, you know, venture back tech companies that we’re talking about.
0:03:13 So the criteria for Sarah’s List, it’s a company that has product market fit.
0:03:15 It’s just a clear, obvious, successful company.
0:03:18 Doesn’t mean it can’t fail, but it just means it has product market.
0:03:23 It’s not in the scrappy figure it out phase and, you know, wandering phase of startups.
0:03:27 It’s funded, it’s growing, and you get a nice salary and benefits.
0:03:32 They got milk in the fridge, and that if you joined and you got a $200,000 stock package.
0:03:35 So that’s like, you know, getting 50 grand a year of stocks.
0:03:38 Maybe you maybe you got 150,000 salary and 50,000 of stock.
0:03:41 That could become worth a million plus in the in five years.
0:03:43 So can it 5x in five years?
0:03:45 We’re not looking for max upside.
0:03:50 We’re looking for lowest downside and enough upside where you can turn, you know,
0:03:53 a $200,000 stock package into, you know, one, two, three million dollars
0:03:55 would be the would be the outcomes that we’re looking for.
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0:04:36 So we did this once in 2021, three years ago.
0:04:40 And before we tell you what we picked and how we did, we got a time travel back real quick.
0:04:41 So let’s do this fast.
0:04:45 So back in 2021, this NFT sold for 69 million.
0:04:46 Those are the good old days.
0:04:48 Tom Brady was a football player.
0:04:49 SBF was a hero.
0:04:51 People cared about whoever these people are.
0:04:52 It was a simpler time.
0:04:54 And the stock market was running up.
0:04:56 It was on a 10 plus year bull run.
0:04:59 It had its peak in 2021.
0:05:02 For the listener, people cared about, quote, these people.
0:05:08 These people was Prince Harry and his wife who I don’t even know who it is.
0:05:09 Point, point proven.
0:05:12 I rest my case, by the way, did you know this?
0:05:16 Sesame Street and 711 launched VC funds during this time.
0:05:17 And so they had their own venture funds.
0:05:20 Everybody was getting in on the game, but nothing lasts forever.
0:05:23 And so since then, just to give you some data here.
0:05:28 So since then, about 36% of startups who have raised money since then
0:05:30 had raised at a lower valuation.
0:05:34 That’s not to count the companies that died or the companies that are avoiding raising
0:05:35 because they don’t want to raise down rounds.
0:05:39 This is like transactions that cleared one third of them are clearing at a lower price
0:05:40 of all startups.
0:05:43 It’s even worse if you look at late stage startups.
0:05:46 So later stage startups, which are the ones we’re talking about, series C, series D,
0:05:49 they’re down between 30 and 60% on average.
0:05:52 That’s the that’s the that’s what you’re seeing across the board.
0:05:58 Sad news, two thirds of employees right now that are working at these companies
0:06:01 are working for options that are actually worth zero.
0:06:03 And they probably don’t even realize it yet.
0:06:08 Meaning they got a pay package of stock options at a $24 strike price.
0:06:10 That stock is currently trading in secondary for eight dollars.
0:06:12 So all of their shares are underwater.
0:06:15 Currently, only 33% of the shares are in the money, as they say.
0:06:18 All right. So what do we pick?
0:06:19 We picked about 11 companies.
0:06:23 I think we shared one company, but we had each picked around here.
0:06:24 Here’s how we did.
0:06:26 So it’s not great.
0:06:30 All the stuff I just told you is basically our big fat excuses as to why it wasn’t great.
0:06:31 We both had two hits.
0:06:35 So two things that did that did go up in a sort of step change way,
0:06:38 you know, sort of three, four X so far in the three years.
0:06:42 I had two that were down, like valuation lower than it was previously.
0:06:43 You had three that were down.
0:06:46 And then there were some pushes and a push basically is like has the same
0:06:50 valuation as it had before, but that’s actually sort of a win
0:06:51 because you beat the market.
0:06:53 So you didn’t achieve the series of stream,
0:06:57 but you didn’t take the huge right down that a bunch of wrong about next health.
0:07:00 A next health is wrong. Next health is wrong.
0:07:01 What is wrong on here? Oh, is it actually up?
0:07:03 Well, the word next, there’s two companies.
0:07:06 One is next, one is next.
0:07:08 So I think you there was a little confusing.
0:07:11 But someone in the research department is getting fired here.
0:07:13 No, they’re just missing a tee.
0:07:17 Open store and also open store is down.
0:07:20 It’s unclear, but I mark it as down.
0:07:21 And it’s a little intellectual honesty.
0:07:23 I don’t think I don’t believe that it is achieved.
0:07:26 It’s it’s it’s it’s status to be called up.
0:07:27 We have it as a TBD.
0:07:31 I gave it a a less generous interpretation of down
0:07:33 just to make my own grading harsher.
0:07:33 That’s not about them.
0:07:36 It’s about me grading my own picks more, more so.
0:07:38 And you think Figma is down too?
0:07:41 Well, Figma tried to sound down.
0:07:41 It’s a push here.
0:07:45 It tried to sell for 20 billion, didn’t clear that the transaction
0:07:46 didn’t go through.
0:07:48 So that would have been a 2X.
0:07:51 But then the last, I believe, round of funding.
0:07:53 And this, by the way, this is not all very obvious.
0:07:55 So companies don’t always announce their valuations.
0:07:57 There’s leaked valuations to the media,
0:07:58 which are not always true.
0:08:01 There’s valuations that come with a bunch of strings attached.
0:08:04 So maybe you got a good number, but there’s all these caveats
0:08:06 and liquidation preferences.
0:08:09 And a lot of this was we asked people who own secondary stock
0:08:12 marketplaces, we said, hey, what is this company trading at right now?
0:08:14 And so it’s incomplete information, right?
0:08:16 We’re doing the best we can here with private stock information
0:08:17 that you don’t you don’t always have.
0:08:21 By the way, Sarah, my wife, this is about had a job offer at Figma
0:08:24 like three months before their acquisition offer,
0:08:26 which like it had that gone through.
0:08:32 I believe it would have been a 2X return based off the valuation.
0:08:35 So we almost we almost had a mini hit again, but not quite.
0:08:38 Yes, exactly. All right, let’s get to the 2024 picks.
0:08:40 We’re going to try to do better now.
0:08:45 The good news is the pick any picks you made anything in the vintage of 2021.
0:08:48 Like I said earlier, the all the companies basically got select.
0:08:51 Everything got re-underwritten. Everything got got corrected.
0:08:56 But now we’re at I think we are at a less hypey period of time.
0:09:00 And so this cohort of picks I think should be better.
0:09:01 But again, not financial advice.
0:09:05 Really, neither me nor Sam actually are trying to go get jobs.
0:09:08 This is kind of like what we would do if we were going to get a job.
0:09:10 Sam did this with Sarah when she was looking for jobs.
0:09:12 So this is for fun.
0:09:13 Let’s put that out there.
0:09:14 We’re not giving financial advice here.
0:09:17 So I have like five or six, but then I got a bunch of other ones
0:09:19 that were like it’s like scrap like I didn’t quite get to.
0:09:23 What do you think is the let’s say we each bring five to the table?
0:09:26 I bet you there’s going to be at least three that we are overlapping on.
0:09:27 What do you think?
0:09:29 Yeah, two, I’m guessing two overlaps.
0:09:32 And by the way, I’ll say I think a good hit rate on this
0:09:34 good hit rate would be six out of ten.
0:09:38 Six out of ten have a step up where five years later.
0:09:40 We’re not even five years after the 2021 ones yet.
0:09:41 We’re only three years in.
0:09:46 But five years later that they’re sort of like a four or five X in valuation.
0:09:50 If six out of ten did that, I think that would be a great thing.
0:09:54 I think three out of ten would be sort of the lowest bar that I would accept.
0:09:57 All right. You want to go first?
0:09:58 All right, I’m going to go first.
0:10:00 I’ll start with an obvious one.
0:10:02 It’s probably one that you have to open AI.
0:10:06 And by the way, there are no bonus points for difficulty in business.
0:10:10 The fact that everybody knows open AI, I’m not trying to give you a secret company,
0:10:12 a secret stock tip you’ve never heard of.
0:10:15 The point of this often is that the companies
0:10:17 that are going to be big juggernauts are hidden in plain sight.
0:10:20 So open AI currently valued at 103 billion.
0:10:23 It’s doing about three and a half billion a year in revenue already.
0:10:25 The bull case.
0:10:27 So what do you need to believe if you’re going to join this company
0:10:29 that you that you think it’s a serious less contender?
0:10:32 It’s the first credible Google competitor in about 20 years.
0:10:37 It is something that actually could displace, replace, search, which is like,
0:10:39 you know, when people need an answer to something or they need help with something.
0:10:41 Where’d they go?
0:10:43 It’s the fastest growing company ever.
0:10:44 That’s nice.
0:10:47 So it took them, you know, two or three months to reach 100 million users.
0:10:51 It’s five times faster growing than the next fastest product ever.
0:10:56 It reached three billion in revenue in the last, you know, in like three years.
0:10:57 It’s pretty crazy.
0:10:59 And it’s unique because it’s an enterprise company.
0:11:02 It’s a consumer company and it’s a dev tools company at the same time.
0:11:05 I think that’s pretty pretty unique and gives it a lot of upside.
0:11:09 What you would be worried about if you were looking at open AI is
0:11:11 it’s probably the most competitive market on earth right now.
0:11:15 You were getting competition from every the most well funded startups
0:11:18 are the most brilliant people, as well as the biggest tech companies
0:11:20 the world, Facebook, Google, Amazon.
0:11:22 Everybody is coming after this market.
0:11:25 So that’s the downside is will open AI retain their lead or not?
0:11:28 Yeah. Yeah. The problem with open AI.
0:11:29 Can you get a job at open AI?
0:11:33 Not only is it the most competitive, like not only is it the most
0:11:36 like competitive space, like I imagine they have to have one of the more
0:11:39 competitive, like job applicant pools.
0:11:42 Dude, I read some crazy stat that Tesla has something like 50,000
0:11:44 people a day applying to work there.
0:11:48 And I have to imagine that open AI, it’s somewhat similar
0:11:51 where they are just like inundated with applications.
0:11:53 Well, yeah, I mean, but we’re talking our listeners.
0:11:55 The cream of the crop the cream of the crop here.
0:11:56 This is the creme de la creme.
0:11:59 So yeah, of course, they get a job wherever they want.
0:12:02 So would open AI 5X the current valuation?
0:12:04 Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah.
0:12:07 Yeah, I agree with you.
0:12:09 All right, you want me to do one?
0:12:11 All right. I’ve got one called Retool.
0:12:13 Do you know what Retool is?
0:12:17 I know Retool. I use Retool and I wish that I invest in Retool.
0:12:20 I tried to invest in Retool early on and I missed it.
0:12:21 I’m not a user of it.
0:12:24 So it actually would be best as a user explain what it is.
0:12:29 So every technology company has the same situation
0:12:32 that they would all homebrew a solution for.
0:12:36 The situation is you need a back end admin panel.
0:12:38 So you have this, I’m sure, with Hampton, where
0:12:41 oh, we need to add or remove a member.
0:12:43 Or hey, this person changed companies.
0:12:45 They’re asking if we can update their their thing.
0:12:49 Or hey, can we change their membership status from active to suspended
0:12:52 or whatever, whatever some admin function that you need to do.
0:12:56 And it doesn’t come out of the box with whatever, you know,
0:12:57 you’re using 10 tools to run your business.
0:12:59 But like this is that what’s the tool for your business?
0:13:03 And so Retool is a simple way to make the admin,
0:13:07 you know, panel for admin system for your for your company,
0:13:10 where anybody in the company who’s not a developer can actually go in
0:13:14 and, you know, add, remove, you know, make changes to essentially the database.
0:13:16 That’s like the simplistic way of saying it.
0:13:20 It’s basically a back end tool for any business that you can customize
0:13:24 and your developers can build once so that anybody in the team can use.
0:13:26 So it’s an internal tool.
0:13:27 And here’s this crazy stat.
0:13:28 So the founder, his name is David.
0:13:31 David, David, David’s a baby genius.
0:13:34 So David, David started this when he was like at the University of Cambridge,
0:13:36 when he was like 21 years old.
0:13:39 And he’s like, he’s got one of these like stories for he basically before
0:13:42 this business, he had a payments app that I think did OK,
0:13:44 but whatever, he quit working on it.
0:13:46 But like when you see like a 19 year old kid do that, you’re like, OK,
0:13:50 you this and have a payments app at 19 or you want it.
0:13:52 Yeah. And you’re going to one of the best universities on earth.
0:13:54 Like, all right, something is interesting here.
0:13:56 He gets into the YC comes up with this idea.
0:14:01 And here’s this crazy set, 50 or 60 percent, like 50 between 50 and 60
0:14:05 percent of all software in the world is internal facing tools,
0:14:08 meaning employees who use internal facing tools.
0:14:10 That’s a one chart business.
0:14:13 That’s a one chart business and not a lot of people focus on that
0:14:16 because you kind of focus on things that you see in news versus things on the
0:14:19 back end that you maybe you kind of get you don’t really touch that often.
0:14:22 But the business has crushed it.
0:14:24 And so they launched in 2017.
0:14:26 Their latest valuation is 3.7.
0:14:29 They’ve raised $150 million from Sequoia and a bunch of other great companies.
0:14:30 Listen to this growth.
0:14:33 First nine months, $500,000 in revenue in 2018.
0:14:35 They hit $2 million in ARR in 2024.
0:14:38 They hit around $100 million in recurring revenue.
0:14:41 So it’s got to be one of the faster growing businesses out there.
0:14:44 And I’ve been watching interviews with this guy, David, the founder.
0:14:46 Dude, he’s amazing.
0:14:48 He’s an amazing company.
0:14:52 So at a valuation of 3.7, I think there’s room to run.
0:14:53 I think there’s a five or 10 X potential here.
0:14:56 I mean, that’s got to be a they got to be a huge business,
0:14:58 but the market is just massive.
0:14:59 And I like the guy.
0:15:01 I think that’s something we’re going to see in a bunch of these,
0:15:04 which is that the CEOs seem to be remarkable in all these businesses.
0:15:08 And that’s just if you’re going to make a bet on a private company,
0:15:12 you want to be at one with like one of these all-star CEOs.
0:15:18 My retail story, I two lessons learned here, one, invest in your P&L.
0:15:20 So I had this problem.
0:15:22 We were always trying to build these things internally.
0:15:25 The devs never wanted to work on it enough
0:15:27 because it’s an internal tool.
0:15:28 So who cares?
0:15:30 And when we got retools, like, oh, this is great.
0:15:31 This is no brainer.
0:15:35 And so I the first lesson I always, I always remind myself as the best place
0:15:39 to invest is in your P&L, meaning look at your expenses and go figure out
0:15:43 which of those companies you think other people, you wouldn’t want to cancel.
0:15:46 And other people are going to have as their expense to go invest in that company.
0:15:47 Retools, one of those.
0:15:50 And then second thing was once we got acquired by Twitch years later.
0:15:52 So the first one was probably 2017, 2018.
0:15:56 The second one was 2020 or 2019.
0:16:00 I’m at Twitch and Emmett, who was a YC partner, was like.
0:16:05 I was at a meeting or he’s coming to a meeting with me and he was running
0:16:08 a little late and he’s like, oh, yes, sorry, I was doing an office hours
0:16:11 with this YC company that just had they just hit this point.
0:16:13 It’s like, there’s this thing that happens where you go through YC.
0:16:14 It’s all good.
0:16:17 Then you have after YC where, you know, you’re just like back
0:16:19 to being like a normal struggling company.
0:16:21 He’s like, and then sometimes you hit this inflection point and shit
0:16:23 just really starts to work.
0:16:26 He goes, yeah, this company retooled this really starting to work.
0:16:30 When you’re, you know, when a really smart friend tells you that
0:16:33 something is hitting an inflection point, like drop everything and go,
0:16:34 go, go hunt that down.
0:16:36 I remember at the time thinking, I shouldn’t invest in this.
0:16:39 I saw the guy David in the cafeteria because he had just met with Emmett
0:16:42 and wearing his retool shirt and I went up to him and I was like, nice shirt.
0:16:43 Love retool.
0:16:44 And then that was it.
0:16:47 That was my, all I needed was that guy, how do I invest?
0:16:48 He was young.
0:16:50 I think he, I think he was like a college kid almost.
0:16:53 Yeah, he looked like he just could have been any employee at the company
0:16:54 since he was wearing his own shirt.
0:16:57 Anyway, so retool, I liked the pick valuation is high.
0:16:59 So I think four or five X is tough from there to become a 15 billion
0:17:02 dollar company is tough, but I think it’s a good, really good company.
0:17:04 All right, let me give you my next one.
0:17:08 The next one, Mercury, you’re nodding.
0:17:09 Do you have this one?
0:17:14 It was on my, I had it on my list and then I removed it because I thought
0:17:14 you were going to pick them.
0:17:16 I did pick Mercury.
0:17:18 So Mercury is a company that I use.
0:17:22 So I’m a, again, look at, look at the tools you use that you don’t want to
0:17:23 change.
0:17:28 Um, so I use Mercury for, I think not one, two, but like six of my companies
0:17:32 now, um, it’s just a amazing product.
0:17:36 So the valuation is still in that sweet spot range where it’s, uh, what, I
0:17:37 think it’s 1.6 billion right now.
0:17:41 So the valuation is, uh, there, here’s the bull case.
0:17:42 Here’s what you need to believe.
0:17:44 It has a rare combination.
0:17:50 Mercury is just a bank that is built for small businesses and it’s easier
0:17:50 and simpler to use.
0:17:53 It’s basically just a normal bank, just easier and better.
0:17:55 If you’re a startup and you need to have a bank account, which every
0:18:00 startup does, uh, you can use a bank from like, you know, Bank of America
0:18:03 or whatever, like, um, you know, some, some traditional bank where you’re
0:18:07 going to use their product and it’s going to feel like, you know, a bunch
0:18:12 of 50 year olds hired some web shop to, you know, outsource this tool that
0:18:15 they needed, like the second of like second, second class citizen, whereas
0:18:17 Mercury is like, Oh, a founder made this.
0:18:17 I get it.
0:18:21 It solves all of the pounders, all of the problems that a founder would have.
0:18:21 I get it.
0:18:22 And it’s true.
0:18:25 Imad was a founder of multiple startups before he made this.
0:18:27 And now it’s like the best product for startups.
0:18:30 So products amazing.
0:18:31 It has a rare combo.
0:18:34 It’s growing fast and it’s profitable, which is great because a lot of the
0:18:37 companies that get written down or the risk comes from, they’re not profitable.
0:18:41 They’re burning so much cash that if the growth ever slows, all of a sudden
0:18:43 you get this huge discount in the valuation.
0:18:46 So the fact that this is profitable means there’s a margin of safety here.
0:18:52 Silicon Valley bank used to be the bank of, of choice for Silicon Valley
0:18:56 startups, it imploded, it was a $34 billion company with $7 billion in
0:19:00 revenue two years ago, and it imploded because they mismanaged risk.
0:19:02 Nobody has really replaced them.
0:19:04 I think Mercury is the best position to replace them.
0:19:06 So if you think about like, what’s the shoes they could fill?
0:19:11 They could fill the SVB shoes as a 30 plus billion dollar company.
0:19:12 They’re the category leader.
0:19:14 I saw this great quote from a Sequoia partner.
0:19:18 He said the category leader in any category tends to get something like
0:19:22 75% of the revenue and 50% of all profits that are going to be in a, in a market,
0:19:25 which I don’t know if those numbers are exactly right, but it’s directionally
0:19:29 correct, which is that the winners of every category take this lion’s share of
0:19:29 the rewards.
0:19:31 And I think they have a good moat.
0:19:32 I think they have a great brand.
0:19:37 It’s letting them get customers, you know, for free and regulatory moat as well,
0:19:40 which is, this is not a simple thing that any, you know, any person can go start.
0:19:43 There’s a lot of obviously like financial compliance and regulation.
0:19:46 Now, one thing to caveat, we called them a bank.
0:19:48 That’s cause to the customer, it feels like a bank.
0:19:50 Technically, they’re not a bank.
0:19:51 Who do they use?
0:19:55 So they use like Choice Bank, I think, and Evolve Bank underneath.
0:19:59 So they’re what we call like an EO bank, you know, just like a finance platform,
0:19:59 basically.
0:20:03 And the bear case, the other thing that, you know, the worry would be,
0:20:04 can they grow with their startups?
0:20:08 So some products are great because you get them while they’re young and you grow
0:20:10 with them and other products, you get them while they’re young and then they
0:20:11 graduate off you.
0:20:14 And as soon as they become really valuable customers, they take their
0:20:16 business elsewhere, I think they’re going to be able to grow with startups,
0:20:17 but that would be the risk here.
0:20:19 I didn’t find honestly much of a bear case.
0:20:20 Do you, I don’t know if you have a.
0:20:21 Yeah, I’ve got a bear case.
0:20:26 I think I, I, I almost always bank with Chase because I’ve just always been
0:20:29 afraid of, can I access that my money?
0:20:33 And it happened recently where a lot of people were using Mercury as, I mean,
0:20:34 not to shit on Mercury.
0:20:37 They were using lots of different things and they couldn’t get their
0:20:41 payments out or their payroll out because of the bank, uh, the banks are working.
0:20:43 And S and SFB was one of them.
0:20:46 They’re, they’re, they’re no longer a business because they’re this huge
0:20:48 company that mismanaged a bunch of stuff and it didn’t work out.
0:20:51 And so, uh, yeah, I think that’s a massive bear case.
0:20:54 I think that the reason I bake with Chase is because of Chase, we go out
0:20:57 of business and have the issue that, uh, Silicon Valley bank had America
0:21:00 would basically go under too big to fail.
0:21:00 Yeah.
0:21:03 And I always knock on wood when I say that, but a little bit like that, where
0:21:07 it’s like, you know, I think Chase is like, I don’t have to look at the stats,
0:21:09 but it’s something like 5% of like Americans use it.
0:21:10 So it’s like a pretty big deal.
0:21:14 And so yeah, I think that’s a bearish case as to why I don’t think that’s
0:21:18 necessarily a bear case because first of all, they have like, I think
0:21:23 $5 million FDIC insurance now, like they offer like 20 times more FDIC
0:21:26 protection than, than they, that they need to, or than the average bank does.
0:21:29 So I think they’ve, they’ve got some features that help with that.
0:21:31 But the other thing is like, I think the proof is in the pudding with this,
0:21:35 which is that if, uh, while it’s understandable to say, Oh, you know,
0:21:38 I, I choose to go with a too big to fail bank.
0:21:41 If you just look at kind of where the startups are voting with their feet,
0:21:46 this thing is growing so fast that obviously people are making that choice
0:21:47 already.
0:21:48 So it’s not like a future scenario.
0:21:51 It’s like today that choice exists and people are making the choice to go to
0:21:52 Mercury.
0:21:57 So I don’t see a reason why that would change later necessarily.
0:21:59 Like usually when I think about a bear case, like what could go wrong in the
0:22:03 future with what you’re talking about, which is maybe people just prefer to use
0:22:07 a traditional kind of hundred year old bank because of the track record.
0:22:11 They have that choice today and people are like choosing to do the other one.
0:22:15 So, you know, that’s less of a bear case last weekend because I’m a client at
0:22:18 Chase, they gave me box seats to the US open.
0:22:22 And it totally worked.
0:22:27 I’m going to bake with James for as long as they’ll have me so long as I can
0:22:28 ticket to the US open.
0:22:33 So as soon as Mercury like starts doing these wide dyed perks, they shit.
0:22:36 Like I want, I want a fucking fruit basket.
0:22:37 I want to get basket.
0:22:40 If I don’t give a gift basket, you don’t get my business.
0:22:41 I’ve changed, man.
0:22:45 I mean, I’ll take a 20 piece nuggets from Chick-fil-A.
0:22:46 Like, I don’t, I’m not, I’m a simple man.
0:22:47 I don’t need the US open.
0:22:48 This is easy.
0:22:49 Oh my God.
0:22:55 They took me, I got these like amazing seats to the US open and it worked.
0:22:56 It worked.
0:22:58 Look, like it worked.
0:22:59 I get it.
0:23:00 I fell for the trap.
0:23:03 And so, but yeah, no, I think Mercury’s a great business.
0:23:05 I think the founder is pretty badass.
0:23:06 So yeah, that one’s good.
0:23:06 All right.
0:23:11 So you said that you were going to look at like the founders and, or no,
0:23:12 sorry, you said you’re going to use your P&L.
0:23:15 So where you spend some of your money.
0:23:17 I like that.
0:23:20 I also do like, where do I spend some of my time and where do people
0:23:20 spend some of their time?
0:23:24 And so a tool that I’m playing with is called cursor.
0:23:25 And I think cursor is pretty amazing.
0:23:30 And so, and I’m going to tell you not my story, but the reason I’ve been using it,
0:23:33 but there was this little girl, she’s eight years old.
0:23:36 Her father’s on Twitter and her father’s a developer, I guess.
0:23:39 And her father tweeted something out saying, I’m trying to teach my little girl
0:23:42 how to code and we’re using cursor.
0:23:46 And here’s a face time of her, like a loom, like a screen record of her
0:23:47 learning how to code.
0:23:51 And within 12 minutes or something like that, she’s built a website and she
0:23:52 used cursor.
0:23:54 So cursor is this really cool tool.
0:23:55 It’s got a lot of hype right now.
0:23:59 It just kind of the easiest way to describe it is it’s sort of like
0:24:03 Squarespace Wix or any of these other website builders, but it uses AI and you
0:24:06 talk to it a little bit like a person and it makes it really easy to edit code.
0:24:09 Now there’s a bunch of pros and cons to this business.
0:24:12 The pro is, I think it’s amazing.
0:24:14 Like I think that this tool is awesome.
0:24:14 I’ve been playing with it.
0:24:15 It’s super good.
0:24:17 Their latest valuation is $400 million.
0:24:19 I don’t think that that’s insane.
0:24:21 So that’s like, there’s opportunity there.
0:24:27 I think that the con, and this is a big con, which is these website building tools.
0:24:30 Dude, their PE multiples are shit.
0:24:32 So you look at like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly.
0:24:36 Do you remember all these like they don’t trade that well?
0:24:37 So they can do billions.
0:24:39 I think you’re pigeonholing it as a website builder.
0:24:40 It’s not a website builder.
0:24:41 It’s a it’s a IDE.
0:24:43 You can code anything you can code anything in it.
0:24:48 But it’s still, I think, in that category, in terms of you don’t think it’s in
0:24:53 that category in terms of I think it’s in the GitHub co-pilot replete category,
0:24:58 where it’s a where it’s a coding environment where a programmer can become
0:25:00 now an AI assisted programmer.
0:25:03 So however good you were, however efficient you were, however productive
0:25:08 you were as an engineer, as a programmer, you can now be, you know, some multiple
0:25:11 more, maybe it’s one and a half X more, more productive.
0:25:13 Maybe it’s 10 X more productive as the AI improves.
0:25:18 And so I don’t think because, you know, Wix and Weebly, these are like, you know,
0:25:20 my sister needs a website for her preschool.
0:25:22 So she goes to Squarespace and makes a website.
0:25:24 She’s not going to, she’s not going to go to today.
0:25:25 She’s not going to cursor for that.
0:25:30 And also those tools could never do what a cursor could do where it could build
0:25:32 full applications, you know?
0:25:34 Yeah, I feel you, I feel you.
0:25:35 I still think that like, all right.
0:25:40 So we use, I use bubble, you know, bubble, bubbles like an app builder.
0:25:42 This is a little bit of a competitor to bubble.
0:25:47 And in my head as an investor and potentially as a user, I think it
0:25:52 comes into like, it uses, it’s like the same churn as a small or a website
0:25:56 builder where you spend $10 a month and there’s not always a massive reason
0:25:59 to stay on the platform versus all the other competitors.
0:26:01 Like it’s pretty easy just to like up and try different ones.
0:26:02 Do you know what I mean?
0:26:04 And so for that reason, I think it’s a little bit similar in the terms of,
0:26:05 in terms of valuation.
0:26:06 Right.
0:26:07 Okay.
0:26:10 I have a, I was, I looked at cursor very close.
0:26:13 In fact, they were on my first draft of companies to be on here.
0:26:15 But then as I did more research, I went with another company that you’ll
0:26:16 see at the end of this.
0:26:16 So.
0:26:16 Okay.
0:26:20 But what do you think about cursor for a $450 million valuation?
0:26:20 What do you think?
0:26:25 I think, I mean, I think you’re getting high upside, high downside there.
0:26:29 Cause, you know, that valuation is not based on, it’s not based on revenue.
0:26:33 It’s, it’s based on like, you know, this, this vision of what the future
0:26:34 light might look like.
0:26:35 And that’s great.
0:26:37 And I think cursor is awesome right now.
0:26:40 If I could invest in cursor, I would totally invest in cursor right now.
0:26:44 But I think it is more risky than some of the other ones we’ve talked about so far.
0:26:46 I think that’s true.
0:26:49 They’re at a $10 million run rate, I believe, or I don’t know if it was run
0:26:51 rate, or that’s actually what they did in revenue.
0:26:53 But yeah, it’s tiny compared to the valuation.
0:26:55 What do you have then instead, what’s your competitor to it?
0:26:55 Well, I’ll show you.
0:26:58 So it’s my last one, but I can’t rearrange the slides here.
0:26:59 So you’re going to have to wait on that.
0:27:04 When you told that story about that little girl, I thought you were pulling
0:27:07 a Kamala Harris and you were going to say that little girl was me at the end.
0:27:09 And I was pretty ready for that emotional landing.
0:27:13 Instead, you were like, that was just somebody’s daughter.
0:27:18 I just follow grown men’s daughters on Twitter.
0:27:18 I don’t know.
0:27:20 It was like, where are you getting your take advice?
0:27:23 Dude, it was, are you, did you see that video?
0:27:25 I did not see that one.
0:27:26 I’ve seen some kind of amazing things.
0:27:27 I curse her demos right now.
0:27:30 All the rage, dude, all the rage.
0:27:30 All right, keep going.
0:27:32 All right, my next one.
0:27:34 I don’t even know if you’ve heard of this company.
0:27:35 Epirus, do you know this company?
0:27:37 No.
0:27:40 Okay, so I don’t like that name.
0:27:41 Epirus.
0:27:42 Yeah, Epirus.
0:27:43 So this is a Joe Lonsdale company.
0:27:47 It is a weapons company, a defense company.
0:27:50 And I don’t know enough about Epirus because it’s a very
0:27:54 secretive company and it’s very private to tell you that this
0:27:54 is the pick.
0:27:57 What I actually did was I put this here as a placeholder as a
0:27:58 general strategy.
0:28:01 So one thing I would do if I was interested in this kind of
0:28:04 series list concept, finding a company, I can go join that the
0:28:06 stock is going to be my, my stock package is going to be
0:28:07 appreciating, you know, rapidly.
0:28:09 I’ll get a 5X in five years.
0:28:13 I think that the way Andrew will hit for us last time, there are
0:28:17 now like 10 more Andrew type of companies that exist that are
0:28:20 inspired by Andrew that are worth checking out.
0:28:24 Andrew itself might still be a contender by the way, but there
0:28:25 are more companies.
0:28:28 So Epirus is basically as like long range, you know, like
0:28:29 defense weapon or whatever.
0:28:31 Dude, if you go to their website, it’s Epirus Inc.
0:28:35 It basically looks like some type of like electromagnetic thing
0:28:38 that shoots like radio waves into the sky and brings down drones
0:28:39 and planes.
0:28:39 That’s exactly what it does.
0:28:43 It’s an EMP pulse that will take down, you know, a drone or a
0:28:45 missile or something like that without being a bomb.
0:28:47 Like you don’t have to like, you don’t have to bomb something.
0:28:47 You could just disable it.
0:28:48 It’s just magic.
0:28:50 There’s a great story, by the way.
0:28:51 Is David Blaine the CEO?
0:28:52 Cause this looks magical.
0:28:57 But like when I see like invisible rays, such a good pickup line.
0:29:01 I’m going to use that next time I’m trying to like talk to a founder
0:29:03 and be like, but are you related to David Blaine?
0:29:04 Because this is magical.
0:29:05 Is he a cousin?
0:29:08 It does look like magic.
0:29:11 So he told the story where he’s like, I was like, dude, how do you
0:29:13 sell to these like three letter agencies?
0:29:16 And he’s like, it’s very hard, you know, there’s like decades
0:29:19 long relationships with the traditional companies.
0:29:20 So like, how do you do it?
0:29:23 He goes, well, the big thing we always try to do is get to a bakeoff.
0:29:27 He’s like, we have to get to a point where they’re willing to do a
0:29:29 contest of our product versus their product.
0:29:30 Cause we can win on product.
0:29:33 We have better product than engineering, but we don’t have better,
0:29:36 you know, good old boy relationships here.
0:29:37 So we have to get to a bakeoff.
0:29:39 He’s like, so we did a bakeoff for Epirus.
0:29:42 And basically everybody went to this field and they’re like, cool.
0:29:45 I’ll line up and then you’re going to go first and we’re going to see
0:29:48 how far away you can, you know, disable this and how effectively
0:29:50 you can disable this drone.
0:29:51 Uh, that was the test.
0:29:55 And they lined up and he’s like handing out binoculars.
0:29:56 And they’re like, what was this?
0:29:59 He’s like, you’re going to need these to see how far away we’re
0:30:00 going to be able to disable this thing.
0:30:03 And then they like won the bakeoff, won the contract and all the stuff.
0:30:05 So I don’t know about this company specifically.
0:30:10 I don’t know enough, but I would go interview at the top 10, like defense/weapons
0:30:14 companies, go talk to all of them and then use your judgment on which of them is the
0:30:14 winner.
0:30:18 I know in that basket, there’s definitely one or multiple winners that are,
0:30:20 that are in this, I, but I, from the outside.
0:30:22 Dude, how do you even get that person?
0:30:25 So let’s say you’re Joe Lonsdale, which like, I guess that’s kind of answered
0:30:27 the answer is the question because he’s a big shot.
0:30:33 But if you’re not a big shot and you want to get like some CIA buyer into a field
0:30:38 in Texas to like show up, like to wow him, like, who do you even phone call?
0:30:38 You know what I mean?
0:30:42 Like who, well, I think there’s a multiple answers to this, but I’ll
0:30:43 just give you a couple of data points.
0:30:46 So the very first thing is that there are bids.
0:30:49 There are like RFPs that you can participate in.
0:30:53 There are, there are like, you know, the government has a process, a procurement
0:30:56 where they need to be able to go solicit proposals.
0:30:57 So you can go look at those.
0:30:57 You can go talk to those.
0:31:01 The second thing is when we were at his house after we recorded the podcast with
0:31:05 Joe, we were walking out and there was like 10, like senators there for lunch.
0:31:08 And it’s like, Oh, this is how you build your network.
0:31:10 You, you, he’s like hosting a lunch for like 10.
0:31:14 He’ll like bring you out the back door, like, like I’m literally, well,
0:31:17 because Elon was coming over and he was like, Hey, it might be easier for you
0:31:19 if you just want to go this way.
0:31:21 And we were like, easier for you or easier for me.
0:31:23 Like, maybe for both of us.
0:31:23 All right.
0:31:24 Good, fair, fair enough.
0:31:27 Cause I’m literally in my basketball shorts.
0:31:34 Did he, did he hand you 20 bucks and bought you over and bought you an Uber?
0:31:36 Don’t forget your lunchbox.
0:31:38 And then I like wandered off to a bus.
0:31:41 Um, yeah, was there apple juice waiting for you at the doorway out?
0:31:43 Truly how it felt.
0:31:46 And by the way, I couldn’t have been happier with the arrangement.
0:31:48 I did not want to be a fish out of water either.
0:31:50 So I think that’s one way.
0:31:53 There’s also a great story told on the bottom about like how Peter Teal was
0:31:57 telling them like, dude, because when they started Palantir, he was like a
0:31:58 couple of years out of college.
0:31:59 Like it wasn’t that old yet.
0:32:04 And he had like a lot of like, kind of like the pride and hubris of like, uh,
0:32:07 like a tech kind of like genius type of person.
0:32:10 And he is, you know, a genius type of genius level person.
0:32:12 But going in and saying, you guys are dumb.
0:32:15 We’re smart is not the answer either to sell to these things.
0:32:18 And so they hired this guy, Alex Karp, who’s still the CEO of Palantir.
0:32:20 And one of the reasons why I was like, this guy was just like very,
0:32:24 very good with relationship building, with networking, with being accepted
0:32:25 by these buyers.
0:32:30 And then he recruited like ex government people to be like door openers,
0:32:33 like warm handshakes to help them get in the room.
0:32:34 And I think that that’s how they got.
0:32:38 I want to do a, um, an entire podcast next time, just on the New York Times
0:32:41 article on Alex Karp, very funny, very good, very interesting.
0:32:42 Very good.
0:32:43 Uh, all right.
0:32:44 I buy into that.
0:32:49 I, it’s to me, working at Epirus or any of these national or these defense
0:32:53 businesses, it’s sort of like working at a porn company where like you,
0:32:57 like probably most of the work, uh, might be like your mom, you’re working
0:32:58 video entertainment.
0:33:02 Well, yeah, like most of the work is like normal, like just a normal job.
0:33:02 It’s boring.
0:33:06 But then like you see the output and it’s like, fuck, like death or destruction
0:33:09 or like, like pretty like raunchy shit.
0:33:12 If you’re working there, their tool, this Epirus tool, just in this case,
0:33:14 is like a non-death tool.
0:33:17 It’s disabling the, you know, without, without bombing anything.
0:33:21 But yeah, some of the other ones are, are, are a lot more like, yeah, this is war.
0:33:22 Yeah.
0:33:25 We’re like the output of this, whether it’s right or wrong.
0:33:29 Uh, it’s still like a, it’s, you go to bed every once in a while.
0:33:32 I imagine with a heavy heart, even if you’re doing everything right.
0:33:33 Um, all right, I have, I have another one.
0:33:37 And I am, you know that, what is that called?
0:33:41 That, uh, mid-wit meme where there’s people who are on like this, the dumb
0:33:45 guys are at the far end where they just don’t think things are, how does it go?
0:33:46 You’re on one of them.
0:33:47 Let’s just put it that way.
0:33:50 You’re showing that you got one of the sides nailed.
0:33:54 There’s the begin, the kind of, the beginner, the cave man who’s just like,
0:33:59 you know, build product, talk to customers, right?
0:34:01 And then the Jedi is also like, you know, I should just build a good
0:34:02 product, talk to customers.
0:34:04 And then the guy in the middle is doing like over analysis, overthinking
0:34:10 over, over everything, but I feel like you, you did a good job.
0:34:15 Like, you know, uh, like, like a mind, you like acted out the meme.
0:34:18 I am what I am.
0:34:21 Uh, I took that approach with a couple of these.
0:34:23 Dude, have you heard of this company called the whiz?
0:34:25 I’ve heard of whiz.
0:34:26 I don’t know what whiz does.
0:34:28 I looked at it and I was like, I don’t understand this enough.
0:34:29 Dude.
0:34:29 All right.
0:34:30 So check this out.
0:34:34 So it was whiz is a cybersecurity company, uh, for enterprise, uh, company.
0:34:35 So, or enterprise, enterprise customers.
0:34:40 So basically if you have, if you’re using like large cloud tools, it, the tool,
0:34:43 the whiz’s tool like scans it and be like, all right, you have a potential
0:34:46 threat here, here and here for cyber security issues.
0:34:50 It’s the fastest company ever to get to a hundred million in annual revenue.
0:34:51 Took him 18 months.
0:34:53 The guy who started it.
0:34:56 Now this is why we’re like the mid, uh, that meme comes into play here
0:34:57 because he’s kind of amazing.
0:34:59 I read this article about him a couple of years ago.
0:35:03 And the opening line is, I guess his first name is Asaf.
0:35:04 So he’s Israeli.
0:35:07 Um, and he was like an Israeli defense guy in the military.
0:35:11 And he said, don’t mistake a soft gentleness for someone who’s willing
0:35:12 to play by the rules.
0:35:14 That was the opening line.
0:35:15 I was like, okay.
0:35:16 What does that even mean?
0:35:17 Yeah.
0:35:18 It’s like a Tinder bio.
0:35:18 Jesus.
0:35:20 All right.
0:35:21 I’m interested.
0:35:26 And so basically this guy, uh, he previously had another company that he scaled
0:35:27 and sold to Microsoft.
0:35:29 It was also a cybersecurity cloud company.
0:35:30 He sold to Microsoft for a billion dollars.
0:35:34 He, uh, gets through his, um, his warm up company.
0:35:34 Yeah.
0:35:36 His warm up company is only 38 years old.
0:35:39 He gets through his non-computer ever spends the time at Microsoft.
0:35:39 Things go well.
0:35:41 And then he starts his next company called whiz.
0:35:45 So far they’ve already raised $2 billion, of which, uh, uh, one billion of that
0:35:50 came in one round and the company’s only 18 months old, which is absolutely ridiculous.
0:35:52 Uh, they’ve done something.
0:35:57 I think they’re already at, uh, $350 million in revenue in just three years,
0:36:02 350 annual recurring, uh, revenue in three years, something like 80% of the fortune
0:36:05 100 companies are already using the tool.
0:36:07 So they’ve killed it already.
0:36:09 Now here’s where, uh, things get interesting.
0:36:13 Their last valuation was $12 billion, but there was a rumor that Google was
0:36:15 going to buy them for $23 billion.
0:36:18 And so there’s all these rumors that this was happening.
0:36:22 And so he sends an email to the entire company and let me read you a quote.
0:36:25 He goes, the first line, let me cut to the chase.
0:36:30 Our next milestones are a billion dollars in ARR and an IPO.
0:36:34 And he explains how they aren’t accepting this offer from Google because
0:36:36 they want to like make it big and be this huge thing.
0:36:38 And I love this guy.
0:36:43 I think he’s just one of the coolest, like most interesting CEOs out there right now.
0:36:44 What do you look at?
0:36:44 What do you think?
0:36:45 What do you look at him?
0:36:50 Well, he looks not like what I thought, uh, actually your first line about like,
0:36:54 don’t let my gentle, whatever fool you, like I’m here to whatever handcuff
0:36:55 you to the bed.
0:36:56 I don’t know what he said, but like something like that.
0:36:57 That’s what I heard.
0:37:01 He’s, he just looks like a good, it looks like a Midwest nice guy.
0:37:05 Uh, when I look at these photos, I was really expecting a lot more hardcore
0:37:08 looking at a guy, which is just from my Google image search.
0:37:15 Dude, when you see a guy wearing a t-shirt who sells to like suits or the NSA or
0:37:18 whatever, like these like big, big shots, I think that like you’re a
0:37:23 secretly very dangerous, like the, you know what I mean?
0:37:25 Let me tell you something here.
0:37:27 So, um, okay.
0:37:28 So check this out.
0:37:30 There’s a part of the whiz story that I think is pretty interesting.
0:37:32 First of all, interesting pick.
0:37:35 I think they have such a high valuation that you’re really betting this is like
0:37:38 one of the mega cap tech companies to do this.
0:37:38 Okay.
0:37:38 Fair enough.
0:37:43 The thing that scares me is anything that grows this fast, you know, what goes
0:37:44 up must come down in a way.
0:37:45 This is not, it’s not as Lindy.
0:37:49 It’s not as, you know, when something is a slow compounder, you actually trust
0:37:55 it more than a explosive, but not like doesn’t have a long track record.
0:37:58 Dude, but that’s the goal of this thing is things I could five X in three years.
0:37:58 That’s fast growth.
0:37:59 Five years, five years.
0:37:59 Yes.
0:38:00 Whatever.
0:38:01 Yeah.
0:38:02 True, true.
0:38:04 But I guess what I’m saying is like, it might be priced in, I don’t know.
0:38:06 So let me tell you something that’s interesting about this.
0:38:09 So when I saw this company’s growth so fast, it was a natural question of, well,
0:38:13 how have you heard about the story about this guy named Gilly?
0:38:15 That’s associated with whiz.
0:38:17 No, but I’m in.
0:38:18 All right.
0:38:19 So who is Gilly?
0:38:22 I don’t know how to say his last name, run on, run on on something like that.
0:38:24 Gilly run on on, let’s call him.
0:38:28 Dude, all these guys, by the way, they’re Israeli like special force guys.
0:38:32 So they all this guy’s ex Israeli military intelligence.
0:38:32 Yes.
0:38:34 He also invented capture.
0:38:37 He invented WAF, which is web application firewalls.
0:38:39 He did a bunch of other stuff in cybersecurity.
0:38:43 He was a partner at Sequoia, very well respected in the cybersecurity world.
0:38:45 And he started a VC firm called Cyber Starts.
0:38:47 And they’re the first investor in whiz.
0:38:48 Now check this out.
0:38:51 So let me just read you this excerpt.
0:38:54 The numbers for the, for the VC fund cyber stats are phenomenal.
0:38:59 The fund that specialized cybersecurity funded by Gil only six years ago.
0:39:00 Here’s, here’s how it goes.
0:39:05 So 22 companies combined value 35 billion, five of the 22 are unicorns.
0:39:09 So a higher hit rate than YC first and foremost is whiz is breaking all the records.
0:39:11 Four of them were sold in the last 12 months.
0:39:15 So, you know, like successful exits for a total amount of 1.5 billion.
0:39:19 And the last three months, their companies have raised 1.8 billion, blah, blah, blah.
0:39:24 His his portfolio shows it, IRL of more than 100%, which is, you know,
0:39:26 unusual for even the best performing funds.
0:39:30 Not a single company has failed so far in his portfolio.
0:39:34 And it is currently ranked the top five of all VC funds in the world due to these achievements.
0:39:37 OK, so then you say, well, hold on, what is what’s working?
0:39:39 What’s what’s actually happening here?
0:39:42 And then you say, then there’s something called the Gil run on model.
0:39:46 And basically what he does is he’s got this mafia of the chief.
0:39:51 The CISOs, so the chief security officers at all these enterprise companies,
0:39:53 and they’re all in his pocket, they all respect him.
0:39:55 They think he’s got the Midas touch.
0:39:57 He’s done so much in the space, he builds a relationship with them.
0:40:00 But then he makes them essentially partners,
0:40:03 like I think like Kerry partners in his fund.
0:40:06 And so what he does is he basically has like a bribery network
0:40:09 is what my understanding of this is not what they called it.
0:40:12 But like corruption is awesome, corruption is awesome.
0:40:17 It’s causing so it is referred to as the Gil run on model.
0:40:19 It is causing more.
0:40:21 I got to stop saying this guy’s last name because I’m probably butchering it
0:40:24 because more discomfort amongst Israeli competitors and portfolio companies,
0:40:27 which are all jealous for obvious reasons, it has reached the US
0:40:30 where company executives who are purchasing cybersecurity systems
0:40:33 are as committed to Gilly as they are to their own company.
0:40:37 And basically what he does is he goes to them and he, you know,
0:40:39 winds and dines them with dinners and conferences.
0:40:42 But according to several sources,
0:40:45 he promises teams of fresh graduates, graduates from tech units,
0:40:49 not only investment support in the startup, but initial revenues of two million a year.
0:40:52 This is usually their first year of revenue,
0:40:54 which is intended to boost them above their competitors
0:40:56 and help them get the next round of funding.
0:41:01 And the way he does that is by using his network of loyal, loyal CISOs.
0:41:05 And so the first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund.
0:41:07 It might be considered small money,
0:41:11 but the jumps in the jumps in fundraising for cybersecurity is difficult.
0:41:13 If you can get to that two to 10 million range, you’ve like,
0:41:16 you have escape velocity to get to the next round of funding and all that.
0:41:20 He creates a mechanism that is difficult to compete with
0:41:23 because the companies immediately jump to a valuation of 100 to 200 million,
0:41:25 raise more money and have more resources to compete later.
0:41:29 The seemingly small purchase of 100 to 200 thousand dollars by the CISO
0:41:32 will increase the startup’s value dozens of times.
0:41:34 This is known as the Gilly model.
0:41:37 And I think what he says, there’s something here about like the kickback that they get.
0:41:39 So there’s some here’s what he emailed them.
0:41:41 It is difficult to predict the performance of the fund.
0:41:44 But according to our forecast, the points you have accumulated in the fund
0:41:46 so far are valued at X dollars.
0:41:48 You can expect additional allocations in the coming years
0:41:50 and in the new funds we will raise later.
0:41:52 So it’s kind of a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours model.
0:41:56 I pick winners.
0:42:00 I just thought this guy was awesome because he wrote cool emails
0:42:02 and he’s got a dope smile.
0:42:06 Turns out, you know, there’s good reason for backing him.
0:42:09 Yeah. Well, a lot of them are from, I think it’s called the unit 8200.
0:42:11 Something like that. It’s like the NSA of Israel.
0:42:14 And so if you look at like some of the largest security companies.
0:42:17 So it’s like, I don’t want to talk totally out of turn here.
0:42:20 But I think it’s like Palo Alto Networks and all these like multi-billion dollar companies.
0:42:22 They all came from that unit.
0:42:26 And so it turns out with this guy, it’s more of a they’re they’re they’re
0:42:27 definitely working together.
0:42:29 But I thought they were just working together
0:42:30 because they were all from like the same crew.
0:42:32 You know, it’s like they all went to high school together.
0:42:34 Turns out there’s like a blood oath.
0:42:36 Neither you nor I know Jack shit about this.
0:42:39 But it sounds like a movie and we’re pretty fascinated.
0:42:41 I think that’s what’s happening here.
0:42:43 Sounds like some ocean’s love and shit.
0:42:48 All right, but a big dummy like me came to the great conclusion as this fucking smart.
0:42:54 All right, what do you got?
0:42:57 All right, my next one is a quick one, Neuralink.
0:43:01 So Neuralink is currently valued at five billion dollars.
0:43:04 It’s got like pretty much no revenue.
0:43:05 Here’s the case.
0:43:08 Elon, they put a chip in a guy’s head
0:43:10 and he’s like playing video games on a Twitch stream now.
0:43:11 It’s pretty crazy.
0:43:14 The first patient, they have a huge technical milestone.
0:43:15 Was he paralyzed or he had MS?
0:43:17 He’s a quadriplegic.
0:43:21 So he can’t I think he can’t move his arms or his legs, I believe.
0:43:24 And now with his brain, he’s this playing chess
0:43:26 and he basically can use a computer with his brain now.
0:43:28 Just thinking, OK.
0:43:30 And he’s like, wow, my life just got so much better.
0:43:31 This is amazing.
0:43:34 And they successfully implanted the chip in the guy’s brain
0:43:36 and he can now use computers.
0:43:36 It is incredible.
0:43:38 I cannot believe more people are not talking about this.
0:43:40 I’m going to do a whole deep dive on Neuralink
0:43:43 just because I think that I’m blown away by the videos
0:43:46 I’ve seen and the the nerdy rabbit holes I’ve been down for it.
0:43:52 To me, this is a question of when not if, meaning the next platform shift
0:43:56 is probably glasses, but the one after that or the, you know,
0:43:58 the big one is just put the computer in the brain.
0:44:00 That will happen.
0:44:02 It’s just maybe it’s 10 years, maybe it’s 100 years.
0:44:03 I have no idea.
0:44:06 The other cool case is look, even if this doesn’t five X in five years,
0:44:08 you’re going to be helping a lot of people out because all their
0:44:11 initial customers are people who are, you know, severely disabled,
0:44:13 can’t see and they’re going to make them see.
0:44:15 They can’t hear. They’re going to make them hear.
0:44:16 They can’t move their arms.
0:44:18 They’re going to make them be able to use computers.
0:44:19 It’s it’s really incredible.
0:44:22 So I think they’re doing incredible work and that you’re probably working
0:44:23 with really smart people on a mission that matters.
0:44:26 And you’re probably going to make a lot of money doing it.
0:44:29 The bear case, of course, revenue, a question mark, question mark.
0:44:31 You know, they have like one customer right now, right?
0:44:34 So like it’s going to take time, long path to success.
0:44:38 They’re kind of at the they made the first Tesla Roadster.
0:44:40 That’s where they’re at in the Tesla journey right now.
0:44:44 Dude, but you’re missing the whole point of this list, which is like,
0:44:49 how do you like not like stress out all the time and like things like that?
0:44:52 And all these companies need that they need the personality hire.
0:44:55 They need the guy who’s bringing smoothies to the office.
0:44:56 They need the guy who’s a good time to be around.
0:44:59 They need the guys that would willing to do the dirty work and go clean up
0:45:01 the files and go organize.
0:45:04 Do you think that Elon has a personality hired?
0:45:07 Yeah, I think he does, dude.
0:45:10 I think he’s got like literally like meme lords that work for him.
0:45:11 So I think he definitely got first.
0:45:13 I don’t know, man.
0:45:16 I agree with you on so many things.
0:45:17 I know some dummies that work at Tesla.
0:45:18 Let me put it that way.
0:45:20 I have some like, who’s this guy?
0:45:22 Oh, my cousin works at Tesla that you meet the cousin.
0:45:24 It’s like, does he work like in the tire shop?
0:45:25 Like, who’s this guy?
0:45:29 Yeah, I feel that, but Neuralink’s not that.
0:45:31 How many employees do you think they have?
0:45:32 I have no idea.
0:45:34 I would guess like probably like a hundred is my guess.
0:45:36 Or somewhere like a plus or minus 50.
0:45:38 I have no clue.
0:45:39 That’s too small to hide.
0:45:46 You’re assuming I didn’t say Sarah’s list is the chill life.
0:45:49 It’s not the rest invest life.
0:45:51 I think maybe we have a misunderstanding there.
0:45:53 Maybe Sarah wasn’t doing as much work as I thought.
0:45:54 No, it’s like a 40 hour work week.
0:45:57 I don’t know if Neuralink is a 40 hour work week.
0:45:58 If it is, then I’m on board.
0:46:00 OK, fair enough, fair enough.
0:46:03 All right, I’ll do, I’ve got two more maybe.
0:46:05 All right, you had open AI.
0:46:08 Now, I want to, I want to vote with my attention a little bit.
0:46:10 I use open AI every day.
0:46:12 But you know, I also use a ton is perplexity.
0:46:14 Do you use that to me too?
0:46:15 Yeah, I use perplexity as well.
0:46:18 Now, how do I explain the difference between the two?
0:46:21 I think perplexity is when you need the answer to be right.
0:46:22 Yeah, chat.
0:46:24 GPT is when you have a variety of random things.
0:46:26 And when you want to break storm as important.
0:46:30 Yeah, if I’m doing research for this pod and I need to say a number
0:46:32 that’s not going to be wrong.
0:46:35 Perplexity is a better bet than chat GPT.
0:46:39 So perplexity, I think their latest valuation was three billion dollars.
0:46:41 They raised four hundred and fifteen million bucks.
0:46:45 So it’s already like very big, but I think the market’s huge.
0:46:49 I also think when I find like interesting stories about the founders
0:46:50 and I love it.
0:46:52 So what’s the CEO of perplexity?
0:46:53 I know how you spell it.
0:46:55 Arvin, I think is his name.
0:46:56 Arvin, all right.
0:46:57 So there’s a funny story about Arvin.
0:47:02 He grew up in the same area as the Google CEO, and he grew up vegetarian.
0:47:05 And his mom wouldn’t let him eat eggs, the perplexity CEO.
0:47:08 And he like grew up and like, no, you can’t have eggs.
0:47:09 And he’s like, I need more protein.
0:47:10 She’s like, you can’t have eggs.
0:47:14 So he sees a YouTube video of Sundar from Google saying, yeah,
0:47:18 I introduced eggs to my diet in order to like get more protein.
0:47:21 And then the mother’s like, OK, you may have eggs.
0:47:24 And so the fact that and he goes on.
0:47:28 That’s not where I thought you were going with the story.
0:47:29 He goes on.
0:47:33 Dude, listen, he goes on to like have this story where like they’re like,
0:47:36 dude, Sundar and my household was like God, where it was like,
0:47:38 well, if he does this and you must do this.
0:47:42 And so imagine being raised in such a toxic environment
0:47:45 where you are either him or you are a failure.
0:47:48 And so far, he’s doing pretty good.
0:47:52 So like that’s again, that’s like Sam being a dummy
0:47:56 and voting on a company just because the powder matching the founders
0:47:59 trying to like prove his mother, you know, make his mother proud.
0:48:03 That’s a strong, that’s a strong motivation.
0:48:08 No, but I do think the the company is going to get significantly larger.
0:48:12 Like the episode of like Always Sunny, where Charlie’s trying to date
0:48:14 and they’re like, Charlie, what about her?
0:48:16 She’s great. She’s got a good job.
0:48:18 She’s nice. She’s he’s like, she doesn’t like milk.
0:48:19 It’s like, what?
0:48:22 It’s like, no, she’s lactose intolerant.
0:48:24 It’s like, you know, basically it’s like, what is your criteria, Charlie?
0:48:26 What are you doing here?
0:48:28 Is this a ridiculous pick or what?
0:48:30 No, I think a lot of people would say perplexity.
0:48:33 So I don’t think your your logic, I think is ridiculous.
0:48:36 I think you’re you somehow are landing at the same conclusions as the geniuses.
0:48:40 But the way you get there is unique, I would say.
0:48:46 No, I picked it because I use it.
0:48:50 I like it in terms of getting in terms of valuation right now.
0:48:53 Three, three billion bucks.
0:48:55 So a lot. But I mean, I don’t know.
0:48:57 It’s like a fast growing fish.
0:49:00 It also seems like a company that could get bought.
0:49:01 So like, you know, open AI.
0:49:04 ChatGPT is like aligned with Microsoft and
0:49:07 Google is trying to do Gemini and all this stuff.
0:49:10 But like, if perplexity keeps executing.
0:49:12 You know, it’s the way that Facebook bought what’s out for 20 billion, right?
0:49:18 Like at a certain point, if you are a better version of their core product
0:49:22 of one of these large companies, Google being the kind of the main one.
0:49:25 You know, you’re a very good acquisition target,
0:49:30 even if your standalone business may or may not reach there.
0:49:32 I have no idea, but like it gives you multiple outs.
0:49:35 The downside is like it seems like no tech company could do big M&A anymore.
0:49:38 So maybe that path is not as realistic.
0:49:40 But I don’t think it’s a bad pick.
0:49:42 I think perplexity is an interesting pick.
0:49:43 Do you want to do your your other one?
0:49:45 And then I have one last one.
0:49:46 Well, my last one is Trava.
0:49:48 Have you heard about Trava?
0:49:51 I’ve heard a lot about Trava because there’s like a Trava.
0:49:53 There’s like a Trava PR mafia that’s out there.
0:49:56 And I am not.
0:49:57 All right. So let me start with.
0:50:00 I don’t I’m not part of that mafia because I do not want to work there.
0:50:02 I think it sounds miserable.
0:50:04 But there’s a bunch of freaks who do want to work there.
0:50:08 And if you are one of these freaks, this is a place to let your freak fly fly.
0:50:09 I’m not a fan of it.
0:50:11 And can you explain that?
0:50:13 So I think it’s kind of like here’s a simple explanation of the culture.
0:50:19 Most tech companies are like, we value diversity and balance.
0:50:21 And we want, you know, well-rounded people.
0:50:24 And Trava’s like, yeah, we’re doing China in America.
0:50:28 Like, yeah, we’re working like the Chinese over here.
0:50:30 Like we’re doing the nine, nine, six model.
0:50:32 We’re here to create a trillion dollar company.
0:50:35 We are going to just like compete ruthlessly to get there.
0:50:37 And that’s pretty awesome.
0:50:38 Let me explain what it is.
0:50:42 And then I have some of their I have a little bit from their deck
0:50:43 on when they onboard employees.
0:50:46 But basically Trava is software.
0:50:48 I guess it’s not just software.
0:50:50 You wouldn’t categorize as just software.
0:50:51 It’s it’s a little bit of everything.
0:50:56 But it’s a it’s software and a way to get part time or fast workers
0:51:01 when you are a manufacturer or a big company like that staffing, industrial staffing.
0:51:06 Yeah. So it’s software plus like actually getting the people to show up to
0:51:10 if you’re a big factory, if you’re something where you need, you know,
0:51:13 a hundred new employees or something like in a week to do X, Y and Z.
0:51:17 They make it really easy to find and get those people to actually show up on time.
0:51:19 I think they’re Trava.com their website.
0:51:20 I think it like that’s their tagline,
0:51:23 which is get workers to show up on time tomorrow or something like that.
0:51:26 Trava.work. Yeah. Trava.work. Sorry.
0:51:28 Now, here’s the part where they’re they’re kind of interesting.
0:51:32 So Founders Fun, who I do respect, they’re like,
0:51:34 this is probably our highest potential startup.
0:51:38 And they’ve said that these crazy stories like they’ve showed up at the office
0:51:43 at 10 p.m. and what we’ve noticed is like the office is still buzzing with people.
0:51:47 And it feels like the golden days of PayPal and they have these values.
0:51:51 These values are dream big, have an Olympian’s work ethic,
0:51:55 which is inspired by Chinese China’s 996 mentality, which I’ll talk about.
0:51:57 Have a growth mindset and be customer obsessed.
0:51:59 And so basically they say, dream big.
0:52:02 We want you to be the number one percent in terms of ambition,
0:52:05 plus the number one percent of attitude, which is going to allow us to get the
0:52:07 number one percent outcome.
0:52:09 We want you to have an Olympian’s work at work ethic.
0:52:12 And they basically, I think they explicitly said this on their website.
0:52:16 We have a 996 culture, which means working nine a.m.
0:52:18 to nine p.m. six days a week.
0:52:21 And there’s like these interviews with these employees that are like,
0:52:22 I really wanted that type of work culture.
0:52:24 And I googled, where can I find that?
0:52:26 And you guys had it on your website.
0:52:28 And so that’s why I decided to apply and work there.
0:52:30 And so they’re pretty fucking.
0:52:31 And so they’re born every day.
0:52:35 It’s like I googled where I can work the most hours and I found you guys.
0:52:38 Yeah, they’re pretty insane.
0:52:41 I think they only have like a hundred and fifty employees.
0:52:46 I think the valuation is something like a hundred and fifty million dollars.
0:52:49 I think it’s got to be higher than that.
0:52:53 I don’t I only saw a handful of numbers on their valuation.
0:52:55 Is it higher than that?
0:52:57 Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is.
0:52:59 The valuation is in public.
0:53:02 I think I was trying to like triangulate a bunch of old articles.
0:53:04 And I don’t know if there’s a current one out there.
0:53:07 So I can’t say exactly what it is.
0:53:09 Yeah, all I’m seeing is the Founders Fund, twenty two million dollar round,
0:53:12 which that would probably be more like what you’re talking about.
0:53:13 So it could be worth more.
0:53:14 I don’t have the information.
0:53:18 I just am doing a bunch of guesswork out of just articles that were live.
0:53:22 But people say that it’s growing like five X for a year, which is like huge.
0:53:26 And a lot of smart people who even though I think they’re douchebags like Keith
0:53:29 or Boy, they’re behind the company and they’re definitely smart.
0:53:31 Yeah. OK. All right.
0:53:33 I like I like the pick here.
0:53:36 I didn’t realize their valuation was what it is.
0:53:38 Looks like it’s around two hundred million.
0:53:41 Yeah, I think this is a bet on people, right?
0:53:43 So I think the people behind this company are pretty remarkable.
0:53:47 They do seem like the Olympians of Founders.
0:53:49 Now, the market opportunity is difficult here
0:53:53 because there’s a lot of companies that get valued as tech companies
0:53:55 that are actually something else.
0:53:58 WeWork was valued as a tech company, but it’s actually a real estate company.
0:54:01 There’s e-commerce companies where they’re, you know, DTC companies
0:54:04 where they were valued like they were tech startups, but they were actually,
0:54:08 you know, selling suitcases and shoes and things like that.
0:54:09 And eventually those corrections do come.
0:54:11 And so I think the question here is, like, is this a tech?
0:54:16 Is it a tech company or is it a staffing company that uses tech and started by tech people?
0:54:19 And, you know, I’m not in the weeds enough to know.
0:54:23 But I do know what you said, which is that they seem to have a very unique culture.
0:54:26 It seems like very smart people are very bullish on them.
0:54:32 And it seems like the founders are in that elite, elite level of both ambition
0:54:38 and drive. And that’s those are good things to bet on in general.
0:54:41 But you did definitely just hypocritically tell me that, like,
0:54:43 two of my picks were too, too hard to work at.
0:54:46 And then you picked, like, literally the one that’s like,
0:54:48 yo, our thing is that we’re the hardest to work at.
0:54:49 Yeah.
0:54:51 All right, yeah.
0:54:54 Move it up.
0:54:55 All right. What do you have?
0:54:58 All right. My top pick, my finale.
0:55:02 Drone, I don’t want to drumroll because it’s going to seem anti-climatic
0:55:06 because it’s the same company I picked last time that is not
0:55:09 that was not a winner in the last one, meaning it didn’t five.
0:55:10 We got a replica.
0:55:13 It’s replete. Oh, man.
0:55:16 All right. If you’re listening to this pod, I already know something about you.
0:55:19 You, my friend, are nosy.
0:55:22 You want to know the numbers behind all of these things that we’re talking
0:55:25 about, how much money people make, how much money people spend,
0:55:26 how much money businesses make.
0:55:29 You want to know all of this people’s net worth, all of it.
0:55:31 Well, I’ve got good news for you.
0:55:34 So my company Hampton, we’re a private community for CEOs.
0:55:37 We do this thing where we survey our members and we ask them all types of
0:55:40 information, like how much money they’re paying themselves,
0:55:43 how much money they’re paying a lot of their employees, what their team,
0:55:46 my bonuses are, what their net worth is, what their portfolio looks like.
0:55:49 We ask all these questions, but we do it anonymously.
0:55:52 And so people are willing to reveal all types of amazing information.
0:55:54 So if you really cannot Google, you can’t find anywhere else.
0:55:57 And you could check it out at joinhampton.com.
0:55:59 Click the reports section on the menu.
0:56:01 Click the salary and compensation report.
0:56:02 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:56:03 You’re going to love this stuff.
0:56:05 Check it out. Now, back to the pod.
0:56:11 I think I am more bullish on replete than any any tech company right now.
0:56:14 Are you so bullish on it that if you could bet all of the money
0:56:16 that you have into that company, you would do it?
0:56:19 No, I’m not foolish, but I would.
0:56:23 I did invest in the company and I then on top of my fund investment,
0:56:25 I wrote a personal check on top of that, which is probably the only one
0:56:26 I’ve done that with.
0:56:29 So, you know, my actions do line up with this,
0:56:33 but I wouldn’t bet all of my money on this because I don’t need to do that.
0:56:35 So here’s here’s my case.
0:56:37 So three years ago when we did this episode,
0:56:40 replete was at about a one billion dollar valuation.
0:56:43 It had five million developers.
0:56:47 At the time, it really had no like AI story or tailwind
0:56:50 and revenue was small to nonexistent.
0:56:53 What was then?
0:56:55 They don’t announce, they don’t say,
0:56:58 but it’s because it wasn’t it wasn’t a priority and it wasn’t meaningful.
0:57:02 So now everything has changed except for the price.
0:57:04 So the five million developers has become 20 million developers.
0:57:08 That no AI tailwind has become a huge AI tailwind
0:57:11 and small revenue has become scaling revenue.
0:57:13 He Amjad came out and said
0:57:16 twenty twenty four is our basically like has been our commercial year,
0:57:17 like revenue is scaling rapidly.
0:57:20 Dude, what’s it do? OK, so what does.
0:57:22 By the way, here’s the do you know the replica story?
0:57:24 It’s kind of amazing, to be honest.
0:57:27 So the replica story is Amjad grew up in Jordan,
0:57:29 which is a place I’ve never been.
0:57:32 And it’s sort of this like, you know, the world is very large
0:57:34 and there’s people, there’s talent everywhere,
0:57:35 but the opportunity is not as evenly distributed.
0:57:39 And so he used to use to love programming,
0:57:41 but he didn’t have his own computer at first.
0:57:45 And so he would go to Internet cafes, basically borrow a computer
0:57:47 and he would code, he’d learn to code.
0:57:51 But the problem with that was that every time you go to an Internet cafe,
0:57:53 you’re going to a different computer and you’re not like none of your stuff
0:57:55 is saved from last time.
0:57:56 And if you ever learned to code,
0:57:58 like one of the first things you do is you first have to like set up your
0:58:01 environment. And so you need like your IDE.
0:58:04 You need to install all the packages for the language that you’re going to be
0:58:07 using. If it’s Python, you need to install those files on your computer
0:58:09 for it to work and you need to save those somewhere.
0:58:10 You need to host it somewhere.
0:58:11 There’s all these things that go into coding.
0:58:14 And so he had this unique problem, which was he wanted to code.
0:58:17 And he was so disenfranchised where he didn’t have his own computer
0:58:19 that he was doing at Internet cafes for a while.
0:58:22 Then even after that, you know, he worked at Yahoo briefly,
0:58:26 like once he, you know, kind of graduated and he was still
0:58:29 just sort of always annoyed with this like this like friction
0:58:31 that it takes to get set up.
0:58:37 And so he, as a side project, created this thing that was it was called
0:58:41 something as REPL something at the time and REPL is this like programming term.
0:58:45 But basically what he wanted to do was he’s like, can I make a cloud cloud
0:58:48 based program environment basically like my environment?
0:58:50 But instead of it being local to my computer, have it be in the cloud.
0:58:52 It’s because he saw Google Docs.
0:58:54 He’s like, oh, my God, Google Docs is amazing.
0:58:58 This is instead of having to have Microsoft Office have this software
0:59:01 on my computer, have the file on my computer.
0:59:04 I can just go to any computer anywhere, go to a doc.
0:59:06 The whole editor is built into the website,
0:59:10 which is amazing. I didn’t even realize websites could do this.
0:59:14 And wow, multiple people can like edit the same Google Doc at the same time.
0:59:15 This is incredible.
0:59:16 Can I do that for coding?
0:59:17 So that’s where he started.
0:59:20 And so and so he built it as a side project for many years.
0:59:22 So he worked at Yahoo as a side project.
0:59:26 Then he worked at Facebook and it was a side project.
0:59:30 He worked with the guy at Facebook on the team that the team and the guy who
0:59:33 created React, which is like now, like, you know, the huge programming framework,
0:59:38 React, and somewhere along the way, like Replet basically starts to get
0:59:39 a little bit of momentum.
0:59:41 It’s like 100,000 users as is like side project.
0:59:45 And he worked at Code Academy and Code Academy with teaching people to code
0:59:46 online and they discovered this project.
0:59:51 They’re like, dude, some random guy from Jordan created a programming thing
0:59:54 that like all of our customers who are coming to learn at Code Academy,
0:59:56 they could just code in the browser.
0:59:58 They don’t need to have like their own thing.
1:00:02 And so it’s a side project for many years and he wants to make it a main project.
1:00:04 You know, he’s not taken very seriously.
1:00:05 You can’t raise any money for it.
1:00:07 And he applies to YC three times.
1:00:11 He gets rejected three times and after getting rejected the third time,
1:00:12 he’s pretty discouraged.
1:00:14 He’s like, all right, man, whatever, F Y C, who cares?
1:00:18 And but the thing was that developers really thought this was cool
1:00:21 because it was like kind of a technical achievement to do this, to do this.
1:00:24 He had to like write his own compilers and write his own shit that like would
1:00:25 work in the browser.
1:00:27 It worked with any language.
1:00:32 And so there was, for example, a Atlassian created a competitor to this
1:00:37 called Glitch and Atlassian had like a good track record of like Trello
1:00:39 and Jira like they built like developer friendly tools.
1:00:44 So Glitch comes out, huge PR move, raises a bunch of money.
1:00:48 And they said it’s coding in the browser.
1:00:49 He’s like, oh, no, they’re doing it.
1:00:52 He goes, but they’re like, it’s all JavaScript because JavaScript is everything.
1:00:56 He’s like, well, I made this choice, this technical choice to support any language.
1:00:58 And these guys are saying it’s all JavaScript.
1:01:01 And initially they got this huge boost, but he started to notice that
1:01:04 like this little language, Python started to get really popular on Replet.
1:01:06 And he’s like, I think they’re missing the boat.
1:01:08 I think Python is the thing.
1:01:11 And Python became the language of choice for machine learning.
1:01:13 It became the language of choice for backend development.
1:01:17 It became the language of choice for a bunch of like big waves.
1:01:18 And he was the only one that could support Python.
1:01:20 So Glitch ends up dying.
1:01:22 That Atlassian company ends up, ends up failing on in it.
1:01:24 He just keeps chugging along.
1:01:27 And so along the way, he had this like kind of indie support.
1:01:31 So it was used by a lot of students, a lot of teachers, a lot of coding bootcamps.
1:01:34 But that was kind of looked at like a toy, like, oh, that’s cute.
1:01:37 But those are just like beginners who have no money, who, whatever.
1:01:39 Yeah, I’m reading about him on Hacker News.
1:01:43 Like he was controversial there, but a lot of people loved him.
1:01:44 Some people disliked him.
1:01:49 So early on, he was really loved on Hacker News, not him, but like Replet was really loved.
1:01:50 Because it was like kind of cool that you could do this.
1:01:53 And it actually worked really well because he’s, you know, a great programmer.
1:01:56 And one person who was reading Hacker News really liked it.
1:01:57 And that person was Paul Graham.
1:02:00 Now, Paul Graham had retired from YC.
1:02:02 He was living in the UK in this like mansion.
1:02:05 And he’s not a part of YC anymore.
1:02:08 And I’m going to get rejected from YC three times.
1:02:11 But Paul Graham was like, dude, I think this is awesome.
1:02:14 And he tells Sam Altman, who’s running YC at the time, he’s like,
1:02:15 you got to talk to this company, Replet.
1:02:20 So he goes to meet Sam at at the time was a hybrid office
1:02:23 of OpenAI and Neuralink before OpenAI was a big deal.
1:02:25 Back when OpenAI was just a research non-profit.
1:02:29 And he meets Sam and Sam’s like, hey, you know, I don’t know anything about you,
1:02:31 but Paul really likes your thing.
1:02:32 And he wants me to check this out.
1:02:36 And, you know what, you should just like talk to Paul.
1:02:37 He told me, but I’m not the guy for this.
1:02:39 You should talk to Paul. Here’s his email.
1:02:42 So Amjad ends up trading emails, like long emails.
1:02:46 He said, like, I should turn this into a book someday of like my emails
1:02:49 back and forth with Paul, like the philosophical foundation of Replet,
1:02:54 which was like, what if you could enable like 10 times more programmers in the world?
1:02:56 Because this whole thing was out of opportunity.
1:02:58 So how do you make a programmer who doesn’t even have their own computer,
1:03:02 who doesn’t know how to start, who doesn’t know how to like get everything
1:03:04 installed in their environment, all this stuff.
1:03:05 How do you decrease all the friction?
1:03:08 And eventually, and even in his initial like plan was like,
1:03:10 we’ll have AI that will help you code.
1:03:12 It’ll be your program, your programming assistant.
1:03:14 This was back before AI was a thing.
1:03:15 It was like 2014, right?
1:03:16 Like people weren’t even talking about AI back then.
1:03:18 And it’s in his original slide deck.
1:03:19 I have a slide here for you.
1:03:20 Let me show you.
1:03:22 This was his master plan for his seed deck.
1:03:25 We’re going to grow by building tools, signing up teachers and students.
1:03:28 We’re going to build a simple network and an AI assisted interface
1:03:30 that blurs the distinction between learning and building.
1:03:33 And eventually we’ll become a platform where people come to learn how to code,
1:03:35 code, explore and host their code.
1:03:38 This is exactly what they’ve done.
1:03:40 It’s like the Tesla master plan 10 years later.
1:03:41 This is his master plan.
1:03:42 10 years later, they’ve done exactly this.
1:03:44 The company’s 10 years old now.
1:03:45 More than 10 years old, basically.
1:03:48 He I think he started this stuff like before 2014.
1:03:51 And so it was again, it was a side project for a long time.
1:03:52 Only became like a full time project.
1:03:56 And there’s like, he shared the email like, hey, got rejected again from YC.
1:04:00 And he’s emailing Christina, who was his first investor.
1:04:04 Christina is the founder of Vanta, another company I was going to put on this list.
1:04:07 She wrote the first check into replete as a scout.
1:04:12 And Vanta is a company that, you know, in five years has reached $100 million.
1:04:13 She went through YC.
1:04:14 But the way she did it was she just yo loaded.
1:04:17 She just like moved to a city and he writes this email to Christina.
1:04:19 He’s like, got rejected again.
1:04:20 Hard to raise money right now.
1:04:23 I might just YOLO, just move somewhere low cost and just start building this thing.
1:04:24 Um, that’s that.
1:04:25 And then maybe was what I’ll do.
1:04:28 And so look at this chart now.
1:04:30 So this is replete developers year over year.
1:04:35 It’s literally like a perfect hockey stick and Paul Graham posted this.
1:04:39 And he’s like, the crazy thing about this is that this is, this is an impressive
1:04:43 chart for any company, let alone a company where the users are developers,
1:04:46 meaning all of these developers are going to build things that they has their own
1:04:48 user base, that is crazy.
1:04:51 Um, and so this is the growth.
1:04:55 So back when we did this in 2021, we were here and now we’re here.
1:04:58 It’s like developers are there.
1:05:02 Uh, so GitHub has about a hundred million.
1:05:03 Wow.
1:05:04 Wow, wow, wow.
1:05:07 By the way, GitHub, some crazy stats on my research of GitHub.
1:05:10 GitHub is used by 90% of the fortune 500.
1:05:13 It probably has like the most enterprise penetration of anything
1:05:14 besides Microsoft office.
1:05:16 Um, like Salesforce is 80%.
1:05:18 GitHub is 90%, which is pretty insane.
1:05:20 Yeah, I get sold for.
1:05:25 So GitHub sold back in 2018 for seven and a half billion dollars.
1:05:29 And at the time they were doing about 250 to 300 million in revenue.
1:05:33 GitHub now does about two is about a $2 billion run rate.
1:05:37 And by the way, the fastest growing feature, the thing that makes up 40%
1:05:42 of the growth of GitHub’s revenue growth is co-pilot is the AI assisted coder.
1:05:46 That now does, you know, a few hundred million a year in revenue already
1:05:48 after, you know, just a couple of years profitably.
1:05:54 And so that is the most successful, you know, AI, uh, implementation in any,
1:05:58 in any company so far is GitHub’s co-pilot is 300 or 400 million a year product.
1:05:59 Why do people dislike this guy?
1:06:00 Is he aggressive?
1:06:06 Well, he said something which is just like, you know, uh, hacker news is,
1:06:07 you know, when you’re the underdog, they love you.
1:06:10 And then as soon as they hear your big funding round, they, they go and they
1:06:11 just say how terrible you are.
1:06:14 There’s all, there’s, there’s, you know, whatever this people ever.
1:06:17 I actually included, uh, this is part of my bull case.
1:06:19 That’s what I was looking at, yeah.
1:06:21 So it says, they raise this money and then here comes this guy.
1:06:24 Be fine, man, who says, this is another company I felt is going to implode.
1:06:27 They don’t do anything that’s, that’s interesting, let alone proprietary.
1:06:31 Uh, the CEO is an ass and everybody knows that he acts as if a browser,
1:06:33 a browser repels are going to change the world.
1:06:36 I have no idea how their valuation is so lofty, but the core technology is
1:06:38 so easily duplicated.
1:06:39 Yeah, go ahead, go try it.
1:06:43 Um, since, uh, since the heavy listing, the lifting they used to do has become obsolete.
1:06:49 So classic hack, you know, go read the launch of Dropbox and Airbnb and other
1:06:52 companies like this, this is like, uh, you know, there’s always one of these
1:06:54 comments at the top of their, their, their posts that you want to frame.
1:06:56 So check this out.
1:06:57 This is the AI growth.
1:07:01 So the thing, the criticism of replete would have been great.
1:07:04 You’re getting a bunch of developers, but they’re all young and how are you
1:07:05 going to make money off of students, teachers.
1:07:10 And I think the, the misunderstood part of this, right?
1:07:15 Because if you want to find something at a low valuation, it’s not that low
1:07:17 valuation is just another way of saying misunderstood and mispriced.
1:07:19 So what, what it would be misunderstood here.
1:07:20 What, what would you need to believe?
1:07:24 The thing you need to believe is that this is a leapfrog technology.
1:07:27 So like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen those graphs of like in Africa,
1:07:32 it’s like landlines, like landline adoption of mobile of phones and in your
1:07:35 home was like really, really low or bank accounts was really, really low.
1:07:39 It was like, you know, some, I don’t know, 10% of the population had bank
1:07:40 accounts and land landline phones.
1:07:44 But then, and so you would think, Oh, if this is linear, you start with
1:07:47 the landline phone, then you get a cell phone or you start with a bank account.
1:07:49 Then you start getting a mobile pay, like Venmo or whatever.
1:07:53 Um, actually those are easier to adopt because they’re on your phones
1:07:54 or quicker, they’re lighter weight.
1:07:58 And so cell phones and mobile payments became this like huge adoption.
1:08:01 And Africa actually has a higher rate of mobile payments than America.
1:08:04 It has a higher rate of cell phone adoption than America did at the time,
1:08:07 because it was, it was a leapfrog technology.
1:08:10 It was easier to adopt the smaller thing or the newer thing than it was
1:08:11 to adopt the old thing.
1:08:16 And so, um, one of the things that I’m just saying, I really liked, he goes,
1:08:21 um, you know, people will, all the criticism of replete is great beginner.
1:08:25 People use replete because they learn how to code and it’s just really easy
1:08:25 to get started.
1:08:28 And the criticism is that like, you’re not going to get like big developers
1:08:32 to switch, you know, you know, 20 year vets to switch to replete.
1:08:38 And he goes, the better question is if I have 20 million, uh, you know, sort
1:08:42 of earlier on in their coding career coders right now, and this is a place
1:08:46 where they can get started with no friction, build in any language that they
1:08:49 want, they have AI co-pilot built in, they can host it.
1:08:50 They don’t need to know how to set up their servers.
1:08:53 And there’s a community of other people that they can like, you know, borrow
1:08:55 code from and share from and answer questions with.
1:08:57 Why would they ever switch?
1:09:01 Like you’re saying people will never switch from that, these people will
1:09:04 never switch back to, oh, actually go make your life harder.
1:09:07 What did you, uh, what evaluation did you invest in?
1:09:09 I think like 900 million.
1:09:11 Um, how’d you meet him?
1:09:14 I’ve never met him in person.
1:09:16 This is a company I kind of admired.
1:09:21 I used it and I went, you know, just looked at him and read about it.
1:09:24 And it just immediately was, it ticked my boxes.
1:09:25 So by the way, this is kind of interesting.
1:09:28 So JetBrains, which is another one of these, like the, probably the most
1:09:33 popular coding, uh, environment for Java developers.
1:09:38 It’s a bootstrapped company that does 270 million in revenue, 100 million in
1:09:43 profit, 134 million a year in free cash flow with six million users, um, zero
1:09:46 dollars raised since it started into, in the year 2000.
1:09:51 And so like, I think, you know, when you look at what is Replet’s revenue potential,
1:09:54 I think it’s, it’s a lot bigger than this because this has multiple things.
1:09:55 So what do you think they’re worth right now?
1:09:57 What, what is Replet worth?
1:09:59 What do you think they’re worth today?
1:10:02 Well, their last valuation was 1.1 billion.
1:10:04 I know, but what do you think is like, if they were to raise again,
1:10:06 it would be, uh, at what valuation?
1:10:08 You couldn’t buy my stock.
1:10:12 You’d have to pay, you’d have to pay like a $50 billion valuation to
1:10:13 take my stock right now.
1:10:15 Like I would rather just hold the stock and see where it goes.
1:10:15 Why?
1:10:20 Because you’re looking ultimately in tech investing for giant winners.
1:10:23 Uh, I think a VC once he told me, he’s like, everyone’s talking about unicorns.
1:10:23 I want Godzilla.
1:10:25 And he’s like, basically a Godzilla company.
1:10:28 I said, you know, the company that becomes worth 50 to 100 billion plus.
1:10:30 And he’s like, those are the ones that make your career.
1:10:33 And so I was like, cool, cool branding.
1:10:36 Um, he, but, but what do those companies have?
1:10:37 Network effects.
1:10:40 This is a network effect business where it’s a network of developers.
1:10:44 It’s growing like a staff infection at spring break.
1:10:45 So it’s growing really fast.
1:10:48 Like since the last time we did this, Sarah’s list, it’s grown four X in terms
1:10:50 of the number of developers who signed up.
1:10:52 You should call the founder, but like, looks like you’ve got a real
1:10:54 rigmarum on your hands.
1:10:55 Congrats, dude.
1:10:58 I think it’s mispriced and misunderstood.
1:11:02 I think it gets discounted for being just something for beginner coders.
1:11:05 When I think actually it’s like a Snapchat or whatever.
1:11:09 It’s, it’s a product where that’s the generation you want is the people who
1:11:11 are going to be using this thing for the next, you know, 20, 30 years.
1:11:16 Uh, it’s writing a huge tech wave in that, like, uh, it is perfectly positioned
1:11:20 to ride the AI wave because AI programming is a thing.
1:11:24 Yesterday, Sergey, Sergey Brin was at the all-in conference and he’s like,
1:11:26 yeah, I code with AI.
1:11:28 Like, he’s, he’s like, yeah, I got back into coding.
1:11:29 I use AI.
1:11:30 Basically, I just kind of tell the AI what to do.
1:11:34 It’s like, dude, the founder of Google is like, yeah, I wanted to build this thing,
1:11:37 but I just, it’s easier actually just for me to just tell AI to do.
1:11:38 And it kind of wrote all the code for me.
1:11:38 It was awesome.
1:11:42 He’s like, then I showed it to my team at the like Google, like AI thing.
1:11:46 He’s like, he’s like, I told them, I said, more of you need to be using this.
1:11:51 He’s talking to like the top programmers in Google, um, uh, which is kind of amazing.
1:11:52 Dude, this is awesome.
1:11:54 I think you got to ask this guy out for prom.
1:11:56 I think I just did.
1:11:57 I think you just did.
1:12:00 Is this like you asking Taylor Swift?
1:12:04 You know, like someone, this is, um, you’ve convinced me.
1:12:05 What’s the downside?
1:12:10 Oh, I mean, what, what is the downside?
1:12:11 Uh, let’s see.
1:12:12 I mean, you had that for every company.
1:12:15 That they’re not going to be able to make as much revenue as you think that
1:12:19 people will graduate off of replete and decide that they are remote.
1:12:20 Are they remote company?
1:12:24 No, actually another, another Sam bull signal.
1:12:25 They’re not remote.
1:12:29 And not only that, they move from SF to foster city to like build their own cult
1:12:29 there.
1:12:32 And he’s like, why wouldn’t we, why wouldn’t we move 40, 40 minutes out and, uh,
1:12:37 just make it be like the kings of this little area and have like the best,
1:12:40 the best environment without the problems of San Francisco, but still being
1:12:42 in, uh, still been close enough to the talent density.
1:12:48 I think that, um, you, you saw this great logic and all these silly
1:12:50 arguments and all these numbers and facts and data.
1:12:54 You should have just told me that he wants to build a, a commune in
1:12:57 foster city and I wouldn’t have been on board.
1:13:00 I do any deadlifts.
1:13:00 You like that?
1:13:01 I know you like that.
1:13:02 Does he really deadlift?
1:13:02 Yeah.
1:13:03 He’s a power lifter.
1:13:04 Yeah.
1:13:06 I mean, power lifter, power gains.
1:13:06 Like it makes sense.
1:13:11 I think my, my simpleton strategy can almost be as effective as yours.
1:13:16 If you look at the, our last, um, our lives would say, yes, it does.
1:13:21 Uh, there’s no knock on that.
1:13:23 I, I strive to be more like you.
1:13:24 I think you, you have it right.
1:13:26 No, I’m only teasing.
1:13:29 It’s part of me is being simpleton just because I literally don’t understand
1:13:30 that when you’re explaining that to me.
1:13:33 I’m like, I have to learn what all this means as we go.
1:13:36 Um, yeah, it’s fucking complicated.
1:13:39 They’re telling the story about these guys are geniuses, by the way, these
1:13:41 guys are geniuses to like, and be able to invent things like this.
1:13:45 I just think I just like, I’m like, we’re not the same.
1:13:50 Well, I wrote two words that I would almost never write in a slide deck.
1:13:54 I wrote mission driven and visionary for replete.
1:13:55 And those are so cringe.
1:13:57 You can’t, you’re not even really allowed to say those.
1:14:02 Unless there’s an exception, which is this dude from Jordan who was like, God,
1:14:06 I really want to increase access to, for kids like me built us as a side project
1:14:08 when there was no money on the line.
1:14:12 There was nothing for years just kept, kept tinkering away, building it,
1:14:16 building it, building it in his master plan from 10 years ago.
1:14:18 And the seed deck was talking about how he’s going to have an AI assistant
1:14:23 in your coding terminal that’s going to help you write the code and did exactly
1:14:25 what he wrote, you know, 10 plus years ago.
1:14:27 That is mission driven.
1:14:28 And that is visionary to me.
1:14:32 Well, mission driven, being into mission driven and visionary stuff.
1:14:34 That’s only cringe when it’s not true.
1:14:36 When it’s true, it’s awesome.
1:14:38 Well, it’s because, yeah, because it gets abused, right?
1:14:40 It gets, it’s like, gets used and abused by everybody.
1:14:45 There’s no like, there’s no, there’s no earning that badge, right?
1:14:47 You just get to use it if you want, which bastardized it.
1:14:49 But like, you know, you look at something like Neuralink or whatever.
1:14:52 And you got to give credit to these people.
1:14:56 Like, you know, when there’s, there’s videos of Elon talking like, you know,
1:15:00 decades ago about the four or five, like most important things to do.
1:15:03 And he’s like, you know, the, the advent of the internet, you know,
1:15:08 creating clean, you know, sustainable energy future, creating artificial
1:15:09 general intelligence safely.
1:15:11 He literally was saying these things for, for so long.
1:15:14 You don’t need to be mission driven and a visionary on world changing
1:15:16 things to be intoxicating.
1:15:18 Like that, that makes it awesome.
1:15:22 But you can, like, if I meet someone who’s into something like relatively
1:15:26 trivial and they’re, they’re passionate about it, I still, I get like turned on.
1:15:27 You know what I mean?
1:15:34 Dude, the great upsets, like this guy, his, his rockets to Mars is like
1:15:35 the two hour cocktail party, right?
1:15:40 It is helping people toot their harmonica and have a good time for two hours.
1:15:41 And much stranger than make some friends.
1:15:47 And he is more into that than anybody I know, then, uh, then probably anybody
1:15:50 that there is, uh, he wrote a book about the thing for God’s sake.
1:15:53 And then on top of it, even though I literally don’t want to do that.
1:15:57 Like I would hate if I had to host one of those things.
1:16:01 I love being around Nick because that energy is so, like you said, intoxicating.
1:16:02 It’s the perfect word for it.
1:16:03 Yeah.
1:16:05 When I am, and so when I see a guy like this repleting,
1:16:08 I’m like, I don’t really care about any of that stuff, but I care that you
1:16:12 called your shot and I’m into it during COVID when we all had to work from home.
1:16:16 I got to hear Brian Chesky give these, um, like monthly or, uh, weekly meetings.
1:16:19 And he was like in his bedroom and he looked horrible.
1:16:23 He looked like shit, uh, because like his business was like on top of the world.
1:16:25 And then it’s like, I don’t know if we’re going to be in business.
1:16:26 And I have like 3000 employees.
1:16:29 I’d like travel is literally the worst thing on earth.
1:16:31 Like Airbnb is paused.
1:16:36 Uh, and I remember seeing his talks and I thought like, dude, I will,
1:16:38 I want to fight for this guy.
1:16:41 Like if, if I was on his team, he has got me bought in.
1:16:47 Um, and that, and so my point being is that mission-driven and, um, uh,
1:16:52 visionary attitude that is actually really important when it comes to a value,
1:16:54 uh, how valuable a startup can get.
1:16:59 Uh, I think it is, if you’re making your bet, which is what we talked about,
1:17:01 basically taking your time or your talents and betting on one company,
1:17:05 a super concentrated portfolio where you’re going to, and you basically are
1:17:08 getting a hundred to $200,000 bet that you get to make on a company.
1:17:10 When you, when you take a job at one of these tech companies,
1:17:15 you might as well bet on the most talented, most driven, you know,
1:17:19 mission oriented, sees the future more than anybody else type of founder,
1:17:22 because it’s their decisions that are going to trickle down.
1:17:26 Um, I remember I made a Ethereum and Ethereum is probably one of the best
1:17:29 investments I ever made, and I made it more on the same criteria.
1:17:35 I was like, this gangly ultra nerd who’s saying words that I barely understand.
1:17:38 The spawners got the fittest neck I’ve ever seen.
1:17:43 I’m in and everything I read about the, I was like, so at like 16,
1:17:47 he’s like, or whatever, 18, he’s writing articles for Bitcoin magazine
1:17:51 because he was so enthusiastic about it and he was getting paid for Bitcoin,
1:17:54 which at the time was like $12 per article.
1:17:59 And that’s kind of like how he, you know, um, he is, he’s truly like of this.
1:18:00 He didn’t come when it was time to get rich.
1:18:01 He was there before.
1:18:06 And then I remember when Ethereum hit an all time high and everybody on Twitter
1:18:10 was basically like Lambos and yachts and they are like pumping their bags.
1:18:13 He posted a Twitter thread that was like, Hey, this is great.
1:18:17 But like, how many of the unbanked have we banked?
1:18:19 How many people have we actually helped?
1:18:20 How much of the mission are we actually doing?
1:18:23 Like, yeah, the price went up, but who gives a shit?
1:18:28 And that is, you know, the best founders do that when morale is low,
1:18:31 like the Brian Chesky example, they give you that confidence.
1:18:32 They never let you get that load.
1:18:33 They like bring you up.
1:18:38 And when hype is high, they bring you back down to reality of like,
1:18:39 what are we here to do?
1:18:45 And that when I saw that and I was like, this guy is crypto is full of potential,
1:18:46 but it’s full of pumpers.
1:18:49 It’s full of, you know, people are going to take advantage of this.
1:18:54 I at least trusted that the person who was stewarding that project was
1:18:57 not, you know, to use bachelor terms, they were here for the right reasons.
1:19:00 Vitalik is here for the right reasons.
1:19:03 He was there to actually, you know, like help humanity and build,
1:19:06 build a free economic system to use what terms?
1:19:10 The bachelor, you know, you don’t know that every contestant.
1:19:11 I play sports.
1:19:15 You’re like, I have priceps and biceps.
1:19:20 T levels are over 300.
1:19:24 I can tell you the difference between a barbell or a dumbbell bench press
1:19:25 and why each is good.
1:19:27 You can tell me all about the golden bachelor.
1:19:30 Yes, I can.
1:19:34 Priorities.
1:19:35 All right.
1:19:35 That’s the pod.
1:19:36 That was good.
1:19:37 Thank you, Sean.
1:19:38 Thank you, Ari.
1:19:40 Thank you to everyone listening.
1:19:43 I feel like I can rule the world.
1:19:49 I know I could be what I want to put my all in it like days on the road.
1:19:49 Let’s travel.
1:19:51 Never looking back.
1:19:51 – Bye.
1:19:59 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Episode 629: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) bring you the third installment of Sara’s List. A path to wealth that doesn’t involve insane amounts of risk, luck, or burnout. Just get a job at the right company. The criteria? Growth-stage startups that have the potential to 5-10x over the next 5 years.

Show Notes: 

(0:00) Auditing Cohort 1

(9:56) OpenAI

(12:07) Retool

(17:04) Mercury

(23:04) Cursor

(27:28) Epirus

(33:30) Wiz

(42:52) Neuralink

(46:00) Perplexity AI

(49:43) Traba

(54:54) Replit

Links:

• OpenAI – https://openai.com/

• Retool – https://retool.com/

• Mercury – https://mercury.com/

• Cursor – https://www.cursor.com/

• Epirus – https://www.epirusinc.com/

• Wiz – https://www.wiz.io/

• Neuralink – https://neuralink.com/

• Perplexity – https://www.perplexity.ai/

• Traba – https://traba.work/

• Replit – https://replit.com/

Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:

Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd

Check Out Sam’s Stuff:

• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/

• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/

• Copy That – https://copythat.com

• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth

• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/

My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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