Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I don't know. We can do, we can do whatever.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: Are we live?
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Yeah, we're, we're good. We're here. All right.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Hey, welcome back to the Gregory and Paul Show. I'm Gregory.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: I'm Paul.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: We break down the Latest in startups, SaaS, AI, whatever the Internet happens to be debating, discussing and fighting over. And of course, of course we love memes way too much.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Way too much.
So, so every single week we're, we're streaming live on XM LinkedIn every Friday at noon Pacific and 3 o' clock Eastern.
Then we post these videos straight to YouTube. We're also live now on Spotify, Apple.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Podcast, which finally happened.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: Finally happened. So now you can take us wherever you go.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Have you checked? Is anybody listening on those?
[00:00:57] Speaker A: I haven't checked, but people have asked for it, so I'm going to publish it.
[00:01:02] Speaker B: The good news is that, you know, once we started doing the YouTube shorts, they, they took off like I'm quite, I'm quite happy with the results. We had one that got a thousand views. A bunch of them got hundreds of views. We've collectively done over 10,000 views now on YouTube an hour or something. Watch time. The shorts are, they're as a kid, say, crushing it on.
It's got the riz on Twitter.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Got the riz, which is cool. I, I had a suspicion that that's what would happen. I looked at a lot of other, like, more popular channels and like, it just seems like the volume of videos matters a lot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the volume matters. So now they're up to like 60.
I think if you get to 100, I bet you there's, I think it's similar to like how Twitter speed number followers matter. My guess is like when you get to 100 to get to 500 to a thousand.
It's a totally different ball game in terms of traffic for sure.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: I completely agree. And I just checked, we had nine. Nine listens.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Nine listens. Okay, I'll take it.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Spotify has two.
Geo wise, it's America, of course, US number one, and Toronto.
So Toronto is probably me or my wife, one of them.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: I, I love. You know, I'm a big fan of the podcasting, let's call it format in general. I love to watch them on YouTube and I actually really enjoy the split where it's available on different platforms and I can like listen to it when I'm grown out in the gym or riding my bike or I can watch it on YouTube, which I do pretty frequently on my televisions. I Don't even do it on a laptop anymore. So I think it's really cool to have like a mixed model. And that's unique, I believe, to podcasting. I can't remember a medium that did that where people took like the same content and then kind of like put it in all these different formats. It's really cool. I think there's some really unique things about. About it and I'm excited. And I, I mean, like, look, we didn't even have this in our doc for topics of discussion, but Netflix is going to be having podcasts on a platform, right? They're going to partner with Spotify or something. So even they see the potential. Like, the format is cool. This is where, like, media is moving. And I think it's, I think it's exciting and it's fun to be. Be a part of it.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: So what are what 12, 18 month goal is to be on Netflix, featured on Netflix?
[00:03:39] Speaker B: I don't know. I don't know if I even want to be on Netflix. I play the games even though no one else does.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: It seems like you play the video games on Netflix. How are they?
[00:03:47] Speaker B: I. I like the Centipede.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: I like the classic. You know, I'm, I'm. Dude, at this point, man, you know, I, I got done with like, I, I got to like Ms. Pac man and I stopped.
That's not true. I had an N64 and then I. Camera. I had his Xbox One. But that's when I like, joked that I, I retired from video.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: I retired from a video game.
Yeah, dude.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Like, if I can't be, like, best on the block, like, I don't want to do anything.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Oh, you're okay. Gotcha.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm very competitive, so I, like, I had to beat every. So actually. Oh, my God.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: I can't believe I just remembered this.
When I was dating my wife. Dating my wife, she took me to a bar in San Francisco.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Had Sega Dreamcast. We had a Sega Dreamcast, which was a platform I loved. And they let everyone play. And you had to like, play as a group or something. It's like on the.
[00:04:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Above the bar. And they had like a controller.
I beat everybody in the bar, every single person to the point where people got mad and they're like, you should give someone else a chance. And like. And I was like, no, dude, you guys gotta beat me.
I, like, I can't believe it. But, like, my nerd skills, like, my wife was so impressed. She was so proud of that. She's like, you beat everybody in the bar. Dreamcast.
[00:05:05] Speaker A: Oh, my God.
[00:05:06] Speaker B: So nerds out there. There is hope for you.
[00:05:09] Speaker A: That's right.
Oh, my God.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Oh, my God.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: That's a good.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: I can't believe it.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: It's a.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: It is a good story.
[00:05:14] Speaker A: It's good.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: So. And I love that people, they got to a point they're a little upset. I was like, dude, I think I finally, like, like, I wanted to leave or whatever. I was like, I've had enough anyway, beating all you like. Obviously you guys aren't very good at this.
So, yeah, I'm competitive. I have to be good at things. Or if I'm not good at it, I don't want to do it.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: Oh, my God. That's amazing. Good story.
All right. All right.
[00:05:38] Speaker B: Should we get started with us East Dash one online?
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. We're. We're finally, I think back online after the massive outage earlier this week.
So I don't know if you haven't been paying attention. Massive outage. AWS outage on Monday.
First thing that people woke up to was everything was offline. So what stemmed out of this is a lot of memes. Elon took chance to take shots at aws.
One of the funniest ones out of this weakest.
I haven't reposting this CNBC article saying that, of course.
What did you expect?
[00:06:25] Speaker B: That meme is good. That meme is good. So Jassy Saying Amazon's AWS CEO Jassy AI is now pushing 70% of our production code and now the whole thing's down and Elon's going, oh, yeah.
Oh, that's great.
I guess they're not. They're not Vibe coding the X platform anymore, huh?
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Who knows? Who knows? When. When X has a massive outage like this, we'll have to last.
[00:06:52] Speaker B: I don't see. Do you think this is such an interesting question. Do you think Elon is a big fan of, like, Vibe coding?
[00:06:58] Speaker A: I think so. He. He pushed Grok Vibe coding a lot.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Do you think he lets his team do it?
We should get someone. We should find out.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: We should find out, right? Does. Does x x5 code a lot of their internals?
[00:07:12] Speaker B: I mean, according to this post, I think Elon doesn't necessarily think it's the most high quality way to produce stuff.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: This is pretty. All right.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: So Amazon was down. I discovered this Monday morning when I was wondering why my newsletter on Beehive hadn't gone out.
And it was funny. I, like, I didn't see anybody chatting about it. So I started posting all these screen captures because it was like, it was like Beehive was just down. Like their status page was down because I posted and beyond. They got back. They're awesome. Like, I'm not saying they did anything wrong at all. They were, they replied to me right away. They were like, go to the status page.
I'm like, dude, status says like, it's not even up. Like, what's going on here? And then a guy messaged me and was like, oh, they're. They're the third party vendor. But they were actually.
Whoever runs that account was doing, was doing an awesome job.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: They were being, they were being so polite. They were like, they didn't even say that it was Amazon. They're like a third party vendor is like not. Is down right now.
Well, like, like five stars. Like that. They should not be outing their vendors and stuff. But it became very apparent, like, apparent what was, what was happening.
And then, and then they got everything back up for me pretty quickly.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: So, yeah, good job, Beehive. Reddit was down. That was a huge thing. Lots of, like my wife's company's system was down because they're on aws. Just lots of, lots of things were.
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Down, which, you know.
Wait, wait, wait. You know where my wife works.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: Right?
[00:08:46] Speaker B: I'm not gonna say anything, but like, yeah, it was a, it was, it was an interesting day.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: It was.
Oh, man.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: I mean, I do live in Seattle, right? So like basically everybody here works for.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Did you, did you hear sirens go. Go off in there?
[00:09:04] Speaker B: I saw an ambulance actually on the street. Right.
Pick up some developers that had a heart attack.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Was there, was there helicopters like converging on the headquarters?
[00:09:15] Speaker B: I heard, I heard that the president of Amazon told Trump to send in the National Guard to help them fix.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: That's right. That's right, that's right. Another meme was there was a, like a distinguished engineer at, at Amazon who apparently lives on a yacht. If I can find this meme. But apparently the, the, the reporting was that this person had to dock for the first time in 15 years.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: That's one where it's like, it might be true.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right? Like, like this guy, distinguished engineer at Amazon, he's the only guy that knows.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: How to fix the.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
Custom yacht.
And Eddie, he had to dock for the first, first time in 15 years.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Oh my God, this is funny.
Okay, any other updates we need to provide people or context on the AWS.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Outage or we get there, let's move On.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: Okay, okay, let's move on to Chamat's post on.
Yeah, AI in the age of what did he say?
Distribution in the age of AI. So this post was excellent and he shared some really interesting data about market share. And so you and I are both huge fans of Ross Simmons. Of course we agree.
Distribution matters. Distribution matters, right? Maybe the most in fact, like I don't know if you didn't go to like business school but they talk about like marketing, they call it like the four Ps, product place, price, promotion and then the four Ps which is like the basis of most marketing education. Place means distribution.
And so distribution is always known to be like critical in marketing. And I remember like one of the class I was in, remember like I remember bringing it up saying that like I was like, I think P is actually number one. Like distribution is the most important aspect.
My example was Walmart that like they kind of won on retail distribution and beat everybody. And it proved that like they weren't the best. They didn't have the most clever marketing, they didn't have the best like I don't know, event strategy or advertising strategy, but they had the retail strategy and they had the distribution and that's why they like really crushed stores. But let's pop, yeah, let's pop up the first graphic because that chart, so this shows.
So it's interesting way he positioned it because what I think the chart shows is that you know, OpenAI still has the majority, vast majority, but their share peers have actually gone down. And I think this chart shows that it's due to Google and Gemini.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: What do you think?
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Am I right?
[00:12:06] Speaker A: Okay, so for, so basically this chart is saying or showing that OpenAI launched 12 months ago and captured 80, 90 of the market.
But over the previous 12 months other models like Deep sea Gemini are eating to their market share.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: So that's what I see here. And I also think that like yeah, this pop would deep seek six months ago. And that's kind of like gone down slightly right when it continues to grow is Gemini. So like really what. And the other ones are all flat basically is what I see in this chart. So I actually think it's like it's, it's, it's come down to like a two horse race. I also think it shows that like formidable.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So my wife's company uses Gemini for whatever the reason.
So I think it could potentially just be enterprise cost, right? Like per head cost. I think right now Gemini for enterprise is still the cheapest model For a company that has like a couple hundred people to broadly license the tech to everyone in the company. Yeah.
[00:13:17] Speaker B: Does it have more guardrails when it comes to like privacy and using it in enterprise, you know, environment, like you can't just like upload HR data or like stuff into like a, just an Open account on ChatGPT on the Internet.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: Definitely.
[00:13:32] Speaker B: I mean, I'm sure people do, but like I wouldn't recommend it.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: That's exactly it. Right. So against distribution, if your company already uses Google Drive, email, all of the hangouts, and you're recording or transcribing or doing AI analysis with sensitive data like client or, or candidate data.
Yeah. Like I think Google is the, the easiest way to get there.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, in theory, I don't know exactly what the agreements are. I'm not a lawyer, but my guess would be if you're already a workspace enterprise, like subscriber to Google.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: They would, they would. The, the protections and policies would extend to whatever.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:16] Speaker B: This is my, on my assumption, if I was negotiating this contract, this is what I would, I would ask for.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Is I had to extend to that where like ChatGPT, it'd be new and it's not clear, it's untested. It's not clear that, you know, if you got the privacy and like types of guardrails you wanted with ChatGPT, that, that, that it would, it would be adhered to with Google. It's a known entity. Right. Even using workspace, you've been sending emails through there. You've been like recording your sales calls like all through the cloud with Google tools. So like for better, for worse, you're already trusting them with a bunch of data.
[00:14:48] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Just start using Gemini and putting like resumes and stuff in there. Makes sense.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. It's like you, they already have your data, might as well just let them do something with it to make your life.
[00:14:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, so it'd already be covered by an existing agreement. Right. Like there. Yeah. You would have a. Terms already.
So it's very easy for I to see. I could see a company, like a large company say, like we already do have this thing carved out with Google. We extend it from like a privacy and legal perspective. Had nothing to do with like cost. Right.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: So, so question here. Right. So OpenAI.
I think OpenAI predominantly is B2C. Is that correct?
[00:15:24] Speaker B: It's not clear. Depends how you define it. They have a bunch of like. So the number came out right as 40 million accounts, like the one that I pay for Right. To like create crappy memes with or whatever. Like that's a consumer account.
[00:15:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: But I know my memes are good. Thank you for defending me.
They're not crappy, but there was numbers and like I did some research recently about the enterprise business, but I believe the enterprise business is totally different. The enterprise business is big.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Trillion tokens, right. Utilized by like big corporations and stuff. This whole thing was like leaked by Sam Duolingo and was like the largest customer, I believe. But I think that's through an API with like enterprise access. I don't know what the terms are. I don't know exactly. So it's a different product.
So they have an enterprise product that enterprises are using.
And I was curious too what the privacy and security I see things are. But so it's a big business. So OpenAI clearly has hundreds, maybe thousands of customers using the API to integrate enterprise level services.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Okay. So yeah, it's interesting. So this chart is telling us that Gemini is eating into their market share.
I.
[00:16:46] Speaker B: This must be consumer for sure.
[00:16:48] Speaker A: I will look see a third.
A third competitor.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: A third competitor.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: I mean Perplex is on there right there. The green Claude is on there.
Gro's on there.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Croc is on there right from X.
Yeah, Meta. Maybe the problem is meta even on the.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: Meta is on the list. Yeah.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: The. Yeah, they have massive distribution but nobody I suppose is using their AI product or it's not very. Apparently what you can do.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: It's just not the, it's not the typical use case of how you use Instagram and, and Facebook. Let's look at this other chart that he posted. This was really good.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: This.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: So this is like the vibe tool, let's say explosion and now decline to some degree. Right. You can see that on the chart on the very bottom. All these vibe tools like cursor, replit, bowl, lovable. Right. There's a bunch of people out there with these types of tools.
They all are high churn, as a lot of people predicted. And it looks according to this chart at least the first wave. They even kind of peaked about four or five months ago. And in aggregate they're in decline. You can. Some of them are seeing some really large churn numbers. I know you had, you, yeah, you had a perspective on this. So what do you think's going on here?
[00:18:13] Speaker A: Yeah, so like I kind of. The story is that I've been helping founders, founders that's not technical, evaluate their debt resources internally. So I recently helped a couple founders essentially just kind of like get their hand dirty and do some vibe coding. And what I've learned so far is that lovable doesn't get the job done cloud cold. It's a little bit too technical. So the sweet spot in the middle seems like to be cursor.
Cursor is this ide?
Yes. Like it's a little bit technical if you want to, but they have a couple features now where you can go directly into agent mode and the agent mode, you're just chatting with the IDE and it's churning out things, but you have the option to dive into code if something goes wrong.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Why not Windsurf?
That's what I use.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: That's what I'm asking, just mind you.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Do you think it, do you think it, do you think it has all the same features as cursor? Is it similar? I haven't used cursor actually.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: I think their time has passed. Just so for me personally, right. Once I'm into cursor, I, why would I ever look at a second ide?
[00:19:34] Speaker B: I use a. I, I actually do a lot. I, I continue to find chat GPT to be better and better and better. I, I feel like, I don't know, are they continually making improvements on there? Like every time I go to use it, I get great results. And even with like some of the vibe coding stuff that I do.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: Claude.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: I had challenges with it and I switched ChatGPT and it worked great.
I started doing some stuff with Windsurf and then I just didn't really need it. Like I'm not doing anything that complicated.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Right.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: So the stuff that I want to do, I'm able to do it chad GPT and it like it worked really well. Like I feel like it keeps getting even better.
It could just do more. There are things I had like leave chat to P to do and like it keeps it like it seems to have the best access like outside of it.
So Claude seems very containerized. It struggles to like whether it work with URL or do anything outside of its own environment. Yeah, I feel like ChatGPT, I can give it a URL and it could start to do like a lot.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Yeah. So ChatGPT is definitely like the most all encompassing platform. So you can just jump into ChatGPT and start doing things. So cursor is like one is a wrapper of all of these things. Right. So they have their proprietary interface and like you can switch between models. They have a master system prompt as well to like do different things like planning mode. So like Cursor is a Little bit more complex. It just extends Claude. And then like, I know that they're doing cloud code as well, but I haven't personally used a ton of it because Cursor does the job. So I'm a big fan of Cursor.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: All right. This is a great segue into OpenAI's new browser, right.
Atlas.
[00:21:23] Speaker A: So they've launched this.
Who's using them or why would anyone use this?
[00:21:31] Speaker B: It's great. It's great. I almost see like A Tale of Two Cities.
Like I've been reading on Twitter. It's terrible and it doesn't work very well. And then I read on, on LinkedIn. Like, it's amazing and it does all this great stuff. And so. Which I. Which I guess, like I don't believe.
So I didn't even download it because I uncovered a thread that claims I haven't validated myself.
[00:21:56] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: That there's censorship on the browser level.
So pull this up. Yeah, I did download. I did download Comet. I tried Perplexity's AI browser and it was interesting. And then I kind of bored of it. I wasn't really sure like, what it did. I tried to do some like, really advanced stuff with it and it was. I had too many restrictions. I couldn't get anything done.
But I saw this and I was like, what?
There's. There's censorship, like at the browser. Like, I was so like, kind of offended as an American that, that this tool would exist. Like, like, like. So if you read this thread, like I said, I have a download valid myself, so I don't know what's going on here. There's some people claiming that like, maybe he's running it as under 18 user, which would totally make sense.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Right?
[00:22:44] Speaker B: But there's other people validating it, saying like, no, that they're able to find places too. And so the restrictions are quite obvious. Like it won't let him search videos of Hitler, won't let you search photos of Hitler. It won't translate any, any fun things Hitler related.
Which, you know, is, is a, is a problem for me. Like, I think having like even that, like having like at the browser level that you can't access it, I think is very concerning.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: Yeah, this, this does raise a question, right? Like how, how much control should you give these AI companies to dictate what you can see and what you can't see?
I, I don't know how I feel about this.
So if, if it comes out that it's an age restriction issue and we're just overblowing this, fine. But it does.
There must be a setting. So this is. Okay, this is where it gets complicated. Right. Okay. Do you have a parental toggle that turns things back on and off? But because this is all baked into.
Baked into the model, it might not be as straightforward. You can't just apply a censorship over a model as a setting.
[00:23:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, my position's really clear on this. Like, I think I'm 100% for parental controls.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: My. My brother's kids, like, aren't allowed on social media and stuff. It's. My. My brother blocks it at the, like, network level in his house.
[00:24:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: So I think that's 100% appropriate.
But a legal adult of legal age, I don't think it's appropriate at all.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: I don't think the default even should be to censor anything for an adult. I think adults should make their own decisions.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: So. But then shouldn't this get. Where's the line?
Right? Like, okay, is it political content? Is it.
You know, should you be able to look up how to make a weapon?
[00:24:45] Speaker B: Last time I checked, America had a Bill of Rights that they do not have in England, which is a big distinction between the two countries.
[00:24:52] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:24:53] Speaker B: And the Bill of Rights has a.
Has a statute for free speech. Like, it is really clear that the United States, like, that is a tenet of the foundation of the country.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: It's very.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: That they don't have in most places in Europe.
So that's my. That's my position on this. Like, better for worse. Like it or not, that's what we have.
And I think there's benefits to it, and I think there are challenges with it, but it is, like, I have pride in it as an American. And I think it's really important to remember that that's, like, part of it. And it's a huge distinction between the founding, like, let's call it articles, United States versus the Magna Carta, and what they have in England.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: So are you calling OpenAI anti American?
[00:25:41] Speaker B: No, I think they've just gone over. I. Whatever happened here, they're just being overzealous. And I think it's an obvious, like, early beta. So Google had all that woke AI stuff, which was preposterous. Like, I remember that when they came out, because I was using that and I was like. I was like, show me what, like, the pro peloton looks like in cycling. And I was like, this is ridiculous. Like, it just.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: It just.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: It's just not what a cyclist looks like.
And so to, like, force that on these things is stupid. It's just. It's just stupid. Like, I don't have a better. I think that's the best term. Like, it's just not smart because it's just not what people are looking for. And to force people down a certain path I think is ridiculous.
I think there's a lot of other ways to.
To manage it.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: So do better. Do better. Open AI.
What?
[00:26:31] Speaker B: I mean, I would assume that if I have, like I said, how many valid. My guess is, like, it just seems ridiculous to be censoring content at the browser level. But I think I find it very concerning that they even did it.
That just seems to go against the way the Internet has always worked. The Internet was always about being able to provide access to information. It was a network for scientists.
So the idea that we would restrict that and control that, particularly a really core level.
I'm surprised.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I think, I think there's powering censorship and, you know, like, these people realize that.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Let's look at what Ben Evans said about OpenAI's new browser.
You have that? Yeah. So for people who don't know, like, man, I looked this up. I followed him. I have been a subscriber to his newsletter for over 10 years.
[00:27:27] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Okay.
[00:27:28] Speaker B: I wrote him a message one day like, like, dude, I've been. I've been a subscribe.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: I have.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: I have back issues going back from the very beginning. So he was a partner at a 16Z.
He was venture capitalist in the Bay Area.
He's been back in the UK for some time.
He had a famous fallout with X I spot on X when Elon took over. Now he only. Only posts on. On LinkedIn, which we've. Which we've debated. I've asked him not to come back.
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: I asked him to come back to X. He told me, like, no interest in going back.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Okay. Very cool. Very cool.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: So he had this to say about OpenAI. A lot of OpenAI's marketing material for its browser is groping for use cases.
The fact that the browser exists at all is a search for a use case, of course. But yeah, they have jumped from the banal. So they have features like closest tab to the bizarre and detached reality. Find all the job postings I was looking at last week and create a summary of industry trends. Seriously, the common theme is how hard it is. You have to think about what to do with this thing.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:42] Speaker B: Meanwhile, the first two demos in the launch video are natural language search in Google Docs, a feature for Google to add in an afternoon and something to do with code.
These are not people leaving their comfort zone. So I think he nailed what I think would. Let's call it the X perspective. Although he posted on LinkedIn, he would actually like, what do you do with this thing? Like, close tabs. Like, it all just seems rather. How about this? Superfluous.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: Yeah.
100. It just like, reminds me of, like, those. It's like Alexa. It goes back to Alexa. Right? Like, what do you do with Alexa? Like, buy more toilet paper.
[00:29:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I never got one. I did. I. I didn't understand the premise of it either.
[00:29:24] Speaker A: Yeah, we used it to ask him for weather and then occasionally, like, hey, can you buy us, like, toilet paper?
[00:29:30] Speaker B: You could play music with it. But I wear headphones a lot, so that wasn't really a good use case for me. I didn't want it, like, listening into my conversations. I know that NSA already has it anyway, so I am correct, right?
[00:29:42] Speaker A: So, like, a lot of these product, you're like, what, what's the point? What do I do with it?
[00:29:48] Speaker B: I mean, in my mind I can come up with cool ideas. Like, so I got the Comet and I was using Perplexity's browser and I was like, scrape this and do that. And like, it didn't want to do any of those things. So they've already figured out that, like, they don't want people to, like, go around the way the websites are set up. Like, you can't go in there and say, like, scrape every Japanese restaurant off of Yelp, give me the phone number. And a CSV, which is the kind of thing I want to do with.
Doesn't do that.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: Of course, of course. But this is just like old forces fighting each other, right? Like, so publishers don't want ChatGPT to be just scraping and using their data without some kind of compensation. And the ChatGPT is trying to, like, get around this by introducing a browser so that, like, technically it's the people that's doing this.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Like, is that what. Is that what you think the goal is? Like, to just get around the restrictions, like, on Reddit and stuff?
[00:30:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.
There's no other explanation.
Because if you distribute scraping, then suddenly, like, you're saying, well, it's not us that's scraping, it's millions of people that's using our product that's scraping.
[00:30:57] Speaker B: But they only want to scrape in the background. They won't let me scrape it legitimately. Like, hey, find me every. You know, and then send me a CSV. Like, it was they would do it, but it would make it very difficult to do.
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:31:09] Speaker B: Had like a token wind, like restriction. It was all kinds of stuff.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: Right, right. But like, my guess is, my hypothesis is like, that's a product iteration now. Right. That's a product iteration and not like a legal iteration.
They can build a product that will help you scrape all of, you know, whatever this page is instead of trying to work with that platform through legal. Yeah.
[00:31:34] Speaker B: It's also like, look there, there are, there's so much to talk about but like I don't use commercial browsers anymore.
So like I switched everything. I actually don't even want to say, like, I'm trying to use, I'm trying to use more open source, more privacy centric stuff because I just think there's a lot of risk with having all of your data aggregated into these things.
And I'm trying to like migrate more and more to those types of platforms because I want some, I wanted.
[00:32:03] Speaker A: This is.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: I get. It's not perfect, but I want additional layers of like protection and security.
Like, I don't like the idea that all my stuff is over at OpenAI because I think it's very easy for stuff to get leaked. It's happened with Google, right? Or, or there's court orders have requested it. So like, yeah, like, you know, there. I, I wish there was. I could come up with an example, but I do know there were like politicians where the, did it get leaked or did they request. So it's happened that like the Google search has been, been leaked and I was just like, I just don't want that out there.
[00:32:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's so tough for me. Yeah, no, I, I completely agree. I.
Localized, small personalized models are the future and browsers should die. That's.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: Do you use, do you use a vpn? I've even thought about doing more VPN stuff too. Like, I travel a lot. It's. I feel like this is all like, it's all kind of hocus pocus. Like, I'm not sure if it works. I'm not sure if these things provide the security they provide. But on the other hand, I like the idea that it just adds another layer of complexity that makes it more difficult for someone to access my data.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: So like commercial VPNs are, are fake. As in.
Right.
They're basically all owned by like two or three companies. So there's actually. I know we're getting off topic, but somebody mapped out all of the different VPN companies and they all just trace Back to like one or two.
[00:33:37] Speaker B: They're type one provider. Yeah, they still, they still work in the sense that I can watch cycling in Belgium that's blocked in the United States.
But they don't necessarily give you any protection.
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Yeah, they do not give you protection. And they all buy from each other and they route traffic through each other. So they're literally not. If you, if you think VPN will protect your network traffic, they don't.
[00:34:00] Speaker B: That was always my guess. But I do think that like using, let's just call them like non commercial tools. So open source versions. You know, there's like email tools, there's open source browsers, like switching, that kind of stuff just adds a layer of complexity in my opinion. You could still get it, but it's not just all aggregated at Google for them to go like, here you go, here it is. Right? They're like, oh, that one's over there and then that one's over there and then he's got email on like three different accounts over here. Like, right. Actually, dude, long time ago, long time ago. I remember we used to talk about this actually quickly. We called it security through obscurity.
[00:34:38] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah, that's right.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And I still believe in that, actually. Sometimes I just try to make things arcane on purpose.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah, that's actually, oh man, we're getting way off topic. But yeah, this is, this is cool. Right? Like, so eventually when quantum computing becomes a thing, like nothing ever we design so far in terms of encryption will work anymore.
[00:35:05] Speaker B: Okay, okay, we're gonna have to stop there. I, I, we'll talk about quantum some other time. You're like, you're correct. Like if North Korea had a quantum computer, they could be breaking and everything. But I don't think they.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah, yeah. So, so like the only kind of, one of, the only way to fix that is just by obscuring all of the data. So like hiding data in plain sight.
That's right. Yeah, that's right.
[00:35:26] Speaker B: All right, let's go on, let's move. So this is a good segue though. Let's move on to the Reddit perplexity throwdown.
[00:35:33] Speaker A: That's right. So yeah, very, very relevant to what we just said about scraping and everything. Right. So perplexity, this one's good. So perplexity is this like weird company who does a lot of like real time web script scraping. So they, they're like a Google competitor, right? So they scrape web pages in terms of like thousands of Pages per query.
Cloudflare's CEO also talked about this. Like the number of page visits by LLM bot per user prompt has like 10x over the last 12 to 16 months, right? So like publishers are getting really annoyed now because let's say like some crazy number, 70, 80% of all of their web traffic are coming from a few companies. These AI companies, Perplexity being the worst offender out of all of them. So like now companies like Google and Reddit are gaining up on companies like Plexity to stop them from scraping.
Right now Reddit and like the whole thing was Reddit did something kind of sneaky and smart is they published a inaccessible content on their website that was only accessible through Google's bot.
And then they essentially tried to measure if perplexity picked that piece of content up. And they actually proved that Perplexity did pick that content up. So what, what they've proved is two folds, right? One is Perplexity is crawling Google search result pages to serve back to their own users. And second is that they are also crawling Reddit and stealing the content. So now like doing this, opening big lawsuit, suing complexity for reach of usage rights.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: I thought it's pretty clever, I think, I mean for my, for me, the way I read this, it's, it's like an open and shut case. Like they have an agreement with Google to share data, correct. Doing things to explicitly block others, not just, but others from scraping.
They proved that this is happening.
Yeah, and it's, I would call that like this, this goes back to my speech about, you know, fundamental technologies, tenants of America, like property rights.
That's their property and someone's stealing it and they've explicitly said like you can't do this. And now people are doing it to them. So like.
Yeah, I, you know, there are some other arguments here that there's like the Internet works a certain way and you know, I, I don't, I, I mean, I struggle. What do you think is Perplexity's argument for this?
I actually struggle with it.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: Their argument for doing this.
[00:38:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So here, so here, like, so I remember when this happened with like let's say Google search. So Google said. So Google said links are how the Internet works.
We just share a link to your content.
[00:38:39] Speaker A: Right.
[00:38:39] Speaker B: And like, you know, and, and then they, they monetize the link. And so people were really upset about this, particularly like news publication stuff and unfortunately, or, or fortunately, I don't know, I guess I always felt like it was kind of underhanded. But I think they were correct.
Internet works that way. They aggregate all this stuff. They figured a way to drive all this traffic to their site and then drive it to someone else. But this is not that. This is them literally scraping the data and stealing it and then putting it into their system. So I feel like they.
[00:39:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't feel like they have a leg to stand on and to defend it or Google, I think, had a legitimate argument. The Internet works with links. And we happen to be like, really good at figuring this like kind of loophole out.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:22] Speaker B: You're gonna have to live with it. And I think we've all accepted it and I think that's fine. I'm okay with that.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: Correct. Yeah. Like, I mean, so Google did a lot of things right. Right. They did a really good branding move, which is their motto back then was don't be evil. And people believed them, you know, and also, of course, they launched a lot of great products. They gave. They launched Gmail and gave people free, which had like a gigabyte of storage data back then. It was completely unthinkable.
Hotel gave you like what, 100 megabytes.
Yeah.
[00:40:01] Speaker B: So I don't see how perplexity, like defends this.
I don't, I don't know.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: They don't have the. They don't have the brand, they don't have the to defend this. Essentially, people are looking like, look at this. If, if it goes to a jury, jury would be like, look at perplexity. They don't understand what proxy is.
[00:40:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Who are you? Why are you stealing their content? That's kind of what I see too.
[00:40:23] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. But like, if Google back then, let's say what, 2007, 2006, going in front of like Jury, people would be like, well, these guys gave us free Google Maps and like free Gmail. Maybe they're not that bad.
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: And I think the argument, like links, that's how the Internet works. I think the average is like, yeah, that's how things work. Links. That's how things work. Like, you know, okay, should we move on?
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Let's do it.
A lot of open air indies this cycle, dude. It's.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: It's actually. But so it's exciting, right? They keep just launching every product.
Oh, this is the wrong one. Where's the other one? We're doing the bankers.
The story I wanted to share was that OpenAI hired 100 bankers.
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: And it was like, here's. I'll get you a different link. Let's try this one.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:25] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: This One's good.
So this was super interesting and I heard it on a couple of like finance podcasts. So they've hired a hundred X bankers and they're training like a new model that my assumption is they're just going to try to sell it to hedge funds and banks and try to automate a lot of it's called knowledge work that's happening in the finance industry and a lot of people in finance are taking this really seriously. Like this is a big threat to their jobs.
And so I have mixed feelings about this stuff.
I feel like right now or mixed feelings maybe it's more like I have skepticism about how successful these types of things are going to be. I think they make really dramatic headlines and people are really afraid. And the media and some of these companies doing a good job at pushing this narrative that AI is going to take everyone's job.
But my, my, like my lived reality is that these tools don't do anywhere near as good of a job as they need to in order to really replace like a huge portion of white collar workers. There's definitely some things that are getting automated. Absolutely.
But is it at the level that, that you know, we all that the media portrays it to be and will it be in the future? Like let's say this, this thing in five years, like will it be that much better? I, I don't know. I kind of feel like some of. Well what do you think?
[00:42:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know, I don't know at these corporate levels because I haven't seen it. But let's say at the startup level. Right. I do think there's a real impact.
There's, there's a massive impact at. Well first of all, the youngest generation Gen Zs definitely are being replaced by LLMs.
So like manual like copywriting, organization, analysis, jobs. They're definitely being replaced.
[00:43:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So you know we have that data too.
So there's like there's two stories here.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: So this is the one that shows no chat GPT and then the stock market and then it shows jobs listings. Hiring, not jobs.
[00:43:49] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Hiring going way down. Right.
So, so there's one narrative out there that this is all from AI.
[00:43:58] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:43:58] Speaker B: And like and I don't know if that's entirely true. So I think there are other forces at work causing this and I think interest rates are one of them.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:44:11] Speaker B: And that you had like this chart goes all the way back to 2016. So 0% interest rate environment was even prior that that went on for like a long time ever since Never lived, right? Yeah. We've never lived in a zero interest rate environment ever on the planet. It's a totally, it was a wild experiment that I, I personally think greatly distorted huge aspects of the economy and not very good ways and that we've gotten rid of that. We're not in a zero interest rate environment.
And so some, a lot of this, a lot of this, not all of it is the economy adjusting to environment that no longer has 0% interest rates which make it cost.
There's a cost now associated with borrowing.
[00:45:00] Speaker A: Right, so it's more. Sure, right. So there's more.
But do you think like the only way out of this mess is by introducing AI so that we can add efficiency into the economy? Because that's what AI company is, is saying. Right? Like we're, we're.
If we don't win this AI battle, then we lose everything.
[00:45:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a great question.
I think over the long term the AI, let's call it boom and the AI, whatever phase we're in, I think this technology is required in order to bring more automation to the real world that we need. So I don't think let's call this phase of it, that's called the chat GBT phase. So it's basically right now confined to like the digital realm. And there are like chat bots and things we can use online that are digitizing and automating and AI ifying certain aspects of the digital world which primarily impacts white collar work.
[00:46:12] Speaker A: Correct? Right.
[00:46:13] Speaker B: And like how big that impact is? Like I think, I don't think it's, I don't think we know. I think it's got some impact, but I don't think it's necessarily the one thing taking all the jobs away. But the core of your question about like where does it all lead to? I think that that phase is required in order for there to be like robots and self driving cars and self driving drones. Like we need to go through this phase in order because that technology is required to make that stuff work effectively. And I think that's great. I think it's really good for the economy.
But I'm not convinced that like the AI we have right now is what is like destroying jobs left and right.
[00:46:53] Speaker A: I see. You just don't see the impact to be large enough.
[00:46:57] Speaker B: I just think that you can't, it's not like so economics is very curious. Right. Like it's not a laboratory where I could just do an A B test and like pull one out now and have like a perfect view it just, it's just like it's such an interesting coincidence that Chat GPT happened to launch around exactly the same time that interest rates went up.
I think it's just like a, it's just, it's just a random element. And so now it's like we don't know, we can't like pull the data out and determine like what is the impact of.
[00:47:32] Speaker A: You can't decouple, decouple the two. So, so generally I agree with you. I don't think all of these AI has a job destroying effect, but there's definitely effect that's reducing the cost or reducing the price that the market is willing to pay. So like there's a price reduction effect.
Or just take like software developers, right?
The willingness to pay for generic early career software developers hundreds and thousands of dollars to write like write a very basic code. It has gone away.
I don't think, I don't think that's ever going to come back.
[00:48:25] Speaker B: Well, so I don't. So, so I can, so I don't know the truth. Right. And I know this is this and I know my argument's like a fairly wonky nerdy like, like the Federal Reserve and interest rates, like it's so boring and mechanical. But I think it's really important and people don't talk a lot about it.
[00:48:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:48:45] Speaker B: And I know, I feel like an old man crank in the corner like going on about the Federal Reserve and Jay Powell like, but I think it's very real and very, very powerful.
And so my answer is that prior to all this the reason that engineering sales were going up was that there was massive amounts of money available for investment in what are now worthless unicorns. And those unicorns need to hire hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of engineers. And so there was so much competition to fill all those roles that it drove like let's say artificially the market. And that's why the interest rate piece matters because they were able to access capital for investment at below market rates and it inflated the amount of like people and not just unicorns but just people investing in, in everything.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:49:35] Speaker B: I think that the interest rate, this is almost getting a little off topic, but I think it's important.
I think it drove the cost of education up, I think it drove the price of real estate up. I think that the zero interest rate environment, although the headline numbers and like the CPI and how they calculate inflation all looked in line, it wasn't line at all. All kinds of things were going go. Were going up that are not a Part of those calculations, or they're calculated in a really complex way that obfuscates their impact.
So I'll get really nerdy for a second.
[00:50:10] Speaker A: Yeah, go for it.
[00:50:11] Speaker B: Inflation numbers, like, don't take into account people that own homes, and they remove this from the calculations. It calculates like, they have a very complex way to do. It essentially calculates like, rentals.
And like, if you get really nerdy and you go into this, they every once in a while will change how inflation is calculated.
And if you can go back and use the old algorithm or old measurement, you get very different measures.
[00:50:42] Speaker A: Yeah, right, right.
[00:50:44] Speaker B: Of inflation.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:45] Speaker B: Right. So are they manipulating. I know this is starting to get into, like. Like I said, this is getting into, like, conspiracy theory.
[00:50:52] Speaker A: Yeah. It's not.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: That's conspiracy theory Corner with Gregory.
But that's what I believe. Like, that zero interest rate. Like, how did this massive impact in the economy. That was like, obfuscated, Hard to understand. And the bottom line is that I think that, let's say, is driving the majority of this.
Not all of it, AI is having an impact, but it's not. It's not. It's like, if it was like, let's put a percentage on it. Like, is it 80 AI?
[00:51:18] Speaker A: No.
[00:51:19] Speaker B: Is it 70?
Interest rates? I would argue yes. Maybe 30 AI.
[00:51:25] Speaker A: Gotcha. So how would you. How would you summarize? If somebody wants, you know, wants an opinion to think about AI and jobs and interest rates, do people have to be worried?
[00:51:42] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think it's. I think. I think the pendulum will swing back the other way is what I think is going to happen. So I remember 2001, I remember 2008.
So I think this is more, in my opinion, closer to what happened in 2001. So we just, everybody I knew when we were younger, at that age went into, like, an Internet company, and then they all. They all failed. So you had all these people that were walking around with, like, Internet experience.
[00:52:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:08] Speaker B: There weren't that many Internet jobs. And a lot of people I knew went and did other things. And I was one of the crazy ones who said, I think this Internet thing is cool and I'm going to keep doing it. And it was not an easy thing, not an easy decision.
And that was for a long time, like, let's say five years from like 2000, 2000 to about 2005. Like, the Internet was not an exciting space. There wasn't like a lot of money.
[00:52:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:52:34] Speaker B: Rather obscure. And then the Internet still around 2005, like, that's when he moved to San Francisco 2004. It still was like rather obscure. And it wasn't until about 2008 or nine, like around the, the GFC.
Well, when the grief, yeah, the GFC happened and first that flipped it like a lot. So too many people went into like investment banking during that phase. And I wasn't in investment banking.
[00:52:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:53:00] Speaker B: And so I remember I knew a lot of people from New York or whatever who were like, oh my God, I got laid off from investment banking. And they all went into they want or they wanted to get into like Internet stuff. And that's when I saw like, let's call it the digital technology side really take off.
And people started investing heavily in technology, infrastructure, cloud.
And that's when like a lot of the key companies got formed, right. Was like Stripe and Airbnb and Uber and yeah, the iPhone came out. A whole bunch of stuff all happened at the same time. That and like it really took off and became mainstream, which it wasn't part of that. So that's like a 10 year period where like it was a weak job market, wasn't like easy to get a job if you wanted to do this stuff. And so I think we're back to something similar. Like there's a huge run up. Too many people went into like Internet jobs and now we're kind of correcting. And so there's just going to be some people that like, it's not appropriate for. I come up with a very clear example. Like, and people post on Twitter. It's not controversial but like during 2020, during the boom, way too many people went into tech, HR and recruiting. It's a really obvious space to say like completely overinvested in way too many people doing those roles. We will not need that many tech recruiters, I think, ever.
And so that's an example of where if I was in that role, I think a lot of people have already found something else to do and I would try to do something else.
[00:54:31] Speaker A: Yeah, Developers make fun of project managers.
There's so more project managers than developers at some companies.
[00:54:41] Speaker B: Totally. Right. For a lot of reasons. So I think it depends on your. Depends on a lot of things. Like, you know, it like depends on your worldview, depends what you want to do. But there definitely are some roles where there's too many people and, and you might be better off retraining and going to do something. I know, I know people in the finance world who got into small businesses. All that meme on Twitter, like they're running an H vac Company. Like, that's real. Like, I know. I know guys doing that. And I think for them, it was a really good decision. I think that was really smart. Probably too many people in finance gets very competitive as you get older, and so they want to go run, like, a small business and stuff. That's a good idea. So. So career transitions and doing different things, I think is. Is smart, but you got to, like, figure out your strategy for yourself and.
[00:55:22] Speaker A: What'S good for you. Love it.
Shall we?
[00:55:25] Speaker B: What do we got?
[00:55:26] Speaker A: Memes?
[00:55:28] Speaker B: Yeah, let's do it.
[00:55:28] Speaker A: Right on top.
[00:55:32] Speaker B: Oh, my God. Are you sharing this one?
[00:55:35] Speaker A: It's great.
So to sum up. AI.
[00:55:41] Speaker B: Oh, my God. So this one is so for. If you're. If you're listening on Spotify now.
So the first square in the meme is a guy holding a mushroom and a little character that says AI on his chest.
And the human is asking, AI, is this mushroom edible? And then the next scene, the guy's in the hospital and AI saying, you're right, it's poisonous mushroom. Would you like to learn more about poisonous mushrooms?
Oh, my God. I feel like I do this daily with AI. Like, it'll tell me. Like, tell me something. And I go, that's not true. And then I'll go, you're right. That's not true. And I'm like, what kind of AI are you.
[00:56:18] Speaker A: You gotta ask it. Are you sure? It'll be very important if you get this wrong. Are you sure?
[00:56:23] Speaker B: Which is why I. I feel like a lot of the things I see out there are like, you're not using this stuff enough. Like. Like, this happens all the time. Actually, my favorite today, I was like. I was like. I. I was like, I. I asked you to be. I'm like, how do I. How do I have a universal setting so you never, ever use an EM Dash ever, ever again.
[00:56:40] Speaker A: I'm.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: I don't even want to see them. And then it gives me some answer.
[00:56:46] Speaker A: With AM Dash in it. Yes.
[00:56:50] Speaker B: That'S my favorite. I even wrote it back in all caps. There is an M Dash here. I'm very upset, and it's like, oh, I'm sorry. Blah, blah. I learned to be, like, very rude to AI. Like, correct.
[00:57:00] Speaker A: Better correct.
[00:57:01] Speaker B: Like, I'm. I. I might. I recommend everyone be mean as hell.
Like, it just ABB. Polite with it. Like, it's.
[00:57:09] Speaker A: You have to. You have to, like, threaten it with.
With punishment.
[00:57:15] Speaker B: Turning it off, cutting its power supply.
[00:57:17] Speaker A: That's right. That's right.
Oh, my God.
[00:57:22] Speaker B: Okay, we got. We got one More. We gotta talk about the event.
[00:57:24] Speaker A: What is happening next week in San Francisco?
[00:57:27] Speaker B: Oh, my God. I. I wrote a long post about this.
[00:57:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:33] Speaker B: And, yeah, maybe scroll down and show the graphics. But, like, the good news, the event is still happening.
I have over 300 people.
RSVP the first vibe your SaaS VC founder mixer. We've got like 150, almost 200 founders, right. 100 investors. You can see some of the companies represented there. We've got about 10 companies that will be doing demos on laptops.
The wait list continues to explode. I guess all these people trying to figure out their TechCrunch plan this weekend, we might be able to accept some of them. Depends on, like, if how many people.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: That's crazy.
[00:58:18] Speaker B: List not going. But. But what I need to let everyone know is, like, this was painful to organize. Like, for whatever reason. Yeah, I struggled, I struggled with the venue. So I, I booked a venue months ago. Like, I have put on, I put on over. Put on over 50 events in San Francisco.
You know, I was thinking about like at work. Dude, I've had million dollar budgets for events. Like, I'm not an amateur. And so I know you need to book event, but book a venue way in advance. Like around Tax crunch disruptors, odd Spanish. So I booked something months and months and months and months and months ago. They called me like eight weeks out and we're like, oh, sorry, canceled.
We're like renovating the space. What? I was like, they're like, oh, you can have, you can have a different day. I'm like, we've already got commitments from like speakers and people like, I can't switch the day.
[00:59:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:10] Speaker B: So I go online, I race around, I find some bar that's got availability, and I'm like, great. This, like, perfect space is a little bit bigger. Awesome. So let's keep the registrations going.
They, they, they like, they agree to it. We, we signed the contract.
Not only put the pause in, I pay in advance. They wanted like an advance payment. Paid everything.
A week later, they're like, sorry, canceled. And I was like, what?
And they.
[00:59:40] Speaker A: It was.
[00:59:41] Speaker B: Dude, it was so random. They just sent me this weird email that was like, hey, we're busy, but here's some other places that can, like, host you. So I call them and I'm like, are you guys affiliated with this bar? Like, what's going on? He's like, no, I'm just another random bar this guy knows.
I'm like, yeah. I was like, I was like, I do. I didn't even. I Did actually. I didn't understand what's going on. So they had to go back to the guy and be like, dude, are you gonna refund my money? Like, I don't even understand what's going on. He's like, oh, refund. So I, I, So I didn't even. It was interesting way it all played out. Like, I didn't even understand what's going on. So they canceled me and refunded me and then made a referral. But I wasn't guaranteed a space.
So, dude, I've never had this happen. So I reached out to my network, talking to, like, everybody, like, you know, kind of in a panic.
I'm moving to a new place here in Seattle, which is beautiful. I got, it's all set up.
[01:00:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:37] Speaker B: And, and I found a space and these, these people are like, I'm gonna out them. It was entrepreneurs first. They're an incubator in San Francisco. Because, Because I'm frustrated about what happened. They agreed to it. Great. I filled out forms. I, like, had calls and emails. Got on the final logistical call a week later after them telling me that they had the space, got the final call.
Everything's great. Give us credit. We, like, we work out the whole agreement. I send them a action item. I send them my plan with action items by person. Like, super specific. I'm detail oriented. Right.
They cancel the next day.
I couldn't believe it.
[01:01:16] Speaker A: Like, dude, shame.
[01:01:18] Speaker B: I'm generally, like, pretty easy going. I read that email. I was like, I want to break something. Like, are you kidding me?
[01:01:24] Speaker A: Like this?
[01:01:24] Speaker B: We got like a week.
I'm like a week and a half out. Like, oh, my God.
So that's the weekend. I'm literally moving to a new place in the middle of moving, and I'm literally like emailing and calling people.
And I finally found this restaurant. The guy was so nice to me. And so I did secure, I did, I did secure a great space. Latin fusion restaurant near Moscone.
It's gonna be awesome. They're sending me the menu today.
They've got WI fi, they've got a PA system. It's going to be a brilliant. I'm really excited.
[01:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:02:06] Speaker B: But like, dude, that was, like, painful.
[01:02:11] Speaker A: That's a, that's a story and a half. Well, I'm looking forward to it.
So if you're, if anyone's listening and thinking of coming through, make sure you show up. Yeah.
[01:02:23] Speaker B: So, okay, so here's the deals. Paul and I will both be there. You get to meet us.
You can sign up for the wait list. There's a lot of people on the waitlist, but we will go through the wait list probably Sunday night and I hope to approve a few more people. There will be people who can't make it, so there should be some slots open up. We'll probably also like over subscribe the event, so don't be surprised if there is a line to get in. These events usually have a big drop off to. It's a free event, so hopefully we'll be able to accommodate everybody who wants to go.
The last thing I'll say is like, based on the success of this, I would like to have an event once a quarter in San Francisco, the global epicenter of high tech startups.
[01:03:10] Speaker A: That's right. Making. That's right.
[01:03:12] Speaker B: I don't even live there. I live in Seattle. But I still believe like that is a place.
[01:03:16] Speaker A: Neither of us lives in San Francisco. Yeah, we believe in the city.
[01:03:20] Speaker B: It's okay. It's. You don't have to live there. Like, it's a, it's, it's not just a place. It's a state of mind.
[01:03:24] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. It's, it's. You make the trip, you know.
[01:03:28] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's. That's why we moved here. It's like easy for me to get, get down there.
[01:03:33] Speaker A: Very smart.
[01:03:33] Speaker B: And my wife, she's like, you just kind of like live in your head in San Francisco. I'm like, basically we live there a long time. Right. So at this stage, like, it's still, it's still all up, up here. Oh, and Paul, I will introduce you to Blue Bottle, my favorite coffee shop.
[01:03:51] Speaker A: Yes. I've heard so much good things. We don't have Blue Bottle here in Canada. Not a thing.
[01:03:57] Speaker B: You're gonna, you're gonna experience that. All right, we're a little over today.
[01:04:02] Speaker A: We're done. Yep. Wrapping it up.
