buildin @counterpartytv | prev @alearesearch account run by parents
Joined October 2021
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Jensen reveals he first met the Founder of TSMC by cold calling their number off Yellow Pages
"I heard about this company in Taiwan, TSMC and UMC at the time. They were of course quite poor companies themselves, and they were barely making it."
"TSMC was probably about $300 million, something like that. It's a tiny little company. I heard about Morris Chang. And so I tried to call their US office."
"Back in the old days there were yellow pages. I looked it up, TSMC. There's a number there. I called their number and it's a recording. I left my name and my number and said a few things about NVIDIA: we're a new startup company building computer graphics chips. I called several times. Nobody called me back."
"And so I finally wrote a letter to Morris Chang. Didn't hear anything for a long time, and then one day it was 6 o'clock or something, this person called and said 'this is Morris Chang from TSMC.'"
"And meanwhile, everybody outside my office was playing video games and they're all laughing and screaming. 'Hey shut up! It's Morris!' I was so happy that the founder would actually call us back, because hey, maybe we won't have to die."
"And so we talked and he invited me to Taiwan. I came back to Taiwan, and that was the start of everything. Not just that partnership, but just the whole industry."
Ken Griffin compares Leopold's collapse to when Citadel drew down 55% in 2008: "if Morgan Stanley had failed, I don't think I'd be on stage today"
"[Situational Awareness] got caught in a pretty significant price downdraft caused by both the announcement of Kimi, other chatter in the marketplace about the growth rate of some of the foundational model companies, some large pension plans that were reshaping their portfolios at that very moment in time."
"They got caught, I wouldn't say in the perfect storm, but they got caught in three mid-sized storms. And clearly, they must have had too much leverage in the portfolio at peak, pushed pretty hard in the marketplace, and found themselves in a bit of turmoil."
"I would not manage my business for that to happen any time in the foreseeable future again. There will always be some of our firms that find themselves in a tough spot."
"I mean, Citadel was in a tough spot in 2008. The height of the financial crisis, if Morgan Stanley had not achieved their funding with the Japanese and had failed, I don't think I'd be on stage today."
"Like every firm in financial services, if you survive long enough, part of your history will be a moment in time of despair. If you survive long enough, every leveraged financial institution will have a footnote in their history of when their back was against the wall."
dnap retweeted
MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY in video form (with a few takes)
dnap retweeted
our stream today in 45 minutes
3:21 why I'm a bull again
5:03 nobody has crypto to sell
11:52 Black Monday's chart was faked
16:19 everyone wants to be Kimchi
23:26 GTA 6 DoorDash trade
26:39 cold approach is unpatched
30:29 trading the lab monkey shortage
34:59 Joe Weisenthal turns crypto bull
Jensen reveals 80% of venture backed startups are using open source models
"In the first six months of this year, I think $600 billion worth of venture financing went into AI native startups. 80% of those AI native startups are using open models."
"You're able to take what is close to a frontier open model, post-train it with your expertise and your data, turn it into essentially a super AI that is good at your particular domain of use and build a company around it."
"You're starting to see this all over the place, whether it's in legal services or entertainment or manufacturing and design. And all these different applications are now jumping on."
"I think the world is going to have both closed models and open models. You're just going to use the best model where it makes sense."
Brad Gerstner says SpaceX will probably pay a 10%-40% premium in a Tesla merger
"I think one of the main motivations behind the merger, as somebody who owns shares in both companies, is [Elon] wants to get scale now."
"He wants to accelerate scale now, because if you have scale around capital, and if you put the companies together, it's easier to borrow money, right? It's easier to raise money cheaper, etc. And you're going to need to raise cheap capital to build out all this CapEx."
"'If you look at a control premium, it's generally 20 to 30 percent in these situations, right? But here, I don't think you need any premium."
"The question is whether there's a premium already built into the stock. There's always a premium built into the stock. That's always taken into consideration."
"But I actually have a slightly different view here. If I'm on the special committee of Tesla, I have a unique fiduciary duty because he's involved in both companies, right? In order to make sure this is fair for Tesla shareholders, I actually think they'll err on the side of a higher change of control here because they want to guard against the lawsuits that invariably come and they want to make sure that they have it."
"If you're above 30 percent, it really does insulate you from a lot of those things. And it doesn't have to be from today's price because part of the change of control is already built in. The merger premium is already built in. But I think you're going to see something between $420 a share and let's call it $520 or $550 a share. That's my best guess as we sit here today."
Brad Gerstner reveals SpaceX is building out 25% of all new compute in America next year
“It was an extraordinary earnings call. I think the biggest debate in the market today is, do we have enough capital? Do we have enough manpower to build out the data centers across the United States?”
“So think about the magnitude of what [Elon] announced last night. He said they're standing up 200,000 GB300s per month. Just a few months ago, that was what he was doing in a year. He says he's going to do that every single month.”
“By the end of the year, three gigawatts. He says they're going to stand up 10 gigawatts of compute next year. It's unheard of.”
“The forecast for next year, total compute being stood up in the United States, is 43 gigawatts. So SpaceX alone is going to put up 25% of the total gigawatts going up in the United States.”
“That's like $400 billion that's going to have to be raised to pay out that compute infrastructure. But it makes very clear, Elon understands we're at the brink of the singularity, we’re entering Super Intelligence.”
Steven Bartlett says The Diary of a CEO is projected to make $60 million this year
"The forecast for our broader media company this year is approximately $90 million."
"Next year, that goes to $160 million from a holding company perspective."
"It's a wide range of things, I run an investment fund. I have products that we sell, that we own and manufacture. We have brand partnerships."
"We have subscription revenue as well, several of our platforms have a subscription offering. We do events around our brand as well."
"There are more that are available but those are the main revenue drivers for most creative businesses."
dnap retweeted
our stream today in 45 minutes
2:21 the Black Monday that never came
9:19 Ocean's 11 for Pokémon cards
17:36 PSA's fatal flaw
22:00 NFTs were just early
30:09 old GPUs are worth 3x more now
35:01 gacha is bad for the world
38:17 why onion futures are banned
43:31 trying Korean fake delivery apps
Jim Lanzone reveals what it was really like as CEO of Tinder: "almost 10% of all marriages in the US were started on Tinder"
"Almost 50% of all marriages were started online 50% of all marriages were started online, and Tinder was 25% of online."
"It was always perceived by others to be like a hookup app or whatever, but that is not how the team internally viewed it."
"I loved the fact that Tinder from the outside was viewed one way, but if you were on the inside, you've never met a team of people more passionate about the mission of helping people find their person."
"And I never would have left, it's the only time I've ever left a job. Everywhere else I stayed for a long time."
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
David Sacks says Anthropic’s AI powered worms FUD is not a real threat
"There is no such thing as AI-powered worms right now. It does not exist. They are basically trying to create an experiment where they prove that it could exist."
"Well, guess what, there already are worms out there that infect IoT devices. They're not AI-powered, but hackers have written these worms that exploit locks or cameras."
"There was one in 2016 called Mirai. It scanned for default credentials and it built a massive DDoS botnet based on infecting IoT devices. These devices are very easy to infect because they've got open ports and people didn't change the base password. They can't be patched, right? So they are sitting ducks. So these worms already exist."
"But the argument that Anthropic is making is that somehow these worms are going to get worse because they're going to be AI-powered. What you wouldn't want to do is actually embed a model inside the payload of the worm, because that slows down the worm. The tokens get generated at 0.39 per second, it's very, very slow."
"So essentially what you're doing is you're embedding a weak model in the payload, and that would actually slow down the rate of infection. Maybe the worm is more adaptive, but the reality is it's slower and less efficient."
"And the thing that they don't really point out is this is going to be a relatively easy problem to fix. Where we're headed with IoT is you're going to have a brain device on your home network.
Jason: "You're going to just set your Grok bot or your Muse and say, 'Secure my network.' You're going to have some agent that's constantly checking your network for exploits."
Ben Horowitz reveals bandwidth fell from $1,500 to $50 a megabit in two years after the dotcom bubble popped
"It can end up being a very dangerous arbitrage business where you can get upside down easily."
"You look at Loud Cloud just as an example, here's a simple thing that happened to us in 1999. Bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it, it was very hard to get. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001 it was $50 a megabit. So if you were holding bandwidth, you were just dead."
"So that kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur. And so different than what we'd like to fund. That, you know, it just scared me to death."
POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer