The Simplest Way To Make $1M In 2026

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/aa9e32d8dd7865e0

We have this podcast called My First Million, where we're coming with all these complicated schemes of how somebody can make their first million. Meanwhile
In the relationship, Sarah made her first million before Sam with the simplest scheme of all.
I feel like I can root
Well
It be what I want to
So we invited our buddies.
T V PN and Jordy here to do one of our favorite episodes that we do every year.
Called
Sarah's List. And it's called Sarah's List in honor
Of the queen herself, Sam's wife Sarah.
You know.
It's a classic story, really. She just joined
An great company.
That was
Clearly already great.
as like employee three thousand.
And the math was like this. She got a job at Airbnb and I think it was you know, her numbers aside, the general math is
You get a job and they'll offer you maybe like a forty or fifty K a year stock package in addition to your salary.
So you get your salary, you get your health care, they got a kitchen where they're serving you lunch, they got oat milk in the fridge. So you you're not sacrificing anything. She didn't have to come up with the idea of Airbnb. She joined it.
She wasn't the first employee grinding like crazy. She was employee three thousand.
But that's p stock package, which over a four year period is you know, you're granted about two hundred thousand dollars worth of stock.
Five X and she made a million bucks.
Before either me or Sam.
And so we kinda wanted to honor
the brilliance that is joining companies that are already clear winners
Especially in tech, because the winners can run so far. And so every um every few years me and Sam have done this where we come up with our list. We call it Sarah's list, which is the c the ten companies you would join right now.
Because
As a person
Your time is essentially your investment, right? You were when you join a company, that's an act of an investment. It's funny because I know some investors who did who who made an investment in that unicorn round and they had the exact same logic. They were like complete parlour market fit, obvious runner, like just put just pile money into this like easy investment and then it worked.
She joined I think at the eighteen million dollar valuation, something like that. Okay and then Covet happened and we were like
Sure.
Shit, that was a good idea. Sucks it didn't work. And then uh obviously everything changed in six months. And then I think it it IPO'd around a hundred billion dollars. And you guys remember that famous interview with Brian Chesky where he's told on air, he's like
The share price is this and it's worth a hundred billion dollars. He's like
I
I
I didn't know that until just now because back then in two thousand and
nineteen or eighteen when it was eighteen million dollars. We were like
This could be worth like thirty billion dollars. Like, you know, like if everything works. Yeah, like if everything works. And so anyway, that was her story and it worked out great because she worked
A normal amount.
had great maternity, paternity uh
uh uh package, had great benefits, all that stuff. And so
We've done this for a few years, but you wanna you know something? We've actually haven't actually done this in like eighteen months because it's been so hard these last twenty or twenty four months with everything going on with AI.
And so you guys are pretty cool to have because I think you'll know a lot more about some of the latest and greatest.
Yeah, we wanted you guys on'cause not only
Not only do you guys know.
Are you guys super smart, but you guys uh part of your show is you're talking to the CEOs of these companies.
in these like fifteen minute interviews every single day. And so you're getting a good sense for kind of like
Who's who's doing well, who do you believe, what what companies excite you. So we wanted to
Here what you guys have By the way, last time, Sam, I went back and checked.
I think of the ten companies that we did in our last round, which was something like
Eighteen months ago.
Or two two yeah, it was eighteen months, two years ago, something like that.
I think we got six out of ten that are like already either there or pacing to be there. So for example, like
When we did open AI and we were laughing.
We were like, uh hey, here's a shocker or open AI. It was a hundred billion dollar valuation at the time.
It's now like, you know, close to eight hundred uh billion now.
And so, and we even said, like, look, there's no bonus points for difficulty in life in the game of business. Like sometimes the best companies are just hidden in plain sight, they're right in front of you.
And so I think we've done pretty well. The biggest one was uh was Andril. We did Andril in twenty one, I think. And that was four billion at the time. And I think it's
Ninety or fi I don't remember.
A lot of those companies should stay on the list, honestly. Like I think uh yeah, even even if you just done Andro last year.
Like the valuation has increased so much that it still makes sense to include in those. Yeah, the the biggest mistake that people make is
not going with an obvious winner because
It's already in multiple billions and it just looks like okay, what what's the potential upside from here? And and that's just been wrong so many times in the last uh ten years.
Do you guys ever take um shares or equity instead of uh uh
Uh dollars for advertising?
Uh we we have, but uh it's more just just over the last year we're super young business and uh it's made sense to to optimize more cash flow uh for like actual real revenue. John and I uh stump by themselves.
Yeah, it's a button.
Wait, let me tell you one quick story, Sean. I saw I was at Ramp's office.
And I saw um the pitch that Jordy or I think both you guys both you guys sent.
And I saw one line and and Eric said that Jody wrote it or something like that, where he was like, um the the the beginning of the pitch, it said
If you advertise with us.
You'll get so big that you are gonna be dragged in front of Congress because they're gonna accuse you of having a monopoly. I think this was John's line. This was yours, right? Yeah.
Uh that's so good. There's uh
I don't know if you guys are alwa fans of it's almost any in Philadelphia, but the the dentist and one uh dentist has this thing where he's basically talks about the implication. Yeah. And so it's like it's not it's not that they're in danger, but it's the
It's the implication of danger. And uh there's this famous line in advertising that uh Craig Clemens told us when he was on the podcast and he he talked about how
There's just one um
I don't know if it was a supplement or like a a perfume or something like that that was it was having trouble selling and then they switched the copywriting to say
You know, the the founder swears.
She swears that this does not contain any illegal.
Stimulants. It's just that damn good. And it's the implication that is that works.
Like the hardest you can win in tech is like, you know, that Mark Zuckerberg moment when he goes on Capitol Hill and Senator. Okay, wow, he's actually at that level, that you senator. We run ads.
That's like with my fitness campaign, no one's accusing me of taking anything yet, which means uh it's not working. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why does everybody think I'm all natty? This is a button.
That's hilarious.
I've talked before about the way that I know how to make money, about how build a money making skill, about how to leverage your time and energy. And the team at HubSpot actually went through the video where I explained all that.
And turn it into a free downloadable cheat sheet.
on my four rules of how to make money.
Now.
This is not, you know, get rich quick advice. It's just core principles, foundational principles about building wealth. Things that I wish I knew when I was, you know, just getting started.
And so if you want to download it, it's in the description below. It's totally free. You can go get it. Thanks to the folks at HubSpot for doing the research, making this document, and making it available to all you guys. All right, back to this episode.
Uh all right.
So let's jump in. Uh we each have
Roughly three each. We're gonna try to get twelve, maybe some bonus, some honorable mentions. Cool.
My first pick.
This is a company you guys might not even know about.
Which I like.
Like to surprise you, but I'm s coming in strong here.
Zuru Tech.
Okay, Zero Tech is a company that's based out of New Zealand.
And they're the third biggest toy company in the world.
So they make if you've ever seen mini brands, Sam's a big mini mini food collector. He but he likes little mini toys. Um they make some of the m most popular toys in the world. The the the bunch of balloons where you can fill up thirty water balloons at once. You know, that type of stuff. So the founder, Nick, came on the podcast. He's the wealthiest man in New Zealand.
And his story's insane, like probably the craziest grind story I've ever heard.
By the end of the episode I told him I'd go, I think you're the closest thing to Elon Musk that I've ever seen.
Um people just don't know about you'cause you live on the other side of the world and you were in the toy industry. So kinda people uh overlook you.
Um
So he's got a new company and his new company uh or it's actually based in there.
It's they're building
Holmes.
with a factory. Basically here's what you do. He's got a three you know, it's like Chad GPT. You just describe you drop a pin where you're gonna
Put the home.
It automatically, no matter where in the world, any country in the world, any city in the world, any neighborhood in the world, you put it.
It automatically downloads all it all has all of the building codes.
And the permitting and the terrain so it knows if you're on an incline or if there's a hill there or whatever, right?
All of that already built in.
And it's called Dreamcatcher. So you basically describe the home you want. You're like, Oh, I want this like in a minimalist, blah, blah, blah, five thousand square feet, make it cool, blah, blah, blah.
So you basically describe like Chat GPT the home you want?
And it renders it all using like Unreal Engine.
Uh so it renders the whole thing in front of you.
It creates like an AI video of like a home walkthrough for you using kind of like a you know mid journey type of thing.
And then you literally like
Build the home, you click it, and he's got a factory in China.
That's like the iPhone building factory, but it actually builds all of the sub components for this home.
And it's insane. Like they went and bought like uh when the Palisades fire happened and people needed to sell their lots.
They bought like eighty million dollars worth of lots in LA and he's building
He's basically gonna print these
It's I say print, just it's it's building with a robot. Yeah.
Like fifty million dollar homes in LA.
And so this guy it was the most impressive demo I've ever seen, seeing the homes that they're building.
And it's real. Like this guy is uh he's basically like m m you know manufacturing
Genius, him and his brother.
Uh they have huge factories in China to be able to do this stuff.
And the crazy thing about homes is homes is a space that's really never been touched by
By definitely not AI, but really even most
technology doesn't really uh go into construction and home construction.
And when you're selling homes that are multi million dollar homes, you don't have to sell that many of them.
to be doing billions in revenue. And so
If there was one company that I could kinda empty the tank of my life savings into
I would be pouring it into this, which means it's a contender for Sarah's list for me.
Mm-hmm.
Very crazy. Did he talk at all about why previous attempts in this category haven't
Worked because uh there's been there's been a number of
There's kind of like a
I like this uh I like this bet because
There's actually like a graveyard of
Silicon Valley companies that have like made effort. Yeah, because he's not a Silicon Valley company. He's the guy, uh him and his brother have been basically been building factories in China for like the last twenty years.
So they're a manufacturing powerhouse. So for example
They were in the toy space and they became the third largest toy company in the world. They do like
Over a billion dollars of pure profit a year just into the two brothers' pockets. Like it's crazy.
Then
They went into uh the diaper space. They're like, Oh, you know what, let's go compete in one of the most like difficult to compete with things against Procter and Gamble.
And he built the fastest growing and now the I think I think it's if it's not the number one, it's basically like right up there with Huggies and Pampers now.
Um, even though it's brand new.
diapers company, uh you know, the selling and target Walmart like crazy, and they manufacture their own diapers.
And the reason why was he found that in China there was like a different style of diaper manufacturing, different m materials.
And he basically brought that to market.
Um
In the US.
And so he built the largest that.
Uh, then they did the same thing in hair care. And they did it with they have the fastest growing brand on TikTok for hair care.
Uh and now they're doing it for homes. And so the I think the big difference is
Like Elon, hardware is hard, and most software founders
you know, go in for a rude awakening when they go into hardware. Whereas these guys have been doing
Literally like not just hardware, but like
The the building of the factory is the hard part.
the factory that makes the product is sort of secondary to it, but building an o highly automated factory is the number one one thing. And they've been building factories for a very, very long time. It's actually hilarious. When they went to China
to start their toy company.
They built like he went there because he heard, oh, all the manufacturing happens in China. But what that usually means is you go find a manufacturer, you tell you tell them what you want to make and they make it.
He went to f China, didn't realize that, like a naive mistake and built his own factory there. Like on the side of a river. Like did it all from scratch'cause he didn't understand like
Oh, when people say they manufacture in China, it doesn't mean they go manufacturing China.
They find an existing manufacturer. He m he missed that part and just went the hard way from the beginning.
That's great.
Sounds like you don't like this guy at all.

Did I say I'm a fan? But will this actually work as the bear case? Like wha wh uh unpack that a little bit.
Well the the demo is so insane that
You just have to ask the question like
Is this like many AI products that demo well but
Production shot. Sure, sure, sure. And so basically the demo was so good.
Um
that you know, you just kinda gotta see a home first before you
You know, you fully believe.
Well, I mean w I I would put uh like tariffs is more of the bear case. Like if i i if China, America relations degrade further, then it's gonna be harder to get stuff across the border. It's gonna get hard to start. Well here's here's the craziest part of the whole thing. Yeah.
Um, I th you know, you try to find cost savings when you do stuff like whether you do it in China or you're using new technology.
And so the question was is it ten percent?
Uh is it twenty percent? What how much is it? It's basically like
Mm like
M more than an order of magnitude. So it's more than ten times cheaper to build the homes this way. Um, which I think is the kind of the exciting part. Cause if you can build the cost of build if you can bring the cost of building down
You know, that's actually like very, very meaningful for like I don't know, progress in the world.
But this breaks the whole point of the list. This does not sound I don't want to work with a person that sounds like Elon. There was no caveat that said the founder is completely sane. I didn't we didn't add that. We just said you join a company that's already got a existing These guys have uh hugely successful business already.
But it has a chance to five X because there's a there's a pathway there. All right. That was my first company. Uh let's switch to somebody else. Yeah, let our guests go first. Let the guests go first.
Let's be good.
Quick caveat. So uh we were under the impression that we had to be picking companies under a billion dollar valuation.
It's a good kind of exercise uh and actually like understand that
early stage today still means
Sub one billion, basically. Jordan, are you carrying like a five thousand dollar handbag in that in that photo?
Uh it's not it's a duffel bag.
Can we do the origin of this? Well well so so the so the I mean the bit the the the you know origin of T V PN is uh
Other people have described it as, you know, uh ESPN for tech and business. Uh
What's funny is that John and I do not watch any of the traditional American
sports, football, basketball, baseball, et cetera.
Anyway, first one, Varta Space Industries.
Helmed by none other than Delian Asperger Hov and Will Bury.
Uh former SpaceX uh valuation seven hundred and twenty six million, but
Like one of those multi decade projects that uh
Could have really, really large TAM, really, really large.
I expect to do.
So they manufacture things in space. So they do not build the rockets, they partner with SpaceX.
Ту ланче капсу, а не інсида капсо.
They effectively have created a manufacturing environment where gravity is an off switch. And so for certain things, imagine you're trying to grow a crystal or you're trying to grow a drug or heart tissue, or there's applications for uh
uh certain types of fiber. They're doing a lot of bio uh biomedical work right now. And then there's also defense applications. If you can get things up into space and get them down, there's a whole bunch of interesting things you can do there. And so the companies
Maybe
four or five years old at this point. Hundred and fifty employees based in Los Angeles, obviously, you know, very
Hard working environment, but
Especially with the new
NASA administration, things are moving much faster. SpaceX, there was a lot of uncertainty last year. They started landing the starships and launch costs are starting to tick down again.
And so it gets easier and easier and
When they first put up their first capsule in space, this is the real question with a space company is like how long will it take them to actually do something in space? It used to be
Five, ten years.
Uh they got their first capsule up in just a few years. They're already on their fifth or sixth capsule. People got it back. They got it back.
I think our our kind of framework for VARTA is like if you get a group of ultra talented people together, ultra hardworking people together.
uh that can develop the capability of simply putting stuff up in space and bringing it back down.
It's gonna have a really wide range of applications over the long run.
What's the founder like?
Uh Will Brewey is like completely
Like
super sharp b by the book space engineer background who
Has been able to
Talk to big pharma CEOs and get them to sign up. And then Dalian's, you know, Dalian.
Delian, who's like obviously quite a character, very, very loud, ha has uh but the company in general has been very like anti hype. So there's a lot of companies in space
That are just hype businesses.
They will get all the way to the public markets with without having accomplished much, if anything at all. And uh Varta
Uh has been
uh doesn't chase the hype. They weren't coming out this last year.
having like a new pitch around data centers just because that would have gotten them.
Uh and so
For being a space company, they're extremely I would say grounded
Focused on developing uh capabilities that are gonna be like John said.
Uh very v v uh valuable in a wide variety of applications.
There's like one I the the the it's a very difficult space, capital intensive. There are not a lot of there's some there are a decent amount of companies that are sending stuff up to space. There are mu many fewer that are bringing stuff back down.
Uh and
It's uh and it hasn't been a huge, uh hugely competitive space where there's like ten players.
We we had someone Sean on the pod, I think like last year, explain this company. And they went through this huge thing about why it was cool and we were like
Why do pharmaceutical companies need to make drugs in space? Like why like we did like they forgot to explain that you're not going to do that. Yeah, they didn't explain that part. They were like, Oh it's great because you can man like you know, manufacturing. Very rare things.
Uh but but again you have to view this as
Yeah, as you know, multi-decade thing. If you believe in space, if you believe that you know launch costs are gonna continue to fall, it's gonna get cheaper and cheaper, then there's like this interesting trend that you're on the frontier of. And the company's been very good at weathering storms, whether there's like some slight you know, sell off in the market or the narrative changes like
the the company's well managed and so if you can just keep getting through those and just always be the best space
The the best company that like does stuff in space, basically. Like that's good. You know, I I I do like uh so so
I do like that you're riding the wave of basically like
Is Elon gonna get better at doing rockets? Yep. And if he does, the cost per whatever cost per gram to take something up into space is gonna keep falling. And you just keep you get to keep your business keeps getting better the more hard work Elon does.
I kinda like that in general as a as a thesis. So last year Blue Origin landed their heavy rocket and so now there's actual there's actually two American companies and so that means real pricing po pressure, which is like very, very good.
I was
Uh this is my I have two t two tangents. Yeah.
I was reading the uh Elon biography, which I'm late to, but I kinda like it'cause ev you know, everybody's out on it, everybody's done with it. And I'm the only guy, you know, still in there poking around.
Um there's an amazing section. I don't know if you guys have read this, but it's about the tweets back and forth between Elon Elon and Bezos, the the sort of rival the sort of the passive aggressive rivalry around the launch thing. Sam, I don't know. Have you seen this?
Well there's more recent ones. Bezos just posted the tortoise. Tortoise said I'm the tortoise. He's going tortoise mode, slow and steady.
Who's the passive aggressive one? Both of them.
So Blue Origin was like the first to do a reusable launch, which they Elon wanted badly, right? But
Uh blur up. But he was basically like they didn't go up very high. Yep. And so he was just like
He's like, uh Bezos posts a picture, be like Oh my God, we did it. I'm standing next to one of the the perhaps the rarest item on earth.
A reusable rocket.
Or a or a reused rocket. A reused rocket. He's saying basically that's so rare. You never see a reused rocket. And then Elon goes, Congratulations, but perhaps not the rarest. Because SpaceX has done that six times if we're counting suborbital hops.
And then it was just like kinda like your you your rocket doesn't go high enough. And then when Elon did it like a month later.
This is like
Congratulations to Elon.
A really excellent suborbital launch. One of the best suborbital launches. And Elon was like, Fuck you, dude. It was s so high, but technically yes, was still suborbital. And they've been basically going back and forth with these like
Congratulations, but
And I just kinda love it.
I love it. I love the pettiness. Yeah.
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All right, let's move on to the next one. What do we got?
Back to you, I think.
Okay. Uh I'll do one Okay, my next one is Suno. Okay, I've talked about Suno before.
If you don't know, Suno is basically a app or website you go to.
And you can make music even if you've got no musical talent. So you can just go on there describe
The type of song you want.
Maybe you bring your lyrics, maybe you don't. Maybe you just give it a vibe. And you basically are vibe coding music.
Mm-hmm. It's amazing. I'm addicted to the app. I use it all the time. I've
Probably made I don't know.
Forty or fifty songs. I've burned tens of thousands of credits on this thing. I it's crazy how addictive it is, how fun it is to do.
And I just think this company has a long way to run. So right now, valued at two, two and a half billion, something like that.
They have two hundred million in ARR. So it's not like an AI app that's like
Three hundred million in ARR now.
Three hundred million.
All right. Breaking news. We got three hundred million now already. And so I met the founder. You know, I really like kind of what they're all about. Yeah. And they they also just struck a deal with a licensing company with uh with a musical uh music label, which is important.
Basically th the three here's the up side,'cause I was like, Okay, this is already at two, two and a half billion
Does this have that five X potential? And I was doing some math and it basically
Sound cloud.
Has
Forty million music creators.
Okay, so that's forty million people who around the world who actually have musical talent that are publishing
Uh on the platform.
Suno's only at two million.
uh users on their platform. So they still they and that's
That's people who don't have to have the musical talent part, the skill.
And so the the m the market for the number of people who will make music that don't know how to make music is gonna be something like ten, twenty
Possibly more than that. Possibly fifty X.
The number of
Actual musicians who create music.
So I just think I think this thing has an incredible long way to run.
I would not be surprised if there were hundreds of millions of weekly active users of people who are making music on this thing.
And when you do the math of what that turns into'cause people are willing to pay, right? Like
Imagine not having to like practice or do music lessons or any of that shit. You just pay fifteen bucks and boom, you're a musician, right? Like it's a kind of an amazing trade to make.
So I think this thing has a long way to run. I think Sunno becomes a fifty billion dollar plus company.
It would be also a really fun company to join if you joined right now.
Because
You'd be doing something that's both on the frontier, but it's not like manufacturing in space. It's not like actual like rocket science. And you're just a part of culture. It's gonna become a big part of culture, which is always fun if you're gonna work something. What do you guys think about these companies that are you you we were laughing. I think we said they were launched two years ago and they're at three hundred million in revenue. Does that have longevity?
You have to ask a couple of questions. One is, is it a fad?
Right. Do I think this is just like
Is it like uh I don't know, whatever, dub smash or like you know, one of these things where it's like everyone's gonna try it once, like the yearbook photo thing and then there's really no reason to come back in. I don't think this is a fat. I think people are gonna w wanna keep creating stuff.
The second thing is he's gonna have too much competition.
And I do think that they're kind of on an island where
All the big model companies are probably not going to
This isn't the kind of primary war front.
And they have so many like bigger battles that they're fighting right now. I kinda think Suna's gonna go uncontested for a little while.
uh longer where it's not the main thing that open AI or Anthropic is gonna try to roll out.
And make mainstream.
And so I think by focusing and specializing
Yeah, they have a lot of other stuff built in. Like if you make the song, they have like an editor where you get the stems and you can actually like remix the song and they have like a discovery platform. Like there's a lot more depth that they can go into.
So I think that why why it would be around is because it's not in the crosshairs.

you know, the highest Elo battle in the world, the genius battle, which is like, you know
what open AI and gr you know, Grok and Anthropic are all doing. Yeah, I think I think what what you're getting at is basically like Suno is the front door to AI music in the way that ChatGPT has been the front door to out large language models.
That has a lot of value. I made I made a pretty similar case to a friend who had worked in the music industry for the last decade. He's a uh he's a
Real musician, you know, has gone on tour all over the world. He had the opportunity to join Suno.
at around the same valuation and
I said, you know, I think like you've worked in y the music industry
your whole career, where's the growth gonna be in the industry over the next ten years? It's gonna be
In AI, whether or not people uh like it. And I think
What Suno's tapped into is the same thing that the vibe coding tools have tapped into, where
billions of people have an idea for an app, but like very, very few people
relatively can actually build an app.
And now with Vib Coding, anybody can build an app.
Same thing with music. Everybody's had an idea for
a song or c could come up with an idea for a song that would
You know, create uh.
Uh even in in the most simple way, you know.
creating we've heard stories from people that, you know, every single night they make a new bedtime song with their kids, right? To kind of like
motivate the kids to to uh settle down or or go to sleep or whatever. And so there's so many magical moments.
It's the kind of thing that can have these sort of viral moments where people like realize it's available, create all these songs, or there's like memes that could form.
But it has this like kind of like
I think uh I think people will continue to come back to it. So I'm I'm with you. What happens to uh Spotify's uh market cap then?
Spotify's market cap should be resistant to this because it's a tool for creating music and music will be distributed on Spotify.
And so
Spotify never created an Ableton competitor or Fruity Loops competitor. They never sold guitars. They never sold any tools to
to create music. They might wind up launching some some competitor, but I would Spotify's in kind of a tough spot if you think about it. If they what what what would what would all the biggest artists on on Spotify
think of Spotify coming out with an AI tool that is competing for listening time with those artists. So it's like
It's they're kind of in a position where
Uh, Spotify can't jump into this without infuriating
A lot of the artists on the platform. So I I think it's possible that Sunno could eat into the
Listening time.
Uh
Spotify. But it's hard to imagine a world where I subscribe to
Soon and I don't
Subscribe to the case. Similar to Sora and Instagram reels or VO3 from Google and YouTube Shorts. Like
People will be scrolling these feeds. They m most people don't want any AI. Some people are okay with just like the best AI. And so they want one out of a hundred reels to be actually great AI, funny, inspired. And people on Spotify will want to listen to the hits and the songs that everyone knows, and then they might want to listen to that one.
break out AI generated song, but it's just gonna take one minute for whoever creates that banger on Sunno to export it, upload it to Spotify, and Spotify will be able to instantly monetize it. So I wouldn't see it as like a major threat.
To Spotify.
There's also some interesting like downside protection here that
It just if you f if you think about Suno two and a half billion
Who could possibly acquire them if they don't make it to escape velocity and like Spotify has the market cap, but also
Amazon could put in Amazon Echoes, it could be an Apple thing, it could be a a Google thing, it could be an OpenAI thing. Like there's so many other companies that have the market cap and scale to just
pick this up and make it a good outcome for it. The other the other thing is I know the industry, like the traditional music industry is using Suno, but they don't want to talk about it'cause it's still controversial.
I heard uh I heard from a friend that uh their friend
was a backup vocalist for different artists so like a studio
uh vocalists they their job would be to go into the somebody would write a song, their job would be to go into the studio
and sing the song and then that that sample would be taken around to artists that would p effectively like bid on it. And so the vocalist would like sing it in the style of one artist, sing it in the style of another artist to give people a feel for it.
And they said that that person's revenue went from
uh, you know, humming along for the last, you know, twenty years and to like effectively to zero.
Uh because you can now just generate any
You take the lyrics, you generate it in the style of any artist.
And so
The challenge for for that individual in their career is nobody people that don't hire back up vo a back up like a a back up guitarist.
can go and tour with a band, right? Because people are there to see like the front man or whatever, but a backup vocalist, there's not really like touring demand because imagine you get a ticket to your
Favorite artists and then there's just like
Someone else singing, you're like
Not really getting getting your getting your money's worth. So
Certain like already
Disrupting uh certain corners of the internet. And I think that
Part of what's holding Suno back right now.
It's just that the main artists will not talk about it'cause they know they're gonna get blowback. But
That'll eventually.
Interesting. You guys wanna do it? Yeah. Let's move on to TrueMed.
'Cause I think it relates to hone health, interestingly. We have a couple other hard tech stuff, but TruMed is uh
FinTech Company founded by Justin Mayers. I think we all know him. Uh I think we all have uh
Well, I don't want to speak for you guys, but he's in the man crush category. He's got the killer. Chad. So TruMed adds a compliant pay with HSA health health savings account or FSA button to online checkouts.
By handling eligibility through embedded telehealth. So uh when you go to whether it's peptides that are gonna be popular or eight sleeps or supplements or whatever you're doing to improve your health, if you're gonna do it online, there's an there's an economic advantage of tax savings from pay for it with
pre-tax dollars through your HSA or FSA. And so TruMed is this like
layer on all of that. So you don't have as much like individual trend risk like oh is protein more popular than creatine this this month or this year. Like as long as health continues to be a trend, you're sort of like the right to do it. Exactly. Like they're gonna be
Taking a cut of a huge amount of the volume going towards
Yeah. I started a company called Aurora.
with uh my friends Brian and Charlie and and we're we're a happy true Med customer. TrueMed has a very meaningful take rate, a bigger take rate than a traditional kind of payment provider.
Uh but it's a great trade because you're able to
uh sell incremental product because people are able to buy it in a tax advantage way. And I'm just like an incredibly um
firm believer in the entire mission of the company. I think that we know we know that
Running.
uh is going to increase your health span, increase your lifespan. You should be able to
let people purchase products like this uh as a form of as a form of uh preventative treatment. So
Uh incredible founder, like very, very strong tailwinds.
and uh great experience as a as a customer.
What's your company, Jory?
Rora R O R A dot com. Is that the water?
Yeah.
So Huberman, uh Andrew Huberman's uh kind of uh uh been a uh early partner there, which is which is awesome. And that that was?
Yeah, so I I stumbled into
uh kind of the kind of water crisis years ago.
at this point and started looking at uh
started looking at all the solutions in the category and and kind of ultimately felt like there needed to be kind of like a Dyson type uh brand in the category a brand that was like incredibly focused on
uh R and D and making products in a variety of of different um
Form factors'cause you're constantly interacting with water in your day to day life, whether it's in your
Shower, bath, drinking water, whole home filters, et cetera. And
Um yeah, the market is uh
Was was uh
Quite exciting. It was like something I was personally motivated by because I've my um
My son had uh kept getting eczema. I had like a six month old getting eczema and I was like trying to track down
uh where like ha why it was happening and it ultimately was like tap water baths.
That we clocked and so like ab solving that and then realizing there was an opportunity and and partnered with uh Charlie and and Brian too.
Bring it to life and they've absolutely crushed it.
Are you sort of Joy the um you know, I've I follow you online, I've I've followed your work for years before I think even
party round.
Um are you
The design.
of the two, or the design guy of the two,'cause you seem like you've uh you've had an eye for aesthetics like for a while.
Yeah, I would I would I would generally say so. I mean John John has great taste and and instinct around this stuff, but I've uh
I've just loved like advertising, marketing, product design. I've been uh obsessed with it since I was
Since I was a boy, basically. I was super into like
Uh skateboarding and surfing and snowboarding growing up and so I I I had this sort of like
I I was trying to figure out from a very young age, like
why there was like a snowboard available for a hundred dollars, but I really wanted the one that was eight hundred dollars. And so kind of working backwards from that and understanding um
design and and uh and brand and advertising and all these things. And so bringing that in I mean that's uh
The success of T V PN is due in part to
our obsession with
with brand, which is I think something that um
Podcast historically would think about okay, let's design our cover arc.
That was the first thing Sean told me when we launched Technology Brothers, the original podcast. I was like
You you sent me a really nice message. You were like, I think this is gonna work. I think this is the thing, you gotta go full time on this, do it, do it. And I was like, Yeah, like it seems like the numbers are pretty good. I was being very wonky and you're like, No, no, no, no, like this is a brand.
that like like you've actually broken through and created something that feels it has feeling around it like brand. I was like, Yeah, that's like a lot that's almost all Jordi. Um I helped as much as I could with it, but just the idea to actually create this world and this brand we had a lot of fun with.
Yeah, and then the funny that the thing's addicting about media is you're doing like basically product development, but the feedback loops are so rapid. Like with Aurora, it's like we have this idea to build a water filter company, but then the R and D process was like eighteen months or something between like idea to actually shipping a product. Yeah.
And then with media, it's like idea to product like in like these really rapid, you know, hour long twenty four hour cycles.
And that's like something that I think we love'cause we'll be sitting here
Uh, you know, we'll be sitting there on a Friday
Uh and be like, Okay, We should have a stock ticker on the bottom of the same day. So
Are you guys disciplined with sticking within your brand parameters or sometimes like'cause that could be hard and require it does require
No, I think.
I think it I think it's gotta constantly be
It's gotta constantly be evolving and I mean look look back to like the the skate and surf and snowboard brands, like
Any brand that was just like stuck in their way and didn't kind of expand and evolve and
And reflect culture, like ultimately just didn't make it, right? These are brands that now you could go back and buy and like bring back.
Into the modern era.
Uh, but yeah, it it has to be flexible. I mean, the transition from being called technology brothers to T V PN was like a big moment for us.
A lot of people would have said like
Technology Brothers is a great brand. We had already kind of like saturated
uh acts at the time. So um
We were small, but but people knew about us and so we we knew that that was gonna be necessary to evolve into becoming the kind of media company that
that we want it to be, but yeah, I think you need a commitment to
evolving. And I think the internet
The internet allows you
Uh a lot of a lot of like the ideas that people have had around like brand and advertising were created in a world where you're doing like long term planning around like print and television marketing and catalogs and things like that.
And now with the internet you can just like iterate on
on ideas so rapidly and evolve your brand so rapidly and it's like
A few clicks to like fully update yourself and so
I think the
The only consistent thing for
our company is like the feeling that we're trying to
Create
kind of like what what we want people to feel when interacting with the brand. And I think that that has to that's awesome that has to stay consistent'cause like
That is that is the brand. It's not necessarily like
Whatever whatever logo.
Um
Whatever your logo is at a at any one given point.
Dude, that's great. You guys are Shall we get back to the list? Let's do it. But Sam, Sam, last thing I say my first my first ever company was was a skateboard company and this was like
This was like the pivotal moment for me at twelve years old. I realize I found
Somebody in the Midwest that would manufacture skateboard.
Decks for me. So that was like that wasn't my first million, but that was my first
Hundred dot making my first time making a hundred dollars from building a product.
Uh and uh that was such an insane moment. I was like, You'll make this and then I get to put my logo on it and sell it. Like this is the most
amazing thing ever. And so uh that was like my first
experience building any type of brand.
Uh was was J Man Designs. I still I still have I still have uh
I still have a board at in my home office and uh
I think that once once I realized like hey, you can just that was my moment of like you can just make things.
Like e everything you see in the world is a is a business.
Uh and uh there's no reason that you can't uh build it yourself.
We have to shred the gnar sometimes. I I I still skate.
Um Yeah, I've seen you are incredible at skating those videos. I realized I realized by like a teenager, I was like, This is a hobby that that destroys your body. So I switched to surfing. I can't believe you can still do that. It's uh every time I see that video, it's like insane. Anyway. Yeah. I I I still like to get after it. I wanna be a four year old man doing handrails still.
It's crazy.
What do you do with the money once you've already made it?
This is a question Sean and I ask our successful guests all the time. And the reason we ask it is because if you are successful, if you do have a little bit of money, information on how to spend or invest your money, it's actually really hard to come by.
And I know this because inside of Hampton, which is my community of founders, people ask this question all the time. People have made ten or fifty million dollars. How do you spend it? How do you invest it? And so to help solve this problem and answer this question, I actually interviewed eighty plus founders, guys like Scott Galloway, Alex Ramosi, Brian Johnson, people who are worth
fifty, a hundred, even billions of dollars. And we got them to reveal everything. So their net worth, how much they pay themselves, their monthly expenses, their portfolio, things like that. And we turned these eighty interviews into one document. And I don't think you can find this type of information literally anywhere on the internet. And it's completely free.
So if you want to see behind the net worth of people who are worth billions of dollars and their portfolios, their expenses, everything, you go to joinhampton.com slash reveal. Again.
joinhampton.com slash reveal. Check it out.

All right, all right. Should I do mine? You guys are gonna make fun of me. My my next one
Is
Self promotee. I love this. No, this is amazing. Oh my god,
I thought you might do this. I was gonna make fun of you, be like
But it just makes sense. Okay. So I picked HubSpot, but the reality is is there's probably thirty or fifty or a hundred companies that could go in this uh case here.
The SAS Pocalypse. What was that what we're calling it?
Yep.
Insane. Insane to me.
Um so Hub Spot, I think they peaked around nine hundred, eight hundred fifty dollars a share. Went down, I think the low recently was two hundred bucks.
I think that is insane.
Hub spot.
And again, sub this out with so many different companies. It's probably the same story.
How it's not just three billion dollars in revenue with a fourteen billion dollar market cap, okay? I think that is
Insane. They're projecting to do 3.7 billion in 26.
So you're buy a a uh subscription software company
that I don't think people are going to tear out of their of their business. Something like 3x revenue. Like everyone talks about um
Like all the nerds on Twitter, which I'm one of them, are talking about like
uh bu building their own CRMs. Maybe
Maybe the nerds are doing that, but a roofing company with twenty employees in Tennessee
They ain't gonna be doing it anytime soon.
And so I do think that there's a lot of um
I think this is overblown with them plus
Many companies. I think I saw Monday dot com, I think it was. Yeah. Uh there I think they do a
billion in revenue at a two billion dollar market cap, something like that. I I forget exactly. And I think that's insane. The bear case with some of these SaaS companies is I do think the seat model is a little bit insane because like, do you guys remember just the other day that SubSec article went live
Where it was basically a guy telling a story about how like AI is gonna be so good that people aren't gonna work and if they aren't gonna work, they're not gonna buy stuff. And so it does kinda like bade the question if like software companies do pay per
See?
If you have less employees, square just laid off
However many people, forty percent of their staff.
Whatever, like do they need to continue buying software at the same rate that they were because of the seat model? That's like the bear case, but
I just think the SAS apocalypse.
Totally overblown.

Uh yeah, I mean uh one one
Going back to this Sarah's Less concept, the amazing thing about hubspot equity is that it is uh
Liquid. Right. And so and so you you
Uh it's it's very real. There's a lot of companies in our in our industry where you might get
A massive grant, but you have no
You're you're fully locked up. And I think I think uh to the tune of like can you get the three, four, five acts? Well, if the narrative flips and people are like, Wait, actually like HubSpot has some real significant moat and that thing that we thought was gonna kill them isn't gonna kill them, well it just pops right back up.
And so that's sort of the option value I see. I would actually like more pressure from like
Like
Maybe startups that are n that are not doing the seed based model. They're doing more outcome based model, but a lot of those companies are just getting started and it's gonna be years until there's ever like some real disruptive pressure. So Yeah, m my general framework is that it's gonna even like
HubSpot will need to evolve
In a way that it hasn't since inception, just naturally.
And so we need great leadership.
I don't believe that SaaS is going away, but it's gonna require great leadership to help evolve and help the company like actually build a lot of momentum.
In this new era. So I'm with you. I don't think the
Local roofing company.
is gonna, you know, just be Vive Code and kind of maintain their own
Yeah. Stack, but
Leadership is going to have to like actually yeah, it's going from like
Hey, we can just compound
At this rate annually, forever. And like this is just easy easy mode, SAS that we saw. If they're gonna bake off with a company that has some really crazy agenti features and basically the CRM's cleaning itself up and adding stuff and lead scoring even better, then they're gonna need to invest a lot more. But
In general, very, very strong position to be in, system of record. What say you, Sean? You don't it doesn't even have to be HubSpot. It could be any it could be the dozens of companies. I've been looking at this. I mean I've I've been looking at it actually just as an investor to say like okay
Definitely seems like a overreaction. Um
You know, uh you know, Monish Pai came on the podcast and he said a great thing, which is that
Risk and uncertainty are two different words.
And most investors.
Uh don't understand that.
Mm-hmm.
And he was explaining how
The stock market responds to uncertainty.
More than it does to risk. And so if it if and which is what's happening right now, there's just uncertainty. And uncertainty is very different than saying
Um, something bad is actually gonna happen. It's just that we don't know what the future cash flows look like. We don't know what the future growth rates look like. So you get this discount just for uncertainty.
And uh so I've been looking at all these SaaS docs and I've been trying to decide like okay, Figma and you have Salesforce and you have HubSpot, you have like
All of these on sale.
And I'm like, do I wanna stock up while these are all on sale? Th I think these are pretty good companies here, but they have a they do have some level of uncertainty.
So I've I've definitely been looking at this. Like I I was joking, you know, groaning at your pick, but I actually think it's it's a pretty
Good pick, especially'cause the way John said it, like
You're gonna be liquid the whole time if you Sarah's list this company. You're gonna be working at like a well a company with twenty years of success under its belt.
You know, systems and all this good stuff. And then it's like at this all time low, basically, for for where it's at.
one thing you have to be aware of is like AI, there's not gonna be some announcement by the labs that's like hey guys, AI is actually reversed in progress and it's getting way worse. We think it's gonna be much worse in in the future.
And then the stock's gonna rock it up. It's like A the the AI's only gonna get more capable. There's gonna be new capabilities unlocked.
And so you have to be making this thesis with that in mind. And I think there's a way to do it, which is that
HubSpot serves an incredible amount of small businesses.
They're in a great position to actually deliver the value.
Of AI to all those people.
But that's what I'm saying. It's like it's it's all gonna come down to management and their ability to not just build a story around
AI as a tailwind for the business, but actually show that like
We are delivering the power of AI to our customer base and they're giving us more money.
Every single month than they were the last month.
I in your bull case, Sam, I think you wrote
AI features still suck.
Which is a funny bull case, but it's true. Uh I think there's been a few companies like this, like Intercom.
Zen desk.
Well, they added AI to their existing thing and they're like, Oh yeah, our I think Zendesk was at two hundred million or something in ARR off of their AI feature. Intercom is over a hundred million on their AI feature. Intercom's been around forever with customer support. And you would think, Oh, they're gonna get disrupted by AI.
And they're like, Well actually the harder part is getting all these customer relationships is
It's actually much easier.
To integrate an AI feature than it is to go get
Hundred thousand small businesses to trust you and use you and integrate you. Yep. And um so the question is like can they do that? If they do that, then the narrative is not just like, oh, they're not.
They're not getting disrupted, but actually Oh my God, look at all this extra growth they're getting because they have these features. The thesis that I have been buying into for the past two or three years since AI got really popular was there are gonna be a lot of new entrants.
But the vast majority I think Jordy Jordy or one of you guys made this joke, but it's not a joke.
the vast majority of value creation is going to be by big companies just getting bigger.
I just think that it's the the it's it's it's much easier for a sales force
Two
Get more efficient.
and launch new features than it is a new company. Or at least picking those new companies.
Very hard.
But like picking a company that works already and it's gonna get just a little bit better, it just it makes so much more money.
Right.
On it.
All right, let's move to the next pick. Uh let's get one from the T P P N guys. What do we got?
We should do semi analysis. This is an interesting one.
So semi analysis.
Looks like a substack.
Like if you go to the website, it might even be hosted on Substack. They have a website.
Uh they break down semiconductor and AI infrastructure build outs. They have a model for how data centers are progressing, how much it costs to inference different AI models, how the different chips are doing. They'll do a review of the latest
Google TPU. They'll th they'll explain to you how the latest NVIDIA chip works.
They're doing it's a great business because
Oh, you have
Wire cutter. It's like a it's it's like a it's like a public game. But wire cutter for the richest people in the world because they run
Trillion dollar companies. Yeah, institutions. Institutions. So hedge funds, banks, also the actual hyperscalers themselves. So if you're AMD, you want to know what NVIDIA is doing. If you're NVIDIA, you want to know what AMD is doing, and semi-analysis is gonna talk to everyone, do a ton of research, put together a whole bunch of data into a
cleanly organized spreadsheet that you can import into your valuation model for whether or not Microsoft is going to beat earnings. And so they sell those models. It's a publication or it's a hustle, dude. It's a publication.
You can subscribe to like at the newsletter. You can also buy models that are pre-built, like Excel models with data in them. And those are very expensive.
And then
Yes.

Sam, have you seen this guy Dylan Patel?
No.
This is great though. Never met an Indian guy named Dylan, but love it.
Love it. So he he is when he goes on podcasts, this guy is so knowledgeable about what's going on with GPUs. I don't have you ever seen the the Louis C bit where he talks about like
How he likes to somehow sometimes use the N word but in a positive way and he talks about like if he goes to a coffee shop and orders a a coffee and the guy just like fully like foams it and frosts it and like makes it perfect.

That N word made the shit out of my coffee. That's how I feel watching Dilla Patel talk about GPUs and infrastructure. He'll be talking about the new
Colossus thing and he knows.
The megawatts under the the flops and the what cables they're using. And he knows everything. He's like we got satellites watching the parking lots and we we figured out this is how bad they're scaling.
This guy knows.
He knows so much. It's incredible that how much this one person is know is knowledgeable about GPUs.
And is he writing all of this? It looks like an AI blog.
So it's uh so so they use AI imagery, but all the all the text is is written by their staff of analysts. So they have about fifty people working there. And on a particular deep dive, they might have five to six authors attached.
Dylan might write something, other folks might write something. Doug O'Laughlin's also over there. How much money are they making? Is this like a five million dollar company, fifty, five hundred? Like what what's going on with this? I would put it in tens of millions, but this is the interesting like bull case is that
Right now they have
Like a very respected
analysis group, but they're also launching a fund, allegedly according to the the information, to invest in both semiconductor stocks and startups. And they're already doing angel investing. And then also they're gonna do credit ratings. And so the real model to think about this, the comp is Moody's. So if you're familiar with Moody's they do credit ratings.
And Moody's got started during the railroad build out because the the the railroad build out was so capitally capital intensive that there was a huge there was a huge secondary market for like, okay, is this person that's gonna build this railroad from h from Chicago to Atlanta like are they good for it? Do they have the money?
And so Moody's is now an eighty billion dollar business.
And I and if you look at the stock, like it Moody's has not moved during the sell off, like it's doing fine. And yes, this is very indexed to the AI boom, but the the actual business can be very, very stable, very high margin, and very big, like much bigger than people think when they think of just like publishing analysis.
This one's
This is the best one.
This is the best fine. This is super cool.
Yeah, one of our one of our teammates, his brother just got a job here and John and I
We're so excited for him. Yeah. Cause if you wanna if you're if you're s excited about uh if you're excited about AI and you're not
Like a researcher or a product designer, a product manager, or a founder, but you wanna be at the center
Of the action and actually understand what's happening. This is a fantastic. It looks like the founder lives in S up. Is it like an in-real life uh they have a uh West Coast and uh East Coast. Yeah, but it's a lot of it's a lot of time with like uh hedge funds and banks and managers and
Uh and also Dylan Patel is is very young. I believe he's in his twenties.
And so I I but like your your your your description of his, you know, encyclopedic knowledge of the semiconductor industry is correct. And I think if you just look at what that compounds like over two decades, I think you're gonna you're you're already seeing one of the most important voices in the most important industry, but it just compounds.
Have you guys ever read this book called How to Get Rich?
It's by an author called uh Felix Dennis. Felix Dennis, you guys have.
The magazine guy. You you should google Felix Dennis. So Felix Dennis, he was that kind he was like a combination of Richard Branson and Mick Jagger. He was kind of vulgar.
Uh he had this like British aristocrat vibe. He was really funny. He's very funny.
He died from cancer, and he used to joke that he he was he
was a crackhead. Like he was literally a cocaine and crack addict and he spent a lot of his money doing it and he wrote about it. He was
But he's like funny, he wrote about it. Anyway.
He got rich because he created this thing called Dennis Publications. And Dennis Publications was a computer magazine started in the late seventies.
early eighties and it made him a fortune. When he passed away, he was probably worth eight or nine hundred million dollars. And this is like in oh eight, two thousand eight.
Um so it was very very wealthy.
And there's like been like ten different guys. There's a guy named Pat McGovern who was uh a multi billionaire because of computer magazines in the nineteen nineties. There's Ziff Davis, if you guys heard of that, Bill Ziff.
Um, there's been so many of these. And what you were explaining right now by uh what Dylan Patella does, it's this exact same B to B publication in a technology boom.
owning a very small niche and just kicking ass and doing the same playbook of research.
Media events.
And it has created many billionaires. Yeah, one one way to look at uh semi analysis is like what they're doing to like sell side research firms, which is like, Hey, wait.
Like you're a sub stack. You can't do you can't do like advanced research on semis, you know, or you can't like compete with us. You guys are just the aesthetics of like a Goldman Sachs equity research or Morgan Stanley report, but the data's just as good, if not better.
And and and with T V PN it's like wait, you guys aren't you don't you don't have a cable network, like you like you you you guys can't interview this person on the day that they're IPOing and it's like you can just you can just do things.
This is the It's the same thing. We have I as someone I'm a a a little bit of a media historian nerd. It's the same story over and over and over again. And this is a great find. Sean, you wanna bring us home? What do you got?
All right.
I got one for you guys.
Um
This is a name a lot of people know, but I hadn't really put too much thought into it. So Harvey.
Harvey is basically very simple. It's uh
AI lawyer. Um it's
AI software for law firms sp more specifically.
And I think right now they've they've just been I mean, they've raising rounds to like, you know, if I did this episode six months ago, it would have been like oh they're uh whatever, two billion dollar company, five billion. Now they're an eight billion dollar company.
So I might get I might be getting priced out here as it's as it goes.
But I do love the space. So they're about two hundred million in revenue off of just like a thousand customers.
I think like half of the like top hundred law firms in America are using them in some some capacity.
And um
I was just kinda again, I like to do kind of bottoms up math to to make up make my own case for these things.
So I think in the US there's about
Half a million law firms.
That's just in the US.
And right now Harvey's average contract value is like a hundred and ninety thousand, which means they're basically getting paid like they're a lawyer.
Who works at the firm. And um
And so you know, I don't I don't think that will be be there for you know smaller law firms. I think there will be you know obviously be a lower price point.
But just in general.
A
Uh l uh legal work is very like a perfect candidate for AI work, right? Because it's mostly text documents. It's mostly writing and reading and summarizing.
And then there's all these like really bespoke workflows.
that a law firm needs. There's compliance, there's security, there's validation, there's all these like
things that you gotta build that's like for a law firm versus like would a lawyer rather just upload into chat GPT?
I don't think so. I think there's actually gonna
be like purpose built tools for for law firms.
So Harvey's one, Lagora's another, they're both companies in the same exact space kind of competing for this.
And um
I think the cool part about this is that if you can
add leverage into the legal system.
You uh you know that that'll kinda transform the economics of how these law firms work. Law law firms work, right? Because they currently they bill there's billable hours.
You put more bodies, there's sort of this incentive to spend more time on something.
I think that's gonna change. I think uh, you know, more and more law firms are gonna use this and realize like we don't need to have as many people to be able to do the same amount of work.
And I think their billing model's gonna change. But anyways, I think I think Harvey is a perfect example of like
As AI happen as AI happens right now, there's gonna be these winners.
For the dec Oh remember all those companies that got started when they I happened? Like yeah, there's the big ones, OpenAI and Anthropic and others.
And then I think there's gonna be these like vertical ones and uh to me the legal one is like a clear cut.
Obvious in your face, vertical one, that will be
If you do the math, by the way of like
You know.
Every law firm's gonna use AI. There's I don't think there's gonna be any law firms that are not using AI.
Depending on how much market share you think they're gonna capture, you sort of multiply that times a hundred thousand dollars per firm.
And you very quickly get into the uh tens of billions in revenue uh available to them. Yeah, the the thesis for Harvey has there there hasn't been a lot of big outcomes of just building software for lawyers.
So when
Investors have backed Harvey it's been a
general thesis that they're going to
capture some of the current like labor spend, right? Which is which is a much, much bigger market than enterprise software. I had a
I've got a friend who
uh is at a one of the big law firms. He got an early demo of Harvey when I first talked to him about it. He was like, Oh, it's like
It's cool.
And then a year later, somewhere in like uh early Q four of last year
His like eyes were like wide open and he's like I I'm I'm like it it's it's the real real deal now. So
They've made a lot of progress. The the product gets better.
As the models get better, the question is like how much
Do the labs actually care to
build out the kind of more enterprise functionality that that Harvey's already built out.
Um and and so there'll there'll naturally be some competition there over time, but
Uh, we had John
We had John Quinn from Quinn Emanuel on on our show today.
The most feared lawyer in the world.
Uh really really cool guy. You guys would have a fun conversation with him.
Yeah.
And uh
Yeah.
Oh he's he's a he's a sweet. Um
But but not the kind you'd want on your on your bad side. But I asked him so so AI's really good at generating uh
legal docs already. It might make some errors, but it can make them really fast. I was like, Do you think we'll potentially have a hundred X more litigation? And he was like
Yeah, possibly, right. But he also said that that's kind of like the the bull case for lawyers still ha being at full employment is like
We yeah, you might a lawyer might be way more effective, but there could just be way more cases. So that would be kind of a very American outcome.
It's like w what's that story like in India where they were like there's too many pythons and they put a bounty like if you bring us a dead python, you get like you know, whatever.
And then the Python population boomed because people just started breeding pythons. Yep. That's basically what you're saying is gonna happen. We're just gonna breed more of this like useless litigation. Love it. Well, this already happened in legal. There was a piece of software that would help lawyers write down their billable hours, and it would sort of pad it out. And then so there was software on the client side.
That would automatically scan it and say, That's not work I'm paying for. Get that out of there. Get that out of there. And it became like bot on bot war. Very fun. Did you guys see the episode we did with John Morgan?
No. Oh, from Morgan to Morgan?
Yeah, so we had John Morgan on. So for the listener, uh Jordy, I don't know if you saw would see his I don't know if he's in California or not. I've seen John Morgan. I think it might be the largest
uh type of his law firm. What is he? He is a uh injury law. Yeah, I think he's gonna be a commercials everywhere. And he comes off like a sweet he he's older, he's in his seventies. He almost comes off like a grandpa, like you want to trust him.
Uh so he comes off like a very like
You know, PC soft guy.
But you know, whatever, he's a lawyer. So he he we had him on the pod
I swear to God.
The very first sentence that he says to us.
I say to him
Uh, John, I hear that you own a museum on crime and punishment. That's really unique.
Verbatim. Oh, that thing.
That thing.
Prince.
That's the
First line, I swear to God that he said to us. He owns an amusement
Park business.
And he owns seven
museums called uh the Alcatraz of the East, I think he calls it. And uh We were like, how do you have time to do this? You have a five billion dollar law firm. And he was like I don't hunt deer, I hunt money.
This guy's incredible. That's wild. I'm from John Morgan. It was it was one of the craest interviews I think that we've ever done. It was the most different.
of the commercial versus the reality was like way different. There's a number of Harveys for personal injury, people that are making software specifically to qualify
These types of cases and uh will naturally be controversial'cause some people
Don't like the whole the whole category, but um
Uh that's just an area there's gonna be like vertical Harveys. Terrible. Just send me your deck. I just gotta take a look. I can't believe you guys are doing that, but just hand it over. Uh we got one more for you guys that I uh I think you'll that I think you'll like uh have you guys heard of send cut send?
No. What is that? What is that? Okay. So
fun name for a pretty serious they let engineers upload CAD files and quickly parts made using software automation to make quoting and production fast and frictionless.
Can you done it down a little bit?
What's it going to do? Yeah, yeah, you send in like a like a three D file that says I want uh you know a cube milled out of aluminum and it's gotta have a cylinder. Yeah. So you let's say you wanna design your own pair of trucks. Yeah, your own truck. You designed the trucks on a computer.
And then you take this file and you send it to them.
They cut it to you. You send them the file, they cut it up, they cut up the metal, they send it back to you.
So this one's cool because it's it's fully aligned with like everything you hear about reindustrialization. Yep.
They kind of
Things that America used to do but forgot how to do that we we ship these
capabilities overseas, but
Send Cut Send is a bootstrap company. The founder Jim has been on our show.
Scaled over a hundred million in annualized revenue.
Uh you know, completely independently and have
thousands and thousands of of happy customers.
uh all over the US doing something that again
Uh you would uh you know, people talk about the
Why entrepreneurs end up manufacturing in Asia.
One reason is because of of uh cost, but another thing is just like speed.
Like the y you know, every every person that's manufactured something here will tell you I reached out to this shop.
I asked them to make a part. They didn't get back to me for a week. When they got back to me they said they could do it.
In a in a in two months.
And so send cut send is really focused on uh speed and ease of use and uh they've scaled up uh organically. And the founder Jim is is just amazing. And so how'd you guys find this? This is not
This has not appear to be in your wheelhouse.
Well yeah, I uh we love we love having companies uh come on the show that don't, you know, every single day there's probably
half a million to a billion worth of
fundraising rounds that that get announced on T V PN.
But we love having founders on that that uh
That have never raised a dollar and I met him through uh Jason Carman.
Because
Jason Carman profiles a lot of hard tech companies and he is a supplier to a lot of those hard tech companies. So you can kind of think of him as like the index on all of those like somewhat more risky reindustrialization bats where is this drone company gonna work or is that drone company gonna work? Well, they're both gonna be buying parts from Sun Cut Sand.
Wow.
Great fine, man. This is a really cool one. He used to
So this guy owns uh uh I w when you described it, I was thinking like a more of a blue collar looking guy. He owned a landing page company.
And then
Went into the case.
hacker that decided to
Make stuff in the real world. Yeah. But he's very I mean, the the the bootstrap thing is I think important because like it's a capital intensive business, but he's been, you know, thinking about profitability, thinking about scalability from day one, set up a very healthy business that's
That's not gonna collapse at any point in time. We we joked with him when he was on our show, we said if if you were venture backed, you'd be valued at at five to ten billion. Yeah. You'd be getting some insane
Multiple, but he's happy to just build a a great business and compound every single year and
Uh, we hope that he scales up dramatically and enters a bunch of different
Verticals over time because
Lord knows we need it.
Dude, there's been so many times where Sean and I talked to someone and I'm like, uh
What am I doing podcasting? Like this sounds so much cooler. Do you do you guys do you guys feel like that all the time um by talking to all these amazing people?
I think most of the people we talk to we know we have no business being in their business. Yeah.
And so I feel like we're lucky with that.
Uh, like I wouldn't want to compete with like Peter Rahal in selling protein bars, even though I could go make a protein bar, right? Yeah. I think I'm missing that.
common sense'cause every time I talk to these guys, I'm like, we're so similar, me and you. I was like, I shouldn't be just doing what you're doing. This is great. And I somehow think I had like all of those. Half the interview, Sean like acts like I'm interviewing him. He gets on Sean's like, You know, look, Sam, guys like us, we're just here to like do amazing things and like build great products. And he'll sign off and say thank
Thanks, Sam. I do like the bootstrap side because
Oh, I mean one of the things with Sarah's list is you don't wanna be taking a ton of dilution, right? Because even if the
The stock price is going up. You don't you don't want this company that's keeps requiring more and more capital, has a bigger prep stack, all that stuff. I had one on mine, but was uh I I we don't have to go into it too much, but it's Column Bank that's kinda like this. I don't know if you guys thought saw the story.
Yeah, came out just the other day. So the founder of Plaid.
Uh his new company called Colum. Yeah. Is basically like it's a FinTech company. So it's a bank. He actually bought a bank for I think sixty million dollars of his own money. And then he started this uh and he basically uses it as a uh uh the the underlying bank under Mercury, under Ramp, under Brex, under all these companies.
And so he uh and it I think they're doing this number's out of date. Two in twenty twenty six they're doing two hundred million in revenue.
He um he owns all of it. He never raised any money.
Wow.
It's like you said, it's an index. So it's an index into all the new fintech shit. Yeah. It's like great. If you think ramp's gonna keep growing and you think Mercury's gonna creep keep growing, well, guess what? Column will keep doing well.
And they're they're doing extremely well.
And here you got a founder who owns the whole thing. And so you you know, you go work there, you're not gonna take
Dilution the same way because it's a profitable company. That's awesome. Yeah, and the the they're they're competing with uh all the banking as a service providers because historically you'd have the FinTech, like a Neo Bank.
Like a Mercury and then there'd be like a banking as a service provider and then there would be the actual like
chartered bank underneath it.
And so column is like eating up the bottom two layers of the stack and saying, Hey, build the consumer facing
financial services company, but we'll handle
uh the you know all all the different you know the API layer down to the actual bank.
So the uh I'm just browsing. It looks so we started uh
Uh
I feel embarrassed. Platter plate. I know what it is.
Yeah, it's one of these words where I read, I never say
Colum was started
due to his experience building Plaid, right? Because Plaid is like the Rails uh allows, you know, is basically created in in large part helped create the the overall FinTe boom. And so that's a good example of like when you're picking these companies.
There's a there's there's like this
You know
In Silicon Valley, we all wanna believe that the founder with no experience can just come in and just
dominate the industry just based on, you know, sheer
uh will power
But sometimes just going to be a little bit more.
Going and and uh
Attaching yourself to uh a team led by somebody who has
Deep, deep, deep experience and
has vision that is grounded
Uh around
having worked in the industry for a long time is uh
Like sometimes you don't need to overthink it. Just like if you're gonna join a company, go work for somebody that
Has done it before at massive scale.
W what an unfair advantage. Not only do he see the problem, like you said, but
Uh
How many meetings can you get with fintech companies if you're like, Oh, by the way, I started Plaid, right? You get it you can get every single meeting. You walk in with incredible credibility.
And then you how you own the underlying bank.
And then
For for for whatever reason, I'm not a developer, but like for whatever reason, like having great easy to use APIs is like a really big competitive advantage.
That seems like every company should do,'cause it sounds like
handwriting, you know, it sounds like something so simple. It's like well the a well documented, well designed API.
But apparently it's a pretty big c competitive advantage when you go into a space that historically didn't have that.
And uh
You know, it's no surprise that a company like this is kicking ass.
Martha Boss, man. We gotta get him on. Um
Amazing person. Looks like he's only thirty five, thirty six years old.
Um
Hey.
The bros.
You guys are the best, man. Thank you so much for doing this. We're not I texted you when you changed the name to TBPN and I was like Oh no. Not gonna work. Technology Brothers, that's the one. Yep.
But y I was wrong. You you guys you guys made T V PN work in an incredible way. No, I mean it still is a mouthful, but uh online people just type it out and having four letter domain, four letter handles, like you can't. You know the other reason we did it is at that point we were shifting from just being the two of us talking
To doing gas.
And we wanted the aesthetics of being like a cable network because we wanted to go and get these like public company CEOs on. If you're trying to get a public company CEO, some of them
the really founder mode ones you just talk DM with text and to jump on. But a lot of them there's like layers of of uh people in the communications department
Uh that that you're kind of like needing to gain their trust.
And and so like
By having the optics of being like a network, even though we are just a podcast.
uh we were able to um
Yeah, end up getting a lot of those guests and and um
That's such a funny nuance.
Yeah.
The folks from T V PN have reached out. Exactly. Feels very different than You wanna come hang with the technology brothers? Exactly.
It's like uh it's just a made up name. It just sounded official. Um, thank you guys. This is awesome.
You're welcome anytime and we appreciate you.
Thanks for having me. We did their s we did their sign on. Maybe we should let them do our sign off. So we we we basically asked us, Is that it?
That's it. And then you say that's the pod. So can you give us a
We'll set you up.
Is that it? We done?
That's the pod.
I feel like I can root
Well I know.
But I want to
I put my all in it like my day's off On the roadless travel, never looking back
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