Recent startup, tech, AI, crypto learnings: “The user is never wrong” — Larry Page

Here’s the last one.

The average return on a token that paid for media space on DexScreener was -50% over only a 24 hour period.
Heuristic: If someone is paying cash to make sure I see a token, it’s so they can dump on me if I’m stupid enough to pay attention.

Close to 3/4 of startups work fully remote — in Alliance DAO

Aggregations of opinion polls in the 1960s have shown approval of the moon landing was consistently lower than disapproval. One poll of astronomers showed a majority against the mission. Even President Kennedy’s own head of Science Advisory Committee – Jerome Wiesner – opposed a manned mission, releasing a critical report on the notion.
Popular opposition isn’t something you often hear about regarding the Apollo program. It is conveniently missing from America’s collective memory, in lieu of a tale of collective patriotic triumph. A narrative that pleases Democrats as an example of successful big public programs and Republicans, as a triumph of the capitalist west against the communist east.
47% said it was worth it a decade later, in 1979 and it would take 20 years for amnesia to set it and this number to reach 77% in 1989.

There are just 21 million #bitcoin after all… How scarce that number. There are something like 59 million millionaires in the world (not enough for all of them to hold even 0.36 BTC).

Josh Kopelman: VC is anti network fx. The more you invest the harder to help them

5 levels to AGI according to OpenAI:
1. Chatbots
2. Reasoners
3. Agents
4. Innovators
5. Organizations

Level 3 is when the AI models begin to develop the ability to create content or perform actions without human input, or at least at the general direction of humans. Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO has previously hinted that GPT-5 might be an agent-based AI system.

@feketegy
This is exactly my thought too, think of programming mainframes in FORTRAN or COBOL in the 70s then PCs with ASM and C in the 90s and now LLMs plugs into many languages giving context to code bases where there were none before.

The above figures are clear: There is almost no persistence in CEO performance. The observed number of CEOs in each category is indistinguishable from what we would expect if the process were entirely random

44% of Bitcoin nodes are currently at the chain tip (fully synced with the network), with an additional 48% synced within 5 blocks of the chain tip, resulting in an enormous 92.8% are synced within 5 blocks. Only 7.2% of nodes are more than 5 blocks behind.

While we kept plodding on the “pure dual-core”, Intel, still smarting from the x64 defeat just slapped two 1x cores together, did some smart interconnects, & marketed it as “dual core”. Joke at AMD was that Intel’s marketing budget was > our R&D (true fact). Customers ate it up.

We did launch a “true” dual core, but nobody cared. By then Intel’s “fake” dual core already had AR/PR love. We then started working on a “true” quad core, but AGAIN, Intel just slapped 2 dual cores together & called it a quad-core. How did we miss that playbook?!

Today ‘summarise this document’ is AI, and you need a cloud LLM that costs $20/month, but tomorrow the OS will do that for free. ‘AI is whatever doesn’t work yet.’

power is becoming the main constraint. US electricity production has barely grown in a decade
– the US could solve this with natural gas. we have abundant supply and could build out capacity fast (my note: i wonder if bitcoin miners can help this?)

algorithmic secrets are worth 10x+ more compute. we’re leaking these constantly
– model weights will be critical to protect too. stealing these could let others instantly catch up

Looking at the spending behaviour of long-term holders, it can be seen that although the spent volume by these players constitutes only 4%-8% of the total volume, the profits realized from this spending typically account for 30%-40% of cumulative profits realized over bull markets.

Every Wednesday morning, Amazon’s executive team gets together and goes through 400-500 metrics that represents the current state of Amazon’s various businesses. The meeting lasts 60 minutes, except for when it’s the holiday shopping season, in which case they sit together for 90 minutes. Amazon’s leadership meets for the Weekly Business Review every week, without fail, even when the CEO or CFO isn’t present. They’ve been doing this since the early 2000s.

The Amazon-style WBR is designed to answer three questions:
What did our customers experience last week?
How did our business do last week?
Are we on track to hit targets?

It is easy to trade social capital for financial capital. But while you can cloak yourself in blue-chip designers all you like to impress your fellow financiers, it is extremely hard to trade financial capital for social capital.
You’ve seen this with every washed-up celebrity you know: when the coolest people become rich, even they can’t remain cool.

Larry Page: the user is never wrong

Empower your employees to build their social presence.Tap into those audiences for key company announcements.Build a culture around this so that net new employees can replenish the distribution when people inevitably leave.

Reason Google took so long to build cloud service is because it was lower margin than ads. No internal incentives. Same reason Amazon did it so quickly — higher margin than retail, “your margin is my opportunity”

All this to say that I’ve shifted my thoughts from “crypto and web3 will absorb tradfi” to “crypto and web3 serve as the base layer for AI”
Web3 isn’t our internet… it will belong to the machines

Laffont / Coatue:
$100T in CPU / PC infra investment
Believes all this will be replaced by $100T or more in GPU infra investment — but quantum will be very small part of it

China has commenced operation of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor, for which China asserts it developed some 90 percent of the technology.
Overall, analysts assess that China likely stands 10 to 15 years ahead of the United States in its ability to deploy fourth-generation nuclear reactors at scale

1) Many international individuals decide to start their company in the US (for example Snowflake was founded by 3 French people but it is an American company) as there are fewer regulations (Europe is very complicated given different states have different laws)
2) Source of Capital: the US has an amazing venture capital environment with investors who can act quickly and are willing to lose capital. In Europe, raising capital is much harder and lengthy

In 5 years, it’ll seem bizarre that we ever allowed anyone to email or text or call us AND the norm was to at least think about replying to them. Being reachable 24/7 by anyone and for anything will have been a blip in time, an absurd anomaly in the long arc of the hyperconnected digital age.

This gave those labels a lot of power over Spotify, but not all the labels, just three of them. Universal, Warner and Sony, the Big Three, control more than 70% of all music recordings, and more than 60% of all music compositions. These three companies are remarkably inbred. Their execs routine hop from one to the other, and they regularly cross-license samples and other rights to each other.

As we pored over the code, we found that, although there were a few human women on the site, more than 11 million interactions logged in the database were between human men and female bots. And the men had to pay for every single message they sent. For most of their millions of users, Ashley Madison affairs were entirely a fantasy built out of threadbare chatbot pick-up lines like “how r u?” or “whats up?”

Value of information is the amount of surprise — information theory

Crypto’s trends from the ICO boom; to NFT summer; to socialFi, to memecoining, show me that people like to do their own research, get some sense of market advantage and then buy in size.

This past week we had one of the most bullish signals for the crypto industries with the SEC dropping its case against ConsenSys, alongside an imminent launch of the $ETH ETF. Despite this, $ETH has drawn down 12% from local highs, with majority of altcoins down anywhere from 10-50% in the past week when I first expressed this view.

Crypto-native positioning is more relevant for alts, where liquidity and thinner and % of participant that is crypto-native is higher. For $BTC and $ETH, the consideration is more PvE in nature vs PvP, and my believe are these two are still flag-bearers for the market, especially given the decimation in TOTAL3.

Podcast notes – Irving Azoff, Daniel Ek, and Tom Freston on the music industry

Panel is from 2014 (!)
Listened because I wanted to hear from Tom Freston

Irving Azoff

Live music has never been stronger

Recorded music as % of artist revenues has dropped from 30-40% to 5% in last 10 years

Daniel Ek – founded Spotify at 23, college dropout, rejected from Google job

Thought Napster was most amazing invention ever
Discovered so much music, but didn’t work for the artist

“Make something more convenient than piracy” and people will pay for it

Took 3.5 years to get the first licenses – lost his hair through the process (a joke)

Spotify 10M subs (vs Netflix 350M)
Music always had some form of free – unlike most tv/film
Seeing a lot of interesting global behavior – eg, turned on Turkey, saw bump in German subs because of the 4-5M Turkish people living in Germany

Spotify is a platform, not in business of direct to artists
Long successful partnerships with labels

Whenever an artist tours, their tracks always make Top 100 in that city

In Sweden, streaming took off first, and most valuable aspect Spotify provided was transparency, which gave everyone more data to better negotiate deals, for artists to understand what’s happening

Paid ~$1B that year (2014) for rights (to labels)

Listeners can follow artists – now artists have direct communication with fans

Streaming is biggest change since inception of recorded music

Tom Freston – led MTV for many years

Started MTV with no experience, no money, but a team that was passionate about music

Record industry notoriously resistant to change, resisted all new media formats including stereo

Once you get young artists, discover you can sell records, the record companies change their minds

Any enduring youth business always comes from outsiders – MTV, Vice

More music than ever, but doesn’t drive culture same way as 80s, 90s – tech culture seems to have replaced it

Used to think people would never watch sitcoms on phones – but that’s what the kids do now

Podcast notes – Bill Simmons (Grantland, Ringer) on Peter Kafka’s Recode Media

Guest: Bill Simmons
Host: Peter Kafka

Bill sold Ringer for $250M to Spotify just before pandemic
HBO helped a bit, but he was primary investor
Gimlet had sold for $200M a year earlier

When he launched Grantland in 2007, felt podcasting could be a big thing
ESPN didn’t recognize that, was a source of tension

For first few years, podcasting just felt like fun, was trying new things, taking chances
Podcasting as listening-on-demand
Started getting more fans on street saying “I love the podcast”
Random jogger with headphones pointed to him, “I’m listening to you”
Listening on commutes, at work, while exercising

Initially there wasn’t much competition – just Marc Maron – easier to get celebrities, was like a first date with guests
Now in 2022, all celebs have already been on podcasts, know what it is now
Guests are less interesting now – they’ve already been on many podcasts
Now it’s more about reactive content – about what’s going on in the world, analysis and commentary

Major change is speed at which people react and consume media

The Ringer – trying to figure out how it differs from Grantland – realized it was the speed of reaction, and coverage across multiple channels (blog, video, audio)

Rewatchables is their most successful podcast library – have done 250 movies now

Grantland was sports + pop culture, lots of people didn’t understand how they could combine

What do people care about? “We need to be there”

Netflix’s mistake – binge model doesn’t work for all shows – like Stranger Things (could have gotten 8 weeks of content and commentary, instead of 1 week)
Netflix has so few water cooler hits – would be great to stretch out the this for multiple weeks, give people time to digest each episode

2008, didn’t know repercussions for anything (for social media content) – now it’s just the price of having a platform

Third decade as a national media personality
Prefers when things are quiet, being ahead of curve, talking about stuff he’s really interested in

Spent a lot of time on Ringer film content
Didn’t like doing TV that much – like his former HBO show – podcasts have replaced that format
Players now have their own pods (eg, Draymond)

Last successful new Late Night show was James Corden
But think about how many successful new podcasts have launched in the same timeframe

Spotify built $Billion compound in LA
Adding more video content to audio now
Video very important to Spotify now

Son likes to watch YT clips of Bill’s podcast
Young people just staring at phone, have to win their attention in 2 seconds
Will next gen listen to podcasts? Kinda scary

Sabermetrics really hurt baseball – misses the narrative and story focus
eg, Jeter v Ichiro, do more eye tests, debate it all day, instead of just talking on stats

Football is fun because of the randomness – season to season, teams and individual players, high variance, easier to debate
Tougher with other sports

Went to Spotify in part because of the data on listening behaviors, content, can spot opportunities, eg, Derek Thompson (great writer) – wanted to work with him for awhile

Assessing talent for writing vs podcasting is different skillsets
Grantland had 9 out of 10 of the biggest podcasts at ESPN – value of cross-promo, a combined sensibility / package

Spotify helped with infrastructure, let them focus on what they’re good at, Spotify strong position to be audio leader
For first 2 years of joining Spotify, they were all remote and doing everything on Zoom
Similar vibe to when he joined ESPN, felt like they had momentum, were growing, market leadership, lots of potential (clarified that ESPN didn’t fire him, but didn’t renew his contract)

Runs global sports for Spotify, developing a comprehensive global strategy
Basketball, F1, Soccer – thinking about it globally, leveraging Spotify’s huge audience and tech and resources

Spotify video player will eventually have live content too
Can you watch Euro League championships on Spotify? Day 1 of Coachella?

Spotify’s only been in content seriously since 2018 – lots of progress in a short time

Still has a few years left on his Spotify deal

150 employees in his Ringer universe now
Returning to a normal office / working situation
Feels like Grantland in 2014 – cool checkpoint – getting inbound, momentum, opportunities

Dream podcast guest is David Letterman
Only other time he had nervous energy was Larry Bird (even more than Obama)

Podcast notes – Castos founder Craig Hewitt – host Rob Walling

Guest: Craig Hewitt – Castos founder (public and private podcast hosting tool, 13 employees)

Podcast stats are broken – different download numbers across different services

Both podcast analytics startups Chartable and Podtrac were recently acquired by Spotify
Spotify is a closed podcast ecosystem

Rob believes in competitive market, if open software is the best, it will win (eg, WordPress/Automattic)
Felt it was offensive when Spotify walled off their podcasts – “something that was once open is no longer”

“Open source creates community-based accountability”

Rob gets podcast data from Blueberry, Chartable, Castos

Why is podcast data hard?
-Castos benchmarks their analytics with Podtrac to make sure data is in range (~10% range)
-There’s a lot of bot traffic to remove
-Podcast analytics services only have visibility when the file is downloaded – can’t see how long they listen, how they interact with the file
-Spotify has that closed loop – takes file, distributes locally, have their own app, so 3rd party analytics can’t see Spotify user activity

20-40% podcast listening audience on Spotify – more international, more younger audience

Apple recently launched podcast analytics – helpful indicator but not very accurate

A lot of podcast apps are quite privacy focused – won’t share their user behavior / listening data back to publishers or analytics services

Podcasts will be built into all cars, planes – still quite early

Podcast notes: The Saga of Joe Rogan on NYT podcast

Rogan grew up working class
Very good at martial arts – 19, wins national tae kwon do championship
Moves to LA to pursue standup comedy
Big break – becomes host on Fear Factor
Then becomes commentator for MMA

MMA was growing quickly, and Joe becomes public face of MMA commentary
In 2003, starts recording chats with his friends
Built-in audience: Fear Factor, UFC, comedy nerds
Audience steadily grows
In 2009, moves to Ustream platform – and renames it The Joe Rogan Experience (play on Jimi Hendrix Experience)
In 2013, he starts recording and publishing clips to YouTube
This led to massive growth

Audience is largely men – “patron saint of certain kind of American masculinity”
Like hearing smart people talk about interesting stuff

NYT podcast is highly produced, fact checking, lots of prep
JRE is polar opposite, very long (up to 4 hours), very unedited
“Medium is the message” – wysiwyg
Dabbles in wide variety of topics: fitness, fighting, health, thinkers like DeGrasse Tyson, DMT and psychedelics

His manifesto: always keep learning, keep expanding horizons

Has proclivity for conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, hearing out more radical thinkers, like UFOs, Alex Jones
He may disagree, but he will let them talk – even if they can’t get mainstream media

His biggest view – proudly anti political correctness (anti cancel culture, anti liberal pieties) – really resonates with audience
“It’s ok to be a white man who watches people beat each other in UFC”

Singular figure – pro gay marriage, pro weed, believes in climate change
Not Republican or Democratic – just Joe Rogan view of world

By 2015 – 11M per episode
Viral clips that start to influence culture
Elon Musk episode – smokes joint on air, gets really personal, becomes instant meme – causes Tesla stock to drop

May 2020 – Spotify acquires it for $100M for exclusive distribution rights
People who listen to podcasts listen to more music too
Spotify wants to build exclusive library of podcast content
Deal does well – share price rises, subscriber numbers grow
Spotify surpasses Apple to become #1 podcast platform

Then comes the covid pandemic
Invites fringe guests that counter mainstream health authorities – lockdowns, masks
Joe got covid, treated with ivermectin, skeptical about covid vaccines
Interviews Dr. Robert Malone – medical pariah, darling of Republican Right, who believes hospitals are incentivized to get more covid patients, anti-vax
Interview got huge public blowback

Musician Neil Young was very offended – tells Spotify either me or Rogan –
Joni Mitchell too

Initially Spotify says it’s neutral platform, eg, has rappers with offensive lyrics
CEO Daniel Ek says it won’t de-platform, but will add warning labels, publish moderation guidelines

Rogan releases IG video – half apologizes, acknowledges his approach may need to change
Talks about more preparation, more fact checking, more mainstream guests

Then controversy escalates
India Arie takes music off Spotify, because old clip of Rogan saying N-word

Rogan releases another video – apologizes for using the N-word
Takes down ~70 old episodes

Spotify’s own employees also confront CEO
But Spotify doesn’t back down
Promise to allocate $100M to under repped minority content

Spotify is taking their own stand, but also Rogan matters financially to them (more than he matters to a platform like YouTube)
Rogan so far is cancel proof – saying un-woke things, isn’t afraid to offend people

How can Rogan, who has more podcast listeners than NYT, not be “mainstream media”?
Massively popular, extremely wealthy, yet positions himself as outsider punching up at establishment

Represents a new emerging mainstream – popular, contrarian voices like Rogan’s

Can Spotify give platform to this new contrarian mainstream, while still adhering to old mainstream?