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Jensen reveals he first met the Founder of TSMC by cold calling their number off Yellow Pages
"I heard about this company in Taiwan, TSMC and UMC at the time. They were of course quite poor companies themselves, and they were barely making it."
"TSMC was probably about $300 million, something like that. It's a tiny little company. I heard about Morris Chang. And so I tried to call their US office."
"Back in the old days there were yellow pages. I looked it up, TSMC. There's a number there. I called their number and it's a recording. I left my name and my number and said a few things about NVIDIA: we're a new startup company building computer graphics chips. I called several times. Nobody called me back."
"And so I finally wrote a letter to Morris Chang. Didn't hear anything for a long time, and then one day it was 6 o'clock or something, this person called and said 'this is Morris Chang from TSMC.'"
"And meanwhile, everybody outside my office was playing video games and they're all laughing and screaming. 'Hey shut up! It's Morris!' I was so happy that the founder would actually call us back, because hey, maybe we won't have to die."
"And so we talked and he invited me to Taiwan. I came back to Taiwan, and that was the start of everything. Not just that partnership, but just the whole industry."
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Steven Bartlett says The Diary of a CEO is projected to make $60 million this year
"The forecast for our broader media company this year is approximately $90 million."
"Next year, that goes to $160 million from a holding company perspective."
"It's a wide range of things, I run an investment fund. I have products that we sell, that we own and manufacture. We have brand partnerships."
"We have subscription revenue as well, several of our platforms have a subscription offering. We do events around our brand as well."
"There are more that are available but those are the main revenue drivers for most creative businesses."
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dnap retweeted
our stream today in 45 minutes
2:21 the Black Monday that never came
9:19 Ocean's 11 for Pokémon cards
17:36 PSA's fatal flaw
22:00 NFTs were just early
30:09 old GPUs are worth 3x more now
35:01 gacha is bad for the world
38:17 why onion futures are banned
43:31 trying Korean fake delivery apps
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Jim Lanzone reveals what it was really like as CEO of Tinder: "almost 10% of all marriages in the US were started on Tinder"
"Almost 50% of all marriages were started online 50% of all marriages were started online, and Tinder was 25% of online."
"It was always perceived by others to be like a hookup app or whatever, but that is not how the team internally viewed it."
"I loved the fact that Tinder from the outside was viewed one way, but if you were on the inside, you've never met a team of people more passionate about the mission of helping people find their person."
"And I never would have left, it's the only time I've ever left a job. Everywhere else I stayed for a long time."
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NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
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Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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David Sacks says Anthropic’s AI powered worms FUD is not a real threat
"There is no such thing as AI-powered worms right now. It does not exist. They are basically trying to create an experiment where they prove that it could exist."
"Well, guess what, there already are worms out there that infect IoT devices. They're not AI-powered, but hackers have written these worms that exploit locks or cameras."
"There was one in 2016 called Mirai. It scanned for default credentials and it built a massive DDoS botnet based on infecting IoT devices. These devices are very easy to infect because they've got open ports and people didn't change the base password. They can't be patched, right? So they are sitting ducks. So these worms already exist."
"But the argument that Anthropic is making is that somehow these worms are going to get worse because they're going to be AI-powered. What you wouldn't want to do is actually embed a model inside the payload of the worm, because that slows down the worm. The tokens get generated at 0.39 per second, it's very, very slow."
"So essentially what you're doing is you're embedding a weak model in the payload, and that would actually slow down the rate of infection. Maybe the worm is more adaptive, but the reality is it's slower and less efficient."
"And the thing that they don't really point out is this is going to be a relatively easy problem to fix. Where we're headed with IoT is you're going to have a brain device on your home network.
Jason: "You're going to just set your Grok bot or your Muse and say, 'Secure my network.' You're going to have some agent that's constantly checking your network for exploits."
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Ben Horowitz reveals bandwidth fell from $1,500 to $50 a megabit in two years after the dotcom bubble popped
"It can end up being a very dangerous arbitrage business where you can get upside down easily."
"You look at Loud Cloud just as an example, here's a simple thing that happened to us in 1999. Bandwidth was $1,500 a megabit. And you couldn't get it, it was very hard to get. And so you had to get a long-term contract, three years. By 2001 it was $50 a megabit. So if you were holding bandwidth, you were just dead."
"So that kind of thing is so out of the control of the entrepreneur. And so different than what we'd like to fund. That, you know, it just scared me to death."
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POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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Jason says Bill Gates is the perfect example of why CEOs should never retire and just keep working
"Instead of him being based and saying, 'F*ck you, I'm gonna build the greatest company in the world, I'm gonna keep building, I'm gonna stay CEO', he felt all that pressure from the antitrust and being the most hated man."
"He said, 'Oh, I gotta be loved. How am I gonna be loved? I get rid of Polio, I'll give all my money away, I'll do this Giving Pledge.'"
"The lesson here, folks, is don't quit your job. Just keep working, keep building sh*t. Once you quit your job, it gets in your f*cking head, and then you have too much time on your hands and you spiral."
"And then you're worried about the Pulitzer. You know who's not worried about the Pulitzer Prize? Elon. Steve Jobs is not worried about the Pulitzer. Satya is not worried about the Pulitzer. Zuck's not worried about winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Whatever it is, just keep working. It's enough already with the retirement."
David Sacks: "If you're worried about what your New York Times eulogy is gonna be, then you'll be controlled by those people. And they're the most crazy left wingers there are. So you're just gonna have to accept that."
Jason: "I mean, this is my advice to Bill Gates: come on the program and start another company. Ben Horowitz is here, all he does is build."
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POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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Ben Horowitz says Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies he’s ever seen on security
"The irony on these things is wild. Anthropic is one of the most negligent companies that we've ever seen in terms of their own security."
"They let Claude code, one of their crown jewels, just like walk out the door because they had such bad OPSEC."
"I'll tell you a funny story. So when we first got Opus 4.5, we were doing cybersecurity checks for the firm. So we had an agent basically set up a website for a pet store. And then we took another agent and said, 'Tell us if we can exploit that web store.' And it gave us all the exploits it could find. So Opus 4.5 wrote really buggy code. Great."
"And then we said, 'Oh, the SQL injection you found, is that actually exploitable?' And it goes, 'Let's pop it open.' And the agent using Opus 4.5 breaks into the website and steals all the [data], and we call Anthropic. And what they tell us is, 'You prompted it wrong.' That was their answer."
"So these guys are doing that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, they're coming up with theoretical scenarios about other people's software. That's bad. And so like, what the hell."
"On the distillation thing, you know, to build their model, they distilled the works of every author, every creative, every scientist for the last 2000 years. For them to be complaining about distillation, which, by the way, distilling a model is not even illegal. It's just a violation of the terms of service."
"It's just so much. And the fact that they get people to write things supporting these bananas, ridiculous, two-faced ideas. And the timing here is very suspicious."
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POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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Ben Horowitz says Bill Gates got involved with Epstein to try to win a Nobel Peace Prize
"He absolutely wants to be relevant. You know, it's funny, he's obviously very integral in the Epstein files."
"And one of the big things he was trying to get via the Epstein network was the Nobel Peace Prize or something, like a big award. So he's very, very kind of concerned about being in the spotlight, being on TV."
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POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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Ben Horowitz says OpenAI and Anthropic threaten every stock you own
"We've never had companies that have grown this fast, gotten this big. And so we've never asked that question before, at least not in my lifetime, does the world have enough money to finance these things? Which is a crazy question, but relevant."
"For sure, with respect to the Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs, my belief is those are going to be fine."
"Whatever you're holding in the equity markets, OpenAI and Anthropic are threats to that. There's almost nothing that you can hold in a portfolio that those two companies don't threaten. So I'm not worried at all about the demand for those IPOs."
Jason: "You have to own those because they threaten every single company in the world because they're selling intelligence broadly, and every company is based on intelligence. Therefore, it's that disruptive."
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POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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All-In discussion: Should Sam Altman get 4% of OpenAI, and should Elon get a share?
David Sacks: "I'll repeat what I said years ago, that when the company went from being a nonprofit to a for-profit, they should have done a make-whole. You go to Elon and you basically give him a share, because he put in the first $50 million or whatever."
"You give Sam a grant, you normalize things, normalize the management and governance of the company. And instead they did this weird hybrid NGO thing that created nothing but problems."
Chamath: "You got to think [Sam] has to get between 2% and 4% at this point. I think it's fair relative to the comps. On a total dollar tonnage basis, it's incredible. It's $20 to $40 billion at a trillion, and more from there. It seems like right-ish."
Jason: "What should he have done in terms of screwing Elon and the settlement there? Because [Ben], you're a big investor in all of Elon's companies. What was your advice to Sam?"
Ben Horowitz: "I wasn't in that conversation then. But I agree with David. I think it's always the right thing, if you're going to square it, you got to square it with the people, not just the entity."
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POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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Ben Horrowitz says AI is different from the dotcom bubble because this time there's a supply shortage, not a lack of demand
"This shortage is so bad, I was speaking with Andy Jassy who runs Amazon yesterday. And I said, 'yeah, we're out of everything until 2028'. He's like, 'Oh, it's beyond 2028. End of 2028, maybe. So everything else is sold out.'"
"So he has the advantage of that he's got supply in a great shortage, which is extremely different than the internet bubble. The internet bubble, we didn't have enough demand because we had to build the internet, people had to get broadband."
"You needed all this stuff, people had to get their browser app, etc. There weren't enough consumers on the internet to absorb all the bandwidth that had gotten built out."
"And they had a massive amount of debt, not unlike what we're building today, although not as big. But the lack of demand killed it. We don't really have a lack of demand in AI. So I think the dynamics will be different."
"I do think that for sure if you get into a pathological debt situation, that can wreck anybody. It's why, by the way, we're not invested in any of these neoclouds either, for that reason, because that whole thing scares me, having been through it."
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POD UP! 🚨
Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz) fills in for @friedberg!
-- CoreWeave's Tanks After Debt Selloff: Did the AI Trade Just Crack? $CRWV
-- AI Deflation and the Future of Software
-- Anthropic IPO: Red Flags, Valuation, How Much to Raise?
-- Psyop Corner with Sacks
-- Bill Gates the Doomer: What’s Behind His AI Warnings?
(0:00) Ben Horowitz fills in for Friedberg!
(2:18) CoreWeave's debt selloff: did the AI bubble just pop?
(31:14) AI's deflationary impact: decompiled software
(45:44) Anthropic's investor day gets mixed reactions
(1:03:45) Psyop Corner: Anthropic warns about self-replicating models on IoT devices
(1:22:19) Understanding Bill Gates the Doomer
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