Your ears rang. We took notes. You're welcome.

Friday · 6 min read · Lightly edited by a human who definitely didn't listen at 2.5x speed (lie)

Good morning, capo. This week was about the safe and the bubble. On 20VC, Jerry Murdock dated the burst (October 26 to March 27, if the war keeps festering) and put half the neoclouds on a 36-month clock. Allison Ellsworth walked onto My First Million and explained how Poppi bought the Super Bowl five days out, off a remnant slot found at a TikTok dinner. David Senra, seven weeks running, told the story of Albert Lasker locking the advertising playbook in a safe for 20 years. Also, tokens that want to be a factory, not a priest. Let's go count someone else's money, especially the money sitting in the safe while the bubble dates itself.

20VC — "The AI Bubble WILL Burst" (listen)

1h+ → 90 seconds

Jerry Murdock, founder of Insight, here to put a date on it. The host restated the window Murdock had already given him: "If the Iran war continues to fester then you expect to see a correction and depending on the depth of the correction the AI bubble will burst between October the 26th and March 27." That is not a mood. That is a calendar.

Then the victim class. "If there is a dislocation, no one is better prepared to survive it than hyperscalers. Let's take Neoclouds. I think at least half of them go away within 36 months." The hyperscalers, in his telling, walk through it. The new clouds do not.

The object is fiber. "Back in the dotcom bubble, there was a lot of fiber that got laid in the ground and that fiber was always valuable, but the companies that laid the fiber and stuff, they all went bankrupt." Load it with debt, a dislocation hits, then the margin calls. The fiber stays in the ground. The equity does not.

Takeaway for operators: stop confusing the asset with the company that laid it. If your plan only works if credit stays cheap and the bubble never gets a date, you are the neocloud in this story. Pull the debt off the model and ask what still has value on March 27. Own that. Or don't own the rest.

My First Million — "$2B founder reveals the niches that can make you $$$" (listen)

1h+ → one idea you can steal

Allison Ellsworth, who sold Poppi for $2 billion (the host's number), opened with the least planned media buy in CPG. "First time we did a Super Bowl. Let me lay this down for you. We bought the Super Bowl 5 days before the Super Bowl." Most people buy a year ahead. Leftovers hit the remnant market. She found one at a dinner at a TikTok event. Someone said, "Yeah, I think one of my friends has one."

The brand started as Mother Beverage. Kitchen, apple cider vinegar, tummy problems, two years of farmers markets, Shark Tank, then a rebrand. They launched Poppi on March 3, 2020, first week of COVID. "That first year I think we did about 3 million in revenue and then the next year was 22.5 and then the big jump was from 50 to 200 million and then 500 plus to then be sold." Four and a half years to almost $550 million, her number. After the first Super Bowl they said the word soda 17 times in the ad. Awareness tripled overnight.

The line she offered as the whole method: "Looking back, I don't think if I knew what I knew now, I would have done it. And it's not knowing is just such a beautiful thing."

Takeaway for operators: do not buy the Super Bowl as a brand exercise. Buy it when you are already in every grocery store and someone else has leftover inventory. Keep a campaign in the drawer that could air tomorrow. The remnant market is a real market.

Founders — "How to Make Ads That Sell: Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins" (listen)

1h+ → three quotes and a vibe

Senra's seventh week running, and the object is a safe. Claude Hopkins writes Scientific Advertising, shows it to Albert Lasker, the man who made more money in advertising than anyone. Lasker, as Senra tells it, did not compliment the prose. "Absolutely not. You are not publishing this book. This is giving away all of our secrets." Then the kicker: "You have to wait until I'm done making all this money." Lasker put the book in a safe for 20 years. When he was done, Hopkins was allowed to publish.

The method is truth as a rare metal. John Powers, a copywriter Hopkins studied, took a clothing store that was going under and ran the ad: "We are bankrupt. We owe $125,000 more than we can pay. This announcement will bring our creditors down on our necks. But if you come and buy tomorrow, we shall have the money to meet them." People flocked. The store was saved. Truth was scarce enough to be a spectacle.

Hopkins on toothpaste, and on us: "People will do anything to cure a trouble, but little to prevent it." He advertised Pepsodent as beauty, not prevention, and made a fortune. The closer he earns: "Genius is the art of taking pains." The vibe is not inspiration. It is a playbook so good the boss locked it in a safe until the money was already extracted.

Invest Like the Best — "Ex-NVIDIA Engineer: Why AI Is About to Get 1000x Cheaper" (listen): Patrick's guest Neil opened with a job description. "My job is to make the tokens as cheap as humanly possible." The industry's mistake, in his telling: "We still treat the agent as a person that is expensive to consult and you should ask them when you have a hard question. That's not the way to think about intelligence." His company is a token factory. "Whenever you make something 10 times cheaper, it's a new product category and we aspire to do that for tokens." Stop consulting the model. Run it like a plant.

All-In — "Dario Defends Himself" (listen): The table spent the open quoting Dario's essay, not the Senate. Dario, as the host read him: "By far the most accurate criticism of AI companies, including Anthropic, is that we haven't yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us." The line the table flagged: "The thing that will work is actually curing cancer, not glitzy marketing." Later, one host on why the wrapper now matters more than the leaderboard: "When you take a closed source model, it does really well on a benchmark. When you wrap it in its own harness, it decays in capability." His claim, not ours. The thing that will work is the result. The marketing is the bubble.

Prof G — "Go Woke, Go Broke? Texas Runs on Renewables Now" (listen): Galloway, at SXSW, got shown an app for the Texas grid. "At that moment, 60% of the electricity being consumed in Texas was being supplied by wind power. And then 18% was solar. So, 3/4 of the electricity... was coming from renewables. And this is in a state not known to be woke." His guest, on the price path: "The price of solar power has fallen by more than 90%, batteries by more than 90%, wind by 60 or 70% and they're now at the margin cost competitive or undercutting the cost of fossil fuels." The culture-war slogan is doing no work here. The cheap electron is.

What got airtime this week, by the safe and the bubble:

The fiber stays valuable. The companies that laid it go bankrupt. We remain long the remnant Super Bowl and the book somebody was smart enough to lock up.

If you only listen to one episode this week, make it the 20VC Murdock tape. A dated window, a named victim class, and the fiber lesson.

If you only have 20 minutes, Allison Ellsworth on My First Million. You will walk away knowing what five days' notice sounds like.

Senra has now surfaced seven weeks in a row. Thiel, the merchant bankers, Nolan, Plank, Shannon, Dylan, and now Hopkins. He is no longer a guest on the calendar. He is a cryptid, and we would not have it any other way.

Forward this to a founder sitting on a playbook they are afraid to publish. Or don't. We're a newsletter, not a guilt trip. (Okay, a little guilt trip.)

— The Capo 🎙️🤌

Made with coffee, too many podcast apps, and the firm belief that nobody has time to listen to 15 hours of content per week. That's our job now.