The Ledger, every show

“I'm pretty sure the NFL is the largest single media business in the world. Not an aggregate diversified media business, but like, if you consider the league as a single property, then I think it is the largest individual single property in the world.”

“We interviewed Doug Leone who was, you know, one of the, I guess, two stewards ago of Sequoia, and he told us that after the dot-com crash for the Sequoia fund that was the dot-com bubble fund, every other venture firm out there, after the bubble popped, were …”

“He would have been better off buying the S&P Over that same time period. Including dividends over that same time period. The S and P 500 is up about 11% annually. So the famous Berkshire Hathaway Coca-Cola investment today is actually underperforming the marke…”

“You know, every single major leader in AI that you know of, no matter what company they are at, with the one exception of Jan LeCun at Facebook. He's the only one. Who, like, didn't come from Google.”

“Somebody put it to me in research that if you don't have a foundational frontier model, Or you don't have an AI chip, you might just be a commodity in the AI market, and Google is the only company that has both.”

“Gnome, though, immediately starts advocating to Google leadership. Hey, I think this is going to be so big, the transformer, that we should actually consider just throwing out the search index And the 10 blue links model and go all in on transforming all of Go…”

“So, Anthropic was working on what would become Claude, and rumors were out there, and people at OpenAI Got wind of like, oh, hey, Anthropic and Dario are working on a chat interface. We should probably do one too. And if we're gonna do one, we should probably …”

“So Steve Jobs threatens to sue Google over implementation of multi-touch gestures. And so, as a result, Android for several years doesn't have things like pinch to zoom or the sort of swipe operating system UI navigation gestures, and I'm pretty sure if you re…”

“The VA system was bid out in 2017. The latest announcement from the VA about this project is that it will be live at all VA sites by, this is a direct quote, as early as 20 31.”

“The BCCI has cornered resource access to the best talent in the world. Because they have all the money, and they have the Indian fans who care about watching the best Indian players, and they have essentially veto right over the best Indian players playing any…”

“Anyway, this I think is known at the time, one of the other board members of the BCCI who would soon become the chairman of the BCCI, a gentleman named N. Srinivasan, who also is an industrialist who owns the Indian Cements Company, He buys the Chennai Super K…”

“Winning the Super Bowl is actually like a net negative economic event for an NFL team.”

“And in theory, by the time it is, call it 30 years old, could be as big as the NFL.”

“Rumors are, these are rumors, but heard from multiple places, Mars has actually made Many billions of dollars of profit from commodity trading over the years.”

“IKEA does not have a direct competitor today in 2024. There is not a single other globally scaled furniture business in the world.”

“There are markets in the world today where I think Meta has run this test, where if you turn off ads, In the, you know, meta family of apps products, engagement in those products actually goes down, which is just, like, freaking wild.”

“Well, in 2013, Facebook acquired a small Israeli company called Onavo, and Onavo was exactly what you just said, Ben. A VPN, actually, I think it initially started as, like, a data compression tool, so if you were worried about your data plan, which was Really…”

“And Mark made the comment on stage with us that they've run the analysis. They think they could be twice as profitable in their Core media products if they were on their own platform.”

“This is the first time software has ever been sold. Other than the IBM accounting machinations to protect themselves from antitrust, which was just accounting, nobody had ever sold software before. This is the first time.”

“No other at scale investment firm period, and especially quant firm operates this way today with just one model.”

“Bob was the primary funder of Breitbart, And Cambridge Analytica, and one of the major financial backers of both the 2016 Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign in Great Britain.”

“So in 2001, right after he lost Gucci, Bernard quietly buys an initial stake in Hermes of 4.9%. Now I believe that was just under the threshold that they would have to disclose it under French securities regulations. And then, here's what they do that the Herm…”

“They are now essentially the official Nazi-sanctioned insulin provider for all of Nazi-occupied Europe. So, the German government basically directs Novo To massively expand production and supply insulate, you know, not only to Germany, but to France, to Poland…”

“Nike needed that first year of the Jordan deal to be a huge hit. So they stuffed the channel. They pushed so much product on retailers and through the futures program and whatnot that that's how they hit the hundred and twenty six million dollars in sales. The…”

“Ferdinand himself not just was a Nazi, but was a very close personal associate of Adolf Hitler. He was a member of the SS”

“So in 1978, Furman introduces the Porsche nine, 28 with the stated intention that this is going to eventually replace the nine, 11.”

“We haven't acquired TikTok, we're on YouTube Shorts, we post on Twitter, and like, None of that drives the needle for us. Like, we've had videos on TikTok get a couple million views, and we don't know if it translated to a single new subscriber.”

“The SEC allowed them to go out to 20 years that they could collapse into today revenue.”

“At 10:20 a.m., 10 minutes before the news comes out, Ken Lay's wife sells 500,000 shares of Enron stock that the Kenan whatever her name is, that the Lay Family Foundation held.”

“If you look at the very best People, the best GPs in venture over the past two decades, they all trade public stocks.”

“Literally almost all of these folks who are starting Benchmark, they get so angry that not only do they not invest in the fund, they start organizing against this young benchmark capital. They call up all of their peers, the other university endowments across …”

“It was also reported by the Washington Post after the IPO of eBay that Benchmark had also structured Equity-backed loans to Pierre and Jeff in the amount of 750,000 dollars each as a way to, like, prevent them essentially, give them an incentive not to take th…”

“The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity. Actually, within two months after launch, AWS would have already burned through the excess amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itsel…”

“That becomes EC two. It's that team in South Africa that builds EC two.”

“People are worried about with the Activision deal about whether Microsoft would make Activision's games exclusive on Xbox. I don't think they will.”

“Big Machine, the operating company, all the other masters of other artists, they have everything that stays with Ithaca Holdings. They sell only the Taylor masters to a private equity firm for about three hundred million dollars. So about the same price that t…”

“The Lion King musical has grossed over eleven billion dollars in total revenue in its run, which I think makes it the single highest grossing entertainment product in history, in any medium, film, music, TV, video games, other Broadway shows.”

“Pixar closes its first day of trading, At a one and a half billion dollar market cap, this is how big a hit Toy Story was and how much it was in the public consciousness. This is how Steve Jobs becomes a billionaire... He didn't make anywhere near that kind of…”

“It wasn't even by the late 19 thirties. It was 1934.”

“He is the Walt Disney who Has come up with a crazy new idea based on his obsessive hobby with model trains that the board of Disney Studios has basically rejected. And so he has gone full crackpot like Colonel Kurtz style and started his own separate company o…”

“So the legend that's out there that everybody believes is that this was a napkin sketch that Walt himself drew. No, it was actually created Buy a Disney Studio artist as an illustration for this Wall Street Journal piece.”

“The Lamborghini Urus, the Lamborghini SUV, that is the same platform as the Porsche Cayenne, which is the same platform as the Volkswagen Touareg. When you buy a Lamborghini Urus, you are buying a car that is essentially a Volkswagen Touareg.”

“Fiat paid either zero or almost zero in sort of equity value for Chrysler.”

“Nobody writes anything down, because Bernie never writes anything down, and when the dust finally gets settled, and many decades later, all of the books and stuff become public through a whole series of court cases, turns out Bernie's actually taking eight per…”

“Rather than you taking 30%, I'll pay you five million dollars a year, going up by one million every year, up to nine million at the end of this term, in exchange for your percentage of the TV.”

“So they sign a deal with Russia. And of course it's a deal with the state. You know, anytime you're negotiating with Russia, you're negotiating with the state. To construct a new two hundred and seventy million dollar F-one track around the Olympic Park. And p…”

“I think there's a related bull case of a champion or champion level female driver emerging in the coming years. It feels like that's. Gonna happen. Has to happen. Should happen.”

“And if you look at the data, US adults as a whole, 33% say the NFL is their favorite professional sports league. But if you look at Gen Z, only 23% of Gen Z say That the NFL is their favorite professional sport, so 10 points less than the broader population, a…”