The Ledger, every show

“They invented this Transformers paper, and everything they put out doesn't work. Like Notebook LM, the great one, like it's already dead, right? The project. So it's like they're trying so hard, but they can't do it.”

“Copilot, everybody was like, they're just ahead making all the money first because people, the problem is people are, they just have so much hard time trusting someone, right? And so they're reaping the benefit of being early, But nobody's using the product, r…”

“That's bullshit, right? I just, it's just, you have had some guests here that I love and respect, but they're like, Oh yeah, we're gonna get larger, you know, in five years, and I'm like, what? I just saw something, you know, somebody posted on Twitter, it's l…”

“If they do what Twitter did, if they reduce themselves to 20%, and build an amazing product, and are willing to break all their pricing models and revenues and change all of that, then they will survive.”

“Salesforce.”

“I think I want to challenge like Paul Graham says, do things that don't scale. I think that that's game over for that statement, right? I think now we only have to do things that scale.”

“Drift is the biggest failure in my life.”

“I would have a public company right now if I, if it wasn't for like all those carrots that I gave and candy bars and trophies.”

“Software that has been built in the past 2030 years had the assumption, it was built kind of like we build cars. We build a car all around, and we build the entire environment, so a human goes and drives the car. Right? It requires an operator. The future is n…”

“The cursors and all that stuff, like you can easily switch to like windsurf and you can switch to this and you can go back to copilot and like, so that revenue could disappear. This is a brand new phenomenon and we do not know how it plays out.”

“Cause at Drift I had 800 people, like 250 in the customer organization. That, that cannot happen again because it wasn't working, right? That, that number of people didn't necessarily solve the problem.”

“The code fits on a, like, a page on the screen.”

“I just try to manufacture adversity. That's all I can for them.”

“What I learned was that a four-hundred-thousand-person company just can't move as fast. Lou Gerstner was the CEO at the time and wrote a book called, like, Why Elephants Can Dance, right? And I don't think, I disagree with him. Elephants can't dance.”

“Right now at agency, I have no meetings with anybody, right? We're like 15 people. We have one meeting for the whole company, for the whole team. Show me what you did yesterday, show me what you're gonna do today. That's all we do in that meeting.”

“CEOs are making a big mistake right now. They're like, I talk to them and they're like, yes, this is what I want. I'm down. Elias, let's get agency in here right now. And then they pass me down to the next person and to the next person.”

“And so I don't, I tend to not hire like that many introvert engineers, right?”

“I think people are wasting their time trying to be all frugal or this. I want to focus my time on the customers, right? And my team and my people.”

“In reality, most people should know, like, within the first week or two, it's just, they just reject those signals.”

“By the way that I ran interview at HubSpot and Adrift, everybody, I would help, I have a panel of people interviewing, But I would always interview myself. I will do the informal, I will do the formal, I bring them in, and then I do the closing. But I let them…”

“If you stayed there for a long time, it's a red flag too.”

“The best time to our children is when we're younger, unless we have unlimited resources, right?”

“I convinced him to take VC money.”

“For myself, I'd rather build, man. It's so much easier, so much more fun.”

“I'm on the longer side. I think there's a lot of hype. This stuff, we're not we're not gonna, like, even in the industrial age and the revolutions, right, GDP was growing at one percent, two percent. I don't think we're gonna grow, like, at 10%, 20% in one yea…”

“Startups. We know how to like build products. I mean, we know how to raise money, hire people, build products. We know how to sell it. Sometimes we know how to market them, but I don't believe we know how to take care of our customers, especially in the B to B…”

“At Drift, I built in 2019 the first AISDR”

“At agency, there's only going to be one email address. It's aliasatagency.inc. Everyone will email. I will always like take care of all the customers, right?”

“No one joins agency until they have work for me as a contractor. I'm going to put you to work and I am going to be real exactly how I am with everybody in the company today. And if you don't deliver at a level that is World-class in that one or two week timefr…”

“To trust the output of an LLM to send an email to a million dollar customer. It's like, you know, when you present that to a CSM, they're like looking at it and they're like, they're questioning every word. You have no idea. They're questioning every word in t…”

“I'm talking at the solution level, the old wrappers of databases are going to be dead. Like there's just no way they survive. Unless they adapt quickly.”

“We'll have smaller teams, but we still need more compute. I mean, we're just really trading people for compute.”

“A lot less equity will be spent on, on, on the team, right? Because you're not gonna need rounds and rounds and Distributing equity after every round to hundreds and hundreds of people.”

“Show me, open up your computer. I want to see your Git right now. Show me what you committed. Show me your code. Let's discuss that. Did you really build that? Who was it? So I'm just like, I don't care about my questions. I just go bang, bang, bang, bang. I w…”

“Because I was able to do all that. I raised hundreds of millions of dollars going through all that stuff, right?”

“That Klaviyo, you know, I'm a first investor, good friends with Andrew, right?”

“The reality is that, you know, I made, like, two million dollars in, like, just over, like, six, seven months consulting AI.”

“I think that humans are the biggest blocker to adoption, and they're gonna need a lot of hand-holding and help.”

“I'm scared of the giants, they're not gonna last, but Nvidia, I think Compute, it's gonna, we're thirsty for Compute.”

“It took a long time for all those things to clear up what it meant to sell for a billion in cash, right? A company that we grew to a hundred million in revenue, eight years of hard work, but I lost the dream of building a thirty billion dollar company or takin…”

“So that is a huge release, you know, of stress that I just don't care about that stuff anymore. So that just takes like, I don't know, one third of the problems, and I'm just like, ok, I don't care, just pay it, you know, move on.”

“1.2.”

“Before all my companies, I've built them on the backs of Northeastern students. They're amazing people. They're the best.”

“I wish I would have been tougher with them”

“A thousand percent, so that's why I'm not selling my stock.”

“And so I did consulting for them and I started from the bottom, right? People were like, who are you? I was doing some support tickets for them et cetera, explanations. But then I started getting contracts like the NBA, you know, ticket master. I'm in Dubai ta…”

“I had 800 people, I had 200 in CS.”

“When Brian Halligan came to me and bought my company, Performable, so he's like, our goal is to take it public in the next year or two. I had no clue what taking a company public meant. I mean, we had thirty million in revenue, 200 employees when he said those…”