The Ledger, every show

“Breaking Thinking Machines has terminated its CTO, Barrett Zoff, due to unethical conduct.”

“It went from groundbreaking to first production in just 19 months, an unheard of timeline at this scale.”

“The single refinery can supply lithium for over 500,000 EVs per year, and directly challenges China's 60% grip on global lithium refining.”

“Thinking machines could probably exit somewhere at between 30 and 60 today. Who has that money? I don't know. Maybe NVIDIA buys them or something. At least at some point over the next two years. I think the most likely acquirers would probably be Microsoft, Ap…”

“Amazon's buying the first new copper produced in America in over a decade.”

“70% of the global supply of copper is currently locked away in, or that's not economical to refine into actual copper right now.”

“Meta's been ramping up AI spending on AI, pushing its capital expenditure to seventy-two billion last year with plans to accelerate that spending this year. It's also doled out offers worth tens of millions 1000 of millions of dollars to AI researchers and eng…”

“The company's Ray-Ban smart glasses equipped with AI have also started to take off. The company sold more than two million pairs, And has delayed the rollout of its newest glasses in Europe as it struggled to keep up with demand in the U.S.”

“OpenAI and Sam Altman backing a new bold take on fusing humans and machines. It's called Merge Labs. We've heard about this before. We talked to Rob Taves. They now have two hundred and fifty two million dollars in the bank and an all-star, all-star crew.”

“That is the boost network, which we'll get further into, but also how a lot of these newsletters are earning thousands of dollars per week passively. They're driving new subscribers, which is good for them in their newsletter. Along the way, one in five people…”

“I built the referral program back at morning brew that worked extremely well. It led to over a million subscribers from morning brew today.”

“If 25% are actively monetizing on a month-to-month basis I don't know, probably half of that are net positive because we are very affordable, so probably I'd say 10, 15% are net positive.”

“The SAS business is purely has nothing to do with ads. That is people paying us a monthly or annual recurring subscription for the SAS platform. And that's at eight to 900,000 a month. Currently the ad network itself is bringing in another several 100,000 doll…”

“Overall revenue as of like this recording is about 1.2 to 1.4 million is what will end up this month.”

“So we did, I can give you our whole funding background, 2.6 million in the fall, summer of 2021. We did another one point sinks, just like a seed extension in, I'd say, May of 2022, kind of like a, hey, we have product market fit. We need a few more hires. Tha…”

“So the valuation is actually public. So it's, it was two 25. So less about valuation, more about ownership, having enough capital to build the business.”

“So right now we are 45 full time employees. We're totally remote. We're across eight different countries. I believe right now we are coming up on our second year anniversary since launching. So we launched November of 2021. We have, we're doing about 750,000 d…”

“I've always said from day one that I believe the ad network revenue should be significantly larger than the SaaS revenue.”

“We don't have separate front-end and back-end engineers. We have full-stack engineers top of bottom.”

“We didn't hire a product designer until two weeks ago.”

“And so MailChimp sale through campaign monitor, like a lot of these classic, like traditional ESPs are actually built around e-commerce and marketing, which is probably what most emails use for.”

“Everyone that we have fired was like a, we did a few rounds of interviews, gave them an offer. I had no experience of how they handled adversity, communication, how they actually executed and did their job function in like a real setting, just in the hypotheti…”

“Meta because they just laid off 1500 people in their metaverse division. Obviously, 1500 people is a ton. That's a lot of people. But they still have 14,000 people working on Reality Labs.”

“I have 22,000 responses to this survey out of 90,000 subscribers. So about a 30% conversion rate of people who sign up for my newsletter do end up completing the survey.”

“So we raised 2.6 million and then I realized we didn't raise enough money, so I had to raise more money. This is, like, the deck I made to, like, communicate we needed more money. So we raised 1.6 million off of this deck.”

“I think milk road grew by 25 to 30,000 referrals just with that one milestone.”

“We have like dozens and dozens of users who are making north of a 100,000 dollars a year via paid subscriptions.”

“We have advertisers like Netflix, HubSpot, monday.com, Betterment, that are looking to reach these niche audiences of newsletters, and we help connect them so you can send a newsletter with the premium sponsor without having a sales team.”

“We have about 20,000 active publishers on the platform today.”

“I believe right now we're at 20 to 25% of active users have monetized in the past 30 days.”

“I think last year we did between six and eight million in revenue for the year.”

“We are built on top of SendGrid, which is like an email engine to actually send and distribute the emails. And to get the attention that we needed from them, we needed like an annual contract with some sort of like volume lock-in, which is like, I don't know, …”

“There's ownership of like raw percentage of the business that you have outstanding. And then also like who controls the board, who has like the rights to be able to make the core decisions of which we are in control of the business.”

“There's a lot of fixed costs associated with like having an email vendor. Like if you want to do it right, there was like upfront contracts at 50, 80,000 dollars a year, which we couldn't front.”

“Every time we sent an email to a million people, we'd get 20, 30,000 responses back which is also very overwhelming, but it's an amazing touchpoint with your target readers and audience of what's working, what's not. I'd say 80% of those emails were about the …”

“When I would respond, actually, we spent like four months building this custom. There is no off the shelf solution that also showed not just interest, but like a lack of a competitor in the market that was solving that pain point.”

“So RMVP was simply the most basic website builder you could possibly imagine. It does two things. It collects emails, and it posts, and it publishes all of your published posts in an archive. And then the other component is a text editor that you can send emai…”

“So we're now sending about seven hundred million emails a month.”

“So we raised 2.6 million in our seed round, which was in the summer of 2021. And then we went full time shortly after raising that round. We did an extension round of 1.6 million the following May, June. So that's May of 2022. And then we raised a formal serie…”

“Our CTO, who I mentioned earlier, was our CTO for about eight months, and, like, genuinely, like, the greatest guy, so smart unicorn engineer.”