CES 2025, Podcasting Expert Session, Marketing Insights & More | Future Ventures Series No. 004/

All right. And we’re live. Welcome to the ventures pod this week. We’re going to be talking about some really interesting topics. We are going to dive into the acquired podcast and the founder’s podcast, a session where the creators of both podcasts talk shop about How they built two of the most interesting business podcasts in the world.

We’re also going to talk about ces 2025 Some of the most interesting tech that’s been released We are going to dive into Jensen’s keynote at CES, where he breaks down some interesting topics like the progression of AI some of NVIDIA’s latest releases and some stuff that’s super exciting. So stay tuned for that as well as some of the most interesting marketing data that I’ve found.

From Neil Patel, one of the leading marketing experts in the world. So without further ado, let’s dive into it.

All right. So for our first topic, this week’s deep dive, we are going to talk about the founders and acquired podcast and a session. That these three did together. So just to give you a quick breakdown on these entrepreneurs, the acquired podcast is created by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, they’re the co creators of the podcast.

They dive into in depth stories of some of the most iconic companies in the world. And, their listening base is some of the most successful entrepreneurs, founders, and business people around the world. So Ben Gilbert is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, co founder of Pioneer Square Labs, a startup studio and venture fund based in Seattle.

David Rosenthal, a former venture capitalist at Madrona Venture Group. He comes with a deep understanding of finance, business, and strategy. Together, these two combine their expertise to provide thoughtful commentary on company building. Their podcast has gained recognition among top tier entrepreneurs and investors, including meetings with prominent figures like Mark Andreessen and Bill Gurley.

And then we have the creator of the founders podcast. That is David Senra. He’s the creator and host. Also the one man shop does all the editing and work on founders still today. And this podcast basically explores the lives and lessons of history’s most influential entrepreneurs and creators, David always had a love of reading since he was young.

He was reading like crazy. He would go to the library and just read books. Had a Cuban immigrant father who taught him to never half ass anything and to work hard. And one day he told his friend, I want to make a business out of how much I read. And so that was the start of the founders podcast.

And also one of the Most impressive podcasts out there for really deep dives on business and business topics. And how do you know this? David had a meeting with Charlie Munger where he talked about Charlie’s life and lessons. And also obviously Charlie had that meeting for a reason. He also had a meeting with Sam Zell, one of the biggest real estate icons in the world where he was able to pick his brain and share wisdom.

So obviously both of these podcasts have been incredibly influential to some of The greatest entrepreneurs and business minds around the world. And in this session that they did, we get some insights into how they think about making their podcast and what goes into making a product that so many influential business people want to study.

Yeah. I don’t know if you had any thoughts, Emmanuel, that you want to kick this off with as well.

No particular insights, but the only thing that I found quite interesting or what I liked the most is that they just cover many different topics within the business lens and shed light to historical talks and entrepreneurship, as you’ve mentioned.

And I think it’s a really great way to learn and just benchmark for aspiring entrepreneurs as well as founders who are currently running startups. So I think it’s just really great

content. Yeah I’m a huge fan of both of these podcasts. I listen to them all the time finding episodes that I want to listen to, new episodes going back in their catalog and listening, getting book ideas as well.

Really awesome content. So I’ve broke this up into two main categories. First, I have general lessons from the pod. And then I have more lessons About the podcasters and their craft of podcasting. So specifically a bit about their story and how they make great podcasts. So I’ll go and read you through some of my top insights, starting out with general business and life lessons from the podcast.

And, this is a very much a discussion of manual. So feel free to chime in how you, your reaction to any of these insights. So this was a quote from the podcast. Within two years of intense study, you will get to the point where, you know, more about what you are studying than anyone else.

You don’t meet founders who are into entrepreneurship. It’s their lives. This really rang true to me. And I think it’s also inspiring in terms of what you can do and what you can learn. You look at when Elon Musk was in his early days of SpaceX, everyone was laughing at him saying he was never going to be able to do it.

And the reality is with a couple of years of intense study for more complex industries, maybe five or 10 You can really be one of the leading experts in the world. So the only limits are what you put on yourself. Another interesting insight, Charlie Munger said he made 450 million reading Barrens every year.

He read Barrens for 50 years. Found one investment from reading Barron’s made 50 million off of it. And then gave that money to Li Lu and turned it into 450 million. So I think this was an interesting lesson on the concept of leverage. And leverage is a lesson that we get exposed to again and again when we study history’s greatest entrepreneurs. David center actually said this in the podcast, the creator of the founders podcast, learning from history is a form of leverage.

Again, as I said, leverage is super important and learning from history and what he does studying history’s greatest entrepreneurs is a form of leverage. Naval Robby con constantly talks about finding leverage, whether that’s content code, labor being one of the most historic forms of leverage.

And David highlights here that, this learning he does, studying all these entrepreneurs, he’s gaining insights from their whole career and piecing them together into his understanding and approach to how he lives life. So David is also a huge fan of history’s greatest entrepreneurs. And greatest business minds.

And he had this also to say about Steve Jobs. Believe it or not, Steve Jobs was also a huge fan of entrepreneurs before him, as many of history’s greatest entrepreneurs have been. They idolized previous entrepreneurs. They study them, learn from them. There’s no Jeff Bezos without Sam Walton.

There’s no Steve Jobs in this case without Edwin land. And so when Steve Jobs visited Edwin land in his twenties, he said, visiting Edwin land was like visiting a shrine. And Edwin land was this incredible entrepreneur who really redefined The way that optics was done.

He was an incredible mind and one of the geniuses of his time. And also one of these entrepreneurs who really had no limits, he decided he was going to solve something and he did. There’s so much more you could say about Edwin land and other episodes, but I thought it was really telling to just hear how much Steve jobs idolized him.

And let me see if I can think of what he said, steve Jobs, I believe this was the quote. He said, we are building at the intersection of liberal arts and technology, something along those lines. And that was one of his famous lines at a keynote. And that was just a ripoff from Edwin Land.

So you see this again and again through history where the great entrepreneurs are taking lessons. From entrepreneurs before them using what works throwing away what doesn’t.

In this episode, they talk about how today you can find very intellectual content online through podcasts. Before books were really the only way to do this. And this is a really interesting change that we see in the world. podcasts where people are distilling and refining this knowledge. So that you can get the knowledge from a book that would take you hours and hours to read in one, three, four hours or so.

Another takeaway that I noticed here is all three of these creators in this episode, really, you can feel the passion that they have for what they’re doing and the desire to deliver at the highest level. This is something also from reading. Books like Becoming Steve Jobs, or Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, you realize that he holds his team to such a high standard, and it’s almost constantly rejecting, and this isn’t good enough, go back.

It’s almost as if The greatest creators and entrepreneurs just have a higher standard for what they expect and are willing to rewrite rebuild and keep working on it until it hits that standard. So that was a really interesting insight and something that through various things that all three of these guys said during this podcast, you could tell.

They felt a lot of pressure. The average acquired podcast has a football stadium full of people listening to it in the first few days. And it’s not just Football fans. It’s some of the top entrepreneurs and CEOs around the world. So these guys feel a ton of pressure to deliver the absolute best product to their end listener.

And that’s something that I really want to take away. I think an incredible lesson to just. Really push for a higher and higher standard and imagine some of the top entrepreneurs around the world listening to your content. And is it living up to what they expect and being useful for them, giving them insights that will make them better at their craft?

It’s quite interesting also. When we look at digital media We see things such as 40 views or 40 listeners when we see these analytics on a podcast, but actually to imagine, 40 might not sound as much, but 40 people, a room for 40 people.

It’s quite a lot of, you can actually visualize and now imagine, just as you said, yes, the football stadium, like of people, a bunch of new words, people who are planning to run a startup. People are running startups. People are running multimillion dollar businesses. It becomes a little bit surreal when you think about it in such large quantities it’s really interesting when you put in this type of mindset, working on something that you love that much.

Yeah. And you can use it in a healthy way to increase the pressure for quality, right? Like it’s the thing about online media is it’s easy to throw crap out there and not care about it, but you’re not going to go in front of 40 people and just do a really crappy presentation, right? So if you add that perspective, it increases the pressure on you to really deliver an excellent product and something you can be proud of.

So I thought that was an awesome insight. It’s ties in. So another quote they brought up from Steve jobs. The older I get, the more I realize why people choose to do things matters. And this kind of goes into like other quotes by Charlie Munger, follow your natural drift. I’ll have to find it a little further down here, but Charlie Munger also said something along the lines of.

Most of the problem when you’re not doing a good enough job is you’re just not passionate enough about the industry or the problem. So Steve Jobs, the older I get, the more I realize why people choose to do things matters. It’s because if you really want to be great, you have to love what you’re doing.

It has to be something you’re passionate about doing. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger don’t do their annual shareholders meeting. Charlie Munger obviously rest in peace, they didn’t do that for all those years because it was a business requirement or because it was nice. It was that they really love to get out there and talk with their shareholders and present and talk about business and investing.

And that’s why they were so good at it. And people don’t think of Warren Buffett and Berkshire as a media company, but another interesting insight I had. Everyone knows about Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters. He’s taught so much of the world about investing and obviously that helped his deal flow.

People reach out to him if their business isn’t, wall street reaches out to Warren Buffett. If Goldman Sachs is about to go bankrupt. He has incredible deal flow from that media and from that brand. So yeah, some really interesting concepts there on, why you need to be passionate about what you do and, take a few days, think about this as you’re walking around this, what you’re doing and what you want to do, something that you have fun in the practice.

This was another interesting insight from this podcast is the greatest entrepreneurs and creators, performers in all industries. The practice is fun to them. When they’re alone at the end of the day, watching game film, they enjoy that tedious improvement, looking at what they can do better.

And if you’re not in an industry where you enjoy the practice, good luck at being in the top percent of that industry.

Exactly. I also feel like that’s something that gets lost quite often as well. People say they want to. Reach that top percent or top 5 percent of 1%, but I think many people don’t also realize.

how much fun it actually is to be striving for that work, the actual actions that go into it. And sometimes that gets forgotten. And I think sometimes reminding oneself that it’s the actual process that matters and what’s actually fun, I don’t know, brings back the whole entrepreneurial spirit.

Again, it’s exactly. That’s why we’re doing this. I have a passion about studying entrepreneurship and technology and that passion and desire to improve. I could care less if, this doesn’t improve for three years. It’s fun and I’m learning a lot and I enjoy the practice.

So I really think that’s such a key and that’s something David Senra talks about as well. Ah, I wish I had this quote, but it was something along the lines, like time is the greatest leverage or, I’m not getting that but essentially the power of time where if you have staying power, if you have endurance, You’re going to get better.

If you get those reps in, you’re going to get better. And if you love something, you’re going to do it just because you love it. And by that, you’re going to get better. Your true self is going to shine through. You’re going to find your authentic way of communicating in the sense of a podcast or doing business or performing a sport.

And so I thought that was really interesting. Another interesting concept. This was from a top banker forgetting his name, but another David Senra quote who he’s like a dictionary of the best quotes from top entrepreneurs and business people. One thing I know for sure to make money and to get rich is to play games where you have an edge.

So you always want to make sure you have an edge. You’re combining all these lessons from studying history, studying your competition, but you also need to figure out what your edge is and how you can stand out. Jeff Bezos was asked many times, why don’t you go into physical retail? And Jeff Bezos said, physical retail is an ancient business.

I am not going to go into that until I know I have a significant advantage. It is hard to win in ancient businesses. This was really interesting and ties really well into that quote, he didn’t feel he had an edge there. They might have the biggest online retailer. Physical retail is an industry that has been around, it’s ancient.

And so many tricks of the trade have been refined and the profit margins have come down so much because of the competition in such an ancient industry. When you look at newer industries, newer markets. You typically have more opportunity and more profit margin because that competition hasn’t worn that down and made it more competitive and harder to compete.

So even Jeff Bezos, very slow, even today, there’s just. It’s more concept stores that Amazon has than anything. They’re not going all in on physical retail and that’s because they don’t feel they have an edge there. And so that was a really interesting insight. I thought just always making sure you have an edge.

Kind of on that topic, something that I thought was very interesting that these three guys, I think it was Ben Gilbert who said this, that the dirty secret of the acquired and founders podcast is that people don’t read books. And if you can just read books and distill their knowledge into a podcast, you can get 10 X the market of the book because people won’t read that book.

But they’ll listen to a podcast for an hour, two hours, three hours about that book and the top insights. So you’re basically leveraging this incredible research of these authors and historians and putting it in a digital media form where you’re going to be able to 10x the viewers of that content if you do it successfully.

That was a super powerful insight. That I think, we can study as we’re trying to make content, but also just showing that they found an edge and they found a power law and some leverage that they could. Take advantage of and what they were doing.

Yeah. Edwin land also on this topic, another quote, I have a personal motto. Don’t do anything that anyone else can do straight to the point. Keep it simple. Let’s see what else we got here.

I think maybe just one last thing I want to highlight here

and just, one final note that I thought was really interesting from David Senra, less related to content, but more related to business in general. Lowest cost structure is the largest theme in the history of entrepreneurship. So if you look at Sam Walton, if you look at Jeff Bezos, if you look at LVMH, if you look at all these entrepreneurs, one of the biggest things that they try to do is keep an efficient and low Cost structure and that to David Senra, who’s one of the best historians in modern days on entrepreneurship and business, that is the largest theme and the main form of leverage history of entrepreneurship.

Super interesting.

All right, so let’s switch gears and let’s talk about some of the insights specifically related to podcasting and the story of how these guys created the acquired podcast, how they created the founders podcast, a little bit of their backstory. So as I said before, these guys are, relentlessly obsessed with making sure each of their episodes steps up the bar and lives up to the expectation of their audience.

They want to be embarrassed by their previous episode because they improve so much in the next episode. The reason that David Senra took the jump to actually go all in on Founders was reading an essay by Paul Graham, How to Do What You Love, A little teaser. We’ll cover that in next week’s podcast.

Something I’ve read several times. All of Paul Graham’s blog is an incredible resource on entrepreneurship and doing great work. He actually read that essay one night and that is what convinced him to go all in on making a business out of founders. And sticking it out no matter how long it took.

And there was many years where he was working on founders, trying to figure out the business model before it became the breakout success that it is today.

So this is a little bit more on the founding of founders podcasts. How did you decide to dedicate your life to this? And David said, I’ve only had one habit as long as I can remember that is reading. How can I make a career out of my reading? He also studied anti patterns. So this is funny.

David center had, a rough upbringing. So Charlie Munger talks a lot about this too. Look at what people do and, learn what not to do as well as what to do. And so David center was on a panel and they asked him, what did you learn from your upbringing? And he said, don’t do cocaine and graduate high school, which was hilarious.

Basically, some of the people doing stupid shit in his life and let’s not do that. Let’s actually get our shit together and not do drugs and actually graduate high school and do something significant. So these were anti models that he followed. Really interesting stuff. And I can definitely relate to that myself from my upbringing, seeing David center really always felt like he was the adult.

adults when he was younger, and I can definitely relate to that seeing a lot of alcoholism and drug use. When I was younger and realizing this is not the way to live an epic life and to do great things. And his mom actually, trusted him more than any of his other family members. So I could be getting this wrong, but I think it was her will or something who was going to be the trustee.

And rather than trusting any of the older members of the family. It was actually David Senra who was going to be in charge because he was simply more mature than the others. So he had much more freedom growing up because his mom said you’re smart. You’re going to make good decisions. So yeah, you can do whatever you want.

And I was really interesting and he turned his passion for reading into a business through, a challenging upbringing. It sounds like

another interesting insight I got from David Sunrise. He actually goes back and listens to his podcasts as references. If he It’s going to do a new episode on Edwin land. He might go back and listen to his previous episodes. And this is interesting because it’s another concept like build for yourself.

So a lot of times Steve jobs was building products that he wanted. And this kind of applies to podcasting too. It’s Do a podcast, do content that is actually valuable to you where you go back and you listen to it as a reference. That’s a really good signal that other people are going to find it interesting.

Trying to rip through these, but I got a long list here.

Another tactic that I grabbed from the guys talking here, this was a Lesson from David Ogilvie, and you’re not advertising to a standing army, you’re advertising to a moving parade. Previously in the Acquired podcast, I believe it was their Sequoia episode was one of their best episodes.

And David Senra encouraged them to re release that episode. Lots of their new listeners hadn’t heard that previous piece of content that was so excellent. So you’re not advertising, your content isn’t going out to a standing army. Your content, your media is going out to a moving parade of new people.

Your best content, you can re release it to showcase to your newest audience members, some of the awesome work that you’ve done. Another concept on David Ogilvie that I thought was really interesting. So I actually had this experience telling someone, I was reading David Ogilvie’s book and he’s an advertiser.

And this person was like, Oh, advertising, that’s, just, a scam or whatever, Warren Buffett. Said that David Ogilvy was a genius. He said, you need to study David Ogilvy and Warren Buffett has met some of the best business people in the world. So if he says that about David, then I think you need to take it very seriously.

And so going and studying the lessons that he has and something David Senra did at the end of David Ogilvie’s book on advertising, he talks about the six people who influenced his thinking on advertising and David Senra, of course, what do you do? It’s simple. If David Ogilvie learned from these six people, let’s go read about all these six people and study the lessons that they teach and that they learned in their career.

It really comes down to your craft, refining your craft and studying the greats, studying who they studied, who they admired. There’s really some simple logic that you can follow and be disciplined to become one of the best in your industry. Many top advertising people Have not read David Ogilvie.

And if you’re not doing that, how are you going to be the best if you haven’t studied the best in the world? So really powerful concept in my opinion. So then the guys go on to discuss a little bit about this, like learning from the greats. So David Rosenthal said, great entrepreneurs stand on the shoulders of giants.

But they come up with at least one to two novel ideas. David Cenro said, yeah, it’s the combination of these ideas. And then Ben Gilbert said, it is one big novel idea with the combined concepts of others. So you can see this all it’s not just the ideas from history. It’s also either a combination of those that is unique or a new novel approach combined together.

And but it, as you study the greats in whatever industry you’re in, You’re going to start to form your own novel ideas of how this can apply to the environment today. Another really powerful concept.

Yeah, David Senra, Everything in Life is a Repetition, covered this before, but, the power of time and just endurance. sticking with something. I think one definition I read of endurance that I thought was so epic was like to suffer suffer suffer eloquently or something. Oh, I got to find this and get this one right.

Yeah. So one of my favorite definitions of endurance is to suffer honorably. It’s you embrace that suffering and you do it righteously. You do it honorably. And endurance is one of the greatest powers for entrepreneurs and creators without a doubt.

Another insight on podcasting. So both Acquired and Founders go through line by line of their podcast and they cut out the fluff. They cut out the blank spaces. They cut out sentences that don’t make sense. They refine their product and make sure. What they’re releasing to their audience is something that they can be incredibly proud of and that delivers the most valuable information in the most concise and effective form.

Both of them said, Can I listen to our podcast and enjoy it or reference it? That’s the true test of if it’s going to be evergreen content that you’re going to go back to and that your audience is going to go back to. Is it only interesting that week because of that story or is there something about it that really stands out and makes it have staying power?

Yeah. So those were some of the top insights from this acquired sessions with David Senra and just. Power packed with great information quotes from history’s greatest entrepreneurs. Both of these podcasts are incredible and something I listen to every single week. So hopefully you got a few tidbits of knowledge and can check these out yourself and start to study some history’s greatest entrepreneurs and business stories.

All right. So this week we had CES 2025 and some awesome insights into some of the biggest innovations in tech, new technology that’s coming out. And so I wanted to highlight a few things that really interesting and Emmanuel and I can talk about why they stood out to us.

So we got a thread here of some of the top innovations at CES. This one was a kind of a funny, like a meme presentation. So there’s all this talk about modular nuclear reactors, and they did a little parody. With the Enron egg. So Enron, one of the, one of history’s most famous business fraud stories.

And this guy’s presenting the idea of an Enron nuclear egg that you can just have in your home. Excellent. We had electric car releases by Honda. This was really interesting. So this is the unitry G one humanoid robot. And we’re going to talk about this later in the episode, but everyone is basically projecting humanoid robots are going to have their chat GBT moment in the next year.

So the technology, the algorithms, everything is there to really make these more useful to where I really hope. You can have your dishes and your laundry and your cooking done for you in the next few years. That would be epic, right?

Okay, this was pretty epic too. BYD released a car. That can jump six meters over potholes. Yeah, this is crazy. I can definitely see people just hauling ass and jumping over stuff. And this is definitely going to end up in some bad situations, but good to see, moving towards flying cars.

We got jumping cars now. So that was a cool one.

Sometimes I wonder how all these engineers come up with 📍 these ideas. What’s on the bucket list for 2025. Let’s make a jumping car.

Yeah. The thing is that they’re innovating, they’re pushing things.

And that’s why the Chinese EVs are some of the best EVs in the world right now. I’ve seen some of them where, the back, the seat will rotate towards you as you want to get in and then rotate into place. They’re just innovating. They’re trying to make a better product. And unfortunately, a lot of the traditional Western car makers are just.

Kind of building standard stuff and not innovating. They’re not building the best LLMs into the cars where you can talk to shout GPT in the car. They’re just falling behind. But I think the jumping car is pretty cool. Yeah, this was another cool concept. Not gonna lie, like four years ago I was definitely thinking a smart mirror would be a cool concept where you could have your goals, you could have your fitness.

And here we have a smart mirror where you can really see all your sleep status, your blood pressure, heart rate, weight, all that stuff. So pretty cool concept. I think we’re going to see more and more of these smart devices and some more IOT technology become a reality, especially with.

How LLMs can improve the interaction with these devices. And you’re not going to need to type things in as much as you can talk with the device, get insights, a lot of the generative AI stuff, especially like the fashion industry, you’re going to be able to try on clothes virtually and shop online virtually and see, how does that fit on you?

What does the style look like on you before you purchase it? So cool stuff from CES. Definitely. And yeah, they just wrapped that up. But the most interesting thing for me from CES was Jensen’s keynote. So let’s go ahead and cue that up.

All right. So this is Jensen’s keynote from CES and The first thing I want to talk about here, and this is coming from a guy who knows AI better than anyone, and this is his projection on where the AI market and innovation is going to go. So in 2012 we had AlexNet, then we had Perception AI from those innovations, so we had speech recognition, imaging was really good with convolutional neural nets.

Then with the advent of the transformer and really scaling these GPU training clusters, we got generative AI, which has really enabled digital marketing and content creation. You can create written content, you can interact with these and you can learn anything text based programming also, obviously.

Being a text based with tons of training data, as well as images and video creation, generative AI has taken off and what Jensen predicts will be the next two iterations of AI this year in 2025, he expects agents to take off. Now at Slashdev, we’re building out agents every day for content creation or code review image generation, video generation auditing of different data sets, customer interaction, customer service interaction, basically any white collar job dealing with data, there’s going to be agents that you’re working with.

to do your job. So whether you’re scheduling and you need a scheduling agent to look through the calendars and find the best time for your doctor to meet with this patient and you’re managing that office or dealing with a customer and trying to figure out if their issue is somewhere in your logs of all your customer training data to be able to resolve their technical challenge or whatever it might be.

patient care and being able to get your first response on your health care issue on your phone from an LLM or even in the doctor’s office, basically working alongside an LLM. So even a new doctor can have that whole corpus of information at their fingertips. So agents are going to be huge. And this was like one of those moments that got me really excited because it confirmed a lot of what we’ve been doing at SlashDev and also opened my mind to just how prevalent these are going to be and how you’re going to have multiple agents working at the same time.

In a coding environment, let’s say for cybersecurity, you’re going to have agents scrubbing your code base. And looking for vulnerabilities and highlighting those and letting the developers know, Hey, this is something that we should probably look at based on this latest release of vulnerabilities for the C programming language.

We might have a memory leak here on and on. There’s going to be applications like that. After this, Jensen talks about physical AI. And how that’s going to take off. So we obviously mentioned that robotics are set to take off in the next year. So we’re going to see more and more, obviously we have self driving cars really taking off.

Waymo, Tesla, doing a bunch of stuff throughout the U. S. with self driving and obviously around the world as well with Tesla, full self driving, but I know Waymo is really having, fully autonomous cars, driving people around San Francisco and other places in the U. S. that People are really raving about it’s a little bit slower than they like, but we’re there.

We’re at that point where we’re having self driving cars with their within certain geofences. And then we’re going to have general purpose robotics. So this was a really interesting takeaway here. And I’ll let Jensen now put his words to it.

Ilya Suscover and Jeff Hinton discovered CUDA, used it to process AlexNet.

And the rest of it is history. AI has been advancing at an incredible pace since. Started with perception AI. We now can understand images and words and sounds. To generative AI, we can generate images and text and sounds. And now, agentic AI. AIs that can perceive, reason, plan, and act. And then the next phase, some of which we’ll talk about tonight, physical AI, 2012.

Now magically, 2018, something happened that was pretty incredible. Google’s Transformer was released as BERT, and the world of AI really took off. Transformers. As completely changed the landscape for artificial intelligence. In fact, it completely changed the landscape for computing altogether.

We recognize properly that I was not just a new application with a new business opportunity, but I more importantly, machine learning enabled by transformers was going to fundamentally change how computing works. And today, computing is revolutionized in every single layer, from hand coding, instructions that run on CPUs to create software tools that humans use.

We now have machine learning that creates and optimizes neural networks that processes on GPUs and creates artificial intelligence. Every single layer of the technology stack has been completely changed. An incredible transformation in just 12 years. We can now understand information of just about any modality.

Surely you’ve seen text and images and sounds and things like that. But not only can we understand those, we can understand amino acids. We can understand physics. We understand them. We can translate them and generate them. The applications are just completely endless. In fact, almost any AI application that you see out there.

What modality is the input that I learned from? What modality of information did it translate to? And what modality of information is it generating? If you ask these three fundamental questions, just about every single application could be. And so when you see application after applications that are AI driven, AI native, at the core of it, this fundamental concept is there.

Machine learning has changed.

Yeah, so just a great breakdown of the different traits of These stages of AI advancement. And then, yeah, we got to show this. I forgot about this, but this is a hundred percent AI generated video here. So just check this out.

Brains. They can predict.

Yeah. Video games are going to be epic. That’s for sure. Video games are going to completely change how epic the gameplay is. The environments are going to be. So then, he talks about agents a bit more here. Dives into. Some different agents and, all the different categories that an agent could be in, customer service sales, content, creation, development, anything across the board, we’re going to have agents working to move things forward.

AI PCs, I actually think there’s a later section that’s more relevant to talk about that, that I’m pumped about. Physical AI, so obviously so Meta released LLAMA, right? And LLAMA is basically like what you would consider the go to resource for open source LLMs. There’s some others as well, but most enterprises are looking at using LLAMA so that they don’t have to give their data away to these companies.

They can host and run their own LLM agents and keep their data in house. And what I thought was interesting is based on the success of this, NVIDIA has created this Cosmos Set of open source models for the physical world. So for training robotics and devices that will interact with the physical world.

So all the video training data that you’ll need for self driving cars and for robotics to be able to interact with their environment, they’ve created and released these models that will be able to be used by companies doing demand changes, various space constraints, workforce. Various different tasks, in a warehouse humanoid robotics, obviously he touches on as well.

Self driving cars, a big category too. So the Cosmos set of models seems really interesting for anyone doing robotics. And NVIDIA has an awesome stack for robotics. I’ve got an Orin Nano here, which is, I can give it a quick show and tell here, why not? So the Orin Nano is. One of their cutting edge devices.

I shouldn’t say cutting edge because they’re probably going to release something way better next year. But this has an NVIDIA chip on it and can actually be used for robotics. So here I’ve got a stereo camera connected to it so that you can do like computer vision and NVIDIA dominates these types of setups of these compute platforms with CUDA and with all their machine learning libraries and models that you can use to quickly build and demo robotics in a real setting.

So super cool stuff. I think they’re taking another step towards leading that industry and making me believe they’re going to continue to be a key player there. Yeah, let’s jump forward. Obviously he talks a bit about humanoid robotics being a major trend, but what I wanted to show that I’m really pumped about is this project digits.

So let’s hear what he’s got to say about this.

Xs that we have in the company and it really revolutionized DGX one really revolutionized. Where’s DGX

1? So DGX 1 was a workstation for running these advanced models.

DGX 1 revolutionized artificial intelligence. The reason why we built it was because we wanted to make it possible for researchers and startups to have an out of the box AI supercomputer.

Imagine the way supercomputers were built in the past. You really have to build your own facility and you have to go build your own infrastructure and really engineer it into existence. And so we created a supercomputer for AI development, for researchers and startups. That comes literally one out of the box.

I delivered a first one to a startup company in 2016 called Open ai, and Elon was there and Ilia Sus cover was there. And many of them via engineers were there. And we celebrated the arrival of DGX one. Obviously it revolutionized artificial intelligence computing, but now artificial intelligence is everywhere.

It’s not just in researchers and start up labs. We want artificial intelligence, as I mentioned in the beginning of our talk. This is now the new way of doing computing. This is the new way of doing software. Every software engineer, every engineer, every creative artist, everybody who uses

computers today as a tool will need a I supercomputer. Computer. And I just wish that DGX 1 was smaller. And

Imagine Nice. Ladies and gentlemen, our

Look at that. It’s a Mac mini sized computer. This thing’s gonna be, like, 3, 000 and available around March of this year. So Sign me up, get me one of these. You can run like, I want to say 200 billion parameter models on this. So llamas largest model is 70 billion. And you can run this. At your desktop at home, interact with a chat, GPT Lama style, LLM video generation image generation, whatever you need.

And it’s reminded me of like Steve jobs saying that everyone needs a personal computer. And now Jensen is saying everyone needs like their personal AI supercomputer. And for me, from a developer’s perspective, a hundred percent, give me this as soon as possible. I’m pumped about this product. So

yeah,

that’s, I would say those are the main takeaways I had from Jensen’s keynote really a riveting talk.

I recommend listening to all of it in detail to hear one of the best minds in the business talking about where AI is moving towards. Did you have anything you wanted to add on that, Emmanuel?

Nothing much. For me I’m not so sure what that mini computer was about, but it just.

Reminded me of what we were just talking about earlier about the acquired podcast. Like you can literally see here that like he was inspired by steve jobs how he introduced him. He is just doing yeah, right So I think Everything is just coming together as a whole and you can just see everything now.

You can see the theories that we just talked about a couple minutes ago being implemented right now by him at Keynote CS25. But I also, what I found really cool was when he introduced the RTX 50 series because I used to be a huge gamer myself. And just the Incredible. I think it’s just incredible.

I think he mentioned also somewhere that the 50, 70, including DLS has four has the same, or I think even better performance than a current RTX 4090. And I just found that astonishing. Now, obviously a lot of people are complaining that, and especially at the price point as well, right?

Like 540, 000, I think that is just. But obviously people are complaining or there’s a discussion around, okay. It’s not raw performance. It’s not raw power. The Arctic 50 70 is using four, which is basically some type of multi frame generation is being used with AI, but I still find this fascinating. How have we gotten this far?

I remember just five years ago, I might be a little bit old school for this, but I still used to have a nine 50 GTX nine 50. Yeah, I think there are a lot of things that we can get talked about what JetSpline is releasing and

I think it’s just going upwards from here. Yeah, cutting the cost by two thirds and getting like better performance for anyone who wants one of these.

That’s awesome. So it’s just great to see computing advancing so fast. And getting more bang for your buck. And I think for me, what’s interesting about that project digits is if you wanted to build your own AI computer to run llama 70 B, like you’re going to need to spend a lot of money to build that.

And so the cool thing about that workstation is for only 3, 000, you’re going to be able to run those models. And so it’s really the raw computing power that is set up into that device. If you’d look at this was a workstation for AI researchers, that was like a server rack, and they’ve engineered that down into the size of a Mac mini now.

So to me, that’s incredible. And also the price point, like 3, 000, you can. Go out and buy one of those and have it on, next to your Mac to run all your AI workloads. If you want to test some of these models, whatever you want to do. So that’s why I think that’s really fascinating. And I also like.

For me, what I like about agents is it’s a fragmented distributed market where developers are going to be able to build agents for companies. The thing about these foundational models is it’s the big boys who win. It’s the people with all the money who win. You can’t just have two people and build the best LLM in the world.

You need all the training data, all the. Millions of dollars of compute. And so I think what’s cool is you can run and build agents with something like this, which is the next phase of development that we’re seeing so many enterprises embrace. Yeah, really great talk. Awesome to see and some new wishlist items for all of us.

Or 2025.

All right, next to wrap things up, I want to share some awesome marketing insights from Neil Patel that I thought based on my experience as a startup founder working with growth for so long, these are like some really valuable insights if you actually know how the game works and a good idea of where you should be focusing your marketing efforts and spend if you are building a company.

All this data is based on thousands of companies that Neil Patel works on and the conversions, the ROI of how their marketing spend actually turns into customers. Here we have traffic sources that convert B2C versus B2B. So we can see, B2B and kind of the dark reddish orange and the light orange B2C.

So we have direct traffic with a, rel just relatively, if we’re comparing these high percentage of conversion for both categories. Page search being the best overall category for both, the best for B2B. Page social being the best for B2C, but also being third best for B2B. Direct traffic being the second best for B2B.

And then email, something that many people discount, but email is still a very powerful channel for generating conversions coming in there. And then we have referral, organic search, organic social being the least valuable. Something people, as well as myself, Fall in the trap of doing organic social can be a very low return category to focus on actually.

So it can be a much better idea to make sure that you have. paid search, paid social, direct traffic, and email in addition to your organic efforts. All right. Now getting into even more interesting stuff, same surveys of data. Here we have content marketing tactics, cost versus payback period.

So on the bottom, we have the cost on the Y axis there on the left, we have the payback time and days. So let’s look at what’s valuable here so blogs have a low cost, pretty long payback period. And we also have ROI in the size of the circles. So webinars actually offer the highest ROI according to this data, based on what I can see here, I’ve got a better graphic will show specifically, I’m just judging the circle size.

And then it looks like blogs and then maybe tools after that tools are really high cost, but can generate a great ROI but also the longest payback period for the investment on the shorter payback period, we have things like email newsletter, case studies. webinars, extremely short payback period. This is a great graphic and I would say, this one and this next one combined, cause this is just ROI versus cost.

Where should you be spending your time? As working on growth, working on marketing. And to me, it’s pretty clear you should be blogging. You should be doing case studies. You should be doing webinars. You should be doing email. You need to evaluate how much time you have and where you can focus.

But to me, this really opened my eyes to, we should be doing more webinars slash stuff. It’s clear the ROI potential on this is great and the cost profile isn’t too bad. So why are we not focusing on literally the highest ROI potential item that Neil Patel’s customers have webinars?

And yeah, this was. Really practical tactics for any entrepreneur where you should be focusing your time to get traffic, to get conversions, to grow your business. Yeah. Anything jump out with this for you, Emmanuel?

It’s like you said, just having it right in front of you, just like this it comes to my attention that you can just use like exactly what they have found out.

For example, here you see that you get the six, six times ROI on blogs.

And it’s relatively cheap as well. Same as okay, not images doesn’t have a higher ROI, but still like just having it in front of you like this is something that I haven’t seen before, at least. We always learn about marketing mix and you learn about integrated marketing and. All these fun fancy buzzwords, but just having it like this right in front of you just teaches you that, hey, just implement these in your strategy, in your growth strategy, and you are going to see returns on

these strategies.

Yeah, I agree 100%. And for me, especially like having firsthand experience with this as a business owner. I can also see the truth in this as well. Like we crush SEO and blogs and we get tons of leads from those efforts and it’s really low cost. Case studies are incredibly valuable at different stages in the sales cycle, but incredibly valuable.

Everything we saw about the conversion rates of traffic as well, I can totally align with, this is what I would expect. The best insights for me was that, we can be doing more email. We can be doing more webinars. Those are areas where we’re probably not properly weighting our efforts in terms of the ROI potential.

So this was just, for me, such a valuable piece of research to look at and to evaluate, Am I spending my time on the highest impact marketing efforts and to really look at how we can change our marketing mix at slash dev you also see actually podcasts in here as a pretty good ROI option as well.

Good to see obviously. It depends what you want to be the best at too. So this is you know We talked earlier about the acquired and the founders guys and they talked a lot about advice and should you listen to advice and the reality is advice is a distribution and It’s the outliers that succeed, the top podcasts in the world gets a lot better ROI than this an average blog probably doesn’t get the best return as this.

So you gotta figure out how you wanna compete and what you wanna do well. But this is a really good overview on, where the good return is. And definitely gonna focus more on some email efforts and some webinar efforts from our end, yeah. Hopefully this gives founders some quick insights on some marketing channels that they can focus on to gain more traffic and to grow their business.

Yeah. So that’s everything we got for this week. Really great topics for this week. Talking about acquired and founders podcasts, lessons you can get from history’s greatest entrepreneurs and business stories, updates from CES.

Jensen’s keynote filled with awesome insights on where AI is going and some of NVIDIA’s latest releases, as well as some really practical marketing advice for founders. So thanks for listening and time to get back to building. Cheers.