Co-Founder https://xitter.gq/t.co/83se4Ha3SR - We scale YouTube ,Facebook, and Google Ads. Angel investor and public markets investor.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined August 2010
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Alan Duvall retweeted
The future of marketing belongs to companies that are willing to let the market change their product.
Even as a bull it’s not the capex spending or AI build out. It’s the unknown of what AI does to millions of businesses who pay for ads
Someone give me not investment advice and tell me why I’m wrong.
This seems like a generational buying opportunity right now. Especially if you believe in AI.
Hyperscalers are spending CAPEX to try to win the AI race. Models are getting better at exponential rates.
If you’re an AI bull you think we’re early and this is almost under investing in compute. The world may change as we know it.
Even if you’re bearish, companies can just slow down investment and get earnings back.
Markets are short term focused and scared of change.
I’m long the market but I also think Google is an opportunity. They have the indicators dilemma. I believe they’ve purposefully help back their public facing AI models and products to not bite the hand of search revenue, which btw, is still growing, just less.
I believe it’s growing at all because of some sketchy short term price and auction manipulation to try to juice earnings. I think by next earnings they are going to be at the point of no return and they will have to admit that their search monopoly is over.
They will then pivot their business and release frontier models and products.
Why am I wrong?
For years people talked about how much cash these companies had. Now they have great potential investments to make and the market hates it. I also think they’re pattern matching it to previous innovations that had bubbles and this technology is not like others.
Do not become jaded by evil. Do not let it darken one’s heart. But 50 cent was correct . “If it rattles like a snake and slithers like a snake, it's a snake. You don't have to get bit to realize it's a snake."
Hot take , Google search will decline. But YouTube has massive “oil reserves” CPMs still disgustingly low compared to meta. And cloud and compute and even Waymo
I’ve spent 100 million of other people’s money and has helped me avoid the mistakes when spending my own money. I also treated that money truly as if ever risked dollar was my own.
I have lawyer friends who have also spent other people’s money on legal fees. And they have learned from it
You can learn from the mistakes of others as munger says.
But to Drew’s point most people saying “they spent this much money on meta” don’t actually know shit
CEO of ridge wallet was running an agency spending 200k of someone else’s money before he took ownership. There are exceptions to the rule
So why have 45 billion in cash on Tesla balance sheet. I really find this to be bizarre “advice” or a bizarre prediction .
Everyone must learn to get past the $meta learning phase …. Or they barely have a business model
My advice to anyone considering giving up on their app:
Have you tried paid acquisition, enough to get past Meta's learning phase?
Have you posted YOURSELF online and made at least 250 creatives?
Have you created an automated slideshow system where you've posted AT LEAST 500 faceless Slideshows (with your accounts properly warmed up)?
Have you actually talked to your users to see what they like / what they'd like added?
If the answer to any of these is no, KEEP fucking pushing.
You have just started.
Alan Duvall retweeted
Unless you've got a long track record, few investors want to fund an idea-stage company with no customers. That's not cynicism, it's how risk works. The best pitch deck you can build is revenue. Go find a few people willing to pay you, and the conversation changes completely.
.
In sales funnels work towards giving meta qualified leads data.
Too qualified and lead cost sky rockets and you don’t have enough data.
Start broad to let meta learn.
But in e-commerce it’s an AOV play or low “ticket” that can lead to upsell or higher AOV
The real moat for ecommerce is the ability to launch more branded products to drive AOV and LTV …. So meta can also drive up CAC
Been saying it for the last 3 years. You need better Ads obviously, and a strategic conversion to optimize for. You need to give meta the opportunity to build signal with 50 conversions a week ideally
Diversification was a lie sold by wealth fund managers. Ofcourse it “protects” wealth , but does it? Does it beat the market ? The S&P is top loaded and not diversified. Stick to the winners and what you know
Peter Thiel on why hedging your bets is for losers:
"What's worked is we've got really high conviction on a few things, we put a lot of capital to work in those, and then those actually worked. The pattern that was the less good one was, we don't have a very high conviction on this, we'll put smaller dollar amounts in. That's where we ended up playing the lottery.
Almost every single venture capitalist we're competing against has a probabilistic model. They think they're running some kind of a portfolio. That may be true on some ultimate level, but in practice it becomes this incredible excuse for laziness. Even if the theory is wrong, even if you cannot overcome chance, if you think chance dominates things, it will lead you to be lazy."
If you owe the bank $100 , that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 100 million, that’s the banks problem
Alan Duvall retweeted
Read this.
You have no idea how many other industries this can be applicable to.
LEARN ads.
Two weeks ago a life changing amount of money was wired into my bank account from the sale of my business.
Since I'm no longer a competitor in this particular arena, I'm gonna drop some sauce on how I completely mogged an entire industry on meta ads.
I'm going to be vague so I don't dox myself, but here it goes:
Attention is the only oil
In case you're also confused about Instagram's new "Features":
TL;DR: it's basically clipping
1/ @a16z reported we've hit the max amount of media we can consume: max 26 hrs/week in the US (+ it isn't growing)
2/ so, if the total watched can't grow, every app has to steal time from other platforms
3/ Instagram's idea: be where you watch short AND long videos, like YouTube.
4/ how do you get people to watch the long stuff? let creators turn a "Feature", a video up to 90min long into max. 8 "Reels" (short clips that link back to it)
5/ also explains why video editing platforms let you edit everything (from podcasts to clips)
Winner take all. It’s MAG 7 or bust. $meta
You won’t need to read or write. But you will have to think
