philipp ⚡

some of you need to look at this website motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Austria is concerned that notaries and registries would make less money: 3/9

Back in 1985, barely anyone knew who Tommy Hilfiger was. So he bought a billboard in Times Square saying he was one of the four greatest designers in America, right next to Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein. Twenty-five years later, the company that owned Calvin Klein paid $3 billion for him. Somebody just put the same trick up on a billboard in San Francisco. The Hilfiger sign was basically a game of hangman. It read "The 4 great American designers for men are" with blanks for each name and only the initials filled in, and down at the bottom in small type it admitted his logo belonged to the least known of the four. He had almost no money for ads. George Lois, the ad guy his investor brought in, told him that if he marketed himself like every other fashion brand, it would take him 20 years to build a name. Tommy's first reaction to the hangman idea was that people would think he'd lost his mind, and he only said yes because he figured he had nothing to lose. Think about what your brain does when you read that sign. You see three names you already think of as the best in the business, and you drop the fourth one into the same bucket before you ever stop to ask whether he belongs there. Hilfiger got filed next to Calvin Klein without proving a thing, because your brain did the filing for him. Now look at the billboard sitting by the Bay Bridge on-ramp in San Francisco. It's five app icons floating in front of a giant moon, and that's the whole ad. Four of those apps come from Anthropic, Perplexity, xAI and OpenAI. Add up what investors last paid for those companies and you get more than $2 trillion. (xAI, the company behind Grok, is part of SpaceX now.) The one sitting in the middle is Notion, last valued at $11 billion. That's about half a percent of what everyone else on that sign is worth put together. Notion has spent three years trying to get people to stop thinking of it as a notes app and start thinking of it as an AI company, and the business is getting there. Reports say AI plans were bringing in more than half its revenue by early this year, and Sacra estimates it hit $865 million in annual recurring revenue this summer, up 82% from a year ago. There's been IPO talk for months too, and Wall Street pays a lot more for every dollar an AI company brings in than it does for a notes app. Which bucket you put Notion in is worth billions of dollars to them. Leaving the words off is the smartest part. If the sign said "Notion, the AI workspace," you'd roll your eyes and keep driving. With nothing written on it, the only thing left to think about is who made the row, which is exactly the question you want people asking about you. Nobody's signed it, either. If that N in the middle turns out to be the one paying, it wouldn't be Notion's first mystery billboard. Back in July it put up "AI Dread?" signs around the city with nothing but a phone number on them, and only owned up after the SF Standard tracked it down. It took Tommy 25 years to go from that billboard to a $3 billion check, and with an IPO on the table, Notion would very much like its version to pay off a lot sooner.

Watch Episode 1 of our Odyssey series made with Grok Imagine. Let us know in the comments if you'd like a full breakdown of how it was done! Creative collaboration with @WonderStudiosX and director Dev Walker @glumlot_

Nobody is googling Bitcoin anymore. Search interest is near its lowest level since 2020. That's not the top. That's where I start buying. Buy zone: $78.2K–$75.9K.