etn.
@etnshow • 8,726 subscribers
Europe’s technology show. Hosted by @lukeknight and @ronanchamberss and streaming live on X and Youtube at 11AM-2PM UK every Tuesday and Thursday.
Videos
F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg (Nico Rosberg) shares he's been cold emailing Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke (tobi lutke) for three years and that his competitive edge to success is having no fear of failing: "I'm cold emailing all the time and I get rejected 90% of the time...Rosberg Ventures is one of those chances because actually it was like 90% sure it's going to fail." "I've been trying to reach Tobi Lütke, the CEO founder of Shopify. He's a race car driver so that of course is my best angle and I've been trying for 3 years." "Guessing emails, his EA, common friends, everything...could not get him to even acknowledge or write me once." "And I was on the phone with him yesterday".
etn.238,396 views • 14 days ago
Avi Patel (Avi Patel) CEO of Kled (Kled AI) explains the situation with Luel, says he welcomes competition but larping in Silicon Valley has gotten out of hand: "You go fund this company run by an 18-year-old that dropped out of Berkeley... that one-to-one ripped off my entire company and then on top of that also is faking their compliance." "On their user page, which shows the live user count, it was a manual number counter that was going up. It wasn't even like something that was pulled from an actual place." "50% of their web traffic was from Nigeria... they are manually going out there and bolstering their numbers with Nigeria and actively accepting these fraudulent uploads so that they can look good in front of investors." "As an investor of Silicon Valley that is supposed to be prestigious and honourable... there is no world in a million years where you should give that company $31 million."
etn.115,705 views • 17 days ago
Sequoia (Sequoia Capital) Partner Julien Bek tells us why the next $1Trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm: "Ultimately, if you look at the TAM today, for every dollar that you spend on software, $6 are spent on services". "If you sell the tools, the models are getting better and better and so you're at risk... whereas, if you sell the services, you're actually delivering outcomes." "Until now, we could really just go after the $1, but now with services first and human at the centre, we think you can capture the six".
etn.571,276 views • 2 months ago
"UK AI companies in the last quarter raised six billion pounds...3x what we did last year, more than the whole of... continental Europe combined". James Wise, Chairman of the £500M Sovereign AI Fund I on the UK's AI future: "We're working with some of the leading UK based and international venture funds and those relationships will be incredibly valuable for crowding in more money over time". "Should you need the hundred million pound round, the billion pound round or even the ten billion pound round... all the other public finance bodies we've got are looking at you from day one". "The UK needs a huge amount of capital to compete in AI. Luckily, we're going in the right direction... there is probably nowhere outside the US and China you can raise billion pound seed rounds like we're seeing here outside of the UK". From James's appearance in April.
etn.85,154 views • 1 month ago
.Nicolas Sharp, CEO of Attio, on how the founder role changes: 0-20 people: "You do everything. While you wait for code to run, you log into Xero and do accounting. While walking to coffee, you answer Intercom tickets. It's this crazy cycle." 20-50 people: "You should have a team much better than you at everything. The role shifts to building the team, setting vision, keeping the company solvent. Hire great people, don't run out of money." 50+ people: "At 50 people, I could tell you what anyone was doing that day. That doesn't work past 50. You have to build systems for context and information dissemination. Be very thoughtful about culture." Founder at 10 people vs 50 people vs 100 people: Completely different jobs.
etn.336,620 views • 5 months ago
Co-Founder of Deel (deel) Shuo Wang (Shuooo Wang) says that Deel "screen for happiness" during their recruiting process: "What it means is that we want to hire people that have the belief that they'll be able to solve the toughest problems out there". "We realise that only people who have positive energy, positive vibes, and are very hopeful and happy will be able to continuously push themselves and go forward." "That's what we mean by 'we hire happy people.' Both Alex (Alex Bouaziz) and myself are very happy people and we are very resilient as well."
etn.18,190 views • 7 days ago
Elena Verna (elena verna) Head of Growth Lovable tells us how they built a viral growth engine: "The only thing that's working right now is social. But social not from a paid perspective. It's from an organic, creator-led perspective". "This is actually a pretty big counter pattern to most companies that tell their employees to zip it on socials". "We just say, 'Go be out there, show personality, show who you are, so people know who's building this product behind them "In the era where product is no longer differentiated in features, people want it to be human because we're going back to that human connection because technology is catching up on all of the functionality".
etn.93,014 views • 2 months ago
.Naval's advice to Sigil Wen: "Before I was 30, I never went to a party. I literally slept underneath my desk. Dude, if you want to win, you gotta be serious." Naval is older than Sigil's dad. Still building. Still full sending. "He told me 'I'm not a billionaire yet' even though he's worth so much. He still wants to create and build things." "It's like Kobe Bryant. 'Job's not done.' You raise your Series F? Job's not done."
etn.193,239 views • 6 months ago
"A 50-year-old founder was nearly twice as likely to build a company that IPOs or gets acquired as a 30-year-old". According to an MIT report titled "Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship", a 50-year-old founder is nearly twice as likely as a 30-year-old founder to build a company that is acquired or reaches an IPO. Patrick Ryan Co-Founder of Oding (Odin) joined us for some VC Trivia live: "They looked at not just tech but... small businesses in general that get to an IPO or acquisition by private equity... or a corporate". "But if you compare it to like a recent study that Antler did... in AI startups, the average unicorn founder in AI in 2024 was 29".
etn.47,835 views • 1 month ago
Patrick Ryan (Patrick Ryan) Co-Founder of Odin explains how Anthropic's SPV voiding reduces Section 12G exposure while actively manages a $1.5 trillion valuation narrative ahead of their IPO: "They're getting price discovery. They're getting... lots of retail trading of their stock or interests linked to their stock." "They get insider liquidity that drives employee retention... but they avoid the disclosure regime of public companies. So they get all the benefits of being a public company without any of the downsides." "If the SEC turns around and says, 'Look, we think you've actually been a public company for the last three years,' that creates a real headache for them. So they want to get rid of that." "Stuff's trading at between a trillion and 1/2 trillion in the secondary market. If you're worried about supporting that kind of valuation at IPO, you want to kind of calm people down a bit in advance... to be like, 'I want you to pay less.'"
etn.19,384 views • 20 days ago
Considered one of the most famous litigation stories of the 21st century. We spoke to Dr. Aron Ping D'Souza, who first pitched Peter Thiel the strategy to fund Hulk Hogan’s litigation against Gawker Media. Peter Thiel: "It's this gossip website, Gawker, that keeps writing terrible things about me" Aron D'Souza: "I then probably said the most important words in my life" "If you don't want to solve it why don't you find someone who wants to do so but doesn't have the resources and fund them in a proxy battle" Peter Thiel: "How long and how much money will it cost to destroy Gawker?" Aron D'Souza: "5-10 years and $10M" Peter Thiel: "Great I'll wire you $10M in the morning" Dr Aron Ping D'Souza is now making media accountability accessible to everyone through his new company Objection
etn.36,821 views • 1 month ago
The Ex-VP of Engineering at Shopify has entered the AI race on Thursday, raising at a $40M valuation for his new start-up using only a txt file called "future of work". The founders of Lovable (Anton Osika), ElevenLabs (@matiii), Hugging Face (Thomas Wolf), and Synthesia (Victor Riparbelli & Steffen Tjerrild) all sit on the cap table as well as angels from Shopify. They've quietly been working with some of fastest growing companies in the world, like Spotify, Shopify, Lovable, Legora and Ramp - where the product is now live. "We got term sheets at much higher valuations, but we went with General Catalyst - I knew from that meeting this is a company we want to partner with" We sat down with Siavash who broke down why everyone is looking at Stilla right now. Stockholm is truly on fire.
etn.81,311 views • 4 months ago
On the Mythos Preview, swyx 🐣 thinks Anthropic are too good at marketing, and may be overdoing it. "I think just let your competence shine through. They're amazing. It's a beautiful model. You don't have to be so dramatic". "You don't have to produce a five-minute polished video of the CEO of every security company on earth saying you're the greatest thing since sliced bread." "There was a little bit too much marketing buzz around the drama of like, 'oh, my Mythos just texted me while I was eating a sandwich".
etn.34,155 views • 1 month ago
Michele Catasta (Michele Catasta) President of Replit (Replit ⠕) says "AGI for vibe-coding is coming earlier than 2028": "I would expect by the end of 2026, a lot of the core functionalities that models and agents have to have, in order to become very good vibe coding workhorses, will be there". "Literally the bottleneck would become grit, determination, if you want to take the time and, you know, invest a bit of money to make it happen". "No vibe coding tool today is absolutely perfect... but the amount of creativity that they unleash is second to none."
etn.41,912 views • 2 months ago
France has officially entered the AI race. Founder of Twin (Twin) believes the next $1 Billion company will be built using Twin which focuses on Large Action Models (LAM's). Hugo Mercier's (Hugo Mercier) recent launch took over twitter with over 3M impressions in 24 hours. All this with a $3M pre-seed round, and an insane angel line up including Founder of Hugging Face (Hugging Face) Thomas Wolf (Thomas Wolf) and Head of Developer Experience at Open AI (OpenAI) Romain Huet (Romain Huet). We sat down with Hugo to hear more about why and how the next one person billion dollar company will be built on Twin:
etn.58,087 views • 3 months ago
A recent article from The Information outlined Meta employees were responsible for 1/3 of Anthropic's $30B ARR after using 60.2T tokens in the past month. swyx 🌉 discusses AI token consumption as a metric for measuring employee productivity: "If I'm already spending so much on your salary and you're not as efficient as you could be, then you're probably not utilising your own time as effectively, for my purposes of employing you, as possible". "This is the burden of all large company leaders, you can't afford nuance. You just have to have very high level goals that everyone can align on and three simple charts that run the whole company". "Yes, there's lots of hair and yes it's messy and yes it's annoying to people who care about nuance but directionally it is correct and that's all that we get to measure on right now".
etn.32,016 views • 1 month ago
Gokul (Gokul Rajaram) has worked with generational founders like Brian Armstrong (Brian Armstrong), Jack Dorsey (jack), and Tony Xu (Tony Xu). Here he explains how great companies use "bet sizing" to keep innovating: "Every company has a core business, but if they don't take any bets alongside the core business then they're destined to fail". The Founding Partner of Marathon break this down into three core principles: 1. Allocate Resources: "A core business should have about 70% of resources. The remaining 30% can be used to make four or five bets, with each bet maybe having 5% of resources". 2. Time-box and Goal-Set: "Give these bets a certain amount of time and a specific goal to hit. The first goal is typically "product market fit," where you have maybe a hundred customers who "love you and use your product on a daily, very regular basis". 3. Double Down: If a bet hits its goal, you "double down" and act like an investor, seeding the bets and figuring out which one deserves "Series A investment". Gokul Rajaram mentions that Coinbase 🛡️ has 12 products worth more than $100M and "almost every single one of them outside of the core transaction marketpalce started as a bet". "You never bet the whole company, but you got to take multiple bets".
etn.47,906 views • 3 months ago