Turner Novak 🍌🧢
@TurnerNovak • 209,810 subscribers
investing @BananaCap_ podcasting @ThePeelPod (sign-up for emails below)
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Videos
New The Peel with Sam Blond This is his first podcast since starting Monaco, and our 2-hour conversation walks through everything sales, marketing, and GTM in a AI-native world. Thanks to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode! Watch here + links below. Timestamps: 0:00 Scaling Brex to $12B 1:14 How AI speeds up prospecting and TAM building 5:19 Using AI to get more leverage 9:15 Incubating Monaco at Founders Fund 12:56 Innovator’s dilemma in AI 15:57 AI companies should build full platforms, not wedge products 23:30 Revenue is just a math equation 27:18 Two ways AI increases conversion rates 36:56 AI will never replace spending time with customers 39:46 Don’t measure the impact of brand marketing 49:03 Your marketing must be different (and hard) 58:39 Customer discovery calls and working with design partners 1:03:03 The zero to 100 launch 1:11:00 Monaco’s launch playbook 1:19:00 Send gifts that are unique and social 1:22:17 Naming your company 1:28:04 Founders should send early outbound 1:32:38 How multi-channel augments AI outbound 1:39:42 Using intent signals and outreach timing to increase conversions 1:43:28 Two common ways founders mess up when scaling revenue 1:50:22 Monaco’s Forward Deployed AE's
Turner Novak 🍌🧢804,441 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
New The Peel with Shensi Ding Most founders get one founding story. Shensi thinks Merge has three. Shensi and Gil Feig started Merge in 2020, watched their first customers die, then rebuilt themselves twice for the AI era. Not many founders talk this honestly about tearing up their company. A lot of lessons for others trying to do the same. We get into why integrations turned out to be so important in AI, the playbook behind their night-shift 5-11pm AI transformation, almost hiring a foreign spy, why founders with an EA are moving too slow, the Embarrassment Framework, vibe coding a dinner bot that 10x'd their customer events, and why 6% of Merge employees get married. Full episode here + links below! Timestamps: 0:00 Something broke every year since 2020 2:22 How Merge went all-in on AI on nights and weekends 5:40 New launches got faster 8:32 Building connective infrastructure for AI 10:51 The dinner where Merge started 13:11 Six months of research before a line of code 19:00 Almost hiring a foreign spy 20:48 Merge’s 6% marriage rate 22:50 Hiring enthusiastic, nice, smart people 28:02 Early stage founders don’t need an EA 31:27 Shortcuts are a mentality 33:01 The AI tool that 10x'd their customer dinners 38:33 Marketing became an engineering function 40:51 Starting with SMB and climbing the logo ladder 42:07 How the product went cross-category 44:16 Launching Agent Handler and a new pricing model 46:47 Every product should be multi-model 49:58 Why most MCP servers don’t work 53:31 Startups should go all-in on enterprise 57:00 The hardest things are most defensible 1:00:26 Say "psycho shit" to be memorable 1:05:47 The Embarrassment Framework 1:10:23 Frank Slootman and being okay with being disliked 1:12:48 Giving feedback got scarier at 100 people 1:14:01 What only the CEO can do 1:19:44 The best marketing is not doing what everyone else does
Turner Novak 🍌🧢68,942 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
This video has a million views on TikTok. Feels like we’re at a cultural tipping point pushing back on the dating apps (it’s been brewing years). They’re historically hard businesses to make work, but I think the next big player in the space will be started soon.
Turner Novak 🍌🧢1,464,457 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
First time I’m seeing this view of one of the most insane comebacks in sports history. 2022 Kentucky Derby. Going into the last turn, Rich Strike was in 18th place (out of 20). He had 80-1 odds, the 2nd lowest of any winner in history. He wasn’t even supposed to race that day. Another horse was scratched last minute, and his owner got him registered 30 seconds before the deadline. Proceeded to pull off one of the greatest moments in sports history.
Turner Novak 🍌🧢1,427,646 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
New The Peel with Michael Tannenbaum Employee #1 at Brex. Founder of the modern billboard ad. We talk joining Brex when they were in a kitchen, almost walking away right before the launch, scaling to $300M+ revenue, the time Masa offered him a billion dollars, why you should take the hardest job available, and how he’s learned to think like a founder at Sofi, Brex, and taking Figure public as CEO. Timestamps: 0:00 From Brex employee #1 to public-company CEO 1:28 Operating vs managing a career 3:23 Why he took the worst business at SoFi 7:34 The Big Rock framework 11:01 How to get real customer feedback 14:56 The best nose for value in fintech 17:46 Why banking the affluent beats down-market 21:11 What Figure is, and $1,000 vs $12,000 25:41 How blockchain kills double-sold-loan fraud 26:59 Do you actually need to use blockchain? 28:06 Why memecoins took over crypto 30:46 Masa's billion-dollar offer 36:29 Leaving SoFi for two kids in a kitchen 38:25 Look for a hair-on-fire problem 41:20 Six months from quitting to a unicorn 44:10 The finance guy who ran Brex's marketing 46:20 Inside Brex during the SVB collapse 51:16 The two SoFi insights behind Figure 54:46 From direct-to-consumer to marketplace 56:41 AI can’t get you better credit ratings 58:56 Figure is a modern Fannie Mae 1:00:26 Not everyone wants tokenization 1:01:31 Buyers who commit before the loan exists 1:04:06 Following customers into first-lien mortgages 1:06:41 Buying Kiavi, the fix-and-flip leader 1:12:26 Why more fintechs don't become marketplaces 1:14:46 The AI risk in outsourcing customer acquisition 1:18:26 What going public actually takes 1:20:16 Life as a public-company CEO 1:22:51 Getting shorted 1:24:11 The gas station test 1:25:46 The reverse pyramid of big corporates
Turner Novak 🍌🧢32,336 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
From Charles Hudson on why it's potentially more dangerous to sit out of a bubble than to participate: "That's my lesson from 2021. Because it’s not as if the people who were sober and restrained during 2021 have gotten a lot of credit from their LPs for having not participated in the circus. So I’m like, is that really what modern venture capital is about today? If there’s a speculative frenzy, the rational thing to do, if your goal is to remain a venture capitalist, might be to participate in the frenzy. Even if you have deep skepticism about the final outcome. You need to remain relevant. You need to remain in business and be able to raise capital. And to do that, your firm has to be relevant. And feel like you get the message. And if that's true, that leads you in a really different set of directions than it would if you’re just like, “Hey, the people who go crazy and lose a bunch of money on bad things will be punished. And the punishment will be you will not raise another fund.” I don’t really think it works that way."
Turner Novak 🍌🧢100,942 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
New The Peel with Jim Belosic Jim bootstrapped sendcutsend to a $140 million revenue run rate in eight years. We talk building a sheet metal manufacturing business in the US, creative ways he financed the company early on, using speed, trust, and software to compete with overseas competitors, lessons from restaurants, and why you can’t run factories from a spreadsheet. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode! Timestamps: 0:16 Automating sheet metal manufacturing 5:59 Zero to $140 million ARR in 8 years 7:58 Acquiring a $750k laser with $0 13:38 Automating factories is like baking cookies 15:17 Being legible to capital 17:31 Unlocking custom, low order manufacturing with software 20:00 Building more factories instead of selling the software 24:50 Run your company like a lemonade stand 28:30 Raising an angel round in 2021 as a safety net 33:21 SendCutSend’s unique bottoms-up GTM 38:24 Fun coupons 40:12 Building a moat with speed and trust 45:55 How US factories can beat China 47:40 Gaslight product launches 52:05 Lessons from non-manufacturing businesses 55:19 You can’t run a factory from a spreadsheet 58:10 Using data in manufacturing 59:50 Lessons from Factorio 1:03:17 Unlocking a negative cash conversion cycle 1:06:14 You need to resist automating everything 1:13:51 Surviving COVID with six weeks of cash 1:15:47 Solving the US skilled labor shortage 1:26:17 Teaching kids about manufacturing
Turner Novak 🍌🧢118,367 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
New The Peel with University of Michigan professor Karthik Duraisamy Karthik co-leads U of M's newly created Institute of Agentic Computing. It's a central node for the OpenClaw platform and helps researchers and developers using AI to advance scientific discovery and engineering. This is Karthik's first public conversation going deep on the new institute. We talk about how AI has increased the pace of scientific research, two new discoveries announced yesterday at ClawCon in Ann Arbor, how universities actually work, how AI has impacted students and education, what's happening with college grade inflation, and the code red advice he gave students. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, and Amplitude for supporting this episode! Timestamps: 0:25 The Institute for Agentic Computing 4:27 OpenClaw Foundation and Lobster Compute Company 8:19 How Universities actually work 12:33 ClawCon in Ann Arbor 15:24 Two scientific discoveries made with ScienceClaw 20:06 How AI is speeding up scientific discovery 25:42 Supporting AI and OpenClaw development 29:55 Why universities function like VC funds 34:29 How universities get money from the government 40:55 Why some academics believe AI is a fad 46:17 Biggest bottlenecks in AI today 49:26 How AI will change the world 53:10 Karthik's Code Red advice for students 59:19 Separating learning and doing 1:03:10 Ways COVID and AI impacted college students 1:14:53 How the role of universities is changing 1:23:21 Why college classes suffered from grade inflation 1:26:05 How AI is actually impacting the job market 1:32:49 Karthik’s advice for students 1:39:16 Winning two NCAA basketball national championships 1:43:04 Almost dying in the Grand Teton National Park
Turner Novak 🍌🧢113,419 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
🚨This University of Michigan professor just gave his PhD students a Code Red about AI: "These AI models are now able to reason through things at my level of expertise, in areas that I'm one of the world's experts in. Things that would have taken me 4-5 months are now getting done in a weekend. Until December of 2025, I talked about the potential of these AI tools. But over the past few months, they've gotten as good as leading edge researchers. But there's still value in developing your own intuition and thinking. The best way to learn physics is by working through the problems. You develop a lot of intuition by doing things the slow way. If want to continue to be competitive going forward, you need to experience the friction of learning everything yourself while also mastering how to use AI."
Turner Novak 🍌🧢106,403 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
