Turner Novak 🍌🧢
@TurnerNovak • 208,896 subscribers
investing @BananaCap_ podcasting @ThePeelPod (sign-up for emails below)
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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 🍌🧢804,097 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
New The Peel with Tony Holdstock-Brown • Inngest - the hidden layer of AI infrastructure - why evals today are "batshit insane" - building Inngest's own cloud to get 20x lower cost - growing 35x YoY after AWS and Cloudflare copied them, and - building a company without a personal brand Timestamps: 0:00 The hidden infra layer every AI agent runs on 1:46 Building complex chains of logic 3:31 Why agent SDK's don't go far enough 4:49 Healthcare was the original event-driven nightmare 6:32 Storing traces on your infrastructure enables self-improving loops 14:26 Why Inngest was already in the right place for AI 15:49 Score agents off product events, not LLM's 17:31 The OpenAI copy-paste signal 21:24 Swap in LLMs and cut costs 23:44 How customers pulled the product forward 25:41 Orchestration belongs outside the sandbox 29:48 Building a neocloud to cut costs 20x 32:09 Most neoclouds just resell AWS 32:54 AI infrastructure is all converging 34:49 Why Claude can't just build your backend 36:44 How to build a software factory 39:12 Agents are a lottery you get addicted to 42:44 Loops must always exist 45:38 If models keep getting better, why orchestrate? 48:28 When incumbents steal your features 52:30 You can't vibe code infrastructure 55:54 Why Tony has no personal brand 59:38 Dev tools GTM without Twitter 1:03:20 Lessons from the founder of DuckDuckGo 1:10:39 Truth as a company value 1:13:08 Taking too long adapting to AI 1:15:10 Startups are 100% R&D 1:17:19 Ali from Databricks 1:19:03 Writing his own code, Voice-to-text with local models 1:23:53 Evals are batshit insane
Turner Novak 🍌🧢46,735 просмотров • 5 дней назад
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 🍌🧢100,376 просмотров • 27 дней назад
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 просмотров • 1 год назад
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 🍌🧢1,427,552 просмотров • 1 год назад
New The Peel with Charles Hudson Charles started Precursor Ventures in 2015 to help create pre-seed as a category. We talk about how pre-seed investing has never been harder, why sitting out of bubbles can be more dangerous than joining, how Principals at Precursor get real money to make their own bets, + urgency and “the last $250k effect”. Full episode here + links below 0:00 Is Pre-Seed dead? 4:15 Do round names matter anymore? 12:27 Multi-stage signaling risk doesn’t exist 16:42 Smart LP’s love multi-stage funds 22:03 Is the traditional Seed model broken? 26:31 Velocity of capital deployment drives all incentives 30:30 How to compete with megafunds at early stage 34:24 Megafunds have Seed funds in a vice-grip 38:34 “The best Series A’s are all expensive" 39:33 Are we doing 2021 all over again? 41:53 It’s safer to participate in bubbles than sit out 47:35 Price you pay is everything 50:22 The system incentivizes an addiction to consensus 55:22 High valuation + high CapEx grows AUM 59:56 How Precursor actually invests today 1:01:32 Precursor’s Principal investor program 1:05:56 Deciding when to selling your winners 1:10:53 Raising as a pre-consensus founder 1:12:39 What Charles looks for in founders 1:17:20 What it’s actually like to start a fund 1:20:56 Misconceptions of first-time fund managers 1:26:22 300+ LP meetings to raise Precursor Fund 1 1:29:24 The single change to the pitch that raised his fund 1:31:54 Precursor’s evolution over time 1:34:57 The second desert of venture capital 1:37:34 The last $250k effect
Turner Novak 🍌🧢49,454 просмотров • 27 дней назад
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 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
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 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
🚨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 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
