YouSaid · the spoken record

Nick Denton

lines on the record: 73
first: 2025-03-13
most recent: 2025-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think over this corporate landscape. Net net Trump likes influence. Trump likes money. Trump likes success. I think they're going to let it rip. They're going to let it rip. Anyway, this has been another great episode of this weekend startups. He's at Lawn's L-O-N-S on X. He's at Alex. I'm at Jason. 4.3 letters between us on average, and you can read the docket that Lon and Alex put together this week in startups.com slash docket.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to be really interesting in terms of Gal Slater. There's a lot of saber rattling. This administration is going to be very pro-M&A. They just like to have influence. I think this is like why the tariff thing is so appealing to them, because having a tariff system means everybody's kind of got to come and bend the knee and negotiate. M&A is the same tool. Now everybody, whether it's Bezos with Amazon, you know, or Zuck with Meta, you know, the weather vein of, you know, the political weather vein known as Mark Zuckerberg. He's going to want to buy TikTok. He's going to want to put a bid in. He's now going to have to go through Gal. He's going to have to bend the knee. It's going to have to come to Marlago and this, you know, kleptocracy approach is very real. And you're going to have to bend the knee and you're going to have to come. And this will give the president undue influence.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the way a competitive playing field in the United States is or in Europe to a lesser extent, or MENA, the Middle East, North Africa region, or India. India really is fascinating to me. I need to spend more time in India and Singapore. I'm going to go to Singapore for the first time. And then I need to spend some time in India. I really think that's the economy I have the least knowledge of firsthand and I need to get up on. Yeah.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putting all that aside, we're in a multipolar world right now. South America is going to make their own decisions. Canada's going to make their own decisions. Obviously, MENA, India. India is like, I think really the most interesting one to look at. They are going to make, everybody believes like, oh, we have influence, whatever. India's like, yeah, we're the largest country in the world. We're the fastest growing economy. We have the most number of people going from poverty into the middle class, going into the upper class. We've got this great education system. We've got a driven. India is the America of the 21st century in many ways in a way that maybe China isn't because it's more democratic, right? It's not a perfect democracy. You can look up the democracy ratings. China can never really compete in a sustained long-term fashion in entrepreneurship because they keep rug pulling the entrepreneurs. If you rug pull the entrepreneurs and you don't have a vibrant investment system and it's top down, it can't really be vibrant.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the idea that we're going to be able to be splashy cashier around the world and buy influence, that's ending. We're broke as a country. That's just the truth. We don't have the ability to spend like we used to. And so whether you agree with the velocity and the chaotic nature of the current administration, which if you ask anybody who's a Republican, like they're like, yeah, this is chaotic.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not true, and the EU can go it alone if we don't want to back Ukraine if we don't want to be involved in that. You know what? The EU has plenty of money. These are sovereign countries, they have a vested interest in containing Putin. They're going to do it themselves. Going to make their own weapons. They don't need us.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A brave new world, folks. We are not living in a unipolar or a bipolar world where it was like Russia and the US. It's multipolar now. And that's a lot of, I think, what's informing this administration, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not. We all understand it's multipolar now. There are regions that have their own sovereignty and the EU now, as you pointed out, Alex, I think very correctly, is like, you know what? The United States is not the piggy bank. They're not going to fund what we want to do. We have our own world. We'll do what we want to do. Canada's like, oh, you guys want to nag us? Great. We have a lot of hydro. We'll just turn off your electricity. We'll sell it to somebody else. I think the United States sometimes believes we have a little bit more influence than we actually do and that people, you know, will just”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can take a 20 or 30 year view of investing. So they're not just giving money to Masayoshisound like they did for his giant fund. They're now making thoughtful decisions and rolling up companies. That's what we're seeing here. That's what we're going to see a lot more of.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a perception in our industry that the money coming out of the MENA region is like dumb money. They'll just invest in anything. You go there, you secure a bag, you leave. These are some of the smartest people I've ever met in business. For decades, they've been sending people from Abu Dhabi, from Saudi, from Qatar to the West to become educated and to work in places, and then they come back. So they're boomerangs and they have this king Abdullah scholarship, there's all these scholarships. And when I meet people over there, Oxford, Harvard, you know, University of Hawaii, everything in between. Like literally, it's not just schools. And then they've worked at Google, at Sequoia, wherever, you know, top venture firms. And then they've gone back. They're not just putting money into venture firms. They're on the boards of companies. They're doing company formation. They're doing roll-ups like this because of the sovereign wealth funds.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The investment fund in Saudi, this is their sovereign wealth fund, which owns everything from sports teams To doing the investments in NEOM, I think it's sort of the umbrella. It's run by a gentleman named Yasser, who I met when I was there. And they have a group Sanobel that does the venture stuff. So they have a dozen activities they are investing in that they believe will be the businesses of the future when maybe pulling oil out of the ground isn't necessary, right? Or, you know, it runs out, which they think is a 30-year story, 40-year story. Games would be one of those, and so”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business, yeah. Am Banisher was an investor in that, so they're selling that Pokemon Go for people who don't know is the first augmented reality game to hit scale. These things were going on in Japan for a long time. Augmented reality, when you put digital assets in the real world through the camera and you remember people were like driving around trying to find these Pokemon Go characters and getting in car accidents.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“X is, I think the ex shareholders got ownership in XAI and XAI needs to be, I don't know, I'm not an investor in either, but I know the guy who's running it and a lot of my friends are, XAI is doing something interesting, which is, I think they get X's corpus, which is a huge advantage. So the huge advantage is what I was talking about. And Glenn Beckt today, the huge advantage is if you have a real-time data source giving you information. And so whoever's got real-time data, whether it's Reddit or X or Facebook, they're going to have such a huge, huge LLM advantage.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where it's a money. Look at this a Columbia University Biomine professor shared an email from the NIH announcing the cancellation of his integrated musculoskeletal training program. This really explains the background in such a great way. This is like if I were to send it to Juan and say, what's going on or you, Alex? And said, hey, what's going on here? You would write me back. Here's what's going on. That's really compelling for me.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was a pretty good way. That's F around, find out. But okay, if you click on the quote I was retweeting, that's the one to click on because here where this person, Professor.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Columbia's got a huge endowment. They could easily afford this. And these elite universities, like they, I don't know why the taxpayers are paying for elite universities with hundreds of billions of dollars. Do their research, they should be given the grants from their endowments, which just continue to grow to a level of absurdity. I'm going to put that aside for a second, but if you were to find one of those, yeah, this is me saying, hey, FO, and it thinks it fell, fast, fell off, and no”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, it is a reasonable encapsulation of who I am and it gives you a good starting point. That's not a really great one because what I'm saying is really simple. How healthy do you think that Jason is? It's funny. Yeah, Harry, you get a little bit of a deeper one. But if you were to pick, let's say, Zelensky talking about something And you want the background, that's where it gets really interesting. Or if you were to, you know, click on talking about Columbia losing its grants or something, that's when you could get into a really good background because you might not know if you look at, I retweeted somebody from Columbia who lost their grants And he's like, oh my God, this is so shocking. And I'm like,”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Grock, you know, inside of X, where you press that button, it gives you the context. We talked about it on all end last week, is a really killer feature that I think most people who use that haven't even realized, but there's a little Grok AI in the top right of every tweet. So take my tweet where I did, you know, hey, here's my protocol. If you pull that tweet up and you hit the Grock button, I'm curious what it says there.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I think people, you know, ChatGPT's got really good consumer adoption. But by the way, before Google came out, Yahoo had all that user adoption. So it's quite possible that there'll be a better product than ChatGPT and that whole thing could just collapse.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they have an incredible consumer business there, you know, independent of anything else. And the chat GPT is kind of like the verb. It's kind of like saying taking an Uber. And they also bought chat.com. So, you know, this is the innovator's dilemma that Google has. When you do a Google search now, I think it does a snippet every time, right? If you're logged in pretty much. Yeah.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number of people using ChatGPT every day is extraordinary. I think they were in the top five or ten websites in the world.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, Lon, you frequently will look through the subreddit for entrepreneurship and startups. And this week in startups, and then we have other communities, you're going to be able to write an agent. We could do it right now. Maybe Lucas from our team, who's good at this, could write an agent that goes. So you give it all the places you like to look. It goes to those places in the morning and sends you an email or post it into our production team. Here's the interesting new discussions that I found. And then you click from there. So that first level sort, it might do for you. And that's, you know, really powerful stuff that's going to happen or is happening right now.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More competition to come, I think. What we saw with Manis recently, that's got millions of people on the wait list. And it's like a gentic, which is just a fancy way of saying agents, which is a fancy way of saying.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're not wasting time building these results ahead of time. I don't believe they're doing that, like in caching them. It's getting so cheap that it's going to run on your M4. You're going to have a local version on your phone ripping through stuff. And so, you know, let's say you wanted an analysis of every MP3 on your phone, every audio file. It might just do that in the background and have it sitting there for you. Why wouldn't it do it? If it was going to do an analysis of your photos, you know, normally it would wait till you query, hey, show me all the bulldogs. It might take the top 10 queries, top 20 queries, and run them every day and then present you with the results in a proactive way, like a great employee might, a great team member might be proactive. So we're going to see some really interesting things happen here as this stuff plummets in cost. And it's still trading at what, 40 times revenue, 50 times.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That these companies are in a race to the bottom and it's getting so cheap when we had Raul from Superhuman online, he said they're writing their summaries for your emails ahead of time. Most people, like you do a Google search and it does that little real-time snippet from Gemini.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great news for startups is you can get these API credits from Google Cloud, which we've had a partnership with. You can go to get startupcredits.com. I put all the credits that we're doing at getstartupcredits.com. You sign up there. You get White Gloved, just doing this as a service to our founder. So go to get startup credits. You can get the Google credits there. Other credits. People are giving AI credits out to startups like Candy, which is great. people are building their systems so that if one service gets too expensive, they can move to another or one is better at images than voice, you can move it around. And so the big winner in this race is going to be startups. They're going to keep lowering the prices. They're going to keep increasing the value. And I have always believed that the application level is where the value is going to be.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's true, it seems like that would be really great revenue growth. I'm assuming this is not for the consumer product. This is for the API and that they've seeded the consumer product race to ChatGPT and Gemini and Grok, yeah.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like Harry. I think he's got great intent here. Can't wait to talk to him about it. Maybe he's floating a balloon. We'll see what the terms are. And then so the terms on the 200K also important.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A partnership with because I've been so taken by, he's very generous and sent me these $5,000 headphones. And I listen to them and man, I'm really hearing the music and I'm using Cobuz. I'm going to become an influencer in this space next. Cook some meals together, share a meal with folks you love. I have institutionalized my Thursday night dinner with my friends here in LA. Lon, you've come to the ATX Supper Club. We have a six-person dinner. We book out the best restaurants over like the next 12 weeks. One of my friends is doing that, William Barnes, who worked at Uber and we're good friends. And he's here. So we just go every Thursday to a different restaurant, hang out with animals or kids. I do that hiking, walk in nature. I do that every day on the ranch or I try to. These are the things that are going to help you. Sleep is the new drug in the startup community. People are leaving events at 10 p.m. saying, I got to get a good night's sleep. I got to get a good night's sleep. I'm tracking my score. You measure it, you manage it. Woke, eight sleep. They all do a great job, as does the Apple Watch in doing this. But anyway, I.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I slept with the Bulldog last night. It dropped down to the 80s. Am I going to do Max was in the hospital? He's safe now. He had an ammonia. Happens, these bulldogs are fine-tuned machines. They're like Ferraris or something. They're always in the shop. So I felt like I needed to sleep with them. But, you know, I kind of did this protocol and I have, and this is kind of a startup. My understanding is Brian Johnson, who's going to come to the all-in thing tomorrow night here in Texas, that he is making $100 million a year on the blueprint. As I said, maybe you pull that up one more time so I can read it. I have those top four things I'm focused on. But then I'm telling people, hey, listen, see if you can add two or three of these things without your phone. Play a game. I played Clue with my twins the other night. We had a riot. Read a book. You'll see some more physical books on the shelf here. I'm just starting to get into just 15 minutes of actual physical reading as opposed to audiobooks, which I do when I'm hiking or driving, listening to music. Shout out to my friends at headphones.com, Andrew over there, who I'm going to do.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very simple sleep, exercise, diet, meditation. Focus on those four. And then I gave sort of some things that I'm working on everybody knows I'm on a health kick. And I'm doing it for myself, for my daughters, my family. I just want to be around and I want to be healthy in my older years here. Man, has it worked for me? I got a 99 sleep squirp.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting you bring that up. I think that their view on alcohol has changed and that tourism is the big attraction there. So they're doing new cities like Neome and stuff like that. So in those cities, Westerners are going to be able to have alcohol. And I think you'll assume that cannabis or other things will come after that. I did this tweet the other day. I got a huge reaction on my Twitter where I said, hey, here is my protocol. you know, like Brian, everything's got to have a protocol since I'm an influencer now and a micro-celebrity. I got to have a protocol.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Democracy, it's going to determine peace. And it's going to be one of the great forks in the road, I think, in our lifetimes is where do those countries end up affiliating themselves with. Now, they're their own. But personal freedoms, economic freedoms, those things are all starting to happen in a major way. And I'm particularly excited about it as somebody who worked at Amnesty International and cares about human rights and cares about entrepreneurship.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what Riyadh's chasing. And I'd say they've closed 80% of the gap. And so when you look at what they've done in Dubai, Riyadh's just right on that track. And they are particularly obsessed with entrepreneurship and creating companies. And we'll have a big announcement about some work we're going to do in the kingdom that I've chosen to do. I'm going to make the announcement next month. But I have been spending a little bit of time over there. And I believe company formation in that region is absolutely critical for democracy in the world. That whole region has its own power base, plus they're trying to get pulled towards China, India, and Russia on the other side, you know, in the BRICS kind of situation. And on the other side, they're trying to get pulled into the West and who they align with in the future is going to determine, I think, human rights. It's going to determine”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't fire people. It's not as fluid as an environment. Regulations are crazy. You can't do MA. It's just the worst place to do business. It's a terrible, terrible decision to do business in Europe as an entrepreneur. You got to go where the action is. It's like if you wanted to be in hip-hop in the 90s, you go to New York or LA. If you want to be in tech, you come to Austin, New York. You know, maybe you go to, I mean, I would say Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. If you're a European entrepreneur, you go to those three cities. They're going to throw money at you. They're going to celebrate you. They're going to give you a golden visa. And you're still going to be able to fly home and ski wherever you want or go spend your summers in Italy.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they are exactly agreeing with me. I think anybody who's a European entrepreneur or a VC is probably nodding because Jesus, like they want to regulate every company, they want to make it harder to build platforms. They don't have Section 230 like we have here.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and dogged might be, to your point, Alex, that there's some great change that's going to occur and Europe's going to get their act together and be more entrepreneurial. I doubt it. Europe is Epcot Center right now as far as I'm concerned. It's a place where tourists to go and get to see this old world charm and you can bounce from country to country. It's quite charming. But they treat their entrepreneurs terrible.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is they're all anti entrepreneurship there. The reason why this is notable in Europe Because they're so anti. The reason this is needed in Europe is because they're so anti entrepreneur. When you're in London and you say you're running a startup or you're an entrepreneur, people look at you like you're a charlatan, like you're a con man, like you're a grifter. Entrepreneur equals grifter in a lot of these markets. I'll leave the Nordics out of it because they have a special sensibility for design and a special sensibility for building product that I think is very unique to them. But they just don't have big winners coming out of Europe for a reason. It's because they treat entrepreneurs terrible there. Harry and the Spotify people are the opposite, but it's just too many headwinds. And I think when you're an entrepreneur, what you want to do is remove as many of the headwinds and things that can flip the car and you want to increase the number of things that could be tailwinds. If you're running a company in Europe, you're going against the jet stream. You're going to burn twice as much fuel. It's going to be slow.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those people became loyal to him because it was a grant and he was still able to invest in them, but you still had then wild cards like Pirate Wireless, I think, came out of it or other things that weren't necessarily financial. So it just feels derivative, not particularly innovative. And if you're a founder, first time founder, and you stay in Europe, that's a bad decision. It's just a terrible decision. Coming to America, coming to California, coming to Texas, coming to New York will be much more accretive to your business. Terrible idea to stay there. If you're a serial founder, fine. If you're in the Nordics, perhaps if you've got an investor there who's a lead investor who committed to you, great. But for every Klarna, for every Spotify, it's de minimis, the impact those European companies have had.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just thinking about it pragmatically in terms of innovation. The reason I'm not impressed is it's not innovative. It's a copycat kind of thing. And it's self-serving. So in order for it to be a movement and be disruptive, the reason Peter Thiels was so disruptive is it was a grant. And when he did that was really interesting about it was”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be disruptive doing this not impress. It's just a Y combinator knockoff Founders, let's talk about building your brand here in the real world. We know digital ads are amazing, but if you want to stand out in 2025, maybe you need to think a little bit bigger and a great way to do that is out of home advertising. Yes. You know, those really impressive billboards you see everywhere or even the beautiful murals that everybody loves. This is how you build a brand. And Ed Quick makes out-of-home advertising easy, measurable, and fast. They've taken the headaches out of OOH. You've probably heard OOH out of home by combining ad tech precision with real world impact. So now planning, deploying, and tracking your campaign is as easy as running digital ads with AdQuick, they're going to hyper”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sounds like Founder University a bit. I like the mentorship model. That's always good. When they do this project Europe thing, are they taking equity in that person's company or is it a grant is the question. Are they giving people 200K like a grant, which is what Teal Fellows does with 100K, I believe?”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't look at the stock market day to day all that much. Certainly, I'm not day trading. Great companies are going to grow through these. The most important things for founders in the game and startups listening. Just focus on your customers. And all this meta stuff that you see, like inflation, et cetera, it's fine to understand it. It's fine to geek out on it, but probably not going to change your day to day. You have a certain amount of runway, you know, raising money could be affected on the margins by it, but great companies that are growing, let's call it, in the early seed stage, 10% month over month, which is a pretty easy bogey to hit. If you're growing 10% month over month, you're doubling every seven, eight months. You're going to be just fine. So eyes on the prize, focus on your growth, focus on your team.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because he criticized Trump coin. He doesn't get it. And on the other side, they're like, I hate JCAL because he's supporting Doge.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, you're here to listen to startups, but I would say on the all in, you know, craziness, literally, people are like, I hate JCOL.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only group that hates me equally or more than MAGA are the people on the left who believe that I'm part of MAGA. So MAGA hates me because I'm not part of MAGA and I criticize Trump and the left hates me because they think that I'm too pro-doge or pro-Trump. So you basically lose everybody. I've lost 60% of the audience because I won't pick a side probably.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's kind of following the all in playbook, which is hey, it's all capital allocators talking about their bets in a way that random act of journalism as biased as it is gives you one piece of information. Traditional journalism, where you don't have a financial interest, should give you the other side of the coin, which is calling balls and strikes. Course, we all know the problem is humans are fallible and sometimes they do journalism based on their voting patterns or which party they're part of. And man, it's so hard to do a journalistic product these days that calls balls and strikes because you lose your audience and you're hated by both. I am hated, hated by Magna, as you've all seen who replies.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percentage, that's kind of hard for consumer products. So I think this is really challenging, I think, for the Tesla brand, Molly Wood, who is on this program, was a co-host for a long time. She traded in her Tesla for a pole star because she didn't like Elon in the direction he was taking the brand. So I think Tesla's really got to think and Elon's got to think long and hard about, you know, after he finishes the Doge thing, you know, building bridges and selling to all customers. And I think cyber taxi is going to be a huge hit two years from now. And I think that's the future of the company. And so he's skating to where the puck is going, the Model Y refresh, by the way, is absolutely gorgeous. But it's going to be a tough year for car makers with all these tariffs and everything. Is there anything else in his piece that is notable, the dented piece that you thought Lon or”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, I think the startup takeaways here are if you, and this is the one that I think is important for people to get, for founders listening to the program, because I always try to bring it back to founders. If you pick a political side, you can lose half of your customer base in a media enterprise. MSNBC losing the Republicans and Fox losing the Dems, that's great. There's enough left. The question is when you lose half the people for a consumer product like Bud Light did, right? Or like Elon's doing right now, you know, Bud Light lost a Republican.”
2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
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2025-03-13 · This Week in Startups · Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source