Micron Earnings, HYPE Unlock, and is LIT Bearish?

0:00What is up everybody? Welcome to another episode of Full Port. We are obviously getting well into the lifetime of this series and we cannot be more excited to be increasing the production quality.

0:14We’ve got a lot to go over today. The main two topics, our main three topics here are Micron earnings last night.

0:21Obviously the AI memory trade is well alive. Guidance there. Creating quite the commotion online. We’ll have some commentary from gmoney on that.

0:32And then on my neck of the woods, Hyperliquid and Lighter. The perp decks head to head goes pretty much all over the timeline this week.

0:42With unlocks as well as being dropped from Robinhood on Lighter’s side. A lot of ups and downs there. We’ll give you our takes as we get into things.

0:52How are we doing this morning, G?

0:54What’s up? How are you? I’m good, man. I can’t complain. On top of not only the trades, we’ve also had a little bit of drama, MetaMask, having a security incident.

1:08A lot of people worried. There’s no dull moments. It’s feeling like the bear market was the bull market at this point.

1:16It was like an issue with staking, right?

1:20Yeah. Yeah. No, I remember I was thinking about it last night when I saw it when it first came up. I’m like, what does that even mean? Does that mean like I have to remove my seed phrase from MetaMask?

1:31Like, am I just like, do I just lose? Like in that event, if MetaMask, let’s say, if somehow their wallets were hacked somehow, does that just mean like lose everything on my hot wallets?

1:43I was like, fuck. I was like, well, I lost my Crotrons. That was literally my first thought. I was like, I lost my Crotrons.

1:51So, but yeah, but then when I looked into it, it was it seemed like it was a staking thing.

1:56So, not as big of an issue, I guess, for like retail, but maybe more so if you have, you know, if you have ETH like earning yield and whatnot.

2:10Yeah, I think it’s just another good example of, you know, what if the Black Swan event does happen, right? Like I would say wallet provider is up there with large industry-wide Black Swan event as much as, you know, one of these like large language model or Frontier Labs going down for like a day, like there are significant impacts that will affect the global economy, per se, at that point.

2:42Yeah, I want to jump into things. The number one topic here is going to be Micron that we discussed today. Love to get the chart up. Love to get your takes. And I think you already do. What’s your take here? And what was the actual guidance coming out of the company yesterday afternoon?

3:01So yeah, so numbers came in, they pretty much beat on everything. I think gross margins came in light because of mix and because of the LTA agreements that they had. So that’s kind of what weighed on on things a little bit. It initially sold off and then it ran up to like 1080. I went long into the print, I bought some calls for November and then I put on a position in perps. I actually sold my perps position this morning, maybe like 40 minutes ago around 10am because more so because even though like the numbers looked great and I thought guidance was good and personally, I wanted clarity around capital returns, which they basically said after I think the expiration of the CHIPS Act, for some reason they’re not allowed to buy back stock until then, which would be early December, I think December 9th, that they’ll be working on beginning to return capital to shareholders. So I thought that that was crazy bullish and I think they said they were going to return 100% of like excess cash flow or something like that. I forgot the exact terms, but it was, I read it as bullish and they basically said that supply would be tighter in 2028 than it is today, which is people were thinking that we were at peak tightness in terms of

4:28the industry. So I read it as bullish. I’ll say that maybe the negative reaction that we’re seeing.

4:36So like I bought some more this morning and then I basically just hit it out. I got out of it at like 1033 around there, like at the pretty much like the lows of the day, but like that was just like the trade I put on on the stock. I didn’t do anything on the option side of things, but I think as I’m digesting this, I guess people were a little disappointed in the fact that price appreciation is slowing down. So like second derivative effects, right? The slope of that is slowing down. So that’s some cause for concern. But again, I think that what made me bullish on the LTAs is that you do have more visibility into earnings, right? On the out ear basis, which is kind of what I think will end up rerating this thing higher. So I am still bullish on it.

5:33I think like the trade, I thought, you know, maybe it was gonna, because this morning, if we were around in line from yesterday’s close, so I thought, oh, this could possibly run on the open or maybe have a quick sell off and then rally all day. It seems to be weaker out of the gate. So I hit out of my shares, still watching, still bullish, haven’t done anything with my options positions, maybe at some point, when I feel maybe the selling has settled down, I’ll add to the November calls that I bought. But other than that, like, you know, I think this is just another strong data point. But again, I am looking at the fact that it’s weak on it, right? And so that, to me is kind of like, maybe a comminarian, the gold mine. But again, like, this is kind of like one of those things we were talking about a couple of weeks ago, where the news comes out over the weekend of like AI slowing down, you want to throttle all of it. I’m like, okay, well, maybe, you know, my assumptions are wrong, right? And I think always in trading, you always want to be thinking that right is like, hey, how am I wrong? And what does that look like? Right? And so one of those things is you have a blowout quarter numbers are great, and stock is down. So

6:48that’s just something to think about. Yeah, and I would say the rest of the AI industry, there wasn’t any like, massive sell off, there wasn’t any pop anywhere, right? I think this is maybe just a bit of turbulence in the sector, not seeing anything, you know, disastrous, as I was looking through the pricing this morning.

7:11Yeah, I mean, I think that, again, like everything is kind of probably trading off of Micron, right? Where that’s where everybody’s, this was the new data point, right? That everybody was waiting on. And I think people’s assumptions are going to change with that. You know, also, I think concurrently, like right around the time that they released earnings last night, I think Bloomberg ran an article on Gemini, and their new model that came out because I think they announced it, I think in the afternoon. Yes. And it beat benchmarks, like it was like at the top of benchmarks. But then I guess Bloomberg ran an article quoting employees saying that it’s not performing tasks well. So, you know, they’re not, they’re not able to utilize it to like, do actual work. So, I think that was interesting. Without seeing that article, if you look through the actual benchmark reports, where it kind of was like, Oh, as an overall model, we’re number one, that it didn’t seem to be like, there wasn’t like any one area where it was just like better. It was like, all right, it’s a little bit better here. And then, you know, it’s only like 1%, 2% better than Claude or, or Opus 5.5 or Astra 6. But it still seemed like though, if you’re going to do

8:39like serious workload like coding stuff, you would still go to either Astra or Opus after looking at the benchmark, which was an interesting takeaway. Yeah. And I think like, look, like even just looking at the stock reaction, right? Open at the highs of the day, it’s currently at the lows of the day. I just brought up Meta to see how Meta is doing comparatively and Meta’s like holding in. So yeah, I think because remember, a couple weeks ago, also, people were teasing on the timeline about RSI and about Google getting there to recurse itself improvement. And how people are like, Oh my God, Google’s gonna leapfrog everybody. So obviously, that’s not the case.

9:21And, you know, I think there is, I think the fact that it’s funny, because I was talking to a couple of my normie friends about it last night. And, you know, one of them was like, Oh, yeah, like great. Google came out with a competitive model. So now I can like plug in all my stuff from Google because Google has everybody’s things and like access to everything. And again, kind of going back to what we said on Tuesday, I think Apple number one, Google number two in terms of trusting you with my data, right? And stuff like that. So that being said, I also down I started the download for instinct this morning, I want to try it out. I haven’t tried it out.

10:02I’ve heard like good things about it. My biggest concern with instinct is that I mean, I apparently so they raised at $10 billion, like, I think like at Monday, and then somebody told me that they’re raising a 20 billion now. So like, I’m like, wait, didn’t they just close 10 billion, like literally like two days ago? And they’re like, yeah, apparently, like they’re raising another round of 20 right now. So obviously, they’re the next new hot thing. A lot of people that I’ve been trusting on like the AI stuff over the last couple months are like, instinct filled. So I’m like, all right, well, let me just give it a shot. Like, I’ve been pretty happy with my setup of pretty much running everything on grok bot.

10:43And then like the really important tasks that I have running them through like Astra or fable, depending on who I think is better in that moment. But yeah, I just think that like the interesting thing here with Google, to tie it back to like Google’s price action is that if the model is good enough, Facebook has showed us that consumers will flock to brands that they trust.

11:09Right. And so yep, that I mean, that trust is going to become such a important metric going forward. Which is, you know, since we had that combo on Tuesday, I was I think I was thinking about it yesterday as I was driving, like, if Apple came out with some sort of AI solution, that was good. Like, I would pretty much move everything like granted, I’m already in Apple, right? I have a MacBook and iPhone, I have a Mac Mini already in the Apple ecosystem. But if Apple had some sort of solution that I felt comfortable with, I would like go full like I bring my entire stack on Apple before anybody else. And I think that’s a testament to I think how Yeah, how much people trust them. I you know, you have to also realize, though, that they’re they’re not stepping out of this on like a conscious decision to like, let everybody make the mistakes. I would, I would take basically the rumor mill that you’ve seen online of like, oh, they just weren’t able to do anything competitive, and they couldn’t come up with anything like really solid in AI space. And they’ve really struggled to make that transition from or that transition into the AI sector, as their deterrent. And that actually might end up helping them.

12:31Because they’re not caught up in all this, this drama. Now you could point to somebody like x and Grok and say like, well, okay, they’re also kind of, you know, playing this battle. But you know, maybe sometimes it’s better just to be on the sidelines, let everybody find the landmines and then swoop in with the most polished product and win people in trust that could be the multi trillion dollar play that Apple is officially taking. I don’t know, I’m still I’m still very shocked that we haven’t seen more integration of AI into Apple product.

13:09I will say with the new iPhone 18 still feels like there’s no like, I don’t I don’t feel like I am on my laptop, right? Like, I can literally turn my laptop and be like, I need you to make a PDF and do this do that. And I need you to email gmoney. And I need you to also turn it into a musical play and render it and you know, like, it’ll just happen. The fact that I don’t have that magic, or I feel like Steve Jobs always used to be like, it should feel like magic when you use our products. I, I like don’t feel that magic with AI now being the most magical technology out there.

13:51Who do you think is doing it the closest? Like, who’s doing the closest to making it feel like magic right now? On the hardware side, like as a hardware company? I think just in general, like, like the first thing that pops up to my head is, I’d say I haven’t used instinct. But from what I’ve heard, instinct feels like magic. From what I’ve heard, news feels like magic. I think that most interesting thing I think about muse is the fact that he’s working on consumer hardware. So I’m very interested, obviously, with the little key chain Tamagotchis that are going to come out.

14:28And then the new glasses that are going to come out next year. Well, this is, there’s the opportunity. There’s the opportunity to make it feel like magic, right? Yeah, this is to my point when OpenAI invested like what, like 20 billion or whatever it was, like some obscene number into figure. The robotics company, and a lot of people are like, well, why is a frontier lab investing in robotics company, like they just want to like lock in that partnership. And I do believe it is a, you know, an age old tale, if you’re you come from like the development space or technology space, if you own the technology, if you own the software, and you own the hardware, that’s how magic happens. If you only own the software, and you don’t own the hardware that’s happening, that’s, you know, executing on this, it won’t be as unified. Apple is again, another age old example of this, where the only way to get to the most, you know, controlled environment possible was to kick Intel out, they’ve kicked out AMD on their, you know, some of their GPU stuff, they’re making as much of their stuff in house at this point, because then you can you control it all. And I feel like that is where going from software

15:41to hardware will be insanely hard. It is not the same thing to build software and hardware, just a different problem set. And I feel like you will see Apple who has mastered the supply chain has mastered distribution of actual product and physical goods. They also pretty good at software can make the like double down be like, yeah, not only do we own the phone, but now we have a great LLM and it’s competitive. And we have the best privacy and security. Cool. Sign me up. I’m there.

16:14Yeah, so we’ll see. I think it’s interesting. I probably also think part of it too, has been the fact that they have a new incoming CEO. So he’s probably gonna have a very opinionated POV that’s probably different than Tim Cook’s. And so we’ll see. I think it’ll be interesting to kind of see what happens there on a go forward basis. Yeah, I’m comparing it to the Nick Saban leaving Alabama. Can they continue the dominance that they had for the previous decade here? We will see. You will see. Gee, I want to jump into, is there anything else on like the AI trade here? I’d love to touch on a couple topics. One of them being the revenue trade within crypto right now. Two big ones, Pons and Stonk. And obviously also touch on Hyperliquid and Lighter here. Not sure if there’s anything you want to touch on before you hop into those topics here. No, I’m not too up on, I guess talk to me a little bit about Pons and Stonks.

17:20Like everything I’ve seen on Stonks.fun for the last week has kind of been a lot of negative stuff around like the team, I guess, or whatever, but I haven’t paid that much attention because I just generally don’t pay that much attention to Solana. So I like if you have, if you have, I guess some tea on that to get to get us up to date and then talk about, you know, the revenue met because I think obviously that it’s funny because like people keep talking about the revenue meta is like, that’s just like, that’s just corporate. That’s just organizations making money. Like, yeah, that’s the way it should be. And that’s the sad thing. It seems like this revenue meta, right? Like, like all stocks are revenue. Yeah. Well, I’m into business, right? Like business, business, financials, and valuations are finally making their way into crypto. You love to see it. Let’s go up what we got going on over here on Pons real quick and first Stonk. I want to, I pulled this together real quick this morning, just as an example of what is actually happening from a numbers basis. Forget what’s happening on like the team side, who is actually performing better. We had Pons run up to a billion dollars that is now

18:36down significantly. And we are seeing more, more and more people kind of flood into the Solana side for stonks. My take here, I’m still a bull. I’m very bullish on Pons.

18:52I believe that they have still established themselves as kind of the cornerstone on the side of a new launchpad. And it does show when you look at the actual daily revenue here, while Pons is falling significantly behind Pump.fun, who is the winner of all winners when it comes to the launchpad trade. I do think you have to recognize that they’ve held pretty solid around a million dollars a day in revenue. And I am expecting as more people come into the Robinhood ecosystem, as Robinhood pushes harder on the tokenization of equities and RWAs, and they more integrate crypto into their app, you’re only going to see more traders come to the Robinhood chain, more people on Robinhood’s app come to the Robinhood chain. And within that, you know, it’s a distribution thesis. Will more people use Pons or will more people use Pump because of that? And do you think STONK.fun will be the end game winner here? I don’t think so.

19:57I don’t, I don’t, you know, absolutely, I’m not fully bought into it. And that’s kind of just my take for right now. I do think Pump is still the AAA grade golden example of if you want something that makes money, has distribution, has the marketing, and is pretty ruthless company when it comes to, you know, protecting their market share. I do think that that is still a goodbye.

20:29We’ve seen that move up to I think around 0.005 or 55. As people pointed out in clips, we were calling that down around 0.0015 to 1.8. So, you know, a 3x now nibbling towards the 4x off of those lows. I think you just got to go and bid strength into any of the weakness that we’ve seen.

20:55And that’s Pump, that’s Hyperliquid. And to be fair, I think on the AI trade, it kind of where, where was the weakness that got flushed out very quickly? That’s where I’m putting my money right now.

21:08I am curious on your take, you know, we covered a little bit on like PON, STONK, Pump. And we’ve got some graphics around Hyperliquid and Lighter. I got a rant. I got to, I got to give my two cents here on, and I’ll actually, I’ll let you go first on this. The Hyperliquid unlock that happened. There’s a lot of concern over this timeline was quite divided. What was your take?

21:32Because mine is, I’m bullish, but I think there’s probably a stronger take on.

21:38Yeah, I mean, I think so we were talking about it either last episode or two episodes ago about the hype unlock that was coming up, right? And that it might weigh on the token. And then it was announced that there was some entity that came in and bought it. I don’t know if people disclosed the price, but they bought all, I think it was like $300 million worth of the token.

22:05And it was all, it was an OTC trade. Those shares never hit the market. Like, that’s crazy bullish, you know, because like this was, this was a huge overhang of people being like, all right, there’s going to be tokens for sale. And that’s going to weigh on the price as the market absorbs that. But guess what? Somebody came in, whether it was a discount, or it was at the last sale or whatever, some negotiated price, those people that probably lightened up on their positions anticipating this or sold short or whatever, now had to reverse the trade. So, you know, I think we saw the token react positively yesterday. It was, it was up today. It’s giving back some of those gains. But like, I think ultimately it’s crazy bullish, you know, like, I think, you know, probably like, to me, this hype kind of looks a little juicy for, you know, probably buy some here, give it to the low from like yesterday, whatever that low is, 84-ish. And you can probably put on that trade there. And yeah, I think if you’re a bear on Hyperliquid right now, you should take yourself out, away from your desk, turn the computer off, burn it, and stop being a LARP trader. I don’t see the bear case. I think the same people that were fighting hype at $10 over the same unlock schedule, the same fears,

23:37are still on the same thesis of, hey, because tokens are getting unlocked, it’s going to go down. The fact that there’s appetite here is certainly a strong indicator that there are outside firms that see this going at least two, three, four, five X. And I’m seeing price targets of like $285, $315. And obviously, these are multi-year price targets. But you know, it does make you question, you know, is in our current landscape, does Hyperliquid have that ceiling to get to? But also, is the PerpDEX terminal trade still on? That is the one question. I’ll pull up the real quick here. Oh, my gosh, I’ve hit the wrong button. I’ve modified this. Oh, I’ve lost the other one. I pulled the bull versus bear case here on what I had a good graphic that I’ll pull in actually in a second here. But the bull versus bear case. I got this from Eric and matter online this morning. Hyperliquid currently at that time, seen around $89. And now, we have the big question around with Hyperliquid, not getting any partners bailing on them, if anything, more people coming to the table to work with Hyperliquid while lighter had Robinhood do them so dirty during the Robinhood summit, where Robinhood was like, hey,

25:15actually, we’re going to go work with Bitstamp and build our own perp solution. We don’t need lighter anymore. And completely just ghosted lighter at the altar, essentially. And now we have a lot of people questioning on this large pullback on lighter, what’s going to happen?

25:36And you know, I do think I do think that’s worth jumping into here. And I’ll show you if I pull up the other the other graphic that we have here. All right, at least at least we have the graphics working a little bit. Well, shout out to like, timeout. Also, shout out to you for making these graphics. I know you’ve been working on them for the last week or so. Very cool stuff. So wait, bring it back up because I don’t think people got a no. Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate it.

26:11I know you’ve been the power the power of AI and and being able to build this stuff kind of relatively quickly, obviously, to how long it used to take. But shout out to that.

26:21Give people and people give give Hunter his kudos because he’s been working very hard on this.

26:26I appreciate it. Shout out to the index team who has put up with my dictator like behavior over the last few weeks to get to a point where we can have ESPN level graphics and data and investigation at the click of a button and spin these up in a couple of minutes. I love it.

26:47But look, I think if you step back over the last this is over the last 10 days.

26:52And I think if you look, they’ve treated pretty neck and neck on the 29th evening, that large pullback on lighter that was at the Robin Hood summit when again Robin Hood literally just was like lighter who completely forgetting that they existed.

27:11And you’ve seen some time back here on that token. Go ahead. Yeah.

27:16So I was unaware of this. So please tell me a little bit. So I haven’t been tracking that much around what’s been going on with lighter. So I know a couple of people a couple of months ago, it was announced that Robin Hood was going to use lighter rails to build their perp decks. Now, I think one of the issues that people brought up at the time, again, correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just I haven’t been that close to that story. But one of the things people brought up at the time was that the lighter rails would have the lighter Robin Hood rails would have separate liquidity than like the lighter perp decks, right? So it’s almost like they were building like a second perp decks for them.

28:03And people were like, Oh, this is gonna be bullish, blah, blah, blah, like obviously spinning things as as bullish Lee as possible. And so then, I believe part of this run up was also the fact that, you know, people were anticipating that because of Robin Hood, all this volume was going to come on to lighter, because Robin Hood, obviously is the retail flow company. And then basically, I believe Robin Hood had a two day summit, right? I think it started on the 29th. And then it was yesterday. And then I think it was over last night. And at that summit, they basically announced like, we’re going to be utilizing bit stamp in order to build out our product. Yes, yeah. And so, you know, you have the entire lighter investor base going into this event, all being you like, Oh, we can’t wait for them to talk about crypto, we can’t wait for them to bull post our bags. And unfortunately, they walked into, you know, a buzzsaw. And essentially, Robin Hood said, Yeah, we’re gonna go a different direction here. Thanks. So then, I guess like, I guess two questions come to mind is one is does that mean like, they never had an agreement? Or like, you know, it was never I think, I think there was certainly

29:25something in the works, but it was probably, again, the ball is in the court of the people of distribution. And so I’m sure that there was a way for at, at least for Robin Hood to be like, we don’t want to do this, but like, we’re all paid for like development work or whatever, like, or you guys didn’t meet certain metrics. So like, we are going to like default on the agreement. Because you can’t, you know, couldn’t do x, y, and z. And we said we’d only, you know, go forward if you can meet these. Look, I’m sure they are looking for the most competitive partner. And I believe there’s some investment exposure on the bit stamp side with Robin Hood. I don’t know if they’re an investor or what, but I do know that there was when I was reading through some of the news, I was like, oh, that makes sense. Like, there’s more alignment with the bit stamp camp.

30:22I guess my question is, like, does bit stamp have a perps product that?

30:27Well, clearly, like, I mean, I have something I actually don’t know, I’ve never used bit stamp.

30:34Yeah, same. So that’s why I think that’s kind of interesting. But yeah, maybe maybe they, you know, a significant investment from that. So they do. They own I think they own it because it’s when you go to bit stamp, it’s bit stamp by Robin Hood. Okay, so I get, you know, I guess I guess they do. I thought one of personally, like, I thought one of the most interesting announcements to come out of the Robin Hood conference that and again, I wasn’t following it too closely. I was only kind of following maybe like certain people that were there and that were bull posting and posting from the conference was, I thought the most interesting thing was the social feed that they were going to introduce into their main app. Yep. Which to me is like very, it seemed like it was a very direct, competitive threat to FOMO. Because obviously, they have the distribution, right? And so they they already have people that like are yellowing zero day options and stuff like that. So I just think it’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out. Yeah, go. Yeah, I was gonna say, well, look, you have to understand and look at the investor base for FOMO. A lot of the early investors in FOMO, whether it’s Falcon

32:03X or individuals have exposure at Robin Hood, and or early investors in Robin Hood. So there’s alignment of and that has been pitched on positive Robin Hood’s look at the app. And I’m sure that the price that FOMO is wanting to get does not align with what Robin Hood thinks that they can squeeze on their own. Certainly Robin Hood here is going to give it their best effort to take over the social trading space within their app. And obviously, if they can’t establish a social graph at a, you know, defensible, like moat, then they will turn around and be like, Okay, we’re going to acquire social graph right now. But they are not acquiring FOMO for any of the tech. Right.

32:50Like that. No, I know. I think that I think that like, like I said, I thought the most interesting thing is that I think if for anybody to do social trading, I think Robin Hood probably in the best position, because they do have pretty much that, let’s say whatever that overlap of user base is, they have it over there, right. And so I thought that was probably to me the most interesting announcement to come out of the Robin Hood conference over the last two days, I didn’t think that there was anything else that was that much more significant, but I could have missed it because I was more it’s funny, because like on the on the x speed, you once you like like something you go down, like you get fed more of that. And so you might end up in like this little echo chamber. So like, yesterday, I was obviously in the AI Micron echo chamber. So that means I was like, getting served less crypto content. I was I was getting served nothing but AI VC drama content yesterday. That was all I know. Let’s talk about that. You’re talking about the node.

33:57We have to talk about the node have to talk about the node.

34:00I got served that as well. So I get for people that aren’t up to date. There was who was it cognition?

34:11It’s cognition, cognition. And man, I forgot the by all been on blanking. Hold on. I’ll just look at my feet. Definitely the first thing on my feet. cognition, drama, but cognition, and factory AI. So basically, Chris, Degg, Degg then was apparently, I guess, a board member on factory AI.

34:43Yeah, pull this up on your screen, if you can hear timeline.

34:47Yeah, share this tab instead. So this is the tweet from the founder of factory AI, the CEO of factory AI, Mattone Grinberg. And so Chris Degg then was on their board, apparently. And I don’t know exactly what factory AI does, or cognition, for that matter, other than the fact that I know cognition. It keeps coming up with people being very excited about what they’re doing. But I haven’t like, looked so much into it. I think they’re more, they might be more focused on the enterprise side of things. So that’s probably why I haven’t necessarily looked that much into it. But there was this drama where he was on the board, he accepted a job from cognition, I think to lead their sales. And Mattone, the CEO of factory AI is alleging that he was sharing secrets from factory AI and going back and sharing them with cognition and then got brought on to cognition, like high level, right? And then he was calling him out for being unethical. And so then Venod, who is, I don’t know the name of this fun, but he’s like, it’s his last name. Oh, Casa, Casa, Casa, yeah. Yeah. The node Casa came out and kind of, by the way, he’s really been in the news over the last six months, especially with his acquisition

36:17of the Seattle Seahawks. I mean, he’s really kind of like, come on and like, shaking up the space of drama and not good drama either. Yeah. So, you know, first off, he’s got a whip that defense into shape because my AI picked them for fantasy football. So I think last last week they, they, they got me one point. And because of that, I’m two in one. So I have a loss officially, but not anyway, besides that, besides that he came out and he like railed factory AI for, for making those comments. And I think he called them like a second tier competitor or something like that.

37:01He said you’re a second tier competitor. But turns out, Colesla Ventures is an investor in both cognition and factory AI. So I think like what was showing up on my feed beyond the initial drama, where I was just like, all right, like sucks, but whatever is the fact that here you have a VC making investments in competitors, obviously picking favorites, right? And like, I don’t know, I’d be pretty pissed if somebody that was on my cap table said that about my startup. And I think it kind of like goes back to the fact of like, you know, should VC investors be investing in competitors? I for the most part, like I’d love to know like your POV, like me as an angel investor, I kind of feel the need like I think, I think obviously investing in startups is very hard. Like VC is a very hard business, despite what people might tell you or what you might believe when you know, when you see somebody like an open AI or an anthropic whatever, because for every one of those, there’s like 1000 zeros, right? Maybe not 1000. But like, you know, those are like one in a million types of wealth, you know, what like reflexive wealth generation events, not every investment is like that. And so those winners have to pay for all

38:27the losers if you expect to make money over that. But I think to me, it’s very difficult to invest in competitors, because ultimately, they kind of want the same market share, right?

38:41So it’s very and especially like as a startup, even people that might not be competitive at the outset, might end up crossing any into each other’s lanes, because like a startup is just trying to make money, right? Like they’re they’re trying to survive any which way for impossible. And so the thing that like, I realized pretty quickly is you’re not necessarily investing in the idea, because the idea is going to morph, what you’re really investing in is the founder, right? And it’s not necessarily the idea. So but I just think still, I think maybe I can’t, I definitely have have had overlap, but like, not intentionally, like it just is very hard. I in, in my opinion, like, I just don’t think I could be like a great value add investor on the cap table, if I’m like, Oh, well, like I’m also invested in your biggest competitor, right? I mean, so I’ll, I can speak to this one, because I played both sides. And I’ve had this happen already. As on the investor side, Dylan and I when we invested, and, you know, I’ll take blast ecosystem, because that was one that we got, we got pitched every single, you know, startup, we sat down and said, Look, we have to identify the winner in each of the sectors, if you’re going to invest there,

40:05and obviously blast as a whole, whole disaster. But our philosophy has always been like, you don’t go and invest in eight of the lending protocol companies, because you’re basically going to be like, seven of those eight will lose. And essentially, you’re going to have to at some point king make somebody and I don’t think ethically we were aligned with that. It was more we should be able to identify the winner and stick there. I do understand that the world will be some overlap.

40:34But when it is a direct one to one competitor, that I don’t like I would never do. I know people that when they came to loot, they’re like, hey, I’m an investor in, you know, one of your competitors want to invest in you as well. And I was like, well, I don’t know, we’re like fully aligned that right? Like there is, like, who do you want to win? Who are you going to help us?

41:00How can I know also, like when I say stuff to you, it’s not gonna like I don’t want there to be a conflict of interest. And I don’t as a founder, I don’t like that. I want I want people that are going to be on like when I hire somebody at loot, you’re full time loot, you’re all loot, you you know, you see the vision you’re bought in doesn’t matter how good or bad things are like you were just it’s how do we proliferate the brand and the technology? I want the same thing with my invest. I don’t want an investor like you’re just another one. Good luck. If you win, you win that totally agree. Even, you know, at 90cc I was I was very like cognizant of who was investing in what because, again, like I want you to be ride or die, right? And if I like need an ask of an investor, right? Because I do think like my approach to angel investing, and even my approach when when I had 90cc as a founder was like, you’re there when I need you, right? Like if I like I don’t, you know, what if I need something from you, or if I think you can help me on something, if I want to run something by you, it’s good to know that you’re a phone call away and that or whatever, a telegram message away, and that I can get you on the phone, and I know

42:13you’ll do your best to help me out. If you are invested in one of my competitors, right? Like, I don’t know, like, is your investment bigger in that competitor? Do you think like you know what their what their roadmap is? And you’re like, Oh, well, there might be overlap there. So you try to push me in something else. Like, I just don’t necessarily trust your judgment 1000% because your motive is to make money. Your motive is not necessarily for me to be successful, right, per se, right? Like, obviously, if I’m successful, that helps your portfolio. But if you could have, you know, like as an investor, if you could have all your portfolio companies do well, then obviously, that helps with your DPI and your returns. So you kind of want to try to play for that. But as a founder, like I want to win, right? And so I think I don’t know, I just, I love that I thought it was all very interesting, like how this like came to light. But I think also, like, but note has been called out, I think in the past, I like for doing like, again, like similar investments in direct competitors, right, within the same industry.

43:23And look, like, I don’t think VCs are going to stop this anytime soon. I’m sure there’s a bunch of VCs that are in open AI, and are in anthropic and are in, you know, we’re in xAI now SpaceX that, you know, they’re like, Yeah, like, I don’t care which one wins, because if one of them wins, you know, I’m doing great, right? But you know, they prefer all of them when so I, I don’t think like, as much as I would love for this thing for this to stop. I do think there are certain investors that just some founders like, well, I just want you on the cap table, right? Because also, like, what does that mean? For, you know, making it easier to raise from other investors? Yeah, with stuff like that. So yeah, look, I will always stand on the the strength of like, you’re either in or you’re out, like, there is no in between. But that’s also just what kind of ship I run. And I would and I, it’s like a double standard, I want a year either in or out, I feel like that’s, that’s got to be the way that you approach this. And certainly, I think in the VC space, it has certainly been like a signaling of like, what capital is behind you, it does mean something when you have, you know, I’m sure I don’t know what the order of investment

44:37here was. But let’s say you are a lower tier, and you haven’t made it to like, you know, the upper echelon of the, you know, of the labs or AI providers, to have somebody come lead your round that has a big investment in your biggest competitors like, Oh, great, like, they’re gonna want us to win, like, all the money is going to come flowing in alongside us.

44:59I can understand that that logic, I still don’t know if it’s, I don’t think I could ever get past like, hey, this guy actively has a big investment, like gaining, like hedging you.

45:12That’s not good. But yeah, I think, I think, I think this really kind of bubbled over significantly here into last night when it was basically everybody just going back and forth each other. You know, there’s a great meme, I quote, tweeted it on x of the missiles being fired from two towns at each other. And I was like, both of these are collage collage ventures firing missiles at each other. It’s drama, drama on the timeline, I don’t think it will affect anybody significantly here. But you know, this is, this is what we got. It’s just, yeah, you gotta, you gotta pick, you gotta pick a side. But yeah, this is my favorite meme of the night. Listen, I don’t think like, like, like, like, kind of your point, and kind of what I was saying, like, there’s some there’s some people that is like, hey, as long as I get the cosine from CoSLA, then oh, it makes it easier to raise money from others. And then maybe it doesn’t matter, right? So it’s like, I think everybody is, you know, every founder, every startup is in a different position, right? If you are intuition, where you’re raising around at like, double what you just raised at this week, you can be like, no, like, if you are an investor in anthropic, like, I don’t want you,

46:38right? Or like, whatever, right? Whatever it is, you can set your own terms. But I think, as you kind of go down the quality stack, people are willing to forego, you know, certain things, right? And then ultimately, you know, it’s, it’s I saw this tweet, actually, I’ll bring it up yesterday, or this morning, actually, and I think I quote tweeted it, it was from Jake Bruckman, who was talking about clearly not a sentiment of a founder, ICOs were a pretty good replacement for VCs, to be honest, right? And so I mean, I always I always say this, the, the biggest headaches on the cap table, or like pretty much any business dealings I’ve dealt with, are the smallest checks. And that has been tried and true throughout my entire career, whether it’s from an investment perspective, from a fundraising perspective, this and that, where the reason why that that makes sense, is that the people with the biggest pockets understand that like, this is a, it’s a game where not, you know, like, it’s a percentages game, right? And so you want to have like a good slugging percentage, and you need to have like a good on base percentage, and at bats and all this stuff. And it’s not, you know, that not every investment is

48:02going to work out, but you’re playing the odds. And the people that don’t understand that, are the people that cut the smaller checks, because they don’t have necessarily that same experience.

48:12And they are upset, because you lost, you know, $5,000, $10,000, or whatever. But meanwhile, the guys that are writing like seven or eight figure, you know, nine figure checks, like, yeah, that’s just like, part of the game, right? And so, yeah, for some reason, this just came to mind of like, yeah, I totally agree. I think that like, there, there is no replacement for like, a good investor on the cap table, right? Like, I’d rather have a large investor that understands the game.

48:46And I want to give a big shout out to collab currency and Derek Edwards and his team there, because they were the guys that led the 90cc round. And obviously, it didn’t work out, but he was like, super supportive the entire time and kind of helped me help guide me in like, the right direction, that I don’t think I would have had if I just had like, a bunch of angels on the cap table or had done an ICO, where it’s funny, the first the first comment, you know, is definitely sarcastic, right? When buybacks where, and you know, Shaw, Shaw, kind of lived that with his AI 16Z and Eliza stuff, a year or two ago. But yeah, where it’s, you know, people are like, Oh, how are you accruing value to shareholders immediately. And like, my, my thing has always been is like, you’re in a store if you want, you want dividends and buybacks and all that, like buy Apple, right? Like, they don’t buy a crypto startup that needs every like, I think Hyperliquid was a little bit of a unicorn in the sense that they were able to generate a ton of cash, kept a very lean team. And we’re able to start generating instant buybacks. But most startups are not like that, right? Most startups are, if you make a million dollars, you need to take that million

50:00dollars and reinvest it back into the business. Because you want that million dollars to turn into 100 million. And if you are taking that money outside of the business, it’s going to be much harder to return capital to shareholders, it’s going to be much harder to get to that 100 million. Right. And that’s, that’s just a fact, right? The biggest companies, fastest growing companies in the history of the planet Earth are not distributing capital to shareholders in the first 24 months from inception. You know, they are reinvesting every single, every single dime back into that business, because there’s going to be their bet is that there’s more value accrual down the road. And so I think that’s something that very sophisticated investors understand. A lot of times retail doesn’t. And they’re just like, I want like, why, why do I wake up? And, you know, the price is down? Like, fix this, right? Your your sole job is to do something like at its greatest. Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, I just think that like there is there, I think there always be a space for VCs and large investors, sophisticated investors that understand that. And I think for that reason, it’s like when you do an ICO, all these types

51:16of things, like, yeah, like it’s probably easier money, in the sense that they’re not doing like as much CD, it’s easier to get the capital out of them, because you can tell the story.

51:26But then on the flip side of that is because they’re less sophisticated, they’re going to be expecting they’re going to be mad if you know, it’s not up into the right only right out of the gate.

51:37Yeah, I look, it comes down to who do you want to who do you want to deal with that the worst moment?

51:43That’s how I always think about it. Do you want to deal with somebody who’s going to be, you know, has been there before? Do you want to deal with somebody who’s going to be basically saying, get my money back at any cost and don’t care about your company?

51:54Again, alignment is a huge thing when you’re a founder, taking venture money from anybody.

51:59I have lived I’ve lived that life several times here. And I certainly have learned a lot over the last five years of whether I’m on the investor side or the founder side of the do’s and don’ts and the shortfalls of taking capital. I will give a shout out real quick here to PowerPay, as well as Quadwitch in the chat on x. Appreciate the support GM to both of you.

52:25Hope you’re well. And thank you for the the check ins and the love there. I do I do want to also shout out everybody who over the last couple episodes has been following us on x.

52:40Love to see the numbers growing there, as well as the numbers on YouTube and Spotify are going up. Love to see it. And very appreciative for those that support.

52:53We’ve got a lot of feedback as well on like graphics and what what you guys want to see. So this show offered some of those. We’ll be continuing to ramp up there if you have ideas, you want comparisons, you want things visualized, you want investigations analysis on any tokens.

53:11Again, please just drop a tweet, tag Full Port tag gmoney tag myself in it. And we’ll make sure to look out for any of those tweets. And hopefully on Tuesday, we’ll cover those.

53:26Gee, what else we got going on right now? I feel like there’s probably another thing at least that we’ve skimmed over here. I know Athena was the one I was like, I do want to mention at some point has gotten a lot of timeline. I pick up on this when when you start to see the tokens get mentioned a lot. Athena obviously had a big pullback right after its launch. And now we’ve seen it starting to creep up. We also saw some target prices come out of standard chartered yesterday, basically calling for an 8x over the next two years on Athena pricing.

54:08I’m not familiar with the specifics around how that will happen. But I do think that it is one that has gotten a lot of narrative on the timeline. I’m not sure if you’re able to pull up the chart for ENA real quick. Yeah, take a look at it. I do know VVV also getting a lot of mentions near having a little bit of a pullback as well as some other of the names. I do think there’s going to be a little bit of a rotation into the blue chips here, regardless of what we’re looking at, with the screen share here. As you can see, September, fantastic month if you are a holder of the token, you can see this really fall off. A lot of bull posting going on here. I don’t know if I’m a buyer right now at these numbers, I’d like the dust to settle maybe a little bit and get some directional stability. But definitely something that should be on your radar after this movement over the last 30 days. Crazy. Yeah, I don’t know enough about ENA. I guess technically, again, I think you just want to be trying to buy strong stocks, add support, you could buy it here and probably give to whatever that number is. I can’t tell. $0.24? Yeah, below $0.24?

55:39You probably use that. I think Bitcoin has held in strong after what came out yesterday, the PCE number yesterday. And so, yeah, you probably buy it. I was playing that breakdown off of gold, and it didn’t break down. And gold is, I guess, holding that low for now.

56:00But yeah, Bitcoin is obviously much stronger at this point. And, you know, probably like buy some here, give it to the low, if there’s continuation there. But I do think that you want to be watching rates, keep on creeping higher today is probably the first red day in a few days. And we’ll see, you know, for each top, the 10 year top that 5.3 or not. And then here’s the 30 year again, looks like it may have topped maybe today put in the top today. And that’s probably also why probably microns are in the strength in or whatever, and maybe the low in inequities here. But yeah, I mean, I think that to me kind of going into the weekend, you just kind of, I don’t really see anything significant that I’d make change wise and in my portfolio allocation pending like maybe new news coming out AI, which every every Friday, I feel like at five, six p.m. something new happens in the AI sector that people freak out over over the weekend, and then it turns out to be a nothing burger by Monday. So yeah, certainly, I’m sure there’s more ahead of us this weekend as there is every weekend. I’m pretty, I’m pretty flat into the weekend. No, no movement on anything. I’m kind of comfy and quote runs right now, hoping for a bounce

57:25there. Haven’t seen anything too significant, a sell off is a little painful to endure, I will be honest, but like I still think if Kraken and ink can pull out some some wins here, you should see some appreciation on the price side. What is it for right now? I’m curious.

57:46Floor is right around 1.54 on the F side on open C. Yeah, so around like $4,000 token price.

57:57We’ll see. We’ll see what happens still again, not giving up just there’s we got some we got some momentum to go here. Let’s call it a show here.

58:11Yeah, solid. Anything closing thoughts? Nope. See you on Tuesday. All right. We’ll see everybody on Tuesday, 10am Eastern Time or 1030am Eastern Time. Appreciate you guys tuning in. We’ll catch you on the next one. Cheers, guys.