AI companies are paying up to $2M for access to your company's slack messages, and the dubai affiliate guys have already moved on from dropshipping to harvesting corporate data.
here's everything from this week:
the data gold rush is real and it's messy. AI labs desperately want to learn how people actually work, employee-to-employee interactions, how projects get done. tom turned it into a live ad read on the pod ($100K to $2M, 20+ employees in slack, "no catch") while jacky called it NGMI behavior on air. tony already got offered $300K from one lab and is shopping for a better number. the kicker: there are only a couple of real buyers, everyone else in the market is a broker reselling to them.
our first guest mark made the smartest counterargument: don't sell. models will eventually run out of data, so we might see negative token prices where labs pay YOU to use them. every year you hold your data it gets more valuable, and selling it now means training your own future competitors for a one-time check. tom's rebuttal: google, meta, apple, and slack already know everything about you anyway, so if someone's finally paying, take the money. tony got sold by the end of the episode.
mark's business is an absurd machine. licensed collectibles, 200 product drops a month, 1,800 SKUs, most releases sell out in 21-28 days. he went through YC (same batch as gitlab), did the thiel fellowship, failed at a play-video-games-for-money startup, then accidentally built an empire making collectibles for youtubers. saw a raccoon going viral on twitter, had a finished plushie in two weeks. the moat is volume: when creator schedules slip or channels pivot, 200 monthly releases means no single delay matters.
the licensing model explained: someone owns the rights to a character, you pitch them, they take a royalty, you make and sell the product. deals close in days or take three years, so you keep hundreds of pitches out at all times. and once you acquire companies, the existing relationships compound, "hey, we also do this product category now" is the easiest upsell in the world.
the AI segment went places. mark's company won't touch AI for creative work (licensing partners would riot) but automated their entire ops layer: logistics, warehousing, five google sheets of manual reconciliation turned into one-click dashboards. his stack: codex and claude for the dev team, K3 as the first open source model to gain real traction internally, with fable reviewing K3's work and vice versa. jacky runs his whole team off one $19 K3 subscription through a vibe-coded internal dashboard because he's too cheap for multiple seats.
the wildest reveal: a competitor doing $30M/year partners with walking apps to game google maps rankings. they incentivize people to physically walk to businesses, leave five-star reviews for points, click the website. that's how they offer a 7-day ranking guarantee. also discussed: the bootleg chinese token routers selling fable at 95% off by aggregating burner accounts, and tony's theory that you're the one doing the distillation for them when you use it. jacky's response: "if this is my contribution to open source, I'm down."
bonus: tony's new AI executive assistant books things over iMessage with actual hands. planned an entire paris trip, found spider-man seats live on the pod, and when it tried to schedule the task for tomorrow he said "hurry the fuck up, mikaela's getting angry" and it went instant. also tom brought four new people into the company group chat and jacky went completely silent. "I kind of shut down when there's too many people. four is probably the limit."
NGMI with @itstonyyu and @tomwang24, first guest episode with @markprokoudine.
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