"If there are any other moral cowards who haven't yet left this hall, please do so now." ⠀ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opens his address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York with a sharp rebuke as delegates walk out of the hall in protest of his speech.

I'm excited to share that my book, Life at the Speed of Play, will be out in June. I've spent the last 5 years writing so I can share my lessons and stories around building products and scaling companies.

BOMBSHELL: Motaz Azaiza admits he filmed Israeli hostages being beaten in the streets of Gaza on October 7, and deliberately never published it, to protect the identities of the people beating them. He did post other October 7 footage that day, celebrating the attack. He quietly deleted it later. Azaiza is an influential "photojournalist" from Ghazza. TIME named him to the TIME 100. He was nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize. CNN, the Guardian and Sky all interviewed him. Ms. Rachel Griffin-Accurso, who has 16 million subscribers, made a video for preschoolers introducing "my friend Motaz." She deleted it later. Two weeks ago, he did a 3 hour and 38 minute interview in Arabic. He made a number of EXTRAORDINARY admissions. 🧵

Admire your courage @macklemore!

Every antizionist who believes they’re “on the right side of history” while defending a dude who literally does Nazi salutes in Jewface needs to realize how profoundly they have been brainwashed into being the foot soldiers of a global anti-Jew agenda without realizing it.

Iranian twin sisters Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were beaten until their faces were badly swollen and bruised, suffered broken elbows, knuckles and feet, and had much of their hair ripped out as they were dragged between prison cells. Taraneh has now been sentenced to death by hanging, while Romina was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The sisters were 19-year-old high-school students when masked IRGC agents dragged them from their bedrooms with bags over their heads after they joined anti-regime protests in Isfahan. Their family was not told where they had been taken, and their mother spent four months searching courts and hospitals before finally seeing them in prison, where she could not recognize her own daughters. Taraneh was threatened that guards would rape Romina in front of her unless she signed a confession. Her lawyers later told the court that her confession had been obtained through torture. No evidence that either sister participated in violence was presented. Their family has not been allowed to see either sister since they were sentenced.

Last Thursday, we hosted a learning circle with our luminary LP, @markpinc, founder of @zynga and one of Facebook’s earliest investors, for a conversation about the human side of building a company. Mark and @bencasnocha talked about what it takes to build something that lasts, from growing Zynga to a billion users to coming back years later and making the difficult decision to bring it back to its core. Thank you to everyone who joined us, and to Mark for a great

OMG! @billmaher has become the most balanced voice of truth regarding terrorism, jihadists, Israel & Gaza. Watch this & amplify!

We grew from ~0 to $500M ARR, adding $250M last year alone while being EBITDA profitable. 1,300-word post on every growth tactic that worked for us: 1. What got us from 0-$400M ARR in the US works in every country. 2. Retention and Monetisation Hacks. 3. Localization > Translation. 4. Experiment with $1M internal seed checks. 5. Pivoting to only AI content production unlocked 100% ARR growth. Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas, with our own pool of one-person studios. 1. Acquisition Playbook for 0-$10M ARR in any country in 6 months We run a 90 sec video trailer of an audio drama as an Ad and ask users to download the app if they're interested in the rest of the story. Our core insight after spending >$100M on acquisition is: If the clickthrough rate (CTR) for an ad goes from 2% to 2.25%, our customer acquisition cost (CAC) decreases by ~ 30%. We remodelled our system around this insight and built an AI-first 2.25% CTR ad manufacturing machine that works in every country. For every new country, we take our hit shows -> use LLMs to extract and most intriguing moments -> Write a 5-min script combining all the best parts. The first 60 seconds has to have a hook every 5 seconds and needs to end with a crazy cliffhanger to force a download mid-scroll. If a marketing video is not hitting our benchmarks (2.5% CTR and 55% 3-second through-play), a creative director gets involved to change the hook or cliffhanger to get the numbers there. AI lets us make 1,000 Ads per show, and in total we do ~17.5k Ads per month. When a business creating scales from 1k to 10k Ads, the normal thing is for CAC to skyrocket. But with what I just shared, we 7-8x'd our User Acquisition budget without increasing our CAC materially. It took us 8 months to figure this out, but then the timeline from 0-$10M in every country got shorter and shorter: US revenue grew to $25M in 19 months. (US is now 78% of total) Germany to 21M in 11 months. France to $10M in 3 months. 2. Retention and Monetisation Hacks. We knew we wanted to create an audio entertainment platform, but there was no standard format. For the first 2-3 years, we tried 10 different formats before landing on the winner. After we got it right with audio drama (8-12min chapters, written for mobile fiction, serialized, episodes have strong hooks and end on cliffhangers), avg daily streaming time went from ~25mins to 150+. Audio drama made us realize that Pocket FM was creating a whole new medium. There was no playbook for anything that we were doing. Everything had to be thought & built from scratch. This is what we did for each major bullet: - Monetization: Users have some free daily minutes to listen; then it's pay per episode. We also added the option for users to unlock episodes by watching ads, which is doing extremely well. Ads scaled from zero to a ~$90M run rate in 12 months. - Engagement & production: You don't become obsessed with an app you open once a week. To have users engage daily, we make the next episode free every day. Also helps them build the habit. - Discovery. Huge problem because people consuming Pocket FM enter the app, tap the show, and lock the screen. We fixed it by doing "playlists" of episodes. Once users's free minutes on a show are done, we ask users if they want to pay. If they say no, we play a new show, one where they haven't used their free mins. And we stitch episodes of different shows together that way, creating natural discovery. 3. Localization > translation. 78% of our revenue is still concentrated in the US. Localisation is fixing this: You might write a show for a Spanish audience where language, jokes, folklore, have a certain flavor; if you merely translate the show for, say, a Norwegian audience, that color is lost and hurts the show in the Norway. Listeners would relate more if the show was written by a Norwegian. That's why, instead of translating, we localize shows to different regions. We use AI to take the spine of stories and adapt their whole cultural layer to the other country. The results: a US show that was localized for a German audience had 50% higher retention than the translated version. Localization + our user acquisition playbook led to: - $10M+ ARR in France within 3 months - $21M+ ARR in Germany within 11 months. And this expands writers' addressable market. We get messages of writers thrilled to have revenue coming from the US, India, EU, LatAm, without them doing much incremental work. 4. Experiment. We give $1M checks to new internal initiatives, and the team has 12-18 months to prove their thesis. If they prove it, we double down. This is how Pocket Saga came about, our AI video microdrama app. It's an AI video equivalent of Pocket FM. Same shows and structure, but as a vertical 2-min mobile video series. We launched it two months ago and it's at ~$15M ARR. Pocket's broader thesis is to help creators tell their stories to as many people as possible. Start with audio drama -> multiple languages or localize to diff countries -> microdrama -> more formats like movies, TV shows, and games. Best of all is that writers get revenue streams not only from countries they wouldn't have tapped into, but also from formats they wouldn't have thought possible. 5. Pivoting to only AI content production unlocked 100% ARR growth. In mid-2024, we pivoted to only AI content production. Our growth took a very direct hit. Pocket was already at $200M ARR, growing 50% YoY, and we flatlined for a whole semester. Six months later, the business exploded. After the switch, we went from ~25k hours of content produced per year to over 2.5M hours, which are also higher quality. Because AI orchestrates the writing and more data is fed into it, more blockbusters come out. Over 90 titles have $1M+ in lifetime earnings and 13 crossed $10M. Quality control is done with LLM as a judge, and LLMs are quite tough. Results are very encouraging: - 12-month revenue retention went from 44% to 76%. - In the past year, we added $250M in net new ARR. __________________________________ Pocket Entertainment (Pocket FM + Pocket Saga) has become the largest AI entertainment platform. We have the largest storytelling catalog with 770,000 titles, 550k creators, and 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute retention & engagement data. We are using all of this data to improve every aspect of our business. Our Bet: In the next 3 years we will be able to produce Naruto-like series for $1000. Netflix has to spend $17B to find 100 Blockbusters per year. What happens when you can produce 1M high quality shows for $1B? The streaming wars caused a $300B reallocation of market cap. The AI entertainment wars may be a $1T+ reshuffling of market cap. We are at a unique spot. Unlike other AI creator tools like Runway or Midjourney, we own both the supply and demand side of AI content. We've attracted over 550,000 writers who are producing an annualized 2.5M hours of content every year. This pairs with 137B+ minutes streamed. Because of this, growth is accelerating as we scale further. We have multiple S-curves inflecting at the same time: - AI produces better and more ads -> scale faster in new countries - ⁠Writers + AI produce more shows -> more blockbusters - ⁠Localisation -> more reach per blockbuster - ⁠Audio to video format expansion -> larger TAM -> more creators Every aspect of our business is designed to improve another, and everything is aligned so that the number of blockbusters continues to rise. If you're interested in building at the intersection of ai, tech and entertainment, DM me.

Today, Covenant is emerging from stealth and introducing Anthem: a heavy-payload deep precision strike capability designed for mass production, with deliveries beginning in the thousands in 2027. We’ve raised $250 million, flown Anthem in more than 200 tests, and secured approximately $150 million in orders, including contracts with the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and key international allies. We’re building Anthem at our 105,000-square-foot production facility in Dallas, alongside factories in Germany and Israel. Covenant is backed by @a16z, @foundersfund, @Lux_Capital, @lightspeedvp, @8vc, @aleph, and @AltimeterCap. Deep precision strike is the biggest gap in the arsenal of the West, and we spent the last two years building Anthem to fill it. Now we deliver at scale.