Consumer Greed

Good afternoon LPs,

Yesterday I got back to NYC after spending a couple weeks in Florida. While away, I saw all the Ashton Hall morning routine videos and felt inspired to perfect my own ritual. Everyday in Florida I woke up at 2pm, popped 4 ZYN, sat outside for 15 min praying for the downfall of my enemies, drank 3 Red Bulls, and spent the rest of my working day yelling at people on the phone while fishing for large mouth bass. I’ve never felt more zen in my entire life.

Anyway, let’s get into today’s newsletter.

Hard and Fast News

Fake headlines, real news

23andMe has filed for bankruptcy, their CEO stated, “we’re sick of people sending us everything BUT their saliva” (Techcrunch)

Tesla stock has rebounded proving that any company can come back if you have a trade show on the White House lawn (Investors.com) 

Trump claims to be selling one thousand 5M “Gold Cards” a day. Top purchasers are allegedly from North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. (MSN)

DoorDash Offers Loans on Food Orders

Last Friday the unicorn lending startup Klarna announced a partnership with DoorDash, allowing consumers to finance their DoorDash purchases. Many of you are probably wondering, “how the fuck did we get here”. Let me take you through America’s consumer debt history: 

1946-1955:

You're a middle class American family with 4 kids. You make $3,000/year ($49k/year today) working in a factory that makes lead lined baby bottles. The only thing you can get loan for is a shitty house in Pennsylvania because the U.S. government feels bad since you saw your best friend Jimmy get decapitated in Iwo Jima. The debt culture is simple. You see something you want that’s worth $50. You ask yourself, do I have $50? If the answer is yes, you might buy it. If the answer is, I have $49 - you don’t buy it. 

1955-1970:

Post WW2 home ownership has BOOMED, over 2/3rds of American households own a home. Credit cards made their debut and some Americans are starting to come around to them. This is the white picket fence era of America - your dad works one job and provides for a 6 person family. You don’t have a lot of stuff, but you own a car (which you paid for in cash), you go to the Ozarks every summer, and live a nice but modest existence. Kids have 2 paths in life: acquire a skill like plumbing or be a fucking nerd and go to school. A lot of people choose to be gross degenerate hippies who don’t want possessions. 

1970-1980:

The baby boomer hippies quickly realized living tents is gay and they want stuff now. But most of them don’t have good credit scores. This is a problem. Turns out if you follow The Grateful Dead for 5 years in a van full of herpes and greasy hair, it’s hard to learn a skill or get an education. So some hippies decide to go back to school to become lawyers and doctors. Everyone else works as a cashier and dreams about buying a mustang. Uncle Sam and big banks realize these former degenerates can’t buy cool shit, so they introduce subprime loans allowing losers with shitty credit to buy Harleys and other bullshit. Thankfully most people are modest and only buy what they can afford, but the dark seed of debt has been planted. 

1980-1990:

Oh boy, it’s the 90s. Things are ripping. Your mom is wearing neon sweats in the living room doing dance workouts in front of the VHS home movie theatre she bought with dad’s Amex. After the workouts QVC comes on and mom buys turquoise earnings without leaving the house. America isn’t directly involved in wars, but we’re funding them and building a lot of cool technology. The internet is coming, email is coming, and Steve Jobs is doing acid in a basement thinking about iPads. The consumer debt tree is still sapling but its root network is spreading fast. Financial institutions now make more money off of consumerism (investing in mortgages, credit card, car loans) than they make off of production (actually building things). 

1990-2002:

If you thought the 80s were cool, the 90s are electric (literally). Kids don’t play with cost-free sticks anymore they play with super soakers and video consoles their dad bought them for Christmas. By the late 90s everyone is getting a cellphone. Everyone wants to go college. Why? Because your GF Jessica is going to college and you don’t trust her to be around frat bros. But college is expensive so you’re gonna need a loan. Good news is, college still means something. So you graduate with a good job and make decent money. The problem is that you’re paying $850/month to your student loans and you want a cool car. You went to fucking Vassar and deserve a BMW. Thankfully you don’t even need to go to a bank anymore, BMW is a bank and they’ll loan you that 3 series. Luckily even with all this debt you can still stretch and buy a home. 

2002-2008:

This is the beginning of the end my friends. 50 cent is hot, drives Ferraris, wears $20k worth of gold chains, and goes to the club. This is the bling era and all hell breaks loose. Everybody is looking up to rappers as role models. If they have a Gucci tracksuit, you need one too. Housewives are addicted to magazines and TV shows with actresses and models showing off their cool clothes. If you make $200k the bank will let you buy a $2M house in New Jersey. Everywhere you go everyone looks rich, they’re not. They’re poor as fuck driving Mercedes and wearing Rolex’s. The housing market begins to literally self-destruct, and an autistic guy with only one eye somehow sees this coming and shorts the market. The U.S. government bails out banks and automotive companies and kicks this burning pile of consumer debt garbage down the road. Everyone thinks they’ll learn from their mistakes, which is obviously never gonna happen. 

2008-present:

Following the financial collapse people lose their jobs and live more modestly (kind of, but not really). Before we know it social media takes over. Tech booms and creates a shit ton of high paying jobs. The stock market rips for literally 20 years and companies become worth trillions. Everyone should be rich now right? Wrong. The only people that have money are tech bros and baby boomers who owned homes for 50 years that are worth $3M. Millennials desperately wanted approval so they took out $200k in student loans to go Wesleyan and most of them haven’t paid those loans back. They’ve been too busy posting thirst traps on Instagram and showing their friends their cool vacation to Fiji (which they paid for on a credit card). All of the most famous people in the world are social media influencers and everyone is trying to be one too. The only way to do that is by buying cool shit, going on awesome trips, and posting photos so the 300 people you know from high school think you’re doing great. 

It’s gotten to the point where people have so much debt they can’t afford anything. But in the split second people realize they’re trapped in consumer debt hell, a new Lizzo song drops and Taylor Swift gets a new boyfriend. They immediately forget the reality of their debt stricken lives. Everyone has crippling anxiety but can’t figure out why. The solution is anti-anxiety meds and DoorDashing Ben and Jerry’s, but your credit card bounces because you’re at your limit. Thankfully DoorDash cares and knows that you deserve that ice cream. So they let you pay it off in monthly installments. Now your tummy is full and the Lexapro has kicked in. You put on Netflix to watch Temptation Island with your booty call and write a dumb tweet about how no one can afford a home, and that it’s the boomers' fault. And to some degree it is. But the reality is, we’re all to blame.

Raise 2M+ From Your Customers

What if you could raise money for your startup while going viral and getting thousands of new customers?

I know what you’re thinking, Jack, “that’s crazier than the time you tried to slide into Kim Kardashian's DMs”. But hear me out.

In 2024 Tyler Denk, CEO of Beehiiv, raised $1.1M in 2 hours from his users and generated millions of impressions and got thousands of new customers.

But most founders have no idea how to pull this off.

That’s why I’m co-hosting a webinar with Tyler tomorrow at 1pm EST to teach founders how to raise 2M+ from their customers in a community round.

If you want to learn how to raise millions from your customers, come hang with Tyler and I as he shares his secrets behind Beehiiv’s community round:

Memes

iamjasonlevin

15K followers

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Here’s the first teaser for a new comedy series I’m launching April 1st called Silly Valley Ventures.

jabronicap

12K followers

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The Klarna memes popped the fuck off, we’re at 4M+ views on this one.

allanbolic

1,591 followers

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This is not what happens after you intern at Jabroni Capital.

Song of the Day

Whenever I’m down in Florida I have a tradition which is called, a critter crawl. Basically I whip a golf around Florida in the middle of the night blasting tunes and looking for critters. My friend suggested we play this Milli Vanilli song from 1989 and I’ve been obsessed the last couple of days. Is it a good song? Not really. But it’s a perfect time capsule back to the late 80s, and if you shut of your brain off it’s a hell of a vibe.

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I’d love your feedback on what sort of content you’d like to see or how you think I could improve :)

That’s all for this week folks,

Jack Kuveke (J.K.) | GP @ Jabroni Capital