Guest
Mike Beckham
1 indexed appearance on the show — Paid Media, Creators & Influencers, Product Development, Founder & Team, AI
Appearances
Takes from the episode
Extracted from the full conversation — a take may be the cowboys’ or the guest’s. The clip link settles it.
2026-05-09 Paid Media
AppLovin has grown from an untested beta channel into a always-on, high-volume performance channel worth multi-million dollar spend without it even being considered testing anymore.
We ended up spending more money on Apple 11 in Q4 2024 than Meta... I spent over $3 million last year on it. And it that wasn't even testing. That's just good results.
▶ 18:25 2026-05-09 Founder & Team
The greatest benefit of entrepreneurship is the high agency to choose who you work with and what you work on, valued above titles or income.
I really think the best thing that entrepreneurship can give you is high agency that you get to choose who you work with, you get to choose what you work on.
▶ 44:25 2026-05-09 Product Development
Ridge identified a gap in what to buy 35-year-old men as gifts and built new product lines (luggage, apparel, etc.) specifically to fill that occasion-driven demand.
There was a big opening in the market is what do you buy 35-year-old men for Christmas? And that's where we made the Ridge wallet, the luggage, the everything else we have coming out.
▶ 35:45 2026-05-09 AI
AI's usefulness is a direct reflection of the user's creative imagination, and this creativity can now replace expensive agency work like commissioning brand jingles.
its usefulness and your perspective on it is directly a result of your ability to conceptually understand or dream up ways that you might use it... we can generate 50 options that we like and we can kind of decide which one do we want to use and we can split test that.
▶ 53:05 2026-05-09 Creators & Influencers
Brand builders should be wary of trying to be talent managers with creator equity bets, even though early sponsorship of the right creator (like Theo Von) can turn into a huge long-term win.
you're a brand builder, you're not a talent manager or an A&R... we were very early sponsor of him... Theo Von has gone on to build an amazing career and he's super famous.
▶ 27:05 2026-05-09 AI
Betting against technological progress has always been wrong historically, and AI-driven labor disruption will end up net positive for the people it displaces, just as past shifts like the decline of farming did.
if you had bet against humanity and it bet had had had bet against technological progress at any point, you would have been wrong... every time there's been a disruption, it's been net positive for the people being disrupted.
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