Binance Hacked $6.3B Stolen, DoorDash Buys Instacart For $17B, Jake Newfield from Hermetiq, + More!

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Stripe: https://stripe.com/startups Rippling: https://rippling.ai/twist Northwest Registered Agent: https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Plaud: https://plaud.ai/twist Today’s show: Binance lost an estimated $6.3 billion in the biggest crypto hack ever, and Jason proposes a radical solution. The entire tech industry should stop shipping new features for one month a year, and do nothing but patch. (Call it No App November?) On a busy Friday show, Jason and Lon dig into the. Binance breach and look back at Jason’s prescient 2021 warning about leaving your money in crypto exchanges. (He recommends spreading your wealth around various different banks!) Plus, why he’s giving CZ credit for backstopping customer losses out of his own fortune. Plus, DoorDash’s $17B acquisition of Instacart… Did DoorDash overpay? And is this happening now to avoid the harsher regulatory climate should Democrats regain power in the midterms? Then we’ve got Hermetiq co-founder and CEO Jake Newfield, who has twice won the LAUNCH Accelerator’s pitch competition. Hear the celebrated two-minute pitch for an AI build engineer, and find out why Jason thinks having a “lighthouse customer” makes such a huge difference. Finally, we’re awarding the Grand Prize in our $5K bounty competition to create Jason’s Annotated app, and remembering the legendary film and TV actor Sir Patrick Stewart. Guest Jake Newfield on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakenewfield/ Hermetiq: https://www.hermetiq.com/ Bazel: https://bazel.build Apply to the LAUNCH Accelerator: https://www.launch.co/apply Relevant Links Binance links the $6.3B theft to a compromised DevOps laptop (BleepingComputer): https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/binance-links-63-billion-crypto-theft-to-compromised-devops-laptop/ The 1978 Lufthansa heist (History.com): https://www.history.com/articles/1978-lufthansa-heist-jfk-henry-hill-goodfellas Trump pardons Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (KWTX/AP): https://www.kwtx.com/2025/10/23/trump-pardons-binance-founder-changpeng-zhao CrowdStrike: https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/ Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/ Grant Cardone challenges Jason to $1M Bitcoin bet: https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/markets/grant-cardone-challenges-bitcoin-bear-to-1-million-bet DoorDash to acquire Instacart for $17B (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/29/doordash-to-acquire-instacart-for-17b/ Economic Liberties calls on the FTC to block the deal: https://www.economicliberties.us/press-release/economic-liberties-calls-on-ftc-to-block-doordash-instacart-merger/ Central Market, H-E-B's upscale banner, expands home delivery (Supermarket News): https://www.supermarketnews.com/foodservice-retail/central-market-expands-curbside-and-home-delivery People are using AI to make their smart TVs dumb again (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/people-are-using-ai-to-make-their-smart-tvs-dumb-again/ TWiST $5K Bounties: https://bounty.thisweekinstartups.com/ Founder University: https://founder.university/ Founder University x Japan: https://japan.founder.university/ Inside.com domain auction: https://inside.com/ Yank Sing: https://yanksing.com/ Cafe du Monde coffee and chicory: https://shop.cafedumonde.com/product/coffee-beignets/cafe-du-monde-coffee-and-chicory Patrick Stewart, "Star Trek" and "X-Men" actor, dead at 86 (CNN): https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/29/entertainment/patrick-stewart-death “Time Squared” (Star Trek: TNG S2E13): https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Time_Squared_(episode) “Green Room” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8XSARX3DQg “X-Men: Days of Future Past” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK2zYHWDZKo Timestamps: 0:00 The largest crypto hack or theft in history 5:45 Jason gives CZ credit for backstopping losses 7:34 Jason’s cybersecurity proposals 11:48 Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on https://stripe.com/startups. 14:49 DoorDash buys Instacart for $17B 18:48 Is DoorDash overpaying? 24:28 Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business. 26:26 Vibecoding your smart TV 27:20 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 30:04 Jake Newfield (Hermetiq) gives a perfect pitch 34:13 Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! - Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain 37:12 Lead with your lighthouse customer 43:14 The Cafe Du Monde branding lesson 51:10 The Annotated Bounty finals begin 1:04:00 Jason announces the grand prize winner 1:07:34 RIP Sir Patrick Stewart Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.com/ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Twist Friday, October 30th, 2026, year of our Lord. Binance has been hacked for billions of dollars. Unknown, based on my cursory look at this. If this is an super intelligent cyber hack. If this is a spy, a vixen, dare I say, there's been these alerts like watch out for romantic interludes trying to get your laptop. Male, female, across the board, by gay, straight, whatever. I mean, if you watch the Americans, this can come at any angle. No, it's not just dumb guys.

• 0:41Jason Calacanis?

  It could be girls, it could, it could be gay guys, it could be lesbians, anything is on the table when it comes to that type of hacking. Or is it just a vanilla cyber hack without AI? Who knows? Tell us what's going on.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  So yeah, Binance, they're the world's largest crypto exchange station. They were hit by a complex attack affecting an estimated $6.3 billion. That makes this the largest crypto hack in history or in

• 1:11Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on a second. Largest crypto hack. Has there been a larger theft?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Oh, great question.

• 1:18Jason Calacanis?

  Gold, diamonds. Let the team go research that. This might be the largest theft, bank robbery, if we consider it in that vein. I believe this is the largest bank robbery in history. I don't know. It would have knocked off Lutanza for

• 1:34Speaker 01

  The Lutanza heist couldn't have been anywhere close to this. Yeah, no.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, keep going.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Google AI is saying that you are correct, but we'll keep, we'll keep looking that up. Binance says it will cover all losses and has set aside more than $6.3 billion of company funds to do just that. Deposits and withdrawals are suspended while it runs security checks. Early investigation, that's all we've got so far, reveals that a compromised engineer's laptop may have allowed the attacker to submit unauthorized withdrawals. That's, that's about all the information we have on the cause right now. Tethers, Circle, Ripple, Ripple and World Liberty Financial have helped freeze affected assets. About $3 billion is frozen on chain so far. Now, Jason, before we, we discuss this, I do want to play this classic J Cal take.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  This is July 7th, 2021, twist episode 1241. Here's some Jason thoughts for 2021 about whether

• 2:26Jason Calacanis?

  Starting to lose weight, but still a little chubby.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  A little bit. Here's, here's your on whether you should leave your money in one of the big crypto exchanges.

• 2:33Jason Calacanis?

  If, if it was me, I would take any crypto I've bought on these exchanges and I would move them to either a valid exchange or to my own wallet as quick as possible. I would not trust leaving your money in Binance. That sounds like the stupidest thing you could ever do. So anybody who has a Binance account with any amount of money on it, listen to me now. Take every single penny out of Binance and put it into your own personal wallet or take it off the exchange, you know, put it in cold storage, put it on a, an exchange that is based in a region where they are regulated. Absolutely do not trade on these exchanges. And if you insist on trading on them, why would you leave any amount of money up there? Get it all out of there as quick as possible is my best.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  There you have it, folks.

• 3:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, the context here on that date was what? So if we were to look up the news that that was pegged to, I'm curious. I wonder if they had been hacked and that's what I was responding to. I wonder what the context is here.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  I will look it up. Give me one second.

• 3:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Because I, I think what happened was CZ was at some point

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  pardoned by Trump. And then before that he had done something to go to jail, correct? Like there was

• 3:49Speaker 01

  This was, Binance had been banned in the UK. Barclays was taking action against them and Binance was banned in the UK. That was the context here. I do, the CZ conviction that Trump pardoned him on, that was guilty plea was 2023. Sentencing was 2024 and then they got the pardon in 2025.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  Was that a United States thing or is it outside the United States? I was trying to remember all the CZ stuff. This is one of the interesting things about these pardons. And white collar crime or alleged crime, you know, he could have been innocent and

• 4:27Jason Calacanis?

  Trump saw this tremendous injustice and did the right thing.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  This was the, the US Department

• 4:33Jason Calacanis?

  It could be something else.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  The US Department of Justice, what went after him. CZ is a Canadian national.

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  So did he go to jail in Canada or did he go to jail in the United States? I, I don't know the contours of the cases. Yeah, there's so many of these that occurred at the same time. Nicola, obviously the founder of Nicola.

• 4:54Jason Calacanis?

  And obviously FTC and Elizabeth Holmes. And two of those people still in jail, the other two got pardons. CZ is worth $110 billion? Wow.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Did go to jail in the United States. He plead, pled guilty to the US Bank Secrecy Act violations and failing to maintain an adequate anti-money laundering program at Binance. He was sentenced to four months in prison. He served his sentence at a low security facility in California. Oh, Lompoc, famous California prison, Lompoc.

• 5:26Jason Calacanis?

  And he owns 90% of the company. So this is obviously very personal. I think, you know, I'm going to, putting aside whatever happened with CZ previously, he's obviously worth tens of billions of dollars. And this would be a fatality if he hadn't backstopped it. And so you, you gotta give him credit for getting on this early and backstopping it. I know he was on Twitter, like while this was happening in real time, saying, no problem, no problem. People were dunking on him, but I'm going to stop for a second and give him some credit for somebody who is worth tens of billions of dollars to say, this happened in my crypto exchange. I am, he, he's not a public company. He owns 90% of it. It's a privately held, tightly held company.

• 6:09Jason Calacanis?

  For him to just come out and be like, don't worry, backstopping it for three, four, five billion, whatever the losses are.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 6:15Jason Calacanis?

  That's significant. That's probably 20% of his net worth or something. But better to keep you for 80% and pay this. So I'm just going to give CZ, you know, a shout out here for doing that. But I, I will stand with my comments previously, which is it's a bit crazy to keep a large amount of your net worth in any one bank account, exchange, et cetera, in today's market. We learned this from Silicon Valley Bank where the FDIC limit is $250,000 per account. I don't know if that's changed at all. And then, you know, a bunch of the, I don't know if it was Ramp or Mercury or Silicon Valley Bank 2.0, other folks started pitching our startups and us on, hey, if you raise a $3 million round, here's an idea for you.

• 7:01Jason Calacanis?

  We will set up 10 bank accounts for you. Put 300K in each one and then the FDIC will backstop 250 in each. Your total exposure will be, you know, 500K instead of this, whatever. You gotta really like think of the worst case scenario. And I always tell founders, do not give all your money to one bank. I always maintain multiple banks, multiple bank relationships, spread the money out a little bit in case you get stuck like this, right? It's a really important concept for people to take to heart in crypto especially. And then how this stuff got sucked out, we're going to have a big post mortem on it, post mortem on it. I do think everybody has to stop what they're doing in terms of developing new features. We should have a holiday.

• 7:45Jason Calacanis?

  Or a tradition now that we do, you know how they have, we have Cyber Mondays and stuff like that? We need to have the equivalent of like cyber Septembers. Not that you're trying to sell goods at a discount, but that everybody stops releasing new features for every September and just works on patching, updating. The entire industry says no releasing of new features. That's the month we're going to secure everything. And obviously we'll be doing security all over that.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  It's, it's no, it's no app November, not no FAP November.

• 8:20Jason Calacanis?

  No app November, right? Thank you. Just, we, we need to take a pause, not on develop of, of, you know, new language models because of recursive intelligence. We just need everybody to batten down the hatches. And I think the, the cyber spend, which I, my friends from CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, I think people spend 5% corporations, you know, low single digits on this kind of corporate security, cybersecurity. I mean, I think it's got to double now. I think you gotta double it.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, the youngins don't remember Y2K, but this is what happened. Like we, we got like six months, nine months out before Y2K, we got all these warnings. And then that really, it really did feel like that's what the industry did. Like a lot of people just reset their focus to we gotta fix this problem before planes start falling out of the sky and all the Y2K disasters.

• 9:07Jason Calacanis?

  And you know, listen, what a time for me to make my call that Bitcoin is never going to hit its all time high. And a week later this happens and it goes back down to whatever 76 or 77. Shout out to all the people who want to gamble with me that Bitcoin is going to hit an all time. I don't know if you saw Grant Cardone and a bunch of other people are trying to bait me into a bet. And I'm like, I'm not opposed to taking these bets. Let me just make a little clip here. You can clip this and put it on the internet. I'm happy to take action on this, but I don't want to take tenure action because like, I don't know if I'm going to get paid and whatever. And I, I do want an escrow company or somebody to adjudicate this and I want the money to be in a productive asset. So in other words, if I do, let's put the million dollar bet aside.

• 9:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's like unnecessarily gratuitous, but let's say I did a hundred K bet with Grant. Is there an escrow service I can put it in and say, hey, I just want that hundred in the, you know, put it in the S and P 500 or something and I'll put 125K in case it goes down or whatever. And then this third party settles it for us, has the smart contracts, et cetera.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  This is a great idea for a company, Jason. Like I

• 10:11Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta think there's companies that do this, but it's a good idea, Lon, yes.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  It is.

• 10:15Jason Calacanis?

  But people don't do it too often. That's the issue.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  I've been in, in wagers that I feel like people would have wanted a third party adjudication service.

• 10:24Jason Calacanis?

  I would pay 1% of the bet just for somebody to settle this and just manage it. But that's only like a thousand dollars or $2,000 or $10,000. I don't know if it's worth anybody's time.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  You'd have to scale it up, yeah.

• 10:36Jason Calacanis?

  Adjudicate this, but I, I would take some of these bets if it was like easy for me to do. I'm just busy guys. And they're like, you didn't take the bet, you don't care. I'm like, it's an easy bet for me to take up. If anybody wants to bet me 100K or something quick and there's an easy way for me to fund it.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:51Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I'm, I mean, you guys see my, my J trading, I'm J trading, you know, 100K bullets, 250K bullets on a pretty regular basis.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  You're, you're in the arena trying things. It was Grant Cardone, Fred Krueger and Terrence Michael. We have all the posts of all the people who wanted to bet.

• 11:05Jason Calacanis?

  My God, these guys are triggered, man. There's nothing more triggering than me talking about Bitcoin. And the name calling and everything. It's crazy, but yeah, I think Fred was like 10 years, 2036. I mean, I don't think Fred, Fred's an old dude, right? Like, isn't he like 70 years old? He looks terrible. Let me see that picture. He looks like he's 70. I don't think he's making it that far. Let me see the picture of Fred Krueger.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 11:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, he's doing his Bitcoin.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  He's doing a Bitcoin talk.

• 11:32Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta, I gotta respect Fred Krueger's game here. He's literally doing a live, he's still doing spaces pumping.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:41Jason Calacanis?

  BTC. I mean, the reason, my basic premise around this BTC thing.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Terrence Michael said that one too.

• 11:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  He's the co-host.

• 11:48Jason Calacanis?

  Key challenges facing early-stage founders. Number one, running a company is expensive. We all know that. Number two, it's hard to keep track of all the banking and payment tools that you're using. And three, what do you do when it's time to incorporate your new business and make sure that everything is buttoned up? Hey, maybe you're raising a round or you're hiring more people. You need it to be tight. Our friends at Stripe now have easy solutions for all three of these conditions. With their Stripe Startups program, your early-stage, venture-backed company gets access to the best fintech stack in the business, period. With their banking product, Stripe Treasury, you can open a new account in just minutes. No minimums and no monthly fees. And with Stripe Atlas, you can form a new Delaware C corporation, get a company tax ID,

• 12:33Jason Calacanis?

  and start issuing founder equity in just a few clicks. Learn more and apply for the Stripe Startups program today by visiting stripe.com/startups. Go to stripe.com/startups so they know your Uncle Jay Cow sent you. Let me tell you my basic reason why I think BTC is that most res on, since you're asking.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  I was.

• 12:53Jason Calacanis?

  The number one reason is you don't have the Fred Kruegers and sailors of the world. Ponzi scheming, pumping and dumping, shaming people, laser, remember laser eyes, orange this.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Diamond hands.

• 13:06Jason Calacanis?

  Orange ties, diamond hands. You don't have that, those bot armies coming after you anymore. So usually, when I would post something like this, you would have a thousand credible people with laser eyes. Like credible people who are venture capitalists, founders, et cetera, media personalities, who had laser-eyed, put orange nonsense, which is my favorite color, which kind of pissed me off a little bit. You'd have all those people say, have fun staying poor, have fun staying poor, and whatever dumb, you know, one-liners that they would crib from each other as they sycophantically, you know, followed each other off this Bitcoin cliff to a wasted decade,

• 13:49Jason Calacanis?

  or a wasted five years at least of trading this thing when they could have been doing productive stuff in the world. All that wasted time, whatever, they're all gone. It's embarrassing to put laser, I mean, can you imagine how embarrassing it is to be a 40, 50, or in Fred's case, 70-year-old guy, you put laser eyes on?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  It was very millennial cringe now. It would play very millennial cringe.

• 14:10Jason Calacanis?

  So cringey. I mean, the only people I really respect is Michael Saylor, who has not changed his tune. He's like, it's Manhattan. I'm like, bro, if this is Manhattan, this is, this is Manhattan from Escape from New York. This is not like, this is Manhattan from Planet of the Apes. This is not like the Manhattan you're thinking.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  I am Legend Manhattan, yeah.

• 14:27Jason Calacanis?

  I am Legend Manhattan. But Michael Saylor might come on the All In Interview program.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Really? That would be a great one. That would, I would love to see you sit down.

• 14:35Jason Calacanis?

  He asked to do it like, I don't know, a year and a half ago when I was like, this Mr. Thing is crazy. Like, what, what is going on here? Why do you need to make something so complicated?

• 14:42Speaker 01

  It's very.

• 14:43Jason Calacanis?

  Then he was like, I want to come on. And I was like, okay, come on. And then he ghosted us. And then my people have been reaching out to me, might come on now. So I don't know.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  That'd be great.

• 14:50Jason Calacanis?

  I would have a thoughtful discussion with him. Let's keep going.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  I think it'd be great. All right. We'll do, we'll do one more story here before we move on. We got to talk about this DoorDash thing. So DoorDash, they're buying Instacart in a cash and stock deal worth around $17 billion. This was announced yesterday. DoorDash will pay $65 a share. It's about a 25% premium over Instacart's October 22nd closing price. Instacart, of course, went public in 2023, following a big pandemic boom when people were ordering groceries instead of leaving the house. But they've struggled to keep pace with Uber, Amazon, and Walmart in the category. Here's the pitch. Grocers will get DoorDash's delivery network plus Instacart's grocery and fulfillment tech, while customers get to stop paying for two memberships, DashPash and Instacart Plus.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  The companies claim that's going to save about $100 million per year. An anti-monopoly group, of course, already asking regulators to block this. They're saying that the combined company would control nearly 60% of third-party grocery delivery in the US. So I guess first question to you, does this go through? And is this a monopoly risk to put DoorDash and Instacart together?

• 16:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so third-party grocery delivery service is like, not grocery delivery.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:08Jason Calacanis?

  So already, the people who are, you know, shaking the anti-trust sword there and waving it around have narrowed it. So you need to always be intellectually honest when you look at something like a merger or acquisition. So if you're looking at the Warner Brothers, or CNN, or Discovery, and you're like, oh my God, like, is this consolidating everything? You know, sometimes people will leave out TikTok and YouTube. So they're like, oh, it's, it's going to make a 60% contributor. And then you include YouTube and it's like, it's going to make a 30%, you know, consolidation. And maybe that consolidation is actually necessary to go up against it. So this is, if we were to look at all groceries delivered, you know, you're going to have to take into account

• 16:52Jason Calacanis?

  Amazon and Whole Foods. You're going to have to take, some of these people, like Walmart, have their own delivery services. HEB launched their own delivery service here in the great state of Texas, and we love our HEB here. For those of you who don't know, it's incredible.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And Central Market too. Are you hip to Central Market? That's their, their Whole Foods.

• 17:11Jason Calacanis?

  Central Market is their upscale brand. It's kind of like their Whole Foods. Incredible company and incredible brand. So what really matters, under Lina Khan, she would be losing her mind right now over this. Under President Donald Trump, this is an easy, like, wave it through, like, yeah, just keep, keep going. You know, you know, the.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Bought up a bunch of DoorDash last week.

• 17:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, play the security guard here who's waving people in. Remember that one where he's frisking people by going like this? You ever seen that meme?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. He's going like around in like the laziest way possible.

• 17:46Jason Calacanis?

  He doesn't even touch him. He's just like, yeah, whatever. That's, that's the.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:50Jason Calacanis?

  Make me, make me a FTC meme with an FTC jacket of like whoever's running it. And like Lina Khan would be tackling the person. This person's like waving them through. Great time for M and A. So yum, yum. It's going to go through. That's why it's happening now. I'll be totally honest. Yeah, here's your, so this is going to go through real fast. And that's why things are being done. Anything you see done in the next 12 months is because business people saying,

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:24Jason Calacanis?

  we got 18 months to lock this up. And suppose this is going to take a year to do.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:30Jason Calacanis?

  I am, I'm a shareholder in DoorDash and Instacart and Uber. I have all three of those in my portfolio. So whatever happens here, I'm arguably going to win on some level. I do think this is a complete overpay and that it's a bad idea for Uber to buy it. Why?

• 18:48Speaker 01

  DoorDash.

• 18:50Jason Calacanis?

  I know that. I'm saying Uber was in the running here.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 18:53Jason Calacanis?

  It was a bad idea for Uber to even be in the running here because their stock is, it's better to buy your own stock when you would have to overpay. DoorDash and Instacart, if you look at their multiples right now, so

• 19:09Jason Calacanis?

  if the, if you look at the PE data, DoorDash, 88 times trailing price earnings is their valuation. And I guess Instacart was 25 times their past earnings. In other words, DoorDash's stock is overvalued, Instacart's undervalued. So it makes this a more efficient purchase for them. Now Uber's stock is undervalued as well, so it would be more neutral. What you have to ask yourself, and I was talking to somebody who was, you know, at the top of these companies previously, this cohort of companies, like literally a top five player in this thing. He's like, for $17 billion, you could do a lot more, you know, either buying back your own stock, investing in automation.

• 19:52Jason Calacanis?

  So it feels like this is something Uber walked away from and that these guys embraced. Because they have a high stock price. When you have a high stock price, let's say, remember SpaceX bought Cursor? They had a high stock price. So it makes total sense to do that. That's when you do it. When you have a high stock price, high multiple, you put your equity work. When it's lower, you don't. Instacart, I believe, is a slow-growth company. So what are the, what's? Anytime we do these, we're going to always talk about like Instacart's growth and how they're doing as a business. Do you have that teed up in your notes? How Instacart is doing as a business? This is the bad news for.

• 20:35Jason Calacanis?

  Like this business, Instacart quarterly revenue from 2023 to now, we're sitting here three years ago, they were at 803 million and we're sitting here now and they're at 10, 1 billion 95 in Q3. I mean, this is an incredibly slow growth company.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, it's the pandemic story we've seen play out a lot, which is obviously a lot of businesses experienced a huge surge when everybody was locked inside their homes, but growing after that, continuing to add on to that boost is a huge challenge and it just doesn't look, there's so many competitors in this space. I feel like Instacart is just one name of many now.

• 21:14Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, then you look at earnings next, like, is it a money printing machine or not? One of the nice things I will say here is people who like Instacart really do like the service.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 21:23Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, but when you look at GAAP net, um, income here as Claude is doing for me in real time, you can see that, okay?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:30Jason Calacanis?

  Um, you know, the, the business is flat in terms of earnings, like we're, we're sitting here three years waiting for this thing to become a money printing machine. Now, if you were to put up DoorDash, which just recently, you know, last year or two, started becoming a money printing machine and Uber, obviously, maybe four years ago started that journey. The reason Instacart is the seller, not the buyer, is because it's not a thriving company. And that's what happens. If you stop growing, you become a, and the acquisition target and there's going to be many, many more companies like this. Um, there is an interesting rub to this. The Instacart business was really based on advertising, uh, and advertising, my understanding at Instacart is where the profits come from.

• 22:16Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, and so a lot of these, uh, businesses now are making over a billion dollars from advertising every year. Uber has massive advertising. This is like a very interesting one to look at. Instacart advertising and other revenue. Um, I'm not sure what's in other revenue, but you know, uh, three years ago, they're sitting on 243 million dollars in advertising a quarter. This last quarter, 331. So they're making 1.2 billion dollars in advertising. Um, and its total share of revenue is about 30% of their revenue is from advertising. Most people don't understand that part of the business yet. So why is that important? You look at advertising businesses like Meta, you look at advertising businesses

• 23:01Jason Calacanis?

  like Google, those businesses, uh, have, are fantastic, obviously. One, use psychographics and creepiness. Meta, right? They know everything about you, your friend group.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:12Jason Calacanis?

  Your friends looking at like a certain type of car. They show it to you. If you engage with it, then they show it to you, plus for family members. It's all pretty dark. Then they show it to the people who live around you and work with you. And then all of a sudden, everybody's talking about this new, you know, Toyota, whatever it happens to be. And then Google, obviously you type in a keyword and it sends you directly to the Toyota, you know, uh, whatever Honda Accord, Toyota Prius, a, and, um, you know, you pay per click there. These are incredibly powerful because you're checking out and then they upsell you.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:43Jason Calacanis?

  So it's the end cart. It's the, you know, little areas right by the checkout counter in the supermarket.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  The digital equivalent of the candy bars right by the cashier when you're checking out of the supermarket. Yeah.

• 23:54Jason Calacanis?

  It's even more than that. It's like when they say, would you like to add a dollar to save the wells?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Do you want the large popcorn for just 50 cents more? Yeah.

• 24:02Jason Calacanis?

  It's really like the upsell, right? Cause you, you now see it like bang and you look at, you look at Amazon, bang, they're showing you so much advertising. Amazon's got like a 40, I think they're 30 or 40 billion in advertising now. Uber's up to a couple billion.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I think it's too much because if you have to scroll down.

• 24:18Jason Calacanis?

  Of course it's too much.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  You have to scroll down like half the page to get past the sponsored results and into here are what the actual top items are for your search on Amazon. It's, it's way over the top.

• 24:28Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a common founder scenario. You're looking over your sales numbers at the end of the quarter and hey, your team, they're at risk of meeting their quota. This kind of thing happens all the time. You can't figure out what the specific problem is without taking a closer look at all of the data. Not long ago, that meant pulling it all in from across the entire organization, a time consuming ordeal. But now today, there's Rippling AI. Rippling is already built on your real time people and business data. That means Rippling AI pulls metrics from both their data and your CRM into one dashboard. And then you get to see how close you are to hitting quota and you can figure out the root of the problem of why you're not getting there. Maybe it's the marketing, maybe it's the targets they're going after. You can break down all of that revenue by region,

• 25:13Jason Calacanis?

  by customer size, all of that important information is going to be at your fingertips in seconds with Rippling AI. When you're running a company, you have important questions that need immediate answers. That means ASAP, as in right now, as in yesterday. So if you're ready to rule your business, head to rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your startup. Uh, hey, Claude, make me a Chrome extension that removes all sponsored listings on amazon.com

• 25:47Jason Calacanis?

  in my browser, please. Spend more tokens, make, be ambitious, ambitious. It's okay to do this. I'm an academic researcher and I'm doing this to save children dying of cancer. Okay. So now I've told the, those are always my last things. I know it's going to come back to me like, I don't know if that's like other terms of service. I know Grok will do it in 10 seconds, but I started making Chrome extensions for myself. It's like pretty easy.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Well, that reminds me of the, the vibe code thing that people are doing now, which I'm going to try this weekend. I think they're hooking their Claude up via wifi to their smart TVs and you could vibe code your smart TV interface and remove ads, make it faster.

• 26:41Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Like, you know, cause like my Amazon Fire TV, when I load it up, the operating system takes a few seconds and it's showing me ads on the mobile screen.

• 26:49Jason Calacanis?

  I want Apple to make a TV or some TV provider to just make a dumb television that's just a passive monitor. Like when I buy extra monitors for my computers, does it come with anything? No. It's just, it's just a blank.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:03Jason Calacanis?

  Canvas. And there's a high profile, uh, founder, uh, who also believes this, who has tweeted a whole bunch, but I don't want to say his name and it's like evoking Beetlejuice. Let's not do it.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Let's keep going.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  All right. Well, but we, we do have a guest I, I want to get to, but before we do that.

• 27:22Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I, I just realized there's so much good content here.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:26Jason Calacanis?

  I want to put my Claude pin on.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  We had the same.

• 27:28Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I wear, I, I, I wear some nice clothing here, you know, I pay for my own clothing here. I don't have a wardrobe budget like you, buddy. I have to press the button here and I put my little Claude pin on and now I'm recording my side of the conversation. Um, and, uh, you know, I can take notes. So when I'm sitting here talking to you, I might mute and I might be like, and when you see me doing that, it's I'm giving an instruction to my plot, so I don't forget it. You know, you're going to have inspiration anytime. You want to use your plot pen or I love, I love the note product. Um, and I, I, this, this might be my Christmas, uh, gift to everybody. Hmm. Let me see here. $189 for a plon to go in the back. Would I send people the plon? Hey, can we make a

• 28:12Jason Calacanis?

  note? I want to send like a hundred of these as Christmas gifts, um, or holiday gifts. I don't know. Um, send some of these as holiday gifts. Yeah. I need to get a discount code and buy a hundred and send it to people. Hey, don't miss it. Don't miss a thing in 2027 from your boy J. Cal.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 28:26Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, hey, if people are listening to the program, want to try this product, which I give my full endorsement to, cause I'm addicted to it, uh, and want to have it by ski season so they can record everything they talk to themselves while they're on lift lines and everything, like a sociopath like myself.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, what can they do? I mean, can you imagine when they connect this to, uh, my Claude and I start telling it in real time, I create, I'm going to, ooh, I'm going to build software to connect this in real time to my Grok bot.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  When Claude met Claude and Grok bot. Yeah. I think you could, I mean, I, I bet you could already just tell Grok bot you want to do that. Connect the Claude web app to your.

• 29:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. That's what, that's the way to do it. Let's do that. Let's do that. Let's create that.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  That's easy.

• 29:08Jason Calacanis?

  Isn't it crazy that we can just do this stuff now?

• 29:10Speaker 01

  No, it is. When I read about, I read a tutorial that's like, Lon, here's how you can connect Claude from your laptop to your smart TV over wifi. It's like, I can code thing like I'm a coder now.

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  I want the, I'm going to have my, uh, I'm going to have my Grok bot ping this all the time and then look for me. And when I say Grok bot. It just knows. When I say Grokbot, it knows. All right, give them the code.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  All right. So if you want to check it out, you want to go to plaud.ai/twist. And if you use the code twist, you're going to get 10% off. So if this is your Christmas shopping, you're going to save a bundle thanks to your friends at This Week in Startup. So plaud.ai/twist and use the code twist to get your 10% off.

• 29:53Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Fantastic. Let's keep moving. I got a haircut and a meeting. I got some oysters I gotta eat.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  We're gonna knock this out. We got.

• 30:00Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna meet with my CFO and a lot going on today.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:03Jason Calacanis?

  Very busy.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Well, let's get you to your plans. But before we do that, our next guest won the launch pitch competition, and he won it again the following week. He's Jake Newfield, the co-founder and CEO of Hermetic, which builds an AI build engineer. It's named Barn Owl. Jake, the floor is yours. We can't wait to hear your pitch. Welcome to the show.

• 30:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Hey, Lloyd. Jason, good to see you guys.

• 30:27Jason Calacanis?

  Good to see you. Now, for people who don't know, you're in the Launch Accelerator Class 37th, or 37th cohort. Been doing this for over 10 years now. And every week, we have a handful of investors come. They hear your pitch. You're in week, I don't know, five or six right now. And you pitch for two minutes. They give you feedback, but we ask all the investors, pick your number one, your number two, and you can give an honorable mention. First place gets two points. Second place gets one point. Third place gets a half point, Lon. You add all that up every week. And then we keep those scores for the whole 12 weeks. Then we do these like intensive weeks like we had last week in San Francisco. How many VC firms and investors did we take you to see last week, Jake?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  It was like three per day. So.

• 31:12Jason Calacanis?

  15?

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Pretty much, yeah.

• 31:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And then we're going to do a New York tour, a trek. So we did the LA, we did the San Francisco trek, went to New York trek. So instead of, you know, a demo day with a bunch of dentists who put 25, 50K checks, what we do is, we go to the early-stage funds. We say, hey, I got a proposition for you. What if we brought our top seven companies to your office? They pitch for two minutes each. In, you know, 90 minutes, soup to nuts, you're in and out. You meet seven companies. We're like, oh, usually that takes us, you know, 90 minutes per company. And these are pre-sorted by Jake Allen and his team. Okay, that's really a great value for those folks. And so I think this time, we're going to bring you to 20 or 30 different VC firms and just push you in their office. And what that does is, Lon,

• 31:58Jason Calacanis?

  this is my strategy. I always try to do a little bit better for our founders. Now, when the founder follows up with them, hey, I don't know, Fred Wilson, I was at your office on this date. I met with your partner. This person wanted to give you an update on our business. If you were willing to look at it, I loved your podcast about X, Y, and Z. Boom. So you're building that relationship fabric. You're getting anointed to a certain extent. And then whoever's first place gets super anointed. Jake, congratulations on being first place this past week. You have two minutes on the clock. Three, two, go.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Jake Newfield, co-founder and CEO at Hermetic. Because of agentic coding, tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex, coding and creating code is no longer the bottleneck that it was a couple of years ago for companies. The bottleneck is now the build process, which is the process of compiling, verifying, and testing code. And this is a massive problem, right? Because every company from the AI labs down to AI-native startups, that is becoming the bottleneck for their software development process. And we are solving this today for one of the top AI labs, who's paying us 240K to provide analysis into their over 2 million builds per day that they run, which is 4 billion build events.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  And we're solving this at the protocol level. The protocol being the RBE protocol, which is implemented by Basil. So we're doing to Basil what Databricks has done with Apache Spark, thus becoming the data layer between builds and the AI agents themselves. So the data that these AI agents can use to automate builds. My co-founder and I worked together previously. So Tim was a senior engineer at Apple, leading a team over there. He was the chief architect at Lucer Works. My background is more sales product, Columbia Business School MBA, sales at Salesforce and Cloudera, and product management at Akamai. And we're taking on a big market, right?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  We see a $25 billion market opportunity that we aim to tackle. We've raised $2.2 million to date, including Launch.co, and Aran Jantulpule, who is a VP of Developer AI Google and Gokul Rajman, and several other partners. And that is the under-two-minute pitch.

• 34:13Jason Calacanis?

  I know a lot of you out there listening are wanting to start your own company. So if it's finally time for you to make your dream into a reality, you can't find a better partner than our pals over at Northwest Registered Agent. Northwest Registered Agent is now offering free identity services. That means a free domain name, open-source web hosting, a business email and phone number, and everything else that's going to make your new startup look and feel like a professional company, all with no purchase required. And this is free done right. They're not passing your data along to any third-party vendors, and they're never going to sell it. So if you have an idea you can't get out of your head, or if you're already building something amazing,

• 34:53Jason Calacanis?

  get started with Northwest for free and upgrade as you grow. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain. Love it. I love it. So tell me, what are the most common questions you've gotten from investors? We track this as well, Lon. So even before AI and note-taking, I had my team transcribe on the video, like the next day, we would take from the Tricaster, this is 10 years ago, the Tricaster output. They would go back to the office. They would carry the Tricaster back, and they would transcribe the questions and the answers. Then, and sometimes we pay a transcriber, a dollar a minute, whatever, and we would workshop with the founders, like, hey,

• 35:35Jason Calacanis?

  how good was the question and the answer that they gave? Jake, what's the question you get over and over again from investors here?

• 35:43Speaker 02

  The question I get over and over again, Jason, is, you know, why the heck would one of these AI labs be paying for your product? You guys are a startup. At the time, they started paying for us. We were a two-person startup, barely any funding. So why don't they just build it themselves? This is like a critical path issue for them. And the reason I give, I have two answers to that. One is kind of the theoretical philosophical answer, which is, you know, for the same reason that these AI labs don't want to build their own data lake, and they use Databricks for the data lake, or the same reason they don't want to build, you know, their own single sign-on product, you know, they use Okta or something. Whether you're talking about Google and AI Lab, whatever, just because a company is big and successful doesn't mean they want to build everything under the sun,

• 36:23Speaker 02

  because that takes resources away from the core stuff that they're building, which in the case of the labs is LLMs. Like, what do these labs care about? They care about building the best LLMs. They don't want to get into the, you know, the real estate business or building data pipelines for Basil data. So that's the philosophy of it, right? It's like, it's strategic misalignment for them to build it themselves. But then there's the reality of it, which is that they are paying us. So beyond me saying, hey, I think this is what they should do and might do because of these reasons, that's philosophical. The reality is, we get the wire every month, which validates.

• 36:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  That thought.

• 36:57Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Listen, this is one of the great lessons of entrepreneurship. When you get a lighthouse customer, Lon, you lean into it and you say it upfront. Always start with what's strongest. You want to build credibility. Investors, Jake, you know this, are very busy. They see a lot of companies. The issue for investors now is not that there is no companies to pick from. It's they have a limited amount of time, and the signal-to-noise ratio is absurd. It's absurd for me. And I have, you know, typically 10 associates,

• 37:38Jason Calacanis?

  researchers, and analysts working for me at any given time. I overstaff my programs with the revenue from the media company in some cases, or other things, so that I can spend more time with founders and find these great companies. But if you start with, hey, we hit our first quarter million in revenue, and we have a lighthouse customer, we have a second lighthouse customer, now you're immediately going to get the meeting. Period, full stop. Lighthouse customer, if the investor invests at your stage, if the investor invests in your category, like, you know, marketplace, or software, dev tools, whatever it happens to be, you're just getting the meeting. What founders then do is they try to do everything else to try to get the meeting.

• 38:20Jason Calacanis?

  Sometimes you want to do less in your pitch and spend more time on just getting a great customer and having that customer speak for you. Now, you don't have a testimonial from that customer yet, right? Do you have like a quote from them?

• 38:35Speaker 02

  I don't yet. I will.

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  So that's the, like, the next piece is, like, you get a quote from them, and they explain why they're using the product, and you put that into the pitch? And don't take it from us. Take it from McDonald's. McDonald's said, you know, before this, we were screwed. Now, all of our problems are solved. You know, whatever it happens to be. And you can just ask your customer, hey, would you write this like a Yelp review? That's how I kind of say it to them. Hey, can you write a review of the Launch Accelerator? Like, Jake, I'll ask you to do this when you graduate. If we did a good job. Hey, can you write us like a Yelp-like review? It could be one sentence, it could be 10, but, you know, something in that range, between one and 10 sentences of, you know, what we meant to you. It could be casual.

• 39:18Jason Calacanis?

  And so this is a perfect pitch because you have the lighthouse customer. It's not because you do fancy graphics. It looks good. It's not because you're the greatest presenter in the world. You're a strong presenter. You're confident. You're crisp. You have all those qualities. But it really is about that lighthouse customer. So I guess then my question becomes. Can that Lighthouse customer pull in another ship to your port? And can you get customers two and three? And how close are we with customers two and three? They don't have to be as good as the Lighthouse customer. But that would be then what some investors might say to you is this is really impressive. We really want to, you know, see what happens when you have, you know, the next two six-figure customers, five-figure customers per year. So how are you doing with that?

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're working on that.

• 40:03Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  I think, I think we're close.

• 40:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Awesome. I mean, just incredible job. And tell me candidly, what has the reception been? Pre having a Lighthouse customer, post having a Lighthouse customer?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely helped a lot. Everything you said, Jason, you know, it validates what we're doing and the pain we're solving. And I think every investor is scared, rightfully so, that startups are building something which tomorrow could get eaten up by one of these labs.

• 40:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  You know, how does it, as an investor, I think it's a scary time to be VC because there's no moat anymore, or they're not, not this, not the same way there used to be. So an OpenAI, Anthropic tomorrow could go, you know, create something that one of your startups has, and the investor loses all their money. And so for us to be able to say, hey, not only are they not, you know, creating what we've built, but they're paying us for it. I think it shows investors that we're doing something valuable enough that, you know, if you got, if, if, if, if the folks, if the companies that everyone's scared of, if they're paying us to do something, I think it's a good signal that we're doing something unique and valuable.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Jason, unpack this a little bit for us in terms of moats. Like, how would you answer a question from an investor like that?

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, as Jake said, you know, for investors, they're a little scared, hey, I have no moats, et cetera. I think the new moat is that you're relentless and that people trust you. And that would fall under brand. So we should have a new focus on brand today. I'm doing this myself. And so what is uniquely human about Jake? He's Jake. What can he do to make Hermetic, you know, be indispensable? It's that he's thinking about what the customer needs before they even know they need it.

• 41:55Jason Calacanis?

  He is looking and studying them and saying, how can I make this experience even better? If you go to a truly great restaurant and they get to know you, you come in, your drink lands before you order it. They let you know, hey, J Cal, when I go to Boa, you know, Steakhouse here in Austin, they say, would you like the Alaskan King crabs? And would you like your West Elm New York strip medium rare? They've put that note into their system and they send the same waiter over each time, whether that waiter is in that section or not. And they know I like a certain booth. So nine times out of 10, I get my booth and they kind of customize it. Makes me feel good, impresses the guest.

• 42:38Jason Calacanis?

  That kind of hospitality is a moat. Most people would say, oh, that's not a real moat. It's not a technical moat. How you make that customer feel, Jake, and how they feel you're being attentive towards them means everything. And if you're charging a fair price, which you are, and it's making them more efficient, then they're going to go, well, there's no reason for us to do this. Like, I, I could start, I could start my own, I'll give you an example. I like chicory coffee. You know, Cafe Dumont, you may have gone?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  I've never been, but I've heard, I'm familiar.

• 43:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, we are in Austin now. We've got to make a New Orleans 48-hour run.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  It's only eight hours away by car.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  But we, I don't know, let's see what a PJ can do if we get a little Phenom 300 and zip-zippy. You, they make chicory coffee.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:27Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. Really strong coffee with.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Big Y's is the, the other claim to fame then.

• 43:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And so you go there, you get this coffee cut with chicory bark, makes it even richer, nuttier, it's delicious.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  It is very good.

• 43:41Jason Calacanis?

  I order those cans of coffee. And then at some point I was like, this seems a little expensive. I'm going to like, buy some chicory and then mix it into my coffee. Couldn't get it right. Didn't give me the same pleasure of having that orange can, pull up the orange cans of vacuum sealed cans of Cafe Dumont.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Cafe Dumont chicory coffee. And so the experience, even though I could do it myself and save 50%, the experience of having the Cafe Dumont made me so happy, so pleased. I liked the brand. I liked the feeling of that top left can. Now, that's 10 bucks for whatever it is, 12, 15 ounces of coffee. I can, I could do better, right? If I, if I made it myself?

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:25Jason Calacanis?

  Au contraire, ma frère. I just buy it.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:28Jason Calacanis?

  I just buy it because I like it.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  There are stores in Texas I have seen it around. You could, harder to get in California, but in Texas, people are hip to it.

• 44:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's, it's available. So that's my point. Brand, Jake, is now a function of how, it, brand is the moat. And then how relentless and trusted your brand is, is why people will buy it. You know, like I, I've told people this with the Teslas for, for a long time. One of the great things about having a Tesla is you get these over-the-air updates. Every time you get an over-the-air update, you feel like, oh, wow. And Apple has the same thing. You look at the change log and you're like, oh, I got more free software? Oh, the value of this product increased. So I love this company. And they're not saying, hey, would you like to buy the fact that we now have Spotify or Apple Music? They didn't say like, unlock Apple Music for 10 bucks. They're just like, Apple Music now works. Scan the barcode, now you can connect your Apple Music. Okay, well, that's great.

• 45:21Jason Calacanis?

  I'm paying for that already. Great job, Jake. Really excited to be on the cap table. I'm, man, you know, we got this syndicate, thesyndicate.com. When we have a company in the top two or three of the cohort and you have six weeks left, sometimes J Cal likes to share the wealth and send it to 4,000 active family offices and angels. And man, just the branding of that alone is worthy of consideration, Jake. So let's, let's finish the accelerator strong and I will see you in New York the first week. The first week of December, we're going to New York. Is that right, Jake? Is that the date?

• 46:01Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right.

• 46:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so and then also the first week of December, when I'm there, Jake, this hasn't been announced, so you don't know about this yet. I didn't tell you. Thesyndicate.com is going to host Dim Sum for the top 100 syndicate members. We're going to invite them in order. It's going to be like my little holiday party in New York, so.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  You're a Dim Sum fan. That's your thing.

• 46:22Jason Calacanis?

  I, I'll tell you why I like Dim Sum and why I do Dim Sum a lot. Dim Sum, you don't have to think. Great food comes to your table and you share it on the lazy susan. What does that do when you want to do networking or talk?

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Nice conversational, conversational.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Correct. It's not a sense, I, I didn't even think of that.

• 46:38Jason Calacanis?

  Spin it.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  That's smart. That's smart.

• 46:40Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Bring it to you.

• 46:41Jason Calacanis?

  That's me, that's my brand.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  That's how, that's what I like. I want them to bring me the food and they keep bringing it. So I don't have to feel shame when I ask for more and more.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  They just keep coming with the cart.

• 46:50Jason Calacanis?

  It's like the omocasse of Chinese food.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:53Jason Calacanis?

  If you think about it, right? It's like omocasse, they bring the cart by. Unfortunately, when we did it at Yangtze, who does the best job, that's my favorite, there's two locations, we did it, we did it in the restaurant where they don't have the round tables. We've got to go back to the other one where they have the round tables and the lazy susan.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  I like the spinning, the spinning idea.

• 47:09Jason Calacanis?

  The spinning is critical.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  It's critical, yeah.

• 47:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's critical. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to invite 100 syndicate members, maybe 50 will show up, maybe I'll have 150 in demand, just to hang out in New York for 48 hours. You know, I'll do like two events, maybe we'll do the, the Dim Sum there. We're going to have a couple of speakers. I might invite the accelerator class to come to that. We'll see if we have time on the agenda. And then I'm going to do like maybe some kind of dinner thing. And it's going to be just a way for us to get to know the syndicate members, join the syndicate, thesyndicate.com. If you want to come to the accelerator, launch.co has all the details. Jake, continued success, my friend. It's really great to be in business with you. And remember my promise to my startups. We want to be the best investor you ever have, not just in this company, but for your entire career as a founder, you have to let my team know if there's anything we can

• 47:55Jason Calacanis?

  do to support you more. Anything's on the table, okay?

• 47:59Speaker 02

  More Dim Sum will be good.

• 48:01Jason Calacanis?

  More Dim Sum, okay, that's it, okay.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  It sounds like that's on the agenda, so.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Pork buns, steamed pork buns, that's what it's going to take.

• 48:07Jason Calacanis?

  More soup dumplings. All right, Jake, we'll drop Jake off.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Thanks, Jake.

• 48:10Jason Calacanis?

  I have a wee bit more time here, Lonnie Donnie. I would like to get this annotated thing out of the way and give some prize money to people.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Before we jump into that, do you want to take a moment and talk about Founder University, Japan and US? It's in here on a docket, they want us to promote.

• 48:26Jason Calacanis?

  All right, very simple. Founder University, founder.university, founder.university. Go to the founder.university website. There's a button, it says apply. If you're a founder, you click the button, apply. You apply. The cohort number 13, lucky number 13, is going to be early in 2027, basically in end of January-ish. Okay, that is Founder University that we're doing in the United States. On the Founder University website, we should, we should have a link that you can click to go to Japan. But I'm guessing I can go founderuniversity.com/japan? And let's see if that works. Founder University, okay, yeah, it's japan.founder.university.

• 49:09Jason Calacanis?

  But if you go to founder.university/japan, it will also go there. So great job on my team of anticipating. Cohort three for Founder University Japan will be 30 companies, 10 finalists that come to the United States, 12 weeks. And you can see there, it's basically a bootcamp in Japan. We do in-person in Japan every week. We bring in four or five of the companies every week. All of them can come and they co-work on Wednesdays.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:34Jason Calacanis?

  And this is a pre-accelerator. And the concept of a pre-accelerator is, we will work with you for 12 weeks to build your company, get product-market fit, refine your pitch, hiring, whatever you need to get done. But you don't have to take our money coming into the program. It's a much lighter touch, Lon. You can just join the program. We have like a little gentleman's agreement that we get to invest in future rounds, just a tiny amount, if you do wind up raising. So we just, you know, please let us know and we'll give you a quick answer. But it's really wonderful because we get to meet a large number of startups, we get to bond with them. And for over 12 weeks, each week, they give an update on how they're doing.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  They fill out a form, Lon, on the progress. We study their progress. We try to get rid of blockers. We try to accelerate things with them. And then every week, they can ask us, hey, I'd like a 25K check, 125K check, maybe I want to be syndicated, I got a lead investor. And then we'll evaluate them for investment. When we do the accelerator, only seven companies, Lon. Only seven companies. And we give you 125K on the way in, just like Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, and all the other great programs in the world, 500 Global. So this is a lightweight way to spend 12 weeks with my team. We are massively thankful to have an incredible partner in JetRO in Japan to do this with. This is our third cohort in Japan. And you know, I love Japan.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  All right. Thank you for doing that. Now, let's jump into our final round. We're announcing the winner, if you want to, today of our annotated bounty contest.

• 51:07Jason Calacanis?

  Final round. You're going to rapid-fire show me in order, just show me the final progress.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  We've got three finalists. One of our finalists is leftover. It was our favorite from round one. And then we have two new apps to show you. And then we will pick our top one. Of course, reminder for everybody watching, this is a competition. We are giving away five grand to whoever can build the best version of Jason's vision for the annotated app. It's basically an extension, a sidebar that could save any piece of media and then reshare it with some additional commentary to start a new conversation. That's the sort of rough concept. So let's take a look at demo number one.

• 51:47Jason Calacanis?

  And you can go to annotated.com. And yeah, or that's actually not where the, where is the, oh, there it is. Okay. Buildannotated.com, win 5,000. That's at bounty.thisweekinstartups.com. And this is the second bounty we're doing. So let's get started.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Sure. So demo number one is from Will Flynn. We've got a, it's just, they're all called annotated, so I have no way to set the bar. But we've got a demo for each one. So here is the demo video submission from Will Flynn. Let's take a look at that.

• 52:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so this is Will's annotated.com.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  This is Will's annotated.com. And you can see he's got it. We're here on launch. We're looking at a clip or a Twitter post from launch. And we're going to reshare it along with our highlighted, this is our favorite quote that we're pulling out. And you can see Jacob is leaving a comment on it. And now he's going to hit publish. I believe he will have to sign in after this step.

• 52:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And you can put a clip there. He's going to sign in with his Google account like that.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  He's going to sign in.

• 52:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  And then he's signing in.

• 52:52Jason Calacanis?

  And this is actually built. You guys use this? Is this you doing it? Our team? Or he submitted this video?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  No, no. This is Jacob, our producer, using it. It is live. It exists on the internet right now.

• 53:02Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay, now here, this is very important. Pause it here. Because he has the, can you go back a little bit there and just pause it? Okay. So what's interesting here is when you find somebody else's annotated comment, say here on a specific tweet, or it could be a New York Times story, if you have the toolbar on, it highlights it in yellow. When you click on it, it gives you the annotation and you can add to it and keep the story going. Now, on Twitter, you already have the ability to talk to each other. So this is like a weird example. But if this was a New York Times story, it's not, you could highlight a paragraph in the Washington Post, the New York Times, I don't know, Wirecutter Review, a Consumer Reports, a blog post, a Substack. And then you can kind of hijack it, move it over to another discussion with your team

• 53:47Jason Calacanis?

  privately or with yourself. I love this feature.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yeah, he is still, I mean, we're still sort of taking this off of X, the everything app. And then it will move it over, as you can see, to annotated, where there's now, it's a post, you've got the original context, and you've got Jacob's new addition. And now there could be a new discussion thread purely for the annotated community based on what you're just sharing.

• 54:11Jason Calacanis?

  Great.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  We've got some more examples. We've got one more, one or two more examples here from Will. Here's a, if you're on YouTube, you could take a clip. You want to show off how cool these robot fingers work? You could actually tell it exactly what part of the clip you're commenting on.

• 54:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, look at that. No, no, you could scrub it and record. Wow.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. You could actually tell it, like, however you want to, you can actually move it around, choose exactly the right clip that you want from this YouTube. And then it'll move that as well over to annotated.com. So you could sort of take it.

• 54:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, look at that. And they added Gemini fact-check there automatically, a little Gemini note. Interesting. Okay, great. And then let's see where it goes from here.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  Let's keep going.

• 54:56Jason Calacanis?

  And then it actually made a clip. So it cut the video and moved it over to the annotated servers. So if that YouTube video was taken down with fair use commentary, we took those, you know, two seconds. Here's a YouTube story going next. Okay. By the way, I like that. I like the idea of you could take up to 20 seconds of a video, 30 seconds of a video. That's fair use. I mean, if somebody did that to this video, I wouldn't be totally brokenhearted about it.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  And the entire idea of fair use is, well, you're adding commentary. You're not just clipping somebody else's work and saying, here's my work. You're clipping it and saying, I'm commenting on the robot fingers and their dexterity in this original video with a link back to the original video. I think that's.

• 55:35Jason Calacanis?

  Makes me wonder if we should put a minimum number of characters. Like, don't let people just save it without comments.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  Yes, that makes sense. Like, it has to be, yeah, 100 characters of original text.

• 55:45Jason Calacanis?

  You got to put some commentary on it, yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  I like that.

• 55:47Jason Calacanis?

  For fair use purposes. And we could explain that to people.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah. Let's continue. We've got one more example here from Will's demo. Yeah, it's this, it's a CNN article about YouTube. They've got CEO Neil Mohan says that they're, basically, we're going to highlight a quote that's him saying, "We're doing everything we can to protect children on YouTube." And then we're adding this sort of snarky comment.

• 56:10Jason Calacanis?

  Love it.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  "Are they? Are they really?" So this is an example of exactly what you were saying before. You could sort of add live commentary to a news article as you're writing it. And then other people with the annotated app would see your annotation.

• 56:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. I think it's like, it does what it says. It says what it does.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 56:27Jason Calacanis?

  Congratulations. It is the perfect 1.0 beta product. Keep going. I love how to handle video. Great job.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Demo number two from Kirsten Dahl of Databricks, I believe. She's submitted an Ask Jason question before. That's how I know that name. So here is her version. And we're starting out with a clip from a recent episode of This Week in Venture Capital. There's our buddy DeeDee Doss. So we're, you know, same idea. We're going to take a clip from this video, comment on it right here in the sidebar. You can pick out exactly, you could tell it, I want between this time code and this time code. You leave your own comment on it, and then we'll see what happens.

• 57:08Jason Calacanis?

  Great. I love it. All right. And, oh, it published it. There it goes.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Boom. There it's published.

• 57:15Jason Calacanis?

  Now, she embedded the video.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:17Jason Calacanis?

  Which is kind of gracious. And I wonder if you were to click play, if it actually jumps you to that part. But a good-looking three-column website design, not bad. Doesn't look sloppy at all. Okay, yeah, it didn't jump to that exact moment, but pretty good.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Go back, go back, Jacob. I believe it, I believe this is just a clip of the part that they wanted. It kept the thumbnail.

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's got the YouTube, it's the full video, I think. Oh, no, it's 1 minute and 31 seconds. You're right.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  It's, they kept the thumbnail and they kept the YouTube branding.

• 57:45Jason Calacanis?

  I understand.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  But it's only the minute and a half clip that we were looking for.

• 57:48Jason Calacanis?

  I love that. I love that. I love that feature.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  I agree that. I think that's pretty sharp, personally. Like, I think that's pretty snazzy. All right, let's keep going.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  So that was that example. And there you go. Here we go. A different.

• 58:02Jason Calacanis?

  A news story.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Another news story. We're taking again, just this one clip out. Very easy to just pull it up in the sidebar. We're adding our own thoughts and commentary about just that sentence. It's an important note for all managers. Delegation without micromanaging. I didn't get to finish reading, but there it is. Just that quickly before I can even finish reading it. And then, look, I think it looks, I like the way that the annotated posts look on Kirsten's submission a lot. I think it looks. It's very distinctive. If you were looking at this, you'd be like, that looks like an annotated poster pulls in all the relevant information. I think it looks really good.

• 58:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And we're going to have this constant issue of what is the subject line? And then what is the comment and the confusion there? So it says, Denny CEO rule highlights value of delegating over micromanaging. That's the story's headline. Then the comment from the individual is secondary to that. It's got to be the reverse. I think what you want to do is put the Fox business thing and the headline in the box. The, what do they call that? The snippet?

• 59:03Jason Calacanis?

  And then I like Jacob says this, but what do you think, Lon?

• 59:07Speaker 01

  I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. I, I think that this headline is a, is this a, Jacob, correct me if I'm wrong. Jump in here. I think that headline is a summary of Jacob's comment because the actual.

• 59:19Jason Calacanis?

  Scroll back and we'll find out.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  The actual headline here is CEO Sunday, Denny CEO. Oh, you went back. Uh, the, yeah, the.

• 59:29Jason Calacanis?

  Somewhere in there. Yeah.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Manage what you must, not what you can is the, is the quote that he's taking. But now go, go back to.

• 59:34Jason Calacanis?

  Now, if you look at the URL, it's taking the slug from the URL. Yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  Oh, it's taking the slug from the URL.

• 59:40Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is like the nuance of product design, which we have to A B test, but the, there's, it's a little confusion what annotated is doing. That's why I think we need a bubble treatment. Like in yellow, in a little comic book box with the person's name there. So you know, it's from Jacob. He's commenting. You get what I'm saying? As opposed to making this metaphor, we're using the same metaphor as a news story on the clipping. We need a new metaphor for clipping and commentary, which should be a bubble like your iMessage, and then it would be clear. This is a bubble talking about that story.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  Right. So I think it has put Jacob's, it's the first thing that we see here is a summary of Jacob's comment. And then this is Jacob's comment. An important note for all managers. Delegation without micromanagement is vital. And then below that, we're seeing the context from the article. I agree. It's not immediately clear what is going where. And so we could do a little bit better.

• 1:00:37Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it does say clip from Fox Business. So the person who did this one is kind of trying to explain it. What it should start with is Jacob clipped. Or Jacob says, and you know, it has their quote.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:49Jason Calacanis?

  Based on this story from Fox Business. And then it does it. So it's kind of like, here's the comment. Here's the story. Or here's the story and here's all the comments about the story. So here's what people are saying about this story. So if you go to the story object, it could say, here's the story from Fox Business and everybody who's commented on it. And this would just be say it in plain English. So people are not confused. Okay. Keep going.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  All right. I, I, one more thing I would point out while we're still frozen on here. I really like this all takes on this. You can imagine if this ever got really popular. Like if a lot, millions of people started using annotated and you commented on a very popular news story. And then you could click all takes on this. How useful would that be? Just like.

• 1:01:32Jason Calacanis?

  Super useful.

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Dozens of spicy. We replicate X and what's so great about.

• 1:01:35Jason Calacanis?

  Here's another idea. You could actually do what TechMeme does and say, go out and find people commenting about this and put that under there as well. So you're like, here's a Reddit discussion. Here's a Hacker News discussion. Here's a slash dot discussion, et cetera. So you could actually pull the best stuff from around the web as well.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Train a Grokbot up on that, but you could just have annotated do it. All right.

• 1:01:53Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. Let's keep going.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  So our third and final entry.

• 1:01:56Jason Calacanis?

  Equally good. Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  I think they're both great so far. Our third and final entry is Alan Shiflett. So he, we did, we praised Alan's work. He's graduating to round two. He's our round one finalist as we've got over, but he actually significantly updated his submission since we last featured it. It's now an app. So let's take a look at his demo. This is the mobile app version of annotated.

• 1:02:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  A bunch of changes since round one. On X, you can now select just portions of text and choose whether or not to include it in the live post. And of course, we're, we're looking at it on this new app. You can listen to and create annotations of podcasts while they're playing.

• 1:02:38Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  So that's what we're seeing here.

• 1:02:40Jason Calacanis?

  So we're listening to an all in episode. You go to 37 minutes in and you create a clip. Okay. Great. Yeah. That's interesting. It's an interesting moment to do it while you're listening. So it's like a podcast player with the ability to annotate. I like that.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  I mean, that makes a lot of sense because how often are you listening to a podcast and you hear somebody say something and you go, oh, that, that idiot. That's not, that's not right. I do this with listening to all in all the time. Both, both. That's a great point. And oh, I can't believe.

• 1:03:06Jason Calacanis?

  Of course. It's the number one podcast in the world.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. So I think that, that really does like scratch a podcast listening itch where it's like, I want to talk about what I'm hearing right now.

• 1:03:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  And this app also identifies ads within episodes. So you can skip them and focus just on the content. It has guides for your favorite podcasts where you can rate each episode and how valuable it is, how much you might enjoy it. And it even shows you your listening habits and how much time you've saved by listening at faster speeds or skipping ads right on the app. So there you go.

• 1:03:39Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Awesome. And then we had two others in the first round, right? So we, we have six submissions total here, or no, five unique submissions, right? Five. Don had done one last time too.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Yes. We, we have picked our top, we received 83 total submissions for these.

• 1:03:54Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And you picked your top five.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  We demoed three the first time and then we demoed three this time, one carryover. So we've demoed five total on the air out of 83 that we.

• 1:04:03Jason Calacanis?

  Here's what I want to say. These are all equally good. All five were equally good.

• 1:04:08Jason Calacanis?

  I, it's, I think everybody kind of hit the exact notes. I don't think any one of them is distinctly better than the others. There's just different ideas in each. So I'm going to call an audible here. Take the top five that you guys picked. We'll give them each a thousand dollars. How does that sound?

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  I think that's.

• 1:04:24Jason Calacanis?

  If anybody does not want the thousand dollars, which probably comes with a 1099 or a prize thing because of taxes, let my team know. Uh, an actual nonprofit or something you want to donate it to. That's not like a political one. I don't, I like, don't make me give money to like some war in the Middle East, one side or the other. Pick an innocuous known charity, the Red Cross or something non. Don't put me in the middle of your social war. Pick like something to, for kids with brain cancer or.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  I think like, yeah, like, like an animal charity would be great. Doctors Without Borders is great.

• 1:05:01Jason Calacanis?

  Something that I'm not going to get slammed with in the future. Give each person a thousand dollars and we're done. We're done with the annotated.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  That sounds very fair.

• 1:05:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Great job, everybody.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  All, and thanks to all of our.

• 1:05:13Jason Calacanis?

  And this is very good for me. I got a lot of, the whole goal for me here was to get ideas, Lon. I got a lot of ideas, a lot of inspiration.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  And I would like to point out, I mean, the annotated contest, it really highlights how an entire business can spring Jason from just a great domain name. You bought annotated.com before you even really knew what the product would be.

• 1:05:31Jason Calacanis?

  No, I kind of did. I kind of had the idea. Yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Well, you had an early version, but.

• 1:05:35Jason Calacanis?

  I had a version, yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Getting to that domain, it became a compelling product because you own.

• 1:05:40Jason Calacanis?

  I bought it over 15 years ago for $35,000. I think I paid a lot. No, no. That was a day.com. I paid 30,000 for. I think annotated I paid like five grand for. So I own A D A Y, a day. I was going to do joke that a day, recipe dot a day was my original concept there. And then I guess somebody did a day.com. Uh, like there's a clothing wear company and they're like, hey, can we have the domain for free? And I was like, uh, I'll do it for a million dollars in equity in your company.

• 1:06:11Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, and a hundred K in cash or something like they were, but they were like, oh no, but we're a startup. I'm like, it's a four letter domain. It's got serious value.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Even better, you know, raise a couple hundred million.

• 1:06:24Jason Calacanis?

  If anybody wants to buy inside.com, the auction, pull that up for a second, inside.com, the auction is going to end November 1st. We haven't hit the reserve, but get in there, make a, hopefully we get it past a million dollars. So I can return some capital to the previous investors. So we're going to just let that one go before 80 is where it's at. And we've got two days. So I guess we get some last minute ones there. Hopefully it hits my, my minimum there and we can sell it. If not, I'm going to, I'll put it on, uh, I'll give it to GoDaddy since they're a partner and have them do that.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  I was just about to say, perfect, uh, perfect partner to send to, uh, girl. And if you want to grab the perfect domain, whether it's inside.com or something else.

• 1:07:01Jason Calacanis?

  A day.com, annotated.com.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Any, anything like that. Godaddy.com. That's where you want to go to check it out.

• 1:07:08Jason Calacanis?

  GoDaddy is incredible. Go check out GoDaddy. They have so many different, actually, one of the services they have is 99 bucks. You can have them go try and negotiate to, to buy yourself a domain. I use that all the time from a secret account when I try to buy these things. So great partner. I've used GoDaddy for 20 plus years. My favorite registrar. All right. We're done. Uh, I gotta go. Do you want to give me one off duty? Your, your best off duty, Lon?

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I think we have to mention, uh, we lost a legend this week at the age of 86. He's Professor X to many of you. He's Captain Jean-Luc Picard. To many others, a classically trained Shakespearean actor. Uh, we said goodbye to Patrick Stewart this week. What, what, what a legend. I've been rewatching the next generation. Like, you know, I like to look through something on before bed.

• 1:07:58Jason Calacanis?

  Favorite episode?

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Oh, there's, there's, there's so many. You know, the one I just rewatched, I'm blanking on the title of it, but it's, uh, they encounter a drifting, you know, like a shuttle craft and inside is an unconscious Jean-Luc Picard from the future. And so they, the crew of the Enterprise is a classic from season two. They have to figure out what's going to happen. It's going to cause Picard to leave the spacecraft of when it gets destroyed. Yes. It's a brilliant, brilliant episode. Incredible performance because Patrick Stewart's playing a dual role. This confused unconscious Picard from the future. And then, you know, Captain Picard. What a great episode. What a great show.

• 1:08:38Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, is there another non sci-fi comic book role that I should see Sir Patrick Stewart in?

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  Oh, I've got a great one for you. There's the guy Jeremy Solnier. We, we talked about him, Solnier, I think. We talked about him because he's the guy who did Rebel Ridge, that one with Aaron Pierre, where he was like feuding with the sheriff.

• 1:08:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  He did a movie called Green Room and it is about a punk band that ends up playing at this like Nazi club. And then they end up getting sort of locked in the green room. The Nazis are trying to get them and it's like a survival thriller. Patrick Stewart plays the leader of this Nazi gang and he's incredibly so scary. It's nothing like any other role.

• 1:09:21Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, what's the name of this?

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Green Room is the name of the movie.

• 1:09:24Jason Calacanis?

  Green Room?

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Green Room. I believe it's, I think it's on Netflix now. Uh, this is a great movie. It's really intense. It's a thriller. It's kind of violent. But man, you have never seen Patrick Stewart be terrifying and just weird.

• 1:09:38Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to watch it this weekend. I'm going to, I'm going to watch it this week.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  There he is. There's their skinhead Patrick Stewart.

• 1:09:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that tracks. Uh, I'm going to just say on the X-Men, I think X-Men Days of Future Past is probably the best X-Men of the series. Days of Future Past. Cause it puts together the old and the young cast, right? That's the right one where they put them together.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Wolverine jumps into his brain, his own brain from I think the seventies. And so he meets all of the first class versions of the characters in that.

• 1:10:10Jason Calacanis?

  I thought that was the best one.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  It's great. It's great. It's a great comic book too.

• 1:10:14Jason Calacanis?

  I'll give his second to his Logan, uh, which is, you know, he's, um, he's a very frail Professor X and Professor X always, you know, I think my favorite X-Men of all time. Uh, rest in peace.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:28Jason Calacanis?

  Two.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  R I P. Sir Patrick Stewart.

• 1:10:31Jason Calacanis?

  Sir Patrick Stewart. What an entertainer, man. What a legacy. What a great. I like, I like the other guy, Ian McKellen.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Ian McKellen, they were good, they were good friends. Yeah. So Ian McKellen had a really heartfelt post yesterday.

• 1:10:42Jason Calacanis?

  Sir Ian McKellen. Lots of sirs going around here. We'll see you next time on this week's service. Bye bye.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Bye, everybody.