Meta's "creepy" new Ray Bans, Beehiiv teams with Discord, AND a visit from Lovable CEO Anton Osika! | E2181

Today's show: On an action-packed TWiST, Alex and Jason check out Meta's latest wearables, which promise to fix the "constantly staring down at your phone" problem and prevent you from blocking that little light letting others know you're filming them. Think the upgrade is worth $799 of your hard-earned money? PLUS, Lovable CEO Anton Osika stops by to answer YOUR questions, talk about how people are using the iconic vibecoding app, balancing accessibility and user engagement with the need to actually bring in revenue, and why Stockholm has become arguably Europe's leading tech hub. AND Beehiiv joins with Discord, Google bakes Gemini into Chrome, and MORE of the week's biggest tech news. Check out all this and more in a brand-new "This Week in Startups"! Timestamps: (0:00) Why Jason thinks Meta's new $799 Smart Ray Bans, which covertly record people in 3K, are creepy! (04:14) Why, in the technology business, not quitting is how you succeed. (09:47) . TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. (10:54) Show Continues… (17:02) Anton Osika from Lovable calls in from Stockholm: Why he thinks it's Europe's biggest tech hub. (20:37) Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST (21:44) A look at Lovable's new security features, to make founders feel more confident in their vibe coding (27:31) How Lovable is balancing engagement with the need to make money (29:55) Alphasense - Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at https://www.alpha-sense.com/twist (31:03) Show Continues… (42:29) Anton's tactical advice for founders who want to build a community around their product. (49:14) A viewer asks: Is vibe coding CHEATING? (59:01) Google is baking Gemini into Chrome… but how will it work? And what about privacy? (01:05:05) Beehiiv links up with Discord. Why Alex has a few concerns! (01:11:01) Responding to some of YOUR comments. (Leave us reviews and comments on Apple and Spotify!) Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: . TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today. Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST Alphasense - Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at https://www.alpha-sense.com/twist Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis 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 Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  When do you think it crosses over? Like if you were to give an honest assessment, or if we were going to make a poly market and we were going to place a bet on it, that lovable's security is twice as good as an expert, twice as good as an expert.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  For applications built fully in lovable compared to sysadmin building it from scratch, I think on average, like on average, it'd be more secure to be more secure is going to be in the coming 18 months.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by AlphaSense. Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at alpha-sense.com/twist. Sentry, your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users get three months free of the business plan, which covers 150,000 errors. Go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST. And .tech, say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today.

• 1:13Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I am your host, Jason Calcanis. With me, my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. We've got a full docket. You can watch the show live, thisweekinstartups.com. There should be some live links, but X.com, LinkedIn, if you follow me, Substack, if you follow the show there. Plenty of places to follow us live, including YouTube. So go over to YouTube and just do a search for This Week in Startups, and we take questions from the live audience. If you're listening to this and you're part of the podcast crew, no problem. Monday, Wednesday, Thursdays, 12:00 PM Central Time, also known as Texas time. So we've got a lot on the docket today.

• 1:54Jason Calacanis?

  And I guess the biggest news story in big tech, not little tech, is AI's Meta Glasses? Seem to be a hit, huh?

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Meta's AI Glasses. This is a thing we've talked about on the show quite a lot, Jason. Just to remind everybody, they dropped an earlier version of their Ray-Ban Meta Glasses that could take, I believe, photos and such. They just updated that to the second generation. But Jason, I think the big news this week is that they put out new glasses that have a screen built in. A pretty large technological jump from the preceding generation.

• 2:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I have the Gen 2s. They're incredibly creepy. I have a friend Amanda who brings them out at dinner and turns them on and tries to record the dinner and we all boo her when she does because it's a little tiny white LED light. And you know, before we get to the new ones, I'll tell you my experience with the old ones. The old ones are really great when you're with your kids. So I was on the ferry in New York. New York City is like really punched up the ferry game big time. And it's quite nice to take the ferry from Brooklyn. I was staying at this Brooklyn Hotel, you know, right under the Brooklyn Bridge. We took the ferry into Manhattan, went to get Korean food in K-Town, yada, yada. What was super interesting about is when I put these on and I'm interacting with

• 3:10Jason Calacanis?

  them, they don't think they're on camera because it's covert recording. So they act natural. And then they found out I was recording them and they got really upset. But they're kind of fun in that way. The problem is you're constantly having to look down at your phone to figure out what you're doing. So I did a live stream with it. But what I found with the live stream was when people were asking me questions, I'm like looking down at my phone. So it's a terrible experience. So the people watching my live stream on Instagram when I tested it, were looking at me looking at the phone of myself and the chat room. I was like, well, this is dumb. But I guess the reason it's not dumb is because this new version. So if you look at this new version, I think now I can play the video,

• 3:55Jason Calacanis?

  it has a heads up display. It has AR. So in these big chunky glasses, when you put them on, and here we go, you get to see a little faded image. And then instead of controlling it with your phone, you control it with this haptic around your wrist. This is, I think, what everybody wants, I'll be honest. And this is what Google Glass was 10, 15 years ago. And that, they gave up on that at Google, which was a huge mistake, you know, in the technology business, not quitting is how you succeed. So Google should have kept the Google Glass movement going, just like, you know, Zuckerberg did after buying Oculus,

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  which is, you know, I don't want to say it's a flop, but. You know, it never hit the mainstream, I think, you know, it's never really an application. And I think the application has always been AR. And here we are. So the question is, will Apple give up? Will, and I think Google's getting back in the game. I was told that they have something in the works. I don't know if it's public or not. Maybe producer Claude can help us with that. But it is a, um, this is a vision that is both disturbing and awesome because when you're walking down the street to not look at your phone when you're trying to get directions or to answer the phone or to see your texts without looking down, that's all great. But now you've become permanently online and you're creeping out on people by recording them covertly.

• 5:25Jason Calacanis?

  So we're going to need a whole set of new norms and new regulations. I think these things need to have a red blinking light when recording. I think since Zuckerberg did it in a way to foster the covert recording, he put a very low LED light. And I think he did that on purpose, or the team did so that you could covertly record. We're going to need legislation because they're not going to do it on their own. It should be a red blinking light like everybody is used to when you're recording.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Producer Claude from our dear friends over at Anthropic says that at Google I/O 2025, they did confirm, quote, "Android XR as a platform for both glasses and headsets." And they're also working with Warby Parker, Gentle Monster and others to ensure the glasses that come out of this are stylish and wearable. For more, claude.ai/twist. We love those guys. Jason, what do you think about the hand gestures? Because to me, that actually is a pretty compelling piece of technology. Putting the privacy element to this aside, having a wearable that can tell what your fingers are doing by tracking your motion, it's a technological and engineering success.

• 6:31Jason Calacanis?

  I was impressed. I found out that Apple, my Apple Watch has that. So if you double tap your fingers together, you can answer a call.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Like this?

• 6:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Literally, yes. If, well, ask producer Claude what the motions are and which Apple Watch that is. But, you know, the, the CEO of Whoop, who's been on the program, is so nice. He sent me a Whoop 5.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 6:52Jason Calacanis?

  And I only care about my health data. I found the watch. Kind of a dud for me. I just want my heart rate. I want to like record my workouts. I want to record my sleep, but the sleep app and the exercise apps and all that stuff on Apple, I think are mid. You know, they're not great. And then they sort of push you to other apps. So it's not like an integrated, but the Whoop 5 is super integrated. So I am now addicted and I love the Whoop. I think the Whoop is a super game changer because I get my workout, my sleep, my energy, my stress level, my VO2, they kind of extrapolate to give you your VO2, which is important, resting heart rate, and then it makes a calculation for your biological

• 7:37Jason Calacanis?

  age versus your chronological age, I guess. And all of that has me a bit addicted to it. And it lasts, the battery lasts forever. So

• 7:47Speaker 02

  Oh, that's clutch.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And then in order to charge it, you just slide this little battery pack on top of the wristband and you don't need to take it off. So people are keeping these things on. I've kept it on for over 100 days. I am addicted to the Whoop. I think when they pair that with blood testing, it's going to be great. If you could have your, all your blood results from Superpower or Function Health or any number of people who are doing that. And in the Whoop app, they have labs, so they're going to be adding that product. And this is the start of, you know, user-led healthcare. And I don't really engage with doctors like

• 8:31Jason Calacanis?

  I used to for healthcare because I feel like they're behind the curve in nine out of 10 cases because they're so stressed out. They're, they don't have a lot of time for patients and patients with these new platforms like Function, like Superpower, like Whoop, you can just take control of it. So on the haptic side, It's going to take a little interface getting together, but it's going to work because people have gotten used to it with their headsets. You use AirPods, you use Pixel. What do you use for your, when you're listening or going on a run?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Right now, I have a pair of Beats Pro in ear that I bought out of an airport vending machine.

• 9:10Jason Calacanis?

  For twice as much. And what do you do? Do you tap it to like pause the music or answer?

• 9:14Speaker 02

  It has a little button, a button you push on them. So it's not, it's not a haptic, it's just literally a physical button.

• 9:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's chunky. So yeah, with these new ones, you can shoot the lock off your wallet. You're so frugal. I give you permission to buy the, I like the Nothing earset. I have the company Nothing. They have a cool earset that I like. And they just announced the 3.0 of that. And I have the Apple ones. And I also have the Sony one. So I've been testing all of these. I'm like just very promiscuous with buying new technology. What do you think of this haptic revolution and like the possibilities there?

• 9:52Jason Calacanis?

  We all understand the importance of a crisp, memorable, easy to spell domain name. One of those names you can say over the phone and people know how to type it in without asking you the spelling. But let's get real. The good ones are either taken or there's some poacher who's holding it and waiting for some huge payday and they don't reply to you, even if you want to pay for a premium domain. You don't want to use up all your runway on a domain name. That's just the truth for a startup. You want to put that valuable cash back into your startup's operations. So you should consider this, a .tech domain. You can get a clean, crisp, super memorable name for your website and company and signal out loud to your customers and investors, we're a tech company. That's

• 10:34Jason Calacanis?

  instant branding for you. That's why over 500,000 founders have collectively raised over $5 billion in investment, building their companies on .tech. So skip the hassle. Head to www.get.tech/twist or go to your favorite registrar and grab your .tech domain today.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  I'm really excited by it. I share all your privacy concerns with these new Meta Ray-Ban displays. By the way, 800 bucks to start and you can go get your.

• 11:03Jason Calacanis?

  That's a great price.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  It's better than I expected.

• 11:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a great price for that much product, but continue.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's an enormous step forward. So it does have to use your phone. It's kind of a base. You don't have to have your phone out. Enormous upgrade. I think the 600 by 600 pixel display looks pretty darn crisp and it's bringing some of the stuff that I love from Google Glass to now, which is like live translation. If you recall, there was an app for glass that would translate signs for you. Now you can do that with these. And I think on the privacy front, they're doing some intelligent things. So if you try to cover up the light that displays when you're recording, it'll tell you to stop doing that. So it's actually has a sensor to block you from blocking it, which I think is a good step forward in terms of, you know.

• 11:46Jason Calacanis?

  That is actually, I didn't know they did that. I think they did that because a bunch of these YouTube prank shows or TikTok prank shows, producer Nick sent Lon and I a link to it. Maybe Lon can find it in our group chat. But these kids are running around like haranguing people, harassing people with these glasses. Listen, I was a punk kid too. I would have been doing this exact same thing. But yeah, that's a good thing that they are now. Cause what these kids were doing was putting a little piece of gaffers tape over it. Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's just unacceptable to me. The thing is though, I agree that society is just not here yet. I don't think we're going to have these be in regular use. I think Snap should get a lot of praise for their spectacles product, for getting those a bit more into the mainstream, into the normies, into the kids. But I think right now, if I showed up to anything in my personal life, wearing these, and I said, I'm going to take a video, people would be like, I don't know, man. Seems a bit much. Like I thought we were sitting down.

• 12:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think if you're at a kid's party and it's

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 12:43Jason Calacanis?

  very clear that like you're going to take some pictures of like the happy birthday song and you declare, hey, I'm gonna put my glasses on to record this. That's why you see the light and you kind of, that's going to be the next couple of years is people declaring they're going to do it. I could see in four or five years, just like everybody takes their phone out and records the happy birthday song and nobody blinks an eye. I think people are going to be doing that. You're going to, it'll just be normalized pretty quick. But then you're going to have to take them off. I think that's going to be, that's the thing I'm wondering about. But maybe we're just old Gen Xers who. Are curmudgeonly and, you know, care about privacy. These young kids don't. So this is going to be a hit.

• 13:27Jason Calacanis?

  I predict it's a hit. It took them a decade to get here. I think they also have a branding problem at Meta. Because these are the Meta Ray-Ban somethings. Meta Ray-Ban Display, I guess.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  I believe that's the current working name.

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  So that's four names, four words. Buy Facebook and Instagram. You know, they should just call them, you know, whatever. Ray-Ban somethings. And did they, did Meta buy Ray-Ban? Is that what I read? That they bought Ray-Ban?

• 14:00Speaker 02

  I forgot if they, if they bought all of Luxottica or part of it. But I, look, Meta's not amazing at naming things. They've kept Instagram's name. I think that's the best choice they've made. I mean, Oculus, Horizon, Worlds, VR, whatever. It's never been, Jason, the most crisp of brands.

• 14:16Jason Calacanis?

  And then what app do you load? And does the app work? I, I need one of these. Okay, producer Claude is telling us Meta bought a minority stake in Ray-Ban's parent company.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  SL or Luxottica.

• 14:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  It's the conglomerate that owns essentially every single brand of eyeglasses out there. They're essentially a cartel or a monopoly, if you will.

• 14:36Jason Calacanis?

  I would like to, you know, with these, see them come. I would like to see a third party come up with one of these that's not tied to any of the platforms. I just want one that is just independent of everybody and works with everybody seamlessly. So that I can use it on YouTube. I could, you know, and it's not like, I feel like Meta did this to keep people in there. And I guess spectacles to a certain extent, to keep people into their ecosystem. I'd like these to work like natively with my Apple Photos, my Apple Camera. Like, why can't I open up the camera app and have it just work there?

• 15:17Jason Calacanis?

  And then when I open up Instagram or I'm using Substack or whatever I'm using, it should just work. And, you know, somebody should. Make an open source kind of version of this that or open hardware version of this since it's so important, I think, with society. But these are going to be great. AR is awesome. I've never liked VR. It gives me motion sickness. And I've always loved AR because it kind of keeps you in the real world. And there'll be so many small applications. And I think iMessage is the one that is the key, which is why Apple is doing the Vision Pro. And I think Apple will have a competing product out. I think Apple will show a competing

• 15:58Jason Calacanis?

  product, not available for purchase, but a competing product to this, which is what I'll say is glasses that connect to your phone, not a big rig. I think they'll have that out or announced and show it within 18 months. And I would like to make a Polymarket on that. So if we could talk to our friends at Polymarket, when will Apple have a pair of AR glasses for consumers? And, you know, they announced them and announced the release date. I'll say 18 months. You take the over or the under, Alex?

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Uh, Apple to have a pair of AR glasses for consumers comes down to price, Jason. These are 800 bucks from Meta and up for the bracelet and glasses.

• 16:37Jason Calacanis?

  So let's say under 1500.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Oh, I'll take, for fun, I'll take the over on that one.

• 16:42Jason Calacanis?

  Take the over. Okay, then I'll just take the under. Another $100 bet. We'll record it at this week and startups.com slash bets. And that will be, you can send it in Bitcoin. You can send it in an Uber card. But, you know, somebody should vibe code all of this. And if only there was a vibe coding platform that could do this.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  There was a vibe coding platform. You know, Jason, I recall when we talked to a founder back in February, his name was Anton Osekka, and he's the CEO of Loveable. So I think we should have him back on. In fact, I think he's here. Hey, there he is.

• 17:15Jason Calacanis?

  Anton, where are you calling him from?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Stockholm, Sweden. That's where we're building from.

• 17:20Jason Calacanis?

  Stockholm, Sweden.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is.

• 17:23Jason Calacanis?

  Do you ever get that smorgasbord? You get that smorgasbord?

• 17:25Speaker 01

  I'm not a huge fan of the smorgasbords personally.

• 17:29Jason Calacanis?

  Ida Davidson?

• 17:32Jason Calacanis?

  You ever been to Ida Davidson, that place where they make them?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  I think I've been to Ida Davidson once, but I mean, I

• 17:40Jason Calacanis?

  What about Noma? You been to Noma?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  Yes. I don't go to the fancy places though, Jason. I go to the ones where you get your food fast and then you go back to a building.

• 17:51Jason Calacanis?

  So you're building the company there and you had incredible revenue run rate. Tell us about the incredible run rate that lovable had and then we'll get into product.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think Stockholm is very underrated and what we're set on is to build the first trillion dollar company from Europe from here. And I can talk more about it.

• 18:13Jason Calacanis?

  Sorry, did you say trillion?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  That's the plan.

• 18:16Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  So I think we're seeing more unicorns being minted in Stockholm than other European cities this year. And this is a lot of momentum that's building up right now. I think you're going to see a lot more. But as per your question, last time we spoke in February, I think we had just hit 20,000 paying customers or something. And now we're almost at 20x that. And we're still very early days on the product. What we're going to do is to let the 99% who don't know how to write the code instantly turn their ideas into software.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  And that's unlocking entrepreneurship and it's speeding up very, very large enterprises where the product managers, designers, marketers can move without being bottlenecked by engineers. And as the product becomes much more capable, we're naturally being able to capture more of the value that's being unlocked by the software eating the world. Right? So what I'd love to talk more about is specifically how I think Stockholm is an underrated place and why we're going to be successful in this endeavor.

• 19:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we'll totally get into that. The thing about that was very interesting when I knew you were on to something is I said, we need to make like a community portal for the syndicate.com. That's our angel syndicate, like 11,000 members, 4,000 have made an investment and like, there's like 500 who are super into it. And I was like, they really want to hang out. So we had a Slack room, but I was like, we need something that's like our own portal. You know, kind of like Angel List, but they don't have community features over there really, but I want more like a community driven thing. And so Well, interestingly, Kelly on my team was like, oh, I built it. And I'm like, you built it? And she's like, yeah, here, I've been spending like 100 hours on this. And she shows it to me and I'm like, that looks like you. And she vibe coded it in lovable.

• 20:08Jason Calacanis?

  And I'm like, what is it going to take to make this production ready? So I feel safe. So tell me about that aspect of the business. We had that one company that was vibe coded tea, I think. And I don't think it was lovable, but if it was, it's fine to talk about. But they didn't lock it down. So tell me about security and being production ready.

• 20:37Jason Calacanis?

  When your website or your app goes down, it just want to fix that problem as quick as possible. And that's why there's Sentry, application monitoring software. That's essential for over four million developers today. Sentry handles all of your real time error monitoring and tracing. So the moment something breaks, you know what happened and you know why. And you know how to clean it up. But the real reason we love Sentry is like all great startups. They're obsessed about their product and constantly shipping incredible new features for their customers. Some examples, Seer, their AI powered debugging agent that uncovers the root of your bugs and errors in 95% of cases. They also have an AI agent monitoring system. And this is going to become more important in the future, folks. We all know that.

• 21:19Jason Calacanis?

  That's going to help you track down specific problems happening behind the scenes when your LLM starts hallucinating. And they just added structured logs, allowing you to view and search everything going on between your front end and your back end, helping you track everything on your application, not just the errors. Don't just listen to me. Try it out for yourself. Go to sentry.io/twist and take your monitoring and debugging to the next level. That's sentry.io/twist.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yep. So we take security as the top priority because if you are building something that's not secure, you should not have built it at all, right? And it's clear to me, if you look at like in the sixties, you were sending people to the moon and you could have put a human in the cockpit like steering that rocket ship. But what you realized back then already was that you need a computer to run this rocket ship mission because it's much more reliable in the certain scope of running, at least launching that rocket in the sixties. Humans always make errors and we're going to see the same thing happen to computer security where you're not just simply not going to trust a human writing secure code.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  You need an AI system. Yeah, you need an AI system to write secure code. And we've launched over the last few months, we launched several security features that scans everything, all the kinds of calls that the AI has written for you. I cannot say that it's more secure than a security expert today. So I do recommend looping in a security expert for like life and death applications or like so very sensitive data, a hundred percent.

• 22:57Jason Calacanis?

  Why do you think it crosses over? Like if you were to give an honest assessment or if we were going to make a poly market and we were going to place a, you know, a bet on it, that lovable's security is twice as good as a human, you know, chief security officer, like a, you know, a sys admin, a sys ops who's just top 10%. So better, twice as good as the elite.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  As an expert.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  As an expert, twice as good as an expert.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  So like, look, I don't, I really don't trust like the average developer to write something securely, average human developer.

• 23:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so let's go with elite.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  So it's good, it's good you picked elite ones. It does depend on how much time the human gets and how much time both of them get.

• 23:44Jason Calacanis?

  Let's say unlimited time.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the unlimited time, when does it cross over?

• 23:51Speaker 01

  For applications built fully in lovable compared to sysadmin building it from scratch, I think on average, like on average, it'd be more secure, two weeks more secure is going to be in the coming 18 months.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Okay, I was gonna guess 18 months.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Not for arbitrary projects. I think for like super special projects where the AI has never seen a project like this, this, the humans are still like, they are still the ones cutting the frontier of like novelty and figuring things out. But in 18 months, for basically all standards, all software, like bank software, everything, we're going to see AI being more secure for the leading platforms.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Anton, I want to dig into that because one theme we've seen since we spoke to you in February is that people have become a little bit disillusioned at the pace of progress with new AI models. People say they're not getting better as fast as we expected. And so I think that people are pushing back their timelines on when we'll replace, you know, function X from a human with an AI service. Your 18-month timeline feels pretty aggressive in a good way. Talk to me about the improving models, improving agentic work, and how you're going to take lovable from where it is today to that point in just six quarters.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  So if you look at the product lifecycle, like building software, there's actually much more steps than you might imagine. It's not just a human like writing all the code and then it's done. It's all of this like, okay, this is my hypothesis of what we should build. These are my hypothesis of how the user flow should be like. And then validating those, going ahead, building out the application. And then after you build the application, it's all of this operating it, looking at the scaling, observing if there are any bugs running in production and so on. And what we're doing is to build out that full platform where we make it as easy as possible for the AI to take the decisions within that domain, like within our specific architecture for how the applications are built.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  And that's, like, there's a very strong synergy, like one plus one equals three in terms of doing that really well, adapting it to the AI, polishing it for the, polishing like everything around it and the garden is for the AI, as well as, as you know, the big labs releasing new models every three months that are showing vastly greater capabilities than the last ones. So that's like the synergy in how we do it and us making it opinionated. Unlike Claude Code and the Cursor and so on, it's why it's rapidly becoming more reliable for even for the people who are not non-technical, who don't know how to write code.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  So having a unified stack that's opinionated helps and also improving AI models. But that kind of hits on my point. So in your view, Anton, the products from your OpenAI's Anthropic and the other major AI model companies are still improving at a pretty quick clip even at this point in the year.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And that's what going to enable creating almost all software. We talk about 95% of all SaaS businesses should be able to be built much faster and more reliably on our platform than other platforms. And with it, you get like one click payments are set up. One click in the future, maybe your entire company is incorporated and you have your bank set up on one platform.

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  That's really interesting. So you're thinking of all the pre-conditions and post-conditions that happen around vibe coding. And you know, Stripe did the same thing, right? They have a service.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Stripe Atlas.

• 27:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Stripe Atlas to do. Oh, you used it to incorporate?

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Same here, same here.

• 27:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. So like a shout out to our guys at Stripe. This is like a really interesting thing and these APIs are all available. And then hosting apps is the other big piece. So it was always very expensive to host on these platforms. How do you look at hosting as a moneymaker versus maybe a competitive advantage? And walk us through how you're pricing all this right now, because I played with lovable, you know, just to kind of get my feet wet, but it was like a 50 buck a month subscription or something or 100 bucks.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  25.

• 27:54Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's 25. Yeah. And I was like, well, I'm just, I'm not really doing this other than just playing with it. But I felt like there were a bunch of roadblocks, you know, or paywalls. So you have to balance these paywalls with engagement. So as a founder, how are you thinking about getting as many people onto the platform versus making money?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  That's a great question. We're looking at making it cheaper and cheaper to build so that when we're really providing all the value you get from running your product on the platform, that's when you're never going to leave because it's so much value and then you will pay more at that point. Currently, hosting is completely free. You pay for buying a custom domain in the platform, but the building consumes a lot of AI compute, right? So that's what we've been charging for to date. I will be able to say more about this next week, so people can stay tuned for the biggest launch to date on our product, actually, happening in the coming days.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  Around hosting or just around the pricing? Yes, so hosting, the default hosting is still going to be free. What's we're giving, adding some more capabilities where we just have to somehow be able to charge because of that cost us a lot of money. And that's something that we'll be talking more about next week. And as an example of what value you're getting, once you have built something, it's on like you're going to be able to have to charge your customers. And that's how Stripe make their money, for example. And now, most companies and software has AI built in, right? And that's something that you should be, you shouldn't have to think about how that

• 29:44Speaker 01

  works. It should just work. And that's something we will be doing our utmost to take care of for our customers.

• 29:55Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:39Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:03Jason Calacanis?

  Are you upside down on the economics right now? In terms of profitability on a per user basis? Or is it break even or modestly profitable? Because I do hear that some of these deep research type projects that fire off 50 threads at once. That companies will actually lose money on those.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:24Jason Calacanis?

  But they're kind of like abstracting that into the overall, or maybe they don't mind losing money every user. Because the cost of compute and tokens is coming down so dramatically. Walk us through that journey.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, we want to make it as cheap as possible to build and create things. It's a part of the mission to like let human creativity be a driver, which is a more optimistic future than us just consuming brain rot. And but today we're in a very good place where we can very easily become profitable without big changes to how our business works.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  So, so Anton, just to be clear, that's like just gross margin positivity? That's what you're kind of implying there?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yes, if you split up your users into the free users and the paying users. And we have gross margin profitability on the ones on the paying ones. So that that means that we can like ask you grow users very rapidly without like me being freaking out about our bank account.

• 32:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, your burn rate could get pretty significant, but in today's age, you are facing serious competitors. So there's an argument to like Uber did and Lyft did. Hey, if we lose a couple of rides per you lose a couple bucks per ride, no big deal because at some point we could flip the switch. So. Anton, take me through what it's like when you hit this kind of revenue as a startup so quickly and then competitors emerge and then thinking about pricing. And is this going to turn into a pricing war? Has it turned into a pricing war yet?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  I don't think much about the pricing. Like, I think, thinking more about the pricing in our conversation here than I do most weeks. We're just thinking about really building a product that our customers love and making that into a generational product and the generational company on top of that, where we want lovable to be used by a billion developers or builders that don't have to write software code. There's like 50 million developers out there today, right? And it should be the foundation where people build anything with lovable. And what's possible for us to do here is to not just have this trillion dollar outcome

• 33:37Speaker 01

  as a goal, but to have it as a proving ground where more of the great ambition and the talent and a strong culture from European companies can be inspired to have this large global goals as we are currently pursuing.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Anton, there was a really interesting piece that came out in early September. It was called "Where's the Shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up?" And it was a complaint that we're not seeing as many like new iOS applications come out. And basically, if AI makes it so easy to build, why aren't we seeing more of it? Then I turned to your guys' numbers, you know, 100 million ARR and your user base has exploded. So are people building apps that are a little bit out of the visibility of like most traditional developers? Because in my view, if I built a thing for my mom, that would not show up on GitHub. It wouldn't show up on the App Store. So I'm just curious about like, are people building tons and tons of apps or are the critics here a little bit mistaken in where they're looking?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  I think they are mistaken. Like, there's so many software products that we use today. So it's harder to go like into mainstream media with success cases. But if you take, so Lovable is very global. There is a company called Q Group in Brazil, where the founder himself, he was a quite large company, but he sat down and he built a new product for them in three weeks, launched it, made three million dollars in the first two days after launch, with some existing distribution channels, of course. And that's just one of thousands of businesses that are being built, oftentimes by people who were previously, did not have the foundation, the capital required,

• 35:18Speaker 01

  specialized skill set to build a business. So there are lots of success stories. And what I can say as well in like how Lovable is driving value for companies is that very large companies are using this technology. And they're using it for a part of the product lifecycle. And that's oftentimes the most time-consuming part. And 60% of figuring out like, is this actually worth investing in and putting it, taking it all the way to our customers? So product managers, designers and marketers, they're often moving much, much faster and prefer like, Lovable is the best tool for them to prove out, here's my great idea. I'm not just going to talk about the idea.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  I'm just going to build it in a few hours. Show it to my manager, show it to my customers, and then say, let's launch this. And then you've saved 60% of the time. And engineers have this perfect specification to go out and implement in the system.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  That's so funny. I thought you were just going to say, yeah, Alex, you don't see them on GitHub or the App Store because they're web apps. But that's a different answer and also a really good one. Jason, I think you want to do something.

• 36:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think it's actually could be quite a revolution for young people. We've been talking, Alex, on the program about static team size. Big companies aren't hiring. And we've seen this massive increase.

• 36:38Jason Calacanis?

  Quite disturbing this past year in the United States of young people not being able to get jobs specifically in big tech. And I talked to Vice President J D Vance about it at the AI summit. He was a little concerned. And for young people, the benchmark is going to go up for you to show that you're valuable in this new world. Well, here's the easiest way to do it. If you have initiative, you know, on top of the hard work, that's what all bosses want. They just want somebody to show initiative because they're busy. Your boss is busy and they've got a boss and their boss has a boss and there's all these goals and existing things you have to get done. So if a young person coming up

• 37:21Jason Calacanis?

  in their career says, hey, I looked at this thing you asked me to do. It's repetitive, it's boring, and it's time consuming and expensive for our company. So I vibe coded something. Would this be okay? I have that happening in our organization. Now, it's not just lovable. People are doing it in Notion with Zapier and kind of doing little workflows there with these form programs. So there seems to be like two parallel ways to do this. Design a full product in a lovable and then show that or doing, you know, what I'll call scripting and light coding. But this could be a game changer for young folks who can't get employed. And they called this spec work, Anton, back in the day. Have you heard that term before? Spec work?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  I'm not that old, though.

• 38:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I know. That's what I'm trying to explain here. So there was, there was a whole movement called the no spec movement. Somebody can pull up the webpage for this. When design became commoditized, because hey, Canva came out and other tools, Figma, et cetera, and even back in the day, Photoshop became more, you know,

• 38:28Jason Calacanis?

  More common, up and coming designers, especially from around the world, would start making logos. And they'd say, hey, I redid your logo. Would you like to buy one for $500 or can I get a job? And then CEOs started to see this, so they started to ask people, hey, I'm looking for a new logo. Will somebody make me one? And the designers got really upset because back then a logo design was five to 15K. If you can imagine that, and imagine five to $15,000. It seems crazy to you. We thought, okay, well, I raised a million dollars for my startup. Why wouldn't I spend 25,000 or 10,000 on a logo? And this was bread and butter. People would get two logo deals a month. They would do 20 a year. They'd make 5K each. They would be a freelancer making 100, 150 grand a year.

• 39:13Jason Calacanis?

  It was quite common in web 2.0. And then the spec movement came out and then everybody started saying, don't do spec work. That was like.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we're seeing like a no spec 3.0. That's what we're seeing. And it's coming both from the people inside of companies, product managers and so on. But I foresee that what you're saying is definitely going to happen where young people who often learn faster, they have more initiative taking capability are going to come to companies and say like, hey, I can, I can do all these new things that your staff currently cannot because I grew up AI native. I actually have this 20 year old who's helping with automations in our company. Like I don't, I can't put the most senior engineers on it because it's like automations. But the mission I'm telling him is you have to automate lovable. Like that's the, that's the goal for you. Automate everything lovable. And I love the positivity you're putting on for, for young people out there.

• 40:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And then if you can't get a job, even if you've done all that spec work, the company that doesn't hire you, or you're inside a company and you build all this stuff and they're like, yeah, we don't want to do that. Well, here's what you do. You just think, are there other companies who would want this product or service? And maybe I can sell it for 100 bucks a month or $1,000 a year and get 100 people to buy it. And now I am working from home in my underwear three days a week and I, and I make more money than I work for my current employer. So that's going to be a really interesting tension. That happened to Alex, by the way. He's not wearing pants, by the way.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  I am wearing very comfortable shorts, but from the waist up.

• 40:44Jason Calacanis?

  I knew it. I knew he wasn't wearing pants.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  All right, let's plug in. Are you wearing a belt?

• 40:49Jason Calacanis?

  The point is, you left TechCrunch and now you have like two jobs, three jobs, and you can actually start to say, you know what, I'll make more money, I have more freedom, more agency, I guess is the word I'm looking for. So it's kind of exciting. It's a really cool future.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  It is. Anton, quickly on the student discount that I showed, building off what Jason just said, how popular is Lovable amongst students and is that a critical cohort of your overall user base?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  It's very popular, just because students are a bit disillusioned by feeling that the only thing they do in college is to ask Chatschep St and put in the answer into their take homes and so on. And they're thinking about what's next. I heard at the most prominent technical university here in Sweden, people thinking about starting a company as students after they graduate, went from 8% to 80% over the last 10 years, which is huge. And you can really feel that in the atmosphere here when you go to events, that there's so many young people who want to build successful startups. And they often come up to me at less and say like, oh, my God, I'm so grateful. You saved my company, or you made it possible

• 41:57Speaker 01

  for me to raise a big round based on what I built in Lovable. It's not like students, they're not so well capitalized. So it's not the biggest chunk of our revenue yet. We're betting on that becoming the case when they become founders, which is the biggest source of our revenue today.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  So founders are your biggest customer base?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yes, founders, entrepreneurs of small companies, the developer agencies and so on, that have been bottlenecked by not being able to find great engineers or paying for great engineers. That's the biggest source of revenue for us.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 42:29Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, you know, one thing I wanted to talk to you about was when you have a startup like this and you're trying to build a community and a movement around it, what are the tactical things you can share with other startup founders listening about tactically building a community of power users? I know you guys have a Discord, not sure how vibrant that is.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:51Jason Calacanis?

  But maybe you could talk about that.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  106,258 members on the Lovable Discord, 8,744 online.

• 42:58Jason Calacanis?

  So you got 8,000 people in a Discord grinding. How did you get that flywheel started? And what impact does Discord have on your business, would you say?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  So the community and users wanting to teach each other how to unlock the full potential of this tool that like it looks very simple. It's just a chat box, but there is actually so much to learn to really master it and get to be able to work in tandem with the AI. That's that educational part is huge and all the hackathons and events, I think we were interacting with 300 grassroots events being run about level this to the end of this year.

• 43:37Jason Calacanis?

  In person, really?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  In person.

• 43:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And what do you use to manage that? Are you using River?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  That's a good question. For for physical events, I think the team, they're completely understaffed. There's like one person mostly working on this and we're not being proactive in the sense that we could be on.

• 43:55Jason Calacanis?

  So that means an opportunity, yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  It's a huge opportunity for us to empower that more and empower the Discord community more to make it to put some structure around that. But I can just say like, what you want to do is to think about what's the journey for people coming into the community and giving them a platform if they're good, if they are good ambassadors that can educate, giving them a platform, a personal platform that they that they can leverage in the community. And again, this is an opportunity that we haven't really jumped on. But if somebody is listening to this and wants to help out on the community, reach out to me.

• 44:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we'll talk about Stockholm in a minute and your love of that great city. But let's take a couple of questions from our live audience. If you're listening to this on podcast, you can go to YouTube and sign up for This Week in Startups, hit the subscribe button and there's like a little dropdown where you hit an alert bell and then you'll get alerted when we go live. We're going to start doing some random live streams, by the way, Alex. So I'm giving you permission, Alex and Lon and Oliver, to next week.

• 45:03Jason Calacanis?

  When a live news story happens, go live on the channel and just talk about one story and do it in under 10 minutes. So I'm giving official permission to my team to do that. I think there's like, people want a little more content. I did it yesterday on Spaces, I talked about the Jimmy Kimmel situation. I don't know if you saw that, Alex, but- I did, you said you got good engagement on that. Unbelievable. People are like, "Do this more often, I want to talk more often." So we had so many questions come in for you, Anton, across our Substack, Live, LinkedIn Live, YouTube Live, and X.com Live, that we take a couple if you're okay with that, Anton. It's a little dangerous to take live questions, so here we go. Editorial Director, Lon Harris.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  I don't have any dangerous questions for you, Anton, they're all very above board. First up from Alex Ray, "What do you think of Anthropic CEO's AI is going to take over, we must regulate tour?" Alex saw him speak at an event in DC and felt like they're trying to get regulatory capture to happen. What are your thoughts?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I hate like over-regulating things. I think Europe is a good example of where we're maybe too happy to pull the trigger on over-regulating before you see a problem. I think there is a, I mean, it's a bit scary with introducing a species that like humans are the dominant species on this planet because we are intelligent. And then when you introduce some new intelligence that could, might be more intelligent than us in all ways in a few years, it's more unpredictable and it's possible that we should think about regulating some of it before, ahead of time.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I don't think, I think you can do it in a way that is not regulatory capture. And I think everyone who's listening to this list should really think first principles and question them in terms of can, if we should regulate, which I think we should, is this actually, can we do it in a way that it prevents regulatory capture? Can we do it in a way that prevents regulatory capture? And I think the answer is, the answer is yes. And that- Um, we can get all the benefits from like the smaller players and like the smaller ones than a tropic to um not be taking on the regulatory burden, whereas only the large players actually have to take on the regulatory burdens. I think that's the case, but I'm not an expert.

• 47:28Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. Let's take another question. Go ahead, Lon.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Uh, so this one comes from PM Dev, a little bit more technical. Lovable being built on an opinionated stack by definition dramatically narrows Lovable's capabilities. Pivoting off of that, what's Anton's technical background?

• 47:46Speaker 01

  Um, so I've been um a founding engineer at the company that just became a unicorn here in Stockholm. Uh, so I I think I did some good work there. Uh, and I was the CEO.

• 47:58Jason Calacanis?

  Were Cloner, Truecaller, Kingfisher?

• 48:00Speaker 01

  It's it's called Sama Labs. So it just became a unicorn, I think officially, and and exited. But um I since then, after that, I actually started a Y company, a company that uh we raised 20 million dollars from from top we uh visas after growing really fast. And I was I was a CTO. So I um went from CTO to the founding and being a CEO at this company. And to the question, um, how we think about it is that Lovable needs to have all the primitives on the kind of software architectural side to be able to create everything you need from for for 95% of SaaS companies. So on the Facebook scale,

• 48:43Speaker 01

  maybe it's going to be hard to vibe code it on a Lovable. Um, and but how these different primitives come together in the technical architecture, that's what's uh that's what's opinionated. But as long as you have all the primitives, there should not be a significant significant narrowing of what you can produce. And that's why you people love using Lovable. I use love to use it as well, especially if you are technical, you can do your hobby project in like in minutes instead of taking a few days for them.

• 49:12Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Any more questions from the audience that are notable?

• 49:14Speaker 03

  One more. This is the spiciest one.

• 49:17Jason Calacanis?

  Uh-oh. Okay, here we go.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  Andre Inescu, uh, is vibe coding a little bit cheating? Do you think software engineers maybe are better off without it long term? Your reaction?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Okay, so if it's cheating, would software engineers be better off without it? No, I think. Everything, there's a fun company. I don't know so much about them, but they're called Clouly. And they, they talk a lot about they are going to build the ultimate cheating tool. And everything that was once a technological advancement, like the calculator, was considered cheating in the beginning, but a calculator is not considered cheating today. It's just a new tool to learn as fast as possible to be, to increase your competitiveness in the job market.

• 50:00Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely fantastic. As we wrap here, Stockholm has had, you know, many, many unicorns. It's Sweden is a small country. Is Sweden 30 million population, I think?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  It's barely 10.

• 50:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Sweden's barely 10. Was it, which one is 30 million in the Nordic Switzerland? I know that's the biggest, I think that's the biggest country, but you have Norway with like five or 10.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  I think if you count, if you count them up, it might be 30, I think.

• 50:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it might be 30 all across all of them. So the number of unicorns per million people, Alex, in my book Angel, I had talked about that, like

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:36Jason Calacanis?

  as a per capita. Think about this list, Klarna, Spotify, Clash of Clans. I forgot the name of, maybe that was King.

• 50:45Speaker 02

  That was King?

• 50:46Jason Calacanis?

  That was King.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yes, it was. He's not in.

• 50:51Jason Calacanis?

  Minecraft? I think Minecraft. Am I right?

• 50:55Speaker 02

  And then

• 50:56Jason Calacanis?

  Lovable. Truecaller. Any others?

• 51:01Speaker 01

  I mentioned sauna. Now I think there's going to be more potentially soon.

• 51:05Jason Calacanis?

  So what's in the water in Stockholm that makes this possible in your mind, Anto?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  It's great water. It's super clean. Drink it from the tap. But specifically, there is just a deep pool of engineers here who, who are very curious, grounded and, and serious about building good products and People building are not just chasing cloud, hopping between startups every year, but they they really care about what they're they're doing. And I think this this culture of long term thinking that matters a lot. When when I was on the AI side specifically, ten years ago, deep learning, you know, neural networks, you feed a lot of data was coming out. And then some of us here, we built one of the early AI communities where there is

• 51:55Speaker 01

  like a great list of alumni from it. It wasn't hype, it was just a small group of people reading the most recent research papers and building them, actually caring about implementation, getting it all the way to a product. And I think that spirit stuck around of like building products on top of AI. And now I think we're seeing a new wave. Stockholm is a magnet for talent. There are people moving here. I'm having a large part of my leadership team coming from SF, moving to Stockholm.

• 52:24Jason Calacanis?

  Still hard to find apartments there. I know that was like one of the blockers. I remember when a friend of mine, Tyler.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  It's good now.

• 52:30Jason Calacanis?

  Is it better? You're building more housing stock. It was hard to get an apartment, right? And the apartments were affordable, but you had to wait years to to get your apartment, I remember.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  I mean, there is a bit of this regulated pricing market. I think we have it in a few cities, but it's always possible to get an apartment. And yeah, we have.

• 52:49Jason Calacanis?

  Things moved outside of Stockholm? Like, is there a satellite city or two that have become popular?

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Stockholm is the one accelerating. I mean, there are there are two other big cities with some significant tech scene in Sweden, but Stockholm is the one ramping up the fastest. And I mean, as an example, Lovable is built from Stockholm by alumni of unicorns and a lot of global tech firms, top talent.

• 53:17Jason Calacanis?

  That's the key thing. Whenever we see a startup community start to thrive, it's because you have some unicorn company create a bunch of alumni and that diaspora then invests in, because if they made some money and you had stock options, they go invest in other things. And Canva came out of the Atlassian founders. And now you've got all these Canva millionaires, billionaires, who are then starting new companies. And so now you've got like multiple generations. And I think Stockholm with the same thing. So many of the people who were in Skype and made a bunch of money then, and those founders started investing in more companies. And then obviously, you're going to see that with Spotify founder, Daniel

• 54:01Jason Calacanis?

  Ek invests and starts other companies. And I'm sure he's an LP and supports the community. So it's absolutely fantastic. And I think people should be taking notes as to what happened there.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Anton said one month ago that in 10 years, quote, "People will talk about the, quote, "lovable mafia." So Anton, I have to ask, are you already shedding talent, people leaving to go start their own companies? Or are you thinking like more in the future, people are going to head out?

• 54:22Speaker 01

  No, I think about more in the future. We, I used to say this in the last company I built, the pick that I mentioned. And from there, we're seeing, I mean, four YC companies come out and multiple of them valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 54:43Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. Yeah, it's, and you have a view on secondary sales. I'm sure when a company accelerates in valuation, you have some early investors and/or employees who want to sell. But obviously, if there's liquidity in your stock, then hmm, they might get too much liquidity too fast and not see any reason to come to work. So what's your take on that as a founder?

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Second of all, yeah, no, we want to help our employees. I think it's important, I talk about not, we have a long way to go. And the big thing you should be proud of after you're done here is what the generational product and generational company team we built. And if you take some of the chips off the table, it should be done just so you can like, Think less about being like risk a risk averse and we secondary sales, how we do it is that we limit the total amount, total amounts.

• 55:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, that's what Elon figured out when SpaceX and I think the Stripe team figured that out as well. Just do like two orderly sales a year is I think both companies do that process. And then people make their request and management says, okay, yeah, you want to sell 50% of your position and you've been here for four years. Well, you sell 25 and whatever it is, some some orderly fashion. Listen, Anton, continued success. You're incredibly focused. It's so much opportunity and you're doing everything right. So congratulations and I'll see you when I'm in Stockholm.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yes, come here, please.

• 56:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I used to come all the time. There were so many tech events would invite me out. I just too many invites right now and not enough time. I would like to come back out. Yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  I found something you cannot say no to.

• 56:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, there you go. Well, we'll talk soon and great job, Anton.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Thanks, bro. See ya.

• 56:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right. They'll ask you to upload your file. Yeah, another great founder, doing great work, great job with the questions from the audience. We always love that. And again, we're going to do a little more live, a little more experimenting there. We're always experimenting here. You're excited about doing a breaking news story at some point?

• 56:50Speaker 02

  I'm totally here for it. I mean, Jason, fundamentally in my DNA, I'm a news guy.

• 56:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  So like to me, when there's a lot going on and it feels very active and busy that I thrive on that.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  But I'm just so glad we had Anton back on so quickly because when we had him on, his company was at 4 million ARR. Now they're over 100 million.

• 57:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's crazy.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  And that's not how technology worked when I was learning about startups. That was just not at all. What a different world.

• 57:14Jason Calacanis?

  You know, you have broadband, you have billions of users, you have credit card rails, and these tools are providing so much value at a low price. It's kind of hard not. To engage with them. So if you're working at a big company and you have a corporate card, or you have a personal card, why wouldn't you spend 25 bucks, you know, to just improve your lot in life? So for young people, I really recommend trying to, if you've got to spend your own 25 bucks, just do it. Can you imagine if you go to your boss and you're like, hey, I started using this lovable tool I paid for. Don't worry, I did it on my personal card. It didn't cost the company anything. I spent a hundred bucks the last

• 57:57Jason Calacanis?

  four months and I made this. Now your boss is like, get in here, talk to me, let's go get lunch. Let's have a coffee, tell me everything.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Also, your boss is going to name drop you when they take your work one level up. They'll say, Bob did this, or Jane did this. And then suddenly that person who never knew who you were, knows exactly who you are. Huge for your career.

• 58:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And this is why, like, you know, keeping your head down is not the best advice. Like, you want to rise up and get some attention for what you're doing and be ambitious. And just saying, hey, over the weekend, I did something. I had two of my team members tell me last minute that they applied to get scholarships at the All In Summit. They paid for like these $1,500 tickets. And they went there and they're like, I just didn't want to get in trouble, but we're taking vacations to go to your event. And I'm like, oh, my Lord, you can not use your PTO days for those two or three days. Since you were so ambitious, I am so thrilled that you did that. That's amazing. Now, of course, now I've got 20 people who are going to do it next year. And nobody gets any work done that week. But

• 58:58Speaker 02

  I'll be here. I'll be at home. Don't worry, Jason. I'll hold the fort down.

• 59:00Jason Calacanis?

  You'll hold the fort down. Okay, a couple of other news stories we should probably hit on.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:05Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think's the most pressing here? I saw Google is doing what Comet and some other folks are doing with an AI-first browser. Is that true? And have we used it? Have we seen it? Or is it just an announcement?

• 59:17Speaker 02

  Just an announcement. It's rolling out very soon. I'm hoping to have this in my Chrome by next week. So we'll have some more hands-on notes. Some of the features, though, Jason, are going to be coming out a little bit later. So Google is baking Gemini into Chrome. That's the big headline. It'll be in the upper right section. You can click on it and then it'll help you summarize webpages or groups of tabs that you currently have. Open, it'll help find websites you visited in the past. So kind of a really advanced history search, which of course brings up some interesting privacy points, but we'll get to that later on. And of course, integrations with other Google products like Calendar and YouTube. So you can kind of connect work from one tab to the next. Down the road, Jason, that's when we get to agentic browsing, a bit more like Comet from perplexity, or maybe kind of what Diaz doing

• 59:58Speaker 02

  from the browser company. And there will be a feature coming later on. I think this is the most important thing that will turn your search and URL bar into effectively the chat interface you see with most AI products. Now, they're not going to turn that on by default, I don't think, because they can't afford to take everyone in Chrome and send them to the AI search tool versus the traditional one, because all their money is made on the traditional side. But this certainly feels like Google now does not have to divest Chrome. We learned that from the judge in the search monopoly remedies section of the trial. So they get to keep Chrome. So now they're going to use it. And so to me, this is Google saying we've shaken off the courts. And now we're going to go straight pedal to the metal.

• 1:00:38Jason Calacanis?

  Timing, yeah.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  Oh, very interesting.

• 1:00:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they wouldn't. They were probably, obviously, they've been working on this for some time, probably a year, I would guess. And so they've been working on this for a year because they did include it. I'm seeing lots of AI pop ups when I'm using Google Docs, Gmail. I haven't seen it in YouTube all that often. I guess you can ask questions of a transcript now. I would just like the search box in YouTube to be AI driven, or in X.com have it be AI driven. I think the meta team is going to done a good job of making their search box in Instagram default to an AI result, which is kind of cool. But yeah, so many possibilities when the Chrome

• 1:01:20Jason Calacanis?

  browser or your browser has AI built in. So this is going to be a big deal, a big, big deal.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  It begs a question, though, and I'm not trying to pick a fight here. So don't, don't take this in a negative sense. But people on the consumer side, they're going to grumble and then end up using it anyways. OpenAI is building a browser. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. XAI sued Apple over it claims preferring OpenAI in the App Store. Now, no matter what you think about About that, it shows that XAI is willing to go fight for what it says is a fair marketplace. If if Google's going to bake Gemini into Chrome, isn't that a much bigger self-preferencing point? So I'm curious if XAI is going to stand up and plant a flag here.

• 1:02:02Jason Calacanis?

  Or the Justice Department or anybody. I think it's one of these things where they're just, we don't have necessarily a savvy enough group in Washington across any administration. Just historically, we haven't had people savvy enough to be at the tip of the spear like us. Like, here we are, we've used Comet, we've used, you know, the other browsers. We're reading every update on them. We're hypothesizing as to how they will help people and the change. That's not how it works in Washington. Washington, somebody comes and complains and says, hey, you know, check this out. And they try to spin it and, you know, get some maybe edge on their competitors. I do think the the ultimate

• 1:02:44Jason Calacanis?

  way to self-regulate in these cases and the ultimately the way the government can regulate these is to give consumers more choice. Because what at the heart of this is the consumer's not having a choice, right? It's just it's being bundled, it's being shoved down your throat. You've got Microsoft Office, now you have Teams. And like, it's like, you can't get away from Teams, right? Or remember when Google Plus came out, you couldn't get away from it. It was kind of everywhere. And Meta is doing that with their AI product. You can't get away from it. But if you say, when you load up your new browser, it says, would you like to use XAI, Claude? Would you like to use this open source product? Which which LLM would you like to use as your default? Just like you can pick the search engine.

• 1:03:28Jason Calacanis?

  And I think in Europe, they actually forced Google with Chrome to give that choice when you install it. I'm not sure if that.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  The browser ballot screen and more recently, September 11. So one week ago, Jason, the EU Commission accepted Microsoft's commitment to debundle Teams to avoid a penalty. So we're still having these fights right now.

• 1:03:45Jason Calacanis?

  OK, great. So thank you for having that knowledge at your fingertips. This is, you know, the easiest way to do it is just give consumers choice. And ultimately, consumers are going to win in all this, as we just had with our guest from Lovable. It's 25 bucks to go make apps.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  So cheap.

• 1:04:03Jason Calacanis?

  And you could go from having no job and being a DoorDash or an Uber driver to starting to make little apps for your local dentist or your local, you know, I don't know, your, your, your local bakery wants to have a website and build something really unique. And you go in there and you build it for them, just like there were people who would go build websites 30 years ago. Or there were Squarespace consultants, you know, that go to local businesses. This is like one of the great hacks. You, you build a bunch of beautiful businesses using Squarespace. Use promo code TWIST, longest running sponsor here, partner. People would make, I remember it's in the early days of Squarespace, they would make websites, email them and say, hey, I built a website for you.

• 1:04:45Jason Calacanis?

  If you want it, I can set it up for you for a hundred bucks a month. And, you know, maybe Squarespace is 20 or 30 bucks a month and they would take the difference. And, uh, you know, the bakery would be like, this is amazing. I have a website that's gorgeous and represents us well. Thank you. So that's a really interesting hack.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  But I, I think the point about, um, people going to private communities is interesting because Beehive, a company we've talked about on the show quite a lot.

• 1:05:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we use them. They're incredible for our newsletter. Yeah.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  A big fan. Shout out to Tyler Dink. They just dropped a new feature and I was thinking about it in this kind of vein, because they now have a new button inside of Beehive that will help you set up an exclusive community on Discord for your paying subscribers. So kind of a tight title, it's a small new feature they just put out, but it made me think of like, here's a way for people that have a newsletter or a blog to quickly spin up their own community, just like you were talking about with Anton. And I was like, oh, this is fantastic. People are going to use it. And then my second thought was, oh, great, more people going into tiny little internet rabbit holes and having small communities. And so to me, it's this really interesting dichotomy between I love people getting to gather and have their interests and be niche and be weird. And then also the further from the light we go, the more I think we also have a reason to worry.

• 1:05:55Jason Calacanis?

  But you know, this, this could also be a positive because you get out of the slop on YouTube, serving you like more and more extreme stuff and trying to tickle your rage or X algorithm trying to do that, or TikTok algorithm trying to do that. And you say, you know what? I just want to be in the Knicks community. So I'm part of the Knicks Fan TV community and I have a private. X.com group chat with a bunch of famous Knicks fans and I also have the Knicks Fan TV Discord. And I find myself increasingly when I'm like, God, this is all so rageful and annoying and all politics all the time on different social networks. I'm like, I kind of like the respite of just saying,

• 1:06:36Jason Calacanis?

  hey, we're here to talk about startups. And so this weekend, we're going to fire up the this weekend startups Discord. I'm going to try to see if the young ambitious people who work for me can get a couple of them to do a little weekend work and pop up a Discord here for the show. And then we'll invite you all to that Discord. And I'm thinking about doing a paid membership. I know Leo has done really good with Club Twit and I can spend some time there. And I'm wondering, you know, I think I may start it off as free, but then go to a paid thing. So we can actually put moderators on it or editorial people on it and make it self sustaining. Not to make a profit, but just make it self sustaining, right? Because these communities rise and fall with like the moderation, I find.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Oh, well, we do. As of, as of minutes ago, actually about two hours ago, we do have our Discord set up, Jason. So once we have, once we have it tuned, we'll invite everyone in, but stay tuned and we'll hang out there as often as we can, just to be accessible.

• 1:07:34Jason Calacanis?

  There was an IPO. I know you love your IPOs. Tell us about the IPO.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  Two IPOs. I'll do them in 30 seconds. StubHub, the online ticketer, went public at the midpoint of its range and then immediately started to go down. Not a great IPO, but then happily for everyone out there who likes liquidity, NetScope, the cybersecurity unicorn priced at the top end of its raised range, Jason, $19 a share, and then immediately rose 18% in its first day. And then today, this morning, its second day of trading was up another six or 7%. So I think the more tech IPO of the week did well and we're seeing basically continued success from debuts. So everyone out there, Databricks, cough, cough, go public.

• 1:08:11Jason Calacanis?

  StubHub was public previously, I believe. So maybe it went private and then went public again.

• 1:08:17Speaker 02

  If memory serves, it was public, it was went private, sold, and then taken out again. So we're, we're back, back, back to the future on that one.

• 1:08:26Jason Calacanis?

  I just love this idea that Beehiiv is connected to Discord with the membership because this is a known problem. There's I think there's another company, Memberful or something, that creates glue between all of these different communities because you can turn on a Substack, a Beehiiv, a Patreon, X, I have subscribers now for my commenting. And so you have all these disparate subscriber bases, YouTube. How do you get them all into the same Discord? And then when they stop paying for it, turn off their Discord? This is a complicated technical problem. And you know, I guess people are just going to choose one location for their subscribers. But it would be nice if this was, you had the ability to subscribe anywhere and then manage it

• 1:09:11Jason Calacanis?

  from anywhere. The world's getting complicated. There's just too many options. It used to be you could just start a Patreon and that was it. Now it's like-

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  There's too many options. But like, I was just thinking about our Discord, because I think it'd be great to have one. But we also have Slack that I've got tabs on. I've got iMessage, LinkedIn Notes, Twitter DMs. And I do feel like at some point in time, don't shout at me, but like, some sort of like-

• 1:09:33Jason Calacanis?

  Unified inbox?

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  That brings it all together. I know technology's just bundling and unbundling, but right now, I feel like whenever I'm working, I'm not watching the 48 channels. So like today, I came back to our Slack after trying to get prepped for the lovable chat. And then we had done AI images for startup idea pitches. And I was like, oh, no, I gotta catch up.

• 1:09:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's the problem with chat is chat is like, it's just like a river. Like, if you, if you miss, you know, the leaf floating down the river, you want it to pull out of the river, it's just, it could be way downstream and you just, you lost it. This is where AI summaries, we have, we upgraded our Slack to like, the more professional version because we had to do like, more security because of our global operations. And the AI summaries are not great, but they're okay. And I find myself, once in a while, like, once a week, if I'm gone for two days, looking at it. And I'm like, this could be so much better. So for the Slack team- It's like if I had to rate the AI summaries right now and like their integration,

• 1:10:38Jason Calacanis?

  it feels like a five out of 10. Like I would keep grinding on that and, you know, helping surface them more. Superhuman does a really good job. Every time you open up a Superhuman email, it already has the summary at the top and they do it before you open it. So it's like preloaded in your inbox. So they take the time to do that, even if you don't see it, so that it's just faster and better.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Jason, do you want to read some comments from?

• 1:11:03Jason Calacanis?

  Oh yeah, let's just grab one and we'll shout one person at you, pull it up on the screen and.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Here it is. This is from our Spotify comments. We love everyone over there. Jason, take it away.

• 1:11:12Jason Calacanis?

  Spotify comments is on there. So this is comments, not reviews. But okay, yeah, we'll take a comment from Spotify. Who do we got?

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  We got Giordo Pasporto 1533. Love reading that out loud. I have to give Eric Jackson, this is from, I believe, our last episode, "So much props for finding the value of the company where invaluable investors could not. For the retail investor, we had the best opportunity to get in, as if it was a seed funding, paying cheap on the stock that we can then hold for a while." This person is just a big fan of Eric Jackson and the Open Door thesis, Jason, which you had quite a lot to say about.

• 1:11:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I love the fact that there's now a group of maniacs out there who find companies that are distressed or there's an opportunity in and say, here's my vision for that company. They're kind of activists, you could call them meme stonks, whatever. But I think they're getting better at it and the collective knowledge they have and the time they have and the motivation they have is, you know, greater than some of the stock analysts who work at, you know, whatever banks and they, you know, they don't have the time to obsess over stocks. It's a nine to five job for them. And these lunatics are like, I'm going to place a bet on Open Door. I'm going to say this CEO needs to

• 1:12:27Jason Calacanis?

  go. They're not doing a great job. These are the CEOs, I think, who would. These board members don't have skin in the game. That was like the best part of that discussion with Eric was his, oh, if you buy even $50,000 worth of shares, it tells us something. And I got to tell you, that does change behavior. And we talk a lot here on this program about generation bet and, oh, people have concerns about it. I got no concerns, man. My concern is that people are not thinking in probable, thinking probabilistically. They're not making bets. They're not making investments. Investments, bets, wagers, they all require you to have a higher.

• 1:13:03Jason Calacanis?

  A higher duty of handicapping and thinking through possibilities, which then makes everybody better at their game.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Jason Calacanis?

  So, put a little skin in the game.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  This is why I-

• 1:13:16Jason Calacanis?

  I invest to understand. I invest to understand. I bought KDEF because I heard people talking about it. I started reading articles about President Trump negotiating with Korea over shipbuilding because they're good at building ships. And we don't build ships here anymore. And now I've like gone down that rabbit hole. And I'm like, wow, there's a whole group of people who are better at building weapon systems, ships that are not in the United States. And then Anduril and all these other US-based companies are competing with them. It's a really great way to learn. Great way to learn.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Speaking of Anduril, just one last little note. Just got a $750 million contract with the Ministry of Defense over in the UK. Not a bad thing for them. But anyways, Justin, I don't want to drag us down another rabbit hole here at the very end.

• 1:14:06Jason Calacanis?

  So, great that we got the review, Oliver. Great that we got the comments, Oliver. What I was looking for was a review. But I guess we'll, we'll do that, you know, as a, as a concept. What I want to do is if y'all take the time to write a review on Apple, we're going to take the time to post it at the end of the show. So, watch the end of the show. I'm going to have producer Oliver or Lon or you, Alex, just read the review and shout the person out. So, at the end of the show, you may get a shout out for your comment or your review. So, get on the YouTube, get on the Spotify comments, get on the Apple Podcast comments, write a review, write a comment, and you might get shouted out here. And we'll give you a little plug for your company if you happen to mention it in there. Okay. See you all next time. Have a great weekend, everybody.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:14:50Jason Calacanis?

  Bye-bye.