Battery Power for Texans with Zach Dell, plus Tim Apple is LEAVING?, Polymarket to the US, and a Tesla fan update | E2190

Today's show: *Zach Dell of Base Power joins us at the top of today's show to talk about building batteries in Austin, that $1 billion investment, and why an "all of the above" energy strategy is the only way forward. PLUS Jason and Alex's thoughts on that Tesla non-upside down car announcement, growing resentments toward AI datacenters, Chinese robots actually going on sale, Tim Cook's potential Apple exit, xAI's Nvidia agreement and MUCH MORE. Timestamps: (00:02:10) A MAJOR GUEST! Zach Dell of Base Power joins us from the top of the show. (00:03:31) The basics of Base Power's business model: the best electron is the cheapest electron (00:08:38) Zach teases Base's new, time-saving approach to battery installation (00:10:32) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (00:18:12) How Base's grid can help drive down overall energy prices (00:21:17) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (00:30:12) Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST (00:36:20) Tesla did not announce an upside fan car… Oh well… (00:44:27) Buy your Chinese robot TODAY on Walmart dot com? Or not! (00:48:12) Is Tim Apple EXITING Apple? Who's next? (00:59:22) ANOTHER mega-deal? Now xAI is circling a Nvidia investment… 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: Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code 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?

  These things are a different breed than your app TikTok, you know, stealing your location or something like that. They can actually go do things in the real world. And here it is. Security researchers say G1 humanoid robots are secretly sending information to China. And yeah, what if these things go rogue is I guess the key.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  It's now off walmart.com. They they yoinked it.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by 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. Squarespace, turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Vanta, compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report

• 1:08Speaker 01

  fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist.

• 1:14Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calcanis. With me, my amazing co-host, Alex Wohl. How are you, sir?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  I'm fantastic. The kids are sick, but I am in good spirits. Let's do a show.

• 1:24Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Yeah, the fact that you haven't gotten sick is great. Let's introduce our guest today. We've got a major guest here, a major guest with a major announcement.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Yes. So today on the show, we had Mr. Zach Dell of Base Power. Base Power is a startup that leases batteries to consumers, puts them in their homes, and then kind of balances out the grid, offering low-cost energy to consumers and more grid stability to all of us in America. The company's in the news today, Jason, because it just raised $1 billion. Zach, welcome to the program.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

• 1:56Jason Calacanis?

  That went fast, Zach. We were just here last year and you guys were, I don't know, had a couple of dozen customers, I think. You were very nascent. And then, wow, what happened in the last year that led to this huge investment?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Well, when intensity meets focus, you get a lot of progress very quickly. So we've been executing to the best of our ability over the course of the last, you know, two years, two and a half years since we started the company. And our product has really resonated with customers. So we've been growing really fast. We've got more demand than we can handle. And so we're trying to uncontrain the business by growing our supply, building a factory, starting to manufacture these batteries here in Austin. And now this new round of capital really uncontrains us from a capital perspective and is going to enable our next phase of growth.

• 2:47Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And for people who don't understand the business, instead of putting solar on your roof and a battery pack, you've come up with a, came up with an interesting thesis, which was, hey, if you just put batteries in there and you load them up when electricity is cheap and then deploy it when energy is expensive, at least in our great state of Texas, that can be particularly effective. So explain that arbitrage, if you will, the peak cost of energy versus the trial cost and how much it costs to put this into somebody's home.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'll take a step back first and say that, you know, what we believe is that people want their power to be affordable and reliable. And that's really it, right? So when you think about your electricity, you want your bill to go down and your lights to stay on. And the way that we do that is by installing batteries that we own and operate on the homes of our members when the grid is up and running. To your point, Jason, we use the battery to support the grid in times of high demand. And when the grid is down, the homeowner gets that battery to back up your home. So the homeowner, the consumer, is getting all the benefits of home backup without that high upfront cost. And then we get to bid these assets into the wholesale power markets and do exactly what you're talking about, which is charge the batteries when the price of power is low, discharge the batteries when the price of power is high, make the grid more efficient,

• 4:06Speaker 02

  use more of that latent capacity on the grid, and build a more resilient, reliable power system for all of Texas and soon the entire United States.

• 4:14Jason Calacanis?

  So explain the, and I'll let you go next, Alex, but just explain Like the biggest arbitrage that could possibly happen, you know, here in Texas, you guys didn't, you guys didn't warn me, but it gets a little hot in the summer. You had like maybe 20 days over 100. People's ACs are blowing. It's incredibly expensive, I think, for electricity at that time. And then maybe overnight, it can go down 20, 30 degrees and people's AC use goes down dramatically. So just on a, I don't know, cost per kilowatt or a cost per day for the average home, what does that look like? That, is it 10x, 5x? What's the difference in cost?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  No, I mean, it can be, it can be $0 to, you know, power can be $0 in the middle of the day when there's tons of solar. The sun is high in the sky. There's tons of solar in Texas, about 20% of our fuel mix in Texas is solar. And so you're really low cost power in the middle of the day. And then in the middle of the night, when the wind is blowing and not a lot of people are using electricity, you have very low cost power. In the evenings, in the summer, you have what's kind of known in the industry as the evening ramp. So the sun's going down, people are using a lot of power in the evening. So, you know, and this is all supply and demand math, right? So the price of power goes up, supply goes down, demand is still high, and you have price spikes in the evening. And in the, in the winter seasons, you have what's referred to as the morning ramp, where similar kind of situation happening where people wake up, they start, you know, heating

• 5:39Speaker 02

  their homes, demand is really high, supply is low, and you have price spikes. So you can go from zero to, you know, thousands of dollars or megawatt hour. And so the swings are really dramatic here in Texas.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  So given that the strings, the swings are so dramatic, you seems to give a lot of arbitrage opportunity. I'm curious about how long it takes to recoup the investment into the batteries because you guys only charge $7 to, you know, $900 to install and then a low monthly fee. So you're taking a lot of upfront costs, Zach. How long does it take to pay those back?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so $6.95 upfront and $19 a month for one of our systems. And the paybacks are fast. It's a number of years, handful of years. It's roughly a 10-year useful life asset and the payback is well inside of that.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  So essentially, within the first three-year period that you guaranteed the current rate today, which is 8.5 cents per kilowatt hour, you'll recoup the entire value of the battery and be into the profit on each one of those installs?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, the idea is that as we develop new generations of the technology, our cost to deploy the marginal asset goes down, the paybacks shorten, and our returns go up, and then we pass those returns on to the customer in the form of lower prices. So our view is that electricity is a commodity. The best electron is the cheapest electron. So our vision as a business is to develop a compounding cost advantage through vertical integration, drive costs down for the consumer, and sell the lowest-cost electron on the planet.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Great segue into the Austin battery facility you guys are building out. How much can you bring costs down on the battery side of things if you can get off of Chinese supply chains and build those domestically?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Very significantly. So by vertically integrating our manufacturing here in Austin, we'll be able to take a ton of cost out of the system and drive our landed costs down, tighten those paybacks, as we discussed, increase our returns, and drive costs down for consumers. And really, this is what it's all about, right? It's like, why are we building a factory? Like, yes, it's cool to have a factory, and it's fun to walk around and touch the machines, but the reality is, we're doing this because we want to drive costs down for consumers, and vertical integration is the best way to do that.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Okay, and then what fraction of your fundraise is going to go towards financing the build-out of your next, I don't know, a few thousand installations versus the actual factory itself?

• 7:40Speaker 02

  A lot of the capital will go into battery CapEx, so the things that go through the factory, some amount of it will go into the machines. The building is already standing. We're not building a new building from scratch. We'll soon be able to talk more about Base Factory 2, which will be a bit more CapEx, but the majority of the capital is going to be going into these assets. And then growing our team, right? We've got 250 people, some of the best engineers, operators, and creatives from all across the country that have come to Austin to join our team, and we're going to be growing that team really aggressively. And obviously, we need a lot of capital to build a really strong team of people, so that's another big focus of ours.

• 8:17Jason Calacanis?

  Just to go a little bit into the batteries themselves, the cells, I'm assuming you're not making the cells themselves, you're assembling everything else around the cells, you source those cells from a Samsung, another manufacturer, and so how does that work?

• 8:32Speaker 02

  That's right, Jason. So we do everything above the cell. So we take the cells and we design modules, and the modules are part of a pack, and then we build the power electronics that basically make up the inverter that allows to move power in and out of the battery. And so we design all of those components that are above the cell. What I'll say is, today, we don't make cells. I think, you know, over the long arc of time, we may go into the cell business as we further vertically integrate. And if we do that, the reason we do it is so that we can drive cost down further for the customer, right? Further vertically integrate, take cost out, drive cost down for the consumer. It's not the part of the business that we're in today, but it is something we're thinking about over the long term.

• 9:11Jason Calacanis?

  And those cells are made almost exclusively in China today?

• 9:14Speaker 02

  They're not, actually. There's cell, there's lots of, the companies that make the IP for the cells are Chinese companies, but they have factories all over the world. So you see a lot of these factories popping up in, some of them in Europe, some of them in Southeast Asia, some of them are getting built in the US largely through joint ventures, many of them with auto OEMs. But while most of the IP for lithium iron phosphate, not to get too technical, but there's a kind of two dominant lithium-based chemistries, lithium iron phosphate, and then NMC, nickel manganese cobalt, the Koreans largely have been, you know, mostly indexed to NMC, the Chinese have been largely mostly indexed to LFP. Most of the LFP IP and intellectual property is dominated and owned by Chinese companies,

• 9:58Speaker 02

  but the actual plants themselves are not all located in China.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Got it. Which one of those is better for home-based batteries, Zach? I'm not as familiar with the actual breakdown of the two different chemistries.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, good question. So LFP really do have safety, right? So when you see, you know, safety risk with batteries, most of that is oriented around NMC batteries because you have higher C rates and higher risk of thermal runaway. And effectively, what that means is you can charge and discharge the battery much faster, which really matters in a car, right? Because you got to get, you know, zero to 60 in three seconds, doesn't matter so much in a home battery. And so the LFP chemistry is a better solution for stationary storage.

• 10:32Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:15Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, not to make it at all political, but we have an administration that's been talking about clean, beautiful coal. You may have seen me getting into it with Chris Wright on some all in podcasts at different points in time. And some of these folks in the movement over there believe that just batteries are not sustainable, solar is not sustainable, we're just never going to be able to make enough batteries. But then I just looked at Tesla's last quarter and they produced a, they produced more battery power this year in three quarters than they did last year in four. And it's ramping up. So is there a disconnect or is this just, you know, maybe people talking their book

• 12:21Jason Calacanis?

  or, you know, it's just insane to think that clean, beautiful coal, as clean and beautiful as it might be, kind of, kind of interesting to put those words around it. It doesn't make much sense to me. And just after my cursory research, it seems like those coal plants are extremely expensive to build. And batteries, it seems like we've been ramping up and they've been increasing their density and their affordability every year. So, so take us through the reality, if you will.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I believe in the all of the above energy strategy. The reality is we have, we are in the midst of a generational increase in electricity demand and what we need is more supply. And there are some types of supply that are better than others. And we can debate that. But what does better actually mean? In my opinion, better means cheaper. The best electron is the cheapest electron, right? It is a commodity. The best version of the commodity is the one that is available and affordable. And so my view is that the lowest cost electron will win. And what really matters is like the marginal megawatt, right? What is the cost to produce the marginal megawatt? I think over time, to the point you're making, Jason, as we continue to ride the cost curves down that we've seen in solar,

• 13:31Speaker 02

  as those continue, but as the same kind of dynamics play out in the battery industry, solar and storage will be the low cost way to generate the marginal megawatt. Now, that doesn't mean we need no coal or no natural gas or no hydroelectric or no geothermal or no nuclear. But I do think that over time, and you know, a lot of great research online about this that I could point you to, solar and storage will win the day in terms of cost of the marginal megawatt.

• 13:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's pretty clear. The physics and the progress and the scale is just all there.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, people talk about nuclear fusion as this, you know, thing that we need to crack. But we have an amazing fusion reactor available to us today in the sky. It's called the sun, and it's extremely powerful.

• 14:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, no. Elon's been saying this for 20 years, like, let's just use the sun. Okay, so the key to the business is just my outside observation is installing solar panels on a roof is expensive, time consuming, damages the roof. It's just, I don't know, you're talking about taking a year. How long does it take to put those two little R2D2 units that look like an HVAC on the side of a building? What's the, what's the total installation time?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 14:48Jason Calacanis?

  We understand the cost, but the time.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Our installs happen in a number of hours. So on the order of four to six hours with our current generation of hardware. Our next generation hardware that is. Might I remind you, fully custom designed and manufactured by BASE.

• 15:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Is much faster to install. And this is a really important piece. When you have a vertically integrated business and the time and the cost of the installation hits your bottom line, you care a lot about the mechanism by which that battery is installed. And so we've designed our battery to be installed in a very different way than home batteries have really ever been installed. And I'll just leave it at that for now and you'll see very soon what that mechanism actually is. But we have basically built a new process and technology that allows you to install many of these accrue, to do many of these installations a day, drive that cost down, allow us to increase our returns at the asset level, which again leads to lower prices for customers.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  So really excited about our next gen battery, about the cost out that'll come from the design, the manufacturing, but also the install cost, which is a huge part of the cost of getting a battery in the ground.

• 15:56Jason Calacanis?

  It does seem the way you're constructing these to go on the outside of suburban homes and not rely on solar, just to put them on the outside seems incredibly quick. I know when you get power walls put in the inside of a home, now you've got to put very heavy things on walls, studs. It's a bit complicated and it's a bit of work. Also, I suspect, but I don't know, are your units cheaper to produce than say the power wall because that is so elegant and thin and mounted? It has a certain elegance to it, but I would also think it comes with a bit of cost. Am I right?

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, the way I think about this is I think that product is, you can think about it as the Ferrari of batteries, right? And ours is really the Camry, Corolla, Workhorse product, right? It's not an iPhone, right? It's not a premium shiny product that should be $20,000, right? Our product is an infrastructure asset. It's an efficiency box, it's a savings machine, right? And we sell it as such, we position it as such. So I think if you look at the last decade of home energy companies, they have really taken this premium product valence, where these things are very expensive and they're shiny. And the reality is like, electricity is a commodity. What matters is cost, efficiency. These are infrastructure assets, they should be sold and positioned as such. And that's really the approach that we take.

• 17:18Jason Calacanis?

  So if you were to put these on, say, I don't know, 20% of the single family homes here in Austin. And the greater Hill Country area, yeah, just around the town. What impact will that have on the grid for every 10% or 20% of homes? Like I'd say every 10% of homes you can convert because the grid here has challenges, right? So explain to us what this could do to the ecosystem. Because it does seem to me at some point with electricity prices spiking because of the use of data centers, it's been going up massively in some regions. Maybe this should be funded by the data centers and the companies that are trying to get more power. Has that come up?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Well, you asked a couple of questions there. I'll try to get to both of them. So the first one is if we're able to put batteries on, you know, 10%, let's take Texas for example, right? So there's, you know, on the order of 10 million single-family homes in Texas, 10% of 10 million is a million homes, right? With our next generation product is a 40 kilowatt hour battery and 20 kilowatt inverter. So a million homes with 20 kilowatts in each homes is 2 gigawatts, right? So, you know, adding 2 gigawatts to the grid is a massive amount of scale. Sorry, 20 gigawatts, excuse me. So, you know, that's a lot of capacity that we add to the grid with, you know, just 10% of the homes in Texas. And what that means is reliability in the state goes up, right? So we have a winter storm, Yuri type situation, and we need much more flexible capacity.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  We now have 20 gigawatts that we can call on to protect the Texas power grid when you have these really uncertain price swings. And then prices go down, right? We are really smoothing out that curve, that peaky curve. And so, again, we drive down prices for those 10% of homeowners that have the base battery on their home. But, you know, yes, when you sign up with base, you are protecting your home and you're protecting your pocketbook, but you're also contributing to making the whole grid in Texas and soon the whole country more reliable for everybody. The next question you asked is about the data center build out. So we are working on a product that we call Speed to Power, which is a solution for data center developers to get grid connected faster. So to hyper kind of oversimplify what this means is if you're a data center developer

• 19:28Speaker 02

  and you, you know, you're Meta and you say, hi, I'm Meta, you know, Mr. Utility, PG&E, I would like to build a 1 gigawatt data center, please, please give me 1 gigawatt of interconnection. The utility says, well, you know, we don't have a gigawatt of interconnection, so you need to get in the interconnection queue and you need to wait in line effectively. And I'm oversimplifying here, but bear with me. Well, what we can do is we can say, hey, Meta, we can go deploy 500 megawatts of batteries around your data center effectively on the same utility feeder such that the batteries are electrically equivalent to having a big battery on the site of the data center. Now, do you really want to put big batteries on data center locations? Maybe, but if I'm a real estate developer or a data center developer and I have a site that's designed for a data center, I'd like to put as many GPUs on that site as possible.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  That site is not designed for batteries and I'm not an energy developer by trade. Right? So what I'd rather do is have a third party come in and say, hey, you can actually just buy our battery capacity from us. We'll discharge the batteries when you're running your GPUs. We'll offset your load at the data center and you can get grid connected faster. And so we're working with some developers across the country on this product and really excited to bring it to market because we want to win the AI race. We want to help these data center loads get grid connected faster.

• 20:38Jason Calacanis?

  It feels like a win-win-win, right? Like the consumer who has the free battery or discounted battery, you guys win because you have a great business and then the data centers win because, hey, my feeling is these data centers and the AI companies are going to become severely hated in the coming years, not just for the possibility of jobs get displaced, but they may also, people might start looking at their electrical bills like they are in Virginia right now, which is data center alley. And they say, whoa, why's my data, why's my bill going up? And then they see on the news, oh, these data centers are being built and people start making the connection that there is a greedy data center taking their energy. As my friends at Squarespace like to say, a website makes it real. So like

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• 22:07Jason Calacanis?

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• 22:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it could be the opposite, actually, where these hyperscalers are actually subsidizing the power costs for the consumer in this kind of mechanism that I've described. So, you know, we hope to flip that script.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  That makes it particularly brilliant. Go ahead, Alex. Well, I'm just curious about the transmission from the homes and their batteries back to the data center, because usually when we see a large facility like that, there's a big power connection to, you know, a lot of copper cables and such. If you're aggregating power from individual homes, Zach, does that become a grid difficulty? Is there a congestion issue there?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  It really depends. It depends on the topology of the grid. So, and where the substations are, where the data center is, where the neighborhoods are, where the substations are. And so there's usually some kind of catchment area, is a term I would use, around the data center in which you can install the batteries, such that they are electrically equivalent to having the battery behind the meter at the data center.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And how large is that catchment area for, let's say, a 1 gigawatt data center?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  It really depends, based on, again, the grid topology, where the substations are, that kind of thing. But it could be, you know, it could be, yeah, exactly. It could be hundreds of thousands of single-family homes.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Got it. Okay, so lots of individual homes there to put enough capacity into them to get the grid. Okay, that makes a lot of sense to me. Who loses, though? Because Jason just said, everyone seems to win here. And that's not usually how capitalism works. So who's going to take a bite out of their profits if you succeed?

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Well, the incumbent retail electricity providers in the competitive markets that are competing with us, I think will have a very hard time.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Well, I think we'll all cry quite a lot about that, Jason, don't you think?

• 23:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, since moving to Texas, much like in Brooklyn, you have to be resilient and you have to be a rugged individual. What I love about your business, Zach, is that it hits on those notes. People here would like to be resilient. They would like to be independent of the grid, or at least semi-independent of the grid. How long, if power goes off, would your average installation keep a home running? Or keep a home running if they, you know, don't use their washer and dryer, which are like the big ones, yeah, or turn their AC down a bit, yeah?

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have two configurations, one battery and two batteries, very simple. The average single-family home in Texas with one battery is going to get about 24 hours of backup with kind of moderate usage. And then, of course, 24 hours, sorry, 48 hours of backup with two batteries. Obviously, if you've got three AC units and two hot tubs and, you know, a bouncy house, you're going to be pulling a lot of power and you're going to run that battery down.

• 24:53Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, you've been to the ranch? I didn't know you were.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Wait, you have how many hot tubs?

• 24:58Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. This is your hot tubs right now, but we're putting in 16. Can a person who's got...

• 25:03Speaker 02

  You're gonna need a lot of batteries out there, Jason.

• 25:04Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. No, I mean, I've talked to you about it before and I've been thinking about it. You know, we have two wells, protein sources, two internet connectors, satellite and wired. You know, you really start to think about, how can I be independent? And how can this, you know, home and this homestead not be reliant on anybody or anything? And that's where I think Americans are going to get to when it comes to energy. It's already happened. I don't know if you've done much research of what's going on in India or China, where people are just buying batteries off of Amazon, basically, and solar panels, and then plugging their devices into it. Not even like plugging, you know, like literally getting a small refrigerator and plug it into an anchor battery with, and putting some

• 25:47Jason Calacanis?

  solar in their backyard. People are becoming very, what's the word?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Resourceful.

• 25:55Jason Calacanis?

  Resourceful, in the face of the energy crisis. What have you seen around the world in your research of the most resourceful places where batteries and solar and independence are happening?

• 26:06Speaker 02

  You know, there's a really interesting story like this playing out in Pakistan, where they have seen, I think, the highest rate of residential rooftop solar deployment in the world. And it's much like what you're talking about, a lot of DIY, kind of self-serve folks doing it themselves, which is super cool. And to our earlier conversation around the cost of solar and storage, you know, they're going to see these costs continue to go down. And so, resourceful folks in all different countries, all different corners of the world will turn to these technologies as a solution to power bills going up and reliability going down.

• 26:38Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Speaking of expansion, how long until you're out of Texas? When can I get this in California? When's it coming to Rhode Island?

• 26:44Speaker 02

  We're working on it. We're looking to expand in early 2026. So we haven't yet announced what our next market will be, but we hope to bring base to every household in America and beyond. And we want to be a global energy technology market leader. So we're really excited to announce our next few markets and we'll hopefully make our way to your neck of the woods very soon.

• 27:03Jason Calacanis?

  And what a great real estate play. If you wanted to build a bunch of batteries and put them somewhere, you got to buy some land. Here, you just, you know, get a little 10 by 10 spot on people's existing properties and you get to distribute all this power. It's just super brilliant as a distributed network. It's very crypto-like in that way. And don't launch a coin, though. Stay focused on what you got.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Okay. There are no coins in our future.

• 27:28Jason Calacanis?

  Please, stay out of the coin business. All right, Zach, thanks so much for coming on the pod. Continued success. If people want to learn more, where can they go if they're in Texas and they want to get in the queue? I know you got a queue there. How do people get in the queue?

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Check us out at basepowercompany.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks to you both for having me on the show and look forward to hosting you at the office down in Austin sometime soon.

• 27:48Jason Calacanis?

  Can't wait. Let's go get some Terry Black's beef ribs and then we'll be there any minute.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Sounds like a plan.

• 27:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Great job and we'll see you soon.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Thanks, guys.

• 27:57Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Very exciting, you know, it's Alex to see people doing real hardware work and really solving these problems. You know, if we were sitting here 20 years ago in Silicon Valley... The idea that a startup would be venture funded and then be able to raise a billion dollars to do an infrastructure play, this really only exists because Elon decided to do Tesla and SpaceX and kind of break people's brains that you could actually do physical stuff in the real world. Mm hmm. Or Uber and Airbnb said, hey, well, we can do things in the real world, too. And now, you know, technologists don't feel limited to laptops and iPhones. This is like a hard installation problem.

• 28:37Jason Calacanis?

  But boy, what a great insight they had that, hey, we don't need another source of energy. We need to store energy when it's at the lowest possible rate. And this is where my frustration with my guy, Chris Wright, you know, in our debates, you know, I don't hear him talking about base power or solar enough. And this administration needs to start thinking, hey, a minute, what could these cost? What do you think the actual cost is to them to put, you know, a battery or two? Those, maybe they cost 5K each, maybe it costs them 1,000 or 2,000 to install, so it's maybe 7,000 a home. I'm talking about their cost. Yeah.

• 29:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's probably not that great. Maybe it's 10,000 a home if we just ramp it up. Well, if there's 10 billion homes in this state and the state is having energy problems, well, maybe the state should be subsidizing that instead of, you know, building coal plants or whatever. And here in the great state of Texas, we have the most solar power of any state. I can tell you it's not because people here are woke or MAGA. It's because, like Zach said, they're focused on what is the cheapest energy. And it's clear solar batteries is the cheapest, with the exception of maybe if there's a coal plant or a gas plant already installed and you put a data center smack dab on top of it. Sure. But, you know.

• 30:04Jason Calacanis?

  Let's, let's keep our eyes on the prize here, folks. Really, great job to Zach and his team. When your website or your app goes down, you 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, Sear, their AI powered debugging agent that uncovers the root of your bugs and errors in 95% of cases.

• 30:46Jason Calacanis?

  They also have an AI agent monitoring system, and this is going to become more important in the future, folks. We all know that. 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.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  If there were 10 million homes in Texas, just throwing a number out there, and you had to do $10,000 installation each, that would be $100 billion compared to Texas's nominal GDP, Jason, which was 2.7 trillion in 2024. We can afford this as a nation. This is within our budget.

• 31:37Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if you were to do bonds, you know, if literally the state of Texas did a bond for $100 billion, or they just did it, you know, I don't know, 10 billion at a time, 10% of homes at a time.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  They could just do $10 billion bonds, pay five, 6% on them, make them muni bonds, or the people who buy them don't have to pay taxes, make some yum yum skis, especially when interest rates comes down. You know, you just a $10 billion bond to put 10% on the homes, that would then make the upgrades to the grid and the upgrades to the sources of power. It would kind of crack the monopolies. It would make a more efficient market. I think it's a very disruptive thing that he's doing.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:19Jason Calacanis?

  I can tell you every time I, in three, in my last four homes, you know, over 20 years I've owned four primary residences. And each time we move homes, I look at that and I, my LA home with the shake roof.

• 32:35Jason Calacanis?

  You know, it wasn't worth, you know, and an old house, a house built in 1940, like they were like, yeah, you can't really put solar on here. The whole house could collapse. I was like, okay, you know, then the next one, same situation, you know, in the Bay area, just this, this house is like old. It's a 1945 house. You can't do it. Modern house, beautiful. I buy this incredible, you know, modern masterpiece. And they're like, okay, you're going to ruin the aesthetic. You're going to take millions of dollars off the value of this house by doing it. I'm like, okay, can't do it. And now here I am on the ranch. And it's like, yeah, just take one of your acres in the corner here. And you can use like a quarter acre or less to just put a solar installation and run the cable

• 33:18Jason Calacanis?

  here. You'd be off the grid forever. So, yeah, it's, it's really smart that they're doing it in suburbia and where there are single family standalone homes. You could also do it in townhomes, I suppose. But this is going to be so disruptive. I love a great disruptive play. And talk about the timing. The timing of this is just perfect because man, prices for energy are going to spike and it is going to add to the resentment of AI. The resentment of AI, you can see it start to building, you know, cab drivers in, in Wuhan are already starting to protest. The number of licenses given in China is

• 34:02Jason Calacanis?

  going to be limited. They're going to limit the number of licenses so that young men don't lose their jobs as drivers. You look at Amazon, you look at the figure robots came out and coming out with version three, Optimus, these things are doing Kung Fu. If you can do Kung Fu, I think you can fill my Amazon package.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:21Jason Calacanis?

  And so we're, we're getting pretty close to job displacement, I believe, at a level.

• 34:28Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think we've seen more than once or twice in the history of humanity, ag revolution, industrial revolution. This could be, this time could be different.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  It absolutely could be. One last thing before we move on. There's a company we had on the show, Jason, called Exo Watt. I'll put the episode number in the description. And I was just thinking about them while we're talking to Zach, because I haven't checked in on them in a little bit. Here is how they are pitching their company now. It's a heat storage system, Jason, for industrial solutions. But now they have changed their branding to powering AI with 24-hour solar. So I think this is going to become the theme from basically all energy startups that we care about on TWIST 500 and otherwise. It's going to be an AI play. And you know what? Good. Love it.

• 35:11Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, these solar arrays, geothermal, you know, smoothing out the grid batteries, it's like, it really is possible right now to just do this. It might take a little incentives on the margin, but not too much. Hey, we had this little spinning wheel.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  We did.

• 35:29Jason Calacanis?

  And I made some guesses, and I think I was wrong.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Yes, sadly, I think your guesses were a lot more fun than what we ended up getting. But Tesla is a company that's a real business, not just an idea factory. So they do have products for everybody. On Monday, we talked about a small video from Tesla showing a spinning fan slash wheel and a sound effect.

• 35:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's show it. Yeah. Yeah, let's show that so we, folks don't have to imagine it. If you missed it, it's a, yeah, look like a fan that would be inside of your computer. I thought this would be a fan that was used in hypercars. There's supercars and there's hypercars. So you have supercars, you know, Ferraris and Lamborghinis. And then you get to hypercars. Those are the million dollar ones that have over 1,000 horsepower, supercar, 600 horsepower. So what was that? What was it? Do we know what that is?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yes, as it turns out, Jason, that was the new 18-inch wheels on the Model 3 standard, which is different than the Model Y standard. I gotta say, shout out to Tesla for having a great hype video, but what they announced were more affordable EVs, Jason. Really?

• 36:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I, I just really wanted it to be the leaf blow or the selfishly the Tesla 2.0. So I could have Tesla Roadster 2.0. So I'd have the 1.0 roads and the 2.0 roads are sitting next to each other in the garage.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Okay, that would be pretty cool.

• 36:56Jason Calacanis?

  That would be pretty cool. But I guess it's the wheel spinning. But there's major pressure right now on the EV category in terms of affordability from two fronts. One is the tax credit going away. You just get 7,500 or something. And then internationally, BYD, Xiaomi, we talked about a bunch of these car companies. You can pop up a car company in China, like you can pop up a cell phone, a mobile handset operator. So it is a new world, folks.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yep. And if you want to see those wheels in action, Jason, here is a picture of the new Model 3 standard with them. They're called the 18-inch prismatic, I believe. It's a prismata wheels. And this is the stripped down version, which to me looks just like other Model 3s. So I think they've found a pretty good way to hide the cost savings. But you can get a Model 3 standard for now just under 40K. And you can get the model, oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, the Model Y standard for just under 40K and the Model 3 standard for 37K, Jason, which seems, even without discounts, pretty damn affordable.

• 38:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, these are much more affordable. The only difference is some of the trim and some of the components. If you look at the trim, the light on my new Juniper Model Y, which I think I'm leasing, but it's, I don't know, it was like 55, maybe 60K all in. So this is 40K and it would be 48 with self-driving. So I think it's 12K less than mine. You have the light goes across and you have a glass roof, not a, you know, a steel roof like this one has, doesn't have the glass roof, which some people might prefer, actually, because sometimes you get too much light in, if you're in Arizona or Texas. And these look a little slower. They have a similar range.

• 38:44Jason Calacanis?

  But they use less batteries because they made it lighter. And then all kinds of tiny savings. I saw people talking online about the seat adjuster is now in the dashboard as opposed to the components on the side. So if you just keep stripping these things out, little tiny things like that add up. You know, $50 here, $150 there, a little bit less actual batteries while maintaining the range because it's lighter. They have fabric seats, not leather. You don't have the cooling, which if you're in Texas, I can tell you, you need to have air conditioned seats. You get into an air conditioned Tesla with the air conditioned seats. Oh my God, your car goes from being 110 degrees inside to, you know, just beautiful 72 in minutes. It's amazing.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  So wait, the, the seats are self cooling as well?

• 39:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they have little holes in them. This has existed for a while. You have heat seated, you have heated seats, right? Which is just like a mesh that warms it.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  You need that in the Northeast. In the South, these have little holes in it. And I guess there's a, a, a series of pipes that blow cold air and the cold air comes through the holes and it freezes your nuts.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  That sounds fantastic because last time I was in.

• 39:55Jason Calacanis?

  Your crack.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I was in New Orleans not too long ago and it was very uncomfortable for a number of reasons, including car seats being too hot. So I love that.

• 40:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  All right. Uh, last thing here, Tesla's worth 1.43 trillion. Last time we checked in and the company didn't really lose any steam over this set of announcements, Jason. So it seems that the market's happy with what they put out.

• 40:15Jason Calacanis?

  They need to put out the Model 2. I think this is a great step. I think the world wants a two door hatchback. And then maybe a minivan from Tesla. But firing up new lines of cars is hard. And I think they, although they may do that, I don't have any inside information, obviously. But if they do that, if they, if they can do that, that would be amazing if they could have either of those cars. And then you would be, you know, competing with the Prius, like the two door Prius or whatever. And, um, you know, get it down to 25K or 30K and under. That's when it's going to be super magical. But I think they're just going to go for Optimus.

• 40:55Jason Calacanis?

  And I think even self-driving is like, going to wind up being de minimis compared to the opportunity with Optimus. So I do think they'll get self-driving working. In the next year or two, to be able to take the safety driver out. That's my timeline. I know other people are thinking it's gonna be three months or six months or three weeks. 14.1 just came out. And if you look at the website FSD Tracker, which is like consumers saying what they're getting. And then you just take the anecdotal row, the anecdotal videos from the super fans who have, you know, who are doing rides in the Bay Area with a driver, have a ride sharing service there now and limited supply.

• 41:38Jason Calacanis?

  And then the Austin one, I would say, you know, they're have, they're at 96 or 97% depending on the ride, obviously, but the FSD Tracker, I think, still has it at 97.4 estimated distance with no disengagements.

• 41:56Jason Calacanis?

  Last 30 days, 97.4. Drivers with, what does it say? One or no disengagements last 30 days?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is one or no disengagements. And this is no disengagement. So essentially, it's the second layer of reliability should be showed there. But I think the city distance to critical disengagement is the most important thing because it's going up quite dramatically, Jason. If you look back at, you know, version 10 here was, you know, 29 miles and now it's over 200. That's a 10x improvement over four generations of the FSD software.

• 42:27Jason Calacanis?

  So if you were going and a critical disengagement is somebody could get hurt. So what that means is if the car is going 200, what'd you say? Was 250 miles without a disengagement?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  I think it was 226.

• 42:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so 226, if you were going, I don't know, 30 miles per average, 30 miles per average, you're talking about every nine hours or something like that, 10, not even 10, like maybe eight hours, no, seven, seven or eight hours, you'd have a critical disengagement. In other words, if this was three shifts a day, or no, four shifts a day, you'd have four critical disengagements. You have a critical disengagement every eight hours. Obviously, it's not acceptable, not ready to take the driver out. It needs to be, I don't know, something critical happens once every two months? I don't know. I don't know what the right number is because the metrics and the statistics are not normalized. But Tesla is going for the wide. They're going that we can watch these anywhere.

• 43:24Jason Calacanis?

  Whereas Waymo is like, we're going to focus on smaller dense areas and make it perfect. Now, if you limit the area dramatically, like Waymo has, and you have LiDAR, you're constantly, every car is building a 3D model of the world, you know, every ride. So if something changes, somebody double parks, or like there's a dumpster somebody put outside somebody's house because they're doing a construction project, whatever it happens to be, you know, there's a construction project of some type in the street, it's going to get built into the world model faster. So, less area equals better stability.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Next up on the show, you can now buy Chinese humanoid robots on walmart.com. So if you happen to have $21,600, Jason, you can get yourself a Unitree G1 Basic. Here is a screenshot that I took from walmart.com. You can also purchase battery packs, or their Unitree GoTo Air Smart Robot Dog for just $2,200. I was blown away by this. I wanted to verify it, Jason. I even chased down the company in question. It's a company called Futurology, and they are now an official vendor for Unitree. So if you want your Chinese spyware on two legs in your home, good news. It's now available for 20K.

• 44:45Jason Calacanis?

  You just, you cut me off at the pass. I mean, I think we need to talk to Vice President J.D. Vance about this, or maybe Marco Rubio. He's Secretary of State, yeah. We need to talk to these two gentlemen, because selling robots from China does not sound like a great idea. And was it true, I saw this spreading, that Unitree robots were sending data back to the mothership?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:18Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I believe it was on a five-minute interval. Now, there's two ways to think about this. One is, it's a piece of technology, and they often send telemetry back and forth between individual bits of hardware and servers. That's not-

• 45:33Speaker 01

  A bad thing. Lots of stuff does that. But when it comes to China, when it comes to data security, and when it comes to other things like their G1 robot having a backdoor that we found, I think it's a legitimately large problem. Now, Jason, we're an open country. We've talked a lot about self-driving cars and their training. I think that it's probably better to have an open society, more competition, and worry a little bit less about certain cybersecurity issues. But in this case, I, because who's going to buy this? It's going to be startups that want to play with a humanoid robot. Well, that's a great place to harvest IP. Your mom's not going to buy this, right? I mean, this is not designed for the average consumer because you have to program it. So on one hand, I'm really excited to see more accessibility to hardware that will allow startups to build and try

• 46:15Speaker 01

  things. On the other hand, we don't have that deal with China you mentioned yet. And so right now, we're still geopolitical adversaries, and therefore spying is a big deal. So I'm kind of torn on this.

• 46:25Jason Calacanis?

  There's spying, yeah, like TikTok. And then there's also attacking and being able to go on the offensive and do missions. These things are a different breed than your app, TikTok, you know, stealing your location or something like that. They can actually go do things in the real world. And here it is. Security researchers say G1 humanoid robots are secretly sending information to China. And yeah, what if these things go rogue is, I guess, the key.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  It's now off Walmart.com. They yoinked it, ladies and gentlemen. And they raised the price of the robot dog. So everything I told you has now been replaced by change in the last two hours. I was trying to point out, you could buy them in a pack of six for three-day delivery from Futurology. But apparently, something happened. Maybe Marco Rubio did take a swing at this.

• 47:15Jason Calacanis?

  Huh.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  But other startups in the US are taking note, Jason. Chris Paxton, he's the AI Innovation Lead at Agility Robotics, a company we've talked about when this story broke, said, "This is real WTF." Because I don't think any American company is ready to mass produce a $20,000 humanoid robot.

• 47:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is a bad idea, folks. You know, you don't need to be paranoid to be concerned about Chinese robots. That's just common sense. I did see in the news, people speculating about Tim Cook.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:53Jason Calacanis?

  Retiring or stepping down at some point. He's going to be 65 years old. And I guess this came from Bloomberg. And the very famous Apple reporter there, Mark Gurman, who

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:07Jason Calacanis?

  gets things right. Tell us what's going on in Cupertino.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Mag7 companies, the largest companies, when they have a change in leadership, it's a pretty seismic deal. I reported on the Steve Ballmer-Tasatina-Della transfer of power. And so this is not like just swapping out your VP of Sales. It's picking your next leader for the next 10 to 20 years of your business. So when we discuss this, that's the scale we're talking about. Apple's a multi-trillion dollar company, relationships around the world. It's a big deal. The question was, who's going to step in after Tim Cook eventually either goes to lead the board, or just sits down and plays with all of his money? The answer, it turns out, is a man named John Turnus, according to Gurman's reporting. And the reason why he's a good candidate, Jason, is that he's only 50, which is relatively young compared to much of the Apple C-suite. He's also had a really

• 48:55Speaker 01

  long tenure at the company. He's been greatly involved in their hardware products, including some of their recent successes that we've talked about on the show, better computers, better chips, and so forth. I think it makes a lot of sense. The thing that I'm concerned about, though, is I feel like today, when I look at Apple, great hardware, crap software. And so to me, they're, they're almost doubling down on what they're good at, and they're not investing in more in what I think they should be, which is their AI suite being complete trash, Siri not being very good, the App Store being a bit of a mess. And so I think John, Mr. Turnus, makes good choice. It's a good selection if you want better iPads, but I think they've already nailed that. And so to me, I was kind of hoping for a different direction.

• 49:32Jason Calacanis?

  Well, 50 years old is when, I believe, Tim Cook took over for Steve Jobs. And there was a guy named Jeff Williams, who was supposed to be, he was the COO of Apple, up until July of this year. And he was supposed to be the heir apparent, Jeff Williams. And he was, he was involved in a lot of launches. I think he was like even, you know, Apple Watch, iPod, a bunch of, like, you know, he's been there forever. What happened to? I guess Jeff Williams was my question. Um, I know that you had Johnny Ive leaving. Um, but when did Jeff Williams, yeah, he stepped down on July 8th.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  July 8th, I have the, uh, the bit of Apple.

• 50:17Jason Calacanis?

  And he's retiring.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Here. Yeah, that's the interesting thing. It's not like he was swapping out jobs, but I mean, also maybe in this current climate, business is less fun. That's my take because if you're Steve, if you're Tim Cook, what do you have to do right now? You have to go to the Oval Office, you have to kind of bow and scrape and the president sets your travel agenda and you have to do, you know, big ribbon kinds. You're not just in the, in the weeds with the technology. You're also playing a political game and I, I wonder if everyone wants to do that.

• 50:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the stakes are higher. Obviously it's a bigger company and less time actually doing product and more time being, yeah, the representative of the company at times a diplomat, you're dealing with geopolitical issues, India versus China versus Vietnam. Um, yeah, and I guess, you know, at some point, the great success of Apple, buying back so many shares, so much cash, the stock going up, you know, so consistently over the 27 years that Jeff Williams was there. Like at a certain point, the money does become a distraction and you have to think when you're 62 years old, like he was when he retired. He's eight years older than me. Um, yeah, maybe you're like, what's left? And what's left is enjoying life.

• 51:32Jason Calacanis?

  And you also never know what's going on with a person. Sometimes, you know, they can be going through a divorce or they have a kid who's got challenges or a parent who's sick. So I always have a little bit of grace for folks like without knowing their personal story as to why.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:47Jason Calacanis?

  And for Tim Cook, I mean, 15 years at the helm.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  He's gotta be getting tired. I mean, it looks like he's in great shape for a 65 year old. That dude's spry. I think he could do it for another 15 years, no problem. But again, if you've got 15 years left on the planet in this life form. And you're 65, you can still ski a little bit. Maybe you can ski for five more years or 10 more years. Maybe you can, you know, really have a fourth act, you know, you used to have like, you were a child, you worked, you retired, you had three acts. Now people seem to have like four or five.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Good news for you and your, your small shareholding in poly market, Jason, because Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange is going to invest up to $2 billion in the company, bringing its valuation all the way up to $8 billion pre-money. And I thought eight plus two equals 10, but Shane did a tweet and he said eight plus two is actually nine. So it's worth either nine or 10 billion. Not quite sure why there's disagreement there.

• 52:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they said up to 2 billion. So maybe they're investing a billion now and 2 billion in the future. Just taking a guess.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  That I didn't have it nailed down. So I didn't want to speculate too much, but it's an enormous amount of money. It's an enormous up round for the company and it really, I think, gives them enough cash to crush the competition and even more. They have a great partner in the nice. The internet, the Intercontinental Exchange is going to distribute data from poly market out, giving the company a business model for the first time.

• 53:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  I couldn't be more bullish for poly market. If you tried to make up an announcement.

• 53:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So they are going to distribute the data to the financial institutions who subscribe to their products and that will, um, that will create revenue for poly market. Am I understanding correctly?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  That's my guess because when I was prepping about this, I was really confused by how poly market makes money.

• 53:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they're going to take when they, they're going to eventually take a portion of the fees like other competitors do. And they just haven't launched in the U S, but they bought that other company. So they will be launching in the U S. And in fact, on poly market, people are. Um, right now, um, there's a poly market for when they'll go public. I'm sorry, when they'll launch in the U.S.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, I have one of those pulled up right here, Jason. There's a running market, um, $3 million in volume asking, uh, will Polly market go live in the U.S. Inside of 2025 and, uh, complete unanimity, 98% chance. Everyone agrees on this. So your view then is that as they expand in the U.S. and they grow their volume, they'll start taking a couple of points off the float.

• 54:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, of course, uh, there would be just transaction fees. So if you wanna, um, you know, and if it's 10 bips, if it's 1%, who knows what it will be, but there'll be a little vig in there and that's it.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but in the meantime, as, as the company doesn't do that, and they, they just kind of operate this exchange right now, as far as I can tell, for essentially free, a software enterprise deal with New York Stock Exchange is a great way to bring in some money in the interim. As part of this announcement, Shane did drop some other notes, Jason, and this was not public. And I also will note, you did not text me this information, so sad times. But before the election last year, they raised a $55 million round that Blockchain Capital led at a $350 million valuation. And then earlier this year, Founders Fund led a $150 million round at 1.2 billion. So those were kind of quietly done leading up to this, but it does explain the valuation jump from their earlier price to now this $9 to $10 billion price tag, which is enormous.

• 55:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's pretty great. Um, I think it's, uh, gonna be a huge success. I guess the shareholders of Intercontinental Exchange didn't like the investment right now, or they've been, actually, they've been on a downward trajectory since August. So I don't know if that has too much to do with this deal.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  It didn't help. The chart here, if you're on the audio version, I just have a, basically a two-month chart of the ICE stock price, and it took another bit of a dip there. The thing I think they struggle with, Jason, is just growth. Uh, the, the company is very profitable off of $2.5 billion in revenue in their last quarter. It was only up 10%. They had operating income of 1.3 billion. So it's just a very. Lucrative enterprise. And so from that perspective, I think taking the swing on poly market makes sense twice. Not only do you de-risk yourself in the traditional stock market world and bring yourself into the new world of prediction markets, but also don't forget poly market is a blockchain based company. They settle their trades on Polygon, which is an Ethereum L2. And so they have both feet in the crypto world. And as we talk about

• 56:31Speaker 01

  tokenization, as we talk about companies like Robinhood getting more into crypto, I think it makes good sense.

• 56:37Jason Calacanis?

  And if you look, it looks like the the Dune data indicates 1.4 billion dollars worth of volume in September, and they're on pace in October for 1.2. So you, you know, you average that out, that would be, you know, let's call it 15 billion dollars a year in volume, 15 billion dollars a year in volume, 10% of that would be 1.5. And if they got 1%, that would be 150 million. Is that right? So this could be making a lot of money very quickly and early on if they just get one, about 1% of that float.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm long term bullish about poly market and Kaochi and prediction markets from Robinhood. Not gonna lie, I know you're a shareholder. 10 billion seems a little expensive for the company today. But if you are the New York Stock Exchange and you want to be de-risked, strategic money just trades differently than financial investments. So I'm actually really here for this.

• 57:34Jason Calacanis?

  My gut tells me this could, the volume here could 10x in the next couple of years as it, because remember, they're not legal in the US yet. They have not launched in the US yet.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:45Jason Calacanis?

  When they launch in the US, I think it, the volume's going to go 10x. Now, it may take a year or two, but I would say 10x the volume, which means they're going to very quickly get to a billion dollars in revenue.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Do you want to do a little, a little twist bet on that?

• 57:59Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. So I don't know, in a year, it's a year after they launch in the US, it'll be triple. Two years later will be triple again. I think they'll triple each year. So which bet do you want to take?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think because you're the shareholder, I'm not going to make you bet against your own company. So I'll take the under on both of those.

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let's just take one. We'll just do it because it was settled in a year. It'd be faster to get the juice. So in one year, it triples volume.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  One year post US launch or one year from October 8?

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, from the launch.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll take the under. Jason takes the over. That way you'll get paid twice if you're right and.

• 58:39Jason Calacanis?

  Another Hyundai.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm going to add it to the docket.

• 58:43Jason Calacanis?

  Add it to the slash bets page.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 58:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's keep moving.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Next up on the docket, XAI may secure a investment from Nvidia. Jason, you talked a little bit with Zach at the top of the show about your concern about how much money is flowing around the world of AI infra and some of the circularity thereof. Well, here's the latest. According to Bloomberg reporting, XAI is looking to raise $20 billion. XAI, of course, is Elon Musk's AI company that's merged. So now has what was Twitter and the new AI company in one bucket. Looking to put together a $20 billion round, seven and a half billion in equity, 12 and a half billion dollars in debt. Nvidia might put up $2 billion worth of money into this. The tricky thing is it's set up via an SPV.

• 59:28Jason Calacanis?

  The debt is.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  The debt is, and they're going to essentially use the chips they're going to buy as the backing, the asset backing for that debt. And that does take some of the financial risk and put it outside of XAI. But it does seem like a bit of excessive cleverness to make the math work out. And I'm just kind of curious, putting aside the fact that it's Elon's company, how does this sound to you as a person who's been in a lot of deals?

• 59:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's actually good for the shareholders of XAI to have the, an equipment lease, basically. So, equipment leases, people would do those even for small companies. You know, Dell has an equipment leasing program. So if you want to buy, you know, 30 laptops and you're $3,000 each and whatever, you get a monitor for people. You can do that with financing, right? So then you don't have to use your capital to do that. You just pay a monthly fee and spread it out over the life of these, which is five years for these. Some people are doing six, some people are doing four. So it makes a lot more sense if you don't want to dilute your equity to set up equity financing. I suspect a decent amount.

• 1:00:38Jason Calacanis?

  Of the deals we're seeing will have some component of this, which is equity financing. So what that means is if you were in the equity financing piece of one of these investments, it could be done any number of ways. You could have warrants to buy a little equity in the company or, you know, whatever. If you were putting in 20 bucks, 7.5 goes in equity, 12.5 goes in debt. You get paid a, you know, a coupon on the debt and then maybe you have some converts, you know, or a little pot sweetener to get a little extra equity. But, you know, it's pretty savvy people are investing in these things. And yeah, it's not actually non-traditional to do equipment financing.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty standard. I actually would be, the thing that's actually surprising is more like the Nvidia OpenAI deal, well, they're putting in a hundred billion and then they're buying a bunch of AMD chips. That's the weird one in all of this.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Okay, so they're a little bit different. So the Nvidia OpenAI deal, they only get the Nvidia money after they buy the gear. So I think that's a tranche-based investment as well. So they're not going to take Nvidia money and then give it to Lisa over at AMD. That would be, that would be too messy. But here's the thing that I've been thinking about. If you're Nvidia, you're essentially, via different mechanisms, taking your GPUs and getting shares in some of these AI companies. Your GPUs, you sell at a 70% gross margin. So do you get to essentially buy dollars in equity for 30 cents on the dollar because you are using high-margin products? It feels like, people are worried about Nvidia. I think they're getting the best deal in the world. It's brilliant.

• 1:02:19Jason Calacanis?

  But, you know, the challenge in all of this is these are conflicted party transactions is how they get framed. When you, it's okay to have a conflicted party transaction. You just have to explain the conflict, if there is one, and there's some diligence you have to do around that. Here's a scenario. Let's say OpenAI and Nvidia, this hundred billion dollars changes hands and it just essentially round trips, let's say, or the majority of it round trips. Let's say the management teams of these two companies, not even the CEOs, just the management teams, they start shelling shares on the way up. Now, let's say there's a recession, for whatever reason, and all these stocks go down 50%.

• 1:03:02Jason Calacanis?

  Nothing to do with the round tripping, nothing to do with the, I shouldn't say round tripping, nothing to do with the conflicted party transaction, I think would be the way to say it. So now the management has gained something, right? They sold shares, the shares went up because of these deal announcements. When these deal announcements happens, typically the shares go up. And the shares will certainly go up when the revenue starts hitting, because people will be more bullish on the companies. Now people sell their shares. They've personally gained from a conflicted party transaction. Then the shares go back down. And if the shares go back down, and then other people, you know, who own shares in the company are negatively impacted, while the management teams are benefiting, you

• 1:03:47Jason Calacanis?

  have lawsuits and investigations. So that's how this practically could, that's the risk in all of this. Now, you don't have to be right to file a lawsuit or win a lawsuit. You could just be an ambulance chasing shareholder and still win. That, that does happen.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Like in the case of Tesla and Delaware, Chance Record or whatever.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so when they had, the person had like 10 shares and they were able to be represented by, you know, somebody and they made money on their shares. So you could even make money and still sue and still win. So this is all getting, I would say, it was notable, and now I would say the word on the street is it's concerning people. You know, when you turn on CNBC, it's become a topic now.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  I can't stop reading about it. The Economist, FT, Bloomberg, everyone's ringing this bell because it's not just that it's the major companies that are doing this. Neo clouds are also doing a lot of GPU based debt. Core weave is at more than $10 billion in GPU backed debt, according to Tomas Tungas, the reventures we had on the show. And also Lambda Labs has at least a $500 million GPU backed loan as well. So it's a lot of money, Jason. It adds up.

• 1:04:57Jason Calacanis?

  And it's concerning to people. So when it goes from people in our industry, talking about it or talking about it on an industry, an industry based show like this week in startups are all in or whatever it happens to be. When the insiders in the industry are talking about it, and then at some point it tips over into mainstream media. Like you said, FT, Economist, et cetera, and you know, and then the rest of the world's talking about it. Now people are focused on this, the attention's on it. And that's where, you know, if you look at the dot com bubble, people started to say like, wait a second. If OpenAI is worth 500 billion and they're making 13 billion, but they're losing tens of billions a year with this build out or more.

• 1:05:43Jason Calacanis?

  When are they ever going to get this money back? When does the, when, when do they get out of the J curve? And then people are going to start doing, you'll see it at some point, people are going to build a J curve chart when they have all the info, finally have all the information on these deals when they, when OpenAI files their S1. And that's when you will be in there and other folks will be in there with a fine tooth comb saying, hmm. This seems like a revenue ramp that's not possible. And this is where the total addressable market, it comes into play. And I did a total addressable market here on the show at one point. And just broad strokes, people spend a couple of thousand dollars a year in the modern world on SaaS products, right?

• 1:06:28Jason Calacanis?

  So if we say this is roughly equivalent and you probably get more value from this. Maybe you keep some of that SaaS, but you might replace some of that SaaS spend with this. Let's take 500 million people working in the real world. Okay. So you've got 500 million there. Let's say they spend $2,000 each a year. So, you know, what does that equal? It's a big number.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  I'm on it.

• 1:06:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, and then you take another, let's say, go ahead.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, no, it's, it's thinking.

• 1:06:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  This is why, this is why you shouldn't use, by the way, L L Ms for, for math when you're doing the live taping. Cause it goes, oh, hold on, let me think. It's a trillion dollars. It's a trillion dollars.

• 1:07:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, you know, you got a trillion dollar TAM just for the business case. And I'll include in that, like the API calls and everything.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:07:15Jason Calacanis?

  Just the 500 million people who really work, you know, in the Western world. That's, you know, the United States, Canada, Europe, et cetera. Uh, modern world spend, not discounted for local currencies or anything, just, you know, EU, US dollars. Okay. Now let's say there's a billion people as consumers willing to pay, you know, roughly what they pay for Disney plus and Netflix. So 30 bucks a month, maybe 25 bucks a month. I'm gonna go with the 25 buck a month. You got a billion people spending 300 a year on, you know, uh, consumer based products. Okay. Now you got another 300 billion, yeah?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  So 1.3 trillion so far?

• 1:07:59Jason Calacanis?

  You got 1.3 trillion dollars in revenue. That's a big number. That's a lot of revenue. And if it was worth, I don't know, five to, I would say seven, eight times price to sales ratio. Uh, or 10 times price ratio, you know, the price is clearly 10 trillion dollars.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Jason Calacanis?

  And that's not counting any gains that come downstream in the developing or frontier markets. Developing market like China or frontier market, you know, I guess that would be like maybe some of the countries in Africa, et cetera, that don't have rule of law exactly. But they're still gonna, doesn't mean they're not gonna use some of this stuff, but they just might use it on average for a buck a person or five bucks a person.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  In India, they're breaking out a $5 a month, uh, chat G P T subscription, just to put a price point on that.

• 1:08:45Jason Calacanis?

  20% of what US pays, right? So, you know, you have all that stuff going on around the world. That's where I think we're gonna wind up. I'm only including the, the, you know, uh, first world, uh, the developed world. Uh, developed world's the correct, politically correct way to say it. So the developed world, I don't know, it's a pretty big TAM.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  It's a pretty big TAM.

• 1:09:08Jason Calacanis?

  If you build that, what's the build out? The build out's gonna be three, four, 500 billion?

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  More than that, more than that.

• 1:09:14Jason Calacanis?

  I think, but I just, if you look at what's been announced, it's like 100 billion from, well, I mean, Sam said a trillion, we'll just throw that number away. But let's say there's seven, eight, I know, I think that's just him.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  Sorry, I just, I just.

• 1:09:30Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, how do you spend a trillion dollars? That's a lot of, that's a lot of money. So let's say there's 10 companies playing in this big game. XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple eventually. You know, you start to get, let's say seven players or, you know, or Tesla, you know, let's say seven players. Seven players put a, you know, 200 billion in each, 300 billion in each. Now you're at $2 trillion. So it's, it's quite possible there'll be a trillion or two trillion in spend 10, over the next five, 10 years. But that means per year, 200 billion a year. So it's quite possible that the revenue from this at 1.3 trillion could actually work out.

• 1:10:15Jason Calacanis?

  It could actually work out. The math maths. So for me, and I'll have Kabir work on a model. So let me let Kabir know, send him this link here. I'm gonna make a model for this and we'll put it in the docket. And then we'll make the model open source. Y'all can create new tabs in the model and, and, and make it better than what I explained here. But this is my back of the envelope, which is my speciality. Back of the envelope math.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Just making some notes.

• 1:10:42Jason Calacanis?

  Boaty.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:10:43Jason Calacanis?

  This is what I do. I tell people in my venture firm, do Boaty. Back of the envelope, just do it in your head. Man, this breaks people's brains. To be able to do math in your head is, uh, I don't wanna say a sign of intelligence, but it's a sign of a hustler. And they can do back of the envelope math. That's when you know, you, you don't wanna be in a poker game with that one. All right, buddy, it's been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. We'll see you on Friday.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  Bye, everybody.