11x in Trouble and China's AI Acceleration | E2103

OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at www.openphone.com/twist LinkedIn Ads - To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups Brex - the financial stack founders can bank on. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at brex.com/banking-solutions. Today's show: Jason, Alex, and Lon dig into the controversy around 11x, the Andreessen-backed startup accused of misrepresenting revenue and using fake logos, and what that says about early-stage accountability. Then we break down China's dual-front blitz in AI and EVs: DeepSeek's open-source model rivals GPT-4, and Xiaomi's $30K SU7 is a straight-up Porsche clone shaking the EV market. Finally, we unpack the "4-persona framework" that helped Wiz rocket to $100M+ ARR faster than anyone — a must-know concept for any founder looking to build, sell, and scale like a beast. Timestamps: (0:00) Episode Teaser (1:27) Introduction of co-hosts Lon Harris and Alex Wilhelm (3:23) New set design and color analysis(5:43) Announcement of "Twist OT" and potential Patreon model( 8:09) Gamestop's Bitcoin strategy and Michael Saylor's influence (10:15) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at www.openphone.com/twist (14:26) MSTR and their shift to Bitcoin (17:01) Michael Saylor's conflict of interest (20:40) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (23:09) Investment strategies for company treasuries(25:10) Allegations against Eleven x startup (30:35) Brex - the financial stack founders can bank on. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at brex.com/banking-solutions. (32:56) The importance of transparency and accountability in startups (42:31) Chinese advancements in AI technology and ChatGPT features (55:09) Insight from Israeli VC Gili Raanan on successful startups (1:04:26) Founder Friday March Pitch Madness bracket competition (1:10:26) How to start a Founder Friday chapter and community (1:11:21) Bracket competition and Launch Accelerator's 34th cohort * 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 Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/Lons LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharris Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:15) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at www.openphone.com/twist (20:40) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (30:35) Brex - Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Let's talk about 11x, the startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz. TechCrunch put out a story about this. In this case, one of the things that they covered was the misuse of

• 0:13Speaker 00

  customer logos, essentially. 11x, according to Zoom info, kept using their logo for at least four months on their site on its AI dialer and sales calls. And they spent four months demanding they stop, they said. And they're threatening legal action over this.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  It's hard for me to believe that for four months, somebody from Zoom was angrily emailing any member of the team at 11x. And that person didn't communicate to the website team, hey, pull this logo. Like, that, that to me is not a satisfying explanation on any level.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone. Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com/twist. LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups. And Brex, the financial stack founders can bank on. Unlike traditional business banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and no transaction fees. And you get 20 times the standard FDIC protection. Get the business account trusted by one in three startups at Brex.com/banking-solutions.

• 1:27Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. He's Lon Harris. He's Alex Wilhelm. We're going to do This Week in Tech, I heard, in two weeks, Alex, together. I was talking to Leo Laporte. You and I, I added you to my calendar invite, just so you know. We're both going to do it on, I think it's April 6th, we're doing it on a Sunday. So you and I will be making, uh, we'll be bringing Twist to Twit.

• 1:51Speaker 00

  To Twit, yeah. We're just going to drop the S and show up. That's going to be hilarious.

• 1:55Jason Calacanis?

  Hilarious. Now, what you got to get Molly, what you show up, we'd have the, we'd have great. This Week in Tech, This Week in Tech by Leo Laporte. He was the godfather of podcasting, along with Dave Weiner and, uh, of course, Adam Curry.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  He tried to hire me away in the early This Week in Startups area, you remember that?

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I, I didn't know that, that's great.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, he tried to poach me.

• 2:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't know that story.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  I didn't want to move to Petaluma, so I turned him down, but, uh, yeah.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Petaluma, having been there a bunch of times for, for Twit.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 2:24Jason Calacanis?

  I love it.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Not a knock on Napa Valley.

• 2:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but it's just you're an LA guy. You're an LA Austin guy.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  I didn't want to go.

• 2:30Jason Calacanis?

  It's too, too small town for, for the, for the cosmopolitan Lon Harris.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:36Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, long story short, April 6th, tune in. Uh, Twist on Twit, drop the S and Alex and I will be there, uh, talking shop with our guy.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:46Jason Calacanis?

  Leo Laporte, who, you know, really did inspire a lot of us. He was a radio guy who then started doing tech TV and G4 TV. Kevin Rose got inspired. That's where Dick came from. I got inspired. That's where Twist came from. Lot of people inspired, uh, by Leo Laporte, who was just the radio guy who figured out how to do live streaming. And he has done so many episodes of Twit every Sunday. I think he does it at, uh, 2:00 PM Pacific time, and it's just a great roundup show. Uh, wanted to, uh, thank the team for painting my shelf. As you can see, guys, I have a new set, beautiful blue, beautiful blue. And we're going to be suiting up here. We're going to be taking the job seriously, uh, because we want to make clips that look extraordinary.

• 3:30Jason Calacanis?

  And let's face it, like our clips look okay and the clip team's doing great. But we really want to be tight, tight, tight, 4K all the way, all day and beautiful. Uh, and you know how I got these colors, Lon? He asked me how I picked the colors.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  How, how did you pick out those beautiful colors?

• 3:47Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you, Lon. Look at those empty bookshelves. It's coming to Austin. It's going to be on this road.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  It's all in boxes. There I got, I got the whole thing.

• 3:53Jason Calacanis?

  Great. So, um, I, over the Christmas holiday, I was in New York. I had Christmas, oh no, sorry, Thanksgiving holiday. Uh, I had, uh, uh, this little, you know, holiday in New York. See, my family had my three daughters with me. You know, I'm a girl dad like Kobe, uh, and they were going to do this color analysis. So there's a color analysis that Korean people use. You can look it up online and, and they have a storefront or they have an office in, um, In like midtown Manhattan and we went to do a color analysis. Turns out my colors are these blues. And so I'm leaning into my blues and my greens and my wife and the team here just spent weeks and weeks dialing in this beautiful blue and I'm getting the lighting

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  right. I'm just taking total ownership of set design for myself. But I got the color analysis done and my daughter's got it done. It's really interesting. They put these little swatches on you and then they move them back and forth and the guy from CNN, yeah, there it is. So this is like a color analysis. So I did what you're seeing here where you sit there and they do this color analysis where they put these different colors in front of you lawn. Red's not your color.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  No, really? It's not? The last time I wore this shirt on this show, my mom wrote me was like, that shirt looks great on you.

• 5:10Jason Calacanis?

  No. What it is is red is not good on anybody, almost anybody, because it creates too much flushness in your face and everything. But this, what do you have on there? Black? Or is that like a gray?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  It's like a navy blue?

• 5:21Jason Calacanis?

  Navy blue?

• 5:22Speaker 00

  This is a blue-green athletic shirt that I like because it breathes.

• 5:27Jason Calacanis?

  Beautiful. It looks good on you. That color might be working there. The red maybe creates too much vibration. Anyway, putting all this aside, it's a very cool thing and it actually works. And so shout out to them. And yeah, you can go get your color analysis. There's like a bunch of people who do this. Anyway, that's how I got the the blue colors here. A little announcement for this week in startups. We do it live, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 12pm Texas time, 10am left coast time, 1pm right coast time. I got it right? Okay. I decided I made a decision. I was talking to Leo Laporte about politics. And it's like ruining every conversation about tech and startups, right? It just it finds a way to inject itself, right? Like, we're all sitting here and we want to jump on the

• 6:11Jason Calacanis?

  signal story, I bet, because that's the crazy story of the week. And there's a lot. There's a tech angle. There's a tech angle, obviously. Here's my announcement.

• 6:21Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to focus on founders, startups, how to build your startup, how to build your team, how to work on your product, and how to really absolutely adore and study your customers. We're going to talk about big tech, obviously, because that affects little tech, right? So, and then we're going to talk about technology. But I'm going to backload. We're going to do OT, twist OT. I just came up with that right now. That's the overtime. Where we will just go YOLO at the end of the show about political topics, about all this other nonsense, pop culture, etc. So if you listen live, you'll get OT. But if you get the podcast, we're not going to keep inserting this stuff into there because it's maddening. We can't talk about tariffs every week when we've got so much other great content.

• 7:06Jason Calacanis?

  So let's get right to the great content. If you want to do the overtime, go to YouTube, search for this week in startups, go to X, follow TWI startups. We're also streaming on TikTok and Instagram. So there's right now between zero and three people on each of those platforms. Please go search for us and follow us. Any thoughts on twist overtime?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  My one thought is, I feel like even though, you know, the money angle, we're not like desperate for the cash, like a lot of other creators, there is like, this would be perfect for like a Patreon, or like you could have those YouTube subscriptions where people kick in like an extra buck or two a month to like subscribe. And then it's like, if you subscribe, then you'll get the extra 20 minutes.

• 7:50Jason Calacanis?

  Like Ben Shapiro does this, right?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like Caleb Hammer, that financial audit channel, like he does the post show, but you got to be a member, five bucks a month, and then you get to see the post show. And that's where they delve into all the tea, you know, all the like.

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So two ideas there. We've got twist overtime, we've got twist overtime pro. What do you think, Alex?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  I think it's a really good idea. And in fact, when you said, I bet you guys want to talk about the Signal story, I looked at the docket, and what's interesting is that we don't have it in there, Jason, because I felt like. I don't know if we could add much that would actually move the ball forward because I think every angle in that story, it being such a bombshell that it's been, light's been shot at it from every possible side. We could go over some stuff, but I don't know if we can really move the ball forward for founders. So I like it. I want to ask a question though. So I always try to find something that we can all kind of laugh about to start the show.

• 8:41Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. Love a little laughing. Yes, please.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so when GameStop announced that they're going to become a Bitcoin treasury company, I found that to be intrinsically hilarious. And so I stuck it in the intro section. Is that too far away from the founder focus?

• 8:55Jason Calacanis?

  This is an interesting commentary because, you know, founders aspire to be public companies and founders fail and they have to pivot. So I do have a take on this. For those of you don't know, Michael Saylor, friend of the pod, I've invited him on a million times. He hasn't come on. He begged to come on. And then when I invited him on, he unfollowed me.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Do we reach out again? I haven't reached out to him recently.

• 9:19Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I'll keep reaching out to him. I would love to talk to him. I don't have a personal problem with Michael Saylor. I think he's doing the most audacious betting strategy I've ever seen in public markets. I don't know why more people are not talking about it. It is audacious and insane and brilliant. Depending on if Bitcoin hits, let's call it $500,000. If Bitcoin never hits $500,000 or it crashes, he'll either be a modest success or it'll be a complete disaster and everybody will say, who didn't see this coming, right? So it's, it's got basically three possible outcomes. If Bitcoin goes down to $30,000 a coin again, and he gets liquidated or some craziness happens and

• 10:03Jason Calacanis?

  the stock collapses and it trades at 80% of the $500,000 Bitcoins he owns, people are going to go, well, we all saw that coming, didn't we? He's speeding into the turn. Of course, he flipped the car. Founders, every time you miss a call, you're losing an opportunity. And we all know, customers are busy. And if you don't pick up, somebody else will. They're going to move on to the next product or service that is not yours. So with OpenPhone, you're never going to miss another call and you're not going to lose track of who followed up with you. It's the number one business phone system. It's the one I use at my companies because it's built for entrepreneurs. 15 bucks a month. What a deal for OpenPhone.

• 10:48Jason Calacanis?

  You get a dedicated business line and that lets you keep your business and your personal life separate. Plus, you get AI-powered call transcripts and summaries, so you never forget something in the call that you needed to follow up on. Maybe there's action items. Maybe your customer wants you to follow up with pricing or a feature set. You're going to know exactly what was discussed and what to do next. Also, you can set up automated messages to ensure no customers left hanging. And OpenPhone works through an app on your existing smartphone or computer. And this makes it easy to manage your calls from anywhere, whether you're on a desktop, you're on vacation, you're a remote worker, you're on your phone, you're in the car, you're at an airport. It's just easy to manage. So here's your call to action. OpenPhone loves This Week in Startups.

• 11:33Jason Calacanis?

  OpenPhone loves startups. They love founders so much that they're offering 20% off your first six months when you go to openphone.com/twist. That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E.com/twist for 20% off for your first six months. What a deal. And if you have an existing phone number with another service, OpenPhone will port those over at no extra charge. Thanks again to our friends at openphone.com/twist for supporting independent media like This Week in Startups. If it hits 100, 200, 300, 400,000, he's going to look like, wow, that was a really good trade. Yeah. He figured out how to triple people's money in a time period where it doubled, right? And he basically has to double from here

• 12:17Jason Calacanis?

  to hit break even because he's trading at two times, I believe, the valuation is roughly two times. Roughly, yeah. So if it was two times, he has to hit like, I don't know, Bitcoin has to hit like $150,000 for him to have the valuation of...

• 12:32Jason Calacanis?

  Mr. MSTR is his stock symbol. For him to be like at one to one is the value of the company equals the value of the Bitcoin, something like that. Ballpark. And there's a bunch of websites that show you the net asset value NAV to the valuation. So what is it now? It's one point.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  I was trying to find it for you, Jason, but I ended up on this chart here and I'm not entirely sure where I'm supposed to look. So if you've seen this and you know.

• 12:57Jason Calacanis?

  So this is net asset value, right? So he has 500,000 coins and at 500,000 coins at 80,000, right? Five times eight is four. So we know it's gotta be something like, um, the value of the company is 40, the value of his Bitcoin is 40 billion, correct?

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. Yes.

• 13:21Jason Calacanis?

  The value of his company, if you were to look at a stock ticker right now, might be 80 billion. I'm taking a guess right now. I don't follow a day to day.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  You're, you're so close to nailing this without even having the numbers, Jason. I found the data point in the chart that I showed for a second. And according to msdr-dracker.com, the finest of all resources, the NAV premium or NAV premium is 1.93x today.

• 13:42Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fine. So he's trading roughly at double the value of the coins. It's $80 billion company, $40 billion. I think because it's in a publicly traded company and you don't control the Bitcoin, he should be trading at point eight. If you believe he's trading at point eight, the value of the company is like 35 billion or something in that range. So I believe he's doubled the value on the public data stock. So essentially if Bitcoin was worth 160,000 coin, I think the valuation makes sense. Let's put it all aside for a second. The company, Mr., um, which is short for, they call it.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  MicroStrategy, right?

• 14:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's short for MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy existed for, I think, 25 years as a public company.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  A long time.

• 14:22Jason Calacanis?

  And as a public company, they had a software product that is now, I would say, I don't want to say failing because it's hundreds of millions in revenue, but it's stepping down. It's deprecated. This happens from time to time, right? You have some big successful thing and it deprecates over time. BlackBerry, you know, whatever it is. Um, so.

• 14:42Jason Calacanis?

  He started buying Bitcoin inside of that company. Now the company has this huge resurgence. Other people are watching this and he is goading people, encouraging people or running a Ponzi scheme, depending on how cynical you are.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  It's a little, yeah, he's pumping, he's pumping hard.

• 14:57Jason Calacanis?

  It's definitely a pump.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  At a minimum, it's a pump. You can call it a Ponzi at max if you want.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  Right. Right. So at a minimum, he's pumping and, and then the cynical, so you know, an objective person says he's pumping, a cynical person say it's a Ponzi. I say there's also peer pressure now. So what he's been doing is this peer pressure. And this is where I, this is where, I don't want to say distasteful, but this is where I get red flags, concerns. When you start

• 15:25Jason Calacanis?

  pumping and peer pressuring people to the extent he is. So he had, just in recent history, he's been telling people like, how much will you respect GameStop as a Bitcoin maxi? How much Bitcoin do they have to

• 15:41Jason Calacanis?

  buy for you to respect? Did you see that survey that he did today? You can throw it up. That's a massive amount of peer pressure. He's trying to goat the CEO of GameStop into buying more and being part of the Bitcoin. Again, you could be a cult, whatever. So he says, what's the minimum amount of Bitcoin GameStop needs to buy to be respected by Bitcoiners? 50 million, just LARPing, 250 million, Mr. Starter Kit, 1 billion, Tesla tier, 3 billion, so 47% of people want him to do 3 billion, 30% want him to do 1 billion. Put those two numbers together, you got 77%, 78%, 78% of people doing this full court press.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  But of course, the people following Michael Saylor and voting on these are Bitcoin people who are desperate for more people to buy in, so their prices go up.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  We're not saying this is a, a poll that is representative of the national view on GameStop purchases.

• 16:37Jason Calacanis?

  The maxi view.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  This is the maxi view.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  I do think the 3 billion dollar number is very interesting because I looked at GameStop's cash holdings at the end of their most recent quarter, around 4.8 billion in cash, Jason, no debt really. Turns out that at today's prices is 55,000 Bitcoin, if they spent all of it.

• 16:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so which would be 10% of the Bitcoin he owns. And then he personally owns like 20,000 Bitcoins or something in that range, maybe 17,000 or something, which is the, of course, huge conflict of interest I've explained here before. No matter what happens with MSTR. He will have taken his Bitcoin, which I think he said he owned on average for like 10,000 a coin.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:15Jason Calacanis?

  Every thousand dollars, it goes up, he makes 20 million dollars. If every 10,000, he makes 200 million. Every 100,000, I think he makes 2 billion. So no matter what he does, he's going to personally make essentially hundreds of millions to billions. That is such a conflict of interest that he disclosed it in a tweet and said before he moved MSTR, and I retweeted this tweet, it's like an ancient tweet from the 2020 era, I think. You can find it, maybe. I retweeted it. It's basically, he said, he informed the board that he owned these before he went on the strategy. That was his CYA, right? If you have a conflict. Now, people are saying it's not a conflict. It actually is a reason to believe that he believes what he's saying.

• 17:59Jason Calacanis?

  But it's a conflict because, you know, like, say, I don't know, a president or something, you know, if you were owned a certain number of coins and you put them in the treasury, that'd be good for you. Here, some have asked, this is dated.

• 18:12Speaker 00

  October 28th, 2020.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  2020.

• 18:15Jason Calacanis?

  Just somebody read it and let's see what it says.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Some have asked how much BTC I own. I personally hodel 17,732 Bitcoin, which I bought at 9,882 dollars each on average. I informed MicroStrategy of these holdings before the company decided to buy Bitcoin for itself.

• 18:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So Alex, you know what that is, that tweet?

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:38Jason Calacanis?

  They pump his CYA.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Don't sue me. Yes.

• 18:41Jason Calacanis?

  Don't sue me, bruh. I told the board and he, you know, as if he's not in control of the company, right? And he's not in control of the strategy. Pretty clear he controls the company. I, you know, I don't know the exact governance, but he's, he's, he's, he's the CEO. He's on the board. I don't know how many shares he owns. I don't know if he has super.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  Or is he just the chairman? There's some strange names they have inside of the org. But like, let's be honest, if you think about MicroStrategy, do you even know the name of the man who runs the software division? No.

• 19:07Jason Calacanis?

  No, couldn't tell you anything.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:09Jason Calacanis?

  So anyway.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  He's the executive chairman and co-founder.

• 19:12Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Of MicroStrategy.

• 19:14Jason Calacanis?

  So who knows what level of control he has over it, but he wants to make sure people know, hey, it is a conflict. He's admitting there it's a conflict and it's a serious enough conflict that I have to inform the board and make sure I get their approval because if he didn't and he did it covertly, that would be like SCC or like the classic SCC. I don't know about this new SCC, you know, come down on him with a bag of bricks, pressuring GameStop into it. I think it's a great move for GameStop to put every dollar they have into this.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  All right.

• 19:44Jason Calacanis?

  And then just because GameStop has no business, right?

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, GameStop's got to do something because it's like going to the mall to buy a physical copy of a video game is just that that's done. That model's not coming back. So they need, they need something else to do.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  This is the, if you're watching the video, this is the GameStop announcement from their investor relations page. It reads in full, "GameStop today announced that its board has unanimously approved an update to its investment policy to add Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset." They are going to do this in some capacity. Hence the sailor tweet. Jason, the thing that I'm curious about, just bringing this back to founders is simply, have you heard of any non-public company putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet? And as a follow-up, if a launch accelerator backed company said, Jason, we're going to buy a Bitcoin to have on our balance sheet instead of just cash, what would you say to them?

• 20:40Jason Calacanis?

  Hey founders, I want to share with you an experience I love. It's when I get an ad that is relevant and not some nonsense. Like the other day, I got an ad for a fund management platform and it was like a new one I'd never heard of. I clicked on the ad because, well, I manage four venture capital firms. We scheduled a call with them and it was amazing. How did this happen? Well, I was on LinkedIn because I like to share links from the podcast, This Week in Startups, right on LinkedIn. In fact, we livestream to LinkedIn three days a week and we get a great audience over there. And I happened to be presented with this fund management platform and it was a direct hit. Like, I mean, talk about hitting the bullseye. If you're in business and you're making a product or service, it's really hard to find customers in the business-to-business space and doing

• 21:23Jason Calacanis?

  B2B advertising is hard, but LinkedIn makes it so easy because, you know, their tools let you target people by job title. Industry, company size and more. So this fund management platform obviously was looking for people in venture capital who had a fund size and a number of people, maybe 10 people, maybe 50 people. And they found me. They got me. They split the arrow. Boom, right on target. And there's two things you really need to know about LinkedIn going into 2025. First, they broke a billion members. And 130 million of those billion are decision makers and 10 million of the billion are C-level executives like myself. Where can you get to those people? It's really hard. And the second thing you need to know, LinkedIn makes an impact.

• 22:02Jason Calacanis?

  B2B marketers report two to five times higher return on ad spend or ROAS, return on the ad spend. You should know that acronym. Compared to other social platforms, 79% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the best platform for paid media. LinkedIn is going to let you build the right relationships. It's going to drive results and you're going to reach your customers in a super respectful business environment. It's not a place where people are dancing around, saying inappropriate things or debating politics. Nope. LinkedIn equals business. Business equals LinkedIn. Start converting your B2B audits into high-quality leads today. We'll even give you a Hyundai $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 22:45Jason Calacanis?

  If it was less than 5% of their holdings, I'd be like, strange, but okay. You know, I do see frequently companies with a large treasury buy treasuries, buy municipal bonds of short duration. So because you need the money. So if you buy two-year treasuries, one year, whatever, and you can get 3%, 4%, 5% on $10 million, you get an extra $500,000 into the company. You have to pay tax on that interest typically unless it's a non-taxable muni bond. I've done that in the past myself. When I did that, I had to go to my, you know, board and say, hey, I'm going to put of this $15 million we have, seven and a half of it into bonds we can't touch for, you know, between one and three years or one and two years.

• 23:28Jason Calacanis?

  And they're going to roll every quarter off and every quarter they mature and we get that money, whatever. And it was nice. We had like, you know, at some point, you know, maybe it was 50K a month in interest coming in. So it was just nice when you're, it winds up being five more, you know, developers for your team that are being paid for by the interest. But the VCs don't give you the money. And investors don't give you the money to be a hedge fund manager. They're giving it to you to grow a business that goes 100x. That's the problem here, but for GameStop, if they can't come up with a good idea. And the best idea they have is to follow Michael Saylor and the Trump administration down this crazy crypto rabbit hole, which I think is going to blow up inevitably.

• 24:12Jason Calacanis?

  And when it does blow up, it either can be the total risk of ruin. Look up risk of ruin. When you have a bankroll, you have to be careful to avoid the risk of ruin. That means you don't put all your money on one bet. You need to be able to weather the storm. Risk of ruin is what happens in poker when you take your entire bankroll. Let's say you were a professional poker player with a million dollar bankroll and you play in a million dollar buying game. People with million dollar bankrolls play in $25,000 buying games and they limit themselves to four buy-ins. So the most they can lose in a single session is 10% of their bankroll. You know, and if you want to play a million dollar games, you want to have a $10 million bankroll. So you're not putting more than 10% on the line. Anyway, risk of ruin, interesting concept for people to know. But if you were pivoting, you don't have any ideas.

• 24:57Jason Calacanis?

  And if I was a shareholder in GameStop, let's say I was the co-founder and I own 10%. I'm watching these folks for years try to get out of the retail game and they don't have a thesis and they can't get out of it. Sure, why not?

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Let's talk about 11x, the startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz. TechCrunch put out a story about this. Some of the notes included that the company had customers sign one-year contracts with a three-year, three-month break. And that it may have been misreporting revenue after customers had broken. Essentially, they turned their annual contracts into trials. An employee said that they were kind of massaging the numbers. They may have left some logos on their site too long after they weren't really customers. The company has pushed back, Jason, but I want to start with that and get your feedback.

• 25:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so it's all alleged, right? And the allegation is-

• 25:47Speaker 01

  The platform is denying the TechCrunch report. That's important to point out, yeah.

• 25:51Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so the company's made, the company made, they had customers, sign a one-year contract with a three-month breakup clause.

• 26:02Jason Calacanis?

  This turned the annual contracts into effectively trials. This is not in and of itself, anything problematic. When I do one-year contracts with people, I'll have a 90-day out. I'll sign a three-year contract with somebody with a 90-day out, a 30-day out. What it means is, I just have to give you notice so we can off-board. And then that company doesn't have, if they had dedicated some resources to it, let's say, you know, an account manager or, you know, a contractor to work on your thing. You just have 90 days to let that person go and to inform them, hey, you know, we're going to just off-board you, whatever. So that in of itself, not a problem. But when you start using the logos of customers,

• 26:44Jason Calacanis?

  and you start using weird terms, contracted ARR, CAR. This is a very abused number. I have been getting, and I have had situations, I'm going to make an amalgamation. The founders told me they had this amount of revenue. And what they meant is the contracted revenue. And then the contracted revenue didn't match the money coming into the bank account. When you're dealing with any type of investor who is, let's call it a smart, any of these words you'd like to use, Alex. Any smart investors who say, what was 2024 revenue? What is 2025 projected revenue? Give me a chart of monthly revenue.

• 27:26Jason Calacanis?

  I have had people say, then, give me a chart of contracted revenue. And I said, no, no, no, no. Who's your accounting firm? I want the actual accrual-based accounting, where you take your 12-month contract. Let's say they paid it in advance. They gave you $100,000 in advance. It's $10,000 a month. They gave them a discount of $20,000. I want to see that $100,000 divided into 12, and I want to see it, you know, put into each month that the service was delivered. And we know that it could get canceled. So if you have churn, which people do, typically 5%, 10%, 15% churn a year. Some people have negative churn, which, because people are adding to their existing contracts. So you have the same number of contracts on, but you go from 10 people to 50 people in your Slack account.

• 28:11Jason Calacanis?

  So you're paying five times as much. So 10% of people, you know, leave the product, but then 50% of the people, you know, 10x their usage of it. You get this, all this.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 28:21Jason Calacanis?

  You know, math and fun with numbers. You know, just fun with numbers is a very dangerous game because if you're selling shares of a company and you confuse a person buying the shares, then you will get a knock on the door.

• 28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Hello, SEC here. We would like to talk to you about a special term called securities fraud.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  That's you never want to hear those words, by the way.

• 28:47Jason Calacanis?

  You hear that?

• 28:48Speaker 00

  Those are not good words.

• 28:48Jason Calacanis?

  Is that not coming up on the microphone?

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Oh, absolutely.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  We can hear the SEC.

• 28:53Jason Calacanis?

  Hello.

• 28:55Jason Calacanis?

  Log. Alex, is the SEC here?

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:59Jason Calacanis?

  Just a scary moment. I remember opening the door and somebody.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Oh, really? You've had the SEC knock on your door for securities.

• 29:07Jason Calacanis?

  I've been served. Sir, you've been served. Boom. And I look at this piece of paper, got the SEC logo on it. When I pull it out of the back.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  That's no good.

• 29:18Jason Calacanis?

  Whoa. You don't want to have like.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Just sit down, breathe.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  You have to go in your box of documents stacked in the powder room and start going through them.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  This is Mar-a-Lago.

• 29:32Jason Calacanis?

  What is this? What is this? Turns out I had somebody on the pod. They were telling me we had invested in the company. They were telling me what incredible prospects they had. They didn't have their accounting dialed in perfectly.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 29:46Jason Calacanis?

  They ran out of money. It was during a down market. Nobody, no white knights come to the rescue. The SEC had somebody tip them off. That not only the company claimed to be profitable or break even, but then they are out of business because they couldn't make payroll. And then they submitted.

• 30:08Jason Calacanis?

  Jason's an investor. The person was on the podcast, you know, 30 days before this whole thing blew up.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 30:14Jason Calacanis?

  And they said the following things. So the SEC says, we would like every correspondence. We would like this, but this, I got to hire, I kid you not, an $1,800 an hour attorney. The most I've ever paid. You start getting into this level. So now.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  $30 a minute?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  That's wild.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  That's 50 cents a second.

• 30:37Jason Calacanis?

  When founders ask me what corporate cards did they use? I tell them Brex, B-R-E-X. That's what all founders use. And when founders ask me, where should they store their cash? Well, think of Brex. Why? Because it's specifically built for startups from the ground up. And that's going to help you take your dollars further. And it's going to protect your cash while extending your startup's runway. How do they pull this off? Well, they offer startups the best parts of checking, treasury, FDIC insurance in a single powerhouse account. Knowing everything about your money is non-negotiable. Nearly 40 startups fail because they run out of cash. And 100% of startups can't afford to make financial mistakes. Don't I know this. You know who founders call when they're running out of money or they make a mistake?

• 31:22Jason Calacanis?

  They call me and I have to deal with it. If you need the best of the best because you're doing something big with your startup, Brex's banking solution is going to get you 20x the standard FDIC protection through program banks. Also, they have the ability to send money worldwide at lightning speed. So here's your call to action. Very simple. Brex is used by one in every three startups in the United States. Let's get that up to one in two. Get the financial stack that founders trust at brex.com/banking-solutions. Once again, B-R-E-X.com/banking-solutions. Thanks again to our friends at Brex who make a great product that we use every day.

• 32:07Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I'm trying to think of when I've lost.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  They come into the office, set a briefcase down, take a sip of water. You're already out. I mean, yeah, that's a car payment. You're out five grand just for that.

• 32:19Jason Calacanis?

  I've got this guy at Tomahawk Steak every 10 seconds. That guy was in Wagon for a year. Anyway, happy to pay it.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  We're out to... Better than prison.

• 32:32Jason Calacanis?

  I'm like, they're like, you have no exposure. Don't worry about it. Then I get the $30,000 bill for my no exposure. I paid, I give, I buy a Prius to my attorney's son or daughter or their housekeeper. Got a Prius on JCal. Yeah. Happy to pay it.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  So happy. I'm not grimacing at all here. I'm not in pain, no.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  And I'm like, okay, well, did they clear me? And they're like, oh, no, they don't do that. What happens next?

• 33:04Jason Calacanis?

  What you're seeing here is a shrug. I'm doing a shrug in front of my beautiful blue shelves.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's Kafkaesque. It's just like-

• 33:10Jason Calacanis?

  They don't tell you. They leave you on the hook indefinitely. There could be another knock. Hey, remember we talked to you 10 years ago about the startup? Turns out, oh, we pinched this person. We would like to talk to you again. That's the problem, I think, with how the SEC is run respectfully, is that they have so much power and they have a very important mission and they're very principled people, but man, it's- they need to be a little more interactive,

• 33:41Jason Calacanis?

  you know, and like maybe wrap things up so I'm not sitting here sweating bullets?

• 33:45Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think they might want an environment where people feel like on edge and scrutinized, you know, like they don't have that many agents working. The way to enforce these rules is to make everybody feel like you could be being watched at any time.

• 33:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, they did also tell me if I didn't get the paperwork to them in time, I was gonna go to El Salvador to stay in a camp, so-

• 34:05Speaker 00

  That's what you get for your tweets.

• 34:07Jason Calacanis?

  I was gonna be going to a camp.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  I wanna go back. I wanna go back to contracted ARR, Jason, or CARR versus ARR. My, my understanding of this is that contracted ARR includes future annual recurring revenue that has not yet manifested as cash? So, my question is, if, if, if I signed up for, you know, Jason's SaaS product on a monthly account, say, I haven't paid yet for some of the ARR you might count if you presume that I'm not gonna churn if I'm monthly. So to me, that actual distinction between CARR and ARR is a little bit muddy. Can you, in idiot terms, explain to me? So I was trying to prep and I couldn't quite-

• 34:48Jason Calacanis?

  So I think the way most people do it, and this is a term that I've only seen the last couple of years people lean into.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  Any contract sign, I sign a 10-year deal with you for 100,000 a year. I have a million in contracted revenue. So now my contracted revenue number, which was 9 million, is now 10. What are the chances you stick around for another nine years and 11 months? I don't know. What this does is it incentivizes the team of sales executives, I think, if you have an incentive. If you show me an incentive, I'll show you a result, right? I'll show an outcome. This is not the incentive you want. You don't want your team to start playing fun with numbers. There's a pipeline report. The pipeline report is how much is the contracts worth? So now you've got salespeople. They have a pipeline report.

• 35:41Jason Calacanis?

  So there's 100 possible customers. I'm in active discussion with Nowlon and each one of them's worth a million dollars. I have 100 million in pipeline. And then there's the people who sign contracts and how much revenue that will generate this year. Okay, great. So now I can look at those two numbers. 100 million in contracts. You signed one of them in the first quarter. You signed one each quarter. You signed four of the 100. So we know that 100 million in pipeline results in 4% on average in closing. So now we judge you. 90, you have a 4% close rate. So either those 100 million in the pipeline, you didn't actually qualify. Qualify means they can afford the product.

• 36:24Jason Calacanis?

  It would be like me saying, you know, a bunch of people come on the lot and they look at the Corvette and they all want to test drive it and they all look at it and say they're interested in it. And I convert 4% of them. Maybe the people that were there not for a Chevy Corvette. They were there for a Chevy, I don't know what the Volt. I don't know what the lowest Chevy is. I'm, I'm gonna be a driver Corvette. Anyway, putting that aside, then you could look at the contracted. So now you start getting into the fun with numbers on the contracted out. You following me here? Those four million dollar contracts are 40 million. So now the sales executive, when they go into their review and they want to get a raise or whatever. I had 100 million in pipeline. It resulted in 40 million. I'm closing 40%. Like, mm.

• 37:08Jason Calacanis?

  You closed 4% of the names. You closed 40% of the dollar value per year. But actually you said you were gonna have a billion dollars. So you still have 4%. So people get into weird fun with numbers. And then they start playing games to build the pipeline up or to build the contracted, when in fact... You actually need to know just how much money you're making every month. That's why subscriptions are the truth. The subscription business model, it really does give you a center of gravity as an investor, as a team, as a board. So just look at the monthly, quarterly and yearly numbers of money into the bank account. I go directly to the accounting firm. So when we're on the board of companies and they're giving all these presentations, say, hey,

• 37:52Jason Calacanis?

  you know, to somebody on the team, make sure you talk to the accounting firm, you know, once a year, once every six months, if you can, if they'll give you the contact info and just check the numbers, check the numbers.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  I'm trying to weigh, Jason, the reporting, which comes from two people, Dominic Marori Davis and Marina Timken, who are both very serious people and they're not, they don't report frivolous things, and the company's response. So in this case, one of the things that they covered was the misuse of customer logos, essentially claiming customers that may not have been the right customers to claim. For example, ZoomInfo used 11X, and this is a quote from the company.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Well, actually, no, they used it for basically, it looks like a month. And then 11X

• 38:36Jason Calacanis?

  They trialed it.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  They trialed it. And then, oh, it was a pilot. There you go. And then 11X, according to ZoomInfo, kept using their logo for at least four months on their site, on its AI dialer and sales calls. And they spent four months demanding they stop, they said, and they're threatening legal action over this.

• 38:58Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  And then the company's response, 11X said, just to be fair here, 11X said, "We have never claimed customers we did not have. The customers named in the article paid for, used our product for a period and then churned. We regret not having better processes to remove logos from our website more promptly." But they said that they told them over a multi-month period to stop doing this. "We spent the last four months demanding they stop displaying our logo and falsely counting us as a customer," the spokesperson said. So to me, even if you're willing to go, the CARR stuff is just accounting nuance and maybe it's a little more aggressive, but it's kind of inside the normal realm of normalcy. To me, that shows either incredibly poor internal organization or too much rule bending for my tastes.

• 39:43Jason Calacanis?

  The appearance of impropriety is impropriety. I keep saying this on a range of subjects to people. Just if it appears to be inappropriate, it is. Just take that philosophy in life, right?

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I have to say, it is hard, as an outsider who knows nothing about these companies and has not been part of any of these interactions, it's hard for me to believe that for four months, somebody from Zoom was angrily emailing any member of the team at 11x and that person didn't communicate to the website team, hey, pull this logo. Like, that, that to me is not a satisfying explanation on any level. Obviously, they're in a Slack room, somebody sent that message. This, it was deliberate. It wasn't just like, oh, we don't have a good process to update our website.

• 40:31Jason Calacanis?

  You can take the time to put the logo up. You can take the time to take it down.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Same person could take it down, exactly.

• 40:37Jason Calacanis?

  So they had the procedure to put it up, but they didn't have the procedure to take it down.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Doesn't make sense to me.

• 40:43Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't make much sense, right?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Doesn't, yeah.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Then there's Airtable, which they also had on their site for a while. Airtable told TechCrunch it wasn't a customer and never gave 11x permission to use its logo. Airtable conducted a, quote, "very short trial of the product." And yet, as of March 21, 11x was still claiming Airtable as a customer on its website. So to me, it's hard to say that all the accounting stuff should be obvious as a concern here because there seems to be a pattern of, I would say, lax management. So I, I guess what I'll just say is this, everyone's going to give early-stage startups a little bit of breathing room to be bullish, to be enthusiastic, to go fast, to try stuff. Shout out people who are building stuff from the ground up. But if your last round was 50 million, I think Andreessen led it, you're no longer a scrappy startup with one or two people.

• 41:30Speaker 00

  You need to behave like a real company because you're almost a scale up at that point.

• 41:33Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, just the fact that we've spent 15 minutes of it on this weekend startups and TechCrunch wrote an article, like, is it really worth it to keep the logo up for whatever number of months and then just create the appearance of impropriety? The founder, whoever the CEO is, has to be fired. I mean, just accountability-wise, we live in an age where there is no accountability. I do think, like, there is something to be said for just owning your mistakes. Please, just own your mistakes, folks, man. It's just, we made a mistake, we'll do better. I, I just want somebody to, will somebody say that?

• 42:12Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody on any topic, just say, you know what? Eh, could have done better. I say it all the time. I say it all the time. Could have done better. Hmm. I would change my behavior there. I would refine how I said something. You know, I'm always like trying to just be a little bit better. Anyway, let's keep going here.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  All right, Jason, you want to talk about Chinese AI? There was a great piece in Bloomberg, uh, digging into a, a diffusion of AI technology across China in the wake of DeepSeek. And also a, a, a deluge of releases from leading Chinese companies in the tech space. Uh, I had been keeping tabs on this, but I hadn't actually quite noticed how many big things had dropped. So just to give people a little taste, in the last couple of weeks, Alibaba dropped QWQ 32B. This was a new 32 billion parameter reasoning model that was quite good and cheap. Uh, also Ernie X1 and Ernie 4.5 dropped from, I think it was Baidu. That was a new reasoning model and a new foundation model.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  And then Alibaba's former subsidiary Ant, I'm not quite sure other corporate ownership there works today. Uh, they came out with a cool new way to train models more inexpensively and also use a mix of homegrown and Nvidia chips to do so. So the AI market in China is cooking.

• 43:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the way I would, um, you know, position this is in the same week, we have Grok dropping stuff. I think ChatGPT dropped some image stuff that's going viral today.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  They baked in, uh, basically like a Dolly type image generator into the main ChatGPT. So you can request images right from the main interface.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  I, I have an example.

• 43:49Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. Go ahead.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  I, I have an example of Jason and I, so I'll bring it up.

• 43:52Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, look at that.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  So I uploaded a picture, a, a still from Twist to test this out. And, uh, you guys are the film guys. Studio Ghibli. Ghibli, thank you.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  There, it's Miyazaki. They did Princess Mononoke Spirited Away.

• 44:05Jason Calacanis?

  Question, are they paying Studio Ghibli for the rights to this opportunity?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I'm sure they are not.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  I'm sure they are not.

• 44:13Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is so, such a copy. This is, if it's Studio Ghibli's iconic style, I assumed.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  That they're making money from it. That was my assumption.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  That is, I, I don't have, I don't think there's a lot of basis for that assumption. I don't think that I've heard about a licensing deal. And I honestly feel like Miyazaki would have put the kibosh on a licensing deal.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Yes, I think that's absolutely correct.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  He's not an AI fan.

• 44:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I think this is a lawsuit then, and one that they will win because an iconic style like this that confuses the user, I'm the user here, I know Studio Ghibli, my, my, my kids have watched their movies.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 44:53Jason Calacanis?

  I know that this is something that people have made money from in the past. There are people who've made like a South Park character generator and I, South Park released that themselves. So you can in fact copyright an iconic style. You can copyright that.

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Well, we're gonna find out in the court of law, but I will say though, they did do Jason a little bit dirty because it made him look like a grandfather.

• 45:18Jason Calacanis?

  It does, yes. It is what it is. It doesn't have to be perfect right now, but I do think they should.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  It's pretty good. I mean, it's recognizable in that style for sure.

• 45:26Jason Calacanis?

  Why wouldn't they pay them as for a license and have an exclusive? Why wouldn't you reach out to them and say, hey, we want to do this? It would be a business opportunity. If they, for every time they do this, I think Studio Ghibli should get like a buck or 10 cents.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  A buck would be a lot, yeah.

• 45:43Jason Calacanis?

  10 cents.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  I think, I think their argument would be how is this different from an artist watching their movies and then teaching themselves how to draw like that?

• 45:52Jason Calacanis?

  Because an artist doing it is going to not be doing it at scale and not confusing the public. And then this is an opportunity for Studio Ghibli to make money from their IP. So derivative works and IP like this, it should be, the opportunity should be given to the IP holder. So if you made it one that was Disney Princess. You know, um, then the Disney princess opportunity should be Disney's. I think we would all agree.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, of course.

• 46:21Jason Calacanis?

  And here to make a twink ghibli.

• 46:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, I, I shared this relatively whimsical tweet from Sam Altman, just to point out that he is very aware of the trend. So it's not like this is something that OpenAI is trying to like pretend isn't happening.

• 46:32Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, in fact, his is his avatar on X now.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Yes, now he is.

• 46:38Jason Calacanis?

  No, I think he paid for it. This is the exact same as using Scar Joe's voice. It is literally the exact same. You're, you're taking somebody's IP like, um, you know, uh, Michael Buffer owns his catchphrase. What is it? Um, are you ready to rumble or something like that? Let's get ready to rumble.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Let's get ready to rumble. Yeah.

• 46:58Jason Calacanis?

  That's protected IP. Like he's, it's his brand. He owns it. Uh, now I can say, let's get ready to rumble here describing his thing. Or I can make a joke about it on Saturday Night Live. But if I started doing it at the beginning of every NBA game or the beginning of any episode here, I should pay, uh, some license to him for that. Since he did take the time to trademark it, uh, you can't trademark styles. Uh, so I think that they paid for this. If they didn't, they should.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Well, we'll, we'll find out. I, I don't see any news about that exact point, but I guarantee, I guarantee Studio Ghibli will be in touch with them.

• 47:34Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, let's, um, just talk a little bit about Chinese, um, the pace at which they're going.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 47:40Jason Calacanis?

  There is no reason for an American to use any of these, um, products coming out of China because there's security concerns. And they're not hosted and easy to use. And you have a hosted free version you can use anytime called Gemini or Grok or ChatGPT. So the fact that they're copying stuff at an incredible pace and doing some of their own innovations, let's give them credit for that. It doesn't really matter all that much. It just shows that everybody all at once is making apps. And that like in the previous thing, or everybody all at once is making websites, or everybody all at once is making movies.

• 48:16Jason Calacanis?

  We should expect that. Um, the question becomes at some point, will they, with these free options, if they are flooded free, open source with the MIT, you know, whatever.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  License.

• 48:27Jason Calacanis?

  License. Will they then have downward pressure on pricing? So I don't see Americans going and using these things because like, who's going to go seek them out or whatever. But I do see them creating downward pressure because if you're a developer. And I did see a developer saying this in a forum recently. Why would I pay this amount for this many tokens from ChatGPT if I could install this on five M4 minis? Or I could buy two Nvidia cards and run it on a local PC?

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 48:59Jason Calacanis?

  So this is where you do start to see downward pressure on pricing. I think some of these models will be good enough to do things like, let's say, the Studio Ghibli thing. Studio Ghibli would partner with ChatGPT, or their team would pay to use Gemini's backend or an AWS or an Azure version of this. But if somebody who's a developer at Studio Ghibli says, you know, I can set this up and stand it up for ourselves on an open source server here. And we can do it for a hundred grand instead of giving a million dollars a year in licensing fees or whatever to pick your hosted version. And we could save the 900,000. Here we go. And as Derek is saying in our chat room, we do this live three days a week.

• 49:44Jason Calacanis?

  For those of you listening to the pod and you're part of the replay gang on the pod. You know, Derek says, hey, age of abundance, and that's what's happened. There is another corollary to this. Type in, if you don't mind, we'll pull up Xiaomi's website, which I think. Yeah, I don't know where to find it. I think it might be MI dot global.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  It is.

• 50:04Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Now Xiaomi makes incredible. Pacquimes, electric toothbrushes, scooters, camping lanterns. Have fun going through their website, right?

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is insane.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  Like, go to lifestyle for a second. Air compressors, sunglasses, luggage, routers, photo printers, hair clippers, scalps, massage guns, anything.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Sunglasses?

• 50:31Jason Calacanis?

  This is what Chinese companies do, just like Sony might. If you go to their massage gun page, did you know Xiaomi, who used to make your Android phone, has massage guns? Okay, that's like the Zara gun that I use. That's incredible. Shout out to them. Awesome gun. And they just knocked it off. Now, are some people gonna buy these in China? Of course. I would like you to. Now, it's not on their website. I don't know why, but type in Xiaomi SU7 Ultra.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. I know where we're going with this.

• 51:05Jason Calacanis?

  SU7 Ultra. Well, Wikipedia page for the SU7. Show people what we're working with here.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  I'm gonna pull it up now and you're going to be.

• 51:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's not just camping gear or massage guns, lawn, or smartphones. The ambition of Chinese companies has been unleashed. And if you go look at this car, um, this Xiaomi SU7 car. It's a luxury, um, version of the Porsche. I forgot what Porsche named their four-door.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  Uh, not the Panamera. Is it the other one?

• 51:45Jason Calacanis?

  It is the Panamera. I think you're right. Yeah, it's not the SUV. This is like a four-door sports car. People are losing their mind about Xiaomi's cars. They're making a range of cars now. This is a phone company. Let me say that again. Xiaomi Auto. Xiaomi Auto, which is xiaomi EV.com. If you pull that up, which people know is spelled X I A O M I.

• 52:12Speaker 00

  I'm gonna let Lon. Lon, pull that up. Well, I just point out that the SU7 Ultra we just showed on screen, uh, opens at 530,000 RMB, which is about 73,000 USD, which is, which is not that much for a car.

• 52:26Jason Calacanis?

  This is a $300,000 car in America. If you were to, you know, buy it, uh, this, we're getting to like a level of, oh my lord, I don't know. That's, and that's the, that's the ultra. I don't know what the SU7 goes for. These cars. Are being sold at some de minimis amount of profit, right? Um, and obviously the other main company in this regard is BYD.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  Yes, it's seven stars at 30 grand USD.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 53:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, thank you. Um, here we go. This is like next level. This is a phone company 10 years ago is now making cars that will rival Germany, America and Japan. And these cars are cheaper. I don't know that they're better. They're certainly not safer. But if you're living in Brazil

• 53:27Jason Calacanis?

  or, you know, in Germany or in Africa or Singapore, maybe this is the right car for you. Maybe this is half the price. And so the copying now is getting faster and better. We had TK Travis from Uber on All In a couple of weeks ago. And he was talking like, he said, I can't understand. I can't overstate how quickly this all occurs. And that was his experience 10 years ago, building Uber in China. They can copy so fast and so great that, um, they will create downward pressure, which then of course makes more choices for customers. And you're not going to need as much money.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  I just want to say to underscore Jason's point about deep seeks, uh, really rapid rise in the AI game. To make the point about Xiaomi getting into cars. I put together a timeline just for our notes, but I'm going to share it here because it's pertinent. So, uh, I didn't realize that it was only back in last May that DeepSeek dropped V2 of its foundation model family. Then September was two and a half. December was V3. That was the real kind of breakout moment for DeepSeek, I think, in the AI community. Then they dropped R1, their reasoning model in January. That's the one that blew up globally. In March, they dropped an improved V3 and R2 is supposed to be coming quickly. So inside of one year, we could go from DeepSeek V2 to R2. That's insane.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  And I think it's very bullish, not for the price of AI models, not for the price of AI inference you can charge commercially, but for the impact of AI technology writ large. And if I was a startup that used AI models in my tech, I would be stoked because everything I build is going to get 5% better a month for the next couple of years. And that's just a great technology tailwind to have underpinning your products.

• 55:08Jason Calacanis?

  I want to jump to this Israeli VC, Gilly Ronan.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's probably, I'll look it up.

• 55:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's probably Gilly Ronan.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  That sounds right.

• 55:19Jason Calacanis?

  He, I guess, was an investor in Wiz. He was on Invest Like the Best, a really cool podcast that I've been on from Patrick O'Shaughnessy. And he explains, really, how unique Wiz was because they were selling into, we talked about sales earlier in the program, how they were selling into four different personas, and that those four personas were actually one. Let's just do 30 seconds from Gilly.

• 55:50Speaker 04

  When you sell a product, you're going to face four personas. The person that has the pain point, that has the problem, the person who has the budget, the person that has the authority, the person that would actually use the product. Now, as a startup, if those four personas map into a single person in real life, that's a mega hit.

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so if we were to look at something like, I don't know, HubSpot, right? It's a marketing solution. You might have a marketer on your team who is on the front line, who does email marketing and builds your mailing list and does, you know, marketing online, and they need a CRM. Okay, they have to go to their CMO, who has the budget, and say, hey, can I buy HubSpot? And they gotta do a little justification there. Then the CMO has to either have the authority, or they may have to go to the CFO, I'm sorry. Then the person with the budget has to go to a person who is the IT manager, who manages SaaS software at the company, and say, hey, can we install this solution and put our

• 57:06Jason Calacanis?

  customers' data in? And they're like, oh, well, the customer data is already in these three different places. So yes, but we've got to build a bridge to do that. And then finally, who's going to actually use this? Well, there might be another person who is in the sales team, who has to use HubSpot to send out their mailing to come join a webinar, right? It could be four different people have to get involved.

• 57:28Jason Calacanis?

  Now, what he says here is when you have a mega hit, a mega hit, and I've never heard anybody frame it this way. So that's why I wanted to bring this up. A mega hit in the business like Wiz is that the person who has the pain point was this security person, a developer of some type, who also had the budget to buy it because they were the one installing it point three, and they were going to use it every day. And that means the product ramped very quickly. We were talking about Wiz on this program and on All In a week or two ago and just saying, how did they ramp so fast? You guys can pull up the chart of the revenue or Wiz's revenue over the years. We were stunned when we talked

• 58:12Jason Calacanis?

  about it here, Alex, of just how quickly Wiz had gotten to 100 million and whatever it had gotten to. This is an incredible insight that I have never seen framed in, you know, my 30 years in the business that I have heard, of course, you have to get consensus in the sales process and there's multiple people, but I've never heard of like, oh, there's a product that boom, you can just buy. It is the equivalent in consumer. We see this all the time. You need to get a ride. You download Uber and you buy it. Now, in some cases, a kid might need to get a ride. So they have to get their parents involved and get their credit card to set it up. So there's two people involved in the decision. You do see that in consumer sometimes. A kid wants Disney Plus, parent has to sign up for it. Maybe there's a technical person in the family who has to put it on the TV.

• 58:56Jason Calacanis?

  So you have to get three people in the family to, you know, one person's good at installing it. But this is a very interesting framing that I'd never seen. And here's the chart of the Wiz revenue. Alex, tell us that and then we'll go to you.

• 59:07Speaker 00

  This is from Sakura and essentially just shows them ramping. I think they did 100 million ARR in 18 months and then they scaled to, I think it was a half billion and they're looking to hit a billion this year in ARR. And then they were going to go public before, before Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, somehow thought it was the right thing to do to remove what would have been the hottest IPO of like the last 10 years and instead bought the company for a paltry $32 billion, ruining my fun and taking away my good newsletter fodder. Thanks, Sundar.

• 59:34Jason Calacanis?

  Pull up the fastest to 100 million. It's in the Slack chat room. It's another really good image to take a look at. You know, people were really amazed by how quickly Shopify and Slack had, you know, gotten to 100 million in revenue. And then Wiz just boop straight up. I think there'll be a moment in time where there'll be a consumer product that goes right to 100 million in a day.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, we're getting closer to that. Yeah.

• 1:00:01Jason Calacanis?

  I this, this is SaaS products. I wonder like if somebody were to release a really cool product like Tinder or I don't know chess.com all at once as opposed to iterating and it just caught viral and viral.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  It'll, it'll happen. I mean, I think we've seen exponential growth like that all the time. Like I remember the era when it was like posting a video and will a video get a million views in one day? And like now that's it. Get a million views in 45 minutes. If you play your cards right and you are a K-pop act or something.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Well, this just goes to show how much the bar is changing. I mean, the old, you know, have a million ARR, raise a series A just feels about as archaic as a buggy whip now.

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  One thing I would add is Gilly does say, if you watch that whole clip, uh, that like not every successful company needs like all four of those personas to map onto one person. It's just when it does, it's like this magic formula. Like there was one guy.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  People talk a lot about ICPs or ideal customer profiles.

• 1:00:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  And when I was at Crunchbase, we actually had a number of different ICPs at the time that they were kind of going after it as a sales perspective. Um, is it possible to have like too many ICPs in question? Because it feels like in the Wiz example, they discovered that they felt they had four, but they really had one and that was a turbocharging element. So how far down should you boil that?

• 1:01:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So you, the, the concept between the ideal customer profile is that that's one singular.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  Okay, got it.

• 1:01:25Jason Calacanis?

  And that there are other customer profiles, of course. So for something like Crunchbase, people didn't know this, but I had built that business like 20 years ago. We called it Venture. There was Venture Source, Venture Wire, and we did Venture Reporter. And we would sell for 500 bucks a year, the ability to go into this database and see all of the people who had raised money in the management team. And we did a little interesting thing. We had a V-card. V-card was this like thing you could click on and would add it to your address book. So this is 20 years ago. I did 25 years ago. This is in 2000. I created this little database and we had sold like a thousand people had paid us $500. You had a half million dollars in revenue for it. Um, and it would turned out.

• 1:02:08Jason Calacanis?

  Salespeople all wanted this. And what they would do is they would sit there all day and we told them they could download up to 20 V cards a day for 500 bucks. And there were people who bought four of these, gave it to four different salespeople and they down and they hit the limit every day, including weekends. And they're like, can we just buy the entire database? We're like, no, we don't want you spamming everybody in here. But people were doing it to get the email addresses. So salespeople for Crunchbase is one of the ways they sell it. If you were to pull up Crunchbase and they probably have a sales page or if you just typed in Crunchbase for salespeople or account executives, there's probably a landing page that sells them on it. And it says, hey, you can find people who've just raised money, et cetera.

• 1:02:48Jason Calacanis?

  And then there's VCs and then there's people at corporate development offices. So you work for corporate. Yeah. So finding new prospects.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Jason Calacanis?

  There's like literally a landing page for this customer.

• 1:02:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:59Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to guess, oh yeah, here we go, for prospecting, for investors, for.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Market research.

• 1:03:05Jason Calacanis?

  Market research.

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  Enriching your own database.

• 1:03:06Jason Calacanis?

  Enriching your database.

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  So it is exactly what you said.

• 1:03:09Jason Calacanis?

  So, you know, one of these is the ideal customer profile. And that would be the one that you go after first and you spend most of your time on. And then of course you go down the line, right? People, the ideal customer profile for Uber Black was, and for Uber at the early days, was a CEO or a VC, a finance person, somebody with a six figure salary who traveled. That was your ideal customer profile. You get the CEO VC who does two trips a month. They need to get picked up at the airport. Those are big ticket items. And you know, they're going to be driven to the airport, driven from the airport and their destination to their hotel, driven from their hotel back to the airport and from the airport at their home, back to their homes, four rides of 150 bucks each, $600 every month, $7,200 a year,

• 1:03:54Jason Calacanis?

  just for that one monthly travel. That doesn't count when they go to dinners and want to have a glass of wine. So that's another 50 of those, you know, so 100 rides there and those are $50 rides. So that's another, you know, you start to get into like, how much is that CEO worth?

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  A lot.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  Worth a lot, you know, they're, they're spending literally 2,000 a month. They're worth 25,000 a year minimum.

• 1:04:15Speaker 00

  That's a Prius. Sorry.

• 1:04:17Jason Calacanis?

  That's a Prius.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  I think everything now comes in Prius sized measurements.

• 1:04:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's 30, but yeah, it's close to a Prius. You're right. It's upwards of a Prius. So that's what you're doing with ideal customer profiles.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  We should. Talk about Founder Friday before we get out of here for today. We've got the Founder Friday bracket ready to go. We have 16 companies. So just to give everybody a little bit of background here, we're doing a Founder Friday city-based bracket March Madness competition. We had Founder Friday events happening all over in cities around the globe, not just America.

• 1:04:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  16 of these cities picked a winning startup from their community. Those 16 are now competing in the This Week in Startups.

• 1:04:57Jason Calacanis?

  Look at this.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  March Pitch Madness bracket. And I've got, I've got a little bit of info. I've got the log line for all 16 of these companies.

• 1:05:06Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, look at this. We have Houston, Boston, Austin, Quincy, New York, Philadelphia, Zurich.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Zurich versus Florianopolis, Brazil.

• 1:05:15Jason Calacanis?

  Brazil, Sydney, Arlington, Chicago, Denver.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Yerevan, Armenia.

• 1:05:21Jason Calacanis?

  Armenia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portsmouth.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  And Portsmouth, they're very excited in Portsmouth. I saw a few tweets from them today. They're, they're fired up.

• 1:05:30Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to see each of these pitches for two minutes on This Week in Startups? And then I pick the winner?

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  I've got, I've got all the videos. So if you want to watch the pitches on Friday's show, we absolutely can. I also have just like a very quick description of all the companies if you'd rather do it that way.

• 1:05:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think the way to do it is, these are two-minute pitches?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  We've got, not everyone said, we've got two-minute pitches from, I believe, 14 of the 16.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:05:54Jason Calacanis?

  So what we should do is on Friday's show, Monday's show, Wednesday's show, Friday's show, four shows, 16, we just have to do two brackets a show or something like that to get to the next round?

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Sure. We could, we could do two matchups per show and that would be, that would take us four, four episodes.

• 1:06:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So we do four matchups per show, two minutes each, four times two is eight minutes, eight minutes of duration. We do it in 15 minutes per show.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Why don't we have Lon and I?

• 1:06:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  Sign one of us, one of the two companies that's going up against each other. And then why don't we also help kind of pitch them and then Jason can kind of.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  But one issue with that is Monday and Wednesday show, I will not be here because I'm driving to.

• 1:06:34Jason Calacanis?

  That's okay, I can do it with Alex.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you too. I trust you two to do it in my style.

• 1:06:39Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, we could, we could also try to go faster. We could dedicate a half hour to it and do eight of them and just boom, get through it Monday, Wednesday, and then have the excitement for Friday or something. So why don't we start Monday?

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:06:51Jason Calacanis?

  Today's.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Today's Wednesday, so we'll take Friday off and then we'll start this Monday next week.

• 1:06:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we have Friday off. What do you mean we have Friday off?

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  No, I mean, we won't, we, we, we're doing a show on Friday. We won't do this bit on Friday.

• 1:07:04Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we could start on Friday, maybe, and we'll see how much we have. Let's get started.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Around. Yeah.

• 1:07:08Jason Calacanis?

  So let's start Friday. We'll just get started immediately. This is great fun. We could do this, you know, twice a year or whatever. All these companies, you get a great promotion. Go to founder, founderfridays.tech is our website. What is Founder Fridays? You get six founders around a table, no more than six. I'm locking this in. It has to be six going forward. And then you have to start a new pod. So you could have multiple pods, but I want a leader per pod. So let's just make sure we communicate this with Ray, who's managing with us and whoever, Matty and Corinne from our team, or I think are doing this as well. We want to lock it into six, always six.

• 1:07:48Jason Calacanis?

  We know that's what works because six people can go around the table and talk for 10 minutes about their startup, their wins and their losses, their wins and fails. That's the format of a Founder Friday. You can do it every Friday, you can do it every other Friday, but we're doing first Fridays is what we want you to commit to with six founders. You could start with two. The format is, it has to be this. You go around a table, you talk about your wins and your fails, one or two minutes for each. Then you have the remaining seven minutes in your 10 minute allotment for the other five people to give you feedback on your wins and your fails. I think the best way to do it is to go around the table, two minutes each, wins and fails, wins and fails, wins and fails. Everybody writes that.

• 1:08:27Jason Calacanis?

  Then anybody in the six, you go around the six again, they ask people and they give their best advice to the other five people. Pick one of them that you can give great advice to. So for example, Lon, let's say you had a startup and you had a fail. Give me a typical fail.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I, you know, we, our runway is down and I didn't let go of any people. So now I'm behind the eight ball.

• 1:08:52Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. You're running out of runway. Perfect. Let's say you have a fail. Alex, what would your fail be?

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  I did not properly manage my cybersecurity risk and I just leaked half my customers' information thanks to a leak AWS database thing.

• 1:09:06Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. Okay. So you got a cybersecurity issue, got a runway issue. Now I'm in year three as an entrepreneur. I got hacked and I had less runway. I say, after we go around the first 10 minutes, you know, one and a half, two minutes each, I say, you know what? I have a cybersecurity expert who helped me and we did, and I hired this crisis PR firm. Here's how we handled it. I'll put you in touch with them. You take out your laptop, you go do the intro right then and there. Boom. You've now taken something that's really hard for Alex. Then Lance says, I don't have a lot of runway. He said, well, how many employees you have? You have seven. Great. Why don't you put four of them onto an hourly basis for 10 hours a week each, starting next week, two weeks from now, you give them a little bit of runway and you tell them, hey, I can only keep you for 10 hours a week. Is that

• 1:09:48Jason Calacanis?

  okay? If not, I understand. And then you've extended your runway from two months now to seven, and now you have the time, you'll hit break even and then you can raise money. I did this. It's hard to do and you get that encouragement. That's what I'm looking to happen here. If you want to sponsor a pod as a lawyer accountant, cloud company, you go to the FounderFridays.tech site, you pick what city you want, you wind up on River. River is our platform we're using to do this. If you have a podcast or a community you want to build, I think somebody's going to, instead of taking a podcast and building a community about it, I think somebody's going to just start by building a community. I think somebody will be like, I want to create a community of vibe coders and they create a vibe coding

• 1:10:32Jason Calacanis?

  community on River. I'm not going to do this. I don't have time, but you know, ours is for founders who have existing companies. So start a Founder Friday chapter. It has to be six people, has to be one hour. You have to report back. The reward you get is you get to be on the program. So we're going to start having also cities come on the program every two weeks. And talk about their biggest lesson. So Lon, I think this should be a pre-produced package. They can either come online, or we can just have them do a video where they say, you know, hey, wanted to let you know, these were the three biggest challenges we had. And here's how we handled them. And we just play that video for a minute and then we respond to it, or they can just give it to us in text and we respond to it, or they can come on the show, have three founders come on the show. They explain their problems and how they solved

• 1:11:14Jason Calacanis?

  each other's problems. But I want to kind of, I want to know the top 1% of the audience. That's the goal of founders. More excitement to come.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  More excitement to come. I love a bracket. I have my, my college women's basketball bracket so filled in. So I'll do another one. Lon, thank you for putting this together.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And we really, I mean, we put a lot of thought into it. We, this bracket is seated. Like, we didn't put the numbers on it. We don't want to hurt any feelings, but we really thought out how this is organized to create the best competition.

• 1:11:42Jason Calacanis?

  Let's also put this in the docket, at the top of the docket, so people can see it this week in startups.com/docket. You can do the docket along with us. Also, Launch Accelerator's 34th cohort is starting in mid-April, and we're still taking applications. You can apply at launchaccelerator.co. Launchaccelerator.co. It's going to be in the notes. How does it work? Just like Y Combinator, Techstars, or any other accelerator, we give you 125K. We work with you for 14 weeks. We introduce you to hundreds of investors. We help you with your pitch. We help you with your growth. We tell you how startups are made. You get exposure to a bunch of speakers, and hopefully, you raise money. Of the people who want to raise

• 1:12:21Jason Calacanis?

  money, 60, 70, 80% of people who intend to raise money, raise money within, in the accelerator or within like six months of graduating. So we have an incredible hit rate of people being able to raise money because we accept people who are kind of trending that way. 5K a month in revenue, 25K a month in revenue, product in market, product market fit, heavy, light, somewhere between those two. And then we help you grow it. We introduce you to founders. We have something called the Whisper Network, which is a database we created where you, as a founder, can come in and say, I would like an introduction to this person, or I want to sort the database by investors who invest in consumer products versus SaaS, or SaaS

• 1:13:02Jason Calacanis?

  versus consumer or marketplaces. You click who you want an intro to, and we automatically send those, and we track how we're doing that. I was inspired by Alexis Ohanian, who created Cerebro, where he tracks all the work he does for his startups. Now, we don't track every tweet we do, whatever, but we're just tracking how many intros we can do for you. We probably do on average for each of these accelerator companies 100 or 200 intros. These are warm intros. They turn into meetings often, and then sometimes meetings, if you've got a compelling product, will turn into investment. Our mission is to support founders and inspire innovation. Thank you, Lon. Thank you, Alex. Follow LonS on Twitter. Follow Alex. And unfortunately, I have one more character.

• 1:13:46Jason Calacanis?

  20%, 25% less efficient than my guys here. I'm Matt Jason.

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  How dare you. I'd blame your parents.

• 1:13:53Jason Calacanis?

  Disappointing.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Should've been named Bob.

• 1:13:56Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, we will see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  Bye.