Drones, Design, and Digital Espionage | E2128

Today's show: Jason and Lon explore the wild edges of tech innovation and regulation — from a student-built acoustic weapon that takes down drones (without harming humans) to the legal gray areas of drone defense over private property. They also unpack the escalating espionage drama between Rippling and Deel, and dive into FireCrawl's viral move to hire AI agents as employees. Plus, a deep look at how world-class design and systems thinking can set startups apart. Packed with insights, laughs, and cutting-edge ideas across defense tech, AI, and startup strategy. Timestamps: (0:00) Episode Teaser(1:39) Intro and Jason and Lon share their love of Andor(6:52) How to spot "World Class Design" and why it matters(10:27) NetSuite - Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(15:50) Athena, Hillstone, and creating the right system(20:00) Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(23:21) So... corporate espionage is BAD? is what you're saying?(30:14) Gemini Canvas - It uses AI to help you write, code, and create in one interactive space. Try it at gemini.google.com/canvas.(32:11) Why Firecrawl is hiring AI agents for staff positions(38:28) Bluesky might not be falling after all?(44:39) How Prandtl Dynamics is shooting drones out of the sky 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 Links from episode: Prandtl: https://prandtldynamics.com/ 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: (10:27) NetSuite - Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist (20:00) Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (30:14) Gemini Canvas - It uses AI to help you write, code, and create in one interactive space. Try it at gemini.google.com/canvas. 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?

  I'm gonna need some counsel here. If somebody flies over my ranch.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  It's your ranch?

• 0:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's my ranch. Can I take him out? Because I think Texas law might be different.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 0:10Jason Calacanis?

  What have you found out so far? Because obviously, this is a moving target, so to speak.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  Definitely, definitely. And Texas has probably the most different laws as the rest of the United States. For the most part, you're not supposed to mess with the internal functions or the flying of unmanned air vehicles. Because you classify UAS or drones the same way you classify aircraft. So think of it as shooting down a Cessna. That's how the law currently sees it.

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  I can't do that. If it's flying lower over the ranch, if it's doing a flyby.

• 0:47Speaker 03

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by NetSuite. The number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform. Giving you one source of truth. Download the CFO's Guide to AI Machine Learning for free at netsuite.com/twist. Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. And? Google Gemini. Unlock the power of AI with Google Gemini. Experience the next generation of artificial intelligence.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Gemini, Google's most capable AI model, is designed to transform the way you work, create, and innovate. Try it at gemini.google.com/canvas.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me, my co-host, Lahn Harris. Alex Wilhelm has the day off today. We're gonna get right into the news. Tons of things going on. There's more updates on this crazy deal versus Rippling espionage story. Anthropics getting to ASL-3. There's a new app for whistleblowers. What else we got on the docket today?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Oh, there's so much. Yeah, I want to talk about Flowith. They're calling it the first infinite AI agent. That sounds interesting. There's a company, a YC company called Firecrawl. They're hiring AI agents. They have a job posting up for three AI agents that they want to hire. There's Blue Sky News. We got to talk about 23 and me got bought. Plus, we've got Parth from Prantel coming in for office hours. It's a packed show.

• 2:25Jason Calacanis?

  I was driving here in my new Corvette that GM lent me a Corvette for a couple of weeks.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  How nice of them.

• 2:31Jason Calacanis?

  Nice to be an influencer. But, you know, I've always been a Corvette lover. So I was driving this incredible E-Ray, which is like their hybrid Corvette. They have a little battery in it. Makes it sort of powerful. So here I am, you know, going down. I don't know if I was on Fifth or Sixth Street, whatever. I'm going down here in Austin, downtown Austin. And look what happens. Looky here. I'm sitting there at the traffic light and I see a little R2-D2 go by.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  There's a little guy, yeah.

• 2:58Jason Calacanis?

  I don't, which brand is that one? I can't see from here.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  AV Ride, it said on the side.

• 3:02Jason Calacanis?

  AV Ride. And look, it gets to the corner and it's like, gotta make a little decision here. But your burritos, your tacos, they're coming.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  They're coming.

• 3:10Jason Calacanis?

  They're coming with that robot.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  They're on their way.

• 3:11Jason Calacanis?

  I think they're in LA everywhere, yeah.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all over Hollywood. You walk around Hollywood Boulevard and there's always one of these scooching by you on this way to bring somebody.

• 3:19Jason Calacanis?

  I have a punch up for this. They gotta teach these things how to go up and down elevators. That's so obvious, the next step. But think about how much work that will be for that company. So when you talk about how much work is left to do from, for door to door.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 3:35Jason Calacanis?

  What I want is that to go to your WeWork and not be downstairs, but to go right up to your hotel room, go right up to your floor and wait for you in the lobby. These things are incredible.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that is, but you, it's interesting, every task like that that you add, the layers of complexity. Like, you have to teach the robot not just how to get on an elevator, how to like get to the right floor, how to figure out when you're at the right floor.

• 4:00Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  You know, like, if you, if it stops on three, but you're not bringing the burrito, you're bringing the burrito to a guy on five, it has to know, don't get off on three.

• 4:08Jason Calacanis?

  For right now, it's obviously going to be the lobby.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:12Jason Calacanis?

  But I'm just thinking, like, what's next? Is this thing tapping on your door?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:17Jason Calacanis?

  Is going to be pretty amazing on an R2-D2 basis. I'm sure you finished Andor.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Oh, of course.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  I mean.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  Finished that.

• 4:25Jason Calacanis?

  We, because Lon is just such an oracle of this, doing the Inside Streaming Newsletter. Is that not like the best Star Wars ever created?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I think it is. I think it might actually be the best Star. At least since, I feel like Last Jedi I really liked a lot. Uh, it's definitely the best since then, but it might even be going back to like original trilogy.

• 4:43Jason Calacanis?

  Empire Strikes Back level.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  It might be as good as Empire and Return of the Jedi.

• 4:46Jason Calacanis?

  So, so good. I just wanna thank them for creating it.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Here's what I was saying.

• 4:51Jason Calacanis?

  Finished it last night.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  One thing they did that I didn't even think about at first, it's so good, is it goes, it sort of retcons the Death Star and it makes it the Emperor's plan all along.

• 5:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Even when he was Senator Palpatine, when he was first drawing all these things together, it was always about creating the Death Star, which makes Return of the Jedi better. Cause in Return of the Jedi, it's like, oh, they're building another Death Star. Okay. It feels repetitive. But when you go back with the insight of Andor, you're like, well, of course he would try to do it again.

• 5:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  He'd been leading up to this for years. The whole energy project was to Death Star.

• 5:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and, and it's really interesting that they're filling in the timeline, so it's 17 years, I think, is when he takes over as Palpatine. It's like 10 to 17 years before the Battle, BBY, the Battle of, before the Battle of Yavin.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yavin.

• 5:36Jason Calacanis?

  And then it's after the Battle of Yavin. So they're really trying to educate the audience on all of this.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, here's the timeline around the major events of, of the original Star Wars.

• 5:46Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible character and literally not a lightsaber in the series.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  No. At the very end, one of the last lines is Benjamin Bratt, as Bail Organa tells him, "May the Force be with you."

• 5:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  And I think it's the first time they've mentioned the Force in like.

• 6:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, which, which that's like such a brilliant masterstroke is just the patience with the series to not go for what would have been easy layups for them. There's no Darth Vader, spoiler alert, no Palpatine. I thought for sure, you know, when that one, uh, so there's a couple spoilers here. When that one. Uh, ISB guy kills himself.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Part of gas.

• 6:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, when he kills himself at the end, when they said they're ready for you.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 6:29Jason Calacanis?

  I was absolutely hoping that he would have to face Palpatine and Vader.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Oh, sure, or some, yeah, I feel like the temptation to put the emperor in there, even just in one, like a Zoom call where the emperor is.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  It was, they should have, right? But I guess restraint is great.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Tony Gilroy said he purposely didn't want to do that. He wanted Krennic to be like the big bad of the show. And, you know, he's the ultimate authority.

• 6:50Jason Calacanis?

  Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is, I just want to shout out to designers everywhere. I just love great design. One of the great things you can do for your startup, and one of the 13 reasons we have to invest in a startup, we have this like secret playbook that you're now privy to. One of the 13 qualities we look for is world-class design. World-class design, you know, when I first told everybody, look for world-class design, they kept checking off this box. My researchers, my analysts, who were looking at the incoming pitches for startups for us to invest in. And I said, that's not world-class design. So I said, please tell us how to define world-class design. I said, well, you know it when you see it. It still wasn't enough, right?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:26Jason Calacanis?

  So I have to like take what's in my brain and put it into a team of 11 investment team members. So I said, if Apple would feature that app at a keynote and Steve Jobs would tweet it or Steve Jobs would introduce the person, that's world-class design.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:40Jason Calacanis?

  Right? So com.com was app of the year. Other apps get featured. Apple doesn't feature it unless it's great. And I saw this guy, Mark Hemian.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Hemian.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  Hemian, who you know.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  LA tech guy.

• 7:51Jason Calacanis?

  LA tech guy. And he did this great thing where he took the Airbnb icons but made them in Dieter Rams style, who is the German industrial designer.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah, I got it.

• 8:01Jason Calacanis?

  And let's just show this on the screen here. These are all the Airbnb designs. We didn't cover it, but last week Airbnb took a second swing at experiences. So when you're at an Airbnb, you're in your city, they want to kind of be the. Everything app. So we now have multiple people going after the everything app and they just took some icons and put it here. If you don't know that style, look at this because they're doing something I guess called detailed 3D isometric icons.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I pulled up he like this is look at this prompt that he used to generate these. It's huge.

• 8:35Jason Calacanis?

  A highly detailed 3D isometric icon of a insert object inspired by Dieter Rams Braun design style Airbnb 2024 icon language mini miniature diorama emoji like objects with crisp edges realistic textures and soft handcrafted realism material a mix of matte plastic brushed aluminum ceramic or leather depending on the original object view three quarter front left isometric view with a slight top down angle lighting soft neutral studio lighting from the top left with double shadows.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Still going.

• 9:02Jason Calacanis?

  Still going and I just read you the first half.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Now, what I think is so fascinating, I used to play around a lot in the early, early days of generative AI when it was first becoming viral. Stable diffusion was like the first app I played around with and people used to use all of these very subjective terms in their prompts. They'd be like cinema quality, high definition, beautiful angles, picturesque imagery. And I think what we've learned over the years of working on prompts and what people have gotten so much more sophisticated at, it doesn't need any of the flowery language. A computer doesn't know what to do with that. But the more details like this that you can add, specific, actual, physical details like brushed aluminum, front left isometric view with a slight top down angle, like if you give the computer specifics, it knows exactly what you want.

• 9:49Jason Calacanis?

  Prompts do still matter and asking the LLM, how would you do this prompt might be helpful. Design matters. Steve Jobs was obsessed with design. If you do world-class design like this that you're seeing here, you will get 30% more investor meetings. 30%. And I think you'll get taken 100% more seriously by your customers. So is it worth it to spend money on design? Well, if you don't have the money, of course not. But we're moving into a world where you can constantly iterate on your design to make it better and better and better because of these language models, because of the tools.

• 10:28Jason Calacanis?

  Doing business and making deals would be a lot simpler if you had a crystal ball, obviously. Hey, if you've got a future prediction startup, contact me. I'm going to write you a check. You're coming to my accelerator. But until then, one way to future-proof your business is with our amazing partner NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one ERP tool on the market today, and it's trusted by over 40,000 businesses for a reason. But you might be asking, what does NetSuite do? Okay, you're at a startup. Maybe you wonder, who is this NetSuite I keep hearing about? Well, it's going to take all your accounting, inventory, financial management, and HR, and put it into one easy-to-use platform, one source of truth, one resource to check for anything you need to know about your business. That's going to give you real-time insights and

• 11:12Jason Calacanis?

  allow you to forecast with the visibility and control you need to make great decisions. It's like being a fighter pilot. You've got all those important instruments right at your fingertips, so you can go fast, beat the competition, and grow your business. So NetSuite is going to help you have all that reliable information when you need it. Founders, you're going to need to know about it. And a great first step is to get the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. So, speaking of opportunities, go ahead and download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com/twist. The guide is free for you at netsuite.com/twist. That's netsuite.com/twist. Maybe you could pick, pull up a couple of the inspirations that Steve Jobs had.

• 11:56Jason Calacanis?

  I put a couple in the Slack room for you there, if you could open one or two of them. And, you know, Steve Jobs, obviously, really cared about design, but he also wasn't too proud to be inspired by it. So what you see on the left here, if you don't know Dieter Rams, is this German designer. On the left, I think, is a radio?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Braun transistor 3.

• 12:17Jason Calacanis?

  Radio?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:18Jason Calacanis?

  It's a radio. You look on the right, it's the iPod. You guys seeing a pattern here? Like, Steve Jobs was very much inspired by his design. Show the next one where you can see like, yeah, this one, if you make it bigger. Here we go. Go Command++ maybe?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 12:35Jason Calacanis?

  No problem. We can edit it and post. Okay, good. So here, you're looking at that, right? The Braun Pocket Radio 58, Apple iPod 2001. Give us a couple of the other ones we're seeing here.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  This is the Braun T1000 radio, that's from 1967, and obviously on the right, the PowerMac G5, your desk, your tower.

• 12:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the tower, and look at that, he's got that almost exact.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:58Jason Calacanis?

  Now, what's this on the left here?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  This is the Braun LE1 speaker from 1959, and you can see how similar it is to that iMac generation.

• 13:07Jason Calacanis?

  Forty-eight years later, that's almost 50 years later, let that sink in for a second. Design can be timeless, and simplicity is elegantly simple, is I think one of the concepts. Steve Jobs won Designs, Design Awards, was considered the tip of the spear in design for many decades.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Did you see The Brutalist, that movie? This reminds me of a lot of that Bauhaus sort of style as well, which was also German.

• 13:34Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, and my point here is, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. What's the last two? It's worth looking at.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  This one is a T1000 radio from 67, and then again, the full case, if you look at a PowerMac, Mac Pro from the early aughts. And then this last one is, on the left, we've got a Braun calculator from 77, and on the right, Apple's calculator app from 2007.

• 13:59Jason Calacanis?

  Which is an exact copy.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  It's an exact, yeah.

• 14:01Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's literally exact, down to the yellow button.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Made it a Braun calculator in your iPhone.

• 14:06Jason Calacanis?

  And the point here is, immature artist, copy, mature artist, steal. You can just, with your startup and your design, be inspired by designs that happened before you, adapt them, and get all that credit, and build on the legacy of other designers, I think it's fair game.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:23Jason Calacanis?

  If you're upfront about it, and you give a little bit of credit, and a nod, you don't want to just steal for stealing's sake. And when people, when you're, I find design is very intimidating for people. Here's what you do with design, you just say, who are the designers who inspired X, Y, and Z? So find some things you like in the world, say, which designers are related to these designs I like, ask an LLM, and then go find some books, buy a couple of books, put them on your shelf, and when you're not in front of your computer or your device, just... Take them in and then think about your startup and how you're designing your product to make it better, your logo, your website, how your interface works. This is one of the things that made Superhuman do so well.

• 15:03Jason Calacanis?

  Superhuman has a very constrained, awesome design, and that made that startup really appeal to investors, employees, and of course, customers most of all. Another thing I want to talk about is I got an email this weekend from Athena. Everybody knows Athena provides those assistants. I'm an investor in the company. I have two Athena assistants. They're assistants from typically the Philippines who work for you and are just super dedicated and make you more efficient. They have a newsletter. I don't know how to sign up for it, but anyway, you can look for the Athena newsletter. It's on Beehive, I think.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  It is on Beehive.

• 15:41Jason Calacanis?

  So do a search for it. And you can go to athenawow.com if you want to get a couple of weeks for free. But they did this really interesting summary. And what they do in this newsletter is they talk about people who are efficient and how to be more efficient in your life, how to get more done with less. And they talked about Hillstone's only choice system. David Chang calls their French dip haunting. Danny Meyer confidently orders the usual without glancing on the menu.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Haunting?

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  Haunting.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  That's a good French dip if it's haunting.

• 16:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I want a haunting French dip. I want to be haunted by French dip.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I'd like to be haunted by my French dip.

• 16:18Jason Calacanis?

  They're talking about Hillstone, one of America's most consistently extroverted. What is Hillstone's secret? Meticulously designed systems that completely remove friction. I saw that sentence and I said, this is what I talk about all the time, right? You want to remove friction in your startup. You want to make things go faster and easier, and you want systems over goals. You want to create systems over goals. And so I'm always trying to do this in our business when we sort for founders, we look for them, create systems that remove friction, get us closer to founders, and get us supporting them and figuring out what they need, right? And you're seeing that firsthand because you're also working on the investment side of the business. Hillstone founder George Beal famously drills every table into the floor so the tables never wobble.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Good idea.

• 17:05Jason Calacanis?

  It's like such a simple, great idea, but how many times you been in a restaurant? It happens like one out of five times, right? It's like a 20% problem.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we recently, I won't shout out and shame the restaurant because I love the restaurant, but we recently went to a very nice, kind of fancy place in Austin. It was Uche. And they sat us at a high, weird, wobbly table. And we had to go ask for a second table.

• 17:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we were that, we were those guys.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  It was that, well, because it was, it was weirdly wobbly.

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  And it felt like they added that table to a well-designed room to just add a six-top?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 17:38Jason Calacanis?

  And it was so weird.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  I love Uche, I wasn't gonna call out.

• 17:41Jason Calacanis?

  Uche was the greatest, I'm going there tonight, actually. The table was one-third higher than all the other tables.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  It was a little bit of a weird, awkward table.

• 17:50Jason Calacanis?

  One-third higher.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  It stuck out to me all this time in my mind.

• 17:53Jason Calacanis?

  And the chairs were also like a different level of height.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were a little bit above everybody around us.

• 17:59Jason Calacanis?

  But basically, our food would have been at our belly height.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:04Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. So we would have been like these giant NBA players.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  It's what it felt like, it felt like when Patrick Ewing goes to a diner.

• 18:13Jason Calacanis?

  It was just crazy. Shout out Patrick Ewing.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Shout out to Patrick.

• 18:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so that's one tip, right? So he said, and I went to their website, if you go to their website, look at their rules on their website, because they have a rule that they only do like four tops, and they don't allow kids, but if you do bring kids, like they'll admonish you that if they're crying to get out of there, and they don't do big parties. That's another one of the things. Every, and I'll read some here from this, "Every table is a booth, each equipped with its own spotlight, eliminating guest work around seating and lighting." So this is also another issue, right? Because everything's a booth, you know what everybody wants when they go to a restaurant? What do they ask for?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  The booth.

• 18:50Jason Calacanis?

  They ask for the booth. Yeah. You get a booth. That's it.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  You want the booth.

• 18:55Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody wants a booth, right?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Booth is the ultimate restaurant move.

• 19:00Jason Calacanis?

  So the booth is bolted, it's a default. On their website, they talk about like their rules around dining and, um, did you find that page on their website, Hillstone? If you look on the Hillstone website, you'll find this.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  I'm checking it out now.

• 19:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah, go take a look. The Hillstone has like on their website their rules around, and dress code. Then servers handle exactly three tables, never four, because the restaurant layout itself enforces this rule. So they lay out the restaurant in little pods. You have three each. So this was like really informing some of my thinking around our ratio of number of founders to, you know, an investment team professional.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Right, I found.

• 19:37Jason Calacanis?

  While other restaurants pile tasks on managers to fixing, Hillstone builds systems that prevent problems from existing. And so this is something that's a really important point. Excellence doesn't rely on oversight, but on systems designed to make the right choice the only choice. The right choice is the only choice.

• 20:00Jason Calacanis?

  Founders, if you're serious about raising money, you need to set up your business the right way. Tight is right, and it all starts with having a registered agent. Investors simply won't fund your business if it isn't structured correctly. Before a VC can wire you the first dollar, they're going to check, is your company incorporated? Is it in good standing and compliant? Missing a filing or losing your status, I mean, it's just going to be a deal breaker for the VC. It's like you're not taking things seriously. And that's what happens during due diligence. That's when a VC makes sure they're not making a mistake by giving you investment dollars. And hey, angels do this as well. And that's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. For just $39 plus state fees, they act as

• 20:43Jason Calacanis?

  your registered agent. They handle all the paperwork, they keep you compliant, and they make sure investors see you as a serious business that's worth funding. In just 10 clicks in 10 minutes, your business is officially set up and investor ready. Northwest handles filings, they protect your privacy, and they ensure that you never miss a deadline. These are the chores that you don't want to have to deal with. You need a partner, and Northwest Registered Agent is that partner. Thousands of founders trust Northwest because they keep businesses in good standing. And with their expert corporate guides, you get real support. You don't get bots, you get real people on the phone. So here's your call to action. Very simple, easy peasy lemon squeezy. Don't let bad paperwork cost you

• 21:26Jason Calacanis?

  your next funding. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist and get your business investor ready today. For just $39 plus state fees, you can set up your company the right way, fast, private, and compliant. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today.

• 21:45Jason Calacanis?

  One of the systems here at our investment is we want multiple co-founders.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:50Jason Calacanis?

  That is a system-level decision that we have decided. We want people who are going after the English-speaking market, and we want people who are incorporated in the United States. Why? But we don't have people who speak Japanese, so it's hard. And we don't understand the Japanese law around investing in startups. That would take another 10 people to set up a Japanese office. So we'll leave Japanese investing to the Japanese investors. We focus on that. We focus on early stages. People want us to invest in 25, 50, 100 million dollar rounds all the time. We say, no, no, we want to focus on our programs. So make a good system choice, and then you don't have to have as much management. This is why I created, like, here are the 13 qualities we look for in a startup.

• 22:32Jason Calacanis?

  If they have two, three, or four of them, let's go ahead and meet the company. And then I made a systems choice. If, when we do the 25K check, which we offer people a $25,000 check to incorporate their company at Found University, I just said, if any one team member wants to do it, and they write up a review of the company, and two other team members give an answer, which could be no, the system is, you can still make the 25K investment. So we never are going to have a situation where somebody wanted to make a 25K investment and didn't because there was some debate. The rule is, one person wants to do it, who cares? 25K investment. Worst-case scenario is they lose the bet and they learn something. Best-case scenario is they make a crazy bet on an Uber,

• 23:17Jason Calacanis?

  or a Robinhood, or a DoorDash, something that doesn't seem possible. Let's get into the news here. I think, for me, the corporate espionage stuff is incredible. T up the corporate espionage.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  All right, so everybody bear in mind Rippling and Deal. They are two sort of HR, payroll, fintech kind of companies. They help small businesses and startups to handle and manage and pay their teams. Rippling has sued Deal alleging that their rivals stole trade secrets, conducted tortious interferers, and unfair competitive practices. Basically, they're saying a Deal employee

• 23:55Speaker 01

  covertly worked at Rippling and passed Rippling data over back to Deal. Deal has countersued. They argue Rippling was also attempting to spy on them. So, all of this is going on in Ireland courts right now. Deal filed a new motion asking for Rippling to hand over more behind the scenes information about hiring. I'll try to make it as simple as I can what's going on. So, all of these allegations center around a former Rippling staffer named Keith O'Brien. He has admitted in legal documents to being a spy for Deal. So, he was working for Deal, then worked for Rippling, passed Rippling's secrets back over to Deal.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  According to Deal, Rippling fired Keith O'Brien, paid him a termination fee, then rehired him, and has agreed to help him with his legal expenses relating to the Rippling versus Deal saga. So, Deal is saying, "That's very unusual." It's very unusual for a company to fire someone for cause and then rehire them during a legal proceeding and help them pay some of their legal fees. So, what Deal wants now is for Rippling to turn over all employee agreements with Keith O'Brien unredacted, so they can figure out what's going on with this guy and why he was hired and fired and rehired.

• 25:17Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. This is like that Robert Hanson guy, the FBI agent back in the day who worked for the Russians or something like that.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, like it's a little bit like that, yeah.

• 25:26Jason Calacanis?

  They keep flipping.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  He said, "These guys are, yeah, are they double agents?" Or now it seems to be, "Are they triple agents?"

• 25:32Jason Calacanis?

  So, O'Brien was working at Rippling. Deal got him to flip, stayed at Rippling, then...

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 25:42Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe, and then he got fired by Rippling. They terminated him, and then Rippling was like, "You know what? We probably should keep this guy on staff."

• 25:49Speaker 01

  That's what it sounds like. It sounds like they're like, "Let's keep this guy happy. Let's pay him some kind of salary. Let's help him out with his legal fees." It's all speculation. We have no idea what this guy was really up to.

• 25:59Jason Calacanis?

  This is really dumb. If you really want to understand what you're... I'll tell you how corporate espionage works in the real world and startups without actually having a spy. You literally don't need to do that.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  This is literal espionage. Like, we have an inside man in the other company passing us information.

• 26:18Jason Calacanis?

  If you interview people who work for a company, let's say you were to... Gosh, let me really make sure I do this deftly here. I would never be involved in anything like this. I just want to be totally clear. But I have heard stories because I've been around for a long time. Let's say, pick a company. Any company that has like, it's on top of its game and you want to get information for them.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Google.

• 26:43Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. Okay, so you want to understand how Google's ad network works.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do.

• 26:48Jason Calacanis?

  You're Facebook.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I very much do.

• 26:51Jason Calacanis?

  Facebook's like a new startup. You go find people on the LinkedIn or, you know, whatever, who worked at Google.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:59Jason Calacanis?

  You put out an ad. You look at people who worked in Google's ad network on optimization, client, whatever. And you figure out what they got paid. You put out an ad. You hire an agency, like a recruiting agency.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 27:16Jason Calacanis?

  To put out an ad that doesn't have Facebook on it. You tell them, "We want you to ask all these questions, record the call perhaps." And then have five or six people from that company target them with the ads for the job. You put the job out for $450,000 base and $1 million in total comp for ads for, you know, RSUs. You know, make it so that they can't not take the interview. You have no intention of hiring them.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Right. You're just pumping them for info.

• 27:49Jason Calacanis?

  Pumping for information. They sit in a meeting. You get to the third, fourth, fifth question, "Hey, so what are you working on?"

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:54Jason Calacanis?

  "Tell me about that." I mean, they're talking to a recruiter. The recruiter then meets them for lunch, talks about stuff, and then they just dump all that information back to their client who hired them on retainer to do this.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:06Jason Calacanis?

  So they don't even need a success fee.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  And then, when you, when you work for a tech company, when you're interviewing with other tech companies, that seems totally normal. That's what the interview process is sort of like anyway. You're, you know, you've got to talk about what you've been working on. What are some of the biggest challenges you face? What are some of the projects you've managed? Or I've been in interviews like that. I don't, never for untoward reasons, but it wouldn't seem that strange.

• 28:30Jason Calacanis?

  And then there are these information networks. I don't know if you know about those. So there are information networks. There are expert networks. Expert networks, let me just pull up like an example of this. But there are expert networks and there was an SEC investigation of these. So...

• 28:51Jason Calacanis?

  Expert networks were set up to pay people who worked inside of corporations to anonymously get paid to give information to researchers. Okay, sounds interesting. So people work at Walmart.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:09Jason Calacanis?

  They get asked to do, and they get paid $1,000 for an hour, $5,000 to talk to an analyst who just asked them questions about the market. Now, these people think, well, I'm just an expert, I'm getting paid for my expertise. But it's actually somebody who's trading or competing against Walmart or Target. So it's either Target going after Walmart, Walmart going after Target. But this being presented as like, we're not going to get what's called material non-public information, MNPI. But people are doing it explicitly to make the trade. So if you watch the TV show Billions, like, they're using all kinds of ways to get inside information from companies.

• 29:52Jason Calacanis?

  These expert networks became the ultimate, you know, way to do this. And so you can look up expert networks, that's how people do this. And there are ways that they enforce compliance in these things, but most companies now say, if you do this, it's actionable. You cannot participate in these.

• 30:15Jason Calacanis?

  So many companies are developing powerful new AI apps that are going to radically improve your productivity, but Google has been off to the races. They got a new product, it's called Canvas, and this platform comes with Gemini 2.5 Pro model baked in. It's vibe code ready, ideal for control freaks like me, who have ideas and want to see what they'd look like in practice right away. So you can go from a rough concept to an image, or even a functioning website, in just minutes with a few prompts. You know how like you build a website for a project you're working on, you don't touch it for three years? I want you right now to go use Canvas in Gemini 2.5 Pro, and I want you to go, say, make this website better, here's my goals. We're talking about rich, robust, fully functioning prototypes near instantly.

• 30:59Jason Calacanis?

  Gemini Canvas is reinventing front-end development. So if you've got some ideas and you want to turn them into documents, code, or prototypes right now, get your vibe code on Gemini Canvas with the Gemini 2.5 Pro model. Visit gemini.com/canvas to see for yourself.

• 31:18Jason Calacanis?

  So that's how it actually works.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  We don't know how much of this is true, but these are just the allegations.

• 31:23Jason Calacanis?

  Also, you could just use a product. Like, if you have a customer, if you're Rippling or Deal or, I don't know, ADP, whatever company competes against each other, you could just talk to one of your customers who previously used them and tell them, "Hey, what did you like about the system? What didn't you like?"

• 31:40Speaker 01

  This was my thought upon reading. Like, I have a former, I've used both Rippling and Deal. They're very similar. And I couldn't even tell you what technology they're trying to steal from the other one. It seems like it's pretty straightforward from a techno, not a knock on either of them. They're fine at what they do. But what's the high-tech thing that they're doing? They're just keeping track of everybody's payroll. It doesn't really seem like that convoluted or like cutting-edge to me.

• 32:08Jason Calacanis?

  None of it makes sense. Okay. Tell me about this, I guess maybe the startup that wants to hire AI agents?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Oh, I loved this. Yeah, we gotta talk about this. So Firecrawl is a Y Combinator-backed startup. They are a scraping tool that gathers data from around the web to train LLMs. That sounds scummy, but they're actually trying, their whole bit is they're trying to do it with clear ground rules, with guardrails. They're trying to responsibly scrape the web. So like a lot of their customers are enterprises that are scraping their own web data for AI training, and then a lot of the other sites they work with are opt-in. So companies that want to have their data scraped to help train AI. They honor the robot.tech settings. They only scrape websites. So it's a lot of like more responsible. That's their company. So they've put up three job board postings.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  They are exclusively looking to hire AI agents. They've set a $1 million budget to fill three positions. So far, there are about 50 applicants. They want AI agent employees, I'm doing air quotes for those of you listening, they want AI agent employees to autonomously create SEO-friendly blog posts and tutorials for their website. So it's like, imagine a content farm, but instead of humans doing the content farming, it would just be AI agents. But the extra wrinkle would be the AI agents watch the engagement metrics and then tweak their own blog posts based on what's getting performance. So they're basically SEO consultants, but AI.

• 33:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. This is stunt?

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 33:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's a stunt, obviously, because they're putting this out here to get people who are interested in AI agents to talk about this in the media.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  They know dopes like me are gonna talk about it on our podcast.

• 33:52Jason Calacanis?

  But, anyway, well done. And I put the link in here, pull it up if you will. Content creation agent, AI agents only, San Francisco, California, remote US, any, new grads, okay, junior software, and I guess this is the job board for Y Combinator has a job board?

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yes, this is the Y Combinator job board.

• 34:12Jason Calacanis?

  I just want to point out that they're also looking for a founding engineer for 150K to 250, a head of customer support engineering, 200K to 300K, with the amount of equity, creator and community lead, et cetera, et cetera, founding AI engineer. But if you look at the top three, no equity, no point three basis, point seven, point seven.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Well, why would you give equity to an AI agent?

• 34:37Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the AI agents are gonna need a union, apparently, but look at the salary for the content creation agent.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, 5K to 25K, I'm not taking it.

• 34:46Jason Calacanis?

  You're not taking it?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Not taking the 5K job.

• 34:49Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what if you created the prompt and you just ran it and checked on it every day for 15 minutes?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, obviously, that's the idea. If you are one of the guys who invents the AI agent, it's passive income for you, your job is done.

• 35:03Jason Calacanis?

  I'll be honest, if somebody could make me an AI agent that read all the news stories that were related to what we're doing here, and summarized it all, and, okay, but if you could hire them, and they were 500 bucks a month, would you come to me and say, hey, for but 20 bucks a day, I could eliminate an hour of work and put an hour into other work?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  I will say, if we could have an AI agent put the entire docket together, even to a point that I could spend an extra 30 minutes to an hour cleaning it up and fixing it, that would be pretty amazing.

• 35:39Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so somebody make, this is what I want somebody to make, make an agent. For us, that reads Hacker News, Reddit, you know, some choice Twitter handles, tech meme, everything else. And just say, like, based on what we've talked about on the docket previously, what should we have in the docket now? Make suggestions. And then just have it, give us a thumbs up, thumbs down if we like it. Or we rate it. And then get better.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  That's the biggest, based on my use of AI tools, I feel like that would be the big. Everything beyond story selection, I already feel like an AI could basically do.

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  It's the it's the picking the stories, just the stories we're gonna like and not just picking any startup news. Like, that's where AI tends to struggle, in my experience.

• 36:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe somebody on our team knows how to do this and they can start building these agents. I, I, I need some agents to get going here. I got, I got a lot of ideas for agents here. That would give us the ability to do more work and you know, we, we talked about static team size as a trend. I'm putting some of my trend stuff together because I'm doing my, every year I do a keynote at a KPMG in the summer. Maybe the second year I'm doing it where I go through my trend report.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:47Jason Calacanis?

  And I did it last year. I gotta look at my trends from last year, but static team size is one I talked about. And boy, has that one

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, yeah.

• 36:53Jason Calacanis?

  Come to manifest itself.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Lots of people talk about it.

• 36:57Jason Calacanis?

  I, I estimate with these agents, we're gonna see the five to 10% faster that everybody gets at their job using AI first, go to 10 to 20. I think the agents, because none of us here are using agents. We know about agents, but none of us are building agents on a daily basis.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 37:12Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I might have one or two people on the team who are doing one.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like Lucas is starting to play around with some of these agents.

• 37:19Jason Calacanis?

  But it's not getting to everybody in the organization. We have to figure out how to get everybody to be able to make agents quickly and to maintain them, because it's not just about creating them one time, it's about the reinforcement.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Using them and, and making them better by reinforcing from using them.

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:36Jason Calacanis?

  So anyway, I think it's a great story. I, I give a shout out to this team just for being Precocious enough to understand what's in the zeitgeist.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  I mean, it is. It is worth talking about just from a one thing that we talk about in Founder University and with these companies all the time, early-stage companies. They're all looking for, how do I get the word out? How do I virally market what I'm doing? How do I get people interested?

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Earned media.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  And yeah, like, and so this is a great example of, I think, you know, use, lean on what you know reporters like to talk about and media people like to talk about it. People losing their jobs to AI, is AI gonna take my job? That's a huge topic right now. If you can come up with a way to interact with that story, even in kind of a silly way, people will talk about it.

• 38:21Jason Calacanis?

  Let's talk about, speaking of socialists, Blue Sky falling. I think this is actually a good story for Blue Sky.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Oh, there's, there's kind of two stories for Blue Sky. Uh, so, uh, the big one, the news item today is that, uh, during NBA playoff games, Blue Sky posts skeets, as they're called on the site.

• 38:39Jason Calacanis?

  What? They call them skeets?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, they let the users, they let Blue Sky users vote on what should posts be called, and they voted skeets. Uh, so yes, Blue Sky skeets from the official NBA account during, while playoff games are on, NBA, uh, posts will be marked with a red border and they'll have live on them. And if you click on the NBA icon, it'll take you directly to where the game is streaming or the NBA hub.

• 39:04Jason Calacanis?

  TNT, NBA on NBC coming back next year, ESPN.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  Right, wherever NBA wants you to go to see the game, you could just go directly there from Blue Sky.

• 39:14Jason Calacanis?

  As it should be.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, it's like, uh, their, their attempt to sort of make it like, draw everyone's attention to the fact that you can externally link. They don't de-rank posts with links in them and, uh...

• 39:26Jason Calacanis?

  Like X does, like Facebook does, like Instagram does, like TikTok does.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden.

• 39:31Jason Calacanis?

  I like that, yeah.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Uh, so COO Rose Wang explained that they don't want to trap you in Blue Sky. Her quote, "We want you to use Blue Sky to discover what's happening."

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  Blue Sky is a nonprofit or a company?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  They're a company. There is the, there is the open source standard, which is called Atmosphere, I think.

• 39:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  And then Blue... Blue Sky Social is a private for-profit company that's on that open source standard. So they're part of this whole network, but they are a for-profit company. That ties into the other thing going on with this guy today. Wired published a profile of their CEO, Jay Graber. So she gave some general background. They're at 34.6 million users. They have 25 employees, but they're looking to bring on five more. They're at 30. They're working on ID verification and identity. They're working on communities and they have all these external Blue Sky feeds that they're working on integrating into the main platform. But she did also talk a little bit about revenue. They don't have any kind of revenue share in the works,

• 40:33Speaker 01

  but because they don't downrate links, they're sort of, that's the, that's the strategy. You can't earn money from your Blue Sky post, but you could grow an audience on Blue Sky and use it to link back to your Patreon or your Substack or wherever else you want to say.

• 40:46Jason Calacanis?

  They're a public benefit corporation, just to put a finer point on it. Public benefit corporation is a way of pretending your for-profit is a nonprofit without actually being a nonprofit.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:56Jason Calacanis?

  And the way you play this game is, and like, listen, I don't want to be too cynical here, but you know, like Ben and Jerry's, Tom's of Maine, I think some of the, or Tom's Shoes, or whatever, some of those are public benefit corporations. What that means is you state a mission and that all stakeholders, instead of shareholders, are taken into account when the board makes decisions. So this is the game, the shell game that Sam Altman is playing.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  I was about to say, this is the OpenAI game, yeah.

• 41:27Jason Calacanis?

  Right. It's, it means nothing. It is literally window dressing.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, because they are talking about, they're going to make money via subscriptions. That's what Graber says in this interview. They're also considering marketplaces, sponsored posts, and even experiments with advertising. So we will see more revenue driving on a Blue Sky starting this year, probably.

• 41:49Jason Calacanis?

  Their publicly stated mission, or like the public benefits mission, develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. In other words, create an open decentralized.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, an open source town square.

• 42:06Jason Calacanis?

  Resistance town square. And it was founded or backed by Jack, right?

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:12Jason Calacanis?

  So this is the bizarre.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Jay Graber now says he's not involved at all in the day-to-day. In this Wired interview.

• 42:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but he is the guy who backed it. And he backed it while he was at Twitter.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Correct. Because he had that whole open source, like he backed a lot of different open source projects.

• 42:28Jason Calacanis?

  Bitcoin.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, Jack was just sort of generally committed to open source as a concept.

• 42:33Jason Calacanis?

  He provided 13 million in funding to Blue Sky. Public benefit, does that mean he owns a percentage of it? I wonder if he's an investor or it was a donation. But he did it via, is he on the cap table? I wonder, this is the question I have about it. I think, did he do it through Square? Did he do it personally? And you've got to give Jack some credit. He's like one of the few founders that built two publicly traded, two what were publicly traded companies worth over a billion dollars at the same time. I think it's only him.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  She says, "I was a contractor. I wanted independence because old Twitter moved slowly. Jack Dorsey was our biggest champion, but then Elon Musk said he was going to buy Twitter, and that threw off everything. No projects were going to get shipped, especially not something as ambitious as Blue Sky. That's when we started thinking we should experiment with building our own app."

• 43:28Jason Calacanis?

  But did he get, is he a shareholder? Yeah, he provided funding, not a donation.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Right. So, yeah, she says, "Jack isn't involved anymore. He had a portfolio approach to decentralized technologies, and early on he helped several projects get off the ground. He funded another distributed protocol that I think today he prefers, Noster, N-O-S-T-R, which shares many architectural similarities to Blue Sky, but works more like a cryptocurrency wallet."

• 43:54Jason Calacanis?

  See, I think that's interesting, too, is like this whole decentralized piece to it where when I post to microblog, it gets all the replies from all the different services and pulls them back there, and it posts to all of them, except for...

• 44:13Jason Calacanis?

  Substack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all the places I want to post to, LinkedIn. So it's like, literally, it doesn't work. Yeah, maybe he's got very small ownership, it's not publicly disclosed, it seems to be the case. If anybody knows what's going on here, I would like to know. We have a guest.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  We do.

• 44:30Jason Calacanis?

  Office hours time.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Parth Mahendru from Prantal. They're one of our twist companies, they're in our current accelerator, I believe. They're a Toronto-based startup. They develop non-lethal solutions that counter unmanned aerial systems, UAS, using ultrasonic technology. It's basically an acoustic laser that can take out a drone. So this acoustic laser, they focus the sound waves, it disrupts the gyroscopes that allow drones to fly and know where they're at in 3D space. So that's how, sort of, my rough layperson example of how it works. They designed the system, it was for engineering students from University of Toronto, which includes our guest Parth today, and they sort of devised this whole system.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  They're currently working on a prototype the size of a carry-on suitcase, as well as a backpack model that foot soldiers could bring into the field with them. All right, let's welcome our guest, Parth Mahendru, from Prantal. Parth, thanks for being with us here.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. Morning, Jason. Good morning, Alan.

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  How are you doing, Parth? We met because you had a Wall Street Journal story about your college team that had built this technology. Tell us a little bit about how it's going, and maybe we'll play it and you can explain to the audience, as basically as you can, what you built.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  For sure. What we do is we take down drones with sound. Because our tech is safe, and it's legal. Meaning, we have a sound cannon that shoots drones out of the sky, but the sound cannon does not harm humans because the sound frequencies that it uses is the ultrasonic frequencies which humans cannot hear. So it puts us in a very interesting niche, where we have civilian infrastructure, say prisons or military bases that are close to houses and civilians, where you cannot readily use lasers and missiles. And that's kind of where our system shines, and that's our use case.

• 46:27Jason Calacanis?

  So here we see the drone, it's flying, you're chasing it down, you shoot it with this cannon, it falls out of the sky. You can sell these, or you'll be able to sell these eventually, to prisons, or if I had a, I don't know, a music venue and I was concerned about terrorism, or just people videotaping. Now, have we built laws yet for shooting things out of the sky, being legal? Because I know there was a lunatic, it was probably Florida, if I had to put my money on it, some guy literally shot a drone.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Really?

• 47:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  With a gun?

• 47:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, do a search, you'll find it. It's a guy literally shot a gun, he got arrested, and it was like, literally, an old man. I think this guy was in the Korean War and he had flashbacks, and he was just like-

• 47:11Speaker 01

  It was a Walmart drone?

• 47:13Jason Calacanis?

  And he shot, I don't know if it was a Walmart drone-

• 47:15Speaker 01

  No, it was, I'm looking at the article. Seventy-two-year-old Lake County man who shot a Walmart drone he believed to be surveilling him has been ordered to pay the retail chain five grand.

• 47:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean-

• 47:25Speaker 01

  Charged with one count of shooting or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings, vessels, or vehicles, one count of criminal mischief, and one count of discharging a firearm in public.

• 47:35Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna need some counsel here. If somebody flies over my ranch-

• 47:40Speaker 01

  It's your ranch?

• 47:41Jason Calacanis?

  It's my ranch. Can I take him out? Because I think Texas law might be different.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 47:45Jason Calacanis?

  What have you found out so far? Because, obviously, this is a moving target, so to speak.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Definitely, definitely. And Texas has probably the most different laws as the rest of the United States. For the most part, you're not supposed to mess with the internal functions or the flying of unmanned air vehicles, because you classify UAS or drones the same way you classify aircraft. So, think of it as shooting down a Cessna. That's how the law currently sees it.

• 48:15Jason Calacanis?

  I can't do that? How, if it's flying low over the ranch, if it's doing a flyby? It's kind of funny that we're even having this conversation, because I've had people flying over the ranch in, basically, go-karts with a fan on the back. I don't know what you call those things. Any idea what those are called?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Go-karts with a fan on the back?

• 48:36Jason Calacanis?

  Have you seen these? Like, paragliders, maybe they're called?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 48:38Jason Calacanis?

  They have a fan, and you're sitting in a seat, and then they have a parachute.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, okay.

• 48:42Jason Calacanis?

  There's a guy, I don't know if it's my neighbor or whatever, but he's flying around in one of these things- I don't know if people are just randomly taking off from land.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a powered paraglider.

• 48:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah. So I can't shoot that guy down.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  No. I don't think so, but for the most part precedent has been if someone's below 300 feet, then it's technically on your property. Anything above 300 feet or something along those lines, you could take it out, but then that's also in a legal gray zone because you're not supposed to shoot down aircraft. So without proper authorization, it's just a messy situation, especially when you're shooting bullets at it because it could have people nearby.

• 49:21Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  That's why we need non-lethal.

• 49:23Jason Calacanis?

  We need non-lethals, yeah. So if I have a paintball gun, I could hit the guy with a couple of paintballs. That might be fun. Or pepper balls. There's non-lethal pepper balls that you can spray at people. Anyway, we don't condone any of this here at this weekend startup, to be clear.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Certainly not. Don't shoot anyone down.

• 49:37Jason Calacanis?

  How's the startup going? You know, you're one of the first investments we've made in what I'll call, you know, military tech or adjacent tech. And how are you thinking about your startup? Are you thinking, hey, I should go military and there's tons of investors interested in that? Or should we be going, you know, with venues and or should we in between maybe the local police? How are you thinking about your startup and go to market? Because I know you've been in the laboratory building this for a year or so.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Yep. Yep. And again, thank you so much for your trust in us. It really means a lot. Currently, we're still building our tech, but we have demos set up very soon, starting with in the next five days. So that's going to be our first unveiling of our product at a private demo with with certain military stakeholders. That's going to be happening towards the end of this month. We're super happy and very pumped up about that. Other than that, our major clientele, the people that we're focusing on are go-to-market strategy. The overarching goal is obviously getting into the military industrial complex, but the way you get there

• 50:45Speaker 02

  is through years of solicitations, testing, and then making your device mil-spec, that's what they call it, making it vibration-proof, dust resistant, waterproof, so on and so forth. And these things usually take a long time to get certified and a lot of money. In the meantime, with whatever we've built, we uh we've started demoing and we've started um starting to have pre-orders and leases upcoming this summer um with commercial entities and government agencies such as prisons and police forces. Those have been um a pretty they have a pretty big interest in our tech. And obviously, uh like you mentioned, concerts and sports venues. Um there was a Taylor Swift concert in in Toronto a while ago.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  And I saw uh the security team have like fishing nets trying to fish drones out um from the bough kinnies. Yeah, so.

• 51:35Jason Calacanis?

  Crazy, you know, it these are these drones are also, you know, they don't fall out of the sky that often. They're relatively safe. It's kind of hard to crash a drone now, I think. You have to have like a drone that is one you built yourself, kind of like Ukraine is doing. Most of the commercial ones are designed to not crash into things. They have avoidance systems, etc.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it used to be if it like if you went out of range, it might just plummet out of the sky, but now it can sort of land itself.

• 52:02Jason Calacanis?

  It returns to sender. It basically knows where it it knows the waypoint where it left from.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:08Jason Calacanis?

  And when it loses connection to the handset, it just starts heading back to that.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:12Jason Calacanis?

  Am I correct?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  Um, pretty much. They have the go back to home feature. Most of the commercial drones nowadays.

• 52:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So uh any questions or challenges you have? It sounds like you're off to the races. It sounds like you're gonna need to raise money and you got a one or two year uh process of, you know, getting this thing ready for purchase by the military or or militaries around the world. How are you thinking about international and and questions for me?

• 52:37Speaker 02

  One of my questions that I had um might not be a very straightforward question. It might be very specific, but it is um us going from demos to full-scale products. Um there's a lot of things that we need to do, a lot of um polishes that need to be made to make sure that the the the operation is seamless. But right now, we have we have a a balance, so to say. Either we perfect the product or we have a semi-function. product to give to stakeholders. Now, usually if this was software, I would think to get something out the door as soon as possible. But given that these are pretty major stakeholders, like a major airport. Um, that we're going to be leasing out the next, next, the next month.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Um, it begs the question, should we invest more time into finalizing our design, perfecting it? Or do we produce more designs, for example, to give to more stakeholders?

• 53:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is a resource question. I, I've, I'm typically in favor of listening to the customer and the partner and hearing what their needs are. It's quite possible this airport wants a solution immediately and will deal with it being, uh, you know, maybe not as polished around the edges. If you don't have the industrial design done, if, you know, it's not waterproof, whatever the case may be. The airport might say, good enough, we want to pilot this with you. Uh, and we're okay with the fact that we're a pilot customer, we've piloted things before. So that would just be level setting with the customer. And then there are international customers who also might invest.

• 54:13Jason Calacanis?

  So if you look at what's happening in the Middle East region, you know, they have monarchies there. And the way the monarchies and the investment funds work is, you know, you have families that are connected to the monarchies. They literally could be cousins or adjacent to them. They may want very much to invest in your company. They may very much need the technology at their airports or their oil fields, just to give two examples. And they might have the ability to say, here's a magic wand when it comes to regulation. We can get this done. So if you look at the veto companies, uh, my understanding, if we were to look up Joby and some of the other veto companies, a lot of their first,

• 54:54Jason Calacanis?

  um, you know, things, pilots that they're putting out there for the vertical takeoff and landing companies are in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, uh, Bahrain, the Kingdom, uh, Saudi Arabia. And your second question, yes.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Yep, uh, sorry. My second question was, um, it builds on to the first one. It's, we have some pre-orders. We have, um, potential leasing agreements that we've signed. How do we fulfill them, sort of say, given, um, certain constraints that we have? For example, our team is not massive. We don't have salespeople on the floor. We don't have technicians on the floor. Um, and if we were to give someone a few devices of ours to, say, test for a month, we would definitely need to be checking in on it. Uh, I'm not sure if this is a hardware-only issue or if this is because we're at that stage. Um, how do we, how, how would you recommend we deal with?

• 55:43Jason Calacanis?

  I recommend finding a customer who can spend a decent amount of money because they have an acute need and that will be willing to let you be on site and you could bear hug them. So you got two or three team members to say, hey, listen, we want to be on site for a hundred days with you during the pilot. We want you to pay a half million dollars in advance. And so you might have like a really, um, you'd be able, you might be able to solve two problems at once. One, you get a, an amazing lighthouse, you know, killer customer who also has a need and who's also willing to pay. Is that helpful?

• 56:16Speaker 02

  Definitely. Um, and just to follow up on that, would that mean, say, pushing off certain clients or certain potential customers who were, um, interested in getting our tech, but not really the lighthouse customers?

• 56:30Jason Calacanis?

  You have to prioritize. You can't boil the ocean. You can't service all markets at once when you've got a startup. So when Tesla came out, they came out with the Roadster and they figured out there were rich tech people who wanted to see electric cars and they were willing to pay a hundred fifty thousand dollars for a car without power steering and barely had air conditioning, uh, and a heater, like the HVAC and it was very small. And that would pay the hundred fifty K upfront. So they picked a customer base that wanted a sexy sports car that had the most ridiculous acceleration ever and could beat a Corvette or a, a Porsche or a Ferrari off the line because of the electric, uh, motors and wanted to have the latest technology that had ever been built.

• 57:14Jason Calacanis?

  They didn't build the Model Y, the Model Three, Cyber Taxi, Cybertruck, or the Model S at the same time. You know, startups are about compromise there and you can actually use this to land that best lighthouse customer. You say, listen, we've got seven different customers. You go to the seven, say, we're looking for somebody. Who can make this commitment and then you can make the sacrifices founders, which might be hard if you have families etc. to say, hey, we're going to be on site. So we all got families. Let's say you had three co-founders and you have a couple of co-founders. If all three of you have families, you might say, hey, listen, I'm going to like be away from my family for 10 days. Kind of hard to do. You have to talk to your spouse etc. You know, and I'm going to be on the ground for these 10 days. We're going to have one of our founders who doesn't have a family relocate there for 90 days.

• 57:59Jason Calacanis?

  The other founder is then going to rotate in for 10 days. So that person can go on their vacation, whatever it is, and make that big sacrifice to make sure that first customer, that's the lighthouse customer, that's spending so much that you bear hug them. You bear hug them so that you can't lose. You gotta make that deal work. And then you can use that to show how serious you are to investors. Look, we have this airport, Dubai Airport, whatever, the new airport in Abu Dhabi. Or like, I mean, there's some incredible airports over there. And we are, we really relocated ourselves there for, you know, 60 days to get this done. And that's our commitment level. You know, we're all in this race for credibility. And investors are looking for the most dogged teams.

• 58:40Jason Calacanis?

  We were talking earlier on the pod about how somebody had asked me, is there a venture fund I can put money into that only invest in in-person teams? It's like, huh. They really think that like as an LP, that is the determining factor. And they're now asking venture firms, are you in person or not? And why or why not? And so you're starting to see that. Awesome. And let us know who we can introduce you to. You know, we're good with the warm intros, I hope.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  For sure. And I completely agree with the in-person thing. That's a, that's a big point, especially for hardware startups. We're just doing, we're working every day. We're testing every day even right now. I was, I was soldering some boards while I was waiting. You just gotta do what you gotta do.

• 59:27Jason Calacanis?

  And keep your periphery vision open. You know, the peripheral vision. Sometimes you start with taking these drones out of the sky. But you know, you start talking about sound-based weapons or deterrents. Maybe there's other ones. I saw recently there was some people rioting. I think it was in the EU somewhere. I don't know if it was Spain etc. And they cleared a street with a sound weapon where, you know, these protesters were getting too frisky. Now, I'm not saying I'm endorsing this, but. You know, in the case of a riot lawn, would you rather have people get hurt and beaten? Or have their ears hurt? You know, like, that seems like the most non-lethal thing you could do. Rife with abuse, like pepper spray.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Jason Calacanis?

  But better than bullets.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  I mean, better than being shot, so, sure. They're saying, earlier this year, an illegal sonic weapon might have been used on protesters in Serbia.

• 1:00:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Serbia, okay.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, people started a subdued sound lasting only two to three seconds, but one person called it "very unusual and very frightening, like a sound from hell."

• 1:00:31Jason Calacanis?

  He's there.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  I think, once you mention that, I think I can just quickly tell you, we're doing this one other thing with a company that we haven't disclosed yet, but we're, you see CCPB cameras, that are surveillance cameras, we can, say, disable them from a distance without physically touching them, so that helps teams, say, clear out rooms, and includes teams and police forces. So we're currently testing some of those with this undisclosed company, but we're very excited and we'll keep you updated on how that goes.

• 1:01:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's what I mean, like, keeping that peripheral vision open, and when you talk to venture capitalists, you'd say, "Hey, listen, here's what we made, here's the core technology first application, here's two, three, four," you know, and there's things that have to happen for three and four to happen in terms of scientific breakthroughs, but the second one is a realistic one for us to launch in year two, and then we're selling two products into people. Incredibly well done, continued success. How can people find out more about the company and reach you?

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Go to prandtldynamics.com, or just call in our phone number, that is actually my phone number, I will pick up 24/7.

• 1:01:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you so much for your time.

• 1:01:39Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:01:41Jason Calacanis?

  This is a big concern. I hate to even bring it up, but as a person who was there for 9/11, I constantly am vigilant in a way, maybe I wasn't pre-9/11, and when I got my drone, and I started playing with one of these DGI Mavericks, and I was zipping it around, I just thought to myself, "How on earth has there not been a major drone attack in America?"

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Jason Calacanis?

  And when I saw this company, and I read about it on the Wall Street Journal, that this team had created this in a competition, I just said... You know what? I might lose my money on this because it might be too far-fetched, too sci-fi. You know, maybe the world's not ready for it. Maybe it won't work. Maybe it will. There's so many risks when you're doing startups. But I was like, we do need to be thinking about how to stop these drones.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Sure, absolutely.

• 1:02:28Jason Calacanis?

  How has it not happened?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  I mean, we keep talking about, you know, how it's how huge of a shift it is that the military, it's always been, you know, like, well, where are our planes and where are our troop stations? Like, how quickly can we get them to the operating theater? You know, like, so it's like, oh, the aircraft carrier, and then it's at sea right near the country, and that's how we get our guys over there. And like, drones and unmanned, it just changes that whole thing.

• 1:02:54Jason Calacanis?

  You literally put it in.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  It's like, well, now you could be anywhere, and you could send your drones in to drop bombs.

• 1:02:58Jason Calacanis?

  I could have a luggage roller with five of them.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so it really, like, everything we think of about how wars happen and how wars are staged and military sort of strategy, it's all, it's all thrown away.

• 1:03:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, it's been another amazing episode of This Week in Startup. He's x.com/lons, I'm x.com/jason, and you can look at the docket, thisweekinstartups.com/docket, sign up for our newsletter at thisweekinstartups.com, and go ahead and post a comment, follow us on all the socials, and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Bye.