Sora app review, Perplexity's Comet is FREE, and which AI tools reign supreme? | E2188

Today's show: Is Sora not just a copyright-killer but a TikTok-killer? Hear our review! The "This Week in Startups" team has been playing around inside OpenAI's viral app, which just hit #1 in the iOS Store. See all of Lon's creations, explore the land beyond the Uncanny Valley, and find out why the hottest new social app could stand to be a bit more social. PLUS Brave surpasses 100M MAUs… why Jason would sell ALL his OpenAI shares right away, Apple pulls the ICEBlock app from the App Store, AND how one founder hacked his local coffee shop to network and even get face time with a few VCs! It's all happening of a fast-paced Friday TWiST. Timestamps: (0:00) Why Jason started an Executive Training program at LAUNCH (05:17) Perplexity's Comet browser is now FREE to use; Jason unpacks their strategy (10:02) Monarch Money - Get 50% Off Monarch Money, the all-in-one financial tool at www.monarchmoney.com/TWIST (13:42) PLUS browser/search engine Brave passed 100M MAUs! (17:44) How a founder "hacked" his local coffee shop (20:06) Alphasense - Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at https://www.alpha-sense.com/twist (21:35) You need to make it EASY for people to give you feedback! (25:41) A look at the leanest startups around and how companies are doing more with less (30:11) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to http://LinkedIn.com/ThisWeekinStartups to claim your credit. (30:38) Why Jason would sell ALL his OpenAI shares right away! (38:56) Lon stops by to review the Sora app; the good, the bad, and the remixes! (48:45) Apple pulled the ICEBlock app… is this a free speech issue? (56:11) A new startup wants to fight gov't corruption… and keep a share of the proceeds Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: Monarch Money - Get 50% Off Monarch Money, the all-in-one financial tool at www.monarchmoney.com/TWIST Alphasense - Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at https://www.alpha-sense.com/twist LinkedIn Ads: Thanks to our partner @LinkedInMktg. Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to http://LinkedIn.com/ThisWeekinStartups to claim your credit. 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?

  We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for this, these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com/ThisWeekinStartups to claim your credit. AlphaSense. Get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at alpha-sense.com/twist. And Monarch Money. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Visit monarchmoney.com/twist for half off on your first year.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It is Friday. It is October 3rd, 2025. Tons of tech news. We're going to get into it. But Alex and I were just getting started in the pre-production. I was letting him know about a new innovation I created. It's a new innovation, which is I started an executive training program inside of our venture firm. What I found is a lot of young people don't understand what it means to be an executive. Because, I don't know, it's just like work seems to have become far too casual, far too casual. Okay. So as part of like coming back to in-office, tracking your hours, doing calendar blocking, where you're going to get certain things done on your calendar, doing a start of day, an end of day,

• 1:39Jason Calacanis?

  keeping a to-do list, follow-up communication, crisp communication, listening to questions that other team members ask you and answering them is, you know, like, it's like a skill that's actually, I thought would be, you know, most people would have coming into the workforce. Nobody's got it. Nobody. Nobody's got executive function and let alone executive training. So actually, I will say there's a varying, I would say, one in five people have executive function, which is like, I can self-direct myself to get tasks done. I'd say like the most of the people I meet these days coming into the workforce, it's all like lollygagging around, not as like...

• 2:20Jason Calacanis?

  You know, when I came into the workforce, they had training programs. You like if you're a journalist, you were trained. There was somebody to mentor you. They wouldn't let you publish. I guess there was more resources around. Things were more profitable. There was less competition. The businesses were more established. There were fewer businesses. You weren't, at least in journalism or in banking, it wasn't like you couldn't have a training program, right? You people were just willing to invest in these things. So I was like, you know what? I'm just going to start investing in these things and see what comes out the other side. In one week, night and day, people were like a five out of 10. And effectively, it was all of a sudden seven, eight, seven and a half, six and a half, just like, and that doesn't seem like a big jump, but in a week, in five days of having discipline, it's huge, right?

• 3:04Jason Calacanis?

  People went from working 35 hours a week, 40 hours a week to working 50 hours a week, sometimes even 60. And if you really want to have your career, you know, if you want to have a career and, you know, not just a job, you have to put in the time and you have to be directed. So I don't know. When you started your career, did you have mentoring or not? And was that in the?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  I got mentored effectively by joining a very small company. My first job in journalism was the NextWeb or T and W back before the FT bought it and so forth. And so I was working out of my dorm room, you know, in between classes for them. And so I kind of got to cut my teeth where no one was watching. So I got to make a lot of mistakes outside of the, you know, the limelight, if you will. But I think Slack is probably the biggest source of dysfunction in offices because, because everyone can be constantly in communication, everyone expects to always be available. And so I remember back in Crunchbase, you would get people in a room, you know, I was on the executive team there, so I had some experience with that. And you would just end up in a room with people with everyone on Slack, talking to other people who are not in the room and getting people to be able to do one thing

• 4:09Speaker 01

  at a time, when they were often judged on communication response times, was, was very difficult. And so I think the blocking, the calendar blocking is just clutch.

• 4:18Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Yeah, people are in a perpetual state of playing defense. They're just responding to things coming at them as opposed to doing things in the world and getting things done. And this is very important for executives as well. And then I started a management meeting every Wednesday night at buy everybody dinner. And that's also gotten people to like up their game, I would say. I don't know, 20%, which is significant across 21 people. It's the equivalent of getting four free new employees. And if the exec training gets you 20%, okay, that's like getting a, I don't know, if every five people you get who are 20% better, you get a sixth person. So very important when you're in a startup or a medium sized company to really think about how you're doing that training.

• 5:03Jason Calacanis?

  Actually, interesting, getting people to use AI tools is one of the big things I've been trying to get people to do. And I see our first story here is about the Comet browser and the other browsers out there. Seems like it's a, the browser wars are happening again.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yes, sir. Yes. So the latest news is that perplexity, Jason, a company that's best known for its AI search products and also launched the Comet AI infused browser that we talked about on the show a number of times, not only made the browser available for free instead of just for some of its paid users, but also just took the waitlist off of it. Said it had millions of people waiting to use it. And this is a pretty aggressive move. Previously a gated feature now available for all. Curious about your first impressions of that move. And then I ask more questions about business models, but were you surprised?

• 5:47Jason Calacanis?

  I think they probably did this right. They knew it was when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned. As an example, I created a shortcut. I don't know if I've ever shown it on the show, but let me show you it at work here. So I created a shortcut there. Please visit the following sites and find me trending tech news stories. You can watch it going to the webpage here and going on Hacker News, finding the top stories. You can watch it go on to, you know, when you watch the assistant here, you can watch it actually do stuff. And it's basically taking over your browser and doing stuff. And here it is.

• 6:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's making the, taking the stories from Y Combinator, Techmeme, you know, Reddit, whatever. And it's putting them into a table and it's putting the point score from Hacker News or Reddit in there. It's like. And I can do that anytime. I can just click on this little shortcut, bang. Now, this is sending off an enormous amount of compute.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:50Jason Calacanis?

  It's loading many pages. And if it's loading five or six websites and doing 10 things on each page, you're talking about 50 threads maybe going concurrently and then, yeah, I don't know how many GPUs I'm firing off on. Anyway, that was probably their concern is can they handle the amount of traffic coming in? And can they handle it profitably? The big story next year will be we invested all this CapEx on servers, on data centers, on energy. And when is the ROIC, return on invested capital, going to show up? So you put in $10 billion, $100 billion.

• 7:35Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. Sam Altman's been saying a trillion dollars. It seems farcical, but you know, people are going to put tens of billions of dollars into each of these data centers and can you make tens of billions of dollars back by the time those data centers are, you know, fully deprecated? And so that is the question of the hour. That's probably why they took a little bit of time to launch this. And then additionally, they were probably reading the room. We're talking about Google Chrome launched their AI companion. I don't know if we showed it here, but I know producer Oliver was playing with it and shared some short videos, but I don't know if we ever put it in the show.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  I don't think we ever showed it live. We discussed it, I think, when they brought it out, but just in a little, little brief clip. What does Oliver think of it?

• 8:17Jason Calacanis?

  Um, it's, I don't think it's as good as, it's not as feature rich as Comet is. And then I use Claude as my LLM for Comet. So, you know, when you start thinking about this, like it's, I have a Claude Pro account, obviously. And so you have to be able to service your customers. Then you have competitors coming. OpenAI, chances on Polly market of OpenAI launching a browser. I think we pulled that up and we can pull it up again here. Polymarket, I think, had it at 70% that the browser would be released and users could use that browser. So we'll be sitting here by the end of the year. And I think every LLM

• 8:59Jason Calacanis?

  will have a browser to do this. Okay, here we go. OpenAI browser in 2025, 74% chance by the end of the year. And the resolution of this bet was, just to remind folks, you always got to look at how it resolves.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  If it publicly releases a standalone web browser that is intended for general web browsing and is available for use by the public in at least one country or region. So a US release would be a good or a Chinese release, but it has to be out in at least one country. Seems pretty reasonable to me. But that brings me to my question about this, Jason, because I thought it was relatively bold, a perplexity with a company that presumably loses money to take on more costs. So I was trying to sort out the why here. I'm curious if they're trying to angle for an acquisition, because as you said, if every major LLM company wants to own a browser, why not go buy one from a company that has already proven its ability to attract millions of people to its browser and maybe grow your overall market share. And in that setup, if they lose a lot of money on inference costs in the interim,

• 9:59Speaker 01

  do they really care? Because they're going to sell the company anyways.

• 10:06Jason Calacanis?

  You'd be shocked at how many founders I meet, even angel investors and early-stage investors who don't have control over their personal finances. They're winging it. People are just heads down. They're busy. They're focused on running their companies. They're living their lives. They got kids. They got families. Well, they don't understand their net worth, and that means they're leaving money on the table. You need to join me and thousands of other busy people who use Monarch Money to solve this problem. It's the all-in-one financial app designed for people with insane schedules and lots of commitments like me and you. Monarch takes all the busy work out of financial planning. You link all your accounts in minutes. You know how to do that. And then you get the data you need, presented in crisp, clean, beautiful visuals and charts that make everything immediately clear to

• 10:48Jason Calacanis?

  you. I have to watch so many different transactions every month, and not just in my private portfolio, in my public portfolio, my investments. But you know, I'm trying to keep things going here on the ranch. I got to get my ski days in. I'm doing speaking ads. And Monarch keeps everything tight and organized for me so I can focus on all the other important stuff I'm working on. So go to monarchmoney.com/twist in your browser for half off your first year. That's right. monarchmoney.com/twist.

• 11:14Jason Calacanis?

  50% off your first year, monarchmoney.com/twist and let them know your boy J Cal sent you. So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars if they lose an extra one or $2 million a month at this point in time. So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product and then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a

• 11:54Jason Calacanis?

  backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and TechMeme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website, I'm opening the browser windows. So since it's my browser and my IP address and the MAC address of my computer, it's not their scrapers going and doing things in the world. I think that's like a backdoor hack for these brands. So if you said, I don't allow with

• 12:32Jason Calacanis?

  the robot TXT anybody to index my site and you're using CloudFlare, well, now you've got a backdoor into any piece of content in the world that any customer opens up. Instagram, X, a lot of these social networks, LinkedIn, they're locked boxes now. They don't allow you, they'll index like the top of a page, like a stub, here's like the top 10% of the information on your LinkedIn, but they don't put the full thing there. If you go to the page, it doesn't show it unless you're logged in. Well, I'm logged into LinkedIn. So now, if there are a million people using this browser, you've got a million people visiting LinkedIn, and if they visit 10 pages a month, now you've indexed those 10 million pages via the proxy that is your customer. So I think this is a backdoor

• 13:17Jason Calacanis?

  copyright IP.

• 13:20Jason Calacanis?

  Solution. I don't want to say hacked, but it's kind of a hack. It might be gray hat in the middle.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Okay. Also, keep in mind Comet did have a paid service. You could pay five bucks a month to get access to Comet, and then they were going to chop that up with publishers. That's still a product they're going to do. And they announced their partners, I think a day or two ago, Jason, CNN, Conde Nast, Fortune, and then a couple of other newspapers, including the Washington Post. But the search point's very interesting because on September 25th, they announced the perplexity search API. So they're essentially allowing people to hook into their search product directly, which is also something similar to what Brave is doing because Brave is both a browser and a search engine. And Brave just said, as they reached 100 million, I think it's monthly active users, they also are doing 1.6 billion queries per month with Brave's search.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  So quite a lot of momentum there from yet another kind of alternative browser slash search company. Seems like that's the new model we're seeing.

• 14:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Brave has been at the forefront of privacy in browsers, which people seem to like. It also makes your browser faster because they're privacy based. You get rid of a lot of the cruft in your browser. So my two top browsers are Brave and Comet. I use them regularly. And yeah, it's nice to have a faster browser. The search product, search API products can become more and more important because I think Google today, there was some rumblings in the SEO community, the search engine optimization community, that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100.

• 14:53Jason Calacanis?

  And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and all, any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You gotta load 10 pages, you know? And so you can no longer hit their API and get 100 pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you can check the stock right now and pull up the stock price. People were saying that the stock is down because of this, like 5% or 10% because Reddit typically appears in the lower rankings. So this is, could be a big part of this future story, which is.

• 15:40Jason Calacanis?

  The impact of SEO and scraping and content creators and how do they get traffics to their website? How do they get traffic to their website?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  So here's a recent chart of Reddit's financial performance as a stock, Jason. Clearly, it's taken quite a lot of blows. It was around 240 earlier in the week and now it is down to $208 per share. So yes, a lot of downward pressure there, perhaps from the Google SEO situation.

• 16:03Jason Calacanis?

  Down in the past week total?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Let's see, 240. Hold on. I'll just run the math for us really quick.

• 16:11Jason Calacanis?

  It was.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  It is off 13% over the last five trading days. Well, ironic because Reddit does have a deal with Google that pays them for access to their information. And as we talked about it, I think at the end of last year, Reddit put together its own search product that you and I were pretty bullish on, but then doesn't seem to be discussed or mentioned. I never see people using it. So I wonder if their own kind of in-house search portal is a bit of a flop, which surprises me frankly, given that I thought that was going to be successful.

• 16:36Jason Calacanis?

  I think the entire future of Reddit is to go there and get an LLM search box and that underneath it have, you know, make it look like Google with the search box or perplexity or anybody, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, have it be a search engine and underneath it have all of the top communities and then it should be studying you and doing your for you page and serving you up stuff that and they really should just assume that the, the era of free search engine traffic is going to be deprecated slowly, but surely. And then they just need to have people go direct. Direct traffic is the hardest thing to do in the world. So

• 17:17Jason Calacanis?

  you have to really build a strong brand and to disintermediate Google from being the way you get traffic. And it's most publishers can't do it. It's easier to focus on, you know, meeting your audience where they are, whether that's Google or Facebook or Instagram, obviously. So it's, this is something to keep an eye on.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  All right. Next up on the docket, I found what is I think my favorite ever post on the r slash startups subreddit, Jason. It's all about a guy who hacked the South Park Blue Bottle to meet a number of investors. So what this founder did was took their laptop to the Blue Bottle at 7:00 AM, sat down, put a sign on their laptop that said, coffee on me for valuable feedback. And then they just sat there and people came up to them for, I guess about five hours. And they ended up talking to 121 people. And most importantly, they ended up talking to not only three other founders they made connections with, but also three venture capitalists came over and talked to them about what they were building. So they got to work at Blue Bottle,

• 18:17Speaker 01

  always lovely, and found a really neat way to do a lot of meeting people, doing their networking. People talk a lot about how hard it is to meet VCs, to get those warm intros, Jason. So I love this story. People in the comments were saying they're going to bring the idea to Boston, to their own startup ecosystem. But I was curious, what you think are good ideas for founders out there who do want to meet VCs that might be outside of their network, given that I don't think everyone can go to Blue Bottle and follow the same path. But I'm curious, what are ways they can do that?

• 18:44Jason Calacanis?

  Well, first off, I just want to give a big disgraziad to Blue Bottle. Because oat milk is now the default in their US cafes.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  All right.

• 18:54Jason Calacanis?

  This is absolutely terrible.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  This is lovely.

• 18:57Jason Calacanis?

  Terrible. The oat milk tastes terrible. It destroys the flavor of coffee. And we should, this is woke nonsense. Give me, the default should always be good old American, full fat milk. And then if you want to eat nuts or whatever in your milk, you can do that. What are you drinking? It's black.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Do you see this? This is a black coffee. No, this is, this is fancy, fancy. Yes, it's local. But in my view, if you're gonna-

• 19:24Jason Calacanis?

  How much did you spend on that?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Between $3 and $4.

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, that's not so bad. That's a Providence. Prices are pretty good.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  You can spend, there are fancy coffee shops here. This is from my local takeout breakfast food spot down the street. It's from Amy's.

• 19:40Jason Calacanis?

  I think the thing you should really look at is making your own cold brew. I can give you the recipe.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Water.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:47Jason Calacanis?

  Freshly ground beans. You stir it in a carafe and you leave the carafe for 22 hours and then you filter it. And then you'll have the most amazing cold brew for but 50 cents a glass. And this is what I do because I'm cheap.

• 20:06Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:51Jason Calacanis?

  And their equity funding screener includes private companies, not just the public ones. They save us time and they make us superhuman. So start your AI search and market intelligence journey today and get deeper insights to power your business. We're even going to start you off with a free trial. How great is that? alpha-sense.com/twist to get started. Make sure you use that URL so they know we sent you and you can get this great deal. Anyway, this is a great idea. There are other places you can meet folks. There's a Listening Lab concept that I was taught early in my career 30 years ago, 20 years ago, where you intercept people online at Starbucks and you say, hey, I built an app. May I buy you your coffee and get five minutes of feedback on it? I'm a founder.

• 21:37Jason Calacanis?

  And most people will be like, I'll give you the feedback. Anyway, you don't have to buy coffee, but you buy from them anyway. And then eventually they'll kick you out of the place if you do it too often. But that's a great way to get feedback. And then putting a sign there, what that shows investors is you're fearless.

• 21:56Jason Calacanis?

  And you can talk to human beings in the real world. This makes you unique amongst humans. Most humans are scared to get feedback and you're being vulnerable. Hey, I could use some feedback. This is why when you email an investor, your entire biography, not helpful. Because the longer the email, the more people just say, I'll read it later. And then they never do because people are busy and you're infringing on them. Short, crisp email. Here's a chart of my growth. I, you know, dear Jason, I know you're an investor in Uber and I watch All In. I really like this episode and you and Alex did a great job on this topic. Okay, a little bit about you, you're paying attention. That's from the book, How to Make Friends or something like that. What's the famous book?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

• 22:43Jason Calacanis?

  By Dale Carnegie. Everybody's got to read that. You show interest in other people, they'll show interest in you. So the first sentence, a little interest in the person, you did a little homework. Takes 90 seconds to do that. Then you just lead with a chart, a customer, whatever's the strongest in your story and ask a question. Hey, we're growing 20% month over month. We're charging 20 bucks a month. I'm wondering if we're too cheap. Do you, I'm curious in your experience, you know, having been an investor in Robinhood about pricing. If I have any places you could point me in terms of pricing and, you know, here's our deck. We're going to raise our seed round and if you, I would love to meet you anytime, anyplace, seven days a week. You tell me where to be, I'll meet you for 10 minutes. And if you say it that way, you're saying, oh, I'm willing to meet you anytime, anywhere.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  I'm willing to meet you for as little as 10 minutes to show you my vision. And then you're also doing the reciprocity where, you know, or vulnerability. I'll say here, it's not reciprocity. It's vulnerability. Hey, I could really use some feedback on this particular issue. So you're making it easy. The task then in the inbox is Do I want to take a meeting with this person? Do I want to review the chart? And there are questions about pricing and maybe I can answer it really quick. So that's the other way to do it is. And the reciprocity thing in the email or on social media is, hey, I made a clip from this week in startups where you and Alex were making this bet. I don't know if you're new, but the bet's coming due in three months. I think you're going to owe Alex a hundy.

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  Now, somebody sends me that and it's a clip on social media. I might even retweet it and now I might follow the person. I'll certainly reply to them. So this is another way for you to be what they call a reply guy in the business. Get into socials, start engaging with people. So there is a online version of this, which is, oh, I love your videos and you're commenting and you've got a really nice social profile that explains who you are very crisply and very directly. I'm the CEO of this company. This is what we do. Here's a link to it. And then your pinned tweet somehow represents that because they're going to see that pinned tweet first or Instagram, your pinned or TikTok, your first three pinned things. Answer the questions people will have. Who are you? What are you doing? Why should I care? Very basic question.

• 24:55Jason Calacanis?

  So I applaud this person for putting themselves out there.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Just as a closer, they didn't actually end up buying coffee for anybody, Jason, because no one took them up on it. So they ended up getting all that input, advice and networking for free. So big win for them.

• 25:09Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. I mean, the other thing you could do is you could say, I'm looking for a developer and a co-founder. Like I have so many people who are like, I can't find a co-founder. I'm like, well, what are you doing to find one? And they're like, nothing. I'm like, oh, okay. So just the Easter bunny is going to just show up on your doorstep with a basket of chocolate eggs and a founder? I was like, it's not going to happen. Like, what are we talking about here? So people like people who are in action. If you're in action, if you're in motion, if you're doing things, that's attractive to people.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  All right. Next up on the docket, Jason, there is a amazing leaderboard called the Lean AI Native Companies Leaderboard that I was going through this morning, and it brought up a couple of questions that I wanted to run by you about founders and their expectations. So here's the data set that we're looking at. Some of the data points here are a little bit out of date. For example, Cursor now has more employees, but if you're on the audio version, this is a chart that tracks companies, how much money they're bringing in in revenue, and then the number of employees, and it ranks them based on how much revenue they're driving per employee. Jason, on the show, we've talked about static team size, use of AI automation, and companies doing more with less over the last couple of quarters. A lot of companies here are doing over $1 million in revenue per employee, which is very impressive for companies of their size.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  But it got me thinking about what is normal now, and what is kind of the thing that founders should be shooting for? Because if I look at this, Jason, and I see that, you know, company X has five employees and 20 million in revenue, is that a good benchmark to shoot for? Or are these companies that are built just differently than most startups are? And so these examples, these leading companies in terms of efficiency, are not actually a good role model for most founders?

• 26:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so some of these companies at the top of the stack here, like Telegram and Midjourney, Midjourney was built by a bunch of rich people, and it was early, and they have a ton of revenue. And it looks like their annual revenue is 500 million, so they're making 12 million per employee. Obviously, that's not sustainable or real. It might be for them for some period of time, but another, you know, firm might have 400 people and make 125K per person, right? Or they 10x it, and they would have, yeah, if they had 400, they would have 1.25. So now you have 400 engineers working on something, and the engineers are getting paid 500K,

• 27:29Jason Calacanis?

  and they're each generating 1.25 million. It's like, this could be too profitable, right? You're not ambitious enough. Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough, and not putting that work, putting that to work. These can be really interesting.

• 27:58Jason Calacanis?

  Ways to raise money. So, hey, we're a seed we're a seed stage company like lovable and we're making 75 million. We only have 40 employees and we're making almost 2 million employee. Yeah, it's nice to go raise a bunch of money, but I don't think most investors would want to see you be that profitable to answer your question. And at scale, you could do this with Facebook and you could or Meta Corporation, you could do it, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. And that would tell you, hey, well, what if they cut 20% of their workforce? What would it look like? And then it becomes like an interesting metric, which is what we saw three years ago when all these companies got fit and Meta started cutting people, Microsoft started cutting people, they started to realize,

• 28:40Jason Calacanis?

  man, we probably have overdone it. We don't have enough revenue per employee. So there's a balance here. I don't think there's one number that makes sense. If you were a marketplace, for example, marketplaces take a while to get the flywheel going, whereas an AI software company like lovable, if it becomes very well-known and it goes viral on social media, you know, you got 20 people building it, 40 people building it, you have unlimited number of people who can use it. Now, if you're building a marketplace, you might need a lot of people to build up the supply side of restaurants. And then you got to go to another city and put more restaurants on if you're DoorDash or Uber. It's and it's never ending.

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  But when it hits scale and you're making, you know, a 10 or a 20% vig like an Airbnb or DoorDash is, they can be wonderful businesses. So, Amazon would be another incredible example. They were making no money for a long time. They just broke even, broke even, broke even. So the revenue per employee were was very high. There was no profits per employee. And then at a certain point, they flipped the switch, right? When you hit scale. So it's interesting to look at. It's definitely a different era. What's nice when you're profitable is you don't need to go to the well for more money from venture capitalists. So I think we will see founders maintaining higher ownership, maybe as high as twice as much ownership by the time the companies get to scale.

• 30:11Jason Calacanis?

  Founders are constantly asking me, "Hey, where can I find my first customers? I need a customer." I'm talking about business-to-business advertising and marketing your product to other businesses. And to do that, the greatest place in the world, hands down, is LinkedIn Ads. LinkedIn's advertising tools aren't just going to throw your message around to anybody clicking on random ads. No, these are not randos. You can pick decision makers based on the data that you know inside of LinkedIn works, the job title, the industry, how about the size of the company. Or maybe you're working on startups and you just want people in New York City and Miami because that's where your first two sales offices are. There's over a billion people on LinkedIn, and that includes 130 million decision makers and 10 million C-level executives. These are the big fish, right?

• 30:56Jason Calacanis?

  These are the whales. Business-to-business marketers report 2.5 times higher returns on their ad spend on LinkedIn versus the other social platforms. Makes sense, right? So, to start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads and customers, we're going to give you $100 credit towards your next campaign. That's how confident LinkedIn is that you're going to get value. They'll just give you the $100 to prove it to you. LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups. LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups. No spaces, no dashes to claim that hundy. LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  So, for folks out there who aren't as familiar with that number, Jason, maybe what's a good estimate for what a founder would expect to own of their company at scale before and then today? How much has that changed?

• 31:43Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if you look at Larry and Sergey, I think they both own roughly 10% of Google at the end of the day, so 20%. That was considered very high. If you look at Aaron from Box, that was known as like, "Oh, he only owned 4% of his publicly traded company. Maybe he raised too much money." Of course, the company's doing great. Most of the time when the companies go public, I'm not sure what Elon owns of Tesla, but I think it's 15%. Maybe with his new grant, he goes up to 25%. But in his SpaceX, he owns much more. Because, hey, as you go on as a founder, you're able to either fund it yourself or raise at higher valuations, get more done with less. Ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, when you go public, owning 10 to 20% amongst

• 32:25Jason Calacanis?

  the founders is pretty typical. I think that number could go to 20, 30, 40% in the future. The HubSpot guys, they owned a lot too. Dharmesh and Brian, I think they owned a decent amount. So you just have to be thoughtful about it. And the early rounds can be quite punitive. I had somebody recently who was like, I'm raising 3 million in my seed round. And I'm like, okay, the product's not launched, right? No, no product launch. And I'm like, okay, so you're raising three at 10 and you're diluting 30%. I said, how about if, you know, you think you can get that 10 million, why don't you raise 1 million at 10, hit some milestones, make that money last 18 months, and then raise again and get 2 million at

• 33:05Jason Calacanis?

  20. And so now you've got a 10% dilution, a 10% dilution. That's a little more efficient than just 30% out of the gate. Can you do more with less? And in this case, it was a founder who was older with families. And then I looked at their team, five team members, all of them like senior executives who were 40 or 50 years old, who probably all want to make 300,000. And they're taking a haircut down at 150,000 or something. And, you know, it's too many people, too many chiefs, not enough Indians, and too much money, right? So that's the problem with, I think, a lot of companies is they dilute too much in the

• 33:44Jason Calacanis?

  beginning. So this is the nature of it. You need to have a smaller team as possible and be as frugal as possible in the beginning. So you know, it's a data point I think everybody should really care about.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  What's that, Jason?

• 33:57Jason Calacanis?

  Their BMI, their weight. And I was worried about that for a long time. If you were a fan of this show, you remember when I was a little bit bigger. I was, you know, I peaked at 213. Now I'm down in the 170s. Lost 40 pounds. I lost so much weight that when I hike around my ranch, Alex,

• 34:19Jason Calacanis?

  it's not challenging anymore. So you know what I do? I put on a 40-pound weight vest to add the 40 pounds of fat I lost. And you know how I lost it? GLP's. GLP's. No shame in the GLP game is what I've told everybody. Now, I didn't talk about it the first couple of years I did it because I wanted to make sure that, hey, people could get these GLP's. When I started using in the early days, there was a shortage and people who had diabetes, you know, couldn't get it because so many people were using this magical drug. This is my opinion. And a lot of the science is kind of backing me up. And now, everybody knows somebody who's had a good experience on GLP's, and I've had a fantastic one. I sleep better. The sciatica in my leg, my breathing, my focus at work. I'm back to

• 35:04Jason Calacanis?

  my fighting weight, my running weight. And you can get affordable GLP ones without insurance or with insurance at my new partnership with Ro.co. You saw Ro.co has Charles Barkley, Ro.co has Serena Williams, and now they got J.Cow. I'm here to tell you, I want you to go look into GLP ones. I'm telling you right now, being schwelt is better than being a fat bastard. That's me, fat shaming my old self. I wish more people did. But, you know, I wanted to live longer for my daughters. I don't want to get emotional or anything like that, but I was like, this is not sustainable. I'm going to lose this weight. I had a hard time losing weight. The GLP's made it easy. Maybe that works for you, maybe it doesn't.

• 35:46Jason Calacanis?

  You'll find out at Ro.co for FDA-approved weight loss options from a provider that I trust and you can trust. Ro.co.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  All right. Next up on the docket, OpenAI completes its tender at $500 billion. Jason? Yeah, a couple of things here. First of all, it is now the most valuable private company in the world. Just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago. And the tender offer was worth about $6.6 billion in total. This is a secondary offering, folks, so it's employees selling their shares. But what was interesting, Jason, is that there was a total of $10.3 billion in authorized sales, but only $6.6 billion traded hands. Why? Not a demand issue, a supply issue. Employees in the company didn't put up as many shares as they could have in this tender offer, which people are taking to indicate that they're big believers in the company. But this got me kind of thinking, how are tender offers sized?

• 36:42Speaker 01

  And how often have you seen one have a supply issue from the employee side? Talk to me about what founders should know.

• 36:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so there are multiple dynamics here. Often, they don't want people clearing their entire position and not being motivated because it's a distraction at work when you look to your left and you look to your right. And everybody's got, you know, jet cards on there or like there are ski houses and they're looking for a ski house. Now, everybody's distracted. So what they'll do typically is say, if you've been here for four years, you can sell half your stock. If you've been here for three years, you can sell 20%. If you've been here two years, you can sell 10%. And if you've been here under two years, you can't. So they'll come up with some sort of formula like that. Obviously, there's a lot of demand here. I think it's a bad trade.

• 37:31Jason Calacanis?

  I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Irrational.

• 37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I literally, if I was an employee with 10 million shares, I would sell all 10 million. Why? If you, you're now, you are, have so much risk owning this stock that there could be a drawdown, there's competition. And reasonably, like, what's the largest comparable company here? Microsoft, Apple? Maybe it's Microsoft because they're a software company, maybe it's Google.

• 38:28Jason Calacanis?

  And so those companies are worth 2 trillion, 3 trillion. I would sell every share you have. Or I would sell 80%, get diversification for your family, take that 80% if you believe in the category. And I would literally put it into the other players you're competing against, if you really believe in that space. More likely than not, if you were to get the 10 million, and, you know, spend 3 million of it on your house, and then put the rest into index funds. Okay, let's keep going.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Let's keep going. Jason, Sora, we talked about it earlier on the show. I have some big news. It has reached the absolute top of the iOS App Store here in the United States, besting even ChatGPT, besting even Google Gemini, which means that OpenAI has yet another hit on its hand. If you don't know what Sora is, it's a new social app from OpenAI using the Sora 2 model that allows you to create social-ish videos of yourself using AI. And it has a cameo feature, Jason, that lets you put yourself into the action. I'm a little surprised for an invite-only product that it reached the number one slot, but good for them.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  I wanted to, I wanted to stop by and talk about it because I do feel like this is a genuine step up from where we've been. Not only just in terms of the fidelity, like, you can make a, you can make a guy in Sora that looks a lot like yourself, you can realistically recreate IP and famous characters, but it's not just that, it, it can fill in the gaps for you. So if you give it a funny premise, Sora's very good at taking, figuring out what the joke is or what the bit is, and actually filling in the details in a way that adds value to the premise you came up with. So let's take a look at the first one here. All I typed in here was, "The first astronaut on the moon gets on the lunar surface and realizes he's not wearing a spacesuit."

• 40:16Speaker 02

  That's all I said, but now play the video, Alex, if you would.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  One small step for man, uh, Houston, be advised, I'm, I'm in shorts. I did not put the suit on. Copy? Kind of chilly out here.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  So I did not tell it any of that. Like he's only in shorts. He, I, and it even made that guy look and sound like Neil Armstrong, all on its own. It figured out the first astronaut on the moon. It recreated that famous footage. So it, it's doing a lot of this without prompting, and that's where I feel like is the huge difference. We've seen text to video, text to image stuff before, and it's quirky and it's fun, but you had to put everything, the prompt had to be so sharp to get what you wanted. And Sora, it's just really good at sort of figuring it out. Now-

• 41:02Jason Calacanis?

  It's probably doing something in the interim law, and where it says, okay, what does the user want? What would be funny? What's a good line of dialogue? Create a script for this. Like, it probably is doing some background, I don't know what the term for this is, but re-prompting?

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I'm, right. It is, it's, it's sort of functioning like an agent, and it is tied into your chat GPT account. So if you use yourself and you say, Lon Harris is on a talk show, it'll have the talk show interviewer ask me like, so what movies have you seen lately? Or tell us what it's like working with Jason. Like, it knows me from my chat GPT, and it implies that to my Sora clips, which is-

• 41:41Jason Calacanis?

  And it landed a joke here when it said, it's cold out here.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  It, um, that's what I mean.

• 41:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's a bit chilly out here.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  It is that next step of cleverness up from where the old ones were, where it can figure out, it, it not only-

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  And you've been very cynical about this category, let's be honest. You felt it wasn't good at jokes, it wasn't good at that. So this is an honest assessment from you that it's crossing this chasm into-

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 42:04Jason Calacanis?

  Contributing creatively.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Yes. It, it is doing more in terms of figuring out, it's, it's getting better at storytelling. It's figuring out narrative, and it's not just characters standing around saying, like, hello, how are you? I am good. How are you? I'm good. How, you know, like the original AI, it was very basic. Uh, and this is, it's, it's gotten to that next level of cleverness, wit, thoughtfulness about the scenario. Uh, but look at this one. Watch this one.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  All right, hold it right there. That's enough. You're flat, you're behind the beat, and it sounds like you're reading a breakup text, not singing a song. There's no fire in that voice, darling, none. You might want to-

• 42:41Speaker 02

  That's not creepy. That, that is close enough to Elvis that we all get it. It's Elvis. It may not look exactly like him, but it's not creepy. It's not in that uncanny valley. They've made it to the other side of the valley, which a lot of people, myself included, didn't necessarily think they were going to. The last thing I'll say in terms of, in the plus category, and I think as a user, this is a plus. As a publisher, media, copyright holder, I would not think it's a plus. But it's very easy to work around. There are guardrails to prevent you. If you just wrote, like, Shrek at a rave, it might be like, we can't do that because Shrek is a licensed character. But you can, like, in this case, I didn't say a character name. I said, "A Jedi knight talks his way out of a parking

• 43:25Speaker 02

  ticket," and you could see the results right here. It did it no problem. Did not give me-

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  This is not the violation you're looking for.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. It figured. I didn't tell it to do that joke. It did that joke on its own.

• 43:35Speaker 05

  I don't?

• 43:36Speaker 06

  What you really want is to let me get back to my mission and move along.

• 43:39Speaker 05

  Right. You should get back to your mission. I'll move along.

• 43:41Speaker 06

  Thank you, officer. The force be with you.

• 43:44Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. Did exactly my joke. That's a pretty obvious one.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  It did exactly the joke. I didn't say Star Wars. I didn't say uses the force. I just said, "A Jedi knight talks his way out of a parking ticket." It filled in the rest.

• 43:55Jason Calacanis?

  And Alex, the reporting is they're telling copyright holders they have to opt out of-

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Correct. That's what the Wall Street Journal reported last week, that, that they said, "Yeah, Sam Altman says you should opt out," that they informed everybody, "This is coming. Let us know if you want to opt out or not." And if you didn't opt out, it's, it's in, and you could play-

• 44:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's, they're gonna get a lot of lawsuits.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  They're gonna get a lot of lawsuits for that.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  You can also see-

• 44:22Speaker 01

  It's gonna be staggering.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Once a u- once one user figures out a character is in there, you could see it take off. Like, a person figured out SpongeBob, you could make SpongeBob characters appear, and now SpongeBob is everywhere. And then a person figured out you can make Pikachu appear, and now there's hundreds of Pikachu. So every time, or Peter Griffin from Family Guy, like, every time there's a new one of those, you see thousands of them as everybody gets excited that they can remix them. So, speaking of remixes, the, the one downside at this point, and I know it's very early on- But it is built for social. It's like a TikTok style app where you're supposed to scroll and you like and you share. But it's as of yet because it's invite only. It is not very social. There's no good way to find people you know in there.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  Address book. They haven't added that stuff, but they rushed it out. They rushed it out. For a good reason. And you could tell, I think for now, it's a lot more fun to make these clips than it is to watch them. So I've seen amazing, really funny stuff that has two or three likes that's just dying on the vine because there aren't enough people watching. Everybody wants to make things. Nobody wants to watch other people's.

• 45:30Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is the future of it. If you are selling ChatGPT subscriptions, there's two ways to go about this. And I showed it, I think, on the show and I did it during my Nostricannas keynote. If you want to pull up that slide, Lon, if you open up Canva, you can find it and show it. I showed it in my presentation at KPMG. I do this like every summer with their partners and their top customers. I do a keynote and I do my predictions for the future. And I said, here's how it would work with the New York Times and ChatGPT or Grok and Disney, whoever. You authenticate with your Disney Plus at ChatGPT or vice versa, and then it unlocks these features. So if you're at the ChatGPT website, you're at the Grok website or the Claude website, it says, connect your New York Times account,

• 46:14Jason Calacanis?

  connect your Disney Plus, connect your Netflix. When you do that, all of a sudden, those characters light up. You click on the Mandalorian and you, it gives you prompts already there. It says, upload your picture and what would you like to do? And you have all that sitting there waiting for you. Canva, by the way, great. So if you see here from the beginning, it's you're on Disney. It says, make me a Jedi, upload your photo, choose your saber. And then it shows me, it's a bad one because we did this six months ago, but.

• 46:45Jason Calacanis?

  This would be what you would do in Disney Plus. And then I think in the previous slide, I did it with the New York Times and Wirecutter. If you go back a slide or forward a slide, you'll see, yeah, so here's my idea. You're on the New York Times, you authenticate with ChatGPT, and now you have a ChatGPT box. You say, give me the earliest mentions of Putin. This is Saks doing some searches here. And here you go. You can go get all these Putin stories and then summarize them and just use the ChatGPT functionality inside of the New York Times interface. So it can go both ways, Alex. You see what I'm saying? Absolutely. This is why I need to be a studio head. I will be running the Disney Corporation. And this will be one of the first things I do. And can you imagine how much money this

• 47:27Jason Calacanis?

  make it? How sticky would make your app if you had 100 photos in there of your kids doing Jedi stuff, or Marvel stuff, whatever it is? Like, now you unsubscribe and you lose that? No. And your kids are going to want to keep doing it. So this is the future of entertainment. You're going to be able to make a short movie with yourself. You're going to be able to put in the dialogue, and then you're going to be able to publish it. So if, when I run Disney Corporation, I'm going to give the ability for kids and their parents to write Grogu bedtime adventure, and publish it to the Disney Plus site for other users to see. And then it would be a leaderboard of the best Grogu stories. And, you know, Disney would vet them, and you have to be a paid user. So if you do something

• 48:09Jason Calacanis?

  inappropriate, they could take it down or whatever. But it would be non, what do they call it? Non-canon?

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Non-canonical.

• 48:17Jason Calacanis?

  Non-canonical. Be non-canonical stories. But can you imagine how amazing that would be if a bunch of kids did a bunch of Grogu stories, or they did a bunch of Groot stories? You know, the little characters that kids like in these?

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's clearly coming. Right now, you can do anything for 10 seconds. I feel like the next iteration is 30 seconds, a minute. Like, once we get more processing power, figure out how to do this with less compute, that's what's coming next is longer clips, and you'll get to make more stories.

• 48:45Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's, um, let's talk about this Apple Ice Block story. This seems really interesting. Lonnie, I'm sure you have some feelings. I have a few thoughts, yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  All right. So after the White House demanded that Apple take down the ICE Block application, which tracked the location of ICE agents in and around the country, Apple complied with A.G. Bondi's request. Lon, surprisingly, little controversy in the technology world about this move.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Well, I do feel like the the argument that you can immediately imagine tech people and companies making is, well, it doesn't have to be an app. You could put it up on a website that you own, that you host. And so like, an app is going into these walled gardens, and that we sort of established the precedent that Apple gets to decide if you get to be in there. And so I don't know, you know, their ICE Block is claiming it's a free speech issue. And I don't know, is my app has to be in your App Store count as a First Amendment issue or not. I feel like that's a little bit of an in between bubble case. Obviously, if this was just on the Internet, I don't think the US government should be able to be like, take that down. And I do think that in light of how much

• 49:52Speaker 02

  we were talking about the Biden administration intervening and like telling Twitter, you can't have that on Twitter, telling Facebook about misinformation, like, well, now we're sort of doing that again, just in a different way. It's different kinds of information that the White House doesn't want to get out. So there is a hypocritical thing there to it, I think.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  I hope this comes up on All In. I'm very curious to see what the thoughts are going to be over there.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  I kind of doubt.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  No, I mean, I'll bring it up if you guys want me to. But there, there is some precedent to this. Speed traps and alerting people to speed traps is, I think, if my memory serves me correctly, and this is where producer Claude can really help us out, even flashing your lights to warrant oncoming drivers, I believe that is illegal in some states. So there is a, there are some laws around interfering with police activity. So as somebody who comes from a family of law enforcement, I would be concerned. If you got a thousand people to suddenly show up during an ICE arrest

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  or any arrest, an FBI arrest, whatever it is, that could be very dangerous, I think. And I would have definite concerns about this because what happens if you create a flash mob? And then violence breaks out and I don't know, protesters get killed, a cop gets killed. Now you're in really dangerous territory here.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  I do have a Claude answer. Courts have generally ruled that warning other drivers is protected free speech under the First Amendment, but there are gray areas. Some states and municipalities have attempted to restrict headlight flashing. Those laws are often overturned, but they do say physically interfering with police operations like blocking their view, that can be illegal. And also, of course, laws vary based on jurisdiction.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely, but FIRE, the free speech organization, really points out that this is protected speech in their view that's being not forced down through a legal process, but instead through the jawboning that was so unpopular from the Biden administration. I just think that it's a disappointing moment in which people that were very fired up about this in one case have now decided to put it down on the other. I went through.

• 52:08Jason Calacanis?

  You mean censorship?

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, government, well, I mean, this is not censorship per se. It's the government leaning on your shoulder versus demanding you do something.

• 52:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so we're talking about the FBI jawboning of the Twitter executives to take down COVID stuff for Spotify. I remember the jawboning term.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  They weren't arresting anybody. They weren't deleting it themselves. They were just telling like, hey, you guys really take this seriously. And that seems to be what this.

• 52:35Jason Calacanis?

  This exists in ways. I was always wondering how Google made the decision to allow Waze to put speed traps in it. And those are super accurate. I thought for sure when Google bought Waze, they would remove that feature because it is the number one reason. People use Waze. Everybody says it's because it's routing. Like, Google Maps does a good enough job rerouting you. Apple Maps reroute you. Everybody can reroute you now and give you multiple routes. I think that's the second feature because how often do you, in a ride, have you been rerouted live?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  Only when something bad happens.

• 53:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, if you had like an accident, that would be, so that happens one in 50 rides, one in 100.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, if that.

• 53:18Jason Calacanis?

  But when you're driving and you're using Waze, I would get a speed trap every 30 minutes, every hour. If I go to Tahoe, it would be five from San Francisco to Tahoe. I mean, I, and I'm not like a major speeder, but just in case I'm, you know, five, six, seven, eight miles over it, I still want to be respectful and not blow past people.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  Waze, according to Claude, thank you, producer Claude, Waze has faced threats of legal action in the past over this, but no actual lawsuits have ever been filed. There was a December 24 instance where two NYPD officers were killed, and the LA police chief sent Google a letter saying Waze could endanger police officers in the community. In 2018, the LA City Council asked the city to sue Waze for creating dangerous conditions on roads due to traffic congestion. And in 2019, the NYPD sent a different letter to Google threatening legal action over the DWI checkpoint reporting feature, but no lawsuits have ever actually gone down. These are just threats.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yes, so Apple did take down in 2011 DUI checkpoint apps. At the time, according to the International Business Times, Google declined to comply. But this story is so old, they actually mentioned Research in Motion, or R I M, the company behind BlackBerry, as part of its reporting. So this is pretty far in the past.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  I do want to say thank you to Anthropic for providing these amazing Claude answers. If you're ready to level up your AI collaborations, you got to go to claude.ai/twist. You can't do everything we're doing with Claude without a paid plan, but Twist listeners get 50% off their first three months with Claude Pro, claude.ai/twist to get started, folks.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, this, this ice block thing, just to wrap it up, anything that could cause

• 55:12Jason Calacanis?

  To put people in danger, and in this case, it puts both sides in danger. I would be very cautious if I was the folks. Now, I understand it. It has people share information when they've seen ICE agents within a five mile radius of their location and shared details of the clothing agents are wearing. Hmm. Yeah, if it's a five mile radius, it feels like they've they're addressing that head on. But it does feel like this is a jump ball situation. I would always I would always fall on the side of safety. Yeah. In this situation.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Well, every, yeah, I mean, safety for the people being rounded up. Sure, but I get what you're saying that if you look at it from the reverse perspective, it's less warning people that they're about to be impacted by ICE. And it's also alerting people to where ICE is and how to find them and recognize them. So that that I do think there is a concern there.

• 56:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's keep going.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Next up on the docket, I found a really interesting startup, Jason, just before we went live. It's called the Anti-Fraud Company. It's pitching itself as a sort of private Doge. And if you recall, there was a student at Brown named Alex She, and he was complaining about how much money Brown University spends on things. I paid a lot of attention to that because I live very close to Brown University. And he's one of the co-founders, along with two other folks who are also anti-monopolists and pharma experts. Their idea is to go out and find waste and fraud in the government and then collect money via whistleblower programs. I don't know if that's a really brilliant business model. Love the idea. And they just raised $5.1 million from Abstract Ventures, Browder Capital, and Dune Ventures.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  But can I show you the launch video? Because I think it really tells us where we are in the market today.

• 57:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  All right. So here from the fine folks over at the Anti-Fraud Company is how to launch a startup in 2025.

• 57:12Speaker 07

  We just found $250 million in fraudulent government spending over the past month. But that's nothing compared to nearly $500 billion that happen every year. And that's why we raised $5.1 million to start the Anti-Fraud Company, a private sector Doge that saves your tax dollars from greedy corporations.

• 57:31Speaker 08

  Even universities and pharmaceutical companies, entities we trust with their children's health and their education, are participants in what we call organized crime.

• 57:41Speaker 09

  And these aren't just one-off mistakes here or there. It's the system. And while they profit, you suffer the consequences. Higher prices, more debt, and less for the people who need it most.

• 57:55Speaker 08

  What is this about? This is weird.

• 58:00Speaker 09

  At the FCC, I worked to stop Big Pharma from defrauding Medicare and Medicaid. And before that, I filed class action lawsuits against Big Pharma for delaying generic competition and raising consumer prices.

• 58:10Speaker 08

  And I spent years of my life researching and writing a book about how Ivy League institutions fix prices, raising costs for students and their debt burdens, and this launched multiple congressional investigations and billion-dollar class action lawsuits.

• 58:22Speaker 07

  I emailed thousands of administrators at Brown University to ask them what they did in the past week, and built an AI system to audit the university's budget. They tried to kick me out, but I ended up testifying before Congress about the Ivy League's antitrust violations.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Anyways, I think that shows what we're talking about here. But Jason, it just takes me to such an interesting moment in time in which slickly-produced hide videos seem to take more...

• 58:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that was not slickly-produced. That was...

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I thought it was...

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  That was pretty amateurish. I don't think that was like Austins from Howie, where he spent like serious money on it. I think that was like kind of a running-gun one. It wasn't a great concept. Long didn't like it. I could see he was like, "This is not really that great." It needed to be half as long and twice as good. It was too long and not as good.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  It lacks a through line. It feels like part of the joke is that it's thrown off. You know, they're using pieces of paper, he's just picking stuff up, but you don't... It doesn't... There's no setup punch. Like, it doesn't build in that way. Yeah, there's no payoff.

• 59:27Jason Calacanis?

  But what I want people to know is, the way whistleblower laws work in the United States is, I believe you get half of whatever's recovered. It's something ginormous from the SEC, and there have been multiple nine-figure...

• 59:45Jason Calacanis?

  Whistleblower payments and you don't need to be public. The whistleblowers get protected. $279 million is the first highest ranked one. Thank you, producer Claude. 266 million is the second. 200 million, the next one, and that's from the CFTC. So there are, the IRS also does this. You can make serious bank. I think this is actually going to become a brilliant business because it's clear what they'll do. They will help you pursue these claims and take a percentage of it is what I think they're going to do. Another way to do this would be to just hire two lawyers and vet incoming and if you encourage

• 1:00:30Jason Calacanis?

  people to be whistleblowers, that's not allowed, I believe. So you have to be very careful. If you can inform people of how whistleblowers work, but I don't think you can encourage people to steal documents. It's a very nuanced thing here. So if you were Gawker or you're the New York Times or Washington Post and at the bottom of the story, sometimes you'll see if you work at Tesla, if you work at Google and have any information and want to talk to our, they wouldn't say have any information. And you want to talk to our journalists, here's our number. But they don't say, if you have documents related to this, please send them to this place.

• 1:01:11Jason Calacanis?

  But some people do have a document dump link where they say, if you would like to give us, if you'd like to contact us, here you can upload documents or whatever. So this is a very unique American concept. Whistleblower awards, they're awesome because it's rewarding tipping people off to crimes. And you really want that in society. I don't know if there was one for FTX or Theranos, but there, I believe Madoff, there was a whistleblower award. I don't know if.

• 1:01:44Jason Calacanis?

  That got paid out or not, but this is a major focus of the SEC is to get whistleblower awards. All right, everybody, another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. Twist will be back on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of next week. And we're cooking with oil. Go to thisweekinstartups.com/docket and you'll see a bunch of links. Give us a review on Apple Podcasting. Write a comment. Follow us on socials. We're doing a little experiment on Instagram where all the news that's in the docket, we release it there so you can get your news fix for tech news in real time on our Instagram account, instagram.com/twist startups. I'm instagram.com/jason. I repost a lot of the stuff, plus, you know, scenes from the ranch.

• 1:02:29Jason Calacanis?

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