OpenAI Scoops Instacart's CEO, AI in the Courtroom & Off-Road Startups | E2123

Today's show: Jason, Alex, and Lon break down OpenAI's latest power move: hiring Instacart CEO Fidji Simo to lead its consumer apps. They also dive into the ethical storm brewing around an AI-generated victim statement used in court — is this the future of legal testimony? Plus, they explore how late-stage funding rounds like a "Series G" don't automatically spell trouble anymore, and what The Checklist Manifesto can teach startup founders. Stick around for another Office Hours, where WhereToWheel gets a shot at the spotlight. * Timestamps: (0:00) We kick off the show! (2:28) Intro: It's all about having a system... (8:52) Wait, OpenAI STOLE Instacart's CEO? (10:00) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions (18:03) Why Adam Curry is the Podfather (20:08) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist (22:53) Would you want to be represented in court by an AI Avatar? (30:44) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (35:38) What the heck is "Minor M&A"? (48:10) When are we all getting humanoid robots? (53:30) Where2Wheel wants to help you off-road 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: Check out Wheel2Wheel: https://dev.where2wheel.com/ * Follow Where2Wheel: X: https://x.com/Where2Wheel Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/where2wheel-llc/ * 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: (10:00) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions (20:08) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist (30:44) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you did this to me after I died and tried to speak for me using what appears to be a 25 cent AI model makeover, I would come down and haunt you until I couldn't anymore. You know, like, it's just abusive.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I feel like we are going to be in a future where everybody's going to have in their will, like, please don't make an AI avatar of me after I'm dead.

• 0:19Jason Calacanis?

  So it's like your organs.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 0:20Jason Calacanis?

  I will give my organs. I will not give my soul and my likeness away. Alex, probably a good time to bring this up. In your contract, obviously, you didn't read it thoroughly enough. We have the rights in perpetuity to have you do all 10 Qs and quarterly earnings even after you pass.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  I'm fine with that, actually.

• 0:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but your kids get like $100 per hour residual. Let me ask you that.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Done.

• 0:42Speaker 03

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack founders can bank on. Unlike traditional business banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and no transaction fees, and you can get 20 times the standard FDIC protection. Get the business account trusted by one in three US startups at brex.com/banking-solutions. LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com/Twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/Twist.

• 1:22Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacan. With my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. You know him from TechCrunch. You know him from Crunchbase. You know him from Captain Crunch.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Indeed.

• 1:33Jason Calacanis?

  He's at Alex on Twitter, X.com/Alex. He loves reading financial documents. He loves big tech. He loves M&A. You got a spreadsheet? He wants you to share it with him. Of course, Lon. It's true. It's true. It's all true. Lon Harris here, another one of our trio. Hey, hey. If you have a question about movies, about an actor, about... Basically, any Bob Dylan song, he's got the answer. I say to somebody like Lon Harris, I'm really enjoying Andor.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:01Jason Calacanis?

  What's another heady, thoughtful, well-written, slow-paced, but intriguing science fiction series and/or movie for me to watch? He would say.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Oh, there's so many. Did you ever see Mr. Robot? Did you watch that one?

• 2:13Jason Calacanis?

  I did. That's a perfect example.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  I think that it has sci-fi elements, but it's not totally like it's, you know, it's not hard sci-fi.

• 2:21Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  But it's interesting. It's a lot of layers, a lot of depth. I really like that.

• 2:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, there you go. Perfect. He is a walking IMDb. All right, here on the show, we're always trying to make things a little bit better. I was just doing a little coaching session, so I want to do like a little founder coaching here at the start of the show. Couple of things you can do if you're not getting the output you want. It's not enough to just tell your team what you want and what the output is, in my experience. You have to get into founder mode on the details of what makes the show better. So if you had a podcast, you said, I want the podcast to look better, to be better, to level it up. You can't just say to most people, because they haven't, you know, maybe had as much experience or they can't read your mind, make it better. What you have to do is create a system. So you have a goal, make a better podcast. Now, you can tell people, make the view better, make the wardrobe better, make the

• 3:08Jason Calacanis?

  content better, but it's better to create a system. And what it means is a system, a process in which that always happens. What's the process? Well, read a book called Checklist Manifesto. It gets people into the mindset of creating checklists. If you create checklist, Alex, then it's very hard to forget what your focus should be. So we like to go live streaming on all platforms. Now, this is a challenging task because we have four different Twitter accounts we want to go to.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:33Jason Calacanis?

  The three hosts and the show. We have five different pages on LinkedIn, my personal account, plus the podcast account, plus Alex, Lon, and a bunch of other ones. Then on top of that, we have Instagram and TikTok, new platforms for streaming. They're a little kludgy. They don't always work. Facebook, I guess, which I don't think we're doing because they don't really get any traffic. And so I say, hey, I want to be live on all platforms. It never gets done. There's always a reason why something doesn't work or something breaks. So what you have to do is create a checklist, check these things. And then you have to make sure the checklist is actually done and empower people to speak up when something's not working as opposed to just keep your head down.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:11Jason Calacanis?

  And then you have to be vigilant to check. So every day when we go live, I just check. Tell me which ones we're live on, not tell me we're live on all platforms. Live on all platforms means you didn't check, right?

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  But actually, we're on this platform. My point is here, it's your job to create the system as the founder and then teach people how to create systems. And that's like what Lon and Alex do here with me as well. It's like, let's create systems that reduce error rate and increase consistency.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  And I don't want to, I'm not talking about the lovely coworkers I have at this company who are all fantastic. But one thing I've noticed throughout my career.

• 4:48Jason Calacanis?

  Career-wise.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  A lot of people are very resistant to this idea. They feel like I have my own process. I have my own way of working. I, I will get, as long as we meet at the end and everything gets done right, I don't want you to mess around with how I get to my conclusion. So it, it, it's a good thing when you're hiring, when you bring in somebody new that you express this is part of the company culture.

• 5:11Jason Calacanis?

  And that cowboy culture that you're talking about Lon is what made airplanes, Alex, and fall out of the sky. And doctors give people septic shock. Is that what it's called?

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Sepsis.

• 5:23Jason Calacanis?

  Sepsis, when you get bacteria in your bloodstream because they wouldn't clean the goddamn scalpels. And what the book Checklist Manifesto does is it says, listen, it's not about ego. It's not about you and your performance. It's about a process that leads to the best outcome. And the process that leads to the best outcome is always a checklist.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Are you watching the rehearsal? I won't take a long digression here on HBO.

• 5:43Jason Calacanis?

  I have not, I will.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  This season is remarkable. It's all based on Nathan Fielder made this one observation. He thinks he read transcripts of cockpit communication before air crashes.

• 5:55Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  And he realized there's.

• 5:56Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I know what the common factor is.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Personality.

• 5:59Jason Calacanis?

  Can I guess?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, please.

• 6:00Jason Calacanis?

  It's always the same dynamic. So there's a series of cascading errors typically caused by a junior person and a senior person. The junior person is running the thing. The senior person, like the flight from Brazil where they went in there and the air tubes didn't work, where like two junior people, the senior person's in the back. Also, they don't want to correct the senior person when they're making a mistake.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  You nailed it. It's that exact thing. It's that exact thing. It's that he found constantly there are co-pilots and they clearly seem to have something they want to say, but they're cowed by the pilot and the captain. They don't want to be correcting them. The captains are sometimes aggressive. And so the whole season is just how can we get these people to work together better? How can we give them a process?

• 6:43Jason Calacanis?

  By which we could safely land these planes. Which is literally the checklist manifesto. If you want to get into crashes, I suggest Blanco Lyrio, Blanco Lyrio channel on Patreon. I pay for this every month. The reason I pay for it is this guy's so good. I just want people like him in the world going out there and examining every single crash. He, you know, did the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash and his name is Juan Brown. He does Blanco Lyrio. I pay for this. I, if you have money and you've got means, go ahead and throw them five, 10 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year, 50 bucks a year. Why? I think people like this reduce the error rate in planes because he examines them and it's, it's literally always the same thing. There's two categories. There's commercial aviation, there's recreational aviation. In recreational aviation, it's

• 7:24Jason Calacanis?

  always a young person or young in their career who does something above their grade. They fly into weather or they have, you know, have to get there too soon. So, you know, this pressure to get somewhere, you know, instead of canceling the flight, they decide they're going to go there even though there's a snowstorm because they have a, a week-long holiday, you know, in Lake Tahoe skiing. Get their itis, I think is the technical term. Yeah. Which I've seen up close and personal with my friends who have planes. Like literally one time, there was one person who was on the plane, who was like really upset that she couldn't bring the last three pieces of luggage, you know, like another 150 pounds. I'm like, we're at a ski resort. Yeah. And they're like, no problem. This happens all the time. We're going to FedEx it. It's

• 8:07Jason Calacanis?

  going to be at your house. And this person starts arguing and I said, oh, I pulled the person aside. I said, hey, I got my family on this flight. You got your family on this flight. There's no inconvenience. Ship my three bags by FedEx. Yeah. We're not putting those bags on the plane. You don't want to fly. And she was like, crash. It's not worth it. And I'm like, what, what do the pilots think? Right? Yeah. And so that goes to, there's another level of pressure, the pilots versus them. Anyway, we've got a lot of show to do today. I just want everybody to embrace the concept of systems over your goals. You've got goals. You've got a destination you want to go. The systems are what are important. And I'm fine with people creating their own system. If it works and they explain it to me and it's transparent, everybody has it and there's a notion, a Coda page or something. Right. For it. So we can all look at it and say, how do we make it better? Alex, I know we have a crazy docket. I don't even know where to begin. So much. So much is going on.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  My biggest story this week, Jason, is that Instacart, a company that we have known since inception. I used to Facebook chat with the CEO back when they were adding small new markets in the San Francisco Bay area. So that's how long I've been covering them. They went public and they're losing their CEO after a pretty solid run. So the news here is that OpenAI is going to hire the, I guess now former CEO of Instacart, to run their applications business. Sam Altman, who we all know from his days at YC and currently runs OpenAI for all intents and purposes, said that the company now has enough going on across three different things. It's research arm, it's build out of mass compute, and also its applications business. He's going to hand the application side over to Fiji.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Also, keep in mind that she joined the board of the company not too long ago and Sam Altman praised her time. Jason, my read of this is that it's not really a diss against Instacart, but that it's probably a lot more exciting to go run a business that is growing at one bajillion percent a year at the absolute forefront of technology than it is to try to grind out another 5% growth in your grocery delivery company. Am I being too cynical or is this just too good of an opt to pass up here?

• 10:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen, as a founder, you can't be putting your business expenses on your personal credit card. No, that is no bueno. You don't want to have tax issues later and you don't want to pay for things. Your personal card, that's post-tax earnings, right? That makes no sense. You need a corporate card and you need one built for startups. You got your personal card, you got your Brex card, you got 10 employees, you got two employees, you got 200 employees. You need Brex. Old school banks charge you insane fees. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. Don't I know it? I think that number's more. 100% of startups, of course, can't afford to make financial mistakes. You've got a bunch of mistakes you're going to make with product market fit and hiring and tech decisions. You're going to make mistakes, we all do. But with Brex, you're not going to make the financial ones. They're going to take your dollars further.

• 10:46Jason Calacanis?

  They're going to protect your cash while extending your startup's runway. Brex is used by one in every three US startups for a reason. Get the financial stack that founders trust and I trust J Cal at brex.com slash banking dash solutions. Let me say that URL again, B R E X dot com slash banking dash solutions. You are exactly correct. If we were to look at the revenue from Instacart quarterly financials, something like 900 million a quarter. I think, you know, they're on like a three, almost $4 billion run rate. Most of the profit, of course, comes from advertising. I don't think they make much margin on the groceries. The business needed to partner

• 11:30Jason Calacanis?

  with Uber to kind of get growth, which kind of tells you something about both how hard it is to get customers and build a network effect and how much of a network effect Uber currently has. So she has gotten that stock to recover. Instacart, you remember in private markets was worth, I think upwards of $40 billion at the peak. Yes. When it went public, if we were to look at the five-year chart here, you know, they went public, you know, $20 a share, you know, it's been up around 40. So it's got a market cap of 11.5 billion right now. It had a market cap as low of five or six billion. Yes. And I'm a shareholder in this company, by the way, just for full disclosure, I just remembered that because it's not really a big position for me. When I say not a big

• 12:12Jason Calacanis?

  position, under a million dollars is not a big position for me. So it's under a million. I'm not saying that to be obnoxious. I'm saying it doesn't change my life. Right. Million dollars doesn't change my life. Certainly under a million doesn't change my life. Certainly nothing changes my reporting, except for like a very large position like Uber or Robinhood. So putting all that aside, in the disclaimer bucket, you're exactly right, Alex. This company is not going to magically become worth 100 billion. This company is going to grow 5% a year. The market cap will be 20 billion and it will get taken out by Amazon, Dory Dash, Uber, Lyft, you know, somebody, Target, somebody like that is going to buy this. And so she probably saw the writing on the wall that she was not going to make a lot of money. Now, what is growing at 100% year over year, both in terms

• 12:57Jason Calacanis?

  of revenue and user base? AI. Specifically ChatGPT, the product, I think is doubling. Somebody pull up the chart of their users, somebody pull up the chart of their revenue, just to sort of compare the two opportunities. She's going to be CEO of the most important part. I would say of OpenAI.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:15Jason Calacanis?

  The consumer business is the breakout success at OpenAI. Here we go. This chart shows what?

• 13:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is from Ramp's AI Index, which actually I wanted to highlight, so I'm glad we get to kind of put two stories together here. This is the share of US businesses that use Ramp that have paid subs to either an AI model and platform or AI tooling. Yeah, this is really fun.

• 13:35Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what Ramp is.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Ramp is a corporate spend platform. If you're familiar with Brex, it's the same idea. Started off life as a way to give out corporate cards to companies with a lot of digital tools to enforce payment restrictions and reporting. And it's grown with a focus on cost savings. It's kind of a, it was kind of mocked, Jason, as a Brex wannabe, but since then it's experienced so quickly.

• 13:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's done well.

• 13:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's great. You give people a Ramp card. You have one?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Not only do I have one, I'm part of these stats. I have used my Ramp card to sign up for both Anthropic and OpenAI.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  There you go. If you're on the audio version, the chart shows pretty rapid growth in the number of businesses on Ramp that are paying for AI tooling. OpenAI, Jason, to your question about market share, has 32.4% of Ramp customers are currently paying OpenAI in some capacity.

• 14:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  8% Anthropic. There's a weird data blip when it comes to Google, so I'm not going to break up their information. But if you take a note, there is finally a little curve there for XAI and Grok. And I've been looking to see when that was going to show up, and there it is.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  Is that people who are just signing up for Twitter Blue? Are they, they get counted as Grok paying customers? Or that's specifically you go pay for Grok?

• 14:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, either way, it's a good example of why the two companies should be the same company.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:49Jason Calacanis?

  Is it, it really does work well to use a social network and hit that button. The number of users using OpenAI seems to be doubling every year. I think they broke 500 million monthly active users. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  400 million in February. I'm looking if we have a more updated.

• 15:04Jason Calacanis?

  That was the number I had heard whisper to me that they broke 500 million monthly active users on the ChatGPT project. That's not paid subs. If you, and we had a big debate, actually Lon and I, when we were doing All In of like, how many people, monthly active users does Google have for search specifically? And Google doesn't disclose. That number, but I think Google's is probably four billion. Here's chat GPT's weekly users worldwide as of February. And when you look at this chart, I mean, it's basically doubling year over year. So if you're at a company like Instacart, your best case scenario is it sells for 20 billion, 25 billion. Somebody pays a premium for it. In chat GPT, I mean, it's going to five X probably.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:44Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, from here. So there's a big difference between best case, a double up, best case, five or 10 X.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yes. And also don't forget they're said to be buying windsurf, the new IDE that everyone's talking about in the AI coding realm, Jason. And that means that Fiji not only has a lot of businesses to run for open AI. She's also adding entire new revenue line. So it's probably just pretty fricking exciting. Like, yes, there's, there's the money side of it, but like, it just sounds fun. Like that job sounds awesome.

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  Plus exciting equals easy decision.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:13Jason Calacanis?

  And then having three CEOs is a power move by Sam. Now they have to report into him and it becomes like making Susan Wojciecki, rest in peace, friend of mine, very sad. Um, she passed away last year.

• 16:28Jason Calacanis?

  Then when they put her as CEO of YouTube and they said, we're going to have a YouTube CEO. What that says to the rank in the file is that person's in charge, not Sundar is in charge. She's going to make, you know, 85% of the decisions, but the important decision, she's got to check with Sundar.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:43Jason Calacanis?

  Even if she does have to check, it kind of just signals we're taking this seriously.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, she, she was the head of, like, if you worked at YouTube, you went to Susan. It was.

• 16:53Jason Calacanis?

  It was that buck stop there, basically. I mean, it might be if she wanted to buy a company or something like that over a billion dollars or something, maybe she had to check in.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  But for the YouTube rank and file, they weren't even privy to that. They just knew Susan was the boss.

• 17:05Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:06Jason Calacanis?

  And, and the buck stops there. And then he made some sort of announcement, Alex, that he's still the CEO. I guess people were misinterpreting the announcement I saw on social.

• 17:14Speaker 00

  He's still going to be CEO of all three elements of the company. There will still be the nonprofit element. And that's what I wanted to bring up, which is we did have that news item recently that open AI is moving away from trying to get rid of its nonprofit. Instead, it's going to restructure as a public benefit corporation underneath a nonprofit. This has created tensions with Microsoft about profit sharing and so forth. But the gist is Sam's in charge and he's handing a chunk of his kingdom over to Fiji from Instacart because he's got, you know, a couple of things on his mind. And I think he's kind of the unofficial AI spokesperson for the world, I guess. And so like, he's always out and about.

• 17:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, somebody needs to be at the office with the team grinding it out.

• 17:51Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:51Jason Calacanis?

  Where do we pivot to here, Lon? What do you think's a good now? Or Alex, what's a good natural segue to go to now?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Let's keep on AI. I want to talk about this road rage.

• 18:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's hear it.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Sentencing.

• 18:01Jason Calacanis?

  I, I only saw, or actually I heard Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak on the No Agenda podcast, which I kind of like. They're, they're kind of like two, it's kind of like Walter and Statler.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Is those the?

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, Statler and Waldorf, the, they're the old muppet.

• 18:15Jason Calacanis?

  Waldorf?

• 18:16Speaker 00

  The mean muppets guys on the balcony?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  They're the old mean muppets in the back who make fun of Kermit and Foz.

• 18:21Jason Calacanis?

  But in fairness, Adam Curry's not mean, but John C. Dvorak is very mean, right?

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I got, I get what you're saying.

• 18:26Jason Calacanis?

  And Adam Curry is literally like, I think the cocaine in his system from the eighties when he was doing MTV is still in his system. That's how much cocaine was done in the eighties.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  It never really is.

• 18:35Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know that he did cocaine. I'm just joking.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  This is what their set looks like if you were curious.

• 18:40Jason Calacanis?

  There it is. There they are. That's John C. Dvorak on the left and the younger, uh, the younger Adam Curry on the right from Hill Country.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Younger.

• 18:48Jason Calacanis?

  We both, paradoxically, we both live in Hill Country here and outside of Austin. So in the greater Austin area. Uh, but a great show. And they were talking about it and I just happened to, you know, if I'm having a hard time sleeping, I put on No Agenda. It's just like my own personal, I'm joking. It's just a thing.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  The godfather of podcasts.

• 19:05Jason Calacanis?

  He is the pod father. I want to have him on the program. Uh, and he's doing really interesting things. I'd love to do a live show with him and show podcasting 2.0, podcasting 2.0. He's created this great standard. Number one, in the standard, a donate button. The donate button is set in the RSS feed. And so I'd be giving it to the Spotify people and Apple. You guys have to stop breaking podcast standards. I want this podcast standard. Daniel Ek, this is a message to you. Tim Cook, Apple, Eddie Q, message to you guys. You have to support standards or I'm going to be on your asses big time. And I'm going to tell people to use Overcast or other podcast players as the default player. Because I want these standards perfect. The other thing you can set is the live tag.

• 19:48Jason Calacanis?

  So if we go live, as I was just mentioning at the top of the show, we go live on a bunch of platforms. We could pick whatever platform we like most. If we're like a YouTube shop, great. If we have thisweekinstartups.com/live or Leo Laporte uses his own proprietary one and Twitter. You just put in the RSS feed when you go live and then all the applications will send people to the same stream. All right, we all know if you're a founder or even if you're a small business, you're thinking about your company 24/7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder. This is not clock in, clock out, nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's of course LinkedIn Jobs.

• 20:32Jason Calacanis?

  LinkedIn Jobs is like your co-founder. They're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn, where there are 1 billion members. You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place. And also LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people, whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants. So do me a favor, don't take my word for it. I mean, you should, I know what I'm talking about. This is where I find my great people, but just understand that 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates.

• 21:13Jason Calacanis?

  So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses already use LinkedIn for hiring. So here's your call to action. Post your job for free. Why wouldn't you do it? It's free, F R E E. That's a good price. LinkedIn.com/twist. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com/twist to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Is this just like an updated RSS form specifically for podcasting that contains the features you mentioned? Just to make sure that I understand.

• 21:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's the upgraded standard. He keeps adding to the standard and he added to the standard these two absolutely brilliant. I really do think Adam Curry is a brilliant technologist because he does his own tech. He edits his show. He uses the soundboard. He's kind of like, he was always inspired by Howard Stern and he had an influence on Joe Rogan, Adam Curry and then Howard Stern. One of the things Howard Stern did very well was he controlled the sound deck. So he was able to do timing better and all this stuff. Adam Curry does all this stuff himself. He vibe codes, he does RSS feeds and he always has, which inspired me. Remember like, I don't know, a couple of months ago, I was getting frustrated and I was like, this, I'm doing my own lights. I did my own lights. I did my own camera. I did my settings. I found the pool that cools the back of your camera

• 22:29Jason Calacanis?

  before my own tech team found it. Then I said, send it to these guys. Like, I'm on it. I tested three different cameras, four different light systems. I'm on it. And that was because I was like, you know what? Adam Curry's right. If you're the artist and you want to really be the tip of the spear, you got to understand the brushes. And if a new brush comes out, you need to try the new brush. You need to understand it. You need to A B test it. If a new canvas comes out, you have to be in there and roll up your sleeve. Shout out to my guy, Adam Curry. Let's get back to this story.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  This all relates back to a road rage incident that happened in 2021. A man named Christopher Pelkey in his late 30s, he was killed by another man named Gabriel Paul Horcassitas. So Gabriel Horcassitas has been convicted of the deal. We're talking about the sentencing. As part of the sentencing, Christopher Pelkey's family created an AI avatar of him. He died in the incident. They created an-

• 23:20Jason Calacanis?

  In a road rage incident, not an accident.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Not an accident.

• 23:23Jason Calacanis?

  He ran the guy off the road somehow?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't have the exact, like, what went down. But yeah, these two guys got very angry at each other in traffic and then one of them was killed.

• 23:33Jason Calacanis?

  And I guess that would be a manslaughter conviction, I would think.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It was manslaughter.

• 23:36Jason Calacanis?

  It wasn't intentional. And the reason I bring that up is because of the iconic scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when Bruce Lee says to the stuntman played by Brad Pitt, "My hands are so lethal that if I kill somebody..."

• 23:51Jason Calacanis?

  The guy playing Bruce Lee, you know, I my hands are so lethal that I could accidentally kill somebody. I go to jail. And then the guy, I forgot the name of the stuntman in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Cliff Booth. Cliff Booth, thank you. There's the walking IMDb. Cliff Booth says, anybody who kills somebody with their hands accidentally goes to jail. It's called manslaughter. Manslaughter, you didn't intend to kill somebody, but you did because of your reckless behavior. Anyway, this is crazy. And I, I just think the idea of, I know that trials are performative, right? There's a performative act, uh, thing to closing arguments, opening arguments. There are flourishes, right? If you watch The Insider about Big Tobacco, or if you, if you watch,

• 24:36Jason Calacanis?

  like, you know, Trial of OJ Simpson, they actually have the videos of that. If the glove doesn't fit, you have to acquit. Like, you can have flourishes of this stuff. But Alex, it seems profoundly unfair, uh, dramatic, perform, performative is the word. It seems too performative for me to make an avatar to try to influence the jury because that's too convincing. Am I right, Alex? What do you think? What's your?

• 24:59Speaker 00

  I, I think it's very worrisome to create an avatar, and we're gonna play the clip in a second, that makes it look like the person who is deceased is leaving a message that they did not write.

• 25:10Jason Calacanis?

  Why? Why is it, rub you the wrong way. Take a minute to-

• 25:14Speaker 01

  I, I should also note, this was just for a judge. The jury already did their job. The man was convicted. This is just the judge deciding-

• 25:21Jason Calacanis?

  For the sentencing?

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is sentencing only.

• 25:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, even for the sentencing? I, I mean, and a judge should be impervious to this?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  The judge did, he, he ignored the AI. The AI asked for clemency, or they had asked for forgiveness. Apparently, this man who died, Christopher Pelkey, his sister and his brother-in-law felt that he was a very forgiving soul. He wouldn't want the man who killed him to get the-

• 25:44Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's a whole nother spin on this.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  That's, that's why I'm saying what I'm saying, because his family is deciding after he's dead, what he might have wanted to say, and they're trying to then influence the judge's views, not because this is his sworn testimony, or he left a note, or anything. It's just, we think he- want this. It's third party astroturfing via AI. And this is not cool like the Tupac hologram. This to me is manipulative and ripe for abuse because you could flip it around and say, hey, he, he would have wanted no clemency, which could also be wrong.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Right. So the judge ignored the AI avatar and gave the guy the maximum sentence. Anyway, 10.5 years for manslaughter. It was a shooting incident, by the way. So this guy Kelkey must have cut somebody off, did something in traffic. The other guy didn't like it. He shot him.

• 26:30Jason Calacanis?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. How is that manslaughter? If you shoot at another person's vehicle, you are intentionally trying to kill them.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I don't have this data, but I guess it would be because it was not premeditated. It was a crime of passion.

• 26:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so manslaughter falls into that too?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Homicide, like he didn't plan, I'm gonna go kill a guy today.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  Maybe he shot at the car.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Or maybe he didn't intend to hurt anybody and was just angry.

• 26:53Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know, man. I, I, yeah, so there is like, it's a crime of passion kind of thing. Like I got caught up in the moment, but, and maybe that was the defense. I wonder if they, this seems highly intentional when you put the guy in, but maybe they're saying self-defense. So if the guy was trying to ram him and he's like, I'm trying to do self-defense. But you have other options in that case, like pulling the car over to the side of the road and stopping.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, anything but shooting somebody. Let's pause and stop talking about it and just watch this clip. Here it is. Let, let, yeah, I'm curious what you guys think.

• 27:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah, let me see this. First time I'm seeing it.

• 27:23Speaker 04

  I would like to make my own impact statement. So, hello, everybody. Thank you so much for being here today. It means a lot. I can't tell you how humbled I am for those that spoke up for me. Everyone who flew in, took off work, those who are watching this remotely. And for everyone who has supported my family and loved ones through three and a half years and two trials. I wish I could be with you all today. To your honor, Judge Lang, thank you for making yourself available to see this case to the end, especially when the rescheduled trial conflicted with your.

• 28:00Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to make any jokes or light of the dead.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 28:03Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously. But did they have to use Brian? Williams's voice for this. I mean, it sounds like

• 28:09Speaker 01

  That's sound like Brian Williams.

• 28:11Jason Calacanis?

  It sounds like a, I mean, did, am I the only person who picked up on that?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  I didn't notice that until you said it, but now that you've said it.

• 28:18Jason Calacanis?

  Play it for another five seconds. I'm not joking. I, I'm wondering if they trained on this person's voice or used a generic one, because you would need to have video of this person to train on his voice.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 28:28Jason Calacanis?

  How did they train the AI? Did they train it to be his voice? Just play another segment of this.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  His sister and brother-in-law both work in the AI field and this sort of they, this came from them, but I don't know what tools they used. I mean, I think what you're getting at gets to my core issue with the whole thing, which is, I think people just don't understand this technology well enough. A lot of people think, oh, I had AI make a statement from this, you know, dead person. They think the computer somehow

• 28:57Jason Calacanis?

  magically knows.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  understands that guy's personality and is really going to craft something that might have genuinely come from them. And that's not, not to take away from AI technology, which is amazing, but that's not what it's doing.

• 29:10Jason Calacanis?

  If the person wrote a book on forgiveness.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:14Jason Calacanis?

  If the person had a podcast about Christianity.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:17Jason Calacanis?

  And you trained it on that data set.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 29:19Jason Calacanis?

  You might be able to say, this is 60%, 70% of what we think their reaction would have been to this issue. Just like you could take This Week in Startups as Podcast AI is doing. Shout out to Podcast AI. They'll be on Tuesday to mentor our founders here in Austin for Founder Tuesdays. Uh, so I could see like in that case, they're doing that, but play just a little bit of the voice while I talk. One of the things that's very interesting here is, now that you tell me they work in AI.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:50Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to be cynical here, but did they use?

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Loved ones through three and a half years and two trials.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  It really does sound like Brian Williams.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  To your honor Judge Lang, thank you for making yourself available to see this.

• 30:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah, I, I, I, I really, that is so accurately Brian Williams from the news. Maybe this guy just sounded a lot like Brian Williams. They would have had to have at least 30 minutes or 60 minutes of his voice on camera to train. I think that's usually what people say you need. Correct. I know when I was thinking of doing a speechify voice, like Gwyneth Paltrow does the speechify voice, and I told them I would do it, I got to follow up with them, somebody make a note for me, but the speechify guys wanted to do my voice and have me read stuff, and I was going to do it as like an influencer deal, because I love that product. It's really interesting, like, maybe they just needed a generic voice because they didn't have enough audio of him. I would have to train like maybe two or three hours of my voice, which you can do easily here.

• 30:45Jason Calacanis?

  Or I founders, I know you're building something amazing and you're going to change the world. And now, hey, the big logos, they're taking your calls, right? But here's the catch, if you're not SOC 2 or ISO 27001 compliant, these deals won't close. Now, some of you are saying, I've never heard of those terms. Some of you are saying, I've heard of them, but I don't know what they are. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're going to be your partner, and they are the all-in-one compliance solution that helps startups get audit ready. And that's going to build a strong security foundation for your company, which you want, but they're going to do it quickly and painlessly. Vanta automates the manual security tasks that slow you down and that streamlines your audit.

• 31:27Jason Calacanis?

  So here's your call to action, whether you're closing your first deal or you're gearing up for growth, Vanta is going to make compliance easy for you. Join over 8,000 companies, simplify your compliance and get $1,000 off at vanta.com/twist. That's V A N T A dot com slash T W I S T.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Producer Chris has weighed in and says that there's actually a video interview they show in this larger news clip, and this is what he sounds like. So he appears to be the vocal doppelganger of Brian Williams.

• 31:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fine.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Here's the thing, the video adds nothing, right? This is just a script that they wrote and then had a picture of him.

• 32:04Jason Calacanis?

  Did they write it? Or do they use AI to?

• 32:07Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 32:08Jason Calacanis?

  What was the prompt?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  But I believe this is a script that they had an AI perform.

• 32:14Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Cause you could also say the script, make a script based on.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  You could. You could have asked chat GPT like, write a statement asking for forgiveness for, like you could do that. I don't think that's what they did. I bet the sister and the brother-in-law wrote this and then gave it to an AI to perform.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  But what does it add? Like you, he didn't write this statement. The man who died did not.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  No, he did not.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Allow for this video. The video is not well done.

• 32:41Jason Calacanis?

  It's so strange. And when you say the, I mean, again, back to cynicism here.

• 32:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:46Jason Calacanis?

  This is so off. He? It's so obviously inappropriate to the three of us.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:54Jason Calacanis?

  To do this, one wonders, my mind wanders and I get, I don't want to be cynical. That the loved ones are either incredibly misguided and nobody had the wherewithal to say, listen, this is a really bad idea. This shouldn't be the guy's legacy. I don't know if he's got family, friends, kids.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:10Jason Calacanis?

  That's, that's number one. Number two, are they taking advantage of this situation because they're AI executives to get press or? And I hate to say that because.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  It occurred to me that like.

• 33:21Jason Calacanis?

  It occurred to you too?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. If they, if they're, if they're working in AI, a big publicity grabbing stunt. I mean, we're talking about it right now.

• 33:28Jason Calacanis?

  What do you, what do you think, Alex? Did your mind go there? Are you too pure?

• 33:31Speaker 00

  My mind did not go there, but I wish that it had. I wish that I need to be 5% more cynical, guys. Uh, to me, I was just, if you did this to me after I died and tried to speak for me using what appears to be a 25 cent AI model makeover. I would come down and haunt you until I couldn't anymore. You know, like it's just abusive.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  It reminds me of the Jet Li thing. When, did you guys hear about this? He was offered the matrix Jet Li. And he, he turned it down because he refused to pose. They wanted to make a 3D computer model of him like they do for Keanu in that movie. So they could do bullet time and all that stuff. And he was like, no, I won't ever let a computer train on my moves. Those are my moves. That's my whole career is doing martial arts. I always remember that because he was so far ahead. He was thinking that in 1999. I can't let this computer learn how I do martial arts or they'll be able to do it without.

• 34:21Jason Calacanis?

  The only thing that's silly about that is they could just take other videos of him now, even without the motion capture.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  It was 1999. He wasn't thinking there yet.

• 34:27Jason Calacanis?

  But he was directionally correct.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. The foresight of that, I feel like we are going to be in a future where everybody's going to have in their will, like, please don't make an AI avatar of me after I'm dead.

• 34:39Jason Calacanis?

  It's like your organs.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:40Jason Calacanis?

  I will give my organs. I will not give my soul and my likeness away. Alex, probably a good time to bring this up. In your contract, obviously you didn't read it thoroughly enough. We have the rights in perpetuity to have you do all 10 Qs and quarterly earnings, even after you pass.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  I'm fine with that, actually.

• 34:55Jason Calacanis?

  But your kids get like a hundred dollars per hour residual. Let me ask you that. If you pass and you could have like Alex, the like analyst, you know, persona, and for every hour of use of it in a podcast or whatever, on CNBC, you, your kids got paid like whatever, a, a, a couple of shackles, a hundred bucks an hour, whatever.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  Would you let that happen?

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Because one, I have no shame. And two, I have two children and children are expensive. And have you seen how the AI is taking all the jobs? Yeah. So call me. I, I don't matter. Bruce Lee is a person of cultural import. I am Alex.

• 35:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you look great. I love the collared shirt. Looking great today. You know, there was another story in the docket. Our friend Eric Newcomer, uh, in his newsletter said there was a lot of secondaries going on.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 35:45Jason Calacanis?

  So I want to just point out a little bit of a trend this specific week. We got IPO news. We had, uh, two companies bought by DoorDash.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Seven Rooms and Deliveroo.

• 35:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. And I think one was for a billion. I don't know what Deliveroo went for.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Two and a half, three. Yeah.

• 36:03Jason Calacanis?

  Billion.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:04Jason Calacanis?

  So that's four billion right there.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  It's a huge Australian.

• 36:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Deli, food delivery startup.

• 36:09Jason Calacanis?

  Then we have, um, whatever, uh, the purchase in Turkey was by Uber. They bought 70% of one. I don't know what that cost, but let's assume low billions. So I think that's four deals or five deals, like off the top of my head. In what I'll call micro M and A, single-digit billions, we're going to call micro M and A going from here. We'll call regular M and A, anything from 10 to 100 billion, and we'll call major M and A over 100 billion. So, micro M and A happening here. Minor, I'll call it minor, minor M and A, single-digit billions, we saw four, five, maybe, just in the last two weeks. And we have an IPO that would be a major M and A-style event, a major

• 36:49Speaker 01

  It's loosening up.

• 36:50Jason Calacanis?

  Loosening up. And then this is really interesting. Secondary Funds grabbed a record 9% of private market fundraising. And I guess, this actually isn't from Eric, this is from Pitchbook. Pitchbook is a private, like, 30, 40, 50,000-dollar-a-year database, kind of like the old-school versus Crunchbase.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:11Jason Calacanis?

  Probably not as good as the data in Crunchbase, I think, but I guess that's a big debate.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Like a Lexus Nexus for investors.

• 37:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I don't know how good this data is, I'll be totally honest. Card has got their data subset, so all three of these companies have their own data, so you have to remember, it's imperfect. It's not like stock data.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  The Pitchbook crew works pretty hard, though. I know a lot of the folks over there, you know, just from talking to them.

• 37:33Jason Calacanis?

  I just know, like, when I look at the data, I know a lot of people who don't contribute their data, I know they have, like, holes in the data, so, independent of them working hard, probably 70% correct is what I would guess. So, they're saying, "Secondary Funds grab a record 9% of private market fundraising." I don't know if the 9% of private market fundraising means total investment dollars into startups or for funds. Did you know if that distinction is there?

• 38:01Speaker 00

  I'm going to double-check with the source right now, because I think I know the answer, but I don't want to talk out my backside.

• 38:06Jason Calacanis?

  Because it could be two different things, right? It could be 9% of venture funding to funds went to secondary, but I think this is investing in startups. So, if you took 91% of it being primary investment into the companies, and then 9% of that total pool would be buying secondaries from the companies. Anyway, that is an increase over the years from, you know, what was maybe 2% or 3% of the market historically.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:30Jason Calacanis?

  So, that is an incredible sign as well. What that means is, the bottom feeders believe now's the time to strike. Because it spiked in 2020, according to this data, again, it's probably 60, 70% directionally correct in my estimation. That's generally what these databases have. So between 5% and 6% during the peak ZIRP era, 2020 to 21, it plummets back down to 2% in 2022. Wrath of Lina Khan, Silicon Valley Bank implosion, actually, the brand's back. I got invited to go to the nickname with Silicon Valley Bank on game four. So I might be in their, in their box for game.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Wow. They're already back and spending money on Knicks tickets.

• 39:09Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, I think they landed pretty well, actually, the different parts of the businesses. And then here we go, 9%. So if this is correct, again, it's probably directionally correct, we might have tripled or quadrupled from trial to now this peak, and it looks like it's going to keep going up. And I know this because there's like a market for calm, you know, the meditation app. And I think that from we sold in secondary 10% of our shares, and I think it's maybe 15% of the price we sold for at the peak was what we were offered maybe three to six months ago. The only reason I'm saying this publicly is because it's public knowledge. It's not, this is not hidden. It's available to everybody. So we can talk about it. And I've

• 39:48Jason Calacanis?

  been public that part of our venture strategy is to sell 10% when we are 50 to 100x, and then another 10% when we're 200x. Just, you know, along the way, because we have to get DPI for our LPs. It's becoming a critical part of venture for seed stage and pre-seed like us to sell along the way. This is a great sign.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  So here's my question, though, Jason, because it seems that we have early-stage investors, angels, pre-seed, seed accelerators, putting capital in, and then they can't wait 15 years for the outcome, right? So is secondary going to become the main vehicle for early-stage investing liquidity versus IPOs and M&A for late stage? And if so, does that mean that venture capital is now essentially just pre-seed through like A, and then B plus is just like private equity?

• 40:35Jason Calacanis?

  I would say it's more like from inception and accelerators all the way to like Series D or so. Series C is when like people start to offer secondaries. D, certainly, people start offering it. So, you know, Rippling just raised 450 million in their Series G, 17, almost $17 billion valuation, and it includes a 200 million, what's called a tender offer. They're buying for current and former employees. So that kind of like in the previous valuation was 13.4 Series F, if these numbers are correct. What that means is, as you can see, there is a, there are people who believe that company's going public.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yup.

• 41:11Jason Calacanis?

  And they want to acquire as many shares as possible. The company doesn't want to create new shares.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 41:16Jason Calacanis?

  So they're saying, if you want to, you know, you can buy, you can put in 450 million in primary, which would be 10% of 16.8 billion would be 1.6 billion. So this is 25, 2.5% dilution for that 450 million coming in.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  That's nothing.

• 41:34Jason Calacanis?

  It's nothing. But they're like, hey, you want to get the other 200 billion? We don't even want to dilute more than that 2.5. So you can buy from our current former employees. So you're right. I think what we'll see is secondaries will be half the market for private company shares and then M and A IPOs will be the other half. I'm just picking a number here to, since you asked the question. And what that means is firms like ours, Launch or Pair or Y Combinator, you're going to see these firms consistently sell into these type of rounds, the year six, seven, eight. I'm not sure how old Rippling is, but I think it's closer to 10 than five. I'm guessing it's seven or eight years old at this point.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Founded in 2016, nine years old.

• 42:12Jason Calacanis?

  Nine year old company. That means they're planning to go public in the next two or three years. So they'll file next year. I'm going to take a guess. Rippling will file in 2026. And this is the setup, Alex. If Trump ends the war in Ukraine, which he seems to be on his way to doing since he's doing the minerals deal, he's committed to providing them with more weapons and we're going to get our money back. Basically exactly what I outlined should happen and what essentially Biden was pursuing. Biden didn't have the, I think, the sharpness to do the rare earth deal. So if you want to compare the two, you know, putting a business guy in there, he says, you know what? I want those rare earths.

• 42:51Jason Calacanis?

  So he added that. But they both are now sanctions, really strong sanctions and really strong weapons support. And I'll give Trump credit adding to it, hey, we're going to get our money back and we're going to do the rare earths. What's great about him having a financial interest there, and this is why trade is so important. We have a financial interest in Ukraine. If somebody invades Ukraine, they're invading our financial interest. So when Sacks said on All In Podcast over and over again, oh, you know, we have no interest over there.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Why should we help Ukraine?

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  Why should we help Ukraine other than democracy and human rights?

• 43:25Jason Calacanis?

  I'll just, you know, that is my position. Don't want to start World War III. Do want to preserve democracy and do care about human rights. Now, we actually have a vested interest. No conflict, no interest. Remember, we say that every week. No conflict, no interest there. So I have no idea how I got to Ukraine, but

• 43:39Speaker 00

  We're talking about next year's IPO.

• 43:41Jason Calacanis?

  The market, if Trump doesn't barrel roll the economy and he soft lands the tariff trade chaos, I'll call it chaos because it was chaotic for six weeks. If he lands that plane and Ukraine gets settled, people have already forgotten, no judgments here, but I don't hear anybody talking about the situation in Gaza at all. It is not on the front page of newspapers here in the United States. You guys might care about it. It is, I can tell you, it's not on the podcast.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  You're not on Blue Sky enough. If you were on Blue Sky, people are still talking.

• 44:12Jason Calacanis?

  Blue Sky is falling. I'm talking about New York Times, nightly news, and podcasts.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  It has dropped out of front of mind for most Americans.

• 44:18Jason Calacanis?

  I would say it's not a top 10 issue anymore. Yeah, this is somewhere.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Whether, however you feel about it, it does not seem to be a high bar.

• 44:25Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just making an observation. So that one has been deprecated as an important issue by the media and by, I think, the intelligentsia even, and the media. So here we are.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  No, I mean, we saw that even during the campaign during 2024. It was never in the top 10, 15 issues people were voting on.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  There wasn't a lot of people that were arguing against more military aid to Israel amongst the two major parties. So there wasn't a flashpoint to really.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Right. It has not been top of mind.

• 44:52Jason Calacanis?

  So the perfect setup for M and A, IPOs, and solving venture capital. We were on the precipice of venture capital collapsing. Two out of three venture firms, I believe the statistic is not making it to, not making it, think about that, to their third or fourth fund. We're on a fourth, and if you counted my Sequoia scouts, arguably, our fourth is really our fifth. So that would be fund zero. And I'm going to go out for our fifth fund, you know, in 2027, I guess. I got one more year of work to do. And I'm feeling actually very bullish about it. I think we're going to see a lot of exits, a lot of M and A, and a lot of, I think we'll see a lot of minor. I think we're going to see a lot of singles

• 45:33Jason Calacanis?

  and doubles, which is fantastic for entrepreneurs, because it will create more investment and reinvestment. When you have a company go public, you create a diaspora. One of the great examples, of course, is PayPal, Alex. That created LinkedIn, Yelp, Founder's Fund.

• 45:53Jason Calacanis?

  Elon would have created his companies anyway, but you can, you can kind of go back to PayPal and X for him going out and doing Tesla and SpaceX. That was the thing, the sort of foundational moment of all those people working together, Saks's firm Kraft.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  A firm with Max Levchin.

• 46:08Jason Calacanis?

  With Max Levchin. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Ken Howery and his firm Luke Nuasit didn't work there, I don't believe, but he then did, worked at Founders Fund. And that's really, I think, what we're going to see here. If more companies can go public, they can create more angel investors, more LPs for funds because they get rich. When it goes out and then they start angel investing and they go out and start their own companies. And that's what happened in Australia. Atlassian went out, they backed Blackbird, the VC firm, and they backed Canva and hundreds of companies and investors came out of Atlassian.

• 46:44Jason Calacanis?

  And they still emerged because Atlassian is doing so well. Then it's happening with Canva. Canva goes public, you're going to see dozens of venture firms get LPs from those Canva millionaires and billionaires. And more companies get started. Alex, wrap us up here.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  I just want to make a small point that when I was learning about venture capital, the idea of a series F was described to me as a series fail. Because surely you should have gone public by the time you raise a series F. Now we're talking about a series G, which I'm going to rename series goddamn.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Because things have changed. You know, I'm being facetious, but I think this just goes to show that we're talking about Rippling and we're not saying boo on them for having not gone out. Just shows how the landscape has changed because no one's mad at Rippling right now.

• 47:26Jason Calacanis?

  They're nine years in. I think most folks are okay with going public. I mean, if you can get a company to go public, if they go out by years 10, 11, 12, people are happy about it. What I was told by people who got into venture early, you know, they were looking at years five, six, seven, eight, going public at the 50 million to 100 million mark. Now, the bogey is $1 billion in revenue and predictability.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  That's a huge bar, man.

• 47:52Jason Calacanis?

  Which is a huge bar. It's crazy. And then what does that do to pension funds and individual investors? They don't get to invest in the public markets and get that run up from, you know, let's say, a billion-dollar valuation to 100 billion. They lose that 100x opportunity. They get to buy in. We had the story about, is it Figure Robotics that had BMW maybe as a customer or not, or a trial, or a pilot? I think it was Figure. And Figure, I believe, the whisper number was a 38, 39, or 40 billion-dollar valuation. And I talked to some people after we had our discussion about it. Alex, you and I were confused. And when I talked to some people about it, they were like, oh, yeah, because we did our thing. Was that, was it securities fraud to say BMW was a customer and BMW cleaned up their

• 48:37Jason Calacanis?

  statement?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Right. Well, because they were making it sound like these robots were working on the assembly line, making BMWs. And it's like, probably more like an experiment. They tested it out.

• 48:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's what their first statement was, that it was an experiment.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:50Jason Calacanis?

  Then they did the cleanup statement that they were working on an active line.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:54Jason Calacanis?

  Now, they could have literally been putting the, what do they call it? The sticker in the window?

• 49:01Jason Calacanis?

  The sticker for when you buy a new car, you know, it's like a sticker in the window?

• 49:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I know what you're talking about. I don't know what it's called.

• 49:06Jason Calacanis?

  It could have been doing that, right? It could have been like spraying an air freshener in the car.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Or, yeah.

• 49:10Jason Calacanis?

  They're a pre-revenue company, and these SPVs were going in the 38, 39, or 40. They were trying. I don't know if it actually closed because I haven't seen anything about it. 38, 39, 40 billion. This is the crazy bull sign.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  39.5 billion.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Oh, I thought it was 39.4. Ah, memory failed me.

• 49:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's so bizarre to even think. I just want everybody to pause on this. As bullish as I am on Optimus and Figure and all of these companies to do great things in the world with human robots, like, we saw human robots for over 10 years with Boston Dynamics. Google bought that company, resold it, and it's not doing anything in the real world? That's that crazy? Like, we have Roombas. Those are great. We have the ones at the Amazon factories. We have drones delivering stuff. To give a company, I just want to also, as we talk about, is the market turning around? There are moments of insanity in this market.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:08Jason Calacanis?

  Paying $39.5 billion for a company that is pre-revenue. I'm just putting this in here now. It's towards the end of the show, nobody's gonna hear this, but I want to be able to clip it in two or three years. That we can say that made no sense.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:23Jason Calacanis?

  That company is worth 5 billion, max. That's the proper valuation.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  There is also, you were just talking about this with Megyn Kelly the other day. I think like self-driving cars, there's a high bar to convince people this is okay. Like, all it's gonna take is one of these robots freaking out and hurting somebody. And that's going to really make it harder to sell people on, bring this humanoid robot into your life.

• 50:47Jason Calacanis?

  They just don't work. Let's be honest. The, when you see what they're doing, whether it's Optimus or these. It literally is like the self-driving cars, you know, halfway between now and when the DARPA experiments. And you look at the DARPA early days, they had these cars like in the desert.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  And they, they, there's nothing for them to hit. And they couldn't even get them to go in a straight line.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:10Jason Calacanis?

  It was so, because there's no internet, there's no GPS maps, there was nothing.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, they didn't have the LiDAR like Waymo had.

• 51:17Jason Calacanis?

  DARPA challenge started in either 2002 or 3 or 4, somewhere around that timeframe. And this was the beginning of Waymo. The Google guys saw that, Elon saw that, everybody saw it because it was at TED and a bunch of these events.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:30Jason Calacanis?

  They were all talking about it, so it kind of incepted in everybody's mind that, hey, we're starting this journey. That's where the robots are. Now, I do think the robots will go faster because they're building on top of autonomy, LLMs, batteries and everything. But here's a video of like the original DARPA challenge.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a still image, I'm sorry, Jason.

• 51:45Jason Calacanis?

  No problem, but even still, no pun intended.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Look at it, yeah.

• 51:49Jason Calacanis?

  You can look at it, it's like, it looks like a Jeep or a Hummer or something.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  It's a Hummer, yeah.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  It looks like a, you know, a decapitated Hummer.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Where does the person even sit? It's all filled with the gear, there's so much gear.

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  There's so much gear that, yeah, and they, these things, when you see the videos of these things in the early DARPA challenges, which are on VHS tapes, like, it literally looks like a bunch of kids with, you know, their homemade RV cars. Kind of feel like we're not that much further along than that with Optimus and all these other robot figures. Like, there's a lot of work to be done for these to do meaningful work in the world. That they can carry boxes, great. But can they carry boxes consistently enough that you would put them in an Amazon factory over the purpose-built robots?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 52:31Jason Calacanis?

  They have to beat purpose-built robots.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:34Jason Calacanis?

  Or they have to be so good at a range of tasks that you don't want to build a purpose-built. So I guess a way to say this in theory would be, um, you need to have this thing be able to fill the dishwasher, iron clothes, take the dog for a walk, take the trash out for a walk, cut vegetables. These are all very sophisticated.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And without separate trainings for each one, like they just got to look at the object and figure out how to interact with it.

• 53:02Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's like we're between five and 10. I would say to do those things I just mentioned, I think we're five years out from that, doing those five things in a home. The laundry, the dishwasher, cutting vegetables, walking the dog. In five years, do those four things happen or not? Let's create a polymark for it. We got to do office hours. Let's get to office. Do you want to show me a video?

• 53:21Speaker 00

  No, I was going to point out that my commentators latest request for startup does include Jason software for robots and they say that it hasn't had a chat GPT moment yet, but it's close. But I don't want to delay us. Let's bring in our guest. So everyone here, you know, it's a nerdy show about startups. So clearly we are all outdoors people, which means that we are all out there four-wheeling on the weekend. I kid, but I've done a bit of this. It's a lot of fun. But what if you live in a city and have a Jeep and want to get out there and get muddy and don't know where to go? Well, that's where a company called Where to Wheel comes in. And Jason, we have Brittany Paragoff from Where to Wheel, an investment of yours. Just a couple of questions. Let's bring her up. Brittany.

• 53:56Jason Calacanis?

  Brittany, how are you?

• 53:57Speaker 05

  I'm good. How are you?

• 53:59Jason Calacanis?

  Good. Uh, so you're in the accelerator right now, LA 34, am I correct?

• 54:04Speaker 05

  Yes, I am.

• 54:05Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So we're in the 34th cohort of the launch accelerator. My God, we've been doing it for a long time.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  You're a series G.

• 54:12Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, we had a unicorn come out of it. We've had multiple hundred million dollar companies come out of it. So it's been like just a great experience for us. Just so people understand, 20,000 people apply for funding from us every year and we have about 1,200 of those now. Maybe it's like 1,500 now. Yes, 1,500 are going to go to Founder University every year. We watch them work for 12 weeks and then some number of them, I think about 50 will go to the accelerator. The accelerator has a check associated with it, the 125K, a check that all accelerators do. And then Founder University, we do some select checks from there. That's the feeder into it. Uh, but the companies in the accelerator, like Brittany is, tend to have products in market and a couple of customers. So tell us what you're working on. And when did we first engage or meet you? Did you come to Founder University? How did we meet?

• 54:57Speaker 05

  We did. I actually saw you speak in Virginia Beach at Star Peninsula like in 2018, right after you launched your angel book. So that was fun. Yep. And then we joined the Founder University, I think cohort seven last year, went through that, got the accelerator check, and now we're in cohort LA 34.

• 55:16Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. So you went to the Founder University.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 55:19Jason Calacanis?

  When you went there, how much of the curriculum, the speakers and the knowledge that we try to convey in Founder University, would you say you knew already? It's okay if you knew a bunch of it. I'm just trying to get an honest assessment of our curriculum here.

• 55:32Speaker 05

  Um, I mean, knew of it, knew how to implement it different, but probably knew about 20% of the different talks, now implementing them, you know, is a little bit of a different game. But there was a lot of really good information and value that was in that program that allowed us to expand.

• 55:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. What, what stood out as if you had to pick number one and number two, top two topics that we helped you sharpen your blade with?

• 55:59Speaker 05

  Number one, pitching.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, great. Awesome. Okay. That's an important skill to have is storytelling and pitching.

• 56:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:04Jason Calacanis?

  What would be number two on the list?

• 56:06Speaker 05

  Number two probably was, um, you know, how to just speak to investors and like we had never set up a data room. So learning all that, the financial modeling, what they want to know, what they want to see and getting that ready for when you're, you know, actually launching your fundraising.

• 56:22Jason Calacanis?

  So important, Lon, when we look at that curriculum, Lon here is the editorial director, not just co-host. We're really working on that curriculum and, you know, I, we would not guess that, that the data room process would be something. And some people might be like, well, data room, I already have done that before in my last two companies. And this is what we see consistently, Brittany, is we have so many folks tell us different parts of the curriculum landed with them.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Yes, that's what I was gonna say. It's hard, it's very hard to predict. There is, because it's clearly, it's not like. You know, you could take a class and everybody gets the same class and then you get to the end of the semester and you learned everything there is to know about being a founder. It's like, everybody's picking up whatever information they can from whatever source they can, but it's not codified in that way. So yeah, different parts of the curriculum appeal to different founders all the time.

• 57:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, great job. So, give us the quick, you know, really simple sentence. That's a, that's a, a thing we do on the, on the, in the Founder University, is explain your startup in a really simple sentence, RSS, really simple sentence for your startup, and then how it's going and, and what blockers and wins you've had.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  Yep. So, Where2wheel is a marketplace that connects off-roaders with private landowners for four by four access. Um, we've done really well. We doubled revenue last year. We're expanding across the US. Um, our biggest blockers are probably insurance. So we're, like, insurance for landowners. So we've gotten a couple quotes, but this sector is a little interesting on the insurance side and they're just not really feasible or offer great protection. So we've actually been leveraging agrotourism statute, which 30 of the states have, and we're protecting our landowners throughout that. So it gives them liability immunity for our activity, but we have a bunch of landowners that don't fall into that. So trying to find, you know, an insurance product for them.

• 58:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So to recap here, Alex, it's a marketplace. You're an off-roader. You want to take your Rivian, your Cybertruck, your Jeep, whatever it is, off-road and see what it can do. There's literally, I think, in the United States, low millions of people involved in this activity, correct, Brittany? If, uh, it's a couple of million people love this?

• 58:24Speaker 05

  Yep, 36 million in the US.

• 58:26Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. 36 million in the US.

• 58:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, one in 10 Americans.

• 58:29Jason Calacanis?

  Takes their truck off-road.

• 58:30Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 58:31Jason Calacanis?

  Now, how many people do it, would you say, out of the 36 million, would be the hardcore that do it every month? Like, they, it's like, they're, it's their poker, it's their Knicks, it's their skiing, it's their number one golf. How many people is it their number one activity? They do it every month, 10 times or more a year?

• 58:46Speaker 05

  I'd probably say about, like, this is like, it's almost like a cult following. So, you know, I'd say like fishing or something like, it's something you want to do almost every weekend or every other. So a high percentage, I'd probably say probably... Sixty to seventy percent of them do. Now, like on our side, our customers come back like week after week after week after week.

• 59:05Jason Calacanis?

  So this is what they do weekly like golf. There's, there's 10 million people who do this every week like golf. Let's just pick a number. 10 million sounds like a good one for me to start with. Now, you said there's insurance issues. That makes total sense. You're in a new space. Airbnb had this problem. Uber had this problem. Uber continues to have this problem. But you mentioned some word that we all raised our eyebrows at.

• 59:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:28Jason Calacanis?

  That we didn't know. So this is a term of art in your space. When you're a landowner, you get some type of protection. It was with an A, I think. What was that word?

• 59:37Speaker 05

  Yep, so it's agritourism. So it's a new, they're state level protection in the US. So 30 of the states have them for agricultural land. So they can have basically.

• 59:47Jason Calacanis?

  Agra tourism.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 59:48Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  It's tourism to attract visitors to your farm, ranch, or another kind of agricultural business.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  So you could, on your ranch.

• 59:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  You could, if you like, set up pony rides for kids on your ranch, that would be agritourism.

• 1:00:03Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  But with agritourism in Texas, does this exist? And what it means is if you go to do agritourism, you don't get to sue me.

• 1:00:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, so if it has, there's 30 states that have liability immunity for the landowner as well as zoning. So you don't have to deal with local municipalities to get zoning. And Texas is one of them. So there's 30 that have all of those. So if you're a landowner and you hold activities, so it could be you pick blueberries, off-roading, hayride. Then when the person comes onto the land, because it's an agritourism activity, you get liability protection from them. So if anyone gets hurt or anything happens, you're protected at a state level.

• 1:00:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, well, so, you know, I, I'm gonna look at this and say, this seems like the greatest thing ever. You have to educate the market on it. Cause I didn't know about this and I own a ranch and I'm, I'm expanding the ranch. So, uh, but I am part of an HOA. Part of my ranch is on an HOA, which is a non-commercial use. So I couldn't do this for commercial because I made that agreement. But some of the other land I'm looking at buying in Hill Country is, um, You know, falls into either what they call, um, what's it called when you're not part of any district? God. Freehold. Unincorporated. Ah. This unincorporated land, there's agriculture exceptions. But so this is great.

• 1:01:24Jason Calacanis?

  So I think you just focus on the states that have it. It's almost like you're a poker, online poker company and you have, you know, 20 states, then 25, then 30. I think you need, this could be a mission that you could kung fu this, where you redirect the energy from this and make this your cause. Our cause, you know, here at our company is to get everybody to have agrotourism. And we are going to create the Agrotourism Association. So I want you to consider creating the Agrotourism Association of America. Agrotourism Association of America, the ATA. And I know it sounds silly, but if you brand that, that you are creating a nonprofit or

• 1:02:07Jason Calacanis?

  just an organization, and these are the tenants of the organization, and you start asking people to join this organization, and you feature them, that they're a part of the organization, and this is your lobbying group, this is your mailing list, and you're keeping people updated on it. Now you've, you have two factors to catch people. You can catch them directly because they search for off-roading in Austin, Texas, or Hill Country, or wherever. You can also catch them for agrotourism. And now that I think about it, you mentioned some other activities. I think that, you know, and this is why, when I remember your, um, business came across my desk, my Slack, as it were, I said, there was some criticism, valid criticism, maybe

• 1:02:49Jason Calacanis?

  this idea is too small. But pony rides, BlackBerry picking, these are valid as well. So is photography. So is rucking and hiking. So is hosting a Renaissance fair. No judgments, Lon.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  I do like a Renaissance fair, they're fun.

• 1:03:07Jason Calacanis?

  I know, that's why I said no judgments.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  You dress up, you eat a turkey leg.

• 1:03:10Jason Calacanis?

  So I think you have to take this energy, right? When there's energy in the world, a cause, people like a good fight. Salesforce was built off of attacking Microsoft and packaged software. I want you to take on this fight for all ranch owners. You're the ranch owner's advocate. And if ranch owners want to monetize their land, the goddamn government has no right. And they need to protect us because Americans need to touch grass. This could then start the tip of the spear. You have people register with the ATAA and they register, they join the consortium. You do an ATAA conference and meetup in Austin. You do one in whatever your second market is, third market.

• 1:03:55Jason Calacanis?

  And you just have people come speak about agritourism they're doing. And then our website, our investment in you is no longer for off-roading. It's for agritourism. And you tell people, hey, you're setting up for doing off-roading. We want to let you know that there are people who do larping and Renaissance fairs. And here is a playbook for starting a Renaissance fair. And here's how you do it. And if you start one, we'll help you promote it. And here's one for people who are doing retreats, family retreats. Here's one for, and you can just produce content after content for camping, for fishing, everything. You have the tip of the spear, you're passionate about off-roading. What's the next thing that those off-roaders like to do? I know what it is.

• 1:04:37Jason Calacanis?

  They like to drive those goddamn cars and go fishing and then they like to do a barbecue, isn't it?

• 1:04:41Speaker 05

  Yep, that and hunting or racing has a lot of crossover.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  I was gonna say hunting, I bet is the same.

• 1:04:47Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  I bet those are overlapping demos for sure.

• 1:04:50Jason Calacanis?

  So then, you know, that's what we're doing here. You come for the off-roading, you stay for the jousting.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  No, hate balling, guys. This is a clear, the clear use case.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Now let me tell you. Paintball's very good.

• 1:05:04Jason Calacanis?

  This is when I get tingles about a startup. Is when multiple people who when they hear the idea they meet the founder, they start thinking about the next three things a startup could do.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's big too. I used to spend time in like the upper Midwest sometimes like stuff like apple picking.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, that was one of my child pumpkin apple picking. How about the hay maze?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:25Jason Calacanis?

  So hey, here's a hay maze. Here's how to do a hay maze for under $5,000 and make 15. You do that how to article, you start doing a content strategy, not paying to put your content out there. You do a content strategy, how to make a hay maze, top 10 hay mazes, you know, in Austin, in Texas.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Well, in October haunted haunted hay rides.

• 1:05:46Jason Calacanis?

  Haunted hay rides, all that stuff. This is when you know a startup is on to something. Is when people get excited and give you a bunch of ideas. That doesn't mean you go do them. But when people start telling you what should be on the roadmap, what I want you to do is write it down. And then compare it to the engagement stats and then you want to bear hug your customers. How many of your, how many active ranches do you have on the system? Which is a ranch that has done one activity or more.

• 1:06:11Speaker 05

  We have probably about eight right now. We have another one launching at the end of this month.

• 1:06:17Jason Calacanis?

  Have you visited all eight as the founder? Yes or no? How many of those eight did you visit?

• 1:06:22Speaker 05

  We have not visited three of them.

• 1:06:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so five of them you did visit.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:27Jason Calacanis?

  I think a really good use of the money we invested and the money you will raise is to do what's called the bear hug strategy. I've talked about it here, which is take your trucks and go visit those places. Go for a ride there, take the person out to dinner or whatever they like to do. Send them some flowers or send them something related to what you see on their social media. If they're really into gardenias, if they're really into archery, send them something if they, if they call it the bear ranch. Find a bear statue, could be like a $10 handcrafted bear statue you get off of Etsy. And you send it to them with a personal note. These first eight customers. You know, they are your core advocates.

• 1:07:08Jason Calacanis?

  They're going to become ambassadors for you if you engage them. So a couple of strategies there, I think. And I love the fact that there's people trying to stop you because now you can make it. If people are trying to stop you and the insurance companies want to do to do. You can create the Agrotourism Association of America, the ATAA, to go after those people and say, we're here to support you. If you get sued, if you do whatever, we're going to give you all the people to call. We know the, we have a chat room you can join. We have a message board. You can call us and we'll tell you attorneys we know. And if you start the subreddit for, this is another great thing for you to do. You should be the mod of the subreddit for agrotourism.

• 1:07:53Jason Calacanis?

  Is there an agrotourism subreddit? Let's take a look. If there's not.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  I was going to say, there are a few big states that don't have this policy, including California and Pennsylvania. So.

• 1:08:07Jason Calacanis?

  Democrats.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, but like, that's a natural place to start. Like California has a million places that would be good for agrotourism. There is, r slash agrotourism exists, but it only has 115 members.

• 1:08:20Jason Calacanis?

  So start a new one. Agrotourism Association. And just let's get started here because I think you could capture a lot of the energy. When there's energy in the world and you can control it, right? And then send it back out and use it for your purposes, hopefully for good. As we got here, helping ranch owners build sustainable businesses. The agriculture, the Agrotourism Association of America, helping ranch owners, build sustainable businesses, build sustainable ranches, build sustainable.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  I think your original slogan was the best, touch grass.

• 1:08:52Jason Calacanis?

  Touch grass.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Perfect. Yeah, that's exactly what it is.

• 1:08:55Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is what Americans need.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:56Jason Calacanis?

  I am so excited for you and your business. Uh, and where are you based?

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  We are on East Coast, Virginia Beach, Virginia.

• 1:09:03Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. People like to go there. I did another thing to think about. I don't know if you got a family and it's easy to uproot. Where is the most off-roading in the world happening?

• 1:09:12Speaker 05

  In America, I mean, obviously, the West Coast has access to more locations with more public lands, but we actually, so we started-

• 1:09:19Jason Calacanis?

  With agritourism.

• 1:09:21Speaker 05

  Oh, agritourism, probably on the East Coast.

• 1:09:23Jason Calacanis?

  So, a place where they have the agritourism exemption, I think, which state?

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  We're in Virginia. We have, we've got, most of our locations are here, leveraging that.

• 1:09:33Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, but which is the most popular place with agritourism and people going on ranches, has the most number of ranches, the most activity is what I'm kind of getting at here?

• 1:09:41Speaker 05

  Probably Florida or Texas.

• 1:09:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I think what you have to figure out is where this occurs most frequently, where the best hosts will be, the, the most people who want to go there. And, um, I think you need to put the company there, at least for a year, so that you can build it. Now, if you happen to be in the place where it's a top three place, fine, but I remember talking to, um, Joe Jebbia on this program and Brian Chesky from Airbnb, which obviously is a corollary marketplace to your business. And at some point, all of their customers and the most sought after destination was New York. And at some point, and, and the regulations at the time were the most fruitful for them. So that combination, you know, where it's

• 1:10:22Jason Calacanis?

  like, most hosts, most desire, most customers, and, you know, best regulatory environment. If you were to do those three circles, he just, at some point, Paul Graham told those founders, "Well, why are you here? Get your asses there." And they just camped out there for six months. You can look it up on our podcast, but I think sometimes if you're really committed, you got to go to where the action is. Great job with the company, and, uh, really excited. Now, you're actively in the accelerator, right?

• 1:10:49Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:10:50Jason Calacanis?

  And what week, what week are you in?

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  I think we're in week three.

• 1:10:52Jason Calacanis?

  And who's your-

• 1:10:53Speaker 05

  Just hit our first pitches.

• 1:10:54Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Who is your primary and who is your secondary at our firm? Their names?

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  Uh, Bianca and Erica.

• 1:10:59Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. Oh, you got two winners there. Uh, so let me know how they do. Uh, and, uh, we're going to start doing some stuff in Austin. So, do you, you, you like the barbecue?

• 1:11:08Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:11:09Jason Calacanis?

  You know, you're a pulled pork, you're brisket, you're beef ribs, bison ribs, you like the pork ribs. What is your favorite?

• 1:11:15Speaker 05

  Barbecue sandwich.

• 1:11:17Jason Calacanis?

  You like a barbecue sandwich? You like the brisket on the sandwich? You like the pulled pork? What do you like?

• 1:11:22Speaker 05

  Pulled pork. We do it North Carolina style out here.

• 1:11:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's wet. North Carolina is pretty wet. Is that what it is? A lot of sauce?

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  More vinegary sauce than like... Mustard vinegar.

• 1:11:31Jason Calacanis?

  I know the mustard vinegar is... Oh, that's tasty stuff.

• 1:11:34Speaker 05

  It's really good.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  This is why Kansas City barbecue is the worst barbecue in the nation because it's too frickin' sweet. Brittany, I don't agree with you politically, but I agree with you on barbecue.

• 1:11:43Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, listen, give him time. Give him time. When he has homeless people at his little park.

• 1:11:49Speaker 00

  I was in San Francisco for eight years.

• 1:11:52Jason Calacanis?

  He did. You pulled the ripcord. You're a moderate. All right, listen. Continued success. Cannot wait to host you here. We're going to get you that pulled pork sandwich. Congratulations on week three in the accelerator. If you want to come to the accelerator, it's launch.co/apply. If you go to launch.co/apply, one of our 11 team members or 12 team members now on our investment team will meet with you if you have a reasonable idea. We meet with like maybe one out of three people who apply. We do what's called an introductory meeting for 20 minutes. Brittany, I'm sure you had one of those at some point, yeah?

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Jason Calacanis?

  And do you remember who you did your introductory meeting with?

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  Kelly.

• 1:12:27Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. Kelly's amazing. She's an all-star. She worked on Founder University. Now she's working on the syndicate and rotate people around so they get a lot of experience. So the 20-minute meeting, very simple. You spend 12 minutes or so pitching us what you're working on. We tell you in three minutes what we do. And then with the final five minutes, a little Q and A back and forth. And then if you decide it's a fit, maybe we talk about a second meeting, but we don't want to waste people's time. So if you want to get that quick 20-minute introductory meeting with my team, launch.co/apply. Launch.co/apply. We have a common application. That'll basically get you into the Founder University, the Launch Accelerator, or even potentially a direct investment if you're like the Series A level. Great job, Brittany.

• 1:13:09Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:13:09Jason Calacanis?

  He's lon, x.com/lon, L-O-N-S. He's x.com/alex. I'm x.com/jason. It's like a 4.3 average. Go Knicks. F Boston. We're going to see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Thanks.