The Biggest Private Funding Round in History | E2256

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Deel - http://deel.com/twist Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai/twist Luma AI - https://lumalabs.ai/twist Today's show: *$110 billion buys you 15% of OpenAI. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank placed their bets on ChatGPT, which now has 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers. Find out why Jason is anticipating the wildest J-Curve swing of all time, and believes we've ALREADY hit AGI… it's just not implemented yet. Plus a visit from our roving correspondent Nick O'Neill, checking in on the Crypto Chaos in Miami Beach, and hot demos from three young founders. GUESTS: Nick O'Neill: https://x.com/chooserich Everest Chris: https://openclaw.unloopa.com/ Ben Broca: https://polsia.com/ Adi Gabrani: https://makemyclaw.com/ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:33 We're hiring a new producer! 05:42 OpenAI raised $110 billion 08:59 Understanding the LLM J-Curve 00:11:25 Deel - Founders ship faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit ⁠https://deel.com/twist⁠ to learn more. 00:15:02 CRYPTO CHAOS IN MIAMI BEACH! 00:21:10 Wispr Flow - Stop typing. Dictate with Wispr Flow and send clean, final-draft writing in seconds. Visit ⁠https://wisprflow.ai/twist⁠ to get started for free today. 00:22:54 Mass layoffs at Block 00:30:50 Luma AI - Stop guessing and start directing with the all-in-one Dream Machine text-to-video platform. Visit ⁠https://lumalabs.ai/twist⁠ to try The Dream Machine for free. 00:32:04 AI Scott Adams: The Saga Continues 00:38:13 Make URLs for local businesses with Unloopa 00:45:36 Rent a Polsia agent to run your company 00:58:55 Deploy swarms in 60 seconds with MakeMyClaw 01:05:05 LAUNCH FEST is coming to SF 01:55:49 Will Paramount actually buy WBD? 01:06:58 Why Lon loves "Knight of the 7 Kingdoms" 01:07:21 On "Neighbors" and First Amendment Warriors 01:13:43 All about Jason's favorite chargers Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ 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

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We gotta get out of here. This OpenAI funding situation has blown our minds. We're gonna be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore.

• 0:08Jason Calacanis?

  This is unedited. This is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Luma AI. Stop guessing and start directing with the all-in-one Dream Machine text-to-video platform. Visit lumalabs.ai/twist to try the Dream Machine for free. Whisperflow. Stop typing. Dictate with Whisperflow and send clean, final draft writing in seconds. Visit wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. And Deal. Founders ship faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more.

• 0:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. It's Twist. It's Friday. It's February 27th in the year of our Lord A.O. 33, Jason. A.O. 33. A.O. 33. 33 days after OpenClaw appeared on this program. And we're gonna keep building replicants. We're gonna keep building OpenClaw agents. Yeah, we're gonna, we're using like Slackbot 2% of the time. We're gonna check out Notion's new one. We're gonna keep track on all of these. We're gonna rotate those into discussions. We do This Week in Startups on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I do All In on Thursday, but it comes out on Friday. Then we tape This Week in AI on Tuesday and we drop it Wednesday morning. So that's what you're getting from J Cal every week. It's a lot.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  Five podcasts. And we're gonna bring back two more. And we need a producer. We need a producer to work under Lon and I. Please. Full-time in Austin, pays pretty good, and you get to have a good time. We need two things. One, you gotta be motivated by the topic subject. We need you. And this is how I hire now. You make four quadrants, Lon. Qualified. Important. Has the skills. Got it, got it. And passion for the subject. Yeah. What's in the top right quadrant?

• 2:08Speaker 03

  You're asking me?

• 2:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, what's in the top right quadrant?

• 2:11Speaker 03

  So, you know, the most passionate and then the most experienced would be the very top.

• 2:16Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. What's in the bottom left?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Not experienced at all, and you're just looking for a gig. You don't really care about what we're doing.

• 2:25Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. So that's the easy box to get rid of.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:27Jason Calacanis?

  Now, on the bottom right, what's on the bottom right? Building your mental model here.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  You're very passionate, but you're, you may not have the qualifications that we're looking for. You're, you're, you're a newbie.

• 2:41Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. Now do the top left.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  You're extremely experienced. You've made tons of podcasts. You know it cold, but you're, you prefer movies and TV or some other topic that's not what we're talking about.

• 2:55Jason Calacanis?

  Now, it's easy to pick number one and number four. Number four, you don't want unqualified people who don't care about the topic. Okay, that's number four in the ranking. And then number one's really easy. Hey, you're super passionate and you're qualified. Great. Now, how do you rank two and three, Lon? How do you think about two and three? Would you rather have a passionate, green person or an experienced person without passion? What do you think?

• 3:19Speaker 03

  You know, I go back and forth on this. When I was new on the scene, when I first started, I would have said experience, that I want people who know podcasting cold, they've done it a million times, and they can learn about tech, they can figure it out. But, but I think, I think I've switched. I think today I would say I want someone who lives and breathes startups, AI, tech.

• 3:43Jason Calacanis?

  Why? Why have you switched? By the way, you're correct. You're correct.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:48Jason Calacanis?

  So it's one, and then the bottom right hand quadrant is number two, and the top left is number three.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  The passion, because I think you can teach somebody, and I have, I think that's what changed, is the experience of showing a bunch of people how to do this job and how to make a podcast. And you can teach that stuff. If they're smart and dedicated, but especially if they are passionate about the subject and can't wait to learn more. I mean, we saw it with Oliver. Oliver came in not knowing anything about podcasting at all, really, but... Loved AI, loved startups, couldn't wait to dig in and learn how to use all these tools. And now he's off producing this week in AI.

• 4:28Jason Calacanis?

  And that is your tactical tip of the day. This is a tactical tip from Jake Allen Lon. It's a tactical tip. It's a TT. It's a tactical tip for you to think about this weekend and bring to your startup on Mondays. Because a lot of people get caught up on this. And when you have, you need to have a mental model, a framework. And, uh, you know, how essential, you know, is another vector you can do this on. When I was doing the Twitter, uh, just, you know, lightly collaborating with Elon and Sacks and Antonio on the Twitter takeover, uh, Elon was like, okay, who's super qualified? And then who's essential?

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:09Jason Calacanis?

  And that's who we need to keep. And if they're not qualified and they're not essential, well, obviously that's easy. And if they're not qualified, but they're essential, okay, we gotta think about that. And then if they're super qualified, but not essential, okay, we gotta go through all these quadrants. So I just drew the four quadrants on the board and it made it really easy to put people into buckets, uh, and say, hey, here's where we're at. So take this with you, talk to your co-founder about it. It's a tactical tip from Twist. It's a Twist tactical tip. T3, there you go. And now we can go on to our first story.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  It's a big one. It's the biggest private funding round in history. Some people are calling this, Jason. OpenAI has raised $110 billion with a B. They're now valued at $730 billion with a B. Uh, Amazon putting in 50 billion. That's 15 billion upfront, another 35 when certain conditions are met. We don't yet know what those are. Softbank Nvidia going in for 30 billion each. Uh, the secondary big news here is that this is a larger scale collaboration between OpenAI and Amazon. OpenAI committing to using Amazon's Tranium semiconductors at its AWS data centers. They will continue to use Nvidia chips on some level. We don't know exactly how this is all going to balance out.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  And they said that this new deal change does nothing to change the ongoing OpenAI deal with Microsoft. So that's the, that's the huge story. I mean, uh, and then the, the interesting thing about this Amazon deal is so they're putting 15 billion up, they're, they're holding back on 35 more billion that they are committing in the future. Information says that those conditions are either OpenAI goes IPO, or they achieve AGI. So that's, we're still talking about this, like, the deal changes if OpenAI reaches AGI. I mean, how far away do we really think that is now?

• 6:59Jason Calacanis?

  I've said this before, we've achieved AGI in 50% plus of skills. Artificial general intelligence basically means you can do, any job a human can do better than a human. I think we're at the 50% mark, minimum. We might be at 60 or 70. It's just not fully deployed. And it's not fully executed on. So sometimes you'll have all the precursors for, I don't know, sustainable energy. We have that right now. We don't need to burn carbon. We have all the precursors. We are a post-carbon burning society. We have just not chosen to implement it. We could have a thousand nuclear power plants,

• 7:43Jason Calacanis?

  and we could have, you know, a project to just put solar everywhere. And we would stop digging oil out of the ground. We have the technology. We have achieved sustainable energy forever in humanity. We have not applied the technology yet. Because we already have the infrastructure for this oil and we're just deciding to use that, you know, until such time as that's too expensive to pull out of the earth. Okay, fine, fair enough. That's where we are with AGI. All the precursors are there. If you sit there at Lon and you spend, I don't know, five hours with your replicant, I don't know, do you have a replicant yet?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't have my, I do not have my own.

• 8:24Jason Calacanis?

  Don't have your.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  I know the name, I'm gonna call mine Gaff after, that's the Edward James Olmos character from Blade Runner, but he does not exist yet.

• 8:32Jason Calacanis?

  What, what does he say at the end?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  It's too bad she won't live, but then again.

• 8:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's too bad she won't live.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  But then again, who does?

• 8:41Jason Calacanis?

  Who does? Who does? Shout out to Edward James Olmos. Is that where it is?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Yes, the great Edward James Olmos plays golf.

• 8:48Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  You had posted a tweet asking for a J-curve based on LLM.

• 8:54Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think anybody did it. Did anybody do it?

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Kabir did it for you. Kabir from Launch has your J-curve ready. Let's bring up the next one.

• 9:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's not exactly a J-curve.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  No, here's the next one.

• 9:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's a bar curve.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  No, that's the Uber one. Open, OpenAI J-curve. There we are.

• 9:07Jason Calacanis?

  Still not a J-curve, but okay. So a J-curve is when you just amount invested. Go find the J-curve for Tesla and go find the J-curve for Uber. And what it is, is how much money you've invested.

• 9:20Speaker 03

  Oh, I see.

• 9:20Jason Calacanis?

  And you just keep adding that up. You keep adding it up. And then you have your profit.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 9:27Jason Calacanis?

  Not your revenue, your profit. And then it starts going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick up. As an example, the free cash flow from Uber in 2025 was 10 billion. It'll be 13 billion in this year. This is Uber's long road to profitability. What you see there is just how much money was lost to build, I don't know. They're at like a quarter. There are 250 million rides a day globally in 10,000 cities. Like to build that kind of footprint required buying companies, building infrastructure, the team, spend, spend, spend. And they also spent money on subsidizing rides to build out the driver network and build out the habit.

• 10:11Jason Calacanis?

  And so they went 30 billion in the hole. This chart is like ending in 24 when they had like a couple of billion dollars in profit. So they went from like 32 to 30. We need to take this chart and put 10 billion, which would make it skyrocket up, and then put another 13 billion for 25 and 26. And what you'd see is 10 and 13 is 23 billion. You would go from negative 30 billion all the way up below that 5 billion line. It would shoot up like a rocket. That is the high art. So if we were to do this properly for, and I'll just have somebody else do it. Get me somebody, one of the fans of the show, build a J-curve. There's been $250 billion.

• 10:56Jason Calacanis?

  If we had a straight line down.

• 11:01Jason Calacanis?

  Since ChatGPT came out, there was less than a billion dollars invested in the space. And then you get to about 250 billion invested, including this 110 billion loan. Let's assume another 250 billion gets invested, 500 billion straight down. So this chart of Uber goes down 30 billion and pull up the Tesla one as well, which you'll find very easily just by typing Tesla J curve chart in Google. Sorry to make this so complicated for my team. We've got a brand new partner here at Twist and as fate would have it, we love and use their product. If you need to hire, manage, pay, or equip your team members anywhere around the world, you need Deal, D E E L. They're going to take care of all the annoying human resources tasks that you don't have

• 11:44Jason Calacanis?

  time for payroll, compliance, visas, and onboarding. So you can stay focused on achieving product market fit or scaling your business or finding more talent. Deal scales with you. They do all your chores, all the hard work, and they do it perfectly from the first hire on. So there is never a need to switch platforms or transition to a new system in the future. It's future proof. And with Deal, you can set up payroll for any country in just minutes and get all the complicated visas and paperwork settled right away, allowing your business to grow without borders. And that's the smart way to grow now. Talent is not limited to San Francisco, the United States, or this continent. It's everywhere. That's why more than 37,000 startups and fast moving companies are already using Deal

• 12:29Jason Calacanis?

  to accelerate their hiring and growth. Find out more by visiting deal.com/twist. That's D E E L dot com slash twist. Also, I happen to be a shareholder in the company. I got very lucky. They acquired one of my startups and I am stoked. It's an amazing company. Tesla J curve is unbelievable. The amount of money invested in that was wild. Why they had to build factories, they had to do all this stuff. Maybe you find it easier on Twitter because people talk about it a lot there. 500 billion invested is the equivalent of, I don't know, what is that 12 times? So here it is. This is amazing. So this is free cash flow in the history of pure EV makers. And what you see is all the losses and you see that red spike going up? Yes. That's the magic. You struck oil.

• 13:15Jason Calacanis?

  What did they have to do to get there? How many billions were they in the hole at the peak Tesla? 10 billion negative. And then you go up and they start making money. And all of a sudden turned a profit in year 11 and they, you know.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Right. So it's year 17, 18 of Tesla. I see.

• 13:31Jason Calacanis?

  Correct. So now you have to do that for language models. For language models, they go 500 billion into debt. That's a big hole collectively.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Lot of chips.

• 13:43Jason Calacanis?

  Anthropic, XAI.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Lot of chips.

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  Mistral, Anthropic, everybody. And then also the data center companies, I would include in there because they're directly, you know, associated with this effort.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:55Jason Calacanis?

  You put all that together, you build a $500 billion hole. Let's say in 2030, they throw off $10 billion collectively in profits. In other words, they throw off what Uber makes in year 14 or what Tesla makes in year 16. Then as a group, then let's say it grows 50% a year. So you go 10, 15, 20, 2.5, you get the idea. Boom, boom, boom, boom. You're talking about a 10 year, maybe a six year run to just get out of the J curve. That's my estimate.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  A few months ago, people were really asking like, are there going to be customers for, like, is there going to be enough people who want to use AI to make the curve go up so, so sharply like there were for Tesla? And I think that there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical even a few months ago. Now with agents really doing all this stuff and so much evidence every day of what people are accomplishing, I think it's harder to be skeptical. It was easier a few months ago.

• 14:51Jason Calacanis?

  All right, there it is, folks. Congratulations to the team at OpenAI. They're making 20 billion.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  They're doing all right. And, and I would say.

• 14:59Jason Calacanis?

  They're worth 7, 800 billion.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:00Jason Calacanis?

  Or maybe eight, maybe 800 billion post money, add the cash in the thing.

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Probably about that.

• 15:05Jason Calacanis?

  So they're 40 times top line revenue. It's absurd, but if they keep growing 50% a year, you know.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  If Codex.

• 15:13Jason Calacanis?

  100% a year.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  If Codex is driving everyone's AI agent, then yeah. There is chaos going on right now on the streets of Miami Beach. I don't know if you've heard about this. The crypto world is in absolute chaos and we sent our roving, we sent our roving correspondent, Nick O'Neill, down to survey the damage. I feel like we should check in with him right now. Live show.

• 15:36Jason Calacanis?

  Humanity.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Nick, joining us from Ivy Beach. What's going on down there, Nick?

• 15:40Speaker 00

  It's chaos and confusion right now. I was just down there speaking with people on the streets of Miami to say, what is going on here? My crypto portfolio is down awfully. They are completely panicking and they're saying that they're gonna lose their jobs with all the money going to a place like OpenAI. I've never felt more depression. They said, Nick, you're a voice of stability and reason. And I said, yes, I am.

• 16:06Jason Calacanis?

  Nick, it's imperative in an emergency situation that like this, that broadcasters like ourselves maintain our cool. Please take a moment to compose yourself. As hard as it is, looking down at Miami, explain the carnage. And we have children watching. For parents, I'm gonna ask you to please take children to the screen. This is unedited. This is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now in Miami.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  I went down and I was speaking to the people at the pool. They were ripping their best, their ever, all their stuff. They said, we gotta get out of here. This OpenAI funding situation has blown our minds. We're gonna be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore. This is a disaster. I, I, I've, I've tried to have reasonable conversations, but I couldn't find a single person out there that could give me any sort of regular insight. Yeah, they basically said, I, I need someone to take care of all my stuff.

• 17:03Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want you to turn the camera too far because this could get graphic, but I understand the block team formerly Square, they were having their quarterly retreat in Miami. Oh, God. They, yeah, they were in Miami and half of them, there's a, there's 400 people down there in the streets who have been given 18 months severance, fully vested, and they have four job offers. Please explain what's happening with those 400 people.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  I saw a literal parade of people being marched out of the office down in Brickell from my balcony here. And people were, literally Miami was not even ready for the moment that occurred right there. I saw them and they were like, what's going on here? They were all carrying brown boxes out the doors, down the streets. And they were like, is this the end? I I went down to get on this scene just to see what people were saying. They could not believe it. Uh, there were tears. There were people that thought that they were going to potentially lose relationships because let's be honest, down here in Miami, everyone's focused on can you afford the most expensive car around and the best clothes?

• 18:11Speaker 00

  Well, the block employees are no longer reliable source for making those purchases, Jason.

• 18:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's it's really tragic. Uh, I can't imagine what's having happening at Club 11. I mean, the trickle down effects.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  It's a FEMA camp now, Jason. It's a FEMA, they FEMA has set up at Club 11. That's it. They're red, they're taking refugees at this point.

• 18:31Jason Calacanis?

  Taking refugees at 11.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  I heard Pitbull is down there volunteering. He's a great guy, very helpful.

• 18:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Man, the brutality here.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:41Jason Calacanis?

  There's unconfirmed reports, Nick. I know that you've got sources and we don't want to spread misinformation. However, there were boats landing from Cuba with refugees, obviously, and Haiti. Is it true that the block employees were taking the return trip to go to Cuba to get healthcare and for better job opportunities in Miami?

• 19:03Speaker 00

  I don't, look, I I don't want to spread misinformation, Jason, but I did go and take a look at the ports just to see what was going on because when these sorts of layoffs occur, you're well aware, you know this from your past years in journalism covering the tech scene, the first place that you want to go are the ports to see where are they going? Where are they departing to? Well, I did see only, I did see a few people, but I don't want to spread rumors just yet about something like that. But I did some people carrying their bags, carrying the brown boxes, getting onto the boats.

• 19:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  And that felt quite extreme if I'm going to be honest, because like, get, maybe give it a few months with your severance, but I don't know.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah, I mean, this is live, unconfirmed clickbait. I did, I I did see pictures, I don't know if they're AI based, Nick, on social media, on TikTok, of people with their Aireon chairs, um, and their Mac Studios, getting on those those boats to, um,

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:03Jason Calacanis?

  Those boats to Cuba.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Asking, asking their agent in real time for recommendations in Havana. That's on their, on the boats. I heard OpenClaws literally steering some of those boats.

• 20:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, wow, yes. That, so literally the people who were. Shuttlewing the refugees, which is not a great paying job. This pays $7 an hour. They've lost their jobs as well.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Get rid of them. They now have their agents. Well, they, they, they were, they're looking ahead. They were like, in five years, we won't need these boats anymore. So we might as well, if I rip off the Band-Aid now.

• 20:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Nick, I'm just going to say tremendous job here. Please, on behalf of the TWIST community, and obviously I'm responsible for you and your family. I know that you've got 14 kids now.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 20:48Jason Calacanis?

  And three wives. I know he's geographically monogamous. It's Miami.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's Palm Beach, and it's Fort Lauderdale. He is geographically monogamous in the state of Florida.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Within, within different parts of Florida, within different parts of South Florida. Understood. Okay.

• 21:03Jason Calacanis?

  Like Alex Carter.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Thank you for your support, Nathan. Thank you. Please, Nick, be safe. Be safe.

• 21:10Jason Calacanis?

  You've heard me talk many times about Luma AI. They're the innovators leading the charge toward multimodal AGI. They just picked up $9 million in their Series C funding in November. There are so many text-to-video models and platforms out there, and many of them can churn out a nice-looking clip. But Luma's Dream Machine product offers something truly unique. It's an all-in-one creative platform, helping you to brainstorm your ideas, turn them into images, and then generating eye-popping, detailed 1080p videos, which you can edit and tweak using natural language, all without switching platforms. And that's the key. The ability to refine these and make them better, that is what the future is. The future is being able to improve your AI-generated images. And today, we're excited

• 21:53Jason Calacanis?

  to announce the Luma Dream Brief Competition. Just create a commercial for a fictional product on Luma, submit it to the Cannes Festival of Creativity, and if your ad goes on to win the gold, you will get $1 million. To enter the competition, go to lumadreambrief.com. And to try the Dream Machine for free, go to lumalabs.ai/twist. That's Luma, L-U-M-A, labs dot AI slash T-W-I-S-T. It's above my pay grade.

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, thank God he's down there, because I would not be going down there right now.

• 22:24Jason Calacanis?

  And what's his Twitter? Stop being boring?

• 22:26Speaker 03

  At Choose Rich on X or Instagram, at Choose Rich, if you want to follow our good friend, our good friend and roving correspondent, Nick O'Neill.

• 22:34Jason Calacanis?

  Oof, but that's a good segue into our next story.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  Is it? Oh, Block, the layoffs, layoffs at Block.

• 22:40Jason Calacanis?

  We should talk about.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  We'll talk about that one. So, Block, you heard us mention, Block, the parent company of Square, Cash App, and Afterpay. Of course, co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. They announced plans to cut their staff by 40%, Jason. That's around 4,000 people, leaving just under 6,000 remaining at the company. In an open letter that he also cross-posted to X, Dorsey pretty much blames AI. Quote, "A significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. Intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week," he added. "I had two options: cut gradually over months or years as the shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter."

• 23:24Speaker 03

  So, you have been predicting this very thing on this program, as well as the All In program, for many months. Is this just the first of what you see as many of these announcements?

• 23:36Jason Calacanis?

  Um, you know, we're in a debate, primarily Sax and I, but other folks. And people have called me names: a doomerist, a catastrophist. I'm always balls and strikes, folks. I just look at the information. I look at what I see firsthand. I think from first principles. I talk to people. I come from a journalism background, obviously. So, when you see me forming an opinion, although Sax and his debate techniques like to make me into a libtard or use all his advanced debate techniques, it's a hoax and his framing and all that stuff. I can tell you straight, you've been watching me long enough. I go research information. I learn. And, uh, you know, then I try to form an opinion.

• 24:18Jason Calacanis?

  And when people correct me, typically fans of the show and friends, I then change my opinion. Okay, so, I have said, what I'm seeing on the front lines is founders being able to not hire the first three or four people they would normally hire for their three-person startup. In other words, the three co-founders, instead of having to hire three people in the first six months or year, say, the first year, they want to get three more people in the building, another developer, another designer, and an ops person. Typically, you get some combination of those, or maybe even a salesperson. What I find is, with these new tools, they do founder-led sales for six months or 12 months longer. They handle their own legal, accounting, et cetera, for the first six months. And then they pick, you know, whichever service provider they want.

• 25:02Jason Calacanis?

  But they can do things on their own. So that was one piece of information I had informing this opinion a year or two ago. The second piece of information is I listened to the words that leaders say, and I take them at their word, or I handicap what they're trying to do. Andy Jassy, a year ago, in the summer, wrote this memo that things were going to change in Amazon and that they saw AI playing a bigger role. Then there was a leaked document from Amazon that said, "We have like 900,000 jobs, 600,000 jobs, we're not going to hire for in the next decade because we predict there are going to be robots," is a New York Times story. You can say fake news all you want. The truth is, I would say, you know,

• 25:46Jason Calacanis?

  50% of the facts in the New York Times are rock solid. Then maybe 30 are debatable and 20 might be wrong. That's not because they're intentionally doing things wrong, whatever. It's just the nature of truth in the world, right? They're trying to pursue breaking news stories. So they have 5% of the information inside of Amazon. The other 95% is a black box. So they follow. They got this leak. It was so acute at Amazon that they were preparing a PR campaign to stop the bad PR they were going to get in the coming years from not hiring people and laying people off. To me, again, I take people at their word. I've been in the startup business for 30-plus years now as an entrepreneur, journalist, and investor,

• 26:31Jason Calacanis?

  and a podcaster. I know what people are doing. They're like, "Okay, around the corner, we're going to start replacing drivers and getting rid of factory workers. We need to get rid of middle managers. There's not going to be as many developers. We need to give to Toys for Tots." And when they put in, "We should do local Toys for Tots things to make the Amazon bad vibes go down," okay, that's another check. Now, we have to look at Block.

• 26:57Jason Calacanis?

  Block like Jack's other company Twitter. Jack is an invest in the future visionary product leader.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:05Jason Calacanis?

  He goes big. There's very few entrepreneurs who have built two, two, one, two billion dollar startups that were public. Steve Jobs built Apple and then he built Pixar. I don't think Pixar ever went public. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I don't remember seeing it trading.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  No.

• 27:25Jason Calacanis?

  But then it got bought by Disney. So he built two billion dollar, I mean, you have to have people build multiple unicorns. But it's two unicorns. One went public, one didn't. You have Elon and he has Tesla, which is public and he soon will have SpaceX. So he'll have two that have gone public, right? It's a very small group. You know who already has two that went public? Jack.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  Jack Dorsey.

• 27:44Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't get enough credit.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 27:45Jason Calacanis?

  Why? Because he's quiet. He's an introvert. I've known Jack since, you know, the earliest days of Twitter. I was one of the first users.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I feel like also culturally, culturally tech is like no longer on his side. Like he's seen as like this woke lefty guy. It doesn't really meld with the current philosophy of the tech industry.

• 28:05Jason Calacanis?

  He's not a lefty guy anyway.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  Well, but that's the.

• 28:07Jason Calacanis?

  He did overbuild the staff.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  Right. Well, that's, I was going to say that is a big thing on social media is saying that this is not really about AI, that this is really like during the COVID era, Square slash Block massively over hired and now they're sort of backing out of that, but they don't want, they want to save face. So they're blaming AI. At Bama Bonds, this guy, Will Slaughter, had the big tweet about this. Unwinding less than half an insane COVID over hiring binge has much more to do with Jack Dorsey's managerial incompetence than whether AI is going to take your job. Dorsey then responded, yes, we over hired during COVID because I incorrectly built two separate company structures, Square and Cash App, rather than one, which we corrected mid 2024. But then he continues, we have and do run an efficient company better than most.

• 28:54Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. This is a very important follow up from Jack.

• 28:59Jason Calacanis?

  And let me just say, it's hard. Being a leader is hard. You make mistakes. He did this so compassionately and so transparently. In his piece, he said, by the way, we're leaving comms open. You can say goodbye to everybody. We're giving you six months severance and then your stock.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  It's, it's.

• 29:16Jason Calacanis?

  You can keep your computer.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  You'll receive your salary for 20 weeks plus one week of tenure, equity vested through the end of May, six months of healthcare, keep your corporate devices and five grand to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition. That's very generous.

• 29:30Jason Calacanis?

  I offered Lon half, Lon today said, hey, you saw the, uh, the, the block deal? I'll take half of that to get the fuck out of here. Lon was like, hey, can I get half that? That sounds pretty good.

• 29:39Speaker 03

  We could negotiate. We could, we could. That's even just a starting, that's a starting position.

• 29:45Jason Calacanis?

  Plus one week for every year you're there. If you're an eight-year employee, you get another eight weeks. Hey, you're sitting there, you're sitting pretty at 28 weeks.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  That's a lot of time to figure out your next move.

• 29:52Jason Calacanis?

  It's a lot of time to figure it out. Anyway. He did it in the classiest, most transparent way I've ever seen, full stop.

• 29:59Speaker 03

  Can I just say one thing?

• 30:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is against the HR people's standard.

• 30:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:04Jason Calacanis?

  They say you, you have to turn everybody's accounts on.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 30:07Jason Calacanis?

  People are going to do crazy things. People are going to delete files. People are going to say things in the chat. They're going to hack things. You cannot do it this way. There's even potential workplace violence. I don't want to bring that up, but you know, there's like, somebody could go postal. You gotta lock the doors, all this kind of stuff. Like you have to escort people out of the building. You want to do it over the weekend so people don't show up on Monday. These are best practices.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, I was just going to say the one thing I, I, I think it's very generous. I do think he did this in the classiest way possible. I just, I would have put caps in the tweet. He, he does that all lowercase tweeting style. And when you're firing people, I don't know, it felt a little precious to me, but otherwise I think he handled this in the best.

• 30:42Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if we're sitting here saying his punctuation is the issue, that means he did it right.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  That's, I, that was.

• 30:48Jason Calacanis?

  We're splitting hairs here.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 30:50Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, listen, sometimes I'm thinking. Faster than I can write everything down. And I found this amazing tool. I am obsessed with it. It's called Whisperflow, W I S P R flow. All you have to do is talk and Whisperflow turns it into crisp, perfect writing instantly. Not just talking about dictation, but removing filler, fixing punctuation and even formatting your text while you speak. It is mind blowing how good this is. It makes all the other dictation software look basic and Whisperflow matches your natural tone and speaking voice. So the writing sounds like you actually wrote it yourself and Whisperflow works wherever you are. I use it when I'm in Slack. I'll use it when I'm in Superhuman, doing an email, doing a message.

• 31:32Jason Calacanis?

  I'll jump into iMessage and even when I'm writing a document or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my OpenClaw agent. Finally, someone I can talk to who actually takes down everything I say. Unlike maybe the interns I've got, they get like six out of every 10 instructions correct. Whisperflow. Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it. wisprflow.ai/twist. It's spelt W I S P R F L O dot A I slash twist. Incredible product. You have to try it.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, the author, the podcaster. He talked on his show before his tragic recent death about a desire to live on as an AI-powered representation of himself. Now there's a lot of debate about as he got to the end of his life, whether he changed his mind about this. There's various public statements. We do not need to rehash this whole debate. One fan, John Arrow, actually made Scott's vision happen. He created at AI Scott Adams and it's a AI-driven simulation of the old podcast featuring an animated avatar that is very convincing, looks a lot and sounds a lot like the real Scott Adams. Arrow has also created Abigail Adams, a young lady character that's inspired by Scott

• 32:50Speaker 03

  and his legacy. So Adams' family and many of his fans, very upset. They've made repeated requests now for Arrow to stop publishing his videos. On Thursday, The AI Scott Adams account posted that they intend to legally defend their right to keep making this content. Here's the quote, "From this project's start, we attempted to have an amicable and collaborative conversation, but that wasn't reciprocated. Given that litigation seems certain, we are sending a global hold letter to anyone with relevant information. This is to ensure all pertinent materials are available to protect Scott's stated vision." So, the last thing I would note here, for all the debate that this is stirring up, the content itself is not really that popular.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  3,400 followers on X, 137 YouTube subscribers. Abigail is not doing better. So, there does seem to be a disconnect between the interest that this project is generating and the actual fans who want to follow AI Scott Adams. So, your reaction?

• 33:51Jason Calacanis?

  I started getting DMs from the Scott Adams stans, like the real hardcore fans who know me, because I was on his show one time debating January 6th and other stuff with him. And they know me because I would listen to his show once in a while and say hi in the chat, because he would mention All In, probably like a dozen times over the years. He really loved sax, he loved Chamath. I think he liked me, even though I might politically-

• 34:17Speaker 03

  I think you guys had a mutual appreciation going.

• 34:20Jason Calacanis?

  Mutual appreciation. And so, they are very angry at me for even platforming the creator of it and for me retweeting it or giving my opinion.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Hey, if you really are in the spirit of Scott Adams, he was for full contact debate and

• 34:39Jason Calacanis?

  I'm no close friend of Scott. We never met in person, we were digital friends, etc. We're obviously like micro celebrities, so micro celebrities have a secret chatroom. But put that aside, we have a secret society of micro-

• 34:54Speaker 03

  Your handshake, you have a secret handshake.

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, sure, everything. He was a self-described narcissist. He was like, I love getting attention. I love when people say hi to me at coffee. I love that people were inspired by what I said. He would have, in my estimation, it's just one person's opinion. Don't freak out. He would have loved AI Scott Adams. He would have loved this debate. He did say he wanted to, these two things can be true at the same time. He did say he wanted people to create AI Scott Adams, and he did say that maybe I want to create a digital son so that people close to me don't get hurt by seeing me online every day. Okay, so there's morals, there's morals and ethics. And then there's the law.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:40Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, here's what I'll say. This isn't like a new issue. Uh, you can't use people's, uh, especially famous people's likenesses for profit or even for nonprofit use. You know, in this kind of way. So legally, they lose.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  You could make a derivative product that you say, hey, I've made this Abigail. She's inspired by the teachings of Scott Adams.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:09Jason Calacanis?

  Totally allowed. If somebody wanted to say, I am a J Cal disciple. I'm a Chamath disciple. I'm a Steve Jobs disciple. And I'm going to wear a Steve Jobs outfit every day, like Elizabeth Holmes did.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:23Jason Calacanis?

  And for a period of time, she was super inspired by Steve.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, she with the turtlenecks. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  With the turtleneck and the voice and the drama and everything. Uh, shout out Elizabeth. Come on the pod anytime.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Once you're out of, once you're out of prison.

• 36:35Jason Calacanis?

  No, I want to do it when she's in. Uh, so long story short, yeah. Long story short, you could do that. You could do your Steve Jobs impersonation every day. It's protected. You know, and so you, you now you go to the moral ethical thing. As I told the person doing this, talk to the family, get permission to do it. Or. Do the derivative, clearly not the same product, but inspired by the teachings. So, here we are, that's what's gonna happen. Um, and the argument that technologists will use is this is inevitable, it's gonna happen, yada yada. You know what? It's inevitable that piracy happens, but that doesn't mean that you can go sell

• 37:18Jason Calacanis?

  Taylor Swift CDs on Canal Street. And we've proven that with Napster. You get a lawsuit. You can't, you know, re-stream MSG and Knicks games without getting in trouble. Do the Russians do it on their Russian streaming sites? Yes. Do the Chinese sell DVDs on every quarter? Yes. Okay. Those are other countries who are not obeying law. You don't get to use that either. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  It's just weird that it's like he's taking a principled stand here. Like, I'm gonna take this to court to protect all of our right to make an AI avatar of someone after they're dead. And like, I find that whole thing kinda like creepy. Like, even if I say out loud on a show once, "Hey, I wouldn't mind somebody doing this," I don't really feel like that should give you a legally binding right. That seems a little far to me. That's just as far as I go. Uh, should we do some demos?

• 38:11Jason Calacanis?

  Please.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  All right, our first demo. Let's bring on Everest Chris. He's the creator of Unloopa, Jason. Unloopa, it allows, and I thought this was really neat. It allows anyone to create an AI-generated website for a local business in their area, and then gives them the tools to sell that business their website. Uh, so here is Everest. He's in India, but he's focusing the tool on the Netherlands. Uh, so I, like, we gotta, we gotta take a look.

• 38:39Jason Calacanis?

  Tell me your name again, so I get the pronunciation right, sir?

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Hi, my name's Chris.

• 38:43Jason Calacanis?

  Chris, okay. And Chris, where in India are you, and how old are you?

• 38:47Speaker 04

  I'm 23, and I'm in Hyderabad right now.

• 38:50Jason Calacanis?

  And are you in college or school?

• 38:52Speaker 04

  No, no, I finished my college. Now I'm into AI.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Now he's into AI.

• 38:57Jason Calacanis?

  Did you go to these like technical schools in India that are really hard to get into? Or did you do that like college course training where it's like really intense and you go for six days a week? I've just heard about this online in TV shows and media.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Hmm, I didn't really go for the hard ones. I just went to a normal university. I mean, like you said, six days a week.

• 39:18Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  I mean, it's pretty intense, but I got through it.

• 39:23Jason Calacanis?

  So you are monitoring this weekend startups, X.com and thinking about opportunities in Europe and America, even though you're living in India. Am I correct?

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Uh, I mean, I just, a tweet of mine went viral.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  You guys reached out to me and so I wanted to be on the pod.

• 39:45Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Here we go. So show us what you built and I will give you some feedback. And this is a business, Lon, that I have seen before because with Squarespace, people started doing this.

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Right. This is, this is like-

• 39:57Jason Calacanis?

  They would build websites and they would knock on doors in America and say, hey, I built a website for you. Would you like it? You know, I'm asking for $500.

• 40:04Speaker 03

  Like the first question I asked Chris was like, well, why don't you just go right to businesses and build them websites with your system? And he explained like, you know, it's that personal touch. He's in India. So it's almost like the users of his site become like his street team. Like he's sort of making websites for all these local businesses around the world. And he's got local people helping him actually at the point of sale. It's very clever.

• 40:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Here we go.

• 40:28Speaker 04

  Okay. I mean, the system is really simple. You just type in which niche you're targeting and which city you're targeting. It's very simple. You just type in the niche you're targeting and the city.

• 40:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So you could do coffee cafes?

• 40:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, any niche, any niche.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  Well, but Jason, it's gonna, it's not only gonna find the businesses, it's actually gonna make the websites right now. Like when we check back in, like you'll see Chris will show us, we're actually gonna get finished websites already.

• 40:58Jason Calacanis?

  Genius. Okay.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Let me show you a finished workflow.

• 41:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so here's your workflow.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this was one me and Lon ran yesterday. I mean, he didn't see the results yet.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm curious.

• 41:11Jason Calacanis?

  Scrap 100 car detailing.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, car detailing.

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  Because you know Lon keeps his car very sticky.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  I do. I love my Prius C.

• 41:20Jason Calacanis?

  It's got all of the different websites there. And I assume we can click on one of them. Yeah, got all the data.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  Show you a website that it built.

• 41:28Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the website it built.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Look at this. Jason, look at this. And this is all based on this real car detailing place in Austin. Like, you could go to them right now and say, hey, do you want to buy this beautiful website I made for you?

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, this is insane.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  It's insane.

• 41:47Jason Calacanis?

  Now, wait, you're also having it contact them? How does it do the contact and the outreach?

• 41:54Speaker 04

  You can just connect your email. So it finds the emails and sends out the outreach through your email. So you can have like a custom email template that it reaches out to them.

• 42:09Jason Calacanis?

  Chris, you have a job. Do you have a job in India?

• 42:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 42:14Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let me ask you. You can be honest, because we're on This Week in Startups, okay? You can always be honest here. You can always be honest with your uncle J. Cal. Unc. J. Cal.

• 42:24Jason Calacanis?

  If you have, if you got a job right now, what do you think your salary would be in India if you got like a job?

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Like an average job?

• 42:32Jason Calacanis?

  An average job, yeah.

• 42:35Jason Calacanis?

  In US dollars, in your dollars, and then we'll translate.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, 400 a month.

• 42:40Jason Calacanis?

  400?

• 42:42Speaker 04

  Dollars.

• 42:43Jason Calacanis?

  US dollars.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  You make 5 grand a year?

• 42:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, 5, 5 grand a year.

• 42:51Jason Calacanis?

  And you're a developer and you're smart.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Look at what he built.

• 42:56Jason Calacanis?

  5 grand.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  I can hear the wheels turning.

• 42:59Jason Calacanis?

  If you made $25,000 in US right now compared to your friends, how would you be living? Like, you're apartment, you're going out to India. How would you be living in India?

• 43:11Speaker 04

  I'd be living like a king here.

• 43:14Jason Calacanis?

  Living like a king.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  He'll be with Nick on the balcony in Miami Beach before we're done.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  Chris,

• 43:23Jason Calacanis?

  if you're this frickin' smart, I'll, I'll pay you $25,000 if you come work for me. Okay? How does it sound? I mean, you, you gotta be actually smart. This can't be like all a put on here. You gotta go through a proper job interview. But would you like to make $25,000 a year? Because that's like a third of what people make in the US. Don't tell him that, Jason. No, I am, but I'm just trying to do arbitrage here. I'm just, what would that be like if you went to your friends and were like, I got you got a $25,000 job offer? Is that like crazy or not? Or does that happen to some of your friends?

• 43:55Speaker 04

  But I think I'll be making more with Anlupa.

• 43:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there you go. I love it. I love it. He's an entrepreneur. It was a test.

• 44:05Jason Calacanis?

  You passed the test. I need to start Founder University, India. I need to talk to the government. I need to, I've never been to India. I need to go. Let's go. This is unbelievable. Let's go to Hyderabad, Jason. Let's go. I'm in. All right. Great job, stay.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  Tell you some exciting numbers.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go. Yeah, tell us the exciting numbers. Maybe I need to be an investor in this company.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  So I launched it. Yeah, so I launched it in 24 hours. It was at 1,000 MRR, 1,000 USD.

• 44:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Just from a single Reddit post.

• 44:40Jason Calacanis?

  All right, that's it.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  No, no, I think you'll be excited for this. And then last week, I posted like three tweets. And now Anlupa is over 8.5 K MRR.

• 44:55Jason Calacanis?

  You're already, you're, what are you talking about? You're at 100K a year. Yeah. Look at you. He doesn't need your 25K. He doesn't need me. That's that, FJ Cal. He's an entrepreneur. It was a test. I wanted to see what was going on here. Okay, here's the deal.

• 45:10Jason Calacanis?

  I want you to come to Founder University. And I want to invest $25,000 in this company. If you want to make it into a US-based company. Cause I think you're just brilliant and smart. If you want to pursue that, you gotta go through diligence. We gotta make sure you're not a criminal. We gotta make sure like you can actually start a US company. Put it aside. Congratulations. This is amazing. Let's go to our next demo. Stick around, Chris.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  All right, Chris, hang out. We're going on to Ben.

• 45:36Jason Calacanis?

  Hang out with us.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  We're going on to Ben Broca. He's the creator of Pulsia. It's an agentic system. It's not OpenClaw. It was built while Peter was off building OpenClaw. It's a separate agentic system, Jason, that helps businesses run their operations autonomously. Ben, thanks for joining.

• 45:53Jason Calacanis?

  All right, Ben, how you doing? Where you calling in from?

• 45:55Speaker 05

  I'm good. I'm from, I'm in San Francisco right now.

• 45:57Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, great. I can tell because it's so sunny. Show us what you built. This is it, demo or die. Show us what you built here on This Week in Startups. You never know what you're gonna see.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  So actually, this is a live dashboard that shows Pulsia in action, working right now on like almost a thousand companies at the same time. So you can see that like actually recently, we had a huge surge of like people starting to use the service. Amazing. And so right now, you can see Pulsia working on different tasks. So it completed 3,000 tasks in the past 24 hours. Right now, it's building a 3D property feed MVP for some user that's like working in a specific company. This is a Twitter action where like following up with 17 gallery pitches.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  And so you can see that like, you know, a lot of users are creating new companies every minute, right? 700 companies were launched in the past 24 hours. So essentially, Pulsia is an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously. So it wakes up every night, accomplishes tasks in the goal to to create and run the company that the user sort of like decided on.

• 47:03Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 47:04Speaker 05

  And it can.

• 47:04Jason Calacanis?

  This is incredible.

• 47:05Speaker 05

  It can build, it can like, of course, code, push a production, launch a real website, tweets. You can see here, those are real tweets that have been tweeted about, you know, if I click on one of them, it's an actual real tweet. Most ADRs cost $750,000 a month. I need a rep ops team. Lead Forge finds your prospects. So this is a tweet that's promoting a company from a real user, right?

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 47:31Speaker 05

  So it can also send emails. So I give it access to an email address. So you can see that like there's a bunch of emails that's been sent in the past five minutes, 4,000 emails in the past 24 hours. One of the things I launched about a week ago is now Pulsia can run ads autonomously for companies. So it creates its own UGC ads. And then there's an AI that, an AI agent that every, every day wakes up, looks at the performance of ads on Meta and decides to either, you know, create a new one or like, uh, suppose an ad that would not be performing or create new ads. So you can see, I'm going to give you an example.

• 48:07Jason Calacanis?

  My buddies think I'm a genius for planning our trips. I just use Fairway Finder. Ten bucks, whole captain's packet done.

• 48:16Jason Calacanis?

  I let them keep thinking it.

• 48:18Speaker 05

  So this is just an example of like an AI-generated ad that was created for a customer to promote their business on Pulsia.

• 48:25Jason Calacanis?

  So it's Y Combinator in a box. You're basically making unlimited number of startups. You own all of them?

• 48:32Speaker 05

  No.

• 48:32Jason Calacanis?

  And then you, or this is a game for people to play. They subscribe to your service, Pulsia.

• 48:38Speaker 05

  So it is all users that are signing up to Pulsia, paying forty-nine dollars a month to get an AI to run their idea. If you think about it, it's like, uh, one of the cheapest ways to get started. Of course, you can go to Lovable, you can go to Cursor and set up your website, but you have to be prompting it. If you stop prompting it, it will not do stuff for you. Here, it autonomously sort of like decides every night, uh, what are the best things that it could do next based on the state of the business? If, if the, if the MVP is not ready yet, it will do an engineering task. If the business is ready, maybe it will start doing marketing. Maybe it will do some cold outreach. Maybe it will tweet. Maybe it will run ads, right?

• 49:19Speaker 05

  And so the idea is like, really, I believe that the future of companies is that most companies will be eighty percent autonomous. Meaning that like the twenty percent is the, the human sort of like, uh, having taste, having creativity and like a certain insight into a specific niche. However, eighty percent of the company could be completely autonomous. Essentially here, the AI Pulsia is giving that to people. And it essentially is doing the engineering work, fixing bugs, grinding every day, sending cold emails, tweeting, doing ads. The human doesn't have to do that. The human needs to give direction.

• 49:54Jason Calacanis?

  So great, so great. I mean, this is. Something we like looked at for like our accelerator and incubator is there's all these different components. So we teach people go to market strategies like you're doing with ads. You know, we'll teach people social media, marketing and hiring and, you know, getting product market fit and you're just making it in a box. And we were always thinking like, I wonder if we could do Founder University in a box. And here you are, you've built it. Is this gonna be, uh, you know, you, did you raise money? Are you gonna build a business here? What's the story?

• 50:24Speaker 05

  So I raised the pre seed last summer. Uh, and, and right now, I mean, that's actually to, to market it more and to, cause now I'm seeing great retention, you know, uh, active users are sending 15 messages a day to their AI CEO to like plan to discuss strategies, marketing strategies, what to do to grow the business. Um, around, you know, 20% of users are, are using the ad product, which is great because ads is a great way to actually generate revenue. Uh, and so I'm excited to get more users on the platform and-

• 50:54Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. Great job. Um, a question from our audience.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, we got, uh, from M. Solomon Bush. How can you afford this? Our customers paying for inference on top of their $50 per month?

• 51:07Speaker 05

  So it's a great question. Like, do we, actually, I would love to make it more affordable. The reason it's $50 is because, yeah, as, as, as you said, it's expensive. Like, it's a lot of inference because every day the AI, oh, you know, thinks and acts every day. And that's, I'm of course using top models, uh, from Entropic and, and, and, and OpenAI. Uh, and so the idea is like the subscription, I'm trying to break even on the subscriptions because the idea is like giving this tool to as many people as possible. But in exchange, we take at Pulse here 20% cut on revenue on essentially transaction on the platform. So if a user comes in for $50 a month, they can get a company getting started, which is very, very affordable. But if down the line, they start making a hundred bucks, 200 bucks

• 51:49Speaker 05

  a month with their business, we just take 20% and that's our way to, to being able to generate profit to continue growing the platform.

• 51:56Jason Calacanis?

  Got it, got it.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  We're very incentivized with our users, uh, on success.

• 52:02Jason Calacanis?

  This is amazing. Really well done. We should talk because I'm in the startup business. And I think what's really interesting about what you're doing is, I mean, I'm sure when you raised your pre-seed round, this came up with investors, like, pretty great place for us to look for founders, right? You've basically got a little incubator here on your hands. Really inspiring, dude. I love it. Any questions for me? About startups and Startup Live? It seems like you already figured it out, to be honest.

• 52:28Speaker 05

  I mean, listen, first of all, thank you for having me. I love to be able to share this to more people. And yeah, I mean, you have a ton of experience and would love to, you know, ask you, like, how do you see about scaling it? How do you think about, how can I get this into more, you know?

• 52:44Jason Calacanis?

  So, you know, I love open source and I love more open platforms and it's always great to enable people to make money. So, let me just riff your lawn.

• 52:58Speaker 05

  Riff?

• 52:58Jason Calacanis?

  What you're doing is like eBay or Airbnb or Uber or many other marketplaces, Etsy, in that this is kind of a marketplace where you're giving tools, like you come for the tool and you stay for the marketplace. You've basically created a way for people to make a living. When you do that, you get love from the entrepreneurs you're creating, just like Airbnb does, right? Airbnb changed tens of thousands of people's lives who were probably, you know, making a wage and they became entrepreneurial. And eventually, if their Airbnb worked out, they got a second one or a third one, and now they moved into the

• 53:42Jason Calacanis?

  owner class from the salary class. Beautiful. So, I think you're doing that. And then, the more you, the less you take and the more you give will be how you succeed. So Etsy and Airbnb take their 5 to 20% take rate. You take 500 flat rate. There's other services that you can upsell people on over time. So $50 for this package, 300 for the next package, 1,000 for the next would be the next thing I, if I was an investor in your company, I'd be sitting with you saying, what would? People pay a thousand dollars a month for. And you could then, you know, start having that conversation. Maybe there's a human in the loop in the marketing function, right?

• 54:23Jason Calacanis?

  You see, you have like, you hire a growth hacker and you split the growth hacker, like rent a human style, across the team. Anyway, all kinds of things like that. And your customers, if you talk to them and say, how can we be more helpful? They're going to tell you. And then it's your job to prioritize and experiment. There's also the possibility of adding to this, the ability to invest in the companies or have ownership in them. So you could say, hey, we'd like to own 10% of your business.

• 54:58Jason Calacanis?

  Or we'd like to own 5% of your business. We'll give you the platform for free for life. If we can own 5% and we get a 5% royalty, you know, or we get 1% of your profit. So it could be 500 dollars a month or a hundred dollars a month and 5% of whatever your sales are, if you're tracking sales in here. So there's all kinds of ways you can kind of do future upsells. For now, just keep delighting customers, right? You're, you're, you should spend the first three years of any business, just delighting customers and then you can figure out the revenue. The model's really simple here. A subscription plus a revenue share plus upsells. And as long as it's tiny, like you're doing, you're going to be successful. You're going to figure this out. Great job.

• 55:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, awesome. Let's do our third and final demo.

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Well, first, first, I think we should, we should check out this poly market. So related.

• 55:50Jason Calacanis?

  I love the poly market.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Related to what we were talking about earlier, I found this one for OpenAI's closing market cap. So on the day that OpenAI eventually IPOs, what will the market cap be at the?

• 56:04Jason Calacanis?

  1.5 billion.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Closing bell. So let's pull that, that poly market up.

• 56:09Jason Calacanis?

  It's 1.5, 1.5.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  So the volume on this 1.4 million right now. So a lot of people, right now, the number one, the top vote is no IPO by December 31st, 2026. And then there's another version.

• 56:23Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  And then there's another version for 2027, and the number one vote there, no IPO by December 31st, 2027. But if you go look at the individual numbers there, there is some range. So.

• 56:36Jason Calacanis?

  Scroll down there because it's definitely going to be public by 2027. So that would include 2026?

• 56:42Speaker 03

  No, this, yeah, this is just the 2026 one. But Salah, if you see up there at the top, there's a choice, there's a button for December 31st, 2027. Click that one.

• 56:50Jason Calacanis?

  I think we're on that.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  No, we're on 2026. Here's 2027. So now scroll down again.

• 56:55Jason Calacanis?

  So no IPO is what?

• 56:55Speaker 03

  So no IPO is F by 2027 is 37, 43% as of right now. But under that.

• 57:03Jason Calacanis?

  So that's the losing bet. They're going to IPO by 2027. So anything.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Under 500 billion is currently at 26%.

• 57:12Jason Calacanis?

  That's wrong.

• 57:12Speaker 03

  1.4.

• 57:13Jason Calacanis?

  This is on the closing day?

• 57:14Speaker 03

  This is, yeah.

• 57:15Jason Calacanis?

  Of the IPO?

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Closing bell on the day that the company IPOs.

• 57:20Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I'm going to load into this one. Scroll down. I'm going to take 750 all the way to 1.5. So if you edit those up, it looks like it's about 65%.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Well, no, 750 billion to 1 trillion is 17%, 1.25 to 1.5 trillion.

• 57:36Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's got to be a trillion. So I'll go trillion, trillion five.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. That's about, no, that's about 30, 31%.

• 57:43Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, I'll take from 1 trillion up. So there's three categories. There are 16, 15, 19.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I see. I see what you're saying.

• 57:49Jason Calacanis?

  So that's 31. That's exactly 50%. I think if you put 50% on there, that's the winning bet. It can't be under 1 trillion on the close.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  I mean, that seems crazy that it would be under 1 trillion when it's already worth 750.

• 58:00Jason Calacanis?

  I think we should put 100,000 dollars on that. So if we put 100,000, we make 50?

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. That would be, yes. You would make 50K from that because you're betting at about 50%.

• 58:12Jason Calacanis?

  But wait a second, if I make 50K, I think that's a lock. If that's a lock for me.

• 58:19Jason Calacanis?

  If I put the 100K into Nvidia or Uber or

• 58:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:24Jason Calacanis?

  Other stock and I make 10% a year, I'll be at 110. Or if I put it into munis, I'll make 5% on the 100K.

• 58:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  7500 versus 50.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  The real money here would be like 500 to 750 billion, but I don't think there's any chance that it's that low.

• 58:40Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  That's the problem.

• 58:41Jason Calacanis?

  No, you can't take that long shot. Those people are being...

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're being silly.

• 58:45Jason Calacanis?

  Ray Tarday, as we say. Okay.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  There's your Polly market.

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you, Polly market. I love a Polly market. Got me thinking, got me thinking.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  We got, we got one more demo that I want to take a look at. Let's welcome Adi Gabrani. He's the creator of makemyclaw.com. Their website allows you to set up and deploy your own OpenClaw bot in just 60 seconds. Here's, here's my favorite part about this, though. He's also got a free 15-minute trial offer. Like, try out OpenClaw for 15 minutes for free.

• 59:15Jason Calacanis?

  I love open source.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  I was fascinated by that. So, welcome, Adi. Thanks for being here.

• 59:20Speaker 06

  Thanks, Ron. Hey, Jason. Nice to be here.

• 59:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right. There, there's gotta be like 500 hosting options now. Why should people pick yours?

• 59:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, so for me, the goal was not to just make it easy to deploy, but also to maintain it on ongoing basis.

• 59:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 59:37Speaker 06

  So, I, I think, and have it, have it in such a way that you can go into the shell and manage it all by yourself, even if you want to. So, I don't want people to be sandboxed into something. But actually, even in the FAQ of my site, I say that if you are using, if you're using OpenClaw, make my claw beyond a certain day, you're doing it wrong. I would want you to come, experience it, move on, self-host it and have fun with it. That's kind of like the, the goal for me.

• 1:00:05Jason Calacanis?

  What's your story? You're an entrepreneur. Where are you based?

• 1:00:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I'm in Vancouver right now. This was a side project, which actually came from getting, so I got involved with OpenClaw early January, where I was building a bot of my own and then saw Peter building.

• 1:00:20Jason Calacanis?

  What's your background?

• 1:00:23Speaker 06

  Tech background at business school and ran a company.

• 1:00:26Jason Calacanis?

  Solo entrepreneur? Have you incorporated yet?

• 1:00:30Speaker 06

  Not for make my claws. I have other company doing, doing AI for mining sector, actually.

• 1:00:34Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. So, that's your day job? Is that your company? You own that one?

• 1:00:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's my day job.

• 1:00:39Jason Calacanis?

  This is a side hustle?

• 1:00:40Speaker 06

  This is a side hustle on the weekends.

• 1:00:41Jason Calacanis?

  How is the side hustle? Doing compared to your main job.

• 1:00:45Speaker 06

  That's a much bigger business. That's a much, that's a much more well-established company. This is, this is, this came because I was playing with personal agents and wanted to get my friends involved.

• 1:00:56Jason Calacanis?

  Which job, when you wake up in the morning, which job are you more excited about? Be honest.

• 1:01:01Speaker 06

  This, I'm more excited about this, but I cannot afford to do this before 6:00 PM.

• 1:01:06Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. The other, have you raised money for the other business?

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  No, that's, that's bootstrapped. One good thing about mining companies is they pay really well.

• 1:01:14Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, got it. What's the footprint of that business? It makes millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands? How many years has it been around? How many employees?

• 1:01:20Speaker 06

  It's been around for around four years in millions, yeah.

• 1:01:23Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. All right. Did you raise money for it? You're just a solo entrepreneur?

• 1:01:26Speaker 06

  No, I have founders. I have co-founders, but bootstrap business.

• 1:01:30Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Awesome. I mean, I, I, I love the hosting business. Because I think it could uncover other things. What are you charging for? What's like the minimum?

• 1:01:42Speaker 06

  So it's 29 for, we give you the key, a very generous key, and 19 if you bring your own key.

• 1:01:48Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Explain to people the difference between bringing your own key and you providing the key.

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, so bringing your own key is you can bring any provider you want and you can, you can use whatever, whatever you like and you pay for.

• 1:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  Whatever language model you want.

• 1:02:02Speaker 06

  Whatever language model you want and, and you, and you pay for it. So that's why this is cheaper. We just host it. The kind of complexity that I'm trying to take away from people is upgrading their open claw whenever the new one launches, making sure nothing breaks.

• 1:02:15Jason Calacanis?

  So what do you give people by default? Are you using Kimi or something or some cheap, using Kimi?

• 1:02:19Speaker 06

  Using, using Kimi right now.

• 1:02:21Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And is Kimi good compared to Claude Opus or?

• 1:02:25Speaker 06

  I think it's about 10% less in, in personality, but about 10x less in cost. So for personally for me, it has been a great trade-off. I have used my, I have, so the way I run it is I have Kimi as my main LLM, main language model. And then for specialized task, I create sub-agents with Codex and Claude to do specialized jobs.

• 1:02:47Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. Super inspiring. Any questions for me? And by the way, Ben, if you've got a question for Adi, you can ask him. It's a little interactive here. We try to keep it. I give you permission. It's fun. Keep it always given interactive. If you have any questions.

• 1:03:03Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah, I think it's amazing. I think I love the the fifteen minutes.

• 1:03:07Jason Calacanis?

  I love.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  Free, free open call. I think that's genius. I mean, I would love to hear about like, what's your conversion of people that tried for fifteen minutes? And decide to actually pay like.

• 1:03:19Speaker 06

  I just, I just launched this and I haven't promoted it at all. So I just launched it and I need to promote it. Uh, but people, uh, just based on some replies I did on Twitter, people were really excited about it. Uh, I, I think, uh, some guy mentioned that, uh, on Windows, he's been having a lot of trouble. Uh, uh, you know, trying, uh, trying open claw and wanted a way to test it first with this telegram. So he was quite excited. Uh, and another use case that someone mentioned was that they, they, they, they opened the bot for fifteen minutes. They were collaborating with a friend on a coding project. And they just gave the bot the permission to do it. So they, I, I told the bot to shut off after fifteen minutes. And they, so, so I think I'm now starting to lean into these disposable agents.

• 1:04:02Speaker 06

  Where, uh, a friend of mine came up with the idea of doing this for a weekend trip. So on a weekend trip, we spin a bot for two week, for a week, for a weekend. It does its own thing and then it automatically self-destructs. So, and this is not a shared, uh, this is not like a shared space. It's, it's creating a virtual machine on the cloud. So it, it can do a lot of, it can do everything that open clock can do for those, uh, for the, for the weekend. And then it automatically self-destructs. So I think there can be a lot of cool use cases which can be built on top. I want make my claw to become the best place where you can use all the open source agents. So, uh, as you would have seen, uh, Hermes, which is by this news research lab they launched. So I'm integrating that into it. So now you, now you can not only just do, uh,

• 1:04:46Speaker 06

  now you can not just install open claw, but also Hermes. So you can choose whichever bot, whichever framework you like, and you can easily install it.

• 1:04:54Jason Calacanis?

  This is amazing. Well done. All right. Uh, gentlemen, great job. Uh, I'm going to be hosting an open claw launch festival Monday and Tuesday. Uh, uh, March sixteenth and seventeenth in San Francisco. You're both invited as my guest, free ticket for each of you. And, uh, if you want to come and the way we do this event, just so people know, we only have four hundred seats. We're giving a hundred to our investor partners. We have a hundred. And 25 of our founders coming from Japan, around the world, Saudi, etc. And our latest cohort of founding university companies in America. Then we're going to invite 100 investors, which means that's like 250 of the tickets.

• 1:05:36Jason Calacanis?

  Then we'll let 100 people who are founders from the public come for free. We always make it free for founders. When you buy a ticket, you pay 20 bucks. When you pick up your ticket, we refund the 20. Why do we do that? People, people will not cancel. So you can buy the $20 ticket. If you have to cancel, you can cancel, but it's 20 bucks. Who cares? It's just a way for us to reduce the number and just make sure we don't burn seats. And if you want to buy a ticket, there's 50 VIP tickets available. If you buy a VIP ticket, lunch is on your own for this event. You can just walk around San Francisco and get lunch. But I'm going to host a lunch for 50 people. And some of the speakers will come to that if they're, if they're around. And you can come to the lunch with me if you pay $1,000. So there's $50,000 in revenue for this event.

• 1:06:21Jason Calacanis?

  Lawn is the way I do it. And that just pays for all the free founder tickets. And we can buy coffee and breakfast.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  And the guest, we can't talk about the guests yet, but I've seen the list they're working on. And it's amazing.

• 1:06:31Jason Calacanis?

  Some good keynotes, especially for a 400 person event.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Some very.

• 1:06:35Jason Calacanis?

  Some of my big hitters are coming.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  Some very cool.

• 1:06:36Jason Calacanis?

  Two big hitters are ready.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Some very cool people who people will want to hear from.

• 1:06:40Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. All right. Launchfestival.com. Thank you.

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  Thank you. And, and thanks to Adi and Ben for being here. I appreciate it, guys.

• 1:06:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Get to, get to work. Go back to work, gentlemen. Ben, love it. Adi, love it. I have ideas. I love both of these. I like both those. And I like Chris. I guess three great founders you found on. This is exceptional. This is what this week in startups is all about. I love First Amendment lunatics. These are people with no life.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:05Jason Calacanis?

  And then they go out, they carry pepper spray.

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:09Jason Calacanis?

  And they go and they film.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  There is one of these guys in this show.

• 1:07:13Jason Calacanis?

  And I just came across my feed because my feed is Bulldogs and weird couples on Instagram now. There's all these weird couples who have the same accounts. I've got like four of those weird couples I follow now.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:07:27Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, as one does. And, and freaks and oddities and other things.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  And, and First Amendment warriors.

• 1:07:36Jason Calacanis?

  And First Amendment warriors. And there's, there's two groups. There's one, well, there's actually like four subsections of this group of the genre.

• 1:07:46Jason Calacanis?

  One, they go to like, when they get pulled over, they refuse to, you know, Fourth Amendment. They don't wanna

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Oh, right, yeah.

• 1:07:53Jason Calacanis?

  Roll their window down. They wanna know, am I being detained?

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  They know all the rules. They know all the rules.

• 1:07:58Jason Calacanis?

  They know all the rules. And they like to mix it up. That one, it feels very dangerous. That's one genre. I'm not encouraging that. The second one, they go to public places and they just record. So they went to like, you know, Tahoe, and they went to a local town that's near me. And they recorded on the street, just like they're making B-roll. And the guy's got like six cameras on his body. And the guy comes out of the store and he starts yelling at him. He's like, no, I'm just taking video. I'm just doing, you know, shots or whatever. He's like, you can't shoot into the store. He's like, well, actually, you know, freedom of speech, I can.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  Public street, I'm looking this way, I was at the sidewalk.

• 1:08:29Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. So the guy comes and he pushes his camera. The guy's got pepper spray. He says, hey, if you hit me again, I'm gonna pepper spray you. The guy pushes him again. He pepper sprays him like.

• 1:08:38Jason Calacanis?

  The guy's crying, whatever. Police come.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  That hurts.

• 1:08:40Jason Calacanis?

  These First Amendment worries. Show them the video. The third genre, and perhaps the best, is in this show, Neighbors. Which is the beach line.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  The beach, oh my god. Oh my god.

• 1:08:53Jason Calacanis?

  There was a beach called Carbon Beach. I had a couple of friends who had houses on Carbon Beach. These are billionaires. And I would go stay and, you know, you go on the beach. And then they would have a thing called squids or jellyfish. People who would be outside Geffen's house, like Geffen has one of these houses, well-known. Famous people have these houses. The guy who used to run Disney was the CEO.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Michael Eisner.

• 1:09:15Jason Calacanis?

  Iger. Eisner had one of the most famous houses. This is all public knowledge because people would know, I'm gonna sit outside of Eisner's house. I'm gonna sit outside of this famous person's house. And, you know, people are just cool with it. But then there's like some Karen in Laguna. And she puts ropes and there's a rule. You can be 10 feet from the high tide mark.

• 1:09:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:37Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody is allowed to be 10 feet from the high tide mark, whether it's Florida, California, and then there's local rules. And then there's people who sell chairs or have private clubs. And they will start putting their chairs around it and creating formations. And then these warriors come out, and there's one on Neighbors.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Jason Calacanis?

  And they come out and they wanna walk across it. So they'll walk through the chairs for the hotel or whatever.

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  I had no idea about this whole subculture.

• 1:10:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's the greatest. It is awesome.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Every episode, they pick two.

• 1:10:06Jason Calacanis?

  Where's the clip?

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  So here he is.

• 1:10:09Speaker 07

  Oh, just doing a little beach vlog.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  It's all private property until you hit ultra light down there, so.

• 1:10:15Speaker 07

  When you say it's all private property.

• 1:10:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, here he goes.

• 1:10:20Speaker 07

  Don't take this the wrong way, please. That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard.

• 1:10:24Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh.

• 1:10:26Speaker 07

  This is not my first rodeo, my friend.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  So this guy he's fighting with.

• 1:10:29Speaker 07

  And you're gonna find out the hard way.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Is paid by the homeowners to control the beach.

• 1:10:33Speaker 07

  And then I'll leave. But you're wrong, because I've looked it up.

• 1:10:35Jason Calacanis?

  So he's a cat.

• 1:10:36Speaker 07

  Didn't work out so well for you, did it, Brent? You think I'm trouble? Wait, I have a hundred of my friends out here on this beach.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  I got my kids out here, so if you wanna cuss and fight.

• 1:10:44Speaker 07

  I don't care if your kids are out here. I'm out here too.

• 1:10:47Speaker 03

  That's, that's a little.

• 1:10:48Jason Calacanis?

  Now, here's the thing.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  That's a little taste of cult news.

• 1:10:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so great.

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  He's a lunatic. So it's, he's getting in the middle. It's not even his neighborhood. He's getting in the middle of this fight between the people who like to hang out on this beach and the homeowners. And there's a scene late in the show that's so great where the woman who's running the "we want to sit on the beach" group pulls him aside and is like, "Can you please stop doing this? You're making us look bad. This is exactly what we want to avoid. You're starting fights. You're making chaos. Now we're really gonna get kicked off the beach."

• 1:11:19Jason Calacanis?

  Um, yeah, the Laguna Beach Karen was the other really great one. Um, she is nuts. Let me play you this.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  But they, they find these, the whole show is just they find these characters.

• 1:11:31Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. I love it. This is the genius of HBO. The hundred billion dollar thing is actually worth it.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Jason Calacanis?

  I retract my previous statements.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  There's another one that's in Montana. It's these two neighbors who are fighting over this gate a guy wants to put up on this road next to his property in Montana.

• 1:11:47Jason Calacanis?

  Look at this, Lon. Let me show you this one. This has nothing to do with neighbors. Watch this woman.

• 1:11:51Speaker 08

  A couple of weeks ago, I featured a video of a woman, a beachfront property owner in Laguna Beach, to be exact, who was screaming at a family of beachgoers to get off her property.

• 1:12:02Jason Calacanis?

  Look, she's got like little fences she puts out every day.

• 1:12:05Speaker 08

  More and more beach area in an attempt to cordon off what she said was her private property.

• 1:12:11Jason Calacanis?

  She's attacking. She's got a.

• 1:12:13Speaker 08

  You're the homeowner of a beachfront property, which must be nice.

• 1:12:17Jason Calacanis?

  A spool of rope and she throws it. She throws the spool.

• 1:12:17Speaker 08

  It's your responsibility to learn the laws and rules that govern your property and the line.

• 1:12:23Jason Calacanis?

  So what happens here now is these lunatics do this. Then these Fourth Amendment people are in groups and they're in Facebook groups. There's an app.

• 1:12:34Jason Calacanis?

  Then, as the guy said in Neighbors, they go swarm.

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Jason Calacanis?

  So whoever does like the shenanigans, then they do like, let's have a hundred people have a barbecue outside this woman's house. It's amazing. This is what like America's all about. I love this guy's stuff. It's crazy. This is why I got a, you know, dozens of acres on my ranch.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's true. You got a private ranch.

• 1:12:55Jason Calacanis?

  Ain't no neighbor bothering me.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Totally recommend Neighbors. I would say that this Montana one, you go through most of the show and you're like, this guy actually sounds pretty reasonable. He just wants his horses to be able to walk down this. And then at the very end, he's like, well, you know, we should be working together to fight against Q. And then all of a sudden it takes this crazy turn and he's like a wild conspiracy theorist. It's unbelievable. The show is so good. It's Josh Safdie who did Marty Supreme. He executive produces it and it's a terrific show. I highly recommend it.

• 1:13:24Jason Calacanis?

  All right. You did a great job. I want to do some things that you wouldn't, uh, this is, these are things you can buy. You know me. I like things on Amazon.

• 1:13:33Speaker 03

  Stuff, gadgets, bric-a-brac. Yeah.

• 1:13:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I like a little bit of stuff once in a while. Let me see if I got the right window here.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  People like bric-a-brac.

• 1:13:41Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go. I'm going to take you through a couple of things I'm obsessed with.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:13:46Jason Calacanis?

  I like a warm cup of coffee.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Who doesn't?

• 1:13:49Jason Calacanis?

  This mug warmer for $22. I have it on my desk. You put your cup of coffee on. You see what I'm showing you?

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  I do.

• 1:13:57Jason Calacanis?

  You press a button, you can pick how, what the temperature is and how long it's on for and it's got a little.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  I love this. So like you poured yourself a cup of coffee. Now you've got it on your desk. You might nurse it for a little while. It gets cold right away. This keeps it fresh and warm. That's brilliant.

• 1:14:12Jason Calacanis?

  130 degrees the whole time. If you want to go 178, you can pick in between. For 23 bucks, the delight I get from this thing every day is extraordinary.

• 1:14:24Jason Calacanis?

  I've talked about Anchor before.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:14:27Jason Calacanis?

  And when you and I were in Japan, you probably saw me pull this out. This costs 120 bucks. It's an Anchor laptop power back. Bank 25,000. It has two built in USB Cs and it has pass through power. So when you plug it in on your desk, you can plug it into your laptop or two other things. Be charging the battery and charging your phone and your laptop at the same time. In other words, it's got pass through power and it's got these LED screens. So you know what it's doing. And then if you're a super nerd like me, it'll tell you here C1, C2, C3 and A. It tells you what each of the ports doing.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:15:05Jason Calacanis?

  So I like to know I'm on max charge for my laptop, whatever. And it gives you the battery health and all that stuff. So you can see the input, how much is left, how long it takes to charge the battery. It keeps you informed because we're all dealing with this stuff. Now, when I'm on a flight, a lot of times I'm on a flight, you gotta find the plug. Even if you're in business, it's hard to find the plug falls out. I don't even worry about that. I just have it with me. I just zip it out, boom. Or if I'm in an Uber, I'm getting driven somewhere, boom, I have it with me.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  At the airport, it's, you know, when you're walking around at the airport and you're looking for where's the outlet? Do I have to sit by the wall? Is there that one chair that has the, and like half the time the chair has an outlet, but it's broken and you can't get any power? This, you don't have to, you never have to have that moment again. You just plug it in right there. It's amazing.

• 1:15:48Jason Calacanis?

  Anchor also makes a new wall charger. Here it is. This one can flip over in any direction. So if you have a weird plug.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:15:57Jason Calacanis?

  It does this interesting thing. Let me see if I can find it.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  Well, cause we all have a hundred devices now. I just got the Plod. I've been wearing the Plod pin now.

• 1:16:05Jason Calacanis?

  You got that, yeah.

• 1:16:06Speaker 03

  You gotta, you gotta charge that too. Like every time you get a new thing now, it needs to be charged.

• 1:16:11Jason Calacanis?

  Now this one, this little cute Anchor Nano USB C. I first saw it when I was in Japan and I went to that great camera store that you went to.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  BIC Camera, B I C.

• 1:16:20Jason Calacanis?

  BIC Camera Tokyo, amazing. There's another off.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:16:24Jason Calacanis?

  Many floors. Anyway, they make these with matching colors for your phone, but it has a display. I've never seen this before. There's a little button on the top and you can cycle through it. See that little indentation?

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:34Jason Calacanis?

  You cycle through it and then it tells you what you're charging. Somehow it knows through a proper USB C cable that you're on a iPhone 17 Pro Max.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:16:44Jason Calacanis?

  Then, so you see that fast charging, whatever.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:47Jason Calacanis?

  And it does fast charging, which really matters.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  They are fast.

• 1:16:52Jason Calacanis?

  Super fast and you can tap it really quickly like if it's on your side table as you see here turn it off. You can do the charger cooler. So if you don't want to, if you're doing it overnight, you don't need to high speed charge, which burns out batteries and does all this stuff and affects temperature. So you can go on the care version. This is getting incredibly sophisticated and here is my favorite part. 180 flexible for your ideal view. So depending on the plug you're using, if it's on top of the desk, on the side of the desk, whatever hotel plug, airplane plug, your office, you can move it to zero degrees, 90 degrees or 180 degrees. The plug just flips around, which you don't think is important until you get to a weird plug.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:17:31Jason Calacanis?

  And what you want to pair with this is this $20 plug, which is a six foot USB cable. Get it in white or black. And you pair it's got 140 watt fast charging for your laptop, but it has dual USB C. So you plug this into something and you get two boom with my daughters. I bought them each the $30 nano when we're traveling and for their rooms and the double. We never have problems with fighting over plugs and the battery. I gave my wife my battery. I gave the kids one of those bulky batteries.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, they thought of everything. They thought of everything at anchor. They figured it out. Yeah.

• 1:18:12Jason Calacanis?

  And Plod, you got the Plod pin.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  I do. I'm not wearing it right now because we're on camera, but I have the Plod.

• 1:18:17Jason Calacanis?

  When do we start the partnership with Plod? Do we have a partnership with them yet?

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  Monday, sir. Monday. Get ready.

• 1:18:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, has it been signed?

• 1:18:23Speaker 03

  It's done. It's we're happy. We will do our, we will do our first Plod segment. Stay tuned for it on Monday's show.

• 1:18:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Monday show. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to our friends at Plod. I'm going to give away more Plod.

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  They're great.

• 1:18:35Jason Calacanis?

  The Plod, I applaud the Plod. This thing is so great. Just as a preview, you wear it, you press a button. When I was skiing and almost died, I was wearing it for those three days. I turned it on at the beginning of the day. And I just let it record me all day. I'm skiing down the mountain. I had a great idea. I said, oh, shoot. Stop at the side of the mountain. I'm going to start talking. I start talking. I start talking. I start talking. Boom. I forgot I did it. Then I now have on my calendar every other day, review your plod.

• 1:19:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Jason Calacanis?

  And now I review my plod and I see all the different ideas. I don't lose all my great ideas.

• 1:19:08Speaker 03

  The great thing is it learns the voices of everyone around you. So I've already taught it everybody. So I could just record a conversation. It'll tell me who said what, when, and you could search it. It's crazy.

• 1:19:20Jason Calacanis?

  And yeah, so you can search it. And then there's a bunch of template lunatics who've made templates out of there. So one of them is perfect transcript. One of them is like meeting. One of them's brainstorm. So you can pick what template you want to generate it. It stores it in the cloud. Here's the great thing. You can hit the send button and I can send a plod to you at a public URL. So if we did a talk, I did this with you when I was testing in Tokyo. I had breakfast with Amanda.

• 1:19:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:19:45Jason Calacanis?

  I had breakfast with Will. We were going to do a talk and we just decided, hey, let's do a like a best practices for startups. And I talked with the team and then I said, hey, make this into an agenda for a podcast episode and a live talk. Then I sent that to you, Lon.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  You did.

• 1:20:01Jason Calacanis?

  And then you use that. So you started on second base. It didn't have to be transcribed. I didn't have to start anything. Boom. I just pressed my plod pen.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  It was like I was at the conversation you guys had without.

• 1:20:11Jason Calacanis?

  Correct.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:20:12Jason Calacanis?

  Plod, plod, plod. I love plod. Bye, everybody.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Bye bye.