Jason's Top CES Products and Takeaways | E2232

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Hubspot - http://clickhubspot.com/twist1 Circle.so - http://circle.so/twist Sentry - http://sentry.io/twist Today's show: On the last TWiST episode before Jason goes to Japan and Alex begins on paternity leave, the hosts break down the blockbuster tech news that is kicking off 2026. Discord AND Strava both eyeing billion dollar IPOs, two massive social media apps with millions of daily active users. Jason unpacks Discord's the growth story, from a gaming-first product launch in 2015, to a community/work platform and social media for all. Jason explains why Strava proves that data is the MOAT for consumer apps. PLUS Jason and Alex are joined by Producer Oliver to rank the top CES products. Jason gave his thoughts on the different robots, self driving cars, and multi-fold phones on display. Would you buy a triple-fold phone? Timestamps: (00:00) Discord looks to go public at $7 Billion! (10:05) Hubspot: Check out the guide "How to Get Your First 100 Customers." Download it for free at http://clickhubspot.com/twist1 (13:37) Strava going public and why data IS the moat for consumer software (19:28) Circle.so: the easiest way to build a home for your community, events, and courses — all under your own brand. (22:25) Anthropic's $350B valuation and why it makes sense (31:59) Sentry: New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST (33:05) Why is China upset about META's Manus acquisition — and why Jason is hopeful for the US-China relationship (37:24) Jason's favorite part of CES: The rise of open source AI! (40:59) Why Jason LOVES his self driving Tesla — why public companies need to be safe and not push too quickly (44:24) Producer Oliver's Top CES Tech products (54:46) Jason's Major Takeway from CES (59:43) How many times can you fold a phone? (1:04:04) New interfaces for smartphones * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/ Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/ * Thank you to our partners: (10:05) Hubspot: Check out the guide "How to Get Your First 100 Customers." Download it for free at http://clickhubspot.com/twist1 (19:28) Circle.so: the easiest way to build a home for your community, events, and courses — all under your own brand. (31:59) Sentry: New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara https://youtu.be/pvJa2pzuXWQ Eoghan McCabe https://youtu.be/9dHN4YFkgv4 Steve Huffman https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reddit-ceo-steve-huffman-on-mod-revolt-building-a/id315114957?i=1000617333424 Brian Chesky https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/airbnb-ceo-brian-chesky-on-early-rejection-customer/id315114957?i=1000611761112 Bob Moesta https://youtu.be/y2UMzSqX94Q Aaron Levie https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/box-ceo-aaron-levie-breaks-down-box-ai-and-generative/id315114957?i=1000612384545 Sophia Amoruso https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/sophia-amoruso-on-branding-raising-a-fund-portfolio/id315114957?i=1000601352978 Reid Hoffman https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/reid-hoffman-on-ais-crescendo-moment-regulation-and/id315114957?i=1000612548498 Frank Slootman https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/snowflake-ceo-frank-slootman-on-moving-the-needle-win/id315114957?i=1000602560622

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Well, we do love to look to the future here at Twist and we love to look to the future also at funny events like CES, I mean, that I have been to many times, Jason.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  But there's also a lot of kind of what I would call CES slot, Boston Dynamics new robot.

• 0:11Jason Calacanis?

  This one has an LLM attached to it and will eventually be available to consumers or businesses.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  But Jason, what is Hyundai good at? Mass manufacturing. They're good at getting things right at scale in a real world environment. So if this is what they're showing off on stage, I presume it's probably 80% as good as we think it is.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  And it really kind of rivals the Sunday Robotics robot and these partnerships with auto companies, it's going to become a common trend that we'll continue to just watch.

• 0:36Jason Calacanis?

  This is going to ramp up quite nicely. You, these companies will have no problem making hundreds of thousands of these and eventually millions. So if people want them, they'll get these down to, that looks like $5,000 to $10,000 eventually. Optimus and the Hyundai one, I would put at $20,000.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  This week in startups is brought to you by Sentry. New users get three months free of the business plan, which covers 150,000 errors. Go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST. Circle dot S O. The easiest way to build a home for your community, events and courses, all under your own brand. HubSpot. Check out the guide, how to get your first 100 customers. Download it for free at clickhubspot.com/twist1.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. Today is January 9th, 2026. Alex is about to go on. Paternity, new baby coming. Congratulations, Alex, number three. I'm so excited for you.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was talking to a venture capitalist that I, that I really like. And she was like, hey, you're doing the thing no one does. You're making a middle child. And I'm like, great. I'm glad I'm keeping that TFR up.

• 1:47Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, you know, I am a middle child and middle children rule the world because they don't get as much attention as the first or the last. So you have to just kind of carve your own way in the world. It's an advantage in a way. But yeah, I think there is something to it. And there's a lot on the docket today. We're going to go over, I was at CES earlier in this week and had a great fireside chat there that went really well with Bob from McKinsey and 1,700 people in the audience. It went out as an all in episode. If you're on the all in feed and yeah, you can go check that out. Bob from McKinsey, really great guy. Got to talk about all the AI stuff, but we're going to go through, producer Oliver's here is just crushing it on this week in AI, our new spinoff podcast, weekly round table. He's going to come on and just go

• 2:32Jason Calacanis?

  through some of those great products and Alex and I will just have a quick reaction to them at the end of the show, but we got to talk about IPOs. This was my big trend for last year when we did our trend show on all in and here, which was M and A would come roaring back and IPOs would come roaring back. I think you had the same take. M and A did come back this year. We saw the Grok acquisition, the Wiz acquisition, DoorDash did three, Stripe did a couple. The M and A is back on the menu, boys, and IPOs apparently are back on the menu. Let's talk about it.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. First of all, we have two bits of IPO news here from the United States in the same week, Jason, which is fantastic and very exciting. The biggest one is that Discord, the consumer gaming chat service that everyone likes to use, has filed confidentially to go public, long awaited, long expected. I think actually on Monday, Jason, we went through a bunch of the poly market odds for who's going to go public and we both thought that Discord was pretty high up there. Well, here we are. So it's a filing that's confidential. So we don't have all the numbers yet. We don't have a per share price. We don't know much. That's new, Jason, other than that this is coming, though I did want to provide a little context for folks. If you recall, a couple of years back, Microsoft tried to buy Discord for between 10 and 12 billion dollars. The company said no, went out and raised capital at a $15 billion valuation. And now, a

• 3:43Speaker 00

  couple of years later, according to secondary trading, the company's worth something a little bit more like seven to eight billion dollars. So it's looking like the 2021 era valuations were a good time for Discord. Still a very valuable business. Still great to see it go out. Probably a little disappointing for the last money in, Jason, but I think a lot of folks will still make a lot of money.

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and we need to get more public companies out there. The public doesn't get to participate very early on because of the state, private, longer movement. Discord's been around for a long time. I'm trying to remember when I first heard about the startup. You can tell us when they launched their product. It was a really interesting.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  May 13th, 2015.

• 4:21Jason Calacanis?

  2015. Okay, so it's only 10 years old. I thought it was more on the 15, but what an amazing. Story this is 200 million global monthly actives, I believe, which is, you know, that's a pretty big footprint, folks. If there's three or four billion people online, you know, that means 20%, whatever, 10%, 10%, maybe 5, 10% are using this product every month. And they make money, I believe, through subscriptions, right? That is this Nitro product. And then they may have some advertising on the margins, but I'm not sure exactly how that works because it started as a gaming platform, but then people took the platform and started using it for everything, right?

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I'm in like 15 different discords for different things. It's great fun. Everything from like fantasy authors to individual video games and early access. It's super popular. Nitro is the consumer subscription side of this, Jason. I think individual servers or kind of instances of Discord can charge for access and the Discord takes 10% of that. They did roll out a number of new advertising formats in 2025 after they swapped CEOs. I think clearly gearing up to juice revenue ahead of an IPO. And also they have a new product called Orbs, which is essentially a kind of like a virtual currency that you can earn by doing certain advertiser-driven tasks that they're expanding. So they're really trying to think of a full-court press on the advertising side to try to probably, one, augment growth and then de-risk them from just having a single main revenue line.

• 5:43Jason Calacanis?

  I'm looking at my Discord right now. We have a This Week in Startups one. We're actually hiring a community manager here because we have so many disparate communities. We have angel investors at the syndicate. We have founders. We have Founder University. So we have the founders we've invested in, in one Slack. We have Founder University now global. We're using for Saudi WhatsApp and we're using the same thing in Japan, a WhatsApp instance, because in those cultures, that's predominant here.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  That's what everyone uses.

• 6:08Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And then here, you know, I'm in my Knicks Fan TV Discord. So when they have a live show and they go over what happened in the Knicks game, it's kind of like a call-in radio program. They actually take the calls for Knicks Fan TV through Discord. Why? They used to have a phone number, etc., but it always was low quality, according to my friend, CP, the franchise over there. And they just push everybody through Discord. Leo Laporte is very successfully running something called Club Twit, which I'm a member of. Everybody should join. It's like eight, 10 bucks a month, but he's got, from what I understand, a decent audience there. And his business, you know, has moved, I think, into subscriptions as a big denominator for him. And that's just great because it becomes a foundation and then you become

• 6:50Jason Calacanis?

  less reliant on advertising and audience size. And then you can stay true to your mission. And in Leo's case, I think true to the mission means just that OG Silicon Valley, Bay Area, look at tech and just people who just love the products and services, passionate about it. Whereas, you know, you, it's hard to compete now with so many podcasts out there. You really have to carve a niche for yourself. And I think people have now made Discord, Substack, Beehive, Patreon, you know, people pick which one of those they want to make their central hub. But it's, it's a juggernaut of a program and a platform. And I think it has great upside. Also, it seems to have used the tried and true Reddit and siphoning off Reddit users to sort of create a new experience. Reddit

• 7:34Jason Calacanis?

  didn't have chat. They kind of have a kluge chat on it. It doesn't seem to be app based. So that has also become a big win. I saw our friend Kevin Rose is now doing communities in his new dig reboot. So he's, he's back in the game and people love a good community, right?

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. The interesting thing, though, in the case of Discord is I'm not sure how quickly its user base is growing. When we think about Reddit right now, Jason, to go back to that example, they're seeing a boom right now in usage, actives and so forth. In the case of Discord, they've been saying this 200 million plus monthly active user number for at least a year. I think I saw a data point from like 2024, that was the same number. So my question is, how good are they at driving increased monetization from a, let's say roughly static user base? And if they're not very good at that, then I'm not sure what the growth story here is. So this is an IPO that I don't think we have all of our thinking done ahead of time. I think we're gonna have to read this document when it comes out and learn quite a lot about the business and figure out how good its 2025 monetization efforts were and what kind of hope that gives us for growth down

• 8:35Speaker 00

  the road. Because Discord is doing, you know, I think the last number I heard was like $600 million revenue a couple of years back. So it's at scale. But you know, as we can see from Box, if you're not growing, your price of sales multiple drops to the low single digits pretty quickly. And that's brutal.

• 8:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Reddit doesn't report their mouse, but they do report their daily active users, which are 444 million, which is crazy. And then people estimate Reddit is at 850 million to a billion. So, community you can make money on, it has to be a platform. It has to be user driven. It's very hard to build like these community websites without the audience really driving it with these subreddits, these sub communities. If you want to be our community manager and you're passionate about startups, we're looking for a bar raiser. For people who don't know the term bar raiser, that comes from Amazon. This was one of Bezos's big innovations. Hire somebody who would raise the bar of everybody on the team. So, [email protected] if you want to apply for that job.

• 9:34Jason Calacanis?

  We need somebody who's been doing community for five or 10 years and can tell us what we should do and how to run communities. We have ideas, but this is always the tension, Alex, when you're running a business, you could hire maybe a young person or an enthusiastic person and kind of train them up on the job. But if you've, you're not an expert on it, it's going to be slow going, right? Whereas, you know, we're experts on podcasting, launching a new podcast, not very difficult for us, but I need somebody who can teach me about community, if you're that person, [email protected]. One of the core challenges facing every single early stage company is getting your first 100 customers. And I say this all the time here on This Week in Startups, to get there, sometimes you have to do creative things, even things that don't scale. So what does that actually mean?

• 10:19Jason Calacanis?

  And what are some tried and true techniques that have worked for founders in the past? And which one of those can you tap for inspiration? To find out, you could join an accelerator or you could just check out this free resource online at HubSpot called How to Get Your First 100 Customers. This isn't just some little pamphlet with generic ideas. No, it's a full framework and that framework is filled with practical tips and real world case studies from amazing founders and experts, including my pal, Sam Parr and Sean Purry, you know, the hosts of My First Million, which is a great podcast. I listen to every single episode. They're just awesome. So, download the guide for free at clickhubspot.com/twist1 or just find a link in the description of this show. And thanks to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring today's episode.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  That's a lesson I first learned at a startup, actually. When I was at Mattermark, before things got a little wonky at the business side, I had some headcount and my then boss, Daniel Moore, was like, hey, you know what you should do? You should go hire the most senior person you can find. And I was like, at the time, you know, 25, 26, I kind of viewed that as insulting in a way because you know, you're younger, your ego is more fragile. But there's a lot to be said for hiring someone with a boatload of experience who can come also fill in your gaps. I love that.

• 11:31Jason Calacanis?

  It is an ego thing. You correctly pointed out why people don't do this. And what you have to learn in an organization is if you're the person who brings in an all-star, who makes the team better. If you were the person on the basketball team who recruited Kevin, if you're Draymond and you recruited Kevin Durant to join the Warriors and you win a chip or two with him, that's like a very powerful position to have in the organization, which is probably why the Warriors organization coveted Draymond, even despite the fact that he's effervescent and unique in terms of his, you know, performances on the court.

• 12:06Speaker 00

  That's polite.

• 12:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, he's a basketball genius, his IQ, and I'm friends with him, but his IQ is like way off the charts, but he also has that passion like Dennis Rodman or any number of people where, you know, the double edged sword of the passion can get you a technical foul. But you want to be that person in the organization. You bring in an all-star, what the boss man or lady is going to think is, okay, this person cares about the business as much as I do. And then you will always have a place in the organization because you can point to it and say, yeah, I've recruited that person. Anyway, it is an important founder lesson in there. Congrats to all the people over at Discord. And another great example of, you know, not selling opens up a lot of opportunities. The thing that sometimes happens when you do an IPO like this is you force the hand of acquirers.

• 12:51Jason Calacanis?

  So now you've actually put a price on the company. When Slack went out, I'm sure they had many offers to be purchased before they went for IPO, but people don't remember. Slack was a publicly traded company. And then eventually that puts a price on it. The price discovery happens. The management team has to own the results every quarter. The discipline comes in, processes come in, you can't wing it, right? And Reddit can't wing it anymore. Steve Hoffman. Is one of the few founders who made that jump to being a public CEO and really guiding that company then acquires can get really interested and say, hey, well, we know the price of this company. Let's start building a position in it. Let's start talking to management and then you can get taken out like we're seeing with Netflix and Warner

• 13:35Jason Calacanis?

  Brothers. Okay, let's keep going.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  Really quickly, Strava is also filed confidentially to go public, Jason. Not as big of a name in this community as Discord is, but it's worth noting that the company was last valued at 2.2 billion and around that was led by Sequoia. Strava, if you don't know, is an application for exercise people. I have used it to track my runs, for example. It's a super great application. They make their money off of consumers. And remember when Reddit before it went public had that big fight and beef with its communities because they shut down third-party application access to Reddit data and everyone was pretty mad at them for a bit?

• 14:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, people were creating a lot of value with their data, but that wasn't getting back to the mothership. And then the mothership said, hey, you know, we gotta, we gotta go buy whatever it was. There was like Blue something, which was the top Reddit app. And they were like, let's just buy it and we'll have a Reddit app that is actually up to speed. X, or formerly Twitter, had a similar thing. When you're growing and you can't get to everything, yeah, you, you provide API access. When you become public, sadly, for developers and the community, you kind of got to capture that value, which is why Zuckerberg shut down his APIs, X shut down their APIs, or charged a lot of money

• 14:51Jason Calacanis?

  for them. So at least if people were going to build something competitive that was on your roadmap, you could get paid for it. That, that is the, the natural tension there.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  I bring that up because in the case of Strava, they did make some API changes, some third-party access changes that made people really, really mad. But if you want to ensure that you're capturing all that value because you're going to go public, you do it. So I'm not shocked to see Reddit do that and then List and then Strava go through a similar kind of internal, if you ask, with its user base and now List. The company was valued at one and a half billion in 2020, just to put a, put some historical context here. And it grew more than 50% last year and the information reports it's profitable. So my question is, how the hell did Sequoia manage to get in for such a cheap price? But when this one does go out, it's, it should be, you know, around 500 billion revenue profits. So it should be a win for all of its prior backers and I'm excited to see more. Mid-cap public companies, Jason, I just want more.

• 15:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's 80 bucks a year, I believe, is the subscription price. And people are extremely loyal to it. And this is another important founder lesson. When people have their data in your product, you know, it's very hard for them to unsubscribe. That's the best moat, the best lock-in. Because I use, as an example, a product called Slopes. Slopes has my last four years or five years of skiing data. For me, paying 50 bucks or 40 bucks, whatever I'm paying for it, I don't even know. And if it was 150 bucks, I'd still pay it. I mean, I might think about it at that level. But I like to compare my stats from this year to the previous four years. And that's one of the most important things you can do in a subscription business is have streaks, have friendships and community. All of those things equal the moat.

• 16:30Jason Calacanis?

  And so while anybody in the vibe coding era, you know, could pop out lovable or another tool and make a Strava competitor very quickly. The data lock-in is what makes these very special. 90% of their revenue, from what I've read, comes from all of these subscriptions. They could layer on ads and other things. We will see consolidation in this space as well. We have incredible investment in a company called Fitbod that just focuses on cross fitness. There's obviously Whoop or Aura Ring. And then you have the Function Health, the Superpower.com and those blood testing. All of this, Eight Sleep, they're all going to come together. And at some point, there'll be a roll-up of five or six of these products.

• 17:15Jason Calacanis?

  And then you'll get a really good picture of your health.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Where should that stack be built? Because I could see Eight Sleep buying companies. I could see Strava buying companies. I could see the scanning companies buying other companies. But if you were to pick some place to build that vertical integration, where would you start?

• 17:33Jason Calacanis?

  Well, Apple Health, obviously, really cares about this. Tim Cook cares about it. And they've tried to maintain an app store where like the Google, the Apple Health data is not a really good app. It's just kind of like the raw data and then other people build on top of it. But people, I think, got frustrated, I certainly did, with my data inside of Apple. Because I was like, just tell me my sleep score. And it's like, oh, you want to get something out of sleep? Purchase one of these seven different. You know, products. And I'm like, no, I just, I bought an Apple Watch already. Just give me my damn sleep score and they wouldn't do that. So I got Whoop and I love Whoop and now I'm addicted to Whoop. I can't imagine, and I think I paid 200 bucks a year for Whoop.

• 18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, it's like 20 or 30 bucks a month. It might be 250. So I think between, and Whoop just launched blood testing. So they're going to put those two together. Everything's going to move to singularity. It's just a matter of who has the hootspie to do it. Shrava going public means they have a currency to buy. Let's say if they wanted to buy Fitbod, if they couldn't buy Aura Function Health, those things are worth billions, but they could go down to the next year of, you know, apps and services that are worth hundreds of millions or even a billion and start to do that. So we'll see who does it. Uh, and now that M and A is back on the menu and IPOs are back on the menu. This is what we want in our economy. We want to have a vibrant IPO market and we want a vibrant M and A market.

• 19:01Jason Calacanis?

  And here we go. We finally have it. The best is yet to come. The next three years are going to be gangbusters, gangbusters. This will be the year of the IPO and M and A. I would say last year, 2025 was the return of M and A. M and A will accelerate in 2026 and seven.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Whoop is considering an IPO in 26 or 27, just to put some more context there. And Aura Ring, I think is going to be at like $2 billion in revenue soon, but they're not looking at an IPO soon. So that's kind of the state of play.

• 19:28Jason Calacanis?

  If you're an independent content creator or you're building any kind of community oriented business like I am, just making great videos or awesome websites, it's not enough. You need to spend real time with your community and you need to do that with tools that allow you to see what's going on and communicate smoothly and crisply with your community members. That's why I'm so happy to partner with Circle, the complete community platform for creators and brands. With Circle, you're going to get an easy way to build branded websites that help you with email marketing strategies. That's super clutch. And AI agents that can help you design, manage data and even do the branding. We use Circle here at Launch to keep up with our Founder University community.

• 20:09Jason Calacanis?

  We've done 14 Founder Universities around the world and they've helped us grow that from this tiny little program out of our office in Austin to this bona fide international movement. And they can do the same for your startup. Twist listeners can get a thousand dollars off Circle's professional plan by going to circle.sotwist.

• 20:29Jason Calacanis?

  That's C I R C L E dot S O slash twist.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Now, you're saying the IPO market here is nuts. You should see what's going on in Hong Kong. There's been so many interesting AI IPOs. You know, we talked earlier about how companies go public so late here in the United States. Well, two of China's AI tigers went out this week. Zhi pu AI or Zeta AIs, I think of them and Minimax both went public and they both did quite well. Zhi pu AI or Zeta AI was up 36% from its IPO price and Minimax doubled on its first day, all the way up to 345 Hong Kong dollars per share. They're both worth about six, seven billion dollars. And if you know the GLM models that do quite well, that's Z dot AI. And Minimax, of course, put out the M 2.1 preview, which is doing quite well on LM arena. These are companies, Jason, that we talked about a little bit on Monday, but they're small

• 21:21Speaker 00

  and I just love seeing them go out early. So if any of them do does well, well, you could make a lot of money.

• 21:26Jason Calacanis?

  And if you are willing to take the risk, just like SPACs or other markets like this, vibrant Hong Kong market, there'll be a vibrant Middle East market emerging, Japan, Australia. They all will allow an IPO with 10 to 100 million in revenue. It's kind of their speciality. And then that means you get to play late stage VC. Late stage VC is not a guarantee. It's not like buying Netflix, folks. It's not like buying Nvidia. You're going to be taking a lot of risk. And I think these companies, if I'm reading correctly here, Zhi pu, Z H I P U AI,

• 22:05Jason Calacanis?

  which is Z dot AI, according to producer Claude, had 27 million in revenue during the first half of 2025. So they're on a $60 million run rate or so. Minimax reported 53 million for the first nine months. So very similar, probably at 70 million or so. Maybe they'll hit 80 million in 2025, I think is the estimate. So these are tiny. When compared to the IPOs we see in America where I think a billion dollars is what people are looking for. Again, increases risk increases opportunity. If one of these goes 10x year over year, 10x again year over year, like Claude did, or Anthropic, or OpenAI, or Loveable,

• 22:47Jason Calacanis?

  you know, or Micro One, a lot of these companies can have 10x year over, these AI companies can have 10x revenue year over year. Do you get to participate in that?

• 22:55Speaker 00

  I mean Anthropic went from basically a run, $1 billion run rate to a $9 billion run rate last year. That's 9x at scale. The thing, though, that I'm just a little worried about is these Chinese AI companies are punching way above their revenue weight in terms of model quality, but because they pursue this open approach to just kind of letting people take it, it does seem to be a little bit tougher on the revenue side of things, Jason. And I wonder if they're going to be able to keep funding their research at the pace that they are because they're spending a multiple of their revenue today on R and D. And you can do that for a while, but eventually it doesn't quite math out.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  Hey Mont, Tenasia from General Catalyst, he's the CEO of General Catalyst, which we talked about last week, raised $9 billion. He was also on my panel earlier in the week, along with Bob from McKinsey, and the three of us were chatting things up and I got to talk to him backstage and during the panel and after. That Anthropic investment for them has been tremendous. And he talked about, you know, we used to talk about triple, triple, triple, double, double, double for SaaS companies, you know, 10x, 10x, 10x, I mean, or 10x, 10x, 2x, 3x, like, this is a whole different ballgame. This is why, even though there's a bubble in areas, there's froth in the AI market, there's also just massive adoption of this technology, which we will see

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  in the GDP prints around the world with people who are adopting it. And we'll see it in the headcount versus earnings versus top line revenue, where headcount, as we talked about for three years now, static team size, you're just going to be able to do more with less.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Now, I want to talk about Anthropic a little bit more because why not? So Jason, you mentioned them and their fundraise and how their venture capitalist partners have done so well. Well, the company is looking to raise $10 billion more at a $350 billion valuation. Now that number 350 is actually the reported price that both Microsoft and Nvidia late last year pledged to invest up to $15 billion as a pair. So we've kind of seen this number before, but it is a rough doubling of its last private round, if you will, in which it raised $13 billion last September out of $183 billion valuation. We seem to have scaled past what VCs can afford to put up themselves. So GIC, the Singaporean Sovereign Wealth Fund, and COTU are set to lead this round.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  It's going to close in the next couple of weeks. It's not done yet. The numbers could still change, but this is the reporting on the ground. And I just want to answer everyone's questions about this. Is this froth? No, because I went back and I pulled all the data, Jason. It's kind of crazy to me how this company's effective multiple on its run rate hasn't gotten out of hand. It's not crazy whatsoever. So if you think about the company's growth through time, it had a run rate multiple of about 31x March of last year. It was about 37x September of last year. And then it was about 20x at the end of the year, and it's going to be about 35x again if this new round closes as expected. And I think frankly, for any company to grow in this fast, paying 35x current run rate is just not crazy.

• 25:51Jason Calacanis?

  And this is what happens between being a private company with a lot of promise and then a public company judged on performance. You go from a voting mechanism, hey, who do we think is going to win in the private markets? To and a weighing, a scale that just weighs the the quality of these earnings and the quality of the company, the management, et cetera. And so you'll just see eventually this will be priced, not on price to sales, but eventually earnings. That's going to take another two years because the earnings of these firms is going to be super challenged for a couple of years. Just like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, were losing money on every ride while they built a scale. And then at some point they flip the J curve.

• 26:35Jason Calacanis?

  Which shows the investment. You're losing money, losing money, losing money, investing, investing, investing, whether it's in factories or software or team and or building a brand and a marketplace. And then all of a sudden, you stop spending out of control. You stop losing money on every ride or delivery or delivered package for Amazon. And then you slowly come out of the J curve. And then you become money printing. And a company like Tesla could be sitting on 30, 40 billion. A company like Meta, Apple could be sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars. And so this is, you know, anticipated and a healthy part of the process. And you'll see these companies come out of the J curve in 2029.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  How much money do you think general catalyst is going to net on its end topic investments?

• 27:19Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. But if they own between 5 and 10% of the company, and this becomes a trillion dollar company, to take down 50 billion is incredibly rare.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Almost never.

• 27:31Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Google, Apple, Facebook, Tesla, you would have to go into those ranges. And typically, people would be selling into that kind of strength. SpaceX would be another one. So I think SpaceX, if you look at Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, they might own 10% of it. And that is possible when you're the series A, series B investor, which is why those rounds are quite competitive for elite management teams. But it's certainly not 20% anymore. It's between 5 and 10 is what the venture firms wind up having in ownership.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  I think you just really outlined the difference between today's venture capital market and the one in days past, because I just pulled it up, Alphabet, Google, when it went public, was worth 23 billion total. And now today, we have SpaceX, which is worth, actually, I don't know offhand, Jason, but

• 28:19Jason Calacanis?

  800 billion, I think, is what people are saying, whispering, 600, 800 billion, something like that.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  30, 40x as much, private today as Google was at IPO. So you can make a lot more money if you can stay in these companies longer.

• 28:31Jason Calacanis?

  The outcomes are much bigger because people stay private longer, and because the opportunity space is not just niche software for enterprises, not just niche consumer products, or even mass consumer products. These are industry changing and leading companies. Eventually, they wind up having two or three business lines that could be contributing to the bottom line. In the case of Amazon, you have AWS, you have their traditional, you know, selling stuff, e-commerce, and then you have their booming ad business. So you have three ways to win with that stock, right? Tesla, you have Power Walls. Solar cars, self-driving and Optimus. That's like four different ways to win if you put energy together.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  I just did an interview with Zip Line, the drone delivery company for Twist, coming out to your podcast feed soon. And they started off, people kind of forget this, doing medical deliveries in Africa. And now we think of them as the, oh, they're the Chipotle delivery company. Oh, they're the Walmart delivery company in Texas. But they have several large business lines as well. And I think it's just such a great way to have a durable company.

• 29:33Jason Calacanis?

  And they went from doing fixed wing aircrafts, being slingshotted into the air. They have these now, you know, backyard units. Forget about what they're attaching, like the drive-through windows they're attaching to, you know, the Starbucks and Chipotles of the world. But they have these sort of backyard bizarre looking, netted out arrays, I guess is what I would call them, with their drones coming in, not fixed wing, but quadcopters or whatever. And man, they look crazy. And when you see them buzzing around, it's like, okay, that's the future.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  This is from their Chipotle launch video. It shows how they drop the package down, Jason, into the little catchment that you're describing. Yeah, this is, this is a company that has, you know, multiple approaches to the market and they're all crushing it. And I just can't tell you how excited I am.

• 30:18Jason Calacanis?

  That is a, and for people who are watching, it's like a little box on a tether. The box comes down into the Chipotle, they throw your bag of burritos in it. It then, in that little box, gets pulled up the tether so the quadcopter doesn't have to land. This is critically important because you don't want to get injured with a quadcopter, right? There's rotors and they're big and they're noisy. But if they can stay up 100 feet or 200 feet and drop a tether down, put their little box, the box empties or gets filled without, you know, they get emptied without a human interfacing with it. You just stand back and watch it happen. Hopefully, humans don't do stupid things like grab the tether and yank it, but.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Someone will do that. Yes, yes. If there's a socket, people will fork it, you know?

• 31:04Jason Calacanis?

  Sounds like somebody jumping in front of a delivery bike. If you're dumb enough to do that, you know, it's your call. But yeah, this is going to be an incredible new future. And I was talking to Sacks just the other day, you know, he's here in Austin. And in Austin, we have kind of a unique experience because of the topography of Texas. In other words, there's a lot of land. Outside the city center of Austin are many Amazon factories or warehouses, rather. So when you order something, it comes faster than I was when I was in LA or the Bay Area. They literally will tell you, you order something at 10:00 PM at night. They're like, do you want this from 4:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM? And you're like, well, nobody's going to be at the gate until 9:00 AM.

• 31:49Jason Calacanis?

  So I don't care, but sure, leave it there between 4:00 and 8:00 AM. You can get stuff same day as the default in the Bay Area. Same day is the default. Logs are an essential part of just about any tech startup. You need to keep your eyes on how your product is being used. And you definitely need to understand what happened when things go wrong. But logs are notoriously messy. It's especially hard to gather the insights you need when your logs, errors and performance data all live in different tools. But now there's a solution. Sentry. Sentry's logs are trace connected and structured, allowing you to follow everything clearly and understand the context, even if you're a non-technical founder.

• 32:31Jason Calacanis?

  Whether you're debugging your front end, back end, your mobile app, whatever it is, Sentry will give you the context you and your team need to get the problem fixed and to get on with your day. You've got other things you've got to focus on. That's why more than 4.5 million developers are already using Sentry, including amazing high-profile teams like Disney Plus and Anthropic. Learn more by going to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST to get $240 in Sentry credits. That's S E N T R Y dot I O slash twist.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Next up, China is mad about the Meta-Manus deal. Now, if everyone recalls, I think it was on Monday, we talked about Meta buying Manus. They are the formerly Chinese, now Singaporean AI company. They've built a very popular agent. In fact, they were probably the first viral AI agent service that we saw out in the market, Jason. And the deal was for, I think, $2.5 billion, including $500 million for employee retention. So $2 billion to the company, a half billion to the staff. Everyone's very happy, hunky-dory, Meta wins. Uh, no, China's very mad. They're looking into the deal. Now, from everything that I've read and understood, I don't think China actually has a mechanism to stop this transaction from happening. But the thinking is they're making a, a, a stink about it, essentially to signal to all internal investors inside of China

• 33:50Speaker 00

  and founders that no more of this. You're not going to be able to go move your HQ to Singapore and then sell to an American investor or an American company. So this might be kind of a one and done situation, a Manus only exception, which I think is, is too bad because there's probably a lot of talent inside of China that American companies would love to purchase via a Singaporean, you know, domicile. But in this case, I, I, I think we've seen the end of it. So shout out to Meta for pulling this off. And I guess the door is closed. I'm sad about this, but I'm curious if I'm being too pessimistic.

• 34:19Jason Calacanis?

  The relationship with China has broken down, obviously, from, hey, we can win together. You guys make things, you know, we design them. It's a great, you know, you got factories. You're trying to get people from farmland and no running water and living on, uh, you know, a dollar a day. And hey, we can maybe create a, you can create a middle class and we can get iPhones uh, every six months or 12 months that are incredible. You know, now we're in the standoff. TikTok being spun out, Meta buying Manus. This is all part of a theme around can the two empires coexist? And can they do business together?

• 34:58Jason Calacanis?

  I actually am hopeful. I think there's so much opportunity for these two great nations to work together that we may see some type of deal from our chief dealmaker that results in a little more fluidity in investment because China needs investment and uh, maybe just a little less uh, saber rattling. We'll see. But I am actually hopeful for it. This is a very dangerous thing for China to do because China has been trying to get their entrepreneurial chops back going after Jack Ma was relieved of duty, reeducated, whatever happened to Jack Ma exactly with Ant and um, the financial arm of uh,

• 35:42Speaker 00

  Alibaba.

• 35:42Jason Calacanis?

  Alibaba, thank you. And Now, what we'll probably see is great entrepreneurs there who have the ability to move around the globe are going to just move, then start something. So instead of redomiciling and moving the company, which hey, listen, if you're in America and you want to move from California to the great state of Texas or Florida, as we've seen Larry Sergey and others, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, you have that ability here in the United States. What they're going to have to do is do it ahead of time. And Singapore is a great landing pad, the UAE, Saudi, Hong Kong used to be the landing pad, but that now that's obviously controlled by mainland. So I think what we'll probably see is Chinese entrepreneurs leaving the country.

• 36:27Jason Calacanis?

  Not good for Xi. So if you take out winning a big prize through an exit or an IPO, that will mute entrepreneurship. And they need to actually get entrepreneurship going again. So it's a short term mistake for them to try to block these kinds of deals. And it's a big win for Meta and for Benchmark. Remember Benchmark got really hammered for being anti-American, you know, not patriotic for investing in the company. I think it was kind of patriotic for us to engage other nations. Somehow that became not patriotic, which I understand, especially if it's like military applications or AI.

• 37:10Speaker 00

  Do you not buy into the idea then that the China versus AI battle is essentially to the death? Because I read a lot of people who are critical.

• 37:18Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's important that we be the leading economy in the world as a democracy. That's important. But I think open source is going to win the day anyway, or take 60%, 70% of the market and then maybe 60, 70% of the revenue will go to closed source, like we saw with Android and iOS. That's the likely scenario. And we saw that this week at CES, and we're going to get to our CES segment in just a moment. The most interesting thing in 2026 at CES in my mind was Nvidia announcing that they had an open source end to end AI like FSD from Tesla that was available to any automaker.

• 38:03Jason Calacanis?

  And they have the hardware stack available to any automaker. So I think we'll have an Android, which would be the Nvidia stack. Versus the proprietary stacks, which would be Waymo and Tesla. And so we're going, all that does is accelerate adoption. The fact that Android came out after iOS just drove massive adoption of smartphones in the mobile ecosystem. So that's what's upon us.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Before we jump over to Oliver, this is the Nvidia announcement that I recall seeing, this drive hyperion ecosystem to accelerate the road to full autonomy. Just to make sure I understand this, this is essentially Nvidia putting together the software and hardware necessary to turn any car into a self-driving car, but they're not going to be building them themselves. This is just to enable OEMs and ODMs to do it on their own. So Stellantis and everyone else?

• 38:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So Mercedes showed off a car that's, you know, in the 40,000 range with the complete sensor array. And that's level two, which is supervised, which will very quickly get to level four, very quickly being, I don't know, a year to three years. Essentially, they're probably halfway to where Tesla is now. In other words, they got to 98%, 99%. The last 1% incredibly difficult. The last 1% is probably the equivalent of the first 98. So, you know, they got, they got a ways to go. But what this will do is it'll give

• 39:29Jason Calacanis?

  every single car manufacturer, the ability to buy sensor arrays, chips, and then do world building inside of their tools. So it's the end to end AI, open sourced. It's the world building data, that tool. So you can build worlds and synthetic data and they'll have some basic amount of world data, whether you're doing robotics or self-driving, both operating in the human world. And then you can buy the sensor arrays. What is Nvidia's goal here? They just want to sell more onboard computers. So they're looking at, yeah, they just want to sell, it's like selling H100. So I think in an arms race, they're like,

• 40:10Jason Calacanis?

  we've got ammunition here. Who needs guns and ammunition? You figure out what war you want to fight. Are you fighting a war to sell more Mercedes Benz? Or are you, you know, selling to Lyft, Uber and DoorDash to enable their fleets to deliver stuff? Doesn't matter to them who's buying it. It matters that they're selling it and how many can they sell? If you want to sell a lot of chips, You know, Android being open source and Samsung and HTC and Sony and countless others, Google being able to make pixels, that just results in a lot of chips getting sold and a lot of batteries and a lot of camera sets. So this is going to accelerate

• 40:53Jason Calacanis?

  the road to autonomy. The road to autonomy is going to accelerate and there'll be many more players.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Yes. Thank God. I love competition here because as I've said 10,000 times on the show, I hate driving. So really excited about having this on all my cars in the future.

• 41:07Jason Calacanis?

  I have to say FSD is so good now. I just upgraded to 14.2.2.2 that I have to keep reminding myself, my spouse, my friends, please keep your eyes on the road. It's so good that I think people are now starting to trust it so implicitly that they are assuming that, you know, because it's better than a human, they can take their eyes off the road, they can sleep, they can watch a movie, they can text. You might be able to do a quick text, you might be able to change your podcast, you know, flip back and forth between

• 41:49Jason Calacanis?

  this week and startups, this week and AI and all in. You can flip between those three. I think that's allowed, but not other ones. You can just, you have enough time to flip between my three podcasts, but no other podcasts. I think that's enough. That's enough for now, but don't, don't go to sleep because if it hits a construction zone or one of the edge cases, you know, you could get in a bad situation. And that's why I'm very concerned about the pressure they're putting onto Waymo, Tesla, Uber, Neuro, We Ride, Pony. They're putting so much pressure on these companies, that they have to get this stuff deployed immediately. No shame in the self, no shame in the safety driver, no shame in a contained area.

• 42:35Jason Calacanis?

  Please stop putting, and it's all these stock promoters. There are all these stock promoters who have built a position in Uber or Tesla or Waymo or whatever. And they're just doing 20 videos a day. I watch these stock promoters. It's a really weird phenomenon. People have placed bets on the stocks. Then they've started YouTube channels and every day they'll release two or three videos about, "You won't believe that Tesla solved FSD. The stock's going to the moon. You won't believe that Uber has doing this." And they're just in this social media war and they're making money two ways. They're making money off of advertising and their revenue share. They're

• 43:19Jason Calacanis?

  also making money through their bets on the companies. It's a very weird moment we're in. So I really hate this phenomenon. It's like GameStop, but in the real world, which makes it dangerous. Like, hey, this is the world we live in. People can place bets.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  I'm less worried than you about the safety driver game, Jason, because every time you talk about FSD, you get slightly more rapturous. And every time I look at Waymo's safety data, it still looks rock solid to me.

• 43:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you don't own a Tesla, right? Or do you?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  No, I have a Hyundai Kona EV.

• 43:49Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's time to buy them. You should buy the Model Y hardware four for your next car. You can, I mean, the leases on these things are three or four or 500 a month. It's basically free. I mean, they're getting close to free.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  $10 a day. It's like the same cost we spend on coffee.

• 44:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then if you can drive, or if you can be driven by it, and you were taking Ubers now for 10, 20 bucks a day for your car, it's essentially what you would have paid 30 or 40 bucks for ride sharing. It's pretty compelling. So you got to get on the FSD trend.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Well, we do love to look to the future here at Twist and we love to look to the future also at funny events like CES, I mean, that I have been to many times, Jason. So we're going to bring up Oliver from This Week in AI. He's going to throw some big wins from CES for you and I to have some fun with. So Oliver. Come say hi.

• 44:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oliver, how are you, sir?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  I'm good. Thanks for having me. That was how, did you enjoy your time at CES? I saw you made a front cover of a TechCrunch article.

• 44:46Jason Calacanis?

  I did?

• 44:47Speaker 00

  You did?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, you did.

• 44:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, show me. What is this article? I didn't know that. What was the article? I didn't see this article. Was it because of my talk?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I think it was related to the talk. It mentioned you, but it wasn't.

• 44:57Jason Calacanis?

  Well, whatever it is. Don't worry about it. We don't, let's not make it about me. Let's get right to what the audience wants, which is what people thought the top 10 products were. We had producer Oliver go through and ask producer Claude what the top 10 consensus product was across all these top 10 lists from Engadget, the blog I started with Peter Rojas and Brian Alvey and Sean Gold and Ryan Block to Vox, The Verge, which was a bunch of refugees from Engadget. And here's what they, they said were the, so this is like a meta list, yeah, we created?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yep, exactly. With the help of Claude, obviously, there's a lot of reporting at CES. But there's also a lot of kind of what I would call CES slop that I'm less concerned with. Maybe like some smart shades or ultrasonic knives that don't concern us here at This Week in AI as much as maybe some other people.

• 45:45Jason Calacanis?

  The weird stuff, you're saying? The weird stuff?

• 45:48Speaker 01

  There was a lot of really cool stuff as well. The first one I thought that was mind blowing was one of the first things that was dropped at CES that I saw on my feed, which was Boston Dynamics' new robot, humanoid. And this was really interesting because we've all heard and seen videos of Boston Dynamics over the years. They were kind of the first company that was doing humanoids. They were doing flips. And it was a lot of cool stuff that kind of captured our imagination, you know, in the 2010s.

• 46:14Jason Calacanis?

  But there was no practical application of those. So let's play here and see what this one does. And I'm assuming the reason this is important is this one has an LLM attached to it and will eventually be available to consumers or businesses?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  It seems like they're targeting industrial automation. A lot of their kind of, you know, early clips and kind of advertising was geared towards industrial. But something that really kind of stood out in these demos, as you can see, it has a super wide range of motion, just walks forward and backwards, arm spin all around, which we haven't seen from any other humanoids up to this point. It also can handle, I think, around 100 pounds of load, which is pretty heavy. This is kind of my first 10 products from CES.

• 47:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and everybody remembers there was a massive M&A movement at

• 47:08Jason Calacanis?

  Google in 2013 or so, and they actually bought Boston Dynamics as well as Mecca Robotics and bought Dolly, which did computer vision, industrial perception that did robotic arms and computer vision. You probably remember this really well, Alex, because you were at TechCrunch or Crunchbase at the time. They went on a massive buying spree. They were too early. LLMs didn't exist, which meant these robots couldn't interpret the real world, even though they were getting there. They just weren't there. So, once again, too early. They wound up selling all these companies, I believe, out of Google when they went on their cost cutting. So, probably a long-term mistake. Yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  The reason why I'm excited about this one is that Hyundai owns Boston Dynamics, they own 80% of it, and SoftBank owns 20%. But Jason, what is Hyundai good at? Mass manufacturing. They're good at getting things right at scale in a real-world environment. So, if this is what they're showing off on stage, I presume it's probably 80% as good as we think it is. But that's not too far away from actually being functional in a factory or a warehouse. So, what I see here is Optimus and also what the Boston Dynamics bought really going head-to-head, which is great because it means the steel was sharpened steel.

• 48:21Jason Calacanis?

  And figure, yeah. I mean, we're going to have a dozen of these. Fascinating that the car companies are particularly good at building these. I think it's two reasons. They know how to manufacture stuff, right? With chips in it and batteries, and they have production lines. And they also use robotics to build cars. So, that's kind of interesting. The people who are applying robotics in their factories are going to be building the robots to go into other people's factories and other use cases. All right. Really interesting. Anything else you want to add there, Oliver? Let's get to the next one.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Just another example. Apptronic has a huge investment from Mercedes. So, we see a lot of these humanoid companies in these partnerships with auto companies. It's going to become a common trend that we'll continue to just watch. So, second, I thought, was definitely another humanoid, kind of, but definitely on a different level. So, this particular robot, the LG's robot called Cloyde, and it really kind of rivals the Sunday Robotics robot, Mimo. I remember, if you remember, we talked about it a couple of weeks ago with the hat. So, the main difference between, you know, this version of robot, which is really meant for to be in the home, folding laundry, doing your dishes, maybe even doing some baking, is it doesn't have any legs. And we have seen that, you know, that can be beneficial. You can get more leverage if you're lifting items.

• 49:35Jason Calacanis?

  And you won't tip over. And you could move around quickly and it could have batteries in it. So the not having legs means you can't go upstairs, but it does mean you don't tip over. Does mean you could put a vacuum in it. Does mean you could put batteries in it. So it does come with some advantages. That's kind of an ugly bot. I'm not gonna lie. It doesn't do much for me, LG. Well, it's coming from LG. And if you don't remember LG, that's the South Korean conglomerate. LG used to stand for Lucky because they were a chemical brand back in the day. And Goldstar, if you remember that electronics, they rebranded the Lucky and the Goldstar as LG. And then in 1995, they started calling it Life's Good for their international.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  But the Koreans, no manufacturing, LG, Samsung make great TVs, great appliances, dishwashers. They're going to be able to scale this as well. So now you've got LG, you know, on top of SoftBank and Hyundai. This is gonna, this is gonna ramp up quite nicely. You, these companies will have no problem making hundreds of thousands of these and eventually millions. So if people want them, they'll get these down to, that looks like $5,000 to $10,000 eventually. Optimus and the Hyundai one, I would put at 20,000 eventual price point. All right, Oliver, what's next?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  I will add that the demo that they showed, it had the LG robot putting some laundry in, in the machine. And it was super slow and all the other demos looked really slow. So this is, they're obviously behind some of the other manufacturers, but it'll be interesting to continue to watch. But and then next, I thought was, I was super excited about this one. I think Jason, you commented about it. Neuro, neuro friend of the pod.

• 51:18Jason Calacanis?

  The founder came on the pod. Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Neuro. Yes, and they have unveiled a kind of new production ready robot taxi with Uber, Lucid. And Nvidia is kind of the power behind the unit. And what we can see here is the, is the neuro unit on top of Lucid car.

• 51:37Jason Calacanis?

  The sensor pack is on the roof and that sensor pack is now down to under 10K. So they're going to be able to add these two, the Lucid, the Lucid is made, this is the Lucid Gravity, the electronic maker. And Uber has ordered, I think 20,000 of these already. And this is in the Gravity, which is their best selling, highly regarded.

• 51:58Jason Calacanis?

  SUV slash minivan hybrid.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  What I'm interested about here is there's four different companies that are coming together to build this one vehicle. And obviously, this car looks much nicer than the Waymo, but obviously still pretty similar. So it'll be interesting to see how they compete.

• 52:13Jason Calacanis?

  This is Uber Black, essentially. So this follows the Uber playbook, Alex, of starting with the high end and then going down. The Gravity, so we're showing the Zooks here as well. But the one we saw originally is the Lucid Gravity. That is a six-seater. That's a big luxurious Model X, you know, Escalade competitor. And it's a really nice car for an airport ride, or a CEO, you know, somebody who doesn't mind paying for Uber Black. Waymo and FSD robotaxis Model Y, that's more of an Uber X experience. And eventually,

• 52:55Jason Calacanis?

  Zooks is more like the Uber Pool lift line. Multiple people will be in those like a, on a route. And all of those are gonna have different price points. And what's nice about it is, we're moving into the mass production phase. So yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  I want to get my own Zooks and put my Peloton in it. And that way I can just Peloton around town, you know, almost like a real bicycle ride.

• 53:14Jason Calacanis?

  You laugh, but there's going to be two different versions of the world. There's a Palo Alto company, I forgot the name of it, but they were also at CES, producing a robotaxi for you to buy as a consumer and sit in the backseat of. And the steering wheel will retract into the dashboard and you have a robotaxi-like experience if you're in the geofen zone where they're allowed to operate. Then if you go outside the zone, Alex, that company then has the steering wheel come out if you want to drive it to Lake Tahoe. So let's say you're in the Bay Area, and hey, you can go up and down the peninsula, you can go to Berkeley, Oakland.

• 53:57Jason Calacanis?

  But you can't go to Napa on it because Napa hasn't approved or Tahoe and Sacramento haven't approved full self-driving or they haven't achieved it in that geo-fenced area. So you could, you know, hey, go to work every day in San Francisco if you lived in Palo Alto or vice versa and be driven in a robot taxi without paying attention.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  Is this the car you're discussing, the robo-car from Tensor?

• 54:18Jason Calacanis?

  Tensor, yes. This company came out of seemingly nowhere, but they're doing a ground up, I believe Hyundai might be making. It's a contract manufacturer making the car for them.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Here we go. Here's the steering wheel folding up and going in. So you can see it retreat. If you're on the audio version, we're basically watching a car that has two large iPads on this dash and the steering wheel literally retracts in like a turtle's head and then the screen goes over and covers it. So you're just looking at your own iPad. Yeah, fantastic. Love it.

• 54:48Jason Calacanis?

  So this will be, I think that's the bit, my big takeaway of CES was it was robotics and self-driving. Okay, let's keep going.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  So next we got the longevity mirror from Neurologic. And I thought this was really interesting. I think what their kind of, you know, thesis is that you could get a lot of, you know, longevity, health, aging data, just from simply, you know, camera that you sit in front of for 30 seconds. And I think that, you know, there's going to be a lot more health tech and we've obviously seen a ton with Aura and Whoop. And you mentioned Strava. They'll all be coming together and I just think that we're going to be living for longer and there's going to be a lot more tech just like this.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Okay, keep going.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  We have two pet health projects. One is a collar. So this collar will basically go on your pet and it does, it's obviously works like a normal collar. You can attach a leash to it, but it also goes beyond and is kind of focused on the health side of things where it'll actually track the GPS, the motion, the sleep and the temperature data.

• 55:43Jason Calacanis?

  Fitbit for your dog. Brilliant. Everybody wants this, especially if you have a ranch or you have a dog that escapes. Next up on the top 10 list is?

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is another pet health tech company that focused on cats, how your cat is eating. And this is just another example of more health tech.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  So it weighs the food you're giving to it or it some way will tell you how much your cat is eating for health? Reasons, that's the goal.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  That is the goal because I know that a lot of animals will like eat less or eat a different amount when they're sick. So I think this is kind of will raise some alarms when that happens.

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  People have fat cats, these cat ladies, as you know, Alex, these cat ladies overfeed their cats. And then they get three or four of them, and this is more about the cat owners being too permissive with food. That's what this is for. You know, as a dog owner, I've know what you're talking about. Exactly. You need to meet only one cat lady. Okay, next up on the top 10 consensus list.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  The Plod Note Pin S. So this is a another wearable AI note taker. It's on your maybe collar or you can probably just throw it in your pocket. And this was announced at CES and what I thought was really interesting about this, and I've played with the Pocket. I made a demo about it, which will be coming out soon on this week in AI. I realized that all these kind of note takers and you know, AI wearables are, I think for the most part, all the same. Where basically they have microphones, they have a certain amount of storage on device, you know, they have a certain amount of battery life. But what's interesting is they basically all will like go to your phone and then you'll be able to use AI features and just use the transcription data from there.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  So it doesn't really seem like any of these devices are that unique. And for someone who's on Zoom all day, I can just use their granola or a Notion AI to do this exact same thing. I would say that the use case that makes the most sense for tools like this would be someone who's out in the field, you know, maybe door to door salesman, someone who's in real estate. They want to remember what their client was talking about. So I think like a lot of us in tech, we're on the computer all day. Maybe it's less coochie cases for us.

• 57:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's who this is for. And if you use Plod or Pocket or any of these tools. What you do is you press a button on them, it starts recording. Then you press the button, you turn it off. It puts it into a large language model. And when you process it, Alex, you can process it as a doctor. You can process it as a meeting. You can process it as a therapy session. If you were a psychiatrist, et cetera. And then it will make notes for you. They are all extremely privacy based. They're giving massive disclaimers about, hey, please don't use this to covertly record people. But that's what people are going to do with these. You're being recorded right now on every call you do.

• 58:35Jason Calacanis?

  All of these have a functionality, Alex, on the products where you can, if you hold the phone, it will use the vibrations and the device attached to your phone in phone call mode to record the phone physically without you having to add something to the zoom. So you can just take a regular phone call and we'll do it. Now, this is illegal in some states, so they come with tons of disclaimers. And there is a rumor that the John E. I. of OpenAI product is not a puck or a pendant. It's a pen. And I had a pen called LiveScribe. And that pen, when you wrote into a book, would take whatever you wrote in the book and make a visualization of it and then use OCR.

• 59:20Jason Calacanis?

  And I was addicted to this. I gave it to everybody 10 years ago in the company as like a Christmas present. It's kind of neat to think of never forgetting things. And it's also super, super creepy.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was gonna say bummer on the privacy front. I can see people using these, but I just don't want them in my house. Thank you very much.

• 59:39Jason Calacanis?

  Anything else that was particularly interesting before we drop you off?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Two more. One would be the Samsung Galaxy Trifold. And I think that this is interesting because I have a question, which is how many times could you fold a phone? But I do see the use case. It basically becomes a full tablet.

• 59:55Jason Calacanis?

  I have the Pixel Fold 9, I think. And, you know, I used it a lot when I first got it. It was great for watching YouTube videos. My personal belief is it doesn't provide enough value. For me to switch to it, but if Apple makes one, I guess I might buy it. I don't know. Do you have any interest in these, Alex? The double fold, the triple fold?

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  I like to have my, my computers be computers and my phones be phones. I like to have my iPhone do iPhone things, but I will say my father-in-law has a folding Samsung that he carries everywhere and he never, ever unfolds it.

• 1:00:30Jason Calacanis?

  He never unfolds it. Ah, interesting. I was unfolding it like playing chess or watching YouTube videos. And I think the software hasn't caught up. What really needs to happen is you need to be doing your Gmail on one side. And on the left side, have it summarizing it or doing AI. I don't think the application layer has been finished on this. So if you were playing a video game on these, like, let's say you're playing chess. And on one of the folds, it's giving you coaching. On the other folds, it's giving you the history of the match. And then the main fold, it's showing the chessboard. That could be interesting, but nobody's built interesting apps yet. And that's the missing piece for these. Well done, producer Oliver, for your first hit here.

• 1:01:14Jason Calacanis?

  Not bad. Not bad.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Thanks. See you guys next time. Thank you, Oliver. On the using your phone to do stuff and have like, you know, help on one side and the actual thing on the other, my first thought was, oh, we could have our, you know, our pre-flop charts next to our poker game.

• 1:01:25Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect example. When you're playing poker, if you were doing a training app, you're playing and it's, people do play with a heads-up display on their desktops. In Notion, you've got your like sidebar and your main, uh, you know, document window. In Microsoft Word, you'll have something similar. So this idea of like, uh, the AI assistant co-pilot on a third of the screen and two-thirds being something, it hasn't been finished. And what really needs to happen is somebody like Google has to take Gmail, which they just released some AI, uh, features for today, I saw, trying to catch up with Superhuman. They, they really need to figure out what each window is for. And then you could become addicted and then say, oh, you know,

• 1:02:09Jason Calacanis?

  I prefer playing chess in this modality. I prefer doing Gmail in this one because I'm faster, better. It's a greater, it's a more entertaining experience. So. This really is when you, this happens all the time. Somebody comes up with this incredible hardware, but you need the application, the killer app and the killer app for foldables. If you know of one, put it in the comments here. And what you can do as a startup is you could go to the people making these and say, can I get 250K to make something the next time you demo it? So you can get developer funding for, and I've seen it over and over again for these. Oliver says he saw somebody playing Flappy Birds and it goes up when you fold the phone. Interesting. That's bizarre. Yeah. You're going to break your phone pretty quick if you're flapping it open and close.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  It's a terrible idea.

• 1:02:55Jason Calacanis?

  Terrible idea. Yeah.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  I will say though, I just think that we're going to be building our own stuff. I've become fully.

• 1:03:00Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, the phone did break. He said the phone broke.

• 1:03:04Speaker 00

  Well, it's CES, you know, I know I've become really a big fan of Claude Code this week. I've been building my own stuff and it's like, whenever we talk about now waiting for permission to do something because someone else needs to build the software, I just immediately now think, can I build it myself? Like I built myself a financial news dashboard and then I made my own GTO trainer app for both six max and eight max and also pre and post flop. It took me like 20 minutes.

• 1:03:31Jason Calacanis?

  It's getting there. It's getting there. I mean, production ready versus vibe coding. Obviously, you know, pushing stuff to production, you're going to need a developer to lock it down. But if you're just doing it on your computer, I think in a lot of cases, we might be sitting here a year from now and you can just make an app instead of paying for it, you just make it, right? You're like, I don't want to pay for this app. I'll just make my own CRM and you just tell it, make me something like Salesforce for my three person company. And I don't care if the data leaks or something inside my company. It's not a big deal. And there is a theory that soon we will have a phone that you open.

• 1:04:12Jason Calacanis?

  And there's no apps. You just open it and start talking to the LLM and then you say, I need a word processor and it pops up a word processor and then it pops it down. And you don't need to open specific apps. It's a very interesting future.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  That's an interesting way to frame that because what you just said is we are going to have a personal AI that we take with us and it will have a phone-based distribution point. But at that point, the phone is just a piece of hardware that's bringing you the software. So it's not really a phone per se. It's more like a small screen into.

• 1:04:47Jason Calacanis?

  It's almost like when they would, there are people who sell the, for a car, the basic chassis, right? And you just have the chassis. You can build whatever you want on top of it. You could build it into a van for an executive. You can build it into a van for, you know, camping. You could build it into a food truck, right? I think that's how people might start to look at these slabs of compute. And maybe you don't even need to have too much local compute. Maybe it goes to the cloud. Maybe it goes to a satellite. I think if SpaceX does a phone or Tesla and SpaceX, Chamath had a really interesting prediction that Tesla and SpaceX would become one company.

• 1:05:32Jason Calacanis?

  And then you could think, okay, the Teslas have satellite dishes in them and they're creating their own network of internet access across the globe. And you have satellite access and there's a SpaceX or Tesla phone that comes with your car or with your satellite hookup and, you know, it just connects to XAI and you put XAI into it. And now you have those three companies building products and services together.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  Sounds more like Starlink plus Tesla instead of SpaceX plus Tesla.

• 1:06:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean. Pick your poison and then XAI building the backend for all of these things. So now when I get in my Tesla, it's got Grok. So you can tell it like, hey, I want to go pick up bagels. And then I want to pick up some donuts from the best bagel place and donut place along the route to my office and you tell FSD to do that.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  How is the integration? How smooth is that? Because that to me sounds awesome, but I've also been in a lot of cars with Kluge interfaces. I'm curious, is it good?

• 1:06:29Jason Calacanis?

  You know, you can see some people doing demos online and I'd say it's two thirds of the way to perfection, which is a way of saying it'll be perfect in 18 months. Like, I think it's like, it's right at the halfway mark to perfection. You know, you could even, you'll probably be able to walk in and I think Waymo is doing this as well. You'll be able to walk in and say, hey, play me some deep focus music without lyrics on my way to work and I need to stop for a cup of coffee. I want a pour over and I really want a great coffee. I don't mind taking 15 minutes out of my route to get a cup of coffee. And just get me to my first meeting 10 minutes before time and park the car, drop me off outside and find me some decent parking. I'm going to be in the meeting for 45 minutes.

• 1:07:14Jason Calacanis?

  So you could even circle and then pick me up in 45 minutes. And it's going to do all that. So you're going to be able to give your car a series of instructions from everything of the comfort to the pickup, to the drop off and to the parking. Really interesting future.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  I just had a great idea. So remember we were talking about Zipline earlier and it drops the droid down from the main drone? And then you kind of pick up yourself from the ground? Okay, flip that around and add self-driving cars. You want coffee. You want to go to get a specific coffee. Why can't you just drive over something, right? And the coffee shop is in the ground and then it opens up a little slot and then puts the coffee up through the bottom of your car. And then you could literally not even get out or stop, really. You could just like pull through like a little lane.

• 1:07:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's interesting you bring that up. You know, the company Auto Lane, which we incubated is doing like the navigation, essentially air traffic control for the parking lot at your Target or at your McDonald's, et cetera. And I saw people are now saying FSD.

• 1:08:15Jason Calacanis?

  Tesla's FSD specifically understands, oh yeah, and there's Autolane. They basically do the orchestration level for when you go to, you know, when you send your car to pick up packages for you. Like, the person has to put it in the right car. They want to put your package in my car. So, somebody has to be responsible for that coordination. The coordinator, the air traffic controller, and that's what Autolane is doing. All right, another amazing episode. Have a great weekend. I'm off to Japan tomorrow. We're going to do four episodes from Japan. Incredible investors and technologists we'll be interviewing at Founder University, Founder University, if you want to apply to the next one in one of three cities now, Tokyo, Saudi, or in the US of A.

• 1:08:58Jason Calacanis?

  And good luck with the baby next week. Alex, we'll see you in a couple of weeks after you get back from paternity. Good luck. Yes, sir. All right, I'll see you all then. Fly safe. Bye-bye.