Zoox Crash Fallout, COATUE's $1B Open Fund, and Office Hours with FusionAds | E2122

Today's show: Jason, Lon & Alex discuss the day's hottest tech and startup news. Zoox's robotaxi crash and voluntary recall, COATUE's innovative open-ended venture fund that could democratize private tech investing, the NSO Group's massive $167M fine for spyware abuse, Uber's record-setting earnings and in-person work push, and a candid AI wake-up call from Fiverr's CEO urging employees to embrace automation or fall behind. From regulatory shakeups to funding innovation and the rise of AI productivity, this episode captures the chaos and opportunity of tech in 2025. Timestamps: (1:09) Show Intro (2:43) Will Coatue's new low buy-in fund replace or supplement traditional VC investments? (9:55) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at www.openphone.com/⁠twist (13:38) Zoox issues recall: why this might be the best case scenario for self-driving cars. (20:18) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (22:39) Meta wins settlement against NSO: do spyware companies even need to exist? (25:45) Uber bests expectations in Q1! Why their future is looking bright. (29:48) Notion - Try it for free today at https://notion.com/twist (33:10) How scared should we be of AI replacing us? Fiverr's CEO says VERY. (40:57) In Office Hours, Evan from FusionAds wants to know: how to make clients feel more confident in with AI-generated marketing? (50:03) The Founder Friday Tournament's Final Four is now... a FINAL FIVE?! Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Links from episode: Do Things That Don't Scale: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html FusionAds: https://www.fusionos.ai/ai-generative-advertising Follow Evan:X: https://x.com/EG_Fusion LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evangraj/ 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: (9:55) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at www.openphone.co (20:18) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (29:48) Notion - Try it for free today at https://notion.com/twist Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  As the president of the internet, I'm going to, or as president in, when's the next election? 2028? As your, as JCal 2028, I'm signing an executive order that all self-driving cars have to publicly release the video within 24 hours of an accident. If there is a person getting hit, obviously blur it out if it's too graphic, but people should be able to see it with the Freedom of Information Act, or after seeing it, actually, after seeing a disclaimer, maybe blurring out the person's face. It's, you know, like if, even if I got hit by a car, I would want people to see it to know the truth. I'm trying to think about a privacy issue, but you might want to blur out my face and not see me.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone. Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com/twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Notion. Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects into one beautifully designed space with AI-built write-in. Try it for free today at notion.com/twist.

• 1:09Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis, with my co-hosts here, Lon Harris and Alex. Not Albrecht, that's Ignatian. Alex Wilhelm. Different Alex. Different Alex, but I always think about Alex Wilhelm, Alex Albrecht. Got a lot of stuff in the news. I want to get right to it.

• 1:28Jason Calacanis?

  And the number one story, God, there's so many number one stories.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  I know. Prepping today is crazy.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  Zouk got in an accident. That's an important issue for me. Number two, COTU is going to do a new venture fund. That's an open-ended fund where you put in as little as 50K. Very interesting, could have an impact. Fiverr's CEO gave an AI warning, basically told everybody in the company, you know, hey, things are changing, you gotta bring your A-game. And Uber had their earnings, they crushed it again, almost to an all-time high, woo-hoo. And they're making everybody go back to work. Did we cover that story already?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  The Uber earnings? No, the Uber RTO, we haven't talked about either.

• 2:14Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so Uber RTO, I think is super important. The NSO Group, the people who make that hacking software, Pegasus or whatever that is, they got fined for hacking, I guess, Apple, Apple and Google Search. There's something going on there where they're going to lose the search deal. These are the things I'm seeing. Alex, which of these stories that I mentioned is the most important story? I'm just curious your editorial judgment. Which one do you think is the most important? And let's do it.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  The most important one is the Co2 story. I think we have to start with, start with the money.

• 2:44Jason Calacanis?

  All I know about is Wall Street Journal story that Michael Dell's family office and Jeff Bezos are anchoring this $1 billion fund. That there's a minimum, it's a very low minimum. So accredited investors, I believe, is where you have to be 50,000. But I know when I raise a fund, there's a cap and the cap on an investment fund for venture is 99 investors or up to 10 million. So when I did my last fund for accredited investors, people who make like 150, 200 K a year, I can have like 10 million worth of those, but I had demand for 120 million of those. But that's just the rules. Venture capital firms can't do this, but this is doing a different fund structure, which I think is the main piece we have to get into.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Just going over the fund itself, this is an interesting vehicle, Jason. It's going to target both public and private high growth technology companies. So the reason why I think this is so interesting for our audience is that it could maybe democratize venture capital and allow a greater pool of people to put capital into a fund that will back private market companies. And I went ahead and polled Co2's known 2025 investments per Crunchbase. And they've taken part in fundings for Harvey, Together AI, Mercury, the bank, Island, the secure browser, Superbase, Ender Labs, Clara, Persona, lots of Twister companies. So you can see they're getting deal flow, right? So now Lon might be able to, with 150 K check, get access to a lot of really interesting private market shares. So your question, how is this possible?

• 4:12Speaker 02

  I spent more time today in SEC filings than I want to admit. I have to say, I think you owe me lunch because, oh my Lord. But as far as I can tell, with my research and really abusing ChatGPT 4.0, the gist is this is not like a traditional venture capital fund. It's called a registered closed end interval fund. That's kind of the moniker attached to it.

• 4:34Jason Calacanis?

  Registered closed end. Interval fund.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So we have to unpack that and explain it and playing English to our audience. I understand that part of this is it's like an IPO. And you have to do higher reporting and people can redeem their money on some regular basis. I think that's the difference.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  You're dead on redemptions.

• 4:57Jason Calacanis?

  Am I?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  And this will be quarterly up to 5% of the fund's value, no more than that. So I guess if someone else cashes out before you and it hits the 5%, that's it for you. Also, if you take your money out in the first year, you pay a 2% premium, oh, sorry, 2% penalty on that. Now, the continuously offered fund, I believe it means that it's going to last for as long as it wants to. There's no set end date to it, Jason. And this is a fund that has been registered under the SEC form N2. Now, it's different than in VCs, and I have a chart I'll pull up in a second showing the discrepancies between this and a trad venture fund. But the reason why I think they chose this format is because it doesn't have a investor cap.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  So the caps we know about SPVs or traditional venture funds simply don't apply here. And that's kind of where it gets a little murky. And I actually want to call an accountant to bring them on the show to break down the deepest nuances here.

• 5:53Jason Calacanis?

  I think you've got the broad strokes. If you're doing an SPV or a venture fund, you can have 99 investors, say, in this SPV, special purpose vehicle, or your venture fund. And it's uncapped, so 99 people put a million dollars in each or 50K. If you want to have more than that, they can do a lower amount, but then they cap it at 10 million. So I did that because I wanted people to be able to put in 25, 50, or 100K into our last fund, like friends of mine, et cetera. This is all in the weeds, but more people will have access and then registered financial advisors. People want to get into alternates. So this is opening up a whole nother group of people to invest in venture capital. Overall, I think it's a great thing.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  I think it's an absolutely great thing, and I know that it's going to be enticing to people because as I was reading this, I was like, oh, should we do this? Thinking about my family and I was like, oh, wait. And cock, cock. That would be the biggest conflict of interest known to man as someone who's still a journalist.

• 6:45Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  You don't think?

• 6:46Jason Calacanis?

  You know why? Because you wouldn't even know what's in the fund. It would be like buying an index fund. So you would just be putting 50K in and you wouldn't know what you have. And, you know, I'm sure they would send reporting that would, but you could just say, listen, I don't make the investment decisions here. So if I, if they bought, I don't know, Solana, or they bought Stripe, you wouldn't even know.

• 7:06Speaker 03

  If the president can make his own meme coins, you, Alex, should be able to invest in this fund.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  All right, Lon, I, I love you and I appreciate you throwing me a bone there, but I do aspire to a slightly higher moral and ethical bar than the current president who's doing meme coin meetups.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  There's your problem. Problem. There's your problem right there, Alex. I'm gonna go ahead and give you permission to understand what I learned about 10 years ago. No conflict, no interest. I'm an Uber shareholder and I have opinions on Uber.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  I want to make one more note, though, in the weeds about why doesn't everybody do what Co2 is doing here with this fund? Because it sounds kind of like too good to be true. No cap on investors. The difference is there's a lot more SEC overhead, Jason. You have to do audited financials and reporting and such. And there's a cool thing called the venture capital exemption that allows VCs to raise funds without actually registering as rigorously with the SEC. So this does not have the paperwork advantages. It takes on lots more work, but with some other advantages.

• 8:01Jason Calacanis?

  Now, there were also fees for this.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:05Jason Calacanis?

  And the carry is different. So take us through the, you know, typical carry. You get 20% carry. So whatever the gain, if the, if the fund made a billion dollars, the partners would get 200 million. Let's say it returned 2 billion. 1 billion is the original amount. 2 billion is what gets returned. You would get 20% of the gain. So 20% of a billion is 200 million. Plus, you would get 2% a year, perhaps 1.5% each year for 10 years, 12 years, whatever that is. So if it's a billion dollar fund, you get 15, 20 million dollars a year to run the team that, you know, and those, and those come out of the gains of that 200 million in carry. So you have to recoup those, but you, you get them in advance. Those are called management. Okay. So what are the, what's the story here with Co2?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Okay, so two main things to know. First of all, the fee is lower than 2%. It's 1.25% annually.

• 8:53Jason Calacanis?

  Significantly lower.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Significantly lower, and they will only take 12.5% of the fund's annual profits, provided, there's a hurdle here, Jason, that they clear 5% profit. So essentially, if they make less than 5% profit, they're not going to take it. So to me, this is very investor friendly. There's a little bit of a catch, though. When I was going through all the paperwork, there are some, essentially, buying fees. If you buy smaller amounts, you might pay, I think it's 2.5% or 3.5% upfront.

• 9:18Jason Calacanis?

  The load-in fee?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  A load, yes, it's the load. If you buy, I think, more than 250K or 500K, that's obviated, but there's actually three classes of shares inside of this, targeted at different investor groups, blah, blah, blah. But the point is, I think the economics here are actually pretty attractive. I thought they were going to be brutal, because here's exposure you couldn't get otherwise.

• 9:36Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is because LPs are having a bit of burnout, and they're seeing that maybe venture as a category because of the wrath of Lina Khan for four years, and the Trump tariff turmoil, these two things combined, you know, balls and strikes here, I'm not making a political statement, I'm just stating facts.

• 9:56Jason Calacanis?

  If you're running a business, every time you miss a call, you lose money, you lose a customer. If I need a plumber, I'm not waiting for somebody to get back to me. I'm calling a number on a list, and I want it to be picked up within one ring, two max. If you use OpenPhone, you're never going to miss this opportunity to connect with your customers. It's an app that you download on your phone, and now you get a custom phone number for your business. It can ring on multiple people's phones. If you have four sales reps, boom, it will just round robin and pick the one who answers first. Any teammate can pick up right where the last person left off. That means faster response times, you're going to treat your customers better. And their AI agent can be set up in minutes to handle calls after hours, so your AI is getting new leads while you're sleeping.

• 10:41Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't matter if you're a one-person team drowning in calls and texts, or if you've got a 10-person or 100-person team that needs to collaborate. OpenPhone is a no-brainer. OpenPhone is offering TwistListers 20% off your first six months at openphone.com/twist. That's O-P-E-N-P-H- O N E dot com slash twist. And if you have existing numbers with another service open phone, we'll port them over at no extra charge. Open phone, no missed calls, no missed customers. So here we are, year five of no exits or very few exits. What this does is they're going to be able to, I suspect, they're not going to go into our business, angel investing, or seed, or, you know,

• 11:20Jason Calacanis?

  series A or series B. This is going to be a way for them to buy SpaceX shares, Androl shares, Stripe shares, you know, work your way backwards for the top 50 members of the TWIST 500, and then let it be like, you know, almost publicly traded stock. It's not public, but so it's a good idea. And it's a way for people to get exits as well. So the venture community might be selling to COTU's fund. And so this would create like a little bridge between public markets and private markets.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  So this is a way to provide secondary liquidity to existing venture funds. Okay.

• 11:57Jason Calacanis?

  So let's say they say, oh, I really like grin. I like palm. I like data stacks. I like your shares in these companies. Well, your stocks just got bought by IBM, I think. But anyway, they're like these companies we have. We want to buy some of your shares. We would have another person to sell to, which would be quite nice.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Chamath had a really interesting tweet about this, Jason. He kind of compared this fund to his existing venture capital LP commits, saying that he's kind of done with the traditional setup, doesn't like having meager DPI, even from really top tier funds. Do you think we could see a shift of some folks that may have put capital into a trad venture capital fund, instead going, why bother what I can get redemptions from this fund and just going all in on the COTU offering?

• 12:44Jason Calacanis?

  There's so much money in the world and there's so many new investors in the world that I think the trend will still be more people investing in venture, venture, investing in more startups and investing larger amounts of money. Why? Sovereign wealth funds are participating in a major way, and now retail investors in a major way. And then globally, high net worth individuals globally getting involved in venture in the United States. That means. The industry is going to continue to grow. The returns might be getting a little more muted. This is going to be topsy-turvy for a little while in venture until Trump stops the tariff stuff, settles it by June, uh, which I think he will. And then we will be moving on to, uh, more M and A.

• 13:27Jason Calacanis?

  So, yeah, it's, uh, it's going to be crazy, but it's nice to see a little innovation here. Sure. Let's go on to Zoo. Well, Lon, what do you think is the next most important story?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Uh, I, I mean,

• 13:38Jason Calacanis?

  No pressure.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  I, I was going to say, yeah, either Fiverr or Zooks. I think Zoo, the Zooks,

• 13:43Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go Zooks.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Zooks accident, uh, was a, was an important thing.

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  See it out first, Lon.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  So, uh, Zooks, of course, Amazon's, uh, self-driving startup. They issued a voluntary recall this week after an incident involving an unoccupied Zooks robotaxi hitting a passenger vehicle in Las Vegas. Minor injuries to the cars. No one was hurt, but this was enough for them to recognize that they had this safety issue. They issued a, uh, safety recall report with the, uh, National Highway Transit Safety Administration. And I believe it was a few hundred Zooks, uh, cars were taken off the road and, uh, have this software update implemented that is going across all their vehicles. And, yeah, I mean, I think the thing to point out here is this is sort of the system working as intended. No, no one was hurt.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  There was this minor traffic accident that alerted them to a problem. They've now fixed the problem and the cars are safer than ever. I mean, this is sort of best case scenario in some ways for how the system would, would sort of function.

• 14:42Jason Calacanis?

  This was a car that got cut off. The details of the accidents were, quote, "The incident involved a passenger car quickly approaching the lane where our purpose-built robotaxi was traveling." This is apparently from Zooks. "Anticipating that the passenger car would proceed forward." I guess in cutting off the Zooks, it sounds like. The Zooks robotaxi slowed down and steered to the right, I guess, going into the shoulder. Instead, the car came to a stop, slammed on the brakes, fully yielding. To the Zooks Robo Taxi remaining in the shoulder lane, the Zooks Robo Taxi has braked hard but contact was unavoidable. So it sounds like maybe the car, it's hard from this description to understand what happened.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  I think I understand the, I've read it over. So the Zooks was traveling, a car approached from the right that looked like it was about to come into its lane. So the Zooks paused, but then that car also paused, causing the accident rather than proceeding into the lane. So it was a situation where the Robo Taxi only failed because it failed to inaccurately guess how the human was going to drive. So you could sort of almost consider this, it was a human caused error, even though the Robo Taxi is the one who was involved.

• 15:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so then we need to, Alex, answer two questions for each of these. Who caused the accident? Who was primarily responsible? Like, so share of responsibility. In this case, 100% the human. And then, the reaction. How good was the reaction? Was the reaction human level? Better than human or less than human? So here we have, caused by human, reaction, undetermined.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  I actually really like Jason's framing here. Who was responsible and how good could humans do? I think that's a good test. The thing is just, it just feels a little bit dated to me. And I don't mean to be contrary, but to me, having watched humans drive my entire life as a pedestrian and as a driver, I just, I wonder if we need to ask the question, could humans do better? Because I bet you $10 that the answer is no. Not on average.

• 16:45Jason Calacanis?

  We, we need to really be on top of this. And I think our job here on the program is to call the balls and strikes and really do our diligence to understand each one. You know, if we look at the Cruz accident, the fact that they tried to cover it up means they should have been penalized. In this case, Zooks probably should get a high five for, you know, this might be a case where we can put it in the bucket of. You know, not bad actor, but good actor and not neutral. So I'm putting this one in the, you know, it's preliminary, but I'm putting it in the, in the good bucket.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, like I said, I think this is what we want. We, we want accidents that no one gets hurt, but that alert us to a possible flaw in the system that we can then reprogram and reconsider like this is exactly what you'd want to happen.

• 17:31Jason Calacanis?

  I also want, as the president of the internet, I'm going to, or as president in, when's the next election? 2028, as your, as JCal 2028, I'm signing an executive order that all self-driving cars have to publicly release the video within 24 hours of an accident. If there is a person getting hit, obviously blur it out if it's too graphic, but people should be able to see it with the Freedom of Information Act. Or after seeing it, actually after seeing a disclaimer, maybe blurring out the person's face. It's, you know, like if, even if I got hit by a car, I would want people to see it to know the truth. I'm trying to think about a privacy issue, but you might want to blur out my face and not say my.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Anonymously, but I think.

• 18:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's an executive order, somebody, you know, that's, that's my fourth executive order as president.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  All right. To back up my, my idea though, I, I went through Zooks's safety site and they didn't have as much information as I was expecting. Cause I'm so spoiled by Waymo, they talk a lot about their safety plan, their features, but they don't have as much data. And so they don't graph it as well. Here is information from Waymo's safety site as of this morning, showing the difference in crash rates between Waymo's and human drivers in three markets across three different metrics. If you're listening to the audio, it tracks airbag deployment, any injury reported in a collision, or if there was a police report. And across those three metrics, for example, in Phoenix and San Francisco, Waymo's have essentially 83% fewer airbag deployments with some airbar in there than human drivers.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  And so to me, the data is pretty stark that even today, these cars are doing better than the average Joe. That doesn't mean they don't need to do better. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have high aspirations, but the comparison between could a human do better or a. Maybe I'm being too futuristic here, but I feel like we've already answered that question.

• 19:21Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I think it needs to be five times better. This is showing twice as good. I think for the mass population to want these to be deployed widely, I think it needs to be 5X, at least three. But that's just my personal belief, you know, based on being a technologist for 30 years.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I also think, yeah, like, there are some obvious advantages that should allow us to make them that much better. Like, once we get the programming right, once we get the technology working right, it's going to be 100%. Like, a human, you could be distracted, you're on your phone, you just got coffee, like, a million things can happen. Not as much. Once we perfect the computer system, it's perfected.

• 20:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Great job. Zoox are riding without human drivers. So, the only two people without human drivers currently are Waymo and Zoox, I believe, in the United States. Cruise was doing them without humans, they're no longer doing it. So I think that's the only thing going on right now. All right, founders, let's talk about your website, huh? It might be a little bit of a sensitive subject, you might be a little embarrassed about it. Let's fix that right now. If you're launching something new, give your brand the refresh it deserves. You're working so hard on your company and your website looks terrible. Do what I do, use Squarespace. It's the all-in-one platform to make a stunning professional website. And

• 20:42Jason Calacanis?

  it's ridiculously easy to use. It's gonna work for everything. If you're selling products, it's got all that e-commerce built in. If you're selling services, it works perfectly. And they have a new AI product called Blueprint. Want more control? Well, of course, you can choose one of the award-winning templates and use the intuitive drag-and-drop tools to make it your own. Easy peasy. Squarespace equals the most functional and beautiful website on planet Earth. Go ahead, squarespace.com/twist to get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com/twist. I believe we need federal regulations that say for year one, and if first million

• 21:25Jason Calacanis?

  miles, first 10,000 trips, you know, pretty high benchmark, but not unreasonable, there's a safety driver. Just because the cost of an accident, if this accident had resulted in one of the cars then jumping the sidewalk and killing grandma...

• 21:40Jason Calacanis?

  Zooks is done for maybe forever and self-driving in that particular city is over for years. All it takes is one of these to hop the curb, even if it's not their fault. And, you know, somebody's puppy or somebody's grandma or God forbid, a, you know, a baby stroller, the, the ultimate, you know, like bad PR, you know, baby stroller gets hit by zooks, game over, no more zooks.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  But I do hope that our collective, you know, worrying doesn't slow down the progress here because to me, and I, I sound a little bit like Mark Andreessen in his, um, let's go faster essay. But it does feel to me that if we slow down a technology that's going to save so many lives of human drivers on the road or human passengers on the road.

• 22:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. To me, it's just like, come on now. And I'll say, oh.

• 22:27Jason Calacanis?

  Let's keep moving. Yep.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  All right, moving on.

• 22:29Jason Calacanis?

  What is the next most important story, Alex?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  I think it's the NSO Group story.

• 22:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  I think it's incredibly important. Okay. So back in 2019, Meta uncovered a exploit on WhatsApp. It's very popular, multi-billion user, social networking and messaging service. This eventually led to about 1,400 people in India being impacted by NSO Group's Pegasus spyware. NSO Group, if you don't know, makes hacking tools that allows governments and other groups to break into phones that are even locked down, very secure like iOS. And Meta was pretty mad about this. It ended up in a suit and NSO Group lost that suit last year. The news this week, Jason, is that a jury has come back and awarded damages. It's about a half billion dollars in quote, compensatory damages to Meta.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  And then also another 167 million dollars worth of punitive damages. In this case, that just means here's a fine. So you don't do this again. NSO Group is making some noise and it may not be able to pay this fee. But I really just think that this is a good reminder that ruining people's cybersecurity, activists, journalists, lawyers in democracies is a bad act and you should not do that. And I, I'm very heartened by this. I wish there was a zero on the, on the final number there, Jason, but I view this as a very positive step towards individual digital privacy. Your thoughts?

• 23:51Jason Calacanis?

  The fact that NSO failed to provide the evidence, like the source code of Pegasus spyware tells you everything. There are security companies that do black hat stuff, like what you crack into encryption, crack into people's phones, do all kinds of stuff. They generally are not here in the United States. They're usually in places like Israel or other countries.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:11Jason Calacanis?

  And we should, if you are the platform, whether it's Apple or it's Meta, you should fight these. And because you want to fight for your users and what's right. It's terrible that people can use these encrypted services to do bad things in the world, but we can't have everybody give up their basic human right to privacy. And so you gotta take the good with the bad. You shouldn't be able to backdoor these things. All humans deserve privacy. The end.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  It feels like in technology, sometimes there's this idea that once something exists, it becomes inevitable. Like, that's it. We have to just give up on trying to regulate it. It's out there in the world. It's going to exist. And I feel like it's nice every once in a while to have a reminder that just because something is possible does not mean we should not regulate it and just let it happen. Like, you still do need to have some rules for the world to make sense.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Could I read part of the Meta statement here? Because this is just the wording here is so funny. They call NSO a, quote, notorious foreign spyware merchant to pay damages because in, just the language here is nuts. Malicious industry against their illegal acts. I mean, Meta seems really, really, really mad. I want to make one more tiny point before we move on. The NSO group always stands up whenever it gets in trouble and is like, you know, we catch terrorists. But whenever these stories break, it's never terrorists that we're being spied on. It's always like little journalists, activists, NGOs, Jeff Bezos's paper. So I just think that maybe we don't need this technology to exist. Maybe we just don't want it. Maybe just a big old no. That would be lovely to see.

• 25:42Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's talk about the Uber story.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  All right, Uber, Q1, Jason, revenue 11.53 billion, 83 cents per share in earnings, monthly active customers, 14% growth year over year, trips 18%, 14% revenue growth year over year, 17% in constant currency, and the company had 1.8 billion in net income, 1.9 billion in adjusted EBITDA, and this blew my mind, free cash flow in the quarter of 2.25 billion, up 66% year over year. So naturally, Wall Street hated it and sent the shares down a couple of points.

• 26:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's down two bucks. The thing is, it had a crazy run-up the last week, which I was out of town and, you know, I don't check it every day, but I was like, wait a second, like a month ago, we were down in the 65 zone, and then all of a sudden, we almost hit the record high, you know, 87 is the record high for Uber, and it hit like, I think in intraday trading, 86.50 or something yesterday.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  It was over 86, yeah.

• 26:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so it's basically, I think, the consensus is that this company has geographic distribution, and obviously, I'm talking my book here, but they have geographic distribution. They have business resiliency because they're in multiple business lines, freight, rides, food and delivery. Other issue is robotaxis, would they get killed by robotaxis? And I think people answered that question with, Waymo is having a spectacular time in Austin with Uber. The utilization of Ubers in Austin is 99% more utilization than human drivers. In other words, if a human driver, like, if these Waymos are doing probably 15 rides a day is my guess,

• 27:23Jason Calacanis?

  maybe they could hit 20, there aren't many drivers, 99 out of 100 drivers don't do that. What that means is, wait times are going to go down, the availability is going to go up. If you live outside of Austin, you might wait 10 minutes to 20 minutes for an Uber. Everybody's had that experience when they're on vacation or they're out of a city center. You're going to have the city center experience of what we called Uber Uno's back in the day. I came up with this term for when you get one in one minute and I would always send a picture to Travis and William and Ryan like, oh, I got an Uber Uno. They also did the Volkswagen deal. They're now up to like 15 partnerships with autonomy companies. The Volkswagen deal is going to be the game changer, I predict. Volkswagen is the number two car producer in the world.

• 28:07Jason Calacanis?

  We're going to need 10 to 20 million cars per year for a decade to put a dent into the number of rides people want to take. The Volkswagen bus, I think, will be the number one. What they call it, the ID bus. They should just call it the Volkswagen bus because that's what it is. This is a cool car.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  It's big.

• 28:25Jason Calacanis?

  It's awesome. It's got like seven seats.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Have you seen it?

• 28:29Jason Calacanis?

  It has sliding doors. I've seen it. I haven't seen it in person yet, but I have seen it all over. You're talking about like two captain's chairs, two captain's chairs, and then a three person bench. The captain's chairs can move around, but you can easily get to the third bench because the second row is two captain's chairs, like you can get on a Model X. That configuration is seven people, so there it is. And it's a beautiful car. These things are going to be everywhere and robotaxis will be everywhere. Waymos will be everywhere and Waymo just did a deal with Toyota to provide their self-driving cars.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's another part of this story is all of the self-driving partnerships. I mean, you mentioned Volkswagen. Just this year, Uber has also announced deals with Pony AI, We Ride, Momenta, May Mobility, Waymo and Nvidia. So like, that's all happening simultaneously.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, their partnerships team is working overtime. Send them more coffee, somebody. But Jason, to your point about the number of cars that we need, I know we're talking about drops in the bucket here, but stories in the last, I think, two or three days had Zooks ramping up production of its cars and also Waymo working to expand its fleet of 1,500 Jaguar i-Paces or whatever they're called. But we're seeing momentum right now to get from triple to, you know, four digits. And then I think we'll be at five digits probably by the end of this year.

• 29:49Jason Calacanis?

  If you're a startup, you need to sign up for Notion right now. Go to notion.com/twist and sign up for free using my code TWIST. Notion.com/twist. Here at my venture firm Launch and my podcast, All In This Week in Startups, we put everything into Notion. It also has an amazing database function and it does CRM for us. It does OKRs for us. It does timelines. It's basically our single source for all of our information and data. Everything in one space, one price, simple, powerful, beautifully designed. The design at Notion is award winning and Notion can seamlessly transition from a workplace power tool into a game changer for your personal life. I've got a couple of different properties. I've got a ski house. I've got a ranch. I've got another apartment. All of that is contained

• 30:34Jason Calacanis?

  in a Notion instance for my family offices. You can get started for free at notion.com/twist. That's notion.com/twist to start free. Take the first step towards making your life organized and productive. The number one communication tool in the world in my estimation is Notion. Notion.com/twist. We say five, you mean 10,000 or more cars.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:56Jason Calacanis?

  Which if they're doing 20 rides a day is not a drop in the bucket. Currently, ride sharing is 1% of rides here in the United States or slightly less. And then globally, it's less than 1%. So I believe we get to 30% of rides. 20 to 30% of rides in 10 years is my estimate, but good for the Uber team. Other piece that I thought was particularly good was Uber now is saying back to the office, but three days a week and previous employees who were remote, yeah, no more remote. You still have to come to the office. 3%. It got a little testy, I guess, on a all hands meeting. People are still doing these all hand meetings where people could just ask any question they want. I think that was like, I think we're going to see those go away in Silicon Valley.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  They don't seem to be very popular like they used to be.

• 31:44Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, when everything's going up and to the right and you have a small company and everybody's got a ton of stock, I think it's one thing to have these. When you start getting into hundreds of thousands or 50,000 employees and some number of them are not going to become billionaires or millionaires based on their equity. Yeah, you might get a little brush back on an issue like this, but here's my advice.

• 32:07Jason Calacanis?

  Go find another remote job. Okay, there's other jobs in the world.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think part of it too, if you're gonna have an all hands meeting to adjust a controversial decision against all of your employees, you might want to have a better line than if you're here for a sabbatical and this change causes you to change your mind, it is what it is.

• 32:24Jason Calacanis?

  There's two different issues. One is, he did say, in person, we get more results, we have good results now, we need to get to great. So that was what he said about the in-work thing. The sabbatical thing, you know, he said like, you can take a month off in eight years if that's what you are here for is the sabbatical, like whatever. I don't even understand why companies have a sabbatical. I never got offered a sabbatical.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, saying the reason we want you to, the reason we want you to be here is to impact the company. We recognize some of these changes are going to be unpopular with folks. This is a risk we decided to take.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  The pendulum has really swung here from employee power to employer power. This is one manifestation of that. The dare up point Jason about good's not good enough, we have to be great. I think Doug tells neatly with what the CEO of Fiverr was saying. Cause his argument is that we have to be basically using AI all over the place now. Forget hiring more people. You need to be upskilling yourself.

• 33:19Jason Calacanis?

  So he sent an email, just to put more context on it. Fiverr is a, let's always explain what the company does in case people don't know. Fiverr's a marketplace. We theoretically spend five bucks to get something done, like a micro task. I need an image, I need a press release. So throw somebody a Fiverr, you know, five quid or whatever. And they, and they do some work for you. Five pounds, whatever. So he wrote an email to the entire company. I don't know the timestamp of this, but this sounds like one of those 1 a.m. CEO, like manic emails that I send.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:53Jason Calacanis?

  Was there a time on it? I'm gonna guess two in the morning, 1:30.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  There's not a, not a timestamp on it that I, oh yeah, 12:58.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  12:58, but not, we don't know AM or PM.

• 34:02Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's AM, 100%. 100%. Trust me, when you're a CEO, here's what happens. You work all day, you work all week, you're in panic mode. You're like, we need, we have competitors, things are changing, Trump tariff, chaos, recession, whatever it is, AI replacing jobs, marketplace competition, and then you decide to write a missive. All good missives, a missive can only be written after the stroke of midnight. This one will be no different.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  Jerry Maguire style, just like Jerry Maguire.

• 34:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, is that what happened in Jerry Maguire?

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, he stays up all night and he writes his manifesto, yeah.

• 34:35Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, great.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so what did, what did he say? Well, he says that no matter your role, no matter your job, even his job as CEO, AI is coming for it. So what is the solution to that? Personally led learning, he wants you to try, tinker, fail, learn and collaborate with how to use these AI tools. Echoing, I think, very closely what Toby from Shopify said, that the way to get better with AI is to use it a lot. It's a tool. I really liked how he said this, he said, I'm paraphrasing here a little bit. What was easy is now zero, what was hard is now easy, what was impossible is now merely hard. So essentially, everything has become easier, which means people need to take on more.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  And then he concludes the letter by saying, essentially, don't come to me for more staff if you're not using AI tools very aggressively. Again, mirroring what Shopify and other leaders have said. I think this is tough from the Fiverr CEO, because a lot of the-

• 35:28Jason Calacanis?

  Love, I'll tell you, if, as a leader and as somebody who works with leaders of companies right now, there is deep panic in the executive suite right now, across all companies. An elevated situation because of the, the economy, the recession, Trump tariffs, all this stuff, combined with AI hitting at the same time. Now, for every opportunity to go faster, hire less people, maybe even trim staffs and costs, you also need to have people be willing to embrace these tools. I'm finding it very hard myself to get people to embrace these tools. I have many people come to me and they have a problem and I'm like,

• 36:08Jason Calacanis?

  they didn't type the question they're saying out loud to me into ChatGPT first or Gemini. It has led to me, in terms of my mentorship with people, getting them to be AI first. It's just like getting people to be online first, internet first, mobile first. As a leader, you have to push people and some people will just not do the paradigm shift in business. And then you have to fire them. You have to fight with them. You've got to push people. It's so hard to be in management.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:40Jason Calacanis?

  That's why you get paid a lot more because you have to worry about these issues.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  I do think it's interesting and it I think something that's sort of a positive in this. We used to talk about AI taking everybody's job. That was the concern. It was like, you're going to lose your job to AI. AI is going to be able to do exactly what you do. And this is part of a lot of different, even the AI warnings now are like, people are going to get better at working with AI and they're going to take your job. Like, it's not about being replaced completely. It's about you having to complement the skills you already have. At least that's how people are talking about it now. Is that what's really going to happen? Who knows? But I do think it's a positive sign that we're discussing AI just completely running everything less and it's more like human plus AI is going to be running everything.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Okay. So how does the rubber meet the road here? So the CEO of Fiverr posted an update. His memo was about a month ago. We're talking about today because he just dropped news about how his company reacted to this. One thing he said, Jason, was that he's going to open his calendar for folks to literally come by and pitch him ideas about how to use AI to make the company better. And as a response to his email and those meetings, he said the following thing. We're already rebuilding how we work and velocity matters more now than ever. Transitioning to a modular architecture, using AI to refactor legacy code, auto generate documentation and power custom workspaces across teams. Everyone must strive to automate their manual work, freeing up time for his thinking, critical decisions and creative problem solving, essentially letting people be more, more human and less robotic. So this back to Lon's point.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  That Satya Nadella, that the Microsoft CEO, I wish I had the clip in front of me, but he, he gave an interview like two months ago where he said exactly this, like, everybody needs to shift their thinking to be how much, it's not AI is going to take my job. It's how much more productive will I be able to be if I complement everything I'm doing with AI tools?

• 38:32Speaker 02

  And potato, potato though, Lon, because if everyone's more efficient and you can do one person, one human plus AI equals five prior humans, doesn't that have the kind of the same impact?

• 38:42Speaker 03

  Sure, it's not a change in what's going to happen. It's a change in how we're talking about working with AI, which does strike me as it's a little bit more humanistic, or it's a little bit more humane.

• 38:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, it is. It's actually a very good insight. People are not saying we're going to replace you in the customer support department, like they were saying earlier, like all these discussions, we're going to get rid of the customer support. It's all going to be done AI. They're saying, you know, please be absolutely engaged with these tools. So we don't have to replace you. Somebody said, you're not going to be replaced by AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody who uses AI. And I think that's the manifestation that's coming here. We are in a position where labor does not have an offer from Uber and Coinbase. Those companies are getting smaller, static team size, as Alex and I have been saying for two years now, almost. You don't need to add people.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  You just need to use the tools and you will get 30% more efficient a year, whether it's coding, sales, et cetera. So here we are. You need to get your button gear. And if you're a young person, get into office. And if you're running your company and you're raising venture capital or you're a venture firm raising your next fund, part of the reason I'm raising, I'm getting everybody back in offices. I want to have an easier time raising my next fund. When I raised the last fund, they asked me, are you in person? Literally, I would say four out of five LPs asked me that. So they believe in in-person culture. And now, what am I doing here? Every Tuesday in Austin, we started in-person Tuesdays with founders. We're inviting our entire portfolio to come every Tuesday, 48 Tuesdays a year, to get mentorship, to come to talks,

• 40:23Jason Calacanis?

  to have lunch and to do jam sessions with us. Why? We want them to win. That's it's as simple as that, folks. You know, if you want to win and you're up against a company, a remote company up against an in-person company, the in-person company wins nine out of 10 times. Okay, let's, I think we have office hours.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do. We do. So today we're having Fusion Ads. I think it's time to forget talking about models and frameworks. Instead, let's talk about how AI is actually meeting the road today. And in this case, we're talking about a marketing context, Jason. So please welcome Evan Garage from Fusion Ads.

• 40:58Jason Calacanis?

  Evan, welcome to the program. Can you show the audience what you're doing? Or does it exist as a product yet? Are you still in the laboratory?

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Oh, no, it exists and we're generating revenue. We can show it, yes.

• 41:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. I think, you know, sometimes a picture or a video or a tour is worth a thousand bucks. So show us what you're working on here because it is really interesting to think about the promise of AI ads. I saw LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman talking about how so much consumer surplus has been created by Google Maps. They said something like $3,000 per person who uses Google Maps and that wouldn't exist

• 41:37Jason Calacanis?

  as a consumer surplus if advertising didn't make it free. So here we go.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  Can you guys see my screen?

• 41:43Jason Calacanis?

  We do.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 41:45Jason Calacanis?

  Great. So remember, most people are listening. So describe what they're seeing.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, perfect. So in short, Fusion Ads is basically a marketing AI agent that increases revenue for small businesses by instantly generating like professional ads that improve return on investment. And so what I'm showing here is you've already registered, you've logged in, and this is the home screen of the back end. And what I think is the easiest thing to describe is that when you come here, you simply ask to put in your URL or-

• 42:20Jason Calacanis?

  Put in Athena Wow.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Well, I have some campaigns that are ready here. So I think it would be several steps if we just put in a URL. But yes, we can do that.

• 42:31Jason Calacanis?

  I like a live demo better. Bummer.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Well, this is a live demo. It's just we set up a campaign.

• 42:36Jason Calacanis?

  No, I know, but seeing the actual creation of an ad for something would be better. But okay.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Well, we can do that next. I mean, here I wanted to quickly, because basically you have to ask, answer a few questions. So what the questions that you need to answer is like, what are you trying to achieve? Do you have an image for the product you're trying to sell? Tell a little bit about who your customers are.

• 42:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so male, female, this age group, and then- You entered here, ensure your home or business runs smoothly. Let's just read that, the prompt you gave it. Ensure your home business runs smoothly with our top tier plumbing services from routine maintenance and leak repairs to complex installations and emergency assistant. Our certified plumbers. So you're giving it like a prompt about the business and what you're trying to achieve.

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, if you put in your URL, we'll scrape everything from your URL and then you basically refine it to be like, yep, this is what I'm trying to tell.

• 43:30Jason Calacanis?

  So it might have pulled that copy from the plumber's webpage.

• 43:33Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 43:33Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, okay, even better. So you don't have to write the prompt.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  And we can do that test that you said, just.

• 43:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, sure.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  One, but so basically then you select what channels you're trying to advertise.

• 43:43Jason Calacanis?

  So that would be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Yep, so the free channels of, you know, using your own existing social media or the paid advertising channels of Meta, Google, Instagram, Google search and Google display, or we even generate SMSs and emails for you to send in your own thing.

• 44:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  So after you do this, you you generate some designs and it will ask you some questions. So so I'll say no, just because it's already here and it instantly generates ads for you. While we're waiting, I'll just.

• 44:14Jason Calacanis?

  Are those, okay, so now we're seeing ads that you might see in Instagram for keep your plumbing flowing smoothly. It put the logo, because we're going a little too fast here. You're seeing the logo of the company at the top. There's a hero image of somebody working on plumbing. Is that hero image an AI-generated image?

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it asked, do you have an image? We answered no. If you do have an image for the product or we scraped it off of your catalog, then you would already have the image there. So these are AI-generated images.

• 44:45Jason Calacanis?

  So it just picked a person working on a sink? And then it's up to you to make sure you approve it, that it's not like a weird picture, right?

• 44:54Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 44:54Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  And you see, well, I had clicked ad design while we were just talking and it immediately added a new ad as we were.

• 45:03Jason Calacanis?

  Can you give it feedback on option L and say like, I noticed it's all white people. One white woman, two white men. Like, can you say, give me more diversity in it? Or like, I'm advertising to a different community. You know, that that sink is too fancy. Give me like a more, a more popular sink, right?

• 45:25Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly right. So here you can click Edit and you can go into like a, you know, canvas style editor where it's a manual editor.

• 45:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, got it.

• 45:36Speaker 04

  And then you can also open up like the chat prompt on the right-hand side, which is more like you want to just give it unstructured feedback, exactly like you just said.

• 45:49Jason Calacanis?

  Like a prompt.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Give me more diversity, replace the image with someone of color, rewrite this ad in Spanish and whatever other, you know, free text format that you want to give.

• 46:03Jason Calacanis?

  Right. And you, and you, do you tell it geographies as well? Because that would be a very interesting thing. If you said, I'm doing this in Brooklyn and it said like, oh, downtown Brooklyn or Sunset Park or Bay Ridge. You know, you could actually maybe even think about what the home cost is there. And then, you know, one group could have Kohler faucets, the other one could have, I don't know what the most generic one is, like it could really start to do interesting things. Yeah.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So when you put in your website, then we got what your address is and we know where you sell your products. So that the, the geo-targeting that you're referring to, it's behind the scenes. As we already know, you have a store or you sell online if you, and then who your target demographic is. You have a store, we know to geo-fence the paid ads within, you know, 15 miles of that particular store.

• 46:57Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  And then what I'm showing you is the UX, but what will be launched next week is more of like just a chat and you can come in in a very unstructured way and chat with the agent, just like you would chat with a freelancer that you hired on Fiverr or your agency. And it will ask you whatever questions are missing in order for it to generate a best performing ad.

• 47:26Jason Calacanis?

  You have the ability to do many ads. If you go to the Facebook ad library, for example, you can look at com.com and they're really good at advertising or Fitbot. And you could see many different ad styles, many different tests that they do with humans. But here, can you just have the AI change my ads every six hours and spend 10 bucks on each one without me interfering? And let it rip? Or do you, should I not trust it yet?

• 47:55Speaker 04

  You cannot, it's not 100% done for you. Um, I think the next round that we will, uh, that we are seeking is specifically to scrape the 13 million ads that are publicly available on Facebook and Google. And those will guide the agent that we have in our AI to produce better, best performing ads for a given product, geography, uh, market and, you know, industry.

• 48:27Jason Calacanis?

  How is the business going? Um, tell me, what are the challenges? Any blockers? So we can do a little office that was here and people can hear an investor and a founder talk about the challenges and how we, um, how we resolve those challenges.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  So, um, traction is good. We're about 16,000 MRR, which is plus 30%, 34% month on month. I'll hop up 143% uh, since January. Um, we spent a lot of time on product market fit. Um, in targeting small businesses. I think the main challenge for if going after that segment is that even though you give them tools to create their own ads, they actually don't trust themselves that whatever ad is created is good enough. So they want to outsource that to an agency or freelancer who's telling them that it is. So that's a bit of a behavioral change and the solution to that is the done for you

• 49:27Speaker 04

  advertising loop that will close so that when we do put the ads live, we are A B testing. We use the performance results in order to give the agent back the feedback and it will automatically take them into consideration.

• 49:41Jason Calacanis?

  So what's the question then? I mean, I understand the challenge. Is there a question to it? Or do you want just me to riff on it?

• 49:47Speaker 04

  Uh, I think riff on it. I think we would love to hear, how do we get more customers? What's a go best go to market?

• 49:54Jason Calacanis?

  So you have to meet your customers where they are. You're doing something incredibly innovative with a group of people who are neophytes and are scared. So you're like Canva, like Canva was a product for people who didn't do graphic design. Let's pause for a second there. It's a, it's the number one graphic design tool in the world and they made a tool not for graphic designers.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  What they did was they induced a market to exist. Right? So there were people who wanted the output of graphic design, but they didn't want to learn Photoshop because once you start doing layers and all this stuff, it's like, okay, I don't want to spend 100 hours doing this. I just want to make a birthday invite. My daughters, nine years old, my twins, all they do is go on Canva and make me funny things, constantly print them out on the color printer and bring them to me. It's hilarious. So I think you might be in the same boat. You're a tool for local advertisers, small advertisers, medium sized businesses that don't have an agency, can't afford an agency, but they want this. So the tool's not ready to do everything.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's 60% of the way there. And that's not your fault. You're innovative, you're skating to where the puck is going. So I have an idea. Why don't we include in the price of the product, human review? So when Grammarly first came out, you know, the program Grammarly?

• 51:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:20Jason Calacanis?

  There was a button in it because they were selling it to people who wanted proofreaders, wanted an editor that said, pay for a human review. And then they had a bunch of freelancers. Look it up, Alex, for me, please, if you can find the page that does that. I don't know if they still do it. And I thought, well, this is interesting. I almost used it because I was like, yeah, I'll pay 10 cents a word or it's like five cents a word. Okay, it's a 500 word article and I'm going to pay 10 bucks to have it approved. Why wouldn't I do that? And you could do it right in the product, get a human review of that. So here's what I want you to test. Tell them, what does the product cost right now? Ballpark?

• 51:56Speaker 04

  Small businesses, $199 a month.

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. So it's $199 a month with two hours of human review included. And each additional hour of human review is $35 an hour. And you can talk to that person on chat or whatever. And then I want you to hire a person, maybe if you take a loss. To do the human review and when you, after they do everything, they say, click here to get human advice and it says connecting you to a human and it could be you or other people. And then you do that piece for them and you call it like you make a couple of personas. Pick which persona you want. This is, you know, Johnny B. Good, who does B2B SaaS, you know, who does enterprise stuff. This is Suzie Q. Suzie Q is really good at local businesses.

• 52:42Jason Calacanis?

  There's another person who's great at restaurants and you say, pick the reviewer you want and you make five personas and you say, this person's 35 an hour, this person's 45 an hour, this person's 60 an hour and then done. You're a startup. You gotta get people over the finish line. So when I had a company, density.io, you can, you can look it up. Density.io was doing installations of people counting machines and it was just always a blocker. Who was going to install these machines and how would it work? And, you know, they just started incorporating the installation in some cases into the purchase price. Then they started charging on a square foot basis because it was too confusing and there was too much friction. So you have a little bit of friction right now. People get 80% of the way there, but they're scared.

• 53:27Jason Calacanis?

  So you can just manually do it until they can do it. They might say, you know what? I can do this myself now. Because when you made the ads better and you said, oh, I want some diversity in the ads and I, you know, there's five, there's six fingers on that person's hand and, you know, maybe we should do more specific brands of plumbing items. You know, you can, they'll be like, I know how to do that. So you kind of tell them, here's what we did. We checked X, Y, and Z. We checked this and you have like a checklist. Read the book Checklist Manifesto. Shout out Checklist Manifesto. You do a checklist of what humans check. So we checked the spelling. We checked the image. We checked for offensive material.

• 54:08Jason Calacanis?

  We checked for crisp communication. We checked the call to action and we changed the call to action. It said book now. We said learn more. So we want you to test learn more instead of book now. Get the idea?

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, the latter we do, the former we don't. I like the idea of adding the human touch into it and including it in a bundle and that gets over the fear that, you know, what if the product doesn't do X, Y, Z and I at least want to talk to someone and then they get reassured and keep going.

• 54:38Jason Calacanis?

  I think Paul Graham wrote. Do things that don't scale. I think there was an essay he did, do things that don't scale in year one, and then you figure out how to scale them if that's what people want. Did you find that grammarly thing by chance?

• 54:50Speaker 02

  I did. So notably, and this was to my surprise, Jason, it was called the expert writing service, and it was discontinued January 34th of this year. They kept doing that for that long. I had, I thought you were actually wrong, to be honest. I'm like, they don't do that. I've never seen it. Turns out, I was wrong. So yeah, that digged it killed off. And Paul Grams, do things that don't scale essay came out July 2013. We'll have that in the show notes.

• 55:13Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. So Evan, I think that's what you do. And how many unique customers do you have using the product right now?

• 55:22Speaker 04

  About 9,000 right now.

• 55:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, how many are paying?

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Oh, I need to look it up. Yeah.

• 55:29Jason Calacanis?

  So some fraction of those are users. I would suggest no users, only paid.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  Right now, we do seven day free trial, and then it converts to paid to seven days.

• 55:40Jason Calacanis?

  That might be okay. You know, maybe like it doesn't let you publish or whatever. You can, you know, do the ad editor, and then they can like take a screenshot of it, but they can't, maybe they can get up to a certain point in it, and then it pushes them to pay. But you might want to get more people on the phone, and instead of going for the vanity 9,000 number, maybe we go for the velocity of paid customers, and then the understanding who our ideal customer profile is, and the quality of the revenue. So hey, we had 1,000 people asked to do a phone call and onboard this month. We're literally getting 30 people a day. We're onboarding

• 56:22Jason Calacanis?

  10 of them based on their needs. We tell them it's good for them. And then of those 300 that paid 199 a month, like then you got a real business. So I almost feel like you need to understand these customers more and why they're doing it. And you might be falling back on the trap of the high number, the big number with a comma in it. I would much rather you see you have nine paid customers right now using the product and getting value than 9,000, and we're not sure if they're actually getting value. And then I'd like to see the nine every month double. So nine to 18 to 40 to 80. And then you're going to learn as an organization what you need to stack.

• 57:04Jason Calacanis?

  That level of customer, you don't need to be efficient. They don't need to be profitable right now. You could be losing $200 on every customer as long as they're using it and getting value. And that's really where I think really high quality investors like a Sequoia or you know, a pair VC, whoever it is, you know, they're going to look at your engagement stats. They're going to talk to your customers before they invest. So you want to have 10 reference clients that just shut up about this. Okay.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  Makes sense. Thank you.

• 57:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Well done. Great job, Evan. And hopefully I will see you in Austin for barbecue soon. Come see Lon and myself and Jackie in Austin and the team. We're going to be doing Founder Tuesdays. Where are you based?

• 57:48Speaker 04

  I'm in Tampa and I do need to go to Houston. So

• 57:52Jason Calacanis?

  You make the trip. We're doing Founder Tuesdays at the office. Startup Tuesdays, jam sessions. All right. Great job, Evan.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. Great to meet you all.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  Thanks, Evan. We're going to quickly talk about Founder Fridays, Jason's favorite thing in the entire world. We have Lon, a very special matchup.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  We do. We a little, we're throwing you a little curve ball here, Jason. We've got, we've got our final four. Just as a reminder to everybody, Osprey from Houston, Texas, Med Simple from Florianopolis, Brazil, Taktoon from Yerevan, Armenia, Mom Sub from Chicago, Illinois. But Team Launch, like so many of these companies, they came to us and they said, hey, we've got two companies. We want to give them a second chance. We want to do a wild card round and end up with a final five, not a final four. So we are, we're going to, we're going to do it. We're going to, we're going to go with it. We're bringing back two of our favorite, two of Launch's favorite companies.

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  Then how do the five then go down to?

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Don't, don't worry.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  We've got a whole plan for how the final five, we're going to pick a winner out of these final five. But first for today, here is our wildcard second chance bracket. Burble from Philadelphia versus Arcana from Los Angeles.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  All right, let's, the start of it.

• 59:09Speaker 03

  Let's pick, we're, we're going to start with Burble. Just as a quick reminder to you both, this is the wellness app. They use hypnotherapy to help you modify your behavior, improve your outlook and change your life. Here's the

• 59:21Jason Calacanis?

  The real thing. Hypnotherapy is real.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:25Speaker 05

  I'm Alexandra, the CEO at Verbal, and our biggest need right now is money to market Verbal. We plan to spend $50,000 a month in paid advertising, PR, and partnerships. You asked about our two-year plan? Well, here are the numbers.

• 59:39Speaker 05

  Year one is about laying a solid foundation to build upon. That's why we're investing in people, process, and product. Year two is an exciting year. We turn a profit. And how do we do it? Because we leveraged what we did in year one. By year five, we're looking to implement our exit strategy because we're so profitable that people are going to want to buy us. In fact, we have fee-to-fee, grants, wearables, VR, AR, and we're available in every language.

• 1:00:04Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I hate the last part. You never, big mistake, big faux pas in startup land, is to say you want to exit early. That means it's not your life's work, which I think it is her life's work. So that is a bit of a tell. We don't want you to sell. We want you to go public and this company to exist for all times. What companies do I talk about all the time? I talk about Robinhood. I talk about Uber. They're not going anywhere, folks. Those companies will be around after I'm gone. That's what we're looking for. So a little faux pas there at the end, but I do like her energy. And I do like the space, and I think people will pay a lot for hypnotherapy because you can do things like quitting smoking, or hypnotherapy for birthing classes, or losing weight, or getting off drugs and alcohol, or a gambling addiction.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, or folding pre-flop, or not folding pre-flop enough, according to the Million Dollar Cash Game and Alan Keating's Hypnotherapist.

• 1:00:54Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Alex Keating, my friend, started doing hypnotherapy because he was playing too many cards.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  To improve his poker game. That's wild.

• 1:01:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, he did it like the days before and morning of, and it really impacted his play when he won big because he was playing too many bad hands and didn't have the ability to fold. And so they did hypnotherapy.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  You have Jack five. Well. Oh. I mean, that's crazy. They can have that kind of a subtle impact on your thinking, you know, like quit smoking or something. That's a that's a big daily habit, but just I fold too. Or don't fold enough when I play poker. It's very specific. Is enough. That's what I. Need a third. That's what I need. It's like. Guess I'm gonna media pizza, not a large. Alex, don't need to read the N Q.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Like Nicola, that's going out of business. You can't stop me. Just get a. No, no, no, no, no. Okay, give me the other one. Lightning round. Come on. Lightning round. We're going back to L A, uh, my old hometown in Arcana. These guys have developed a method by which developers can integrate relevant text ads into their A I outputs. So let's take a look at their. Ooh.

• 1:02:13Speaker 06

  Hello, you're Arcana, a content-based ad-serving platform for G N A effort. Let's start with a quick demo. In this demo, we see Arcana seamlessly integrate contextual ads directly within the response generated by a G N A application, creating potential to monetize every L L M interaction.

• 1:02:30Speaker 07

  Uh, we think Inc Arcana has a bright future ahead of us, especially though like this next two years. We're going to expanding into agent-to-agent services, ad placement beyond G N A I space, and expanding the points of contact between the advertiser and game user. Overall, the results are are simple, increasing customer engagement, right, and user time on app, all while increasing advertiser points of contact and experience. Overall, we're confident. The future is bright, and we think in all honesty, this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the same way that Google and DoubleClick expanded, did the massive pipeline of of online content. We believe this is the first step to doing something similar. Thank you.

• 1:03:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right. If these two lunatics will go to an office instead of working in their, their studio apartments, this is a real winner. I would invest in it. If they can get into a war room with the three or four people who are working on this and a salesperson grinding it out. I love this idea. I've been saying this from the beginning. I think Google's got a bright future in advertising with Gemini if they choose to take it, which is as you're reading your results, they did it aggressively, highlighting words in the results that hit the relevant ads. That could work. Or I was literally talking to Sergey Brin at the All In F1 event. He was our surprise guest onstage.

• 1:03:50Jason Calacanis?

  And I said to him, like, why don't have in the sidebar, a running list of ads and offers for me based on all of my queries. So I'm doing a query about F1 and it's showing me, hey, F1 tickets, F1 merchandise, F1 subscription, this famous, the number one book for F1. And it's just, and then I, and I could, they could fade away, like every 10 seconds they fade away unless I say, don't fade away and I pause it. So they just run in, I think there's a huge future here. I like hypnotherapy. I love the ads and language model. I'm going ads and language model for my wild card choice. What have you got, Lon?

• 1:04:27Speaker 03

  You know, not to make it not as exciting, but yeah, I'm, I'm with you 100%. I think Arcana is, it's an amazing concept. It's an amazing product. Like it makes so much sense when you see it. Like, of course, there's so many interactions that are happening. We've been talking about it all episode. There's so many AI interactions happening constantly every day and it knows so much about you. The AI is learning so much about you and what you're looking for. That's part of how it works. So of course it's going to learn how to market things and sell things to you.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  What do you got? Love the verbal video. Have to make it 3-0 however, because I recently talked to Profound, a startup on the Twist 500. They're doing search engine optimization for generative AI. They call it G E O. Anyways, I just got to dive into this market, how big AI searches and so forth. So to me, there's more money to be made with Arcana. I got to give it to them, even though I will say maybe. Point the camera down so we don't see your whole closet in the background, but you know.

• 1:05:23Jason Calacanis?

  It's all good. Get your butts in an office on in Austin, get an office at Capital Factory next to us. And yeah, you might get a 2,525 K check from us.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:05:32Jason Calacanis?

  Great job, everybody with the wild card.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  So now that we've got five finalists, here's what we're going to do next. We're sending these five companies to the launch investment team. They are going to apply your rigorous method for evaluating the potential of startups, including answering the two key questions. Why will this succeed? And why will this fail? Based on those responses, we're going to pick a top two. They're going to come on this weekend startups live.

• 1:06:00Jason Calacanis?

  Woo, love it.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  Face off, and that's how we will crown our champion.

• 1:06:04Jason Calacanis?

  We need to do a summer tournament of this. Get everybody who is in Founder Friday stoked about it.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Jason Calacanis?

  And let all of our portfolio companies know. And let's learn from this one what worked, what didn't. And let's do the summer startup cup here on this weekend.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Can't wait.

• 1:06:21Jason Calacanis?

  Twist prize, twist cup, Founder Fridays finals. I don't know, come up with a good name. And we will see you all next time on this weekend startups. We call it Twist.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Bye bye.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Bye.