US Crypto Reserve Bombshell, Ramp's $13B Climb, & more | E2092

Today's show: Trump just floated the idea of a U. S. Crypto Reserve, suggesting a 10 bips transaction tax and naming unexpected altcoins like XRP, Solana, and Cardano. Jason and Alex break down what this means for crypto markets, regulation, and startups—plus the legal and political fallout. Is this a game-changer or just another pump-and-dump controversy? * Timestamps: (0:00) Alex and Jason kick of the show!(1:48) Trump's crypto policy and PR strategy(7:14) Analysis of Trump's proposed US crypto reserve (10:21) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(11:32) Predictions on legal challenges to Trump's crypto proposal(12:08) Industry reactions to the crypto tax proposal (20:27) OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠(22:26) Crypto report around market hours and Eric Trump's tweet(24:13) Predictions on Trump's future crypto policies and inflation impact(27:10) Trump's Truth Social and Crypto Investments dynamics(30:48) LinkedIn Jobs. Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(31:05) Jason's alternative idea for a crypto tax(36:40) Ramp's funding and fintech sector growth(41:02) Discussion on investment performance and Jason's ETF idea(46:42) Challenges companies face with public offerings and market fairness(50:14) Potential CoreWeave IPO and high CapEx costs(54:39) Founder Hack from Matt Turck(57:12) Exploring hybrid business models * Links from the episode: Check out Angel University: https://www.angel.university/Check out the JCal Case Study at Stanford Business: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/jason-calacanis-case-study-creating-resourcesCheck out Arduino: https://www.arduino.cc/Check out Ramp: https://ramp.com/ Check out Coreweave: https://www.coreweave.com/ * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm* Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/Lons LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharris * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:21) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(20:27) OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠(30:48) LinkedIn Jobs. Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.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?

  Just balls and strikes here. Very simple idea. Trump comes out and says on Friday at the White House Crypto Summit, which I think is great that the White House is doing a crypto summit. I think it's great. They're going to do regulation. Trump comes out and says, here's how it's going to go. Everybody in crypto pays a wonderful crypto tax. Crypto transaction tax, not tariff. It's the crypto transaction tax. It's going to be wonderful. Everybody pays 10 bips. They pay the vig to the crypto reserve. Problem solved. We're not spending any taxpayer money. It goes directly to taxpayers. Maybe we do a crypto dividend. Maybe everybody gets a little crypto. Wouldn't that be a nice Alex, a little crypto for everybody? Alex from This Week in Startups in the first row.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  I thought we were broke, Mr. President. I thought, I thought we were, we were flat broke.

• 0:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. No dollars. Listen one more time. He's a low IQ, low IQ lib. Okay. He's pro gay rights. I love the gays. Okay, gays for Trump. Huge. Alex Wilhelm, low IQ Alex Wilhelm. It's a tax. Crypto people pay it, not the Americans. So that, I think this would solve the whole problem.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Are you saying that crypto people are not Americans?

• 1:05Jason Calacanis?

  Have you met him? Alex. Very interesting people. Maybe from Mars. I mean, maybe Elon will find crypto people on the red planet. I mean, he's capable of doing it. Okay, anything's possible here.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is easy online payroll benefits and HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com/twist. Openphone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com/twist. And LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:48Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back. It is Monday, March 3rd. I'm Jason Calacanis. He's Alex Wilhelm. A lot is going on. We might as well get right to it. Yesterday, our fine president did pump 2.0. Trump 2.0 has his second crypto moment. And Alex, I, I broke, and I am continuing to break my 72-hour rule. What's the 72-hour rule?

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  We wait 72 hours, whatever Trump says something to try to interpret it. Now, this one is directly involved with startups, so there's no way not to lead with it. And everybody's got an opinion on it, but why don't you tee up what happened yesterday? And then we'll talk about what's happened since and my, you know, as many of you are here. If you're here on this week's startups, you're here to hear my opinion as well and my take on it. So I'll give you my hot take. Please don't aggregate me, bro.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  All right, so going back in time a little bit, the Biden administration famously, I would say, critical of the crypto industry, led to a lot of bad vibes between the Democratic Party and crypto entrepreneurs here in the United States. Then Trump won partially thanks to crypto support. And there was a lot of anticipation that he would be a very crypto friendly president. One idea that had been floated, Jason, was the creation of a Bitcoin strategic reserve. The idea put some of the national wealth into Bitcoin, a scarce asset. And then over time, it will appreciate in theory and then help us resolve some of the debt. Now, probably not enough to make any noise, but it wasn't, you can kind of see it. Then this weekend, we got this instead, which is a little bit different.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Instead of what we thought Trump was going to put out, he instead launched in a first post over on Truth Social, that there will be a US crypto reserve, not a Bitcoin reserve, and that it would include assets such as XRP, Solana and Cardano. Then everyone asking, well, those aren't the assets we expected. He did a quote truth, I believe.

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  A re-truth.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  A re-truth, thank you, Jason. Yes. That Bitcoin and Ethereum, the actual best known cryptocurrencies would be included as well. This led to a pump in the prices of these tokens. As you can see here, Jason, we prepared a chart. It led to a pump.

• 3:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so Trump likes to jump the gun on all announcements. So we know that. And remember, rule number one in Jason's seven rules of interpreting Trump is Trump says a lot of wacky shit. That's rule number one. Trump says a lot of wacky stuff. That's rule number one. Rule number four is always wait 72 hours by trying to interpret what he says because see rule number one and almost always his process is to, you know, do process journalism, process PR. I guess we'll call it process PR.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:34Jason Calacanis?

  Which is, you know, process journalism is you're like, hey, our tip line said FTX is a house of cards. We don't know it's a house of cards, but you kind of run fast and loose. Tons of criticism of process journalism because you can, you know, slander people or you can just kind of go down rabbit holes. It's, it feels unfair and not well thought out. Well, Trump does the same thing in terms of PR and announcements. They're not well thought out. They're not planned. People don't know what he's going to say. And he got that from Howard Stern. Howard Stern's, the reason for his success made famous in a great film called Private Parts, based on his autobiography, was this famous scene where Paul Giamatti,

• 5:15Jason Calacanis?

  who is his manager at the station, gets the results because he's trying to fire Howard Stern, who's been forced upon him by NBC Radio. Howard Stern refers to him as pig vomit. So you can get a sense for their relationship. And he says, I don't understand. Why are people listening to him for 47 minutes? That's unbelievable. It's like a record. And it's like, because they want to hear what he's going to say next.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:38Jason Calacanis?

  And then he says, oh, okay. Well, tell me about the people who are detractors. And he's like, oh, they listen for 97 minutes. He's like, what? They listen longer and they, and they're, they hate him. These are people who hate him? Why is that? And they said, number one reason stated, they want to hear what he's going to say next. So here we are. Trump 2.0 says a lot of stuff. The world went crazy on this because now you have to wonder why those three. Well, they are three of, I think, if we open CoinMarketCap. Coin MarketCap tracks the market capitalization, the total value of crypto projects. In fairness to Trump, I believe. You know, it's right now Bitcoin Ethereum, which he put in his follow-up, and then XRP,

• 6:20Jason Calacanis?

  Tether, which is a stablecoin, so you can kind of take that out, BNP, Solana, USDC, Cardona. So of the top eight, you know, you take out the stablecoins, which I think is two of them, this top six, the five he picked are five of the top six, right? And I don't know what BNP is, but...

• 6:36Speaker 01

  BNB is the Binance House token.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, so is that like a stablecoin, or it's just their house crypto? Okay.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  It's just their house crypto, yeah.

• 6:43Jason Calacanis?

  Got it, okay, so, you know, anyway, in fairness to Trump, he did pick the top five, if you're gonna pick a crypto reserve. The problem with all of this is after the meme coin, the Trump coin, which then the SEC, we talked about this on Friday, I believe, my interpretation of what they did, was they wrote regulation around Trump's behavior, or I should say, a different organization that the Trump Organization runs. So there's this World Liberty Company, and this is where everybody's mind's gonna wander.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:15Jason Calacanis?

  World Liberty Financial, Inc. I believe this is run by one of his children, and I believe that person is Eric Trump. Now, everybody on the left is gonna say, this is a pump and dump. This is a Trump pump. There was Trump Pump 1.0, which was Trump coin, and now here we are, and the SEC had to make an announcement about meme coins, and I believe they kind of framed them around Trump's behavior to kind of get him out of hot water. This is not the type of country anybody wants to live in. Now, you will not hear Republicans complain about this. I'm a moderate, let me just state that from the beginning, I'm pro crypto, I'm anti-fraud,

• 7:59Jason Calacanis?

  that's all you need to know about me, I'm pro free markets, and we could put me aside for a sec. When you do things, you have to look at the game on the field. The game on the field right now, Alex, and then I'll stop on this and get your reactions, because your reactions are also, as a libertarian, liber- liber- I would describe you as a liberal...

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Leftitarian.

• 8:18Jason Calacanis?

  Leftitarian, but you're also pro free markets, so you're like a Clinton-esque Democrat?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Capitalism, democracy, gay rights.

• 8:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fantastic, love it. Check, check, check for me on all those boxes. So... The left is now going to have a field day with this and they will weaponize it. And this is what's really, really just starting to be, and the right will ignore this, just like the left ignored, you know, the Hunter situation, which was pretty gnarly. The left ignored Biden's cognitive decline. I believe that ultimately, and we'll see what Jake Tapper's new book comes out with, but I think ultimately that will wind up being one of the great coverups. And the second time we've covered up a president in cognitive decline, first one, of course, Reagan, Reagan, right? So now this is going to result in the same chaos we had during Trump's first term and into Biden's, which is lawfare.

• 9:10Jason Calacanis?

  You can easily weaponize this because Eric Trump, I think, works at World Liberty Financial.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  And he's become effectively the biggest crypto supporter amongst the Trump family. Jason, you actually retweeted him and he said, buy the dip and had the Bitcoin B symbol, if I recall correctly.

• 9:28Jason Calacanis?

  And then I think today he retweeted somebody kind of questioning him giving financial advice. And then he's like, oh no, now my, now my advice is basically to hold. So here's the challenge, I think. So let's just start with point one. The challenge in all of this is this is going to derail, or I believe it will derail. What I believe is some of the good work of the Trump presidency. I am, everybody knows a never Trumper, who was a very clearly none of the above double hater in this last election. That being said, whoever wins, I give a hundred percent of my support to my president. He's my president. Once he becomes president of the United States, I'm old school Gen X or whatever.

• 10:13Jason Calacanis?

  Criticize it if you like. I'm not part of the resistance on either side. I am, hey, let's steer the president towards greatness. Call balls and strikes as best we can.

• 10:23Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:08Jason Calacanis?

  Gusto is simple, easy to use software. So you can focus on what matters, building your startup. So here's your quick call to action. Do you want all Gusto has to offer with no hidden fees? Well, how about a discount? Try Gusto and get three months free. Gusto.com slash twist. That's G U S T O dot com slash twist. Now we're going to go into crazy lawfare, I believe. Attorney generals, civil suits, and they're going to drag Eric Trump, World Liberty, anybody who donated, Michael Saylor, Brad Garlandhouse from XRP. This is going to drag all of them into lawsuits and chaos by local attorney generals because obviously the federal attorney general

• 11:52Jason Calacanis?

  is selected and is seems like pretty partisan. So anyway.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I want to jump in on the, the, you won't hear about this from the right to my mostly, but to my surprise, Jason, there have been some notable of dissent. So I want to grab, here's Joe Lonsdale, eight VC, I believe he was a

• 12:08Jason Calacanis?

  Friend of the pod.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Friend of the pod. And Joe says, for those folks on the audio version, taxation is theft. It should be kept to a minimum. It's wrong to steal my money for grift on the left. It's also wrong to tax me for crypto bro schemes. Efficient defense courts, national parks, blah, blah, blah. Fine. Cut it out with these schemes, guys. This led Jason to another interesting bit of commentary from technology circles. This is from Nikita Beer, of course, a well-known founder in the social media consumer application space. And he says, quote, in response to Joe, this is getting egregious. Every two weeks, there's a kickback to the family, completely delegitimizes all the work Doge is doing. And so when you say specifically that this is, you know, not what you were hoping from the administration and that you wanted Doge to do well and other things. I agree. It's, it's depressing to see what

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Seems like really unnecessary side quests of grift when some folks were pretty content with what the administration was doing before this stuff.

• 13:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's interesting. I think people agree. Lonsdale is a true independent thinker. You're not going to agree with him about everything, obviously. But I will give him intellectual credit points because once you become a partisan and you're part of a political party. Rule number one is never criticize anybody in the party. Carry the party line, vote the party line.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 13:23Jason Calacanis?

  Period. Full stop. And we see that when you have so few people break ranks when, you know, you ever get a vote in the Senate or something like that, right? It's always party lines, always party lines. This is why I choose to not be part of either party because I like to be able to tell you, my audience, and to have discussions from first principles with you, Alex and other folks.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  So I give Joe Lonsdale a lot of credit. I saw David Sacks came in and I just give a little disclaimer here.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I was gonna say.

• 13:54Jason Calacanis?

  And I are friends for 20 years. We're partners in the All In Podcast. He is no longer on the All In Podcast officially. He does drop in as a guest, as he has himself stated. So he come, I think he's come in two or three times since he took office. He's been very clear. He divested all of his crypto. That's a public tweet he did.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:16Jason Calacanis?

  Number two, he said, wait for the announcement. So he is enforcing the 72 hour rule. You know, nothing's been said yet. So he is the crypto czar.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, just for, you know, good hygiene here, when we refer to David Sacks, please don't re-aggregate me. Please don't weaponize me against my friend and say, oh, Sacks's bestie and business partner is anti-Trump. He's a never Trumper. He said, Trump should go to jail, whatever. It's not going to work, folks. It's not working when you try to weaponize Trump versus, you know, Elon. It's not going to work when you try to weaponize me versus my friends. We can be friends and disagree on things. That's called America.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Also, everyone should chill out with the parasocial relationships and, you know, I don't think we need to break up friendships. That seems to be like a bridge too far.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  It's so lame. You know, like, what are we doing here? If we're going to have a great democracy and we're going to lean into what's great about America, I can disagree with Sacks. Sacks can think I'm an idiot and dunk on me on Twitter. It's all good, folks. We can still be friends. He can dunk on me. We disagree profoundly about Ukraine. We agree on so much when it comes to crypto. And in fact, I believe he is the best actor in the world. And he is one of the most moral, ethical individuals I've met in my life. Now, he's part of an administration. So the previous thing I said is rule number one, when you're part of an administration is not attack other people in the administration because they weaponize that against you in this sort of context.

• 15:45Jason Calacanis?

  So you're not going to hear J D Vance throw Trump under the bus. You're not going to hear Trump throw, you know, I don't know, Tulsi Gabbard under the bus. They're going to be thoughtful about these things 99% of the time.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  What was the first rule of Trump?

• 16:00Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, he says a lot of stuff. Right. So he's going to say a lot of stuff.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  He pops off sometimes. Yeah.

• 16:04Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So let's just read Sacks' tweet out loud, please.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yes. Quote, and this is in response, by the way, to the Joe Lonsdale tweet, which is one reason why I wanted to have that up so everyone can see it.

• 16:14Jason Calacanis?

  Please read it verbatim.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  In response, quote, "Nobody announced a tax or spending program. Maybe you should wait to find out what's actually being proposed." And this actually brings up a big question, which is, okay, if we're going to put these assets into a trust, how does it work? How do we fund it? Where does the capital come from? At what price are we buying in? Who's going to custody of the assets? There's really a million questions to this, Jason.

• 16:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  And I wish that we had had the full package up front. It might have cleared some of the air that has surrounded this because criticism, I went out and found, or tried to find criticism and compliments about this crypto reserve, as Trump put it out. Very easy to find criticism, even amongst the right-leaning technology crowd.

• 16:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Hard to find any praise of it. I found one tweet from Sean McGuire of Sequoia saying, legendary.

• 17:04Jason Calacanis?

  Thoughtful comment from Naval, I thought was pretty great.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:08Jason Calacanis?

  He attacked it and assessed it from a technological viewpoint, 23 hours from the taping of this. He said, "The U.S. taxpayer should not be exit liquidity for cryptocurrencies that are decentralized in name only." So he's talking about everything but Bitcoin. And this is super important. I agree with them wholeheartedly. Bitcoin is decentralized from day one. Now, there is somebody who owns whatever, I don't know, Satoshi owns some large amount in a wallet. So perhaps we'll argue at some point if that person cashes those in and we see that wallet become active, that, hey, this is some grand conspiracy, but it's decentralized, right? That person let go of it. XRP is the opposite.

• 17:51Jason Calacanis?

  And in fact, if you pull up the lawsuit from the SEC in 2020, one part of which XRP won, the recap of it, I believe, they couldn't prove that the XRP founders were selling to retail because the retail trading was occurring on platforms. So they couldn't sort of connect those dots. Doesn't mean that they're not guilty of stuff. It just means they couldn't make that connection. And then there's still an active lawsuit, I believe, for the other part, which is they did a billion dollar unrecognized security. I believe that's obvious. Then I see Brad Gerlinghaus stumping for Trump. I believe that he's a major donor to politicians. I don't have the details on it, but you know, he was at the crypto ball, et cetera, and XRP

• 18:35Jason Calacanis?

  supports everything and splashy cashes XRP all over the place, which was the nature of the lawsuit. They were talking about how much XRP is being, you know, gifted around. Somebody in our comments here made a joke, Brad should just give a billion dollars in XRP for free to become legal to the sovereign wealth fund. That's actually, that's actually a pretty good speeding ticket. I kind of like it on face value as an idea.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  The appearance, though, is you donate money to the president and then they put your asset into their reserve, therefore, as the kids say, pumping your bags. And I want to circle back to the David Sacks thing because I did see people saying that David Sacks's firm Kraft has backed a number of crypto firms. True. And I do think it's great that the firm and Sacks divested their direct holdings, but I don't think you can really unlock an LP. Investment firm relationship is my guess. So I, my presumption is that he's put his percentage in craft to the side, but it still exists in some way. So I think he's doing what we can expect him to do there. So I have no beef with that. But people were saying that

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Bitwise, one of the companies in his orbit, has a number of funds that hold crypto assets, and those are the ones that were being picked. But I just want to say, I went through their filings today. I went through the fund prospectuses and so forth. And as far as I can tell, these are just things that are investing in the top 10 cryptocurrencies, for example, much like we pointed out. So when it comes to conflicts of interest, you have to do the work, which Saks is doing by divesting and missing out on a pump to his new defense. But it is tricky when you are an investor in companies that have exposure themselves, because you can only disentangle yourself so far. So I don't think the criticism is fair that he is being malicious. I just think

• 20:20Speaker 01

  that he's stuck looking bad. And this is why in government, we try to even avoid the appearance of conflicts of interest. And that's why this is sticky.

• 20:28Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:07Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:46Jason Calacanis?

  OpenPhone is offering 20% off your first six months when you go to openphone.com/twist. That's O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E.com/twist. You know how to spell open. You know how to spell phone. Therefore, you know how to spell openphone.com/twist for 20% off for six months. And if you've got existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them at no extra charge. You can be sure that Sacks doesn't need any more money, and that he's divesting. If he says he's divesting, that doesn't mean other people aren't doing tremendous on this. And there was a report, and this is the thing about crypto, and this is where Eric Trump, I believe,

• 22:31Jason Calacanis?

  is going to become like the Hunter Biden theme of this presidency, you know, for better or worse, fair or unfair, because he says a lot of stuff too. So now you got Eric Trump saying how brilliant it was to... He's blocking me, by the way, so I can't pull it up myself, which is fair. I have been a bit critical at times. He says how brilliant it was that they did all this on a Sunday. So he's kind of like almost taunting regulators. He's taunting folks with his tweets. Here's an idea. Say less. Best advice for Eric Trump. Your dad's the president.

• 23:16Jason Calacanis?

  Your dad's being the crypto president. The crypto lobby. I mean, I, I think the crypto lobby, the numbers I've seen thrown around are extremely high. If we read what he said, I love the genius of announcing a strategic reserve on a Sunday when traditional markets are closed and Wall Street sleeps for the first time. Retail investors win. So he's trying to kind of save himself there like I'm on the side of retail. Traditional finance better catch up and will quickly become extinct. The world no longer runs Monday to Friday, nine to five. And then he adds world liberty five to.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Hashtag BTC hashtag ETH. The, the gist here for folks who don't know what we're talking about is that the stock market opens defined and runs for defined hours. Jason, it takes holidays off. It closes early. It's only for a set period of time. Crypto markets run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And so if you wanted to make a trade on say Coinbase after this, you'd have to wait for the markets to open more or less, whereas crypto is always trading. Doesn't matter what time of day or day of the week.

• 24:13Jason Calacanis?

  Let's move to predictions so we can wrap this up.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:16Jason Calacanis?

  Number one, this is a terrible idea. Number two, uh, just a terrible idea. And the reason it's a terrible idea is because it's going to launch just so many legal issues. And it works against what I think are the three most important things Trump is really mandated with doing. If we look at why Trump won, I think number one was immigration and the border. I think he's done a reasonably great job on that. He's deporting 500 to a thousand hardened criminals per day. We haven't heard much about it for two weeks. I'm sure it will pop up again, but that was actually something the overwhelming majority

• 24:56Jason Calacanis?

  of Americans wanted to see 80, 90% of people want to see, you know, legal thoughtful immigration. Number two, dude, people want to see the end of waste porn abuse. He's doing that. So you might not agree with how it's being done, but that's like the second part of the mandate. And the third part is again, uh, and you might not like how he's going about it, but we won't get into Ukraine situation, but stopping foreign wars and diplomacy. I believe actually he's very good at that. I think he will end the Ukraine war where Biden didn't. Going to be very hard for people to give him credit for that because of the stylistic way this is going down, but I think he will come to a great agreement, a grand bargain,

• 25:38Jason Calacanis?

  if you will, with China. I think people don't like the stylistic points on what's going on in Gaza and Trump Gaza's, you know, like pure lunacy with the AI video, pure lunacy in reality television with what happened in the overall office. I actually think, kind of crazy like a fox. I've talked about it before, crazy's on your side. I think he will. On those three fronts, we'll be sitting here in two or three years. I think he could accomplish those three mandates in the first half before the midterms.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:07Jason Calacanis?

  This is the kind of stuff that will derail everything.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  So can I just say, totally off topic, but I was waiting for you to say inflation. Because to me, if I was to pick the number one thing that won Trump the last election, it was inflation, partially due to spending in the Trump administration won, partially due to Biden won.

• 26:25Jason Calacanis?

  The inflation went up during Biden, you're correct.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but.

• 26:28Jason Calacanis?

  And the spending in Trump, 1.0 impacted that, correct.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  So that's what I thought was the number one issue. The other things I think kind of nest into that, in my view, but that's off topic. I was just surprised.

• 26:39Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no. I think actually that's a really good punch up. I do think the American public was fed up with the inflation issue, while at the same time, the stock market was at record highs and unemployment was at record lows and wage growth was reasonable. Putting that aside, I don't think the president actually has too much of an impact on. I mean, I think they can screw it up like the Fed did, but I don't think the president actually has too much impact on that. So, but you are right, that is part of the mandate. And I think we saw the inflation handle looked pretty good, right? Just last week.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  The inflation handle looked pretty good.

• 27:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  So there's some conflicting data there. I'm worried about GDP, but I just want to pull up something regarding the Trump family crypto and the situation. Producer Court found a Telegraph article that said that Trump's Truth Social Company, which is TMTD, Trump Media and Technology Group, says it'll put up to a quarter billion dollars into assets, including cryptocurrencies. I just chased that down via their IR website, and that does appear to be correct. And they may put it into Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies. So you could very much argue that if TMTG, which Trump owns a big chunk in, followed through on its public announcement, Trump just pumped his own bags to an absurd degree.

• 27:49Jason Calacanis?

  Right. So if that's all true, we gotta put all the ifs and caveats there.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Ifs, allegedly, caveats and so forth. What a disappointment, though, Jason, that that that this is what we're doing. Because all he had to do, Trump, was say, we're gonna do a thing that's gonna yield Bitcoin for the government. We're gonna put it into a special reserve, and he would have gotten such a big PR win from the cryptic community, from a lot of folks on the internet, and it would have been kind of a slam dunk. Would it have been a policy that changed the world? Probably not, but it would have been a nice pat on the head for his fans. Instead, we're here, and this is like the thing about Trumpism that I don't I don't get. It seems that there's a way to do things that his audience would like, and then he does something else. And I'm always like, perplexing to me.

• 28:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, another name, I'll just put it out there to track, that people have been whispering to me over and over again, is Justin Sun.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:36Jason Calacanis?

  So he is a businessman, this is CNN, if you trust it or not, a businessman who pumped 75 million into the Trump family-backed crypto token, finds himself in a fortunate position this week as federal security regulators are hitting pause on their civil fraud cases against him. Again, we're gonna just see this over and over again. Whether these things are the normal course of action or not, everything is going to be assumed to be a corrupt grift going forward.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Well, I just pulled up some some reporting and some tweets from Sun, and it does appear that he put another 45 million into World Liberty Financial after previously putting in 30. So that is a $75 million purchase into an asset controlled by the Trump family, more or less. And then you'll note that he's, I think his suit was dropped, so.

• 29:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, you want me to clean the whole thing up for you?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Hit me.

• 29:24Jason Calacanis?

  I've talked about this 20 times. A crypto tax.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Ah, yes.

• 29:30Jason Calacanis?

  The old crypto tax. Now, Sacks retweeted Joe and said, hey, wait for the details. Okay, perfect. I don't advise any of my friends on what's going on. I stay out of it. So I'm arms-length, the same way Sacks sold his crypto, Sacks sold his J coin. I am not collaborating with Elon on Doge, Sacks on whatever, Robert Kennedy, I know some of these people. I am not collaborating on anything, because I want to call balls and strikes here and on All In. Again, independent, I voted Republican one-third of the time, Democratic two-thirds of the time. I'm not part of either party. I'm a double hit. I'll keep repeating that because people keep trying to frame me as some libtard, like crazy, like Kamala Biden supporter. I said very clearly, I wasn't gonna vote for them. So.

• 30:14Jason Calacanis?

  I have been saying this for many years. Here's a tweet from December 14th, 2024. If the government wants to build a strategic reserve in Bitcoin crypto, they should place a tax on it, that being crypto. Every time you buy or sell it, you pay a small percentage in actual cryptocurrency to the government's wallet. Just 50 basis points or even five basis points would result in massive holdings, and most crypto folks would gladly pay it in order to have a legal framework. I mean, hey, and this is my little cheeky at the end. Gets me in a little bit of trouble. I mean, it would be a shakedown and a protection racket, but probably worth it. All right, we all know if you're a founder, or even if you're a small business, you're thinking about your company 24/7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder.

• 30:59Jason Calacanis?

  This is not clock in, clock out, nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are, and that's of course LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is like your co-founder. They're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn, where there are 1 billion members. You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place. And also LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people, whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants. So do me a favor, don't take my word for it. I mean, you should, I know what I'm talking about.

• 31:44Jason Calacanis?

  This is where I find my great people, but just understand that 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates. So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses already use LinkedIn for hiring. So here's your call to action. Post your job for free. Why wouldn't you do it? It's free, F R E E. That's a good price. LinkedIn.com/TWIST. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com/TWIST to post your job for free. Terms and conditions. Do apply. Just balls and strikes here. Very simple idea. Trump comes out and says on Friday at the White House Crypto Summit, which I think is great that the White House is doing a crypto summit.

• 32:29Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's great they're going to do regulation because again, we talked about too hot before Gary Gensler, too cold with Gary Gensler. Let's try to get to just right because we're in a just too hot time period right now. Obviously, Trump comes out and says, here's how it's going to go. Everybody in crypto pays a wonderful crypto tax. Crypto transaction tax, not tariff. It's the crypto transaction tax. It's going to be wonderful. Everybody pays 10 bips. May have heard of bips. Bips is a little word. B I P S 10 bips. They pay the vig to the crypto reserve. Problem solved. We're not spending any taxpayer money. It goes directly to taxpayers. Maybe we do a crypto dividend. Maybe everybody gets a little crypto.

• 33:13Jason Calacanis?

  Wouldn't that be a nice Alex, a little crypto for everybody? Alex from this week in startups in the first row of the.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  I thought, I thought we were broke, Mr. President. I thought, I thought we were, we were flat broke.

• 33:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. No dollars. Listen one more time. He's a low IQ, low IQ lib. Okay. He's pro gay rights. I love the gays. Okay, goes for Trump. Huge. Alex Wilhelm, low IQ Alex Wilhelm. It's a tax. Okay. Crypto people pay it, not the Americans. So that I think this would solve the whole problem.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Are you saying that crypto people are not Americans?

• 33:46Jason Calacanis?

  Have you met him? Alex, very interesting people, maybe from Mars. I mean, maybe Elon will find crypto people on the red planet. I mean, he's capable of doing it. Okay. And it's possible here. I got to go at humor here, but what do you think of my idea? Just say, everybody knows Trump reads my tweets. Everybody knows that. That's definitely true. People are sending his tweets to him because he did the golden visa based on my 500K. He just added a zero. So I said, do 50 bips or five bips. He's going to add a zero, 5% or 50 bips, only his range.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  What's the average rate on like, I don't know, 10, 20, no limit holding table at a casino?

• 34:19Jason Calacanis?

  I think you're, it will wind up being like 10 bucks an hour per person. So 100 bucks an hour, you play 20 hands. That means five bucks a hand. That's my guess is like, because that's what they charge in, in big games.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:30Jason Calacanis?

  When you play a big game, they don't take it out of the pot because the pots get really big. So instead of taking a percentage of the pot, at 30 minutes, they have a timer.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:38Jason Calacanis?

  And at 30 minutes, whoever has the button pays the entire thing, or at 30 minutes, everybody throws in six or 12 dollars.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 34:45Jason Calacanis?

  So at a big game, you're paying like 100 to 250 an hour to the casino. So you play a 10 hour session, they make $2,000. The dealer is getting paid probably 10 bucks an hour, 20 bucks an hour, they get minimum wage plus tips.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, but tips, tips fly to dealers when things are going well.

• 34:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  So that's, so that's, that's my analogy here is this is fine. Let's go do it. Fine. They will just, we'll just do it a little, a little 10 bits, 15 bits. I'll take 20. Um, I can see how that would make a lot of sense. I just think you run into people who couldn't see the good for the, oh my God, it's tax and would therefore kind of lose their, their mind about it. But I think Jason, we can close with this. When we have all the details, we will bring this back up. But in the meantime, after crypto prices went down and people began to lose some of their crypto enthusiasm, here is a shot in the arm, which is good for startups in the sector that are building stable coin tech like Stably from the Twist 500. And I just, I'm going to close.

• 35:34Jason Calacanis?

  Has Stably been on the pod yet?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  They have not been on the pod yet. They are on our list to invite. And also.

• 35:39Jason Calacanis?

  Let's get them on.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Okay. Can we close with a joke, though, on this sector?

• 35:43Jason Calacanis?

  On this sector?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  On this story, I mean.

• 35:45Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, yes, we can. Crypto people want to have the government out of your wallet, unless they can have the government in their wallet.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  They want the government out of their bag, but holding their bags up.

• 35:59Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, that's basically, I mean, it's so ironic. The crypto people were like, we are the anti-government money system. We are outside of government. We don't want anything to do with government unless we can get a quick pump out of this. And that's really the problem. And consumers could be hurt.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Jacqueline Melanick, previously of TechCrunch, now she runs a company that does essentially investor relations for tokens. It's kind of a cool company. Anyways, she had a great tweet and it shows a guy covering his eyes, throwing a dart towards the dartboard, says, headed to the local dive bar to help the White House pick more cryptocurrencies for their crypto strategic reserve. And I think this summarizes people's views.

• 36:36Jason Calacanis?

  Pretty, pretty good. Pretty good.

• 36:37Speaker 01

  And Tim Post Jacky. Okay, let's talk about Ramp, Jason. This is. A big round

• 36:40Jason Calacanis?

  Love ramp.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  That's coming to place.

• 36:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  I mean, okay, let's go back in time. Let's talk about what Ramp is. Ramp, when it launched back in 2019, was considered to be effectively a Brex me too. A Brex also ran, a Brex clone. And that means that it was working on corporate cards. And it had this early idea of what if we helped our customers save money? So it had this, we'll go through your expenses, we'll find duplicates, we'll help you save a couple of bucks. And honestly, I talked to Eric Lyman back in the day when it was smaller. And I was a little bit perplexed by the bet because to me Brex was doing well. It raised a bunch of money, seemed to have a lot of brand cachet, Jason, at the time. But Ramp has grown from strength to strength to strength, adding new products, raising new capital. It did have a valuation dip after the boom.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  But now the news is that Ramp is now worth $13 billion after a $150 million secondary transaction. A lot of money moving around here, big numbers. My first impression is twofold, one, big secondaries mean later IPOs. And isn't it great to see fintech back in the sun?

• 37:45Jason Calacanis?

  You know, fintech is just such a great space. We had Vlad on on Wednesday. I don't know if you caught that episode. He's just tremendous. And the, the thing that's great about fintech and technology is fintech has just traditionally had so much friction. And it's been so slow and arduous and painful to do anything. When I'm working with companies like Mercury, with Ramp, with Robinhood, with Wealthfront, any of those platforms, Coinbase, and we are, I own shares in Wealthfront and Robinhood. I think out of that cohort. And I've, yeah, that's it. I think that's it. And I think Mercury and Ramp have both advertised on this week's startup. So I guess on a

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Disclosures, yeah.

• 38:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, anyway, when I have to deal with a traditional bank, which I have to do, because I can't use these new services, I wish I could. For venture funds, right? And for audits and for accounting, all that stuff. I literally have people coming to me for wet signatures. You know what a wet signature is?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Is that literally like involving ink?

• 38:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. And I'm like, what planet are we on? Like, how about if this is so important? You have me state my name into a video and take a picture with my IP address and a timestamp to validate it's me, like I just did for my Twitter subscribers. In order to collect money on a platform like Twitter, they make you verify your identity. How do they do it? You take a picture of your driver's license, front and back.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 39:16Jason Calacanis?

  You take a picture of yourself. When you do remote health, they have you do something similar, right? I don't know if it's a video or a picture. This is how the world has moved. What if I'm opening up an account that, you know, some bank? Why don't you turn on my camera? Let me take a picture of my driver's license, take a picture of myself. You have the IP address, you got my phone number, then you call me back with a live person. Make sure it was me. Did you just take your picture? Then send me an email. You can do like a triple authentication with a person with technology. You send a link to my email address on file. You call me on the phone with a human being. You ask me my test questions. You have a second phone number from somebody at my company and you check them as well. Which by the way, is going to become the practice with AI. Cause everything I just described, you could use AI to try to fake, right? You can make a deep fake.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  That was literally what I was thinking, like IP addresses are spoofable, blah, blah, blah. But.

• 40:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. In order to like download somebody's Bitcoin or every dollar out of their account, you want to get them on the Zoom, you want to get them on the phone, you want to do two or three of these things live. You know, see what shirt I'm wearing on a FaceTime call, see what shirt I'm wearing on a radio phone call. You get the idea. So be cautious out there. But you know, this is why these companies are so great. As you remove friction from a product, consumption goes up. As you make a product faster, consumption goes up. As you offer a wider array of services that delight customers and solve problems for them, engagement goes up, revenue goes up. I think that's the story of this cohort of, you know, I think they call them neo-banks.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:43Jason Calacanis?

  New Bank, I actually have equity in New Bank through a venture firm that invested in it and I never sold a share. I actually have some exposure to Square, which is now called Block. Block. Again, I didn't directly invest in those two. I don't want to take credit as an investor. I was in a fund, so I get credit for investing in that fund.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Still, good to hold stuff that's done well and Block's historically done pretty darn good.

• 41:02Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, did you see that I'm right behind Pelosi and inverse Kramer on the rankings? I had a tweet, somebody has took my J trading portfolio and they benchmarked it. I'm up 35% apparently in the last year. So I'm like, two points behind. I'm two points behind Pelosi tracker. God damn it.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  So here is, here is Jason's tweet, but sadly he is losing to the opposite of Kramer. Burry, famously the man who bet on the right side of the subprime meltdown.

• 41:32Jason Calacanis?

  Forty-four percent, forty-three.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  And then there's our boy Jason right there.

• 41:35Jason Calacanis?

  Thirty-five percent. Somebody emailed me about doing an ETF, speaking of like fintech. So I could put, you know, ETFs are like, you can set them up for a couple of hundred grand or something. And then people can invest in your ETF and you can get fees on it or something.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  So.

• 41:50Jason Calacanis?

  I could create ETFs, dump my Robin Hood into it.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:53Jason Calacanis?

  This is a feature Vlad should do. Like if you have over a million dollars in holdings, you should be able to press a button and create ETF.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  There was a startup that lets you essentially track your friends' portfolios and you can buy the same stuff as them. So this idea is not novel, but with technology, back to your point, making things easier and faster in finance. Why couldn't you spin up an ETF for a couple of hundred K, charge back to bips, 50 bips or 100 bips?

• 42:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, people might want to follow it. I mean, this is my vision for Twist 500, by the way, is to create a Twist 500, like a $10 million SPV or something. And then put one of my people on buying secondary in the top Twist 500 companies. And then you're like, hey, here's Twist 501. Twist 501 is 10 million. You can go to twist500.com by the way, and see this project we're working on, top 500 private companies as.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  It's good fun.

• 42:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's good fun and we, we're going to kind of track them here. And then as they become public, we take them out and there'll be a bit of a competition for them over time. You know, my idea would be, hey, you set up a Twist 500 and then you say to the fund manager, myself, and like maybe have a collaborator on it, see what the current secondary price is on the secondary markets. Let's build an. Index of them. So then I like, if I wanted access to those companies and I wasn't directly investing in them, I could put, and I would, I put like a million of the 10 million in.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:10Jason Calacanis?

  And then somebody goes and says, okay, we looked at the price of superhuman and calm on the secondary market. Here's the last valuation, current valuation. We know management. We asked, you know, Raul and Alex and Michael over at um, and superhuman, would they mind if we buy secondary directly from their folks or we bought them on the secondary market and then you get exposure?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:32Jason Calacanis?

  It'd be kind of interesting, right? Cause there's the Destiny 100 or something. The publicly traded one that has SpaceX and it kind of flies all over the place. I talked a lot about it. Anyway.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:41Jason Calacanis?

  Lots of interesting ideas. Congratulations on the huge valuation to the team over there. I know we used ramp cards. I don't know if we currently use them, but I remember during a conference or we had a getaway. And it was really cool. Maybe, I don't know if they gave you one, but we gave ramp cards to everybody who was traveling.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 43:57Jason Calacanis?

  I think we might be using Mercury for this now or another company. But anyway, I remember specifically a couple of years ago, we used ramp cards. 25 people working on a conference. I think it was actually for the all in summit one. We just issued them ramp cards for their expenses and we just said, use this for your expenses. We see the expenses coming in and then, you know, for Ubers, we can do an Uber account because they have Uber for business, but for everything else, here's your ramp card. And then we can turn them off or take them from, you know, a thousand dollar limit per card down to zero. So if somebody goes, you know, AWOL and takes, you know, their ramp card and wants to go to 11 or whatever the club in Miami is and hit the strip club or the, you know, erotic review at 11, they, you know, the most damage they can do is a thousand in funny money.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  I don't know how far that will get you at a strip club in Miami. I have no personal experience, but I don't think we'll go very far. Um, really briefly on, on the ramp story, just to kind of add a couple of quick notes here for folks.

• 44:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  The company is now on an annualized revenue run rate of 700 million up from 300 million before. I thought that was very impressive.

• 45:02Jason Calacanis?

  Times 20 is 14 billion and you said the valuation was?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  13.

• 45:06Jason Calacanis?

  And we don't know their growth rate though, do we?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  We don't know the growth rate recently. I also didn't know their gross margins because we're talking about payments to some degree.

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  Do we have any number of revenue from 2010, 2012, a whisper number 2013? That would be interesting because then we could do the two-year growth on average, which wouldn't be perfect. But we should assume this company is growing greater than 30% year over year. In order to get a 20 times top line revenue, remember that's price to sales, not price to earnings. So on a price to sales basis, this is 20 times. Palantir kind of broke all records with like whatever peak that 60, 70, 80 times their top line revenue with I think 30 or 40% growth. You know, companies like Airbnb and Uber might be trading at two, three, four times growth, and those are incredible businesses.

• 45:55Jason Calacanis?

  So just to give people some context here, private companies do get a great price to sales ratios. Meme stocks that have great leadership and great products can get a great, you know, an otherworldly price to sales ratio. But eventually these are going to come down to the price to earnings, which is their profits, as you pointed out.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  Found some stuff for us here. Before it turned three, so in March of 2022, the company had reached 100 million in annualized revenue.

• 46:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  And summer of 2023, that was 300, now it's 700.

• 46:26Jason Calacanis?

  Doubling.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Uh, yes.

• 46:28Jason Calacanis?

  50% to doubling, probably.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Very impressive. And then I just want to throw in one more thing. Secondary, Jason, $150 million with secondary takes a lot of pressure off the company to go public. Even by current standards of 500 million in revenue before you go public, it's above that. We're not going to see an IPO for a while. I was trying to sort out why. I was reading some stuff from Charles Hudson, precursor ventures, love that guy. And he's had a blog post about this, had a couple of things that I want to just say. One was he's not sure that these companies, leadership teams really see the benefit of going public. And the emergence of secondary liquidity for founders and early employees means you no longer need IPOs. And I think those things combined with the fact that companies are going faster and therefore they're creating value more quickly. And therefore, why would you want to let your amazing business go public and lose control over it?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  So I think there's a lot of things that are coming together to allow companies like Ramp to do this. Even if you and I would love to see an S1, I don't think the people with money in Ramp are in a hurry.

• 47:22Jason Calacanis?

  There are reasons to go public, even with this vibrant private market, we can stay private forever. Liquidity to do bigger transactions, M and A, but because M and A was taken off the table, you took that public currency as a weapon off the table, better hygiene. And a more fluid liquidity market would be the other reasons. But again, as you point out, the private markets reward this. The question is, can the LPs, you know, who are early investors, liquidate to somebody else? And we saw this with Stripe, I think, was it Stripe that Sequoia famously had in the earliest funds? I believe it was even in the scouts fund that I did Uber in, and I think Sam Altman did it. They offered their

• 48:04Jason Calacanis?

  later stage funds to buy that 12 year old position or whatever it was. And so that was like, really interesting, because now you've got the same firm selling to their a different LP base under the same moniker, Sequoia. And you just have to sign off on that. You have a little more paperwork, back to wet signatures. So people understand, like, hey, and this happened, I think, with also SpaceX folks, earliest stage fund in there. And then they offer their other LPs who might want access to it. So now you're going to have funds buying and selling in the same round. This would be the equivalent of me selling to Masa personally as a scouts, as a Sequoia scout, and then buying from,

• 48:48Jason Calacanis?

  let's say, launch fund in the secondary before it goes public. I didn't do that. But that's what we're going to see, which is then Andreessen Horowitz, Launch even, other folks are going to look more like a market maker in some ways, selling their early stage investments to the same LP base, or maybe a deeper pocketed LP base, but still part of their network. That's actually going to lock in for the top 6% of the country, qualified purchasers and accredited investors, all of these wins. And what does it do? It locks out everybody in America who's not an accredited investor. Profoundly unfair. This is where the Trump, you know, administration could do something with an accredited investor test and solve a lot of problems.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Before you get on that soapbox, I think that what's important to say is, it's not just accredited investors, it's accredited investors with access to the funds that have access to the deals.

• 49:44Jason Calacanis?

  And even, an even tighter subset.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, I mean, 6% to 0.006%. I mean, there's not that many VCs out there. Uh, all that's to me a little bit disappointing because I would love to see more public market appreciation for companies. But I'll just say that there is one company, Jason, that people say is going to list lots of news from Bloomberg and the information that CoreWeave is finally going to go public. Um, this is a Twister company, raised 13.4 billion dollars in total capital, inclusive of secondaries. But Jason, we talked about NeoClouds, these GPU-based data centers that people rent to run their AI compute. And we've had a lot of questions about the economics because chips are expensive, right?

• 50:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. The information got some data.

• 50:28Jason Calacanis?

  Or as people in the industry call it, the disinformation. That's what these seasoned CEOs call it in the, uh, in the private chat. They do. I don't call it that. They do.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  They, why is that? Because they're salty at its success or salty that they might get things wrong occasionally?

• 50:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think it has to do with the general standoffishness of the people who are building stuff in the world and the people are reporting on them.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:50Jason Calacanis?

  The intersection of, you know, the Dunning Kruger effect and ah, they wrote about my company. Half the stuff is correct, half is wrong. Obviously it is. Journalists are just have half the information.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, people want to tell us more stuff. We could do a better job. Well, I mean, so I think any, any framing that I disagree with is, is clickbait, you know? I mean, people have, hey, this is everyone. Yeah. Where was I? Oh, yeah. So the information, uh, they reported that, uh, CoreWeave's revenue in 2024 was about 1.9 billion. Okay. Eight X year over year. Super impressive. But here's the kicker, Jason. Uh, let's play a fun game. I love putting you on the spot.

• 51:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  Guess what CoreWeave's capex costs were last year?

• 51:29Jason Calacanis?

  All right. CoreWeave has raised 13 billion to date. They are going to go public at 30, 40 billion. They are one of the top purchasers of GPUs. They got ahead of the line and they did this a long time ago. But you said last year, so in 2024, which would be a peak year, but they had to put those orders in. Previously, I'm gonna guess maybe five billion.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  You know, my guess was four, so you're closer than I was. It was actually 8.5.

• 51:57Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, okay. It's a lot of GPUs.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  It's a lot of GPUs.

• 52:01Jason Calacanis?

  Whatever these GPUs are going for, a quarter million, 150, I guess, depending on how they're spec'd out. It's a lot of GPUs. And as we've seen, people will keep vacillating between we don't have a use for these GPUs and we don't have enough GPUs to use. We don't know how to use them. We don't have, we can't get this job done unless we get more. So both things can be true concurrently and we can vacillate back and forth because human beings are innovative little buggers, you know, like we're gonna figure out, oh, I know how to do this with 90% less technology and less hardware, congratulations. And then you're gonna hit another roadblock where you're gonna be like, oh, you know what? We could have indexed every frame of every HD video in the world.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  And yes.

• 52:41Jason Calacanis?

  You know, then made training data based on this. And if we make synthetic data or we do deep research and we do 200 webpage analysis concurrently, then have, you know, 10 threads, put those deep research analyses together and then we do another 10 to check the facts on those. Like, that's what's happening with these deep research things is they figured out with the inference side, hey, how do we put all this inference to use? I know, we'll just have it fact-checked. Or, by the way, now we're gonna have agents running. Here's an idea. You did these 500 queries last year. We're gonna do those 500 every day, twice a day, a thousand a day on your behalf, 365. And when you wake up every morning, we're gonna say, hey, by the way, here's the interesting things that changed since you last did these searches.

• 53:26Jason Calacanis?

  Just like Superhuman now is going through and pre-populating and doing the summaries of your emails, Raul disclosed on Wednesday. Uh, check that episode out. Go to This Week in Startups and then follow along. He disclosed that they do those summaries even if you never see them. So they have them there. This is like pre-cashing stuff, you know? Very interesting. They're gonna do your replies in advance. They're gonna do the sorts in advance. In other words, things are getting so cheap that they're like, oh, there's extra inference here. Let's just do your entire mailbox. And since they charge a buck a day or 30 bucks a month, whatever it is, they can do that, whereas Gmail cannot.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but here's the thing. It's already so cheap. You can do that for a buck a day? Oh, my gosh, that's absolutely astounding.

• 54:08Jason Calacanis?

  That's what they charge, which means they're probably spending five cents a day on this.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  That's insanely cheap and very exciting. As a little addendum, before we jump into a kind of what we call Founder Corner, I think. Uh, why is Corbeef going public? And why is it happening after we just said that no one's gonna go public? The answer is the CapEx number, everybody. If you're not building software, you have to buy a lot of stuff. You need more money. You go public, you raise a lot of money. Tesla did this when it was public and raised bajillions of dollars very effectively. And worked great. So I think they're going public to have a liquid currency to raise more money and so forth. Let's bring our dear friend Lon Harris on.

• 54:44Jason Calacanis?

  Long editorial director.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Is gonna talk to us about a founder hack. And this Lon is one that I adore. It's from Matt Turck. And is kind of one of those, what if he took the world and turned it upside down ideas?

• 54:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  He tweeted this the other day. I thought it was interesting. Uh, a few quotes and how they would apply to a few of our biggest sort of most successful startup companies, tech companies at the moment. Don't do services well, but what about talent here? Hardware is hard. What about Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, SpaceX? Selling to the government is awful. What about Anduril? Uh, so generic startup advice is often terribly wrong, is his conclusion based on all of these sort of conventional wisdom gone wrong ideas.

• 55:29Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you gotta parse each one of them. Two of them or three of them actually overlap or two of the three kind of overlap. Hardware is hard and selling to the government is awful. If you look at, you know, SpaceX and Anduril, they're both doing both of those things. Hardware is incredibly hard. Tesla and SpaceX showed and Nvidia, Apple, of course, did it a long time ago. But that startups could actually do hardware. Hardware is hard is a warning. It's not necessarily don't do it. It's just going to be super capital intensive. And selling to the government is awful. The way I would say it, instead of awful, which is, you know, kind of a nebulous word is it's slow. It's slow. It's time consuming. So you put those two together. What that means is if you do succeed, you have

• 56:14Jason Calacanis?

  a great mote. So incredibly hard to displace a company like SpaceX and those contracts because, gosh, you know, look at how much has been invested over 15 years in that company and their technology. So it is good advice for founders to know that hardware is hard. It's great advice to know selling to the government is difficult. I can tell you in education, a perfect example, the companies and the startups that tried to sell to the government for education had a really hard time. Yep. The cycle is incredibly long, incredibly slow. The people who then sold directly to consumers, Duolingo for language, brilliant.org, one of our startups for math, programming,

• 56:57Jason Calacanis?

  etc. Or in the healthcare space, Fitbod and Nutrisense, Calm from our portfolio did wonderfully. And you can actually hybrid this lawn. Sell to consumers first, perfect it, and then upsell to the government. So if, you know, I think calm.com and some of those other folks in the wellness space now, they are going to sell not just to consumers, but maybe they get covered by healthcare in their second decade. So you can kind of thread the needle, which is get that immediate feedback from customers, make it work with them. And then the low, slow, methodical, larger purchase orders from corporations can come in after that. Tonebase, another one selling

• 57:38Jason Calacanis?

  directly, you know, to sell people how to play musical instruments. I'd love to see Tonebase at some point, you know, a college or a high school could offer Tonebase and Brilliant to their entire student population. And then if the students use it, they pay, or the school pays, or the school pays for, you know, whatever, 10,000 a year to have Brilliant available to all thousand students. 10 bucks a year is a lot less than 10 bucks a month. You know, you get the idea. So, Angel University. I started doing this like where I teach people based on my book, Angel, How to Become Angel Investors. And you know, if I don't charge for it, nobody shows up. So I charge for it. 500 bucks for the virtual, $1,000 for the one in person.

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  I'm doing it April 23rd, New York City. It's going to be at a dim sum restaurant. And then I, this has to be updated, but any profits from Angel University. So like if I hosted a dim sum restaurant, we take the cost of the dim sum out. What's left over, we donate. All right. For Lon Harris and Alex Wilhelm, he's at Lons, a at L O N S four letter club. At Alex, also four letter club, A L E X, and me coming in dead last. Dead last. With five letters in my hands. Five letters. I'm at Jason. We'll see you all next time in this week in Star Wars. Bye bye.