Student Roy Lee Hacks Amazon, SBF's Jailhouse Chat + more! | E2095

Timestamps: (0:00) Roy Lee's hack and Amazon's reaction (3:03) MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy(4:29) Market reactions to Trump's policies(6:33) Creating value in current market conditions(8:00) South by Southwest highlights (10:19) Coda. Empower your startup with Coda's Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www. Coda.io/twist (12:03) The $20,000 electric car concept(16:18) Electric unicycles as a startup category (19:12) Vanta. TWiST listeners automate your SOC2 and get $1,000 off at http://www.vanta.com/twist (20:31) Electric unicycles trend discussion(21:31) Guest introduction: Roy Lee(23:32) Roy Lee's background and startup idea(25:41) Technical coding tests and InterviewCoder (30:14) LinkedIn Jobs. Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist (32:01) Amazon's reaction to InterviewCoder and Columbia's actions(37:03) Roy Lee's future and startup funding discussion(41:19) Hiring, revenue, and fundraising strategies(44:37) Venture capital dynamics and maintaining company control(47:52) Capturing audience before investment and SBF's legal issues(57:57) ServiceNow acquires Moveworks(1:00:00) Impact of Tiger's peak valuations on LPs and IRR calculations* 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 Roy: X: https://x.com/im_roy_lee LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-lee-goat/ * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:19) Coda. Empower your startup with Coda's Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www. Coda.io/twist (19:12) Vanta. TWiST listeners automate your SOC2 and get $1,000 off at http://www.vanta.com/twist (30:14) 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I have all the offers from Capital One, TikTok, Meta, but those are all like, like practice for the big one, which I knew was going to be Amazon. Cause that's like the, the thing that everybody knows. The technology is really not rocket science here. Like I'm putting together two, two concepts that have existed before in the past. It's just LLMs kind of make it like everything hackable.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  So you ended up using this service called Interview Coder and got an offer from Amazon. And then instead of accepting it, you posted a video on YouTube of the actual process of using your tool.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Oh yeah.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  To hoodwink the Amazon guys. And then someone snitched and then everything kind of exploded. Did you leak it yourself or did you get snitched on?

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Someone saw the video when it was at about like 20,000 views. Some Amazon executive saw the video and then they reported it to Columbia and all they did was post the letter that they sent to Columbia.

• 0:46Jason Calacanis?

  So they, wait a second. Amazon's a rat? Amazon's a cheese eater? They ate cheese on you? They ratted you out to the university?

• 0:55Speaker 00

  That's exactly what happened.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  This week in startups is brought to you by Coda. Coda empowers your startup by bringing words, tables and teams together. Strategize, plan and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.io/twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get a thousand dollars off for a limited time at vanta.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.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. It is Monday. It is March 10th. There's a lot going on, including here in Austin, Texas, South by Southwest. With me again, Alex Wilhelm. How you doing Alex?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  I'm doing fantastically. Spring is in the air. There's a spring in my step. I didn't realize how sad I was, but now I'm happy again.

• 1:52Jason Calacanis?

  Great. I'm taking my daughter skiing next week, so I'm very excited to get my last week of two final weeks of skiing in to try to hit my stretch goal of 41 days of skiing. I'm at 24, so I got a little ways to go here, but I might get it done. If not, I gotta go to New Zealand and we'll be or somewhere, I don't know, South America somewhere. If you want to follow along on This Week in Startups, go to thisweekinstartups.com/docket. You'll see the docket. We go live Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 12 p.m. Texas time, 1 p.m. right coast, 10 a.m. left coast, and about 80% of the show winds up in the podcast feed. Well, you can watch it on your favorite podcast player or YouTube, but you get a little extra show, 20% more show, some call-ins and some fun and some banter if you follow us there.

• 2:37Jason Calacanis?

  He's at Alex on Twitter X. I'm at Jason on Twitter X. Some community news. We have a Twist subreddit, r/twiststartups. We have a Twitter community. It's in the docket if you want to go there. You also have the Twist ticker. This is where we talk about startup news and the Twist 500, the 500 top private companies that we're trying to get on the program this year. And you can subscribe to the Twist ticker at thisweekinstartups.com/ticker.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Jason, before we do any serious news, though, can I bring up the fact that MicroStrategy has put together a, quote, "sales agreement" to which they're going to put out $21 billion worth of stock to buy more Bitcoin?

• 3:14Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. That's, um, that's wow. We've had a big couple of weeks in crypto. Obviously, the president said he would be the crypto president, and he is starting to do just that. There was a crypto summit on Friday, and David Sacks, who is the crypto czar, of course, came on All In and did a brief discussion with me over kind of, I call him the wolf of the White House, just kind of cleaning up the mess and the things that are getting knocked over sometimes. When Trump tweets something early or they do something interesting in crypto, I'm being, trying to be a little generous here. Of the sort of captain chaos that can happen with Trump. You know, he says a lot of stuff and people take it seriously.

• 3:59Jason Calacanis?

  Always remember Jake House 72 hour rule of Trump waits 72 hours before reacting. It's hard to do.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  I try to apply that because I think it's actually pretty good advice to not lose my mind every time Trump is like, we're going to buy Greenland and put it into South America.

• 4:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  But the problem with that applied to the tariffs issue in particular is that it feels like the winds can shift like, there's never a point in which there's a decision or a thing and then you can wait and then see, it changes so much in between.

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, if you were a day trader, you know, you got to trade on the Trump news all the time because it does impact markets. But if you're a civilian and you got your money in the, you know, stock market and you had a long-term outlook.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:36Jason Calacanis?

  I think it applies, but you know, the stock market's got to get used to this as well because the stock market does react in real time. They don't pay attention to my 72 hour rule. And, you know, you're just going to have an easier, better life if you deploy the 72 hour rule. For micro strategies, they have 400,000 Bitcoin or 500,000 Bitcoin.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  It's somewhere in there, but the shares of that company are off 14.4% today. Now there is a sell off, Jason, but like that's still a brute. No matter what happens in the world, you don't want to lose one seventh of your market cap in a single day.

• 5:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's going to have severe volatility. Obviously the markets right now are down one and a half percent for the Dow 30, almost 3.7% for NASDAQ. So this is pretty significant sell off. Obviously the tariff stuff and, you know, fears of a recession, stagflation, just a lot of fear and uncertainty out there. Fear, uncertainty and doubt, no bueno for markets, great opportunity to buy the dip. Obviously if you have any cash laying around in my mind, if I did, if I was sitting on a ton of cash, you know, I'd probably be selectively nibbling on stuff, but

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I think the, the net asset value of micro strategies and the valuation are obviously going to at some point crossover. Just like, you know, any inevitability, Trump's popularity rating went like 10 pips over, you know, to disapproval. Took Biden seven months to get there. It took Trump seven weeks. So the honeymoon is clearly over now. And here we are into what people forgot, which was, you know, there is a chaos trade. There is a captain chaos, as I call the president's alter ego. He can create a lot of chaos in markets. What's important for founders and market participants, I think, is to focus on creating value, right? And so we're going to do that here on the show. I'm going to just create a ton of value, value for value.

• 6:23Jason Calacanis?

  If you tune in, maybe you go to some of the advertisers and, you know, use their services if they're appropriate. And then we provide them value by bringing the audience together. And there's just a ton of docket to get through. Microstrategies will trade, I predict, at less to their net asset value. So if they have 400,000 Bitcoin, or let's say they have 500,000, which makes them, I think, the number one owner of Bitcoin now. Maybe the government, US government is the other. 500,000 times eight, 40 billion. What's the market cap? So, I mean, they should trade at, I think, 80% of 40 billion would be what I would say is fair market, 32 billion.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Well, now they're at 62 after losing 14. Now 65% today. So still a little spicy for our, for our tastes, but they are going to buy a lot more Bitcoins. So I think people that are hopeful that this will-

• 7:15Jason Calacanis?

  People will give them money, right? That requires cash, right? So this is an offering.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  It's true. They're not the market offering over time. So there won't be $21 billion in one day, but it does seem that they are still, without slowing down, perhaps even speeding up, Jason, still going forward with this strategy. So you gotta give Michael points, Michael Saylor. He believes it.

• 7:34Jason Calacanis?

  He's invited on the program anytime to discuss the strategy. I think he should trade at below the net asset value. He believes he should trade at above. Right now it's trading at a 50% premium, I believe. So maybe it's 1.5 times, 1.4 times. There's a bunch of websites that will help you track that.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:53Jason Calacanis?

  I will say, it's pretty interesting. South by Southwest is back in a major way. I have five speaking gigs events this week. I did opening keynote with Bill Gurley on Friday. Where he interviewed me, which is kind of weird since he's always been a mentor toward me to me. And for him to interview me has felt a little bit weird, but that was quite fun. We did a full hour and you know, the room was like giant room, two thirds full, uh, which, you know, it's the first day. So the people are still getting here. Saturday, uh, Dignation, I got to hang out with the boys from Dignation, Alex and Kevin Rose. If you don't know, Dignation was like a podcast or web show before podcasting existed. They relaunched Dig On Stage, dig.com is coming, so there'll be another Reddit. So we'll probably participate in that. I'm an advisor to the firm.

• 8:39Jason Calacanis?

  I haven't signed the paper or whatever, but I told them I'd be an advisor. It was fun. Chris Sacco is there. Tim Ferriss interviewed Ev Williams about his new app. Have you tried his new app yet?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  This is the private social network FM Reserves?

• 8:52Jason Calacanis?

  It is called, uh, Mozi, as in Mozi on a long, M O Z I. It's kind of foursquare-ish. It's beautifully designed, simple app. You upload your address book. And then it finds your friends and then you can put in your trips. But it doesn't just like sync your calendar or anything crazy like that. It's quite manual. You hit the plus key. You say where you're going or a local plan or a trip. And if it's like firm or not. I mean, then you could share the plan with people and, um, it was quite nice to use it during South by, because I found out about two or three events I would not have known about. So here we are back to the future.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  I love this. I also love that the, the latest update to Mozi has brought in local plans for people that aren't always on a plane.

• 9:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  You can definitely tell though, who is behind this. It's, uh, people who fly a whole lot like Ev does, I'm sure. And like yourself, frankly, but for those of us who stay put.

• 9:42Jason Calacanis?

  It's for the executive class. I think probably in the nomadic, you know, class. Interestingly, at the event, you know, I, I, I always try to check the Tik Tok to see what the kids are up to. And, um, Rivian is underwriting the whole event, by the way. Super interesting to see Rivian. They've had a little bit of a tough, a tough time. I see that they're doing some commercial business, which is interesting. They launched today a Ben and Jerry's collaboration. So I think there are, people don't know, but Rivian, do they build the trucks for Amazon as well?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yes, that was their, that was their kind of keystone partnership through the IPO. And if I recall, now they're also selling those vehicles to other people, not just Amazon.

• 10:20Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:04Jason Calacanis?

  And the beauty of Coda is it's so flexible. We can use it for everything from tracking those companies to tracking their pitches, to board updates, and it all can live in one place. And we don't get software overload. We don't have 20 different SaaS products that everybody needs to learn. They need to learn how to use one. So instead of juggling all these different tools, you've got one platform and the whole team is super organized. It's really intuitive. The workflows are seamless and getting more powerful by the day. So here's your call to action. Coda empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track goals effectively. Take advantage of this limited time offer just for startups. Go to coda.io/twist today and get six months free of the team plan.

• 11:45Jason Calacanis?

  That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash twist to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. Really interesting to see Rivian here kind of showing off their doing. And this is, I think, a trend, which I want to start with and propose here, which is the 20K new car. The 20K new car is my new trend. 20K all day. I think that's what we'll call it. Here's Rivian. That's their truck. You can see that's the very iconic, similar looking truck, the Amazon truck you see in your neighborhood. So this kind of truck is called a Sprinter or like a Ford Transit. It's a specific type of utility truck typically they have. And you can see you can use it for a mobile ice cream like a kind of situation. So kind of interesting.

• 12:29Jason Calacanis?

  That to me is smart for Rivian because those corporate customers will be consistent in a market where, you know, maybe we're going to see a 20K car. So this is like a new trend. You know, you come here and you hear trends. We've been talking about BYD a whole bunch. We've been talking about the robotaxi being built for, I think Elon said he can get it down to 35K or something, 30K. Pretty typical to buy a 10 to 20K car in China right now. In the Middle East, in South America, you know, Indonesia, Singapore, all over Asia, you're going to start seeing 20K, 30K new cars. And some of them might have self-driving on them. They'll be battery powered. So here it is. Rivian Peck will be available to everyone in Volkswagen's latest EV. So this is,

• 13:14Jason Calacanis?

  I think a sign that maybe Rivian is having some challenges. They got to get some partnerships going. They need money. Other people have needs like drivetrains or technology. So very interesting trend. What do you think of that?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  This is what it looks like from the front, from the side, from the back, from this. And let me tell you, Jason, this is precisely and exactly what I have wanted. Look at this thing.

• 13:37Jason Calacanis?

  Why is this for you?

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Because I live in a town that was designed for horses. And if you live in Dallas or Houston, you live in a town designed for cars. Big, wide streets, good turning radius. But here in Providence, if you drive a full-size American pickup, you're essentially driving a tank through town. So I need a car that is electric because I want to go electric, is small and is fancy. And those are actually hard to find because everyone wants to sell you a more expensive vehicle. So I love this. This looks perfect for me.

• 14:06Jason Calacanis?

  I always felt like BMW made a mistake with the Mini Cooper, which I don't know what the entry price is for the Mini Cooper, but I felt they should have got that like down to 20K. And I think they probably start more like in the 35, 40. I guess they're going for like a luxury small car with that hatchback version. But I do believe these cars could get young people into car ownership again at a time when, well, think about it. Is there anything like?

• 14:33Jason Calacanis?

  Desirable at driving, no offense to like a Honda Fit, I think. What are like the entry level 25K cars like the Honda Fit, like these little gas powered, I don't know what the entry level Toyota is. It's not the Camry or the Honda Accord. It's kind of like the Honda Fit. And there's a Toyota one. They're like rinky ding cars. They feel cheap. They're not sexy in any way, but I do think a sexy, fun Volkswagen Bug type car, which this kind of feels like. Yeah, Mitsubishi Mirage 2.5, cheapest car.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Cheapest cars. The number one got a 2.5 out of 10.

• 15:05Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. Is it 17K? Oh my God, look, it's 18K for a Nissan Versa.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's cheap. Not bad. And the Mitsubishi Mirage G4, the Sentra, and then the electric Elantra. And so there's, there's cheap stuff out there, but not really in the electric departments. Here's the question that I have, though. $20,000 electric cars, if they become popular, and let's say the, the, the big three likes to sell you a truck for 80, does that collapse the total value of North American car shipments? Because that could impact Tesla, Rivian.

• 15:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I, I think this is just going to be a very interesting confluence of like, a lot of different trends. You got the tariff trend, you got the EV trend, you got the self-driving trend, you've got the going full Uber trend, like, why should I own a car? And so to every action, there's a reaction. And so in this like startup landscape, what we're seeing is car companies saying, we hear you. You are a young person. You don't think you need a car because of Lyft and Uber and Waymo and soon robotaxis from Tesla. You're commitment phobic? Hey, what if we lowered it down to 20 and it was an EV and it was kind of sexy? And, and, and. So that's what I think is happening here. And one of the great things about capitalism,

• 16:21Jason Calacanis?

  your cup is going to runneth over. Young people are zipping around on these, I'm getting obsessed with this other startup category. All right. So there's a really interesting person making these electric unicycles. Electric unicycles is the category. InMotion is the company. This is the state of the art one. It's the InMotion V13 Pro.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 16:43Jason Calacanis?

  $32.99. And look at how sexy this thing is. It's gorgeous.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, going downstairs. That's bold.

• 16:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, these things like you're watching it. See how it's got. And this is like the biggest state of the art one, but this guy's going probably 50, 60 miles an hour on it. There's like a 35 mile an hour one, but it can go up curbs. So, and it's got a handle and you can walk it in restaurants or whatever and you can pick it up. So these things are going to change the world. I think this is what a Segway should have been.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:13Jason Calacanis?

  And there's like a model from like maybe a thousand all the way up to, like I said, 3,500, different speeds, different battery lives, different power profiles, different acceleration. You gotta wear a helmet with it, but there's a guy zipping around Austin, and he is cleaning up because he doesn't need to park a car or lock a bike. He is, I follow him on YouTube and TikTok. He'll go drive in, pick up the burrito and get it to your place. And he doesn't have to stop. Look at how cool these things are. How cool of a world would this be if they were everywhere? You just gotta wear, you know, like Segways? My wife was on a Segway. We went on a Segway tour in Paris. It's like a great speed to go at. I think you're going like, I don't know, eight, nine, 10 miles an hour on a

• 17:57Jason Calacanis?

  Segway, maybe up to 12. These things can go 20 or 30. But you don't fall on them as easily now because they have the, the gyros in them. They help you not fall and they can go on bumps. But here's like the Segway tour in Paris and we were riding on this thing. It's like the great speed to go around. They have these tours all over Europe. The problem was, my wife was like talking to somebody and she, just the wheel hit like a little piece of stone that was like attached to a turn or something like a wall. And boom, she went flying off of it. She was fine, you know, she had the elbow pads on and the wrist guards, but you could break your, your, your wrist. But see how they're driving along Conbridge and we just, she kinda just clipped onto a little lamppost or something like the edge of one of those walls. I think that's like the interesting future. What do you think,

• 18:42Jason Calacanis?

  Alex? You ride one of those around P-Town? Is this a P-Town kinda thing?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  I would, because I'm married and have children. So the dweeb factor doesn't, doesn't, doesn't impact me. The thing that I'll say is I have, in San Francisco, they've had earlier versions of these for some time and they have acquired to them a certain reputation for, for, for dweebery. And so as we look to save the birth rate crisis in North America, perhaps we should get back to muscle cars before unicycles.

• 19:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, that's what I want to get is that new Corvette ZR1, the CR1. I'm drooling Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers. Some people call them whales. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid. Certificates like SOC 2 or ISO 27001 are the keys to building trust and unlocking these opportunities. But they take time and energy, pulling you away from building and shipping a beautiful, great product. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're your partner. Vanta is the all in one compliance solution, helping startups like yours and mine get audit ready

• 19:50Jason Calacanis?

  and build a strong security foundation quickly and painlessly. How do they do it? Well, Vanta automates the manual security tasks that slow you down, helping you streamline your audit. And the platform connects you with trusted VC SOs to build your program, auditors to get you through your audits quickly, and a marketplace for essentials like pen testing. So here's your call to action. Whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth, Vanta makes compliance easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many Y Combinator tech stars and launch startups who trust Vanta. Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off at vanta.com/twist. That's V A N T A dot com slash T W I S T.

• 20:31Jason Calacanis?

  I know this sounds stupid that a unicycle would actually become like a winning format, but these electric unicycles are really going to change things. Because you can drive them indoors. And then they also are kind of like off road vehicles. So people are really getting into these. You can spend between a thousand and like 3,000 on these and they look really sharp. These are like something out of Blade Runner. So look for this as a trend. Electric unicycles are coming. So I want to meet one of the startup founders. These things are all the rage in Hong Kong and China. Why are they the rage? Well, because you can drive them right into your apartment. People are in Austin, driving into.

• 21:17Jason Calacanis?

  Restaurants, picking up the to-go orders and then riding to people's apartments, driving into the lobbies, or they have a handle on them. So when you get in the lobby, if the door person's like, "Hey, no bueno."

• 21:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:29Jason Calacanis?

  You just pick it up. You just pick it up.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Speaking about young people zipping around and doing things, we have a guest today, Jason, that is a student still, or was a student, and recently found fame for essentially hacking the big technology technical interview game. Now, if you've ever applied for a job at a Fang company as a developer, I'm sure you're familiar with the technical interview. I don't know, binary trees, inverted linked lists, I don't know, there's buzzwords out there about how these go. But one guy, Roy Lee from Columbia, made a system to hack around it, posted the video online, got snitched on, got in trouble with Columbia, got his Amazon offer yoinked, but he turned it into a product, and we love founder hackers here. So please welcome to the show. It's Roy Lee. Hey, Roy.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  What's up, guys?

• 22:12Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, Roy. Looks like you're the main character.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Thank you, thank you.

• 22:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. So before they come in and arrest you for crimes against interviewing, where are you from?

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Sawony, Georgia.

• 22:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you grew up in Georgia. I guess you were a hacker kid? You've been on the internet since day one, yeah?

• 22:30Speaker 00

  Something like that, yeah.

• 22:32Jason Calacanis?

  And when did you learn to become a developer?

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Honestly, I don't know. Like, I wasn't really interested in programming until after high school ended, to be honest. Like, I started learning at a kid when I was 19. So it was for Silicon Valley, that's like 65, so.

• 22:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly. You're so far behind the curve, yeah.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, and traditionally in high school, I thought I was gonna be an investment banker or work for Goldman Sachs, which is like the craziest thing ever, right?

• 22:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, listen, it's an interesting job, but what you're doing is you're just moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. It's not actually fun. It just happens to pay well at the start because it takes your soul and it erases years of your life. So if you'd like to, like, give up 10 years of your life and then at the end of it be like, "What just happened?", that's what it's like. So you're at Columbia. What year are you in?

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm a sophomore right now.

• 23:18Jason Calacanis?

  You're a sophomore, okay. So you were there during all those crazy protests last year, huh?

• 23:23Speaker 00

  I was not, actually. I transferred in here last semester. So last year, I was at community college, and then I just transferred into Columbia, and now this is like my first and a half semester.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  So you got to Columbia and then immediately just threw a grenade behind you as you were walking in?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  I mean, I got to Columbia and like the first thing I like, I just knew I wasn't going to be here till graduation. So I went and I talked to 50, 50 people who seemed smart. And I asked every single one of them, hey, do you want to start a company with me? And the one guy that said yes is the guy that I ended up doing all the energy cutter stuff with.

• 23:52Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. All right. So tell us, what, what, what's the idea for this startup? And then tell me about the event. Let's talk about the event.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. So yeah, this, this, this is the website. I mean, uh, the, the thesis is very simple. We code, uh, we could sell technical interviews. I've been around for something like 20 years. Uh, I don't know a single developer that likes them. And I myself went through the gauntlet. I did about like 600 questions, which is definitely like I'd probably say probably standard deviation or two above the average, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist. So, so I felt like I had to get it right. But it was, it was just not a fun time. I love programming when I, when I, when I started because it's exciting to build things. This doesn't really teach you how to build things at all. It's just like a massive piece of time. So I thought, what is the most viral stunt I can do to get rid of this? Cause of course you need to be famous on Twitter if you want to be a founder. And also

• 24:45Jason Calacanis?

  So you have to get the audience first. So explain to people what these coding tests are and why they exist in your mind.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll, I'll sit you down. Imagine you're like an 18 year old freshman at the University of Minnesota and I'm some big bad Amazon exec. And I'll ask you, hey, can you find me all the inverse palindromic sub-sequences of even length while doing a handstand and 10 jumper jacks? And essentially it'll ask you some insane riddle, riddle-esque question that, um, like really, even if you were Albert Einstein, you wouldn't be able to solve this. So the challenge here is have you seen this problem before, solved it, memorized the solution? And can you regurgitate the memorized solution without acting like you've seen the problem before? And that's, that's the challenge.

• 25:24Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So it's a bit performative in your mind because you know, like it's, it's not actually testing how hard you work, your grit, well, how good of a teammate you'll be, you know, and what maybe it should be. It's just testing on your feet. Have you seen the question before? Kind of like the SATs in some ways, right? Like, have you seen these SAT questions before?

• 25:43Speaker 00

  Very similar. Very similar. My mom does an SAT preparatory academy. So I'm Oh, nice.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  So tell me about Interview Coder itself and how you built it and then actually used it to go through the Amazon process.

• 25:55Jason Calacanis?

  And what was the screamy show before? Just so we can explain it to the, yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  That was Roy's lead code profile showing off all of his work in lead code.

• 26:02Jason Calacanis?

  Lead code is a place where people go and do these tests, like just so we explain to the audience.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's like a, an agglomeration of all the problems that you might encounter. You can like go through the problems and you can, you can train yourself. It's like a little training camp for.

• 26:18Jason Calacanis?

  So this is like Kaplan SAT prep in a way.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 26:22Jason Calacanis?

  In a website. It's a, it's a, it's an independent company, right? It's not an open source project.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, independent company.

• 26:28Jason Calacanis?

  It's an independent company. I guess you pay for it. They got a premium version or something. That's how they make money.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so yeah, show us what you did and how you hacked the system, as it were.

• 26:40Speaker 00

  Essentially, I used pretty much all of the fall recruiting cycle as like, like practice grounds for testing the product. Like I have, I have all the offers from like Capital One, TikTok, Meta, but those are all like, like practice for the big one, which I knew was going to be Amazon. Cause that's like the, the thing that everybody knows. And the product was developed throughout the recruiting cycle, but the core product really only took me about four days to make. It's a very simple Electron app with a React front end. And the backend is some serverless functions that we host on Resell. Essentially, I mean, it's really simple, right? All you gotta do is like take a screenshot of the screen and then ask ChatGPT to solve a problem. The only thing that's hard is making it invisible.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  But Electron actually comes with a lot of native built-ins, like the technology is really not rocket science here. Like, like I'm putting together two, two concepts that have existed before in the past. It's just LLMs kind of make it like everything hackable.

• 27:31Jason Calacanis?

  When you have to take the test with an Amazon, they're doing it over Zoom, I assume, or some sort of service?

• 27:37Speaker 00

  They have like a custom screen sharing thing called, they use Amazon Chime, but a lot of, a lot of the interviews from what I hear from like my friends who are in people who are using the product, like sometimes they'll ask you to screen share, sometimes they don't.

• 27:48Jason Calacanis?

  So they want to watch you code. How long do these interviews typically take to them?

• 27:53Speaker 00

  The interview might be somewhere like 45 minutes to an hour, but they shave. About fifteen minutes for just talking time.

• 27:59Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So you got a half hour of practically writing code in front of them, answering their questions, showing that you can, you qualify for the job. And how long does it take to get one of these, you know, for the average person right now? Cause we, we've heard about static team size. They're not hiring a lot of people. People think, well, my developers are getting twenty, thirty percent faster every year. So why would I hire more developers? I can just cut the weak ones and make the best ones twenty percent stronger. So what's it like out there on the streets trying to get a developer job?

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, hiring market, well, I, to be honest, I've heard that the hiring market is brutal, but like, I'm, I'm really, I'm a sophomore. I don't really know what it was like two years ago. So I really couldn't tell you, but I've just heard.

• 28:35Jason Calacanis?

  It's brutal is what you hear. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. Very few jobs, so it's getting, they, they can demand more of everybody applying is, I guess, a simple way to say it. So in the old days, if you had four or five job offers, getting people to go on for two or three hours and do two or three interviews and code so much, maybe they wouldn't do it because they got a job offer so quick.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  But now things are quite different. And so you ended up using this service called Interview Coder and got an offer from Amazon. And then instead of accepting it, you posted a video on YouTube of the actual process of using your tool to hoodwink the Amazon guys. And then someone snitched and then everything kind of exploded. Did you leak it yourself or did you get snitched on?

• 29:14Speaker 00

  Uh, well, someone saw the video when it was at about like twenty thousand views. Some Amazon executives saw the video and then they reported to Columbia. And all they did was post the letter that they sent to Columbia.

• 29:25Jason Calacanis?

  So they, wait a second, Amazon's a rat? Amazon's a cheese eater? They ate cheese on you? They ratted you out to the university?

• 29:33Speaker 00

  That's exactly what happened.

• 29:35Jason Calacanis?

  What, do we have the letter? I can see this. So now what's going on with your mom? Does your mom know yet?

• 29:40Speaker 00

  My mom, my mom learned about this like three days ago, like a couple of days ago.

• 29:44Jason Calacanis?

  You're screwed, dude. What did she say to you?

• 29:49Speaker 00

  Honestly, she's been pretty cool about it, like surprisingly extremely cool about it. She knows I'm doing something ballsy and, uh, knows I'm making a lot more money off this than I would have over a summer at Amazon. So she'd be happy.

• 30:00Jason Calacanis?

  So she's actually happy. She's a Gen Xer. Maybe she's a little punk rock, your mom. What's the story?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  No, not at all. She's about as Korean as you, as it gets.

• 30:08Jason Calacanis?

  I'm Korean, as you can tell. My wife's Korean and my daughter's all Korean. I'm, I'm deep in Korean culture. I get it.

• 30:15Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we all know if you're a founder, or even if you're a small business, you're thinking about your company 24/7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder. This is not clock in, clock out, nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's of course LinkedIn Jobs. 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

• 30:58Jason Calacanis?

  people, whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants. So do me a favor, don't take my word for it. I mean, you should, I know what I'm talking about. This is where I find my great people, but just understand that 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates. 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.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  I can't find the actual letter from Amazon on your Twitter, Roy, but I'm seeing repeated letters from Columbia University to you that you have posted, which is hilarious. And if I recall correctly, you're supposed to go in front of a probationary board or something tomorrow. Are you, are you going to go?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm already on probation, but I'm supposed to, there's like another disciplinary hearing that I'm supposed to go on tomorrow. And actually tomorrow is because they're mad that I leaked all the documents. So that's what I'm getting in trouble for.

• 32:11Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so you're fried. You're fried. You're barbecue sauce, man. You're, listen, you're going right. You're Korean barbecue right now, my friend.

• 32:22Jason Calacanis?

  You're the guy I'll be in this.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 32:23Jason Calacanis?

  You're the bogogi.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  I gotta say, I really, I really disagree because like, I mean, this is actually a little bit punk rock. It's a little bit hacky. And I feel like we've lost that vibe in Silicon Valley. And so I-

• 32:34Jason Calacanis?

  He's barbecue sauce. I'll tell you what's gonna happen here. Columbia, they need to have good relations with the hiring people. Somebody comes in and breaks this, I think you're done. I think they're kicking you out, bro.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Man, it's possible, it's possible.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Isn't that the idea, though? Because Roy, you said in an interview with Gizmodo, quote, "Most human intelligence work is going to be obsolete in two years." So I have two years to make something happen. So I presume that you didn't really intend to stay at Columbia and you just wanted to make a big splash, build something and make a lot of money off of it. I mean, Viva.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I, I, as soon as I got here, I sort of knew that I wouldn't be able to see myself through graduation. Um, I knew that I'd drop out eventually, but this would, it would be really funny if I got kicked out. Just cause I mean, like, like AI is growing so much faster than like everybody realizes. I mean, if you're on Twitter, then I think you're pretty early. If you know what Claude code is, you're pretty early. But the rest of the world hasn't caught up. And as soon as the rest of the world catches up and realizes, realizes how unintelligent you have to be, or how not competent at programming you can be and still make a really cool app. Like, there's probably like every CS major in the world could probably have figured out Interview Coder if they just hacked away at cursor for long enough.

• 33:39Jason Calacanis?

  So when you're using Interview Coder, you basically start doing a coding test. And is it doing the typing for you and faking the typing? Or is it just in one screen showing you the answer while you're in the other screen doing the other thing? Or you put it on your phone on your desk and you look down at your phone in the cradle? What's the best practice?

• 33:56Speaker 00

  It's like a desktop application that opens up. You can't have it do the typing for you because a lot of the, uh, they, A, it's very hard to randomize typing speed because the browsers will detect what, what, what sort, what sort of things that you're clicking. And B, a lot of these, a lot of these things that are, that are to type for you, they do the key down correctly, but they never get the key up right, which, which the browser all logs and that's, that's all suspicious, suspicious activity. The, um, the best way to do it is just to show you the answer, have a movable overlay that you can put right on top of your coder. So, so your eyes are like shifting, making it look like you're looking at different screens.

• 34:29Jason Calacanis?

  So you do a little, uh, I understand. Let me tell you what I used to do.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:33Jason Calacanis?

  I had the best hack. When I was in Severine High School, we would do a vocabulary test. So I was obsessed with cheating like you. I didn't consider it cheating, but I considered it like an interesting way to understand things. And what I figured out was if you took a yellow legal pad, an empty one, and then you put a piece of cardboard under the first piece of paper, right? Then you put a piece of paper on that top piece of paper. Then I would take a pen or a pencil and I would write nice and heavy what the vocabulary words were. And then I would say a word that would remind me of the definition. So I would go down that vocabulary list. Then I would take the top sheet, throw it in the garbage. Then I would take the cardboard underneath the first sheet and it would be blank. But

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  if I looked at it from an angle, I could see the indentations. Right. And certainly if I took my pencil and I, you know, did it from the side, it would fill it in and I could, it would reveal it. But I never needed to reveal it. I kid you not, I would do this for four pages down in my yellow legal pad. I would have four pages of notes about every definition, everything history. So when I was taking my notes in history class, I was doing this technique, four pages deep. Sometimes I would do it from the back of the legal pad. So if they came and they, you know, somebody needed an extra piece of paper, they would never know it was on the back one. So I just flip it, whatever. Yeah. The interesting thing about this hack was the nature of doing the hack and taking the notes meant I didn't need to use the notes.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Cause you actually did the work.

• 36:01Jason Calacanis?

  Cause I did the work. Right, yeah. But I was obsessed with how cheating occurs. And you came up with something really good was you figured out the eye contact was super important. And that's a tactic, right? So you figured, hey, if I had transparency layer this, they're never going to find it, right? Exactly. Super smart. Yes. I immediately thought you, you put it on your phone. So if I'm looking at eyesight here and I look down at my keyboard, down on my keyboard, I could have my phone down here mirroring my desktop. Yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  I have the Amazon letter here and you'll note that it says, do not distribute, but too late. You can't read this. I'm going to read the, the highlighted sections for you.

• 36:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Discussing Roy, quote, his performance was spectacular. And then quote, soon after, I, the Amazon guy, received a link to a YouTube video created by Roy in which he showed himself using an invisible cheating tool to gain an unfair and unapproved advantage during the interview process. Later on, we trusting Columbia to take proper action with regards to this student. So Amazon.

• 36:53Jason Calacanis?

  This is Amazon.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, bro. What's up with this?

• 36:57Jason Calacanis?

  Man, what a bunch of cheese eaters at Amazon.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  I mean, if Amazon could do this in a business process, they would get a high five and a promotion.

• 37:03Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, all right, so let's talk, let's talk brass tacks. You come from an independently wealthy family, or you know, they got like the 50K, 100K to spot you to do the startup or no?

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Not very wealthy, no.

• 37:16Jason Calacanis?

  Middle class.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I would say middle to upper middle class.

• 37:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, good. Same as me. I was like lower middle class, but yeah, same same zone. All right, listen, you're gonna get kicked out tomorrow, but if not, you're gonna leave anyway. So I like the punk rock nature of this. You haven't raised money yet, right? You're not even incorporated? Are you incorporated?

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we incorporated a few weeks ago when we saw the Stripe graph move and we were worried about taxes.

• 37:41Jason Calacanis?

  And did you take that angel check yet? You got our first investor yet? Oh, you got a check?

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we did the Z fellows program. So shout out Z fellows. This is a great program. So we have a couple thousand dollars.

• 37:53Jason Calacanis?

  What's Z fellows?

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Oh, it's like a, it's like a one week. Wow, Corey's gonna love this. Yeah, this is like a one week incubator. It's like your first.

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  One week 10K.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like your first check into Silicon Valley. Yeah, and they just get a bunch of, a bunch of young kids together.

• 38:08Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard of this.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  And then Corey writes your first check.

• 38:12Jason Calacanis?

  And so what do they get for that? 1% or something? It's an equity check?

• 38:16Speaker 00

  It's at a billion dollar post-fund evaluation. So essentially, it's a free $10,000.

• 38:21Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, but it converts at the next round. It's probably a billion dollar cap, but it converts at the next round. So you do Y Combinator or something, or you do R Accelerator, convert. All right. You have customers for this product or no?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, for Interview Coder, we have many customers, but we're thinking, I think that the underlying technology can be expanded into many different verticals. And that's what I'm thinking tackling next. There's not much money in technical recruiting and interviews, and there's even less money when you're on the side of the interview.

• 38:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's true. Right. You're not getting the 10K for placing the person. But I mean, listen, if you're smart enough to figure that part out, you can figure everything out. You can figure out the countermeasures. So you're an arms dealer. Now you can figure out actually a better way.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  Possible.

• 39:04Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, sometimes you sell, you know, F15s to one side and then, oh, other side bought F16s. They paid a higher price. They're a little bit faster. They got a, they got a 10 percentage. Maybe the other side should upgrade. You know, maybe they want to go to F18s. I don't know.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  How many customers do you have now? And how fast is that growing? Because you say it's a small market, but I also saw you guys added Hindi. So I presume that you have people demanding access to this product in their native language, too.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. We have, like, outside of America, India and China are probably, obviously, like, our biggest customers. But it's really largely Americans. I think it's probably 75% Americans. Like, literally yesterday, last night, we just crossed the $1 million run rate. So.

• 39:45Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, this has become like a real startup here. Okay. So you're, you're, you're way past even needing funding. Oh, then don't take any money from anybody. Just build this thing off of revenue. Don't, don't sell any shares to anybody ever. You're like the, you, you guys could be like the, you know, $2 or $3 million per employee. Right now, you have two people working on it? So you're half million per employee?

• 40:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that.

• 40:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So just keep going that way. Don't take anybody's money. Just add a zero, be a 5 million. Own the company, sweep like $5 million in profits, $2 or $3 million each every year. You make 30 million over those years. You hired three or four people to do the work for you. And when you sell the company, if you ever do, you're going to own 90% of it. It's a much better thing to do. I've been telling people this is going to happen. Because, look, I'm the earliest stage investor there is, and I missed this, right? So.

• 40:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:34Jason Calacanis?

  You don't need anybody.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  I think it's really funny how much power that letter made it, made it seem that Columbia and Amazon have, but over Roy, they have none. I mean, I like people have the agency.

• 40:47Jason Calacanis?

  How are you thinking about fundraising and running the company? Tell me your vision for this. What are the vibes?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Interview cutter itself is probably not going to get me to where I would like to be later in life. But I think we've uncovered some really key UX assumptions here. And I think we're first to market for this. I don't think anybody else has figured this out because nobody else has been trying to desperately to come up with the most undetectable invisible overlay. But because I have, I think it's uncovered like something very big. And I think I'm onto something really big here. There's a couple of people I'd like to hire and I don't think our current revenue is going to be enough.

• 41:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you're thinking about doing a small raise. What are you thinking about raising?

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Not sure, not exactly sure right now. Not exactly sure now. We're still working out the details.

• 41:30Jason Calacanis?

  Couple of people, they're going to cost 10K a month or something. They're onshore, they're offshore, they're work from home.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a couple of their expenses, but I don't want to give too much away. But we're going to launch in about a week and a half.

• 41:43Jason Calacanis?

  A week and a half, okay.

• 41:45Speaker 00

  The most ambitious version of interview cutter you could imagine.

• 41:48Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. So what do you think you want to raise? What's the, I'll give you some advice to the extent that you give a shit, but apparently you're so punk rock, it doesn't matter. So what is your plan in terms of raise? What are you thinking?

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Uh, just, just, just a small raise. Well, I don't even know how much I'm allowed to say, like, isn't this like a public solicitation or something?

• 42:09Jason Calacanis?

  No, if you're not raising, it's fine. If I asked you theoretically, what are you thinking of raising? Like if you, if you had your druthers, what would your dream be? What do you think? You know, I'm not asking you to like show like a business plan and a term sheet on the screen. If you just directionally, you want to raise a million, a half million, three million.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Directionally, it'd be something like three to five, probably.

• 42:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you want to go right for a series A essentially? Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, listen, you got everybody's attention and you're at like a pretty sick run rate. So you're possible you could do it. Yeah. And then you have somebody join the board. Awesome. Next week, you're going to launch something new, huh? Or in two weeks?

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Very similar, something very, something in the space. Yeah, I think we've cracked some things.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Yeah. I mean, if you've figured out some things about how AI lives on your desktop or lives with you, it seems like the that that could be very powerful. I think that's a pretty interesting concept. You know, there's a couple of people who are watching your entire desktop or watching your entire browser. So, yeah, most people don't understand that this is the next level is the AI is living on your desktop and is watching what you're doing and, you know, gonna start giving you suggestions. It's kind of scary, right? For privacy reasons and for like, what if this thing decides it wants to go buy a bunch of coffee for you? It could get weird.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Possibly, yeah. But I mean, I, I, I just think it it's crazy to think that in even two years, everybody will still be on chatgpt.com or perplexity.com like using a chatbot interface. Like, like, that's definitely not where the future is headed, right?

• 43:43Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's going to be persistent, right? It's going to be in your ear, talking to you the entire time. It's going to be living on your desktop.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Roy, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. And when you do drop whatever it is in a week and a half, and you take the the wrappers off of it, let me know because we are watching your career with great interest. And hats off to Columbia. You guys really got a great one. And I'm sarcastic.

• 44:06Jason Calacanis?

  He's barbecued tomorrow. You know what? Secretly record. Here's what you do. Secretly record tomorrow and then get banned for life. You gotta, you're barbecued already. Good luck in your thing tomorrow. For sure. Get a pair of glasses and secretly record it. Release the transcript. I don't know, stream it in real time, whatever you gotta do because you're gonna wind up on like Johnny Carson, you know, like literally be on Bill Maher this weekend if you can record that. That's my best advice. Covertly record tomorrow.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  That's the idea.

• 44:35Jason Calacanis?

  Good luck.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Thanks, Roy.

• 44:37Jason Calacanis?

  Talk to you soon, brother.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Thank you, guys.

• 44:38Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. See, this is the future of venture capital. You just saw it, folks. Humiliating defeat for venture capitalists. These young kids, these whippersnappers, they've basically got the ability now. Like, this, this kid gets it. He's 21. He got the company to a million. I said this before, like, what leverage does a VC have now? He's like, yeah, I'll raise three to five, maybe. But he's like a Pegasus. And I talked about this concept of a Pegasus with palm.com. They went from a $5 million valuation right to a 250. I was able to invest at the 5 million when they needed my help, but after that, they didn't really need help. So the next stop, you know, was an express train right to 250. That means like, you know, everybody in between wasn't able to secure a position in a high

• 45:23Jason Calacanis?

  growth company in between because they didn't need you to do it. So look, Roy doesn't need me. He doesn't need Y Combinator. He doesn't need Techstars. He got that 10K check, gave him a little bit of confidence from whatever that thing was. Kind of like our founding university where we give 25K, but it's got me thinking like, maybe I just gotta give people 10K as they come into, maybe I have to give them 10K on the way into founding university, give them a 10K option, a 25K option. As an investor, if you pick a team, you gotta just make the bet early is what I'm learning. What did you think of that interaction?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Well, I, it's very interesting because you raise a point that I don't have a dispute to. How, what do you offer someone who can show up with a little tool and make a lot of money really quickly? And what I like about Roy is that he didn't say, we've invented something that's brand new. We're going to change the world with our new technology. He took off the shelf parts and built something awesome that people wanted. And that's really encouraging to me. It feels like the old days of like putting together your own circuit boards, you know, like here is a time in which technology exists out there in disparate Lego pieces that you can put together to build something people want. That's so empowering to people. Doesn't fit neatly into the venture model, Jason, but.

• 46:29Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe I could see if I could slide 250 in at like a $5 million valuation and just say, hey, listen, I'll do this real quick and then I'll get you into the, I'll get you tickets to all the all in summits and I'll get you backstage, right? Uh, like I gotta use intangibles and pot sweeteners now to get in this round.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:45Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I, how am I going to get a slice of this? I mean.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  It's funny though, how much on the same page we are in my notes, prepping, you know, our, our, our signos for this chat. I literally wrote at the bottom, someone should invest 500K into this kiddo now. And it turns out I was too small and too late.

• 47:00Jason Calacanis?

  There's a great lesson here for founders. If you get an audience first, like he did with like a stunt like this, then you get customers and revenue, then you get venture capital or you get investment. Most people do the opposite. They get money, they get a product, then they get attention. Flip it. Figure out how to get attention first. Now you've captured the world's attention and Twitter is where old VCs like myself live all day long. If you can capture attention there with some punk rock thing, you've kind of proven like you're a rule breaker. Great. You're kind of like Steve Jobs. You're like Zuck. You're like Travis. You're like Elon. Okay. You know, don't go too far. Don't go

• 47:40Jason Calacanis?

  SBF. You know, don't steal something from Columbia. Get kicked out. Okay. But don't do fake blood tests. Don't Theranos this. Don't SPF it. You know, there's a real lesson here. Get audience first. Mr. Beast got a huge audience, then he got the business. I have a huge audience. You know, then I invest in your company hopefully and I can use that audience to help you magnify your, your voice. So here we are. Well done to him. And speaking of SBF.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:08Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, speaking of criminal behavior and punk rock and the difference between the two.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 48:13Jason Calacanis?

  Here's what, you know, our previous guest doesn't want to do. You don't want to end up being a Rikers Roy. It's fun to do like, you know, break some rules at Columbia. Just don't get into actual crimes. Uh, you know, and ethics or whatever sank, uh, sanction is, is no big deal. Look at this. Uh, SBF was on the Tucker show.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Yes, he was.

• 48:34Jason Calacanis?

  I saw somebody tweet. I don't know if it's real or not. I always give the caveat. If it's real that he put into this document of how to rebound his image. One of the things he said in terms of how he wanted to rebound his image and like one of these court documents that got seized was a Google doc where he said, go on Tucker and go right wing to get a pardon from Trump, I guess, as part of his master plan.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Here's the court document that Jason's referencing, uh, just in case everyone wants to take a look. This is from court listener.com. And if you scroll down, this is pulled from a Google doc that he had put together. And right here, part three is go on Tucker Carlson, come out as Republican, and then essentially come out, quote, against the woke agenda. So here is the result of that policy. And we have a couple of clips here, Jason. I want to start with, uh, the one digging into how he communicated during the actual unfolding of the crisis itself. Let's take a listen here to our dear friend and everyone's favorite jailbird podcaster, Mr. SBF.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  I've had a lot of time to reflect on how to communicate. And in retrospect, you know, I was, I think I was not effective at communicating, especially when the crisis first hit. And, you know, in the, in the months thereafter, I made a mistake I often make. I get swept up in, in details and I forget to make the bigger picture.

• 49:57Speaker 05

  You, you seem like you were just flying high on Adderall every time I saw you on TV. You don't seem that way now. Were you?

• 50:05Speaker 04

  No, I wasn't, but I was, my mind was freezing because there were, you know, a billion things to keep track of.

• 50:13Jason Calacanis?

  I think he's lying. I'll be honest. He was on this, um, patch EMS AM, MSAM patch. From what I understand, you know, Adderall is one level. This thing is like a patch that gives you a consistent high. Um, so he was on a lot of stuff.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Here, for example, is a, um, an article from Slate discussing exactly this. Sam Bankman pre-confirmed he wears an MSAM patch. What is that? So I think right there we've determined, Jason, there might be a slight credibility gap. Although you could argue that SBF was correct. He was not high off, flying high quote off Adderall. He may have been flying higher off of an MSAM patch. So.

• 50:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is where like, um, you know, listen, Tucker's a great broadcaster, obviously. Uh, very dramatic. So he's got the bravery to ask him if he was on it. But I would have said, hey, where are you on stimulants? Where are you on sleeping pills? Legal prescription, otherwise, you know, what, what, what's the real deal here? Because you have, you know, admitted to using these other things. Cause he did admit to using these things, but hey, listen, I think like half the country, all these young people are on some sort of a stimulant. We've got an Adderall shortage, right? Wasn't there a shortage in the press last year? So so many people are on this thing. We, they can't make enough of it apparently. So it's, there's no shame in the medication game, I guess, unless you commit crimes.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  This is SBF talking about, uh, Trump's crypto approach. Because the, the context here is people are kind of thinking that SBF is, is, uh, hanging it up for a pardon. There was rumors about a Biden pardon that never came to be. Uh, but he now wants a, a. Trump pardon. So here is Tucker and SBF talking about Trump and crypto.

• 51:47Speaker 04

  You look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office, there are a lot of good things. There are a lot of things that were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took that, that, you know, against or in the SEC took. Obviously, the, you know, the follow through is what matters. And that's the stage that we're at now, which is what will come of this. Not surprisingly, changing the guard helps, but financial regulators, they're big giant bureaucracies in the federal government. They're not used to changing overnight. They have been playing a really obstructive role for, you know, a decade in crypto. You know, the US, it's 30% of the world's finance, it's about 5% of the world's crypto.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  And the reason it's entirely regulatory, it's just the US was unique in its difficulty to work with. I think the big question is, when rubber meets the road, like, will the administration do what needs to be done?

• 52:42Jason Calacanis?

  I was expecting him to say, listen, I would have been not guilty if they, you know, if they were pro regulation at a different time. I should have been innocent. If I was him and I was doing his defense, I'd be like, listen, I'm like a 2010 cannabis dealer in Santa Monica who got arrested.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:58Jason Calacanis?

  And now in 2025, you can just walk in with a driver's license and buy, you know, a pound of cannabis and nobody cares. That's his best defense in terms of getting a pardon. I wouldn't buy it because he committed crimes.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:12Jason Calacanis?

  But he might be able to work that angle. Uh, anyway.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  The lesson here for founders, though, apart from not doing fraud, if you do do fraud and get put in prison, make sure you get permission from the Bureau of Prisons for doing an interview. Because SBF got into trouble for doing this, uh, from jail. And I gotta say, going on Tucker, looking for a pardon and instead getting your wings clipped inside of prison is a pretty big self own.

• 53:36Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, did he say what he was doing from prison is illegal? Like, how did he do that?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  I'm not sure about the technical details, but the Bureau of Prisons apparently put him into solitary.

• 53:46Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, worth it then. I mean, worth it to get your word out. Yeah, that is a weird, uh, thing to do. I gotta find out technically how he did this because my understanding is, I've been pitched on this and it's kind of a human rights issue. There are these companies that let you. Do video conference from prison. So you can, you know, talk to your family if you're in jail. You're incarcerated. They charge like a dollar a minute. It's some ungodly amount that they're charging prisoners. You just talk to their families. I'll tell you what, it should be free. Talk to your family or close to free. It should be $1 an hour to talk to your family. Why? If people could talk to their family and people outside of prison, you know, obviously they got to record it, transcribe it and make sure they're not doing deals, you know,

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  code words or something. I understand that there needs to be a little bit more infrastructure here because people from prison could be doing all kinds of nefarious stuff, but the more you could talk to your family, the better that probably is. And I just hate the idea that they're abusing these prisoners. And I hate the idea of solitary. That is literally torture. It is inhumane.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  I cannot underscore all that enough Jason. Solitary is torture. It should not be used ever. Profiteering off of prisoners is exceptionally gross. This is my, the basis of my view about private prisons in general. But the good news, the, the bit of sunshine we can throw here on people is that there's a startup called Emelio, A M E E L I O. And they are a nonprofit startup trying to bring free video calling service to inmates to build connections and prevent recidivism, recidivism.

• 55:16Jason Calacanis?

  Recidivism. Yeah.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Thank you. That word. I knew I can read it. Never said it out loud before. There you go.

• 55:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. My, my, you know, it's a very weird thing about my dyslexia. Like sometimes I just nail long words and other times I'm just can't even say short ones. It's a

• 55:29Speaker 01

  As long as the two of us together can say the words, we're in good shape.

• 55:32Jason Calacanis?

  I can understand solitary, like a short period of times if somebody is like beating or murdering somebody maybe, but like, you know, because of like safety issues, right? For the, for everybody, but

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Sure. The physical violence, you should not be tortured mentally. That's just, it's just like, we're supposed to be the good guys.

• 55:49Jason Calacanis?

  How you treat the most vulnerable people is how you can really judge a society. I've always felt that. How you treat the most vulnerable, a homeless person, a prisoner, somebody who's flat broke, somebody who's down on their knees, you know, somebody who's handicapped in some way, you know, it doesn't need to be a literal handicap. It could be anything, emotional, mental, whatever. On that regards, with our prison system and our penal system in this country, we fail greatly. Oh man. I would love for there to be a private prison, because I'm, I too am against private prisons, that ran an experiment of they got paid a fee. I don't know. Three hundred bucks a month for every month, the person stayed out of prison.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 56:32Jason Calacanis?

  Was productive. So you get 50K a year to run the prison. And then when the person leaves, if they pay their taxes, if they pass a drug test, if they show up for work, you get paid a residual for five years of 5,000 a year for five years. You get an extra 25K for them to stay out because the cost of keeping them in prison is 50K a year. So if you came up with a 50K five year plan or 25K 10 year plan, whatever it is, to get paid a bonus for them staying out of jail. Man, that would be an incredibly interesting concept. I know it's weird, but.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 57:09Jason Calacanis?

  If you show me an incentive, I will show you an outcome. And the incentive right now is to get them back in prison. So you can make 50K.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:16Jason Calacanis?

  But if the profit margin was 20% and you're making 10K a year for each one, if we made the profit margin 10% for keeping them out, that'd be even better.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, because it's it's total profit. Also, what this would do is it would incentivize investment into prisons for education, for fitness, for anything that helps build mental and physical health. And they could essentially expect those costs to be recouped later on when people stay out of prison. So it'd encourage better prison conditions. So I mean, I know that we have a model, an economic and mental and business model we use, and it doesn't fit on everything. But in this case, I think incentives would actually help. And anything to reduce our prison population would be lovely. Jason, before we go, can we do a little startup acquisition story?

• 57:56Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. What else is on the docket here? Yeah.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  Well, I want to get into this quickly. ServiceNow, a company we've all heard of, is buying MoveWorks for 2.85 billion. And I had entirely forgotten what MoveWorks is and was. So MoveWorks is a company started back in 16. It was building a chatbot, AI chatbot for like IT. It's expanded greatly to more parts of business. Essentially, you can use it to answer internal questions for your company, and it has an agentic AI element to it. Okay, sounds generic enough at this point in time.

• 58:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  But back in 2021, it raised a $200 million Series C at a $2.1 billion valuation.

• 58:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Led half by Tiger. So this should be an implosion. But.

• 58:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the Tiger, the Tiger Cubs. Um, you know, that came out of that peak Zerp era. They've all had a problem getting to their previous high watermark. So this money was raised 2021, you said?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yep, at a 2.1 and it's sold for, drumroll please, 2.85.

• 58:56Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so they made a little bit of a modest profit. Maybe if they had put that money in the market for three or four years, it probably would have been similar. So it's a save, but really those tiger evaluations were typically two, three, four times reality. And so there's just a lot of catch up to do. If the, if those tiger and peak valuations wind up being but a push, in other words, you know, the LPs put in 5 billion and they get 5 billion back. I think people will look at it, and this is like perverse and crazy, I know. But the way LPs will look at it was no risk, no reward.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:30Jason Calacanis?

  No gamble, no future. Fortune favors the bold. So that's how the market looks at Masayoshi San. Took big swings, did the vision fund. Should he be able to raise a second vision fund? Yes. Should it be the same size? Probably no. But those bets that were made at peak Zerp, if they wind up simply returning the capital that was put in 1X, no profit, you would have made double if you put your money in the market. So be it. You, you placed a bet, you took a shot. What you don't want to see is losing half your money. That's when LPs can get a bit persnickety. If they come out par, plus or minus 20, like in this situation, they'll be fine with it. So interesting.

• 1:00:11Speaker 01

  We have a little bit more. Uh, two things. One, I, I knew you're going to bring up the rate of return. So I chat GPT that before we got on. The IRR of 2.1 to 2.85 from June of 21 to March of 25 is 10.5%. Not bad.

• 1:00:25Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you know, it's not the 35% they said I returned, uh, you know, or 40% Pelosi returns, but it is what it is. So great job today. We'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups.