HuggingFace Buys Pollen Robotics, DHH & Bezos Founder Advice & a JCal Origin Story | E2111

Today's show: In this episode, Jason, Alex, and Lon dive into Blue Origin's all-female celeb spaceflight (yes, Katy Perry sang on reentry), Hugging Face's unexpected move into robotics, and Jack Dorsey's wild take that we should "delete all IP law." Plus, they break down Figure AI's eye-popping $39B valuation, the risks of SPVs, and what founders and investors can learn from the SPAC boom. As Jason puts it: "You just have to assume an 80% failure rate." * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason kicks off the show! (1:34) Blue Origin all-female crew launch and space tourism (7:17) Emerging technologies and tech adoption trends (10:07) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (12:38) Hugging Face acquires Pollen Robotics; Open AI and robotics debate (19:42) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (20:42) Significance of Hugging Face in generative AI; Jack Dorsey's IP law stance (25:01) U. S. high-tech job market; revisiting IP law discussions (30:03) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (31:03) IP law and American innovation(32:22) Challenges in startup exits and secondary trading platforms (37:09) Figure AI's valuation controversy (46:37) Startup insights and investing perspectives (50:39) Jeff Bezos on risk assessment (57:03) Jason's personal journey and reflections (1:02:06) Developing a samurai mindset; societal systems abstraction * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:07) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! (19:42) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (30:03) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/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?

  Out of these SPACs, there will be a FedEx, an Amazon, there'll be some great company that comes out of this. You just have to assume an 80% failure rate. Now, when I say 80% failure rate, I mean a zero.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:12Jason Calacanis?

  Lose all your money.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  Space tourism, when I saw that one come up, I was like, that's a hail mary. If you're betting on that, you should expect this to be one in 250.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:21Jason Calacanis?

  Now, if you're betting on Joby, I would take it from one in 250 down to one in 50. And that's just what I do for a living is to make these assessments. It's taken me a lot of pain and suffering to get that skill.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 0:36Jason Calacanis?

  Man, there are so many.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  A lot of lessons learned along the way.

• 0:38Jason Calacanis?

  There are so many companies, Lon, that I thought were going to do so much better, that went to zero. And there are so many that beat my estimations unbelievably that I would have put behind those other companies, man. There's so much randomness in this. And the randomness is really the founding team.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io/twist.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me again, Alex Trebek, calling in from Jeopardy. No, Alex Wilhelm. He's X.com/Alex. He's in Providence, Rhode Island. We're here in the great state of Texas in Austin with Lon Harris in our studio.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Hey, hey.

• 1:51Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, shout out to my friends at Capital Factory for hosting us here.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Shut up.

• 1:55Jason Calacanis?

  Let's get to the program. And what's in the news here, Lon, Alex?

• 1:58Speaker 01

  I do want to start us off by talking about this Blue Origin rocket launch. They sent six women into space.

• 2:04Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's all six women.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  All the entire crew of women. This is the first all female crew to go to space since 1963. The Soviet sent a cosmonaut up, Valentina Tereshkova. In 1963, she went into orbit.

• 2:18Jason Calacanis?

  This is a great move by, I tell you, this is a power move by Bezos because there are very few female astronauts. And there's always been this controversy, like who goes on?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:28Jason Calacanis?

  And so basically what you're telling me is all these female NASA astronauts who haven't been able to go up have gotten up.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Oh, these were not NASA astronauts. These were, it was Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos's lovely bride.

• 2:40Jason Calacanis?

  Fiance.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Fiance. It was like a wedding present.

• 2:43Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, oh, I see. I see. Okay. So they, she went up with five astronauts.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  She went up and she had five of her lady friends, Ayesha Bo, who is a scientist. Amanda Nguyen, who is also a Nobel Prize, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a scientist.

• 2:56Jason Calacanis?

  This is great.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Journalist and Oprah friend, Gayle King.

• 2:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Film producer, Carrie Anne Flynn, and pop star Katy Perry.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Woo, Katy Perry. Yeah.

• 3:05Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  This image went viral of Gayle King just before, this is when they were walking on to the spacecraft. And Gayle King, she's got a little trepidation. People thought maybe she had agreed. When this was an abstract, like, hey, you want to go to space?

• 3:18Jason Calacanis?

  She looks terrified.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then when they were walking onto the space shuttle, she's having second thoughts. And then the moment they got back.

• 3:24Jason Calacanis?

  Katy Perry vomiting?

• 3:25Speaker 01

  No, the moment they got back, this is right when the spacecraft landed, Katy Perry kissed the ground.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 3:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So once again, Katy Perry making herself the center of attention.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Of course. Oh, even more, Gayle King let us know that as they were attempting re-entry, Katy Perry treated them all to a little song.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  The best part was when we got back in our seats after zero Gs, Katy saying, what a wonderful world.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  She did that nice.

• 3:50Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my god.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 3:55Jason Calacanis?

  You're in a spacecraft, you can't get away.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  It's a command performance. You can't escape.

• 4:00Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, I can't think of anything worse.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Just let us enjoy the moment.

• 4:05Jason Calacanis?

  Get out to space, you're.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  We're looking at Earth, the majesty of the cosmos all around you, and Katy Perry's gotta be like, hang on, I, I need to make this moment better.

• 4:15Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, wow, I just wanna shout out Orlando Bloom. Now, we all know what this poor man has to go through. I mean, she just breaks out in song and ruins the flight.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  I don't know that ruined, but I, I feel like I would have wanted to just appreciate the majesty, the grandeur of being in space. All right, I'm gonna defend Katy Perry here. She's a singer. What did you think she was gonna do on the way down? Juggle?

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just literally trolling. I mean, you could have just, yeah, let everybody enjoy.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  It's a, it's such a.

• 4:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's a lot.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not just the Katy Perry specifically, anybody.

• 4:50Jason Calacanis?

  This has ruined it for me. Now I don't wanna go to space. Okay.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  I will take your seat.

• 4:55Jason Calacanis?

  A friend of mine and I are gonna go up at some point when he's ready to go up. It's, yeah, we have a, a group of four of us that are gonna do something similar to this, I think.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I feel like that's spitting in the face of our Lord. I, we're, we're clear, there's no oxygen up there. Like, that's not, it's an inhospitable place for.

• 5:14Jason Calacanis?

  All right, well, here's the thing about the Blue Origin approach, and listen, amazing job to Bezos of getting this stuff going.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, they're doing it. They got to space, they came back, everybody's safe and alive at work.

• 5:26Jason Calacanis?

  Number one, there's something about his rocket.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Little, what a great moment for feminism this was.

• 5:33Jason Calacanis?

  It, it, there's a lot going on here. I'll just leave it at that because that rocket, kinda feel like the design of the rocket is a little bit trolling.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Oh, it couldn't look more wang-like. There's nothing you could do to make it look more like a wang.

• 5:47Jason Calacanis?

  No, it is literally designed to evoke a certain, yes.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  A phallic image, yes.

• 5:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, rockets inherently look like penises. And then this one is designed to just look like a circumcised penis.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  If people are curious, this is a New Shepard rocket. I think this is the 11th crewed flight from Blue Origins. They've been doing this quite a lot. This is not, by the way, the new Glenn, which is their big take, you know, cargo to space rocket. This is their like space tourism rocket. So just data points.

• 6:17Jason Calacanis?

  I'll just give some credit where credit is due. Absolutely fantastic that we now have a second, you know, really super viable, it seems. I mean, they're a decade behind, but it's viable. It's nowhere near what SpaceX is doing, obviously, but maybe they're 10% of the way there.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  It's just kind of interesting, too, that it's sort of a different framing, marketing approach. Like SpaceX is so focused on transporting, we're going to deliver satellites, we're making deliveries to the international space agencies, cargo.

• 6:44Jason Calacanis?

  Cost per kilo is what they're going.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Right, and Blue Origin, they're leaning much more into the space tourism, like we're taking celebrities up and we're having these incredible experiences. And I feel like they're kind of branding themselves differently.

• 6:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it was like the Virgin, Virgin Space, which doesn't seem to have made it.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Right, Galactic was then.

• 7:03Jason Calacanis?

  Virgin Galactic, doesn't seem to have made it, but you know, this is entrepreneurship, this is capitalism, some companies work, some don't. This is great because we've been talking on this program for 14 years about things like VTOLs, flying cars, right?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 7:17Jason Calacanis?

  Talking about space tourism, we've been talking about self-driving cars, Waymo, FSD, the DARPA project. We talk about a lot of these things and that they're coming, drone delivery of food and breeders. It feels like in the last couple of months, a lot of the stuff that was supposedly coming in the next 10 years is actually starting to land.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 7:41Jason Calacanis?

  Gil King is not getting on a rocket. She's a pragmatist.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like

• 7:46Jason Calacanis?

  No way she's going up first.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  No, I feel like she feels like me where it's like, we're really like, why, why, why am I testing, testing the odds here?

• 7:53Jason Calacanis?

  You're the laggards laggard on this.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I really don't have

• 7:56Jason Calacanis?

  She's a laggard too.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Desire to go to space. I mean, I'm sure it'd be great. Once you're up there.

• 8:00Jason Calacanis?

  Pull up the early adopter curve. There's a curve that, you know, people in the audience should know if they're founders. And it basically goes, you know, you have the laggards on one side. You have the early adopters on the other. This is like Clayton Christensen, like, you know, classic way of looking at the adoption curve of new technologies. You have early adopters, you have the vanguard all the way out there, standard deviation. And so when you look at this, you got the innovators, right? It's 2.5% of people. Now, these are astronauts are innovators, right?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:29Jason Calacanis?

  The ones who will come up. They have early adopters. Early adopters will be, you know, right after them. You know, these crazy people who will pay $50 million to go on one of these things.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:39Jason Calacanis?

  And then you have the early majority, the late majority and the laggards. What we're seeing here is the early majority is doing space right now. These are not early adopters. This early majority kind of behavior.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Mainstream kinds of people. Yeah.

• 8:51Jason Calacanis?

  And so the equivalent here would be when you looked at the Tesla rollout, innovators were the ones who bought the Roadster.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 8:57Jason Calacanis?

  Early adopters bought the Model S. The early majority bought the Model X. The late majority bought the Model 3 and Y. And the laggards still haven't bought

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:10Jason Calacanis?

  Electric cars. Or maybe they're buying other brands of electric cars or hybrids, right? Like a Prius or whatever. Plug and hybrid might be the

• 9:15Speaker 01

  They're the Rivian folks. Yeah.

• 9:17Jason Calacanis?

  The Rivian folks would be, actually, that's correct. Yes. They would be, be like the late majority.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:22Jason Calacanis?

  I would say. And it's really important to look at that group. Now, when we look at this and we talk about self-driving Waymos, right now, Waymos is in the early adopters phase. We're not even to the early majority. We only have probably low hundreds of thousands of people who've ever used a Waymo.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Right. And I'm like, my mom was in town this weekend. Uber offered to send her a Waymo to bring her to Uchi the other night. She said, no, no, no.

• 9:44Jason Calacanis?

  No bueno.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Not ready.

• 9:45Jason Calacanis?

  Not for mom.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  She picked Raphael, the Uber driver instead.

• 9:48Jason Calacanis?

  And she's the late majority.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:50Jason Calacanis?

  She might be a laggard.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  I mean, she will get there. One

• 9:53Jason Calacanis?

  So then she's a laggard.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. On her second or third trip to Austin, I guarantee we'll get her in a Waymo.

• 9:57Jason Calacanis?

  So this is this, you know, standard innovation, adoption lifecycle. If you look at that drone delivery, we're really in the innovators and early adopters.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:48Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:32Jason Calacanis?

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• 12:17Jason Calacanis?

  and I was like, yeah, we haven't tested it yet. He would, he's the guy who would just take two. Like, all right, let's test it now. He's that like Jack Black. Of he's the Jack Black of the tech industry. Right. In a way where he'll just. But in the most flattering way. I mean, in the most flattering way. I'm not describing his body type or anything. Let's you're making a visual.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  I want to start with a couple of quick things. First of all, hugging face, everyone's favorite online repository for AI models and compute has bought a robotics company, which immediately struck me as kind of confusing because why would a startup buy that does, you know, AI model hosting by robotics company? But the company in question is called Pollen Robotics. It's a French robotics company and they're working on open source robotic technology using AI. So I think the gist here, Jason, is that hugging face wants to go from just being the AI, you know, hub and source for the digital world and also become the same thing in the physical world. And I think that's fricking genius.

• 13:13Jason Calacanis?

  It's a great idea. This company is doing real world robotics. Do you know what format are they?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  So this is Richie two. And for folks on the audio version, it's a very basic robot with two effectors, effectuators, which are little hands. And the, the gist here is open source research, robotics and AI. This is not trying to replace a human right now in a manufacturing facility, Jason.

• 13:34Jason Calacanis?

  But it is a humanoid robot. It doesn't have legs yet. It's got arms. You know, what's great about this is if the models can have human behavior open sourced into them. The entire industry is not going to be owned by one person and it's going to move faster. And what AI needs is open source. When a company is in the lead, they are closed. So chat GPT and open AI closed everything. Right. They realized they had a fantastic lead. That's as cynical as it gets. You're committed to being open AI and then you close everything down because you can make money. Right. That is the most cynical thing you can do. It's basically like completely dishonest to make that flip.

• 14:19Jason Calacanis?

  And the actual point of open AI was AI is so important that everybody should own it. I actually agree with that. Yeah. It levels the playing field, so every person has access to it. Now, when you open the playing field and everybody has access to a technology, that means the business opportunity and the global opportunity is spread equally. If you want to make a competitor to WordPress, you can get wordpress.com, my friend Matt Mullin White, and you can pay them to host your WordPress blog. Sure. You can pay WP Engine, and then there was this other one that I read the ad for. All of those put pressure on wordpress.com. Right. They've had a big back and forth with WP Engine. But anybody can use WordPress, it's awesome. Then you look at what's happening in the AI space. Zuckerberg was so far behind.

• 15:03Jason Calacanis?

  He said, Alex, hey, the great thing to do is let's open source everything we do. That's called Llama. Hugging Face is a collection of all those open source projects. Right. Put into one place, a repository, and you can then pop things up. But what's missing is a company like Tesla that's very far ahead. A company that Waymo is very far ahead self-driving. Are they open or closed? Closed. Closed, of course, because they're ahead. Yeah. This is what you need to know as an entrepreneur. If you're ahead, do not open anything up. Because all you're going to do is lose fast. Right. If you're behind, open up somebody else's clothes. Yeah. That's what Hugging Face is doing. Yeah. And by the way, Nvidia, Alex, you covered an announcement from Nvidia. Nvidia announced Jensen at his last keynote that he was going to do

• 15:47Jason Calacanis?

  an open source and build into the models directly. Mm-hmm. Self-driving technology. So now, for every action, there is an equal reaction. You have proprietary of language models. That's OpenAI, and I believe Claude and Brock are all closed. Right. And they're the top three, and Gemini is closed. Those are your top four. And now we have on the other side, Llama and DeepSeek, open source. Then we look at self-driving. You have Waymo closed, you have Tesla closed, as they should. I'm not making any judgment here. Right. I'm a pragmatist and an investor, I'm a capitalist. Then on the other side now.

• 16:25Jason Calacanis?

  You have self-driving by Nvidia and you have this real-world robot for figure AI. To every action, there's a counter reaction, and that is how the game is played. I advised, as did Bill Gurley, Uber to, and I'm advising them again, this is a message to Dara. Whatever you do, the number one focus of Uber right now should be to be support, open-source self-driving. Why? Why do I, as the shareholder in Uber, still to this day, why am I such a proponent of Nvidia open-sourcing what they're doing? And this open-source movement with humming face? And why do I think Uber should back all open-source? Why would I do that?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Because they're behind.

• 17:12Jason Calacanis?

  They don't have any bets.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:13Jason Calacanis?

  They are putting anybody into Uber's network. So they have Waymo.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:18Jason Calacanis?

  They have WeRide, they've got a bunch of folks. But if open-source technology was used for self-driving, think about how many lives would be saved? I mean, you will pull this technology forward quicker because then anybody who wants to start an open-source company, just like WP Engine and other people who wanted to use WordPress, could just start a competitor. What that does is it makes everybody lower prices and move faster because it's competition. Self-driving, open-source project would absolutely crush.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Well, it makes the most sense, like self-driving is one of those projects that makes so much sense for open-source because it's so much about the data that you're collecting from all these cars on the road. Like if all these companies were sharing everything they're learning every time they go on these rides, we're going to get where we want to go much more quickly.

• 18:01Jason Calacanis?

  More of this is what I'll say. For, I think on Friday, we covered those little robots that drive around delivering burritos.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 18:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. Power move for one of those companies, open-source it.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, Coco and Samo, I think they're called.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Coco and Serv- Service Robotics, J. Sir.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Serv Robotics, there we go.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  But Samo is the name of the little guy.

• 18:21Jason Calacanis?

  Serv Robotics is a head. Somebody should make a version of that where all the parts are hardware open-source. Actually, this is what DoorDash and Uber should do. They should make a hardware project that's open-source for those.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:34Jason Calacanis?

  Where you just publish all the specs and let anybody make them. And then you open-source the software layer and you open-source the data layer. So when you run those robots around Los Angeles, you just publish the data. Just open source publish.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:49Jason Calacanis?

  World data. There's a project called Open Map, I think. Um, that's the open source mapping project that was created by Goala, Four Square and a bunch of other people.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Open Street Map.

• 19:00Jason Calacanis?

  Open Street Map.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Street Map, yeah.

• 19:01Jason Calacanis?

  Because people were fearing the dependency on Google Maps. And then Apple Maps came out, so they have two competitors. And then OpenStreetMap.org is where you can see an open source project. The next thing that should happen is Open Street Map plus these little delivery robots.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 19:19Jason Calacanis?

  Plus Nvidia self-driving. They should all get together and map out the world with LiDAR.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:25Jason Calacanis?

  And make it free for humanity. Now that could be a bummer for Waymo.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe.

• 19:31Jason Calacanis?

  Only on the margins because they have other things that make them defensible, the hardware stack, et cetera. And all it will do is move everybody up the stack to work on harder problems as opposed to keeping all your data for yourself.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:43Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:25Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:42Speaker 01

  The one other thing I would say about Hugging Face that makes this a really interesting thing for me is when I was working on, like when I was first trying out stable diffusion, like during that first wave when everybody was really excited about generative AI. And I wanted to try it out. Hugging Face is so. Essential because that would be where all the little things you want to add. It's like a GitHub for working on those kinds of models where anytime you wanted to add like, like a Studio Jubilee filter or any other like make me look like a Barbie doll, any of those, you had to download a new model or a new tweak of Laura, they call it from Hugging Face.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  So it's very integrated into the process. So I think that's what they want to do. If you were working on a robotics project, it would be the same thing. Like all the little things, all the little coded details that you wanted to add to your project, you would integrate Hugging Face into your workflow.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  One thing I want to bring up before we get too far into the show today is a bit of controversy over the weekend. I don't know where you kind of stand on this one, but Jack, Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter, formerly of Square, now Block and X, he had a tweet that says he thinks we should delete all IP law. And I'm not exaggerating here. His tweet just reads, delete all IP law. And some people came out vociferously against this. Some people were very much in favor. Hot topic. My dad has a couple of patents and I don't know, we've talked a lot here about the importance of copyright. Is Jack having a moment or is this something that's a bit more of a normal view in technology than I was thinking?

• 22:16Jason Calacanis?

  I saw the tweet. I haven't had a chance to respond because I was literally dealing with the fallout from the All In episode on Thursday.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:26Jason Calacanis?

  Which was the record All In of all time. It hit number four in the rankings. We had Larry Summers on, Ezra Klein on, Sacks came back to do a full episode and it was wild.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Before you go on, I want to say Reddit gives me one of the All In subreddits, just it shows it to me and you got shout outs for your moderation skills during that episode in particular. Just wanted you to know that.

• 22:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I appreciate that. I have gotten more feedback on my moderation of that episode than the top five moderation jobs I've ever did. No, Sacks was like, why am I not allowed to speak? And I wasn't interrupting him. Larry Summers.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:00Jason Calacanis?

  Interrupted him multiple times and wouldn't let him speak, which is new for Sacks to experience because you see people. Like Sacks is the one who's interrupting folks. And so I was trying to defer to the guest, Larry Summers, a big guest.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  This felt in particular like, I feel like this is actual history, like in 30 years when people are talking about this moment.

• 23:23Jason Calacanis?

  The tariff moment.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  The tariff moment and the reaction to it because you had this very notable economics expert. Going head to head against a member of the White House team that is actually.

• 23:34Jason Calacanis?

  Doing it.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Tooting this policy where it's a rare thing to.

• 23:39Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't exist in the world.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  It's a very rare thing.

• 23:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think this was my, it was like a Frost Nixon moment, wasn't it?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  There, there is that moment where Ezra.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  There is that moment where Ezra sort of directly challenges Sacks and is saying.

• 23:56Jason Calacanis?

  What are the metrics?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Right. What, what is the actual goal in real metrics that are measurable that we can all look at?

• 24:03Jason Calacanis?

  And Sacks wouldn't give it to him.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Hedges a bit and then Chamath kind of tries to step in and save it. And that to me, it's like, well, that's very notable. Like that's a, it's a memorable.

• 24:13Jason Calacanis?

  And the notable thing about that is I had said multiple times on the episode, hey, listen, we all know we have to bring back chips. We have to bring back, you know, ships and weapons. We talked to Alex, you and I talked about that on a previous episode, how many chips here? And so, you know, what Chamath described is exactly what the Democrats tried to do in the last.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was mostly the Biden.

• 24:31Jason Calacanis?

  It is. No, it is the Biden policy. So you gotta give credit there. What Chamath described is what we all agree on and what Biden tried to do with the Chips Act.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:38Jason Calacanis?

  And onshoring, I think chips, rare earths, um, you know, and, and, you know, some of those, uh, and pharmaceuticals. Putting that aside, at the end, I felt like we had some, I tried to bring it back to have a little consensus. You know, there are two other metrics we could look at that I added, which is GDP.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:57Jason Calacanis?

  And the number of jobs that. Work in high tech. So Alex, a little homework assignment for Wednesday. I'd like you to share with the audience, how many open jobs there are for high tech factory work? And how many unemployed people there are who are capable of taking that? And just a general exploration of how many people in America are qualified to do high tech chip manufacturing? And what degree and or skills do you need to do that? Because my understanding is to work in a high tech factory. We have so few people who know how to do that in America today. That Nvidia, I'm sorry, TSMC, when they built their fab here, they had to bring people from Taiwan. Because there weren't any people here.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Really?

• 25:41Jason Calacanis?

  I want to try to put some numbers on this and some understanding. What is the reality?

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:46Jason Calacanis?

  If we do want to have 100,000 people working in chip fabs here and doing high tech chip manufacturing, or putting phones together here or routers, what degree do they need to have? What level of precision do they need to have? My understanding is there's like two pieces here. There's like physical dexterity to build some of this.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Because it's so small, you're working on something.

• 26:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah, there's a physical dexterity, but also there is some knowledge that you need to have as well. So it is a very hard one for me to understand.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it seems like it's probably, there's, there's got to be different tiers too. I mean, it's a huge team in a big factory. I'm sure some of the jobs are more specialized than others.

• 26:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so back to the IP recap. I didn't get to do the IP recap, Alex, because I was literally had so many people complaining and congratulating me over the weekend. So back to IP, Jack's a friend, he's awesome. I don't know what part of IP he was talking about here is the challenge. So let's break it down. Did he say anything in the follow up tweets?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  In follow ups, it looked like it was about AI. Like we, the only way we are going to compete with the Chinese is if we get over this obsession with copyright.

• 26:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, okay, that's what I thought.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  That seems to be where he was coming from to me.

• 26:54Jason Calacanis?

  It is, when you are a billionaire and you've made all your money in software and building software and you're in the technology industry, you have, you, you very quickly lose any respect for, if you had any to start with.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 27:10Jason Calacanis?

  For artists. In Silicon Valley, people think artists are to be used because artists are so dumb that they've built all these platforms. The platforms aggregate all the value. And YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, laugh.

• 27:25Jason Calacanis?

  How stupid artists are for letting them build trillion dollar, hundred billion dollar, ten billion dollar franchises off the backs of content creators. Content creators are dumb. And content creators need to show these platforms exactly that they're not them. And what they should do is get together, Mr. Beast, I don't know, Charlie XCX, I don't know who the biggest one.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Colin and Samir.

• 27:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, they're not huge. I'm saying the ones who actually drive.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  All the TikTok influencers.

• 27:52Jason Calacanis?

  The top 25 TikTok influencers and Mr. Beast and 25 other people should leave those platforms. Now that content is, now that software is so easy to build with AI.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:01Jason Calacanis?

  They should stick it to them. Leave those platforms and premiere their stuff on their own platform. That gives a hundred percent of revenue or 95% of revenue.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  It's tough, though. I mean, there have been, there have been groups that have tried to do this.

• 28:14Jason Calacanis?

  Number one.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  The Try Guys was a sort of an infamous example. They built up a huge audience on YouTube. You know, the Try Guys, they were on Buzzfeed originally. It was just, they'll go out and try any crazy thing.

• 28:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, it can't work with one person. It has to be a consortium of the top 10.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, dropout. The College Humor guys went and built their own subscription platform. The dropout does okay.

• 28:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you need to mix in a record label too, because that way you can get all the music off of you. So I feel like right now the reporting circle between music comes out, YouTube ranks of views and revenue kind of goes back in the music industry is a hard thing to break. But I think that would be clutch. So creators, some artists, a record label or two, you could do it.

• 28:52Jason Calacanis?

  There's a very simple way to do it, which is, hey, we're going to put 50% of our content on the platform we own.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:57Jason Calacanis?

  We'll keep 50% on the existing platform and every time we'll say, watch the follow up or the behind the scenes at this new place. And if, you know, there was a consortium that did that, you could actually teach a lesson to the technology. I'm not singling out Jack here. This is like pervasive. Zuckerberg would be the bigger version of this. But Jack himself owns Tidal and he's friends with Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 29:21Jason Calacanis?

  Go ask Kendrick Lamar and Jay-Z if they think that somebody should be able to take their music and put it for free on the internet, right? And then what that would do to the culture if those people couldn't make money.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:30Jason Calacanis?

  And then, you know, I saw Elon retweeted it and Elon, in fairness, has exposed all of the IP, uh, all the patents for self, not self-driving, for a lot of Tesla's patents. But as we just said in the earlier segment, I don't think the, uh, self-driving stuff is open source. Right. So people again are speaking out of both sides of their mouth. Jack owns title, right? It's still owned by where I believe? Block, yeah. By Block. Okay, if he feels that way, then go to Jay-Z and go to Kendrick Lamar and ask them if they're cool with all their IP being free. Right. Okay, founders, let's keep it a buck. Finding the right developers is tough. It's hard, especially when you're trying to run and scale up your startup.

• 30:12Jason Calacanis?

  You've got a lot to do and lemon.io is gonna save you time. They're gonna save you money and a ton of headaches and they're great at what they do. They've done work to find and vet developers who are experienced, result oriented, and they charge competitive rates. And you also know that great developers can be hard to find and integrate into your team, so lemon.io handles all that for you. Startups choose lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with at least three years of experience and who are the best of the best, the creme de la creme. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they had great experiences. Here's your call to action. Go to lemon.io/twist and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less.

• 30:56Jason Calacanis?

  And Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io/twist. That's the nature of IP. Artists need to be protected. If China doesn't protect IP, I don't like what Sam Altman and Jack and other people are doing here. I think it's dirty. I think it's a really dirty move to say because the Chinese are thieves that we're not going to be able to compete and we as Americans should hold a higher standard. Right. And I believe this in IP. I believe it in due process. I believe it in many different spaces. You don't get to take the low standard China has for IP or the low standard that El Salvador

• 31:40Jason Calacanis?

  has for human rights and due process and then apply to America and say, and point to those. Bad actors and say that's what we should do.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital says Jack may be smart. This is his stupidest take ever. And I just want to say that other VCs Jason are on.

• 31:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  Are on your side here.

• 31:56Jason Calacanis?

  But like I said, I don't understand his intent here exactly. Right. And so.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:00Jason Calacanis?

  I have to talk to him first before I actually understand. Sometimes people make tweets and they're, you know, they do have a point like.

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:07Jason Calacanis?

  He has a choice here. If he truly believes this, Jack has enough money to go buy Jay-Z's catalog.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 32:13Jason Calacanis?

  Go buy Jay-Z's catalog and open it for us and give it as a gift for free to the world. And let anybody sample it and use it however they want.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, he doesn't want to do that.

• 32:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Let's move on to the next story.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  All right. Uh, one thing we've been talking about on the show a lot is lack of exits. Jason, in the first quarter of this year, we saw some IPOs. We saw some M and A activity.

• 32:31Jason Calacanis?

  It was going great.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's going great. Uh, things have changed a little bit in the last couple of weeks. All right, so there's a group called Setter. Uh, they're a secondary trading platform, Jason, and they released their Q1 report showing the most in-demand secondary companies. And I wanted to share this with everybody because there's a bunch of Twist 500 companies on here. But also I think it's an interesting look at what VCs are trying to scoop from the secondary markets, which is a key place for liquidity these days. Now, at the top of this list, there's some names you kind of expected. SpaceX, Androl, Anthropic, but then there are some surprises. XAI ranked higher than I expected it was going to, given its youth. Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company, Jason. GLOCK with a Q is on there. OpenAI ranks under Stripe with sixth and seventh place. I thought this was a fascinating list.

• 33:16Jason Calacanis?

  Anthropic is at 61 billion. Is that the share price or is that the market cap? Let's see SpaceX. That's market cap.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Last public round, yeah.

• 33:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Private round that we know of the valuation publicly.

• 33:28Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay. Uh, EV, expected value, last round expected value, I think, is what they're mean by EV there.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 33:34Jason Calacanis?

  So, um, there are tons of these secondary markets. There, it's kind of like a little bit of gray. There's some weird stuff going on here. And so if we were to look at this, uh, Androl at 28 billion, SpaceX at 350 and, uh, Figure at 39 billion. Figure at 39 billion does not make a lot of sense to me. That's a pre-revenue company, right?

• 33:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 33:53Jason Calacanis?

  So that's the one that's. Stands out to me. XAI does have some revenue and it owns Twitter, so it has billions of revenue there. So that makes sense. Defense tech, they have billions in revenue, Andro. Um, I mean SpaceX has billions, Stripe has billions, OpenAI has 10 billion. Rock is crushing it. So when I look at these, the only out of the top 10 that stands out to me here as maybe you would debate is Figure AI. Just so you know how these are driven. Secondary markets here are driven not by venture capitalists, but by high net worth individuals.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:28Jason Calacanis?

  And so if you're a high net worth individual, uh, I can go on these and I get pitched on them all the time. And I can buy these, pay massive fees, like typically maybe five to 10% to buy them. And then a 20% carrier, 10% carrier, or you may just buy them without carry. And when I go buy a million dollars worth of Andro, uh, you know, and I own about seven million worth of Andro right now. I'm joking. My guy, Bomber, lucky. If you were to go buy a million dollars worth of Andro on this, you're going to pay like 150,000 or 100,000 dollars in fees to get in there. So it's a bit of a racket. A lot of founders don't like this. And they don't like that these markets are doing this because it just creates a bit of chaos for them.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  How much of this do you think, because you, like you said, these are not, this is not VC driven. This is just individuals who have the money to throw around. How much of these do you think is driven rather than based on the fundamentals of the companies? By their notoriety and prominence in the culture, because I can't help but notice a lot of the companies near the top of the list, they're brands that are recognizable in the world. Your, your stripes, your open AIs, your bike dances, your neural links, they're all famous companies.

• 35:35Jason Calacanis?

  I would say the panache, the patina, the branding is but 20% of this. It is playing a factor, but a lot of this is cause and correlation. So the reason some of these are famous, like SpaceX and Stripe, is because they've been private for so long. Both of those have been private for well over 10 years now. Those two companies have been private for a long time, which means they have a large number of shareholders. They've got a large number of shareholders because they have so many employees. Employees vast over four years typically. If a company like Stripe is 12 years old. You might have an employee who has had three different grants, a four-year grant, a four-year grant, a four-year grant.

• 36:16Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe they've had, if it's a really high-performing employee, maybe they have four grants where they overlap. Somebody told me when Nvidia was private, that like Jensen would just drop extra shares on people. He had like a pool of shares that he had like god power on. He didn't have to go to the board or anything and he would just be like, you did a great job. Boom, I'm doubling your shares and he wouldn't even do it. He'd have somebody go do it for him. So he was just like dropping these kinds of things on people. But there's many, many sellers in these companies because they've been private for so long. A company like Figure AI, they raised this round and I think Ruloff did a tweet about how SPVs were ruining the industry because there were no lead investors. I think this is kind of a sub tweet. I haven't spoken to Ruloff about it. I'm, I'm obviously friends with Ruloff.

• 37:01Jason Calacanis?

  Ruloff, when he said this, at the same time I was getting pitched on Figure AI at 30, 40 billion. And here's the tweet.

• 37:09Speaker 03

  We remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past. SPVs are making a comeback where the lead investor speaks for less than 10% of the capital, yet eagerly lines up the latest set of tourist chumps who think the story will end differently this time. It's only been three years, head exploding emoji.

• 37:25Jason Calacanis?

  I think he's talking about Figure AI here. At the same time, he made this tweet, people I understand were trying to lead Figure AI's round at a reasonable valuation. Say 10 billion and this is no shade at the founder of and the team over at Figure AI. They should go for the greatest, you know, valuation they can get. This is their right to marketplace. However, it is a pre-revenue company. When pre-revenue companies that have serious competitors are raising at a very high valuation, that is going to get the knives out and it's going to get the more than the knives. Actually, you will get a little haters on the margins, the microscopes come out. And the microscopes today are not the microscopes of yesteryear. It's not a spyglass. This is one of those scientific microscopes, like, you know, at Stanford that really get in there.

• 38:09Jason Calacanis?

  And then you're going to start getting the, the real, uh, colonoscopy going on here. They're going to really examine this company and say, if this company's worth 39 billion, it's pre-revenue. What are the details of this? And they're going to start getting very granular into justifying that. And, you know, the VCs could be a little upset that some. Person they consider a knucklehead offers them 40 billion when, you know, let's say Sequoia or Injun Hart which had offered to fund this thing at 20 billion and they really were going to give them credit. Like, okay, you have zero revenue. My understanding, somebody fact checked me, please, that I heard they were pre-revenue. Maybe the BMW, I think they had a BMW deal.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  I have context on that, Jason. Let me share that really quick.

• 38:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, please fill me in so I make sure I get my notes correct.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  So this is from a story about the $40 billion valuation round they're referring to and how it's coming together. There's mentioning this piece about SPVs, people getting in for as little as 100K and essentially what appears to be, from what I can tell, a hunt for capital at that price. But the thing that I want to highlight is, details are a little bit vague and the company likes to talk. So quoting this Wall Street Journal post, "In a March 31 post where he shared a video of these slender humanoids working on assembly tasks for BMW, the CEO wrote, 'This isn't a test. This is what autonomous robots in production operations look like.' Later, a BMW spokesman said that the automaker had three of the robots at its facility for a technical evaluation." So to me, there does seem to be a little bit of a disconnect between promise and reality. He's getting a little ahead of his skis and that makes this entire

• 39:37Speaker 03

  thing to me a little sketchy. Although I will say, it is a twist 500 company. So I don't want to be too.

• 39:43Jason Calacanis?

  Listen, there's no doubt it's a great company. It's no doubt that they are one of the top 10 robotics companies, I think, probably pursuing the space and they've cashed up. Here's the challenge. We've talked about this countless times. If you oversell something while selling shares.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:00Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out to Nikola. People can, you know, consider that to be securities fraud.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:07Jason Calacanis?

  Now, the distance between the two statements you just read us, I will give my judgment. This will be an official judgment. I need to hear the first statement again from the CEO and I will tell you if this is securities fraud or not.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Uh, the CEO Adcock wrote, quote, "This isn't a test. This is what autonomous robots in production operations look like. Turn the music up!" Exclamation point.

• 40:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, this isn't a test. And BMW said?

• 40:32Speaker 03

  BMW spokesman said on April 1, "The automaker had three of the robots at its facility for technical evaluation. Quote, 'Only one is used at a time, but the robot has practiced picking up and grasping parts during non-production hours in our body shop,' the spokesman said. The following week, the BMW spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that there were now more than three robots on site. He said they were being used in non-production and live production situations."

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Pretty close. It's a, this is a bubble case, for sure.

• 41:04Jason Calacanis?

  This is definitely a bubble case.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:06Jason Calacanis?

  Because he said, "This is not a test." Then the BMW spokesman explains exactly a test.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. They came back and said, "We're using it on both live production and non-production."

• 41:19Jason Calacanis?

  And then in the last one, he got saved.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's what, that's the distinction that really matters.

• 41:24Jason Calacanis?

  The final, the final words.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:26Jason Calacanis?

  Save him as not guilty. Give me the final words again. The final part of that statement from BMW, the cleanup.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Right. That, it feels like that was afterwards that they were like, "Oh, we gotta..."

• 41:37Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, I'll tell you, they had, no, no, not even throw him a bone. When they saw that BMW, quote, "The lawyers that figure or the lawyers at BMW or somewhere in between, some counsel probably said, 'Wait a second.'"

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:48Jason Calacanis?

  "We, our understanding is, this is not a test. You just said it's a test. We're raising money at a $39 billion valuation, saying you're our key customer."

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:58Jason Calacanis?

  "Can you please make sure that what you say is accurate in the press?" The final sentence.

• 42:03Speaker 03

  The following week, the BMW spokesman said that he had received an update from colleagues at the plant and that there were now more than three robots on site. He said they were being used in non-production and live production situations.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Now they're in live production situations, which means not a test. So, not guilty. This is not securities fraud. The reason I am harping on this, and I don't want to create another Parlo Lucky situation.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  No, man.

• 42:33Jason Calacanis?

  A CEO is really upset.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Brad Adcock watching this right now, like, "Nooo."

• 42:37Jason Calacanis?

  No, the point I'm just trying to make here is, a partner can say something out of school. Like BMW is their number one customer. Right. This raise is happening because of that BMW relationship. When you look at those SPVs, the people investing in the SPVs are investing because they're seeing those tweets from the founder. Mm hmm. If the founder tweets, you know, this is not a test and then BMW says it isn't, it is a test, then the person who bought the shares at thirty nine billion can get a lawyer and then say, hey, I want my money back because you said it wasn't a test BMW said it is.

• 43:15Jason Calacanis?

  That is the ultimate, ultimate way you can buy shares in a company with an option to get your money back, right? Mm hmm. Now, when the BMW person says, no, no, it's in production. Now you have no recourse. The CEO said it's not a test. The person from BMW said, we're not testing it, it's in product. Then you have no case. Right. This is, and you have to understand, there are bad actors out there as well as a founder. There are bad actors who will take every single thing you say on Twitter. And there are lawyers who'd be more than happy. Sure. Having big targeted company with a big valuation and a billion or ten billion dollars in cash, and they will go dunk on them.

• 43:55Jason Calacanis?

  So just, and, and if you're taking money from civilians through these SPVs, which is Ruloff's point, to tie both points together, Alex. Ruloff is explaining those people are not making economic decisions the way VCs do, which is to get returns for LPs like Harvard or Ford Foundation or CalPERS and retirement funds. They're not, and sovereign wealth funds, they're not making economically sound decisions at all times. They're making decisions based on emotions, based on how, as you said, how high profile is the company? So if a founder is out there increasing the profile of the company, which is the job, and you take money from Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz, they're not going to sue you. They're, they, they're professionals.

• 44:37Jason Calacanis?

  They know, they pay, they've done the math, they've penciled it out, they've made a, hopefully a thoughtful decision. Civilians are like YOLO a hundred K. Right. Then you get a hundred YOLOs and you raise ten million and then there's five other SPVs doing that same thing. Right. And this really does complicate things. We run SPVs at the syndicate.com all the time at a very small scale. The average one is $700,000. We're putting money into seed stage companies, not late stage companies, which is where like the average tech size in RS is 7K and you are YOLOing. And we say that only invest money you can afford to lose. These are typically companies that are either pre-revenue or have a small amount of revenue, hundreds of thousands a year, low millions. I'm actually in the SPV business as well as the fun business, but primarily the fun business.

• 45:22Jason Calacanis?

  So yeah, interesting. Uh, this is a very interesting situation. Be careful out there, folks.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, be careful out there. And also I think SPACs and SPVs are things that people should use if they're incredibly sophisticated in very rare circumstances when they make sense, not if you're a dentist.

• 45:37Jason Calacanis?

  You know, there'll be out of these SPACs, there will be a FedEx, an Amazon. There'll be some great company that comes out of this, uh, these SPACs. You just have to assume an 80% failure rate. Now, when I say 80% failure rate, I mean a zero.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:52Jason Calacanis?

  Lose all your money.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:53Jason Calacanis?

  Space tourism. When I saw that one come up, I was like, that's a hail Mary. If you're betting on that, you should expect this to be one in 250.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:01Jason Calacanis?

  Now, if you're betting on Joby, I would take it from one in 250 down to one in 50.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 46:08Jason Calacanis?

  And that's just what I do for a living is to make these assessments. It's taken me a lot of pain and suffering to, to get that skill.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 46:17Jason Calacanis?

  And there are so many.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  A lot of lessons learned along the way.

• 46:20Jason Calacanis?

  There are so many companies, Lon, that I thought were going to do so much better. That went to zero. And there are so many that beat my estimations unbelievably that I would have put behind those other companies, man. There's so much randomness in this.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:35Jason Calacanis?

  And the randomness is really the founding team.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  I found, uh, some, some fun videos on social media that directly relate to found up starters. We call these startup insights. Uh, I found a really good one this morning from David Heinemeier Hansson, friend of the show.

• 46:49Jason Calacanis?

  DHH.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Our old, our old friend, DHH. Yeah, this is from his, uh, a recent episode of his rework podcast. He talks about the inherent contradictions in being a founder.

• 46:59Jason Calacanis?

  The inherent contradictions in being a founder. Go.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Let's go in assuming it's gonna work. If we're going assuming it might not work, you know what? You're not going to put your all in to it. And if there's anything you need these days, it sure as hell is you're all in. Everyone else is putting in their all in their best thoughts, their best competence, all this stuff into it. You can't show up half assed and then expect that there's going to be a prize for you. That just doesn't work and you actually need that conviction because you're going to have sort of a dip in motivation of like, oh, I think it's not going to work. Oh, this is a great idea. Oh, this is stupid idea. Like it's going to fluctuate, right? So you need to go in with that conviction, like whether fluctuate, whether it go up and go down. I believe this is going to work. And then also again, knowing it probably won't. It probably won't. And when it doesn't or does, you're going to be happy either way. Because you did it in a way where you did it with integrity, regardless of what that means to you.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  You're not doing it in a slimy way. You're not doing it in a quick scammy make a buck kind of way. You're doing it in a way where you go like, you know what? I could put my name on this. If there was a little box, a little plaque, I proudly write made by David on it. So people knew who made it. I'm going to be hiding behind something. I'm going to make something I'm proud of because that's just going to make me feel good about it. I also think it works in the market when you're authentically excited, enthusiastic and integral about what you're building. And then I'm going to build it in a way that if it does not work, I'm going to be better now than I was when I started.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  So I, I thought this was a really interesting sort of insight and it reminded me a little bit of that Rick Rubin book, the, the creative act that we like to talk about. Where it's, it's, it's making something that you feel proud of regardless. That's how he recommends getting out of this sort of contradiction is as long as you are happy with the work that you did and it's something you're proud of and you're happy to put your name on it. It doesn't matter at the end so much whether it works or not. And I, I, I like that approach.

• 48:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you know, David's been through the wringer and he makes a couple of really solid points here that you have to keep in mind. If you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you're going to be fired with enthusiasm. Typically refers to employees, but in general, you know, you, you shouldn't do a project unless you really have that all in. And you notice you mentioned all in many times, like the reason I named the podcast all in, you know, is for a reason. You do need to be dedicated and you need to be all in when you're going for a startup. Why? Yes, he points out it's a roller coaster and you do need to recognize I'm going all in.

• 49:25Jason Calacanis?

  With the understanding that there's an 80 or 90% chance of failure. But no matter what happens, I put my name on the back of it. And Naval was on All In a couple of weeks ago. He sat in the sack seat and he talked about the social network he created for himself. I forgot the name of it. I had it on my phone. They sold it. Spent a lot of time on it. And basically it was going to be an audio version of Twitter where you have conversations on there. And it would be more thoughtful.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  Air chat.

• 49:52Jason Calacanis?

  Air chat. Thank you, Alex. And air chat was pretty cool. And he said, you know, he tried. He wanted to do something important in the world. He wanted to feel like he was doing something of substance. You know, he sees Elon, he said, and he feels like pathetic sometimes that he's not making something. And he's got to go do something that he really feels. And he put his name on air chat. He was on it constantly. I had conversations with him on it. And you know what? Social networks are like the lightning in a bottle of all lightning in a bottles. Like you literally put a thousand bottles out, lightning hits one of them. And the other 999 shatter. And his was one of the 999 that shattered, but he said he felt really good about it. And I think that's one of the things to keep in mind.

• 50:36Jason Calacanis?

  It's a great quote from David Hamar, handsome friend of mine.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  I just want to say, I really want him to follow me around and kind of keep me in line. I feel like if I ever slacked off, he'd be like, you're not Alan. All right. Sorry, DJ.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  In honor of Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin's big day, we got one more clip here. This is from last year's New York Times Deal Book Summit. And here is Jeff on overestimating risk versus underestimating opportunity.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  I think it's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature. The risks are probably not as big as you perceive and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive. The second thing I would point out is that, you know, thinking small is a self fulfilling prophecy.

• 51:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is something I actually had a conversation with Elon about on his plane 15 years ago. We were, he was working on Tesla and was trying to get a CEO. And he was just saying, people always overestimate the downside risk was the way he phrased it. That always stuck with me. It is true. If you fail spectacularly.

• 51:51Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody remembers. You remember, you think it's a big deal. You will think about it constantly. It's, it's the equivalent of somebody going to a party and literally trips and falls. And then they ruminate about that. Ruminati, right? And rumination is a real blocker for success in life. Obsessing and ruminating over, ruminating just means thinking over and over again about something. And when you ruminate over your perceived failings of yourself, uh, you will then start to feel worse about yourself and you'll over index on it.

• 52:32Jason Calacanis?

  And what I have learned is that it's much better to celebrate all of the victories, even the little ones. So we've been sitting here as we build out the studio and I've been celebrating the little victories. Oh, we got the lighting better. Oh, we got the flags up. Oh, we now have this OLED. Oh, we got a better shot over here. Oh, Alex is wearing a collared shirt, not a T-shirt under the glazer. You know, it's just all the little tiny things.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Your perception is that everybody's staring at you constantly and obsessing over you. But actually, no one is ever thinking about you. They're thinking about themselves.

• 53:02Speaker 03

  Spot my syndrome.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so that, that is a helpful thing to remember because I do sort of, you know, I feel like insecure, social anxiety. And you just have to get over that because nobody's actually looking at you.

• 53:13Speaker 03

  Let's, let's turn this around. So Jason, what you just described is something that I actually personally struggle with. Like I'm a big ruminator by, oh, yeah, I'm.

• 53:20Jason Calacanis?

  I don't.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  I'm an insecure introvert. I just pretend. Um, I'm curious about you though, like, do you, how do you avoid rumination? Like personally?

• 53:28Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. So it was very simple. I am super self-aware and I've always said like, I'm a kid from Brooklyn, who somehow figured out at a very early age, how to start his own magazine and be an entrepreneur, because I was unmanageable and nobody taught me anything about entrepreneurship, except watching my dad run a bar, which was chaotic. And I built a mythology for myself. And my mythology was, hey, the kid from Brooklyn did okay. I was going to be a cop. The expectations were incredibly low. And my Lord, you know, I, out of the gate, I started to exceed them. And now I still champion that mythology for myself, which is, can you imagine? A kid from Brooklyn became a millionaire, has everything he always wanted, has a beautiful

• 54:13Jason Calacanis?

  family, has great friends, and can do whatever he wants in life, has two of the top podcasts in the world, and, you know, he gets to ski in Japan. And I take the time to just appreciate how much further I am from the expectation people had for me. And I went into my, my college counselor, my high school counselor at Severin High School in Brooklyn, this is why I don't donate money to Severin High School. Specifically because of this instance and others. And they asked me every year, and in the, like, famous alumni class thing they have, they have Chris Mullin, and then somebody told me they had me, and a story about me. Where they, you know, just talk about famous people at my high school. Severin High School.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  You're a notable alum.

• 54:58Jason Calacanis?

  I'm like the number two notable alum. If you look at the people who went there, Chris Mullin, Olympian, incredible NBA player, J. Cal. Okay, very flattering, I'm still not buying you. They pitched me on building the computer science wing with Jason Calacanis, they asked me for 10 million bucks or something.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 55:13Jason Calacanis?

  I've given them zero dollars for, you know.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Oh, you could have like the Calacanis Memorial Library.

• 55:17Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, yes, and I'm just like, yeah, no.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  10 million dollars?

• 55:21Jason Calacanis?

  Whatever, they wanted.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  For high school, that feels like a lot.

• 55:24Jason Calacanis?

  They literally pitched me on doing all this. And, you know, listen, when I went to the, the person who was the college counselor, I said, they said, well, what are you thinking? And you were required to go twice. That was the requirement.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, my school had a similar.

• 55:36Jason Calacanis?

  So I went to their, this is when I'm a sophomore, junior, and I said, you know, well, I, I read about, I read about Brown.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Good school.

• 55:44Jason Calacanis?

  And in Brown, you can make your own degree. And I'm really interested in computers, and I'm really interested in psychology, I was wondering if there's anything where you can have like the psychology associated with technology.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  What a forward-thinking major that would have been.

• 55:59Jason Calacanis?

  This is the age of 15 years old, 16 years old. Do you want to know what the guy did? He laughed in my face.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Really?

• 56:07Jason Calacanis?

  He laughed at me.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  What? What was Brown super outside of your, like, what was your GPA?

• 56:12Jason Calacanis?

  Two point something. Yeah, it was terrible.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a little low.

• 56:15Jason Calacanis?

  Three, whatever. Anyway, he laughed at my face. He says, there is no way you would ever get in there. Have you taken the police officer's test?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that's not very nice.

• 56:23Jason Calacanis?

  Or the firefighter test.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  You should encourage somebody.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Chips on shoulders, put chips in pockets.

• 56:29Jason Calacanis?

  This motherfucker, believe that, did not even for a second, he could have just said for but 60 seconds. It's really interesting. What did you hear about Brown? How did you hear about it? Have you looked into the requirements to get into Brown? Is there a second place you could go?

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:46Jason Calacanis?

  That maybe you could do a year or two and then get into Brown?

• 56:48Speaker 01

  That's the approach. She's like, what other schools have interesting programs aligned with what you want to study? You could get into and then transfer to Brown.

• 56:57Jason Calacanis?

  So he gives me this, you know, this nag and I just thought to myself, and this is when it became J Cal versus the world.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  You know, or was did you a favor?

• 57:05Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, in a certain way, and I had started to take martial arts and run marathons and I started to get my chutzpah up. And I was like, you know what? If everybody thinks I'm not going to make it, I'm going to just prove it to them. I got a little, started to get a little chip on my shoulder. And so I went on my own and I figured out, oh, I could go to Fordham University. I knew some friends who were at Fordham, in Cheswood School. And so I started going up and I, I, um, my friend was at Fordham. And he was teaching the Taekwondo program there, the Taekwondo Club. And I was in the Taekwondo Club at Soberan High School. So I started going up there every couple of weeks and I met with this guy. Uh, the, the council there was Edward M. J. Boland. I gotta find out where he is now.

• 57:47Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody can find him if they can. I want to send him a gift basket or something or just say hi to him. And I started going to his office because I had applied for admission to Fordham. And Edward Boland was the guy there and they sent me a letter and said, you didn't get in. But I had set up a tour with him. And I said to him, hey, um, I, I had set up a tour, but you rejected him. He goes, oh, well, the tours have nothing to do with the acceptance. You didn't get accepted because we know we have people with higher SATs and higher GPS. I said, oh, so I can't take the tour even. He goes, no, come up and take the tour. So he met me. He took the tour. I took the tour. I said to him, you know, any chance I can get in, you know, and he said, well, you know, traditionally we don't take a student like you. And I said, well, what about non-traditional? He looked at me and

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  he's like, that's a good question. I don't know. And he said, well, where, where have you been accepted? He said, Brooklyn College. He said, I'll tell you what courses to take at Brooklyn. If you get straight A's and you do really well, then we'll consider you for a sophomore. I said, great. I hammered this guy. I brought him three letters of recommendation, three months in a row, and I dropped them off in his office. I literally went to his office unannounced. Hey, Mr. Bowlin, it's Jason Calacanis. He looked at me, didn't recognize me. I said, I came last month. Remember I had that you guys rejected me at Brooklyn College? Yeah, yeah. I said, I did really well. Here's my report card for my senior year, and here's a letter of recommendation from a place where I had a job. He said, oh, that's great. What are you doing here? He's like, I'm gonna take one dough thing. He's, oh, you were your friend from the psychologist? Well, I said,

• 59:13Jason Calacanis?

  yeah. He said, oh, that's great. Nice seeing you. Next month, Mr. Bowlin. He's like, you're back. I'm like, yes. He's like, another recommendation letter? I said, yeah. I gave it to him. I get a call on August 10th. Never forget it. My mom says, Jason, Fordham's on the phone. I run to the phone. I said, Mr. Bowlin, hey, um, how's it going? And I give him a third letter. He said, I never told the story on the air. He said, uh, Jason, I wanted to let you know I'm leaving Fordham University. I said, put in all that legwork. Yeah. Put in all that legwork. I lost my, my rabbi. He's gone. I said, oh, I'm sorry. What happened? He said, oh, I, I got a job at Yale. He said, you got a job at Yale? I said, that's a better

• 59:54Jason Calacanis?

  school than Fordham. He said, congratulations. He said, yeah. And I had, um, I had one request for Fordham when I was leaving. I said, oh, what's that? He said, I wanted the most promising non-traditional student to get in. I said, who did you pick?

• 1:00:11Jason Calacanis?

  I swear to God, but I said, he said, you dummy. I said, what? You. He said, yeah, you're, you're, you're in Fordham. I said, I'm in Fordham? Yeah. I said, I already signed up for Brooklyn College. He goes, well, you, you can get in if you want. Yeah. I, I said, okay. What do I do? He goes, go to the Bursa. Do you want to go to Rose Hill? There's no housing available. Or do you want to go to Lincoln Center? I said, well, I, I can't afford the housing anyway. Where's Lincoln Center? He said, where's Lincoln Center? You're in New York, right? Yeah. Lincoln Center. He says, the Lincoln Center. Sixteenth Street. I'm like, oh, Columbus Circle. He's like, yeah, it's a block off Columbus Circle. He's like, oh, the B train goes there. I have to. He's like, okay. I was like, okay, I'll go to Lincoln Center. He, I said, what do I do? He goes, go to the Bursa. They got your name there. I said, okay. He said, goodbye. He hung up the phone. I said, ma, I got into Lincoln Center.

• 1:00:56Jason Calacanis?

  She goes, I can't pay for that. Said, I don't know, figure it out. Yeah. I went, I went to Fordham. And that's when I learned that there is a whole system, Alex, out there. And you can either be a victim to the system or you can believe in the system or like Neo in The Matrix, you can bend reality. And I decided I would see how far I could bend reality. Hmm. It was literally that moment in time. Those two events led me to believe that I could bend reality to what I want it to be. And it was, it made me so dangerous. Because then I was like, well, I could just start my own magazine. You just start my own company. I could have Sequoia as an investor. I could do whatever I want. And it just started to snowball.

• 1:01:41Jason Calacanis?

  And so, once I started to have that mindset, that there was a reality available, then like this whole rumination or feeling bad about myself when I did something stupid or I mispronounced somebody's name, I was like, well, who cares? And I just started to view myself as a samurai or a Jedi knight operating in the world as a Ronin. That's where I have my lack of rumination from, is that they laughed in my face and told me I couldn't do it. Hmm. And then I bent the spoons. And then I just literally in my mind just thought I was a Jedi Knight. It is normal for people to think like, okay, what did I do wrong? Why, why did he laugh in my face? All this stuff. And I, I realized the reason he laughed in my face is because he's part of the system. And the system is often wrong. It's just a system like, yeah, the system's wrong and it's, it's just a system. It's an abstraction.

• 1:02:26Jason Calacanis?

  So the whole thing, all of society is just some crazy abstraction. If you want to go to Japan and ski, you can get on a plane with a one-way ticket, go to Japan and start skiing. And I met this guy, John, who owns the Ewan I Resort. He did that and then he bought the resort. You can just go do things. Yeah. He bought Ewan I, took three or four years. Yeah. Four or five years to convince the village to let him buy this shut down ski resort. Yeah. Now he runs my favorite place in the world, Ewan I. All right, everybody, this has been another exciting episode of this weekend. It's a vennel. Guys, stop ruminating, you just do fucking things. Let's just do things, okay? That's the deal. That's it. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye.