Google's AI Design Tool, Salesforce's $8B Comeback Deal, and M&A Momentum Builds | E2131

In this episode, we cover three major stories shaping the startup and tech landscape. First, Google unveils Stitch, an AI-powered web design tool with one-click export to Figma—signaling a major disruption for freelance design marketplaces. Then, Salesforce returns to M&A with its $8B acquisition of Informatica, aiming to broaden its AI data stack beyond CRM. Finally, we break down the surge in startup M&A activity, with billion-dollar deals from OpenAI, DoorDash, and others—hinting at a major Q2 rebound. Don't miss Jason's insights on what these trends mean for founders and investors. (0:00) Episode Teaser (1:36) Jason's in SINGAPORE (3:14) The Power of Shame and why we need "Ozempic for screentime" (10:15) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at www.openphone.com/⁠twist (12:38) Google's latest AI breakthrough: Stitch (20:13) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (21:20) The NBA on Polymarket and what founders can learn from the Knicks (27:08) Why did Salesforce buy Informatica? (30:03) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. (32:42) M&A activity continues, and Jason's spicy Q2 predictions (40:57) Did tech go woke or was it just performative the whole time? (45:22) Circle, stablecoins, and the perks of being pro-business (51:27) What Trump's "golden share" of US Steel might look like (54:15) Why Jason is bullish on Joby (57:28) Episode wrap-up and upcoming events Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Links from episode: ClearSpace App: https://www.getclearspace.com/ Google Stitch: https://stitch.withgoogle.com/ Joby: https://www.jobyaviation.com/ 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: (10:15) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at www.openphone.com/⁠twist (20:13) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (30:03) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. 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 also think Jason, it shows that Google really wants to do everything in AI. Like they're trying to flood the zone here and apparently just some success. So points to Sundar and his team. I gotta say they were behind in AI and now we keep talking about him. So that's all.

• 0:14Jason Calacanis?

  And as you can see here, we've shamed Lon, Alex, because of his prompt and it worked.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  It worked.

• 0:19Jason Calacanis?

  He's gonna do better.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  His prompt will be better next time.

• 0:23Jason Calacanis?

  Shop, I think prompt shame is the next big thing. I mean, if you get people to use AII, we should be looking at people's prompt and saying, really, that's the best prompt you can do?

• 0:33Speaker 00

  This is what doing extra.

• 0:34Jason Calacanis?

  Navigation.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  This is what doing extra gets you on twist. You, you see a thing and you think, you know what? I need to test this out myself. I'm not just gonna take.

• 0:42Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not. It's okay, Alex. You, you did a completely serviceable job. That's, I mean, I'm not.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  That, by the way, in Jason's speak is, is, is, is thin ice.

• 0:53Jason Calacanis?

  Serviceable. Congratulations on doing.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  The bare minimum.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by OpenPhone. Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months at openphone.com/twist. CLA, innovation takes balance. CLA CPAs, consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com/tech. And Pilot. Focus on your product. Let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year.

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's your boy Jake Allen here with Bon Harris and Alex Wilheim. One's in Austin, one's in New York and one is in Singapore. I think you can guess someone in Singapore. Gentlemen, how are we doing? What time is it there for each of you?

• 1:52Speaker 02

  It's 9 a.m. here in Austin, Texas.

• 1:54Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, a little early for you.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  It's 10 a.m. here, but I kind of enjoyed starting work today at 6:30 a.m. Because I feel so productive. I have gotten so much done, Jason, in such a short amount of time.

• 2:06Jason Calacanis?

  If you want to feel productive, every time I get jet lagged, like I am now, there's this incredible feeling. You fall asleep at like 6:00 or 7:00 p.m. when you get here, wake up at 12:00 or 1 a.m. and then stay up all night. So at 4 a.m. I decided to go for a walk for, you know, two or three miles around town. This happens to me every time. In the Middle East, I'm in Asia, I'm in Japan, I wind up going for these 3, 4, 5 a.m. walks around the town and it's, Singapore is a beautiful place. It's the size of New York City. But somehow they've carved out a niche here that they are like Hong Kong was earlier in my life, like this incredibly central, important district.

• 2:48Jason Calacanis?

  And so I have a list of places I haven't been. And when the Speaker Bureau is asked, hey, would you like to speak at this incredible extraordinary event? Would you like to speak at this incredible extraordinary event? Here's a briefcase. You know, it's a pretty amazing life, I have to say, to be wanted and to be compensated for flying around the world. I'll leave it at that. It's pretty outrageous. But

• 3:15Jason Calacanis?

  you know, I saw this thing on the Twitter. I guess it was called Lear Space and I sent it to you guys.

• 3:24Jason Calacanis?

  What's her name? Alexa?

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Alexia Banatsa is my former boss, Jason.

• 3:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, she your boss? TechCrunch. I remember meeting her when she was but a cub reporter in L.A. She wrote a story about me back in the day.

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  And yeah, she, I guess, like all TechCrunch VCs went on, all TechCrunch went on to become a VC and got married. And she's Greek, so we have that. And here's Alexia's screen time, if you check this out. And I guess the concept of the Screen Time Network is that you share your screen time so you can be shamed.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  I think the goal is to lower it.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Yes, the goal is definitely to lower it. That's why they're calling it Ozempic for screen time.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  That was, that was Alexia's joke about it. She said, the world does not need another AI SAS. What it needs is Ozempic for screen time. And as you can see, Jason, from her chart here that I have up on screen, she's making a lot of progress over a one week period from 12 hours in one day to just over two, looks like.

• 4:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I asked Oliver, the intern, I bought him a phone. I logged into it as me and I'm on here and I had him use it for 14 hours a day. And then I have him slowly going 30 minutes down so that I can publicly virtue signal that my screen time is going down here. So I have a burner phone to do that for me.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  I, I gotta, I gotta be honest. I, I get, I like the idea, but I don't know if shaming is, is the thing that's going to work here. Like I just, I don't feel like you change, you're going to change your habits that way. I feel like you're going to do it for a few weeks and then go right back to your old, your old habit. I feel like it's a, it's a lifestyle change, not just like, oh, I feel bad. I'm going to lower these numbers so that I don't get embarrassed.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Let me, let me back into why you're very politely wrong, Lon. So one, this is from a company called Clearspace. They're a YC backed company. Winter 23 was their batch, team of five, according to their profile over there. This, Jason, as far as I can tell, is a viral marketing stunt by the company. Clearspace, their application for iOS and Android is designed to help you limit your screen time. This is kind of, um, almost like a joke, social network in a polite sense to show off what you're doing. Now Lon, the reason why I actually kind of disagree with you is what gets measured gets improved. And I feel like right now my screen time information inside of iOS is so buried deep down in the menus and the relatively lackluster software that Apple has on there. So I just don't see it.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  But you don't get your weekly, I get my weekly report. Like they, they, they'll ping you once a week with your like, here's your weekly screen time. And like, I look at it and I agree, it would be good to limit it. Like I'm not, I'm not debating the overall premise here. I just feel like, like if I was going to, if I was going to make a change, I would have to like change something about my lifestyle. Style that gets me off my phone like I'm gonna start taking a walk every day like that would get me off my phone successfully just being like oh I don't want Jason and Alex to see how much I've been on my phone. I don't know if that's like a real fix. That feels like a bandage.

• 6:33Jason Calacanis?

  Nah, I think you're underestimating the power of shame. Shame is something we need much more of in our society. I'm I'm here for it. I think we should be shaming people when they leave the office at 4:30. I think we should be shaming people when they gain too much weight. I should have been shamed when I was fat. People should have absolutely tortured me. I should have been bullied and I should have lost the weight sooner.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  You had you had me in the first half Jason and then you lost me in the back half. But just for the sake of transparency, I went ahead and signed up for the Screen Time Network. Here is my

• 7:04Jason Calacanis?

  Seven hours a day. Seven hours a day.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  It's I think it starts tracking from when you join. So clearly my thing is here. But Lauren, what I really like about this compared to the iOS updates is it gives you a bit more information about like when and how you've done it kind of gamifies it a little bit, gives you some encouragement. So instead of just being public shame, I think this also is kind of like your Strava results you can share with your friends about how your runs are going. No one really cares if you're running 15 minute miles or 10 minute miles. But if you're going 15, 14, 13, that to me is kind of the thing you want to encourage. So I can see this working. I kind of like it. And Jason, here we are talking about Clearspace. We haven't done that before. So you know, shout out to them for doing that.

• 7:46Jason Calacanis?

  That's the big lesson here is you can create a website that's adjacent to what you're doing in a clever way. Simply design it vibe code it and they know the dynamics of shame. They know public competition, time to beat, you know, your best time, yearly average, best weekly average, you know, putting yourself into a pedometer group, which I think Fitbit and some other people did early on. These things actually work and then people want to share it. So when you sign up, you're going to give them your email. So this is a great idea. You should be thinking about this for every startup you do. Calm.com was the master of this. Alex created a website that said, do nothing for 60 seconds.

• 8:31Jason Calacanis?

  He set the 60 second timer. It was pretty famous. He also did the million dollar homepage where he sold. He made a thousand pixels by a thousand pixels, I guess would be a million. And he sold each pixel for a dollar and it turned out to be an interesting business. So you can link them. So these little devices are

• 8:57Jason Calacanis?

  just really great at driving folks to understand the problem in your space. So always think about like a simpler, hookier version of your product. There's the million dollar home place.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  I'm just showing this for folks who were too young when this came out, but like this was a big deal. This was like a viral hit. People tried to make copycats of this. They didn't really work out. But Alex Chewy, who later went on to build Calm, is kind of a hitmaker, Jason. He's kind of got that Midas touch to him.

• 9:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a viral thing and this is a viral thing. It's probably, when you do these things, it's probably not going to work. But if it does work, hey, you may get people talking about it a whole bunch. So good job for them.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  It's a thing we talk about a lot in Founder You. We have a, or and launch as well. There's a company that they sell billboards space and they created, they go on Reddit. Cause they've got this billboard that they actually own. So they could put whatever they want on it. So they go on Reddit and put different kinds of messages on it to go viral on Reddit. And use that to like grow interest around the company.

• 10:02Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Gimme key fun things that are going to go viral on the internet can be a great way to like promote your company, even if it's not directly related.

• 10:15Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:56Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think that's brilliant. I mean, billboards are a big deal in Silicon Valley culture, Jason. I think we all recall the Twilio Ask Your Developer billboards they ran back in the day that really kind of put them as a developer-first company. That worked quite well. So lots of fun to be at.

• 11:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a, the way to do it with the billboard would be to come up with some funny use of it to put up there.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Well, that's what they were doing on Reddit is they actually asked this Reddit community, like, what do you guys think we should put on the billboard? And then they would take pictures of the billboard with whatever the messages the community suggested.

• 11:50Jason Calacanis?

  Too basic. The better thing would be to hashtag your tweet or your Instagram billboard and then put something on there, like, if it hits 100 retweets, then it goes on the billboard. And then say that, if I get 100 retweets, this goes on the billboard. So now you've created a viral loop, right? So, you know, what should we put on the billboard? Doesn't create any virality, but coming up with a contest to do it. Or if I get 100 likes or 100 retweets, then it goes on the billboard. That would create more of a, of a loop, a reason to come back, right? So that's the, that's the virality piece of it. I saw some folks talking about this Google Stitch thing and it looked incredibly...

• 12:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it looked incredibly compelling to me. Maybe you could share that with folks here.

• 12:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Google had its I/O developer event just a couple of days ago and they released Jason roughly 55,000 things. So I think we're all still digesting each element of what Google put out, new models, new image creation models, new video creation models. One thing they dropped was a product called Stitch. And this is not something that's entirely brand new. It is tell an AI what kind of website you would like and then it'll generate something that's along those lines. What's cool about Stitch is that it has a button that says edit in Figma. So if you're a Figma person, they're really setting this up to be a quick loop between ideation, AI generation, and then human editing, which I think is kind of a cool thing. Now, Niyati Sol had a pretty bullish

• 13:21Speaker 00

  tweet about this that we saw. I'll just show that to give her credit for this. She says that it's absolutely mind blowing and that now the potential is endless. There's no excuse left to not build stuff. So I this morning went and gave it a try and let me tell you, it wasn't great. I'm not gonna lie. It was kind of a letdown.

• 13:40Jason Calacanis?

  I think your prompt was pretty bad. A newsy blog newsletter designed for cautionoptimism.news that is punchy, serious, and calm. You gotta do something a little bit more thoughtful than that. Like just redoing a blog is like a very basic. When she did it, she was, look at her prompt or like the result of hers. Hers came out really gorgeous. But you know, the bigger point here is there's another job UX that I think everybody's going to be able to do. Now, that doesn't mean everybody's gonna be able to do it perfectly, but let's pull up her design because it's a little more than just redoing a newsletter page. She did something that was

• 14:22Jason Calacanis?

  more like, let's build an app. And I think that's where it really shines. And as we saw last week, when we did the, yeah, here's hers for those of you watching on YouTube. And can you see her prompt if you click on it? If you click on the image?

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I got it. "Mobile-friendly home for a marketplace of handmade ceramics and pottery with a minimalist soap theme." And then she refined it. "The home screen for the ceramic and pottery marketplace app features a minimalist soap theme with a search bar, a featured artist banner, curated collections, and a bottom navigation bar for easy access to different sections."

• 14:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so with a little more robust prompt and then a follow-up, you can see like, If a designer getting paid 50 bucks an hour on Fiverr or, you know, one of these marketplaces submitted this, I would say that would be what I would expect. And why is that important? Well, I think probably most startups, that's exactly what they do. They design with a 25 to 50 dollar an hour offshore designer that they find on Fiverr. Or what are some of those other sites where you can get like freelancers, Dribbble, Behance?

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Up, Upwork.

• 15:35Jason Calacanis?

  Upwork would be the big one. Yes. Sorry. That was the one I was thinking of. So you go on Upwork and you know, you find these designers who I would say are good at copying other common designs and being inspired by other designs. We talked on All In, I think last week, somebody stopped me who worked at Apple on the airplane and was like, you trashed us last week. I was like, where did, what did I, I was like, get in line. Who did I trash last week? And he's like, Apple. I'm like, I didn't trash Apple. I love Apple. What are you talking about? He's like, our design, Johnny Ive, you said he stole everything. I said, well, no, I said he was inspired by Dieter Braun. Um, so.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  It was Sacks who was arguing that he's a talentless hack who didn't really do anything. You were more in the middle.

• 16:21Jason Calacanis?

  I think I was in the middle of the other two guys were laughing. Sacks and I are back with our pick and roll. We were, what happens is when Sacks and I get going on something like that, he's like, isn't it, was he a media creation? I'm like, interesting. Yeah. Let me get it on this.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sacks's contention was Johnny Ive never done anything good. A pure media creation. Jason was more like the moderate position, like maybe he never did anything good and just ripped off all his ideas, but maybe not. Maybe there's something to it.

• 16:49Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, I was like, maybe that's what great artists do is steal. So I gave it a backhanded call, but the point is even the mighty Johnny Ive copied everything Dieter Braun, is that his name, Dieter Braun?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Dieter Ram, he worked for Braun is the, the brand.

• 17:04Jason Calacanis?

  That's why I got, it's Dieter Ram?

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I believe Dieter Ram is how you'd pronounce it.

• 17:09Jason Calacanis?

  Ram is how you pronounce it. And he worked for Braun, you know, like the shaver, but they did many other electronic devices. I mean, you see them side by side.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Speakers and yeah, transistors.

• 17:18Jason Calacanis?

  Once again, we just eliminated a line item from the costs of running your startup. That's we're here on this week in startups. So I always like to go back to that angle, gentlemen. You now have two tips in the first 10 minutes here. Number one, if you create something viral, you put these two things together. Like a make me a gorgeous website that tracks your iPhone usage that's in a retro style. And that has short URLs and boom, you do that. You could have vibe coded this over the weekend in like a day or two or in a day. This is a probably $5,000 to $10,000 worth of spend of your 125 K incubator check.

• 18:02Jason Calacanis?

  Just like signing your safe note or convertible note and having attorney review it. That was five or $10,000 making a marketing plan, you know, writing some code on the margin. So we're seeing each line item get abstracted. So if you want to come up with a good startup idea, what are the things that people used to spend money on for their startup? Recruiting somebody, acquiring some customers, creating a community, creating your designs, doing PR, sales development,

• 18:37Jason Calacanis?

  raising money itself, that whole money raising process. So look at each of those in terms of the number of hours they take or who you might pay as a consultant. And then I bet you build a startup around every single one of them.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. One last point about this. When I was playing with the Jason refining my initial week prompt, I did discover that it won't make desktop websites. So I was stuck in this mobile world and I said, hey, can we actually just swap desktop? And it said, no, you have to start a new thread for that. So I did. And then it said, you can't do that. Start a new thread for that. So right now, a little bit limited, but again, I also think Jason, it shows that Google really wants to do everything in AI. Like they're trying to flood the zone here and apparently just some success. So points to Sundar and his team. I gotta say they were behind in AI and now we keep talking about him. So that's all.

• 19:24Jason Calacanis?

  And as you can see here, we've shamed Lon Alex because of his prompt and it worked. It worked. He's going to do better.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  His prompt will be better next time.

• 19:34Jason Calacanis?

  I think prompt shame is the next big thing. I mean, if you get people to use AI, we should be looking at people's prompt and saying, really? That's the best prompt you can do?

• 19:44Speaker 00

  This is what doing extra.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Talk about the navigation.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  This is what doing extra gets you on twist. You, you see a thing and you think, you know what? I need to test this out myself. I'm not just gonna take.

• 19:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's okay, Alex. You, you did a completely serviceable job. That's, I'm not.

• 20:00Speaker 00

  That, by the way, in Jason's speak is, is, is, uh, is thin ice.

• 20:04Jason Calacanis?

  Serviceable. Congratulations on doing.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  The bare minimum.

• 20:13Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:58Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:20Speaker 00

  Now, before we get into the next story, Jason, I thought we'd take a quick polymarket break because I know your beloved Knicks are now down 3-1.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  If I recall correctly. So I wanted to bring to you the polymarket odds for them making it all the way to become the NBA champion. I'm sorry to say, Jason, it's actually.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  You're about to be disappointed.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  3%. And last.

• 21:46Jason Calacanis?

  3%.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  And last week, we brought up a market that was a little bit light. Jason, this one has $1.7 billion in volume. So I, I think it's nice and deep. Do you think, do you think the Thunder are 78% favorite? That's my question.

• 22:00Jason Calacanis?

  They're up 3-1 as well or 3-2?

• 22:03Speaker 00

  I think they're 3-1.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  I'll look.

• 22:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it might be 3-1. 3-1. So they're both 3-1. And so, oh, this is NBA champion. So by the way, this is going all the way. So this is not only winning this round, this is winning the championship.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 22:21Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. So the Knicks have to win seven more games to win the championship. Uh, yeah, this is the right odds, I think. Um, Indiana Pacers need to win five and Oklahoma City need to win five, right? The one game blows out the series and the four to win the next. I think, um, the Knicks have squandered their best chance at getting a champ, a champion, winning a championship since the Hakeem Olajuwon series, uh, when we lost, uh, because John Starks couldn't hit the side of a backboard. Um, but you know, there were many reasons, uh, we could have won that series. But yeah, we, we could have been in the finals. So it's incredibly frustrating, but you know, uh, this is life.

• 23:04Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, and I'm excited. We got to the conference finals, but I just want to win the next game. I just want to win the next game. That's all.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Nearly every sports team does not win their season, right? So do you feel like happy as a Knicks fan if they make a good deep run in the postseason? Or is that just more like a, like a, like a teaser that makes it worse when they lose?

• 23:25Jason Calacanis?

  Right now it feels pretty bad. Um, and, uh, because the coach of our team, this is a kind of interesting for startups as well. He, um, something worked, like he has a short rotation kind of concept. So in basketball, you have a 15 member team. You can only play five. Those are called the starters, uh, at the top of the game. And then you can rotate players and typically, I would say the average team plays eight, nine, or 10 players a game. He has always played a short rotation, six, seven players, right? He never gets the eighth or ninth unless it's garbage time, meaningless game. He might put some people in. This has led to his players famously getting injuries because he overworks them. And also this year has resulted in them having incredible stamina.

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  But what it does do is you don't get to see all the possible lineups and you don't give some emerging talent, the ability to develop. So when we got down to

• 24:21Jason Calacanis?

  Games in a seven game series. He hadn't tried out a lot of people on the bench. He hadn't tried out different rotations. And so then he starts experimenting with rotations in game three and we win. And we had some really nice moments where we had to not belabor the point, you know, spread out a little bit of the minutes and try giving different people the opportunity. I do this inside of our venture firm. Everybody wants the starters, the high performers constantly get the same opportunity because they have done really well, being the point guard, the center, the wing, et cetera. What I do is every six months or 12 months, I will change who's in charge of founding university, the accelerator, the syndicate, or working here at launch, or working directly with me as a shadow.

• 25:05Jason Calacanis?

  What that does is it lets emerging talent get the chance to prove themselves. It gives them their 20 minutes in the game, 15 minutes in the game. And yeah, what's the downside? They fall on their face. They cause chaos. They're not very good. You know what? I kind of want to know that quickly so that I can stop investing in that person. Or I can invest in that person and get them better because the mistakes they're making are fixable. Right? It's one or the other. Here's how you do that. You tell everybody at the start, you're going to work on a project like founding university. Jackie worked on that, for example. A guy named Charlie then took it over from Jackie. He added his own spin on it. It went to another level. That's no dig to Jackie.

• 25:48Jason Calacanis?

  You know, and then Kelly worked on it. He added some things to it that made it even better than it had been under Charlie and Jackie. And now Lucas and Lon and some other folks at the headquarters are running it. It's doing even better. And what happens when you move people around as well? You have redundancy. You're not reliant on one person. So if one person's not bringing it, you got this other person's bringing it. This happened to the Warriors. They had older players who were, you know, in the twilight of their career. You had younger players, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. As they came off the bench and got minutes, you were able to give them room to perform.

• 26:31Jason Calacanis?

  But that also did was, you know, if some older person wanted a huge contract, you were like, you know what? Are you worth that amount of money? Or is this younger up and comer worth giving the opportunity to? And this sounds incredibly cutthroat, and it is, and as business is. So if you are looking for yet another startup lesson, you know, look at the Ben and give the bench an opportunity.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Hard to agree with that. Also, it makes more and more fun games to watch because you get to know more players and you get to see kind of more, I don't know, playing methods. I've been watching a lot of WNBA lately, so I've gotten to see some of this, Jason. All right, Jason, you wanted to talk about the biggest deal of the week, which is Salesforce is buying a company called Informatica, which is the most enterprise sounding name of all time. Before you jump in here, I'll just let everyone know it's an $8 billion transaction. And Salesforce, as we all recall, is a company that pledged back in 2023 that had disbanded its M and A committee and was going to pull back from mega deals. And then about 20 minutes later, Mark Benioff was like, well, that's boring. I'm going to go back to doing deals. Tried to buy the company last year, didn't work out.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  And now it is scooping it up, Jason, for about $3 billion less. But no matter what, we love to see some M and A, even if it is a couple of public companies.

• 27:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so one simple sentence, always like to know what the company does. So what does this company do? And what's the thesis? Do we, do we have a handle on that?

• 28:00Speaker 00

  We do.

• 28:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  I'm scrolling through my, I wrote this down, so I knew you were going to ask it.

• 28:07Jason Calacanis?

  Always start with that. Like, I think it's just important for the audience to understand, especially the founders who are watching, why is somebody buying a company? Right? We, it is interesting, I think, in terms of context, that Salesforce, during the wrath of Lina Khan, gave up. Did that really happen? Did Benioff say, we're disbanding our M and A?

• 28:26Speaker 00

  That was back in 2020, that was back, no, that was back in 2023, because he was under pressure by outside investors to stop doing so many big deals. They wanted him to focus more on cost cutting. And then he went back to doing deals.

• 28:37Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so that was because he was feeling pressure from activist investors, not necessarily Lina Khan. But I bet you the outside investors were like, listen, it's not going to get through anyway. So what's the point of all of this? To try to even buy things, spend years doing it, then having like Adobe, having the Figma deal canceled? So. I bet you that was why the activist investors who wanted him to lay people off and get the earnings to spike, you know, and thus get the stock price to spike. So tell us, what is Informatica?

• 29:11Speaker 00

  All right.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  Informatica.

• 29:13Speaker 00

  Informatica does corporate data organization. It helps companies find out where their data is. It helps them figure out the governance for it and also to make sure that they're doing good data observability, Jason, which is making sure that your data sources are accurate and not spitting out complete garbage. Now, that's pretty boring, I think, in a pre-AI world.

• 29:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's a lot of buzzwords. Corporate data organization, well, observation and governance. I'm trying to even parse what that means, but okay. You got a lot of data in your organization. We're going to somehow organize it?

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Yep, that's, that's their goal is to go figure out what you have, help you organize it, figure out who's allowed to look at it and interact with it, governance, and then also make sure that your inbound sources are not polluted and full of crap.

• 30:03Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:47Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:29Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. As opposed to using the SaaS, specific SaaS products, this would do it across many SaaS products. So they would take your Salesforce data, your HubSpot data, whatever, your Slack data, your Google Drive, your email, and be able to look across all of it. Okay, I think I get it. Got it.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Now, that was an important bit of work in the pre-AI world, but now I think it's much more important because everyone wants to use their internal data in an AI context to automate tasks, learn more about their business and so forth. The context here for Salesforce is that the company's growth has slowed. Salesforce is growing eight, nine, 10% a quarter, even with some relatively large acquisitions, Jason. So my thought here is as Salesforce pushes more and more into AI and AI agents, they need to expand the TAM and get out of just customer data. And so working with a company like Informatica will give them access to a lot of customers that have non-CRM data, and therefore they can apply their same agentic technology, back to the buzzwords, across a broader set of problems.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  And so I think it makes some sense, and it's only about a 3% market cap deal for Salesforce. So it's not a bet the farm style transaction.

• 32:42Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. And we've been tracking a lot of M&A here. Did we make our M&A tracker? Or maybe you could just tell the audience, like, what were the, because we, there were, off the top of my head, I remember there were two purchased by DoorDash. Then you had two purchased by OpenAI. So that was four deals. Those four deals, I think, were all billion dollar, low billion dollar deals. So we're starting to see a trend of single-digit billion deals happen just in the last 30 days. You had the cursor competitor. Bought by OpenAI, you had Johnny Ive by OpenAI, 6.5, and I think the other one was 3 billion. Am I about right?

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Yes, the Windsurf deal was 3 billion, but I still think that has not been officially confirmed by the company.

• 33:24Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so that's in process. Then you had the Johnny Ive. Then you had DoorDash bought two companies. I forget which ones those were, but I think they were also 1 to 5 billion. Am I correct with those?

• 33:34Speaker 00

  They were smaller deals, yes.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Was it Deliveroo? Wasn't that one of them?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, Deliveroo, and it was a smaller company. I think Deliveroo was like 3, 3.5 billion, somewhere like that.

• 33:43Jason Calacanis?

  So a direct competitor, but in a smaller market than the other one. Also, by the way, here in Singapore, it's a Grab world. I opened up my Uber Eats, I opened up my Uber, and it was like, yeah, Uber forwarded me to the Grab app. Said, "We are no longer operating here, but you can use our partner Grab." So I think this is one of those markets where they gave up and then got a percentage ownership in the, you know, domestic player, in this case, Grab.

• 34:13Jason Calacanis?

  And yeah, you have to download and sign up for a new app, which I did.

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  And there were two interesting observations I had about Grab. Number one, it sells insurance to customers for 30 cents a ride. And the insurance protects you against the Uber, the Grab, arriving late. And if it arrives late, you get like 5 bucks or 10 bucks. I'm like, who's buying this? This makes no sense. But there it was. Or if you're late to get to it, then you don't pay the $5 fee, which I got ding with the $5 fee, because they will not pick you up in a Grab. It's such a high-functioning society here that all of the livery cars have to go to specific locations located throughout the city to get into the car. So I had to go to like a garage lobby to a hub to get my car, and it was a block and a half away.

• 35:03Jason Calacanis?

  And it took me a couple of minutes because I went to the wrong place.

• 35:08Jason Calacanis?

  So I thought it was super, super interesting to have that experience. And see some little bit of a different take on how these things should operate.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  I would pay for the insurance.

• 35:19Jason Calacanis?

  Weird, right?

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Insurance for.

• 35:22Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I almost felt like it was like a little bit of gambling, like I'm gonna bet 30 cents to make $5.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  That's exactly what I was gonna say. I was like, do you think because gambling is so popular there that they've sort of started to integrate the idea of insurance into? Cause that's like, it's like blackjack. That's exactly what I was thinking.

• 35:37Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's sort of like polymarket too, like polymarket, you're, you're getting insurance. So if I bet that 3% and the Knicks hit. Or if I were to bet the Pacers.

• 35:50Jason Calacanis?

  Then I could have the joy of knowing the team that beat us. Eventually won, so we lost to the champions. So I would get like some, yeah, I hate those kinds of bets. It just makes me obsessed more.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Sad twice. Uh, the reason why I would buy the insurance is I still sometimes run into the, the problem with Uber in which. A driver will accept the ride and then kind of like not drive towards you and hope that you cancel. And I understand the dynamics.

• 36:15Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, the slow roll, the classic slow roll.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but if I had insurance.

• 36:18Jason Calacanis?

  I don't like the slow roll. I always complain about the slow roll. It hasn't happened to me recently. When's the last time you got a slow roll?

• 36:24Speaker 00

  Two weeks ago, I was trying to leave the poker room and I was trying to Uber home and the driver was like, we're gonna play chicken. And I'm like, yeah, I got time. Let's go. Like, so I just waited him out. Jason, back to your question though about M and A. I want to share a couple of data points that I pulled for everyone this morning. First of all, a reminder that we are still in a historically low, low period for M and A. This is a chart I'm showing on screen from KPMG. It just shows venture backed exit activity here in the U.S. And while the first quarter of 2025 with $56.2 billion in known transactions was the highest since 2021. It's still, Jason, not exactly where we want to see. And it's lower than the numbers we saw back in 19, some parts of 20, and also 2021. So it's still a bit depressed.

• 37:09Jason Calacanis?

  That's three quarters of increase and um, it's going to be a blowout second quarter is my prediction. I think we might see that number double.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  You heard it here first, folk.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Well, we have some more data because I was trying to do some work on what's happening in Q2 because Q2 is still ongoing, we're just over the halfway mark. I wanted to bring some more new data to the table. So I went ahead and did a bunch of searches on Crunchbase and there is a meaningful uptick this this year, but I was doing my own data work. So I also grabbed some data from EY, our dear friends over at Ernst & Young. And this is a US activity in terms of deals over the $100 million mark in April. As we're seeing here, the growth in deal value is up 100% April of this year, Jason, compared to April of last year. So I think very strong start to the second quarter.

• 37:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so the deal value is up massively. The number of deals is down slightly. Is that what I'm reading into here?

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yes, 34 versus 42.

• 38:09Jason Calacanis?

  So the dollar, so that makes sense. What that would indicate to me is maybe some of those deals that happened previously were Aqua hires, low value deals, clearing out some inventory that companies worth acquiring, but it might not be able to survive as a standalone company with venture investors on the board. But I will tell you, I've now had to make like three decisions in three weeks about approving two different sales and then getting offers secondary during a like Series B, let's call it. And so this is three delightful moments for me. I should, well, I should say like one of them was a sale that I was displeased with.

• 38:52Jason Calacanis?

  You know, one is a sale that I'm okay with. And then one is a secondary sale that I am,

• 38:59Jason Calacanis?

  dare I say, if we were in my group chat with other investors, I might put an eggplant emoji on the.

• 39:09Jason Calacanis?

  Which is what grown men do in my adult chat.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  It means I'm excited about this. That's the translation.

• 39:18Jason Calacanis?

  I'm excited, enthusiastic because in Italian culture, everybody knows a side of eggplant is a sign of being excited.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  The eggplant Parmesan, the king of side dishes.

• 39:30Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. It's just an eggplant parm homage. Let's not read into it any more than that.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Sometimes eggplant is just an eggplant.

• 39:37Jason Calacanis?

  Use the promo code TWIST and JCal for your hymns prescription.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Eggplant is the worst vegetable. It tastes like garbage. I don't know why people like it.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Oh, spicy taste.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Terrible, terrible food.

• 39:48Jason Calacanis?

  Lon and I are making fun of Alex is now turning into a dynamic. I'm like me and Shemah beating up on Friedberg.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  We gotta scale back. I agree.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Guys, I have a two and a half year old. I get flamed all the time.

• 40:02Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna get an Alex impersonation that has nothing to do with Alex. Actually, I did a little comedy when I was in the Catskills as a child. I did have.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Is that what I sound like?

• 40:15Jason Calacanis?

  No, that's my nerd.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  That's Dave Friedberg.

• 40:18Jason Calacanis?

  My nerd Friedberg.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 40:20Jason Calacanis?

  When he laughs at himself, but he.

• 40:25Jason Calacanis?

  This makes me.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  I like this twist format. We should have Jason be 12 hours ahead more often. This is fun.

• 40:31Jason Calacanis?

  Definitely in La La Land because I was up all in the middle of the night and now I'm gonna be in this weird position where I slept for five hours, got up at 10pm to do this and then yeah, moving on to that.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  I wanna keep the.

• 40:46Jason Calacanis?

  Deal flows back. I think Lena Kahn will be working at a venture firm, a woke venture firm will hire Lena Kahn. I don't know which is the woke. Oh, yes, there are.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 40:59Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, big time. Big time. Yes. It works when you.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  They're socialist?

• 41:04Jason Calacanis?

  Look at their team. No, you're gonna look at their team page and it's going to look like a Benetton ad. And then when you double click on it, everybody has the same title, partner.

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  And then half of the people who are diverse do not have check writing ability. I'm not calling anybody specific out.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Oh, well, this is

• 41:22Jason Calacanis?

  But it is.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  That's interesting because is that is that woke or is that performative? Because I would say

• 41:29Jason Calacanis?

  Performative woke.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Right, like that's

• 41:31Jason Calacanis?

  Performative woke, yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Like if you're actually woke, you would just have a diverse group of partners because that's what you wanted in your organization. It wouldn't be a publicity stunt, but what you're saying is it's actually performative. It's not really. They're not woke people. They just want everybody to think they are.

• 41:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, you know what? F it, I'm gonna go for it. I'm gonna, you know, I'm a little loopy move here, Alex.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  We can always cut this out later.

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm gonna let it go. I'm just gonna let it go.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  I'm not

• 41:54Jason Calacanis?

  Here's what happened in the industry. TechCrunch, your alumni of and I was formerly partners with in year one. We did a conference together for, yeah, bad stuff happened. Anyway.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  I went to it when I was a baby. Yeah, yeah.

• 42:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, it was pretty great.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  I remember those days.

• 42:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, the, uh, the crazy thing that happened was TechCrunch writers, which became like, eh, you know, after the, um, uh, leader of TechCrunch kind of disappeared when, uh, you know, kind of went, uh, into the crypto world. It got kind of taken over, became a little woke, like most of the, uh, valley did during that time period. Hey, and what they did was they would screenshot people's team pages and be like, look, five white guys, you know, and, you know, two Asian receptionists, right? They literally would write stories like that and dunk and be like, oh, you know, look at the diversity problem. Then I literally was hanging out with VCs at a dinner. No less than 12 firms at this like group dinner. And two or three of them are goofing off laughing at the corner.

• 42:56Jason Calacanis?

  And I said, what's so funny? And they're like, oh, we just like, we, we hacked TechCrunch, like literally. And I was like, yeah, how'd you do that? They're like, oh, well, we, we now, everybody in our firm's a partner. And I said, what does that mean? Everybody's a partner? Don't you have like levels? Aren't there levels to this game? They're like, are there?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:19Jason Calacanis?

  He he. And I was like.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I get it. I get it.

• 43:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, there are. There are. Like, you're like a researcher, an analyst, associate, you're a principal, you're managing director, you become a junior partner, senior partner.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  The hierarchy, you move up the stack.

• 43:32Jason Calacanis?

  The hierarchy is exactly like how that works. They're like,

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:34Jason Calacanis?

  Does it have to work that way? I'm like, I don't know. Like, well, I'm like, so they showed me their homepage and they're like, yeah, we hired two black people, three Asian people, a trans person, like literally went on a hiring spree for the most entry level positions, created a scout program essentially, where they gave them the ability to, oh, and they hacked it too, to be, you have check writing ability to write 50K checks out of the scout fund in a billion dollar fund.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:11Jason Calacanis?

  And literally TechCrunch is like

• 44:15Jason Calacanis?

  fawning over the diversity of one fund and crucifying another for this. They literally hacked it and nobody ever double clicked on it.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  This was always the issue with DEI. The attacks on it have been, it's unfair to white people or it's not a meritocracy anymore. But the real problem is it was, it was never sincere. It was always a front to get better press coverage. It was never about making the companies actually more diverse or equitable.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Very few people in business are, are in it for moral reasons. People are in business for profit reasons. Now, the, the partner point that Jason's making is actually interesting because we did notice. I mean, we weren't, we weren't stupid. Uh, but when Andreessen Horowitz just declares that their entire firm is full of partners, it does obfuscate really, really deeply who actually can write checks.

• 45:02Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, there's a name shout out. Ooh, spicy. Alex shouts them out. I didn't say any names.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  You were talking about Andreessen Horowitz led this chart.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  I'm at a table with 12 VCs and a group of them are talking about how they hacked TechCrunch for making everyone a partner. I mean, that narrows it down, Jason, to just a couple of firms. All right, I want to talk about Circle. Jason, we have been going on about stablecoins ad nauseam here on Twist, and I just want to point out a couple of quick things. One, we now kind of know when Circle is going to go public. It's going to be, I think it's June 4th, followed by a June 5th debut. And also, we have some pricing information. We now know what Circle may be worth when it does list. They have put a $24 to $26 per share target on their IPO, Jason, which at the midpoint, gives them a valuation of about $6.2 billion on a fully diluted basis. Now, I tried to figure out,

• 45:57Speaker 00

  does that number make sense for us? And I actually ran into an interesting accounting problem. So their gross revenue run rate puts them at like a 2.6x multiple of that price.

• 46:08Jason Calacanis?

  Gross revenue, which is the interest generated on the holdings of the stablecoins, I'm going to guess.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Yes, that is the vast majority of their revenues, but...

• 46:22Jason Calacanis?

  They could have fees as well, right? So if we were looking at a bank, a bank might have fees, like late fees, overdraft fees, et cetera, gold card fees, right? I have a platinum card, I'm paying $800 a year for, like an idiot, from American Express, just so I can get into the Centurion Lounge, which I'll probably use four times a year. So it's going to cost me $200 each time, which now I feel like an idiot, but okay. Maybe it is worth it. So the other one would be the interest on the float, which is also how a bank works. Okay, got it.

• 46:51Speaker 00

  Now, just to be clear, their quote "reserve income," which is their interest-based payments from holding treasuries and so forth, is the vast majority of their revenue.

• 46:58Jason Calacanis?

  80%, 90%, I'm going to guess?

• 47:00Speaker 00

  95, 96. I'll show you the income statement in a second. But where it gets a little interesting is distribution and other costs. See, what I think is not as well-understood is how tied Coinbase and Circle are. And the terms of their agreement are that if the USDC, the chief stablecoin from Circle, which is pegged to the US dollar, if those exist over on Coinbase's platform, Coinbase essentially gets the money. Which means-

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  All of it, or half of it, or eighty percent of it?

• 47:32Speaker 00

  As far as I understand it, going back and reading through the S1, I still need to do a little bit more research here, it's the vast majority of it. So, that ends up with a big chunk of the gross reserve income that Circle generates from holding the backing currencies and bonds that back the stablecoin, going somewhere else. And you know how we think about Google's revenue on a X traffic acquisition cost basis? We might want to think about Circle in an X distribution cost basis, because they essentially pass through a lot of that revenue. All of that's to say that GMV is not revenue, and you do want to pay attention to net revenue versus gross. So in this case, Jason, if you strip out the amount of money that they're paying to Coinbase

• 48:15Speaker 00

  and so forth, and just get down to their kind of like adjusted revenue, it's like a 6.7X run rate multiple for today, which I think is pretty reasonable for what is effectively a bank.

• 48:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's literally what stablecoins are, they're a bank.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Yes, but not, because they can't give you money back. And we touched on this before, I just want to double click on this, because in the Genius Act, there is a prohibition on stablecoin providers under this, it's going to pass bill that's going to regulate all stablecoins in the US. You cannot offer a payment of yield or interest on an issued payment stablecoin. So, Circle is safe from being undercut by people who are going to give back ninety percent of the revenue-

• 49:01Jason Calacanis?

  I think this is the part that's going to change pretty quickly, is there, in order for this to work, you need to get paid interest on your stablecoin. So, perhaps, I'm trying to think of why the government doesn't want to give interest on a stablecoin, I'm thinking it has something to do with control over a currency, and maybe that's the last piece that a sovereign country has to incentivize people to keep dollars in their currency, which is you can get interest on it. If you can get load-bearing interest on your stablecoin, well, then it's no different than a dollar. So maybe this is their differentiation, the way to differentiate, but I think this is going to mean people are going to keep very low amounts of-

• 49:48Jason Calacanis?

  Dollars in this, but there'll be, there'll be an amendment to this and there'll be a way in which Circle can pay the interest, I bet. Not Circle, I'm sorry. Coinbase as the partner can pay yield. There will be a yield product. I don't know how they'll do it. Maybe it's with loaning out the dollars or something. There'll be some complex way of making money on this. And this is a way for them, Circle to block other players. So you might want to, you know, give free deals to the top three markets, Kraken and Circle and Coinbase and whoever else. And then maybe everybody else gets charged, you know, less. So, or gets less cut.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  Another way to think about this is, on the Coinbase Board of Directors, Coinbase makes a lot of money from stablecoin yield is Mark Andreessen. Mark Andreessen has been helping to staff the federal government and has influence over policy and so forth. So I don't think it's a huge shock that the companies that he is representing are getting kind of a good deal here. Welcome to capitalism and democracy, everybody. But I do think it's going to be interesting to see Jason, exactly what you're saying. What is the innovation that comes next? But I do think that the genius act looking the way it does now is going to help Circle get public because there's going to be at least near-term confidence that their business model won't be undercut by a nascent rival who can just essentially say, well, we're going to give all the money back and therefore Circle's revenues go to, you know, 10%. So encouraging.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  I'm really excited about this IPO. We had Jeremy Alair on the show. I'll have that linked down in the show notes. I just, gosh, so good to talk about some real exits and talk about pricing, Jason, instead of just, you know, Lina Khan.

• 51:24Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. This is why, this is the lesson for the side that lost. If you are anti-capitalism, if you are anti-business and you plant that flag, don't be surprised when a bunch of business leaders who backed you before move to the other team who's saying, we're going to let you do M and A. We're going to let you go public. We're going to get rid of regulations of which there are far too many. You can debate which ones you want to get rid of. And by the way, you gave a bunch of money to the, that side and they left you at the altar. Give us a bunch of money and we're going to bring in the tent. Big lessons for certain political parties. Build a big 10, listen to the business community.

• 52:07Jason Calacanis?

  The business community are the ones who build stuff in the world. Yeah, there are artists as well, but a lot of that art winds up with a little bit of commerce. If you ignore builders, you will lose elections. It might not happen immediately, but when it does happen, it is going to be cataclysmic. I cannot lie here and say that I am not absolutely thrilled with this administration's approach to M and A, IPOs and regulation. I am. I wish the Democrats were like Clinton and said, you know what? Business matters, jobs matter. We understand M and A is a big part of monetary velocity and part of how capital gets allocated is the expectation that you can buy a company or take it public.

• 52:52Jason Calacanis?

  And if we put that on ice for four years, you're going to break the industry. This industry is literally teetering or was teetering. If this had been another four years of this, the, I think the venture industry could have broken and would have been like half the size it was. That actually was a realistic possibility. So this is a message to Dean Phillips and my other friends in the Democratic Party. There is a path here. Cherish business leaders and capital allocators.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you know, this is why I think that the GOP is going to get hosed in the next set of elections, Jason, because what business leaders want is consistent rules of the road, a lack of trade barriers, stability. And we've had one of the craziest hundred and some days now of this administration. And by the way, on the, on the M and A front, I just, I feel like they're getting credit they don't deserve. Like you saw the US Steel deal that's now a huge mess and the government's going to take a golden share, like it's literally acting like China.

• 53:51Jason Calacanis?

  How much are we getting, by the way? How much are we getting?

• 53:55Speaker 00

  That, that right there, the sort of gangster capitalism in which Trump is literally God, king of the world and hitting Tim Cook for not going on vacation with him to the Middle East and like the, this is the most vindictive and petty administration. So I think you're correct in the bets that were made going into the election. I'm not sure that everyone who made that bet is going to be content enough to make the same wager twice in a row.

• 54:14Jason Calacanis?

  Late breaking, Joby Aviation shares up 20%. I was going to do a J trade at four, five, six bucks because I was in the Middle East and everybody was talking about Joby coming to UAE and that you'd be able to go from Abu Dhabi. Two, this is years ago, maybe three years ago, Abu Dhabi to Dubai. It was a SPAC that went out at 10 bucks. And I was following this company because I said, this is going to work. And it was at four or five or six bucks.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, people are in this like copter thing? Are you looking at, I'm looking at the first page of their shareholder letter?

• 54:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it works. Yeah, these things are coming, dude.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  I mean, I know, I would, I would like to try one, but it does not look like that thing is going to stay in the air to me. Like, it's a miracle that that actually works.

• 55:00Jason Calacanis?

  By 100. And probably it'll eventually be safer than an airplane by 10x. And do you want to know why?

• 55:09Speaker 02

  I believe you, I just, it does not look like it would fly. Please.

• 55:13Jason Calacanis?

  Take a guess. Why would the quad copter like this? And you can see a video of it here.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  There, there it is, yeah. But when it flies, those, those propellers are facing forward, not up like a traditional helicopter.

• 55:26Jason Calacanis?

  Right, they, they, they face forward so it can get horizontal, right? As opposed to vertical. So it's vertical takeoff and landing. When it flies, they tilt forward and you get that.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  But why is it safer?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm guessing it's the multiple propellers rather than just the one. If what, if you're in a conventional helicopter, that one propeller messes up, you're dead. This one, you got backups.

• 55:46Jason Calacanis?

  This one, if you look at it, you not only have four engines that can counterbalance each other. There are two rotor sets on each, and I believe they're two engines. So they're stacked. So you could have, I think it's something like five of eight or three of eight. Like, you could have three of the eight propeller engines go out. Because it's eight engines.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Still be able to sort of bring it in, yeah.

• 56:10Jason Calacanis?

  Easily, you could, you could finish the mission, I think, losing three of eight. And I think you could easily land with half of them. And so if they start going, and you're not going up that high. These things are meant to fly, I believe, you can look it up at like 1 to 5,000 feet. These are not meant to be at 10,000 or 20,000 feet. What is the height they fly at? I said 1,000 to 5,000.

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Oh, it's about, it looks like most commercial flights are about 5,000 feet or below. It's capable of reaching 10,000 feet, maximum cruising altitude 15,000.

• 56:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so they'll be just literally zipping New York Harbor, you know, around Singapore's Bay, Sydney Bay, and they'll just fly over the water. They also make no noise. So the big complaint about helicopters in New York is the noise level. I know that Toyota and some other folks have backed this previously. They see this as a major future place. And there was Archer Aviation that also SPAC. These two companies are the two companies, I believe, that will come out of the SPAC era. That could be 10 baggers out of the SPAC era. What's the market cap on this thing now? Because it went up 20%, raised 250 from Toyota.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Joby is worth, as of now, just about $7 billion. So shout out to them for a basically pre-revenue company.

• 57:29Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. I'm in Singapore. There's going to be a meetup on Saturday. You can go to Get River or follow us here on TWI Startups. Follow me at Jason. They'll announce the details today, I think, if you're interested on Saturday. Saturday, this Saturday in Singapore. This Week in Startups, all-in joint meetup. Bunch of fans are coming to a food court. ThisWeekinStartups.com, youtube.com. Search for us and we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Bye-bye. Bye.