Tesla and Uber team up! Plus Weave Robotics' Isaac and $OPEN bull Eric Jackson | E2180

Today's show: Hear why Eric Jackson thinks Opendoor is the new Carvana, and how he's planning to bring Drake on board as an investor (plus Jason's Bestie Chamath). On a brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex are chatting with Jackson of EMJ Capital about his hunt for elusive 100 baggers (stocks that return 100-to-1). PLUS we're chatting with Weave Robotics' Kaan Doğrusöz about designing practical domestic robots RIGHT NOW, rather than prototypes for 2030. Hear about how they got Isaac to fold laundry like a pro. All that and… how Jason would turn around TechCrunch, why board members should always have skin in the game, that Waymo motorcycle accident, AND Uber and Tesla's first team-up to haul freight! Timestamps: (0:00) Jason is worried about the next generation facing the end of apprenticeship; here's his advice for young workers (10:24) 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! (11:30) Kaan Doğrusöz of Weave Robotics joins to talk about getting his laundry-folding robot, Isaac, into customer's homes (18:01) Isaac doesn't have hands; here's how Weave makes it work with grippers (20:44) Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups. (21:48) Show Continues… (24:51) Checking out some of Weave's competitors… how did they settle on Isaac's design? (30:01) Miro - Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out miro.com to find out how! (31:10) What's going on with TikTok? (36:15) Jason's pitch is "BOYA": Bring Your Own Algorithm (38:54) Eric Jackson of EMJ Capital stops by to talk up $OPEN and why he wants Drake to invest (40:14) Eric's early YouTube career as an activist Yahoo! Investor (44:42) Lessons Eric learned from Carvana and how that informed his $OPEN bet (01:00:30) Why bringing Keith Rabois back was Eric's ultimate dream for Opendoor (01:03:02) Why board members should always have "skin in the game" and why $OPEN wants Chamath back (01:07:26) Tesla and Uber are finally working together… They said it was impossible! (01:09:31) A look at YouTube's new AI podcasting features 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: 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! Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups. Miro - Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out miro.com to find out how! 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?

  I think the algorithm should break Section 230 because it's an editorial decision that is more powerful than a human doing it because it's micro-targeted and it never sleeps unless it breaks it unless you give consumer choice. So let that sink in. Just like the bundling of a search engine with a browser could create antitrust issues unless you give people a choice.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Miro. Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out miro.com to find out how. Stripe Startups. Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits, expert insights, and a focused community of builders. Apply today on stripe.com/startups. And Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more

• 1:05Speaker 01

  privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today.

• 1:12Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. I am wearing my chunky 1970s glasses. With me is Alex. We were talking before the show about

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Oliver.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well, Producer Oliver. Please, let's give him his title here.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Producer Oliver.

• 1:31Jason Calacanis?

  Producer Oliver. This week, in the past five days, has gone from not only being like a drag on productivity where we have to train him, he hit not being a drag, being neutral in the organization, to now being adding value.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  Net positive.

• 1:48Jason Calacanis?

  This is important for young, he's a net positive. This is important for young people because, which you have to realize, we are having young people not getting hired, right? We've covered this trend many times, Alex.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Many times, many times.

• 1:59Jason Calacanis?

  And so you have to ask, well, why aren't people getting hired? It's because nobody wants to mentor people early in their career. It's the end of the apprenticeship. I'm taking a different approach. I'm saying I'm going to invest in folks and I'm going to give them a very rapid, very rapid career path because I'm becoming very peculiar in my old age. Huh. I'm getting weird. Alon can tell you because he's been with me for 20 years, like on and off for different projects. I'm now at the phase where I just want to see these young guns I hire out of school,

• 2:38Jason Calacanis?

  how quickly I can make them into little, you know, Samurai, productive X-Men in my X-Men. Why? I actually made a list of things I enjoy and things I hate. I am deprecating everything I hate doing where that's not my highest order. But in the highest order is identifying talent and then nurturing talent. So I've, you know, really made my mission going into 2026 that I'm going to identify young talent, going to mentor them and then help them excel because I see it happen over and over again. I hired executive, our editorial director, Lon, out of a, out of a laser blazer, LaserDisc store in LA.

• 3:22Jason Calacanis?

  I just saw that raw talent. It's like, man, this guy could do anything. He's just so smart and quick witted and fun to work with. And yeah, he's just amazing. And we are, yeah, investing in all these young people. But for a young person, the other side of the coin is Alex, you got to show up and you got to out hustle the people who are already there, which means just raw hours put in. You got to do more hours than your boss. Now, that's not easy when the leaders of the company, Jackie, who's been with me for 10 years, Lon, who's been on and off, I mean, different companies for 20 years, Kelly for seven or eight years, I think, across two companies. You have to like, say, oh my God, they're putting in 50, 60 hours a week and they're really good at what they do.

• 4:07Jason Calacanis?

  I gotta hit 60, 70 hours a week and I gotta put in some weekend hours to refine my skill set. So for young folks, there's plenty of opportunity out there if you can prove that you're willing to put in the time. But if you don't and you don't know these AI tools, you're not willing to learn your skills. I'm super worried.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the trend here is bad, Jason. So here's the here's the Fred chart. This is unemployment US 16 to 24. So that first kind of like first little bit of your career. This is 6.6% was the low point in unemployment for that cohort. It's now over 10, which is a negative and it's kind of scary trend as you can see here. So it's not going in the right direction.

• 4:49Jason Calacanis?

  And that trend, I think, has to do with large companies saying, if we're going to hire folks who need to be trained or whatever, why don't we just outsource it to the lowest commodity, you know, hardworking place in South America or Asia or India, Manila, you know, or even Portugal, a lot of a lot of folks going to Portugal. This is something young people, and if you've got kids, you're going to need to put that hustle in them. And the hustle means learning new skills and actually looking at the people around you and just saying, I'm going to work harder than the establishment at my company. Not an easy task.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  All right, can I start off with the startup story? Because I have one that I'm really excited about. Okay. So there is a company called, as I scroll through my notes, there's a company called Code Rabbit. Now, this was a completely de novo company to me. I want to put it on the Twist 500. The company just raised a $60 million Series B, I believe, at a $550 million round. So Jason, my question to you is, guess what its current ARR is? At a $60 million round, $550 million valuation today.

• 5:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, and the startup does what? What's the really simple sentence here? What do they do? They're an AI company? What do they do? Do they have a product in the market?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  They do. And what they do is they do code reviews automatically for developers. And the the pitch that really got me interested was as developers produce more code using AI tools, basically doing code reviews becomes an enormous bottleneck. There's so much more code to go back through. So they built an AI tool that does the code reviews for you, which I think is a great idea.

• 6:25Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if they were growing revenue the way sometimes an AI company can, which is 10x year over year, let's say they went from a half million to 5 million to 50 million, I could see it very easily sustaining a billion dollar valuation or a $500 million valuation in this climate. Because when you saw Cursor get, I mean, that was, if you asked Producer Claude to show the Cursor revenue, that was, and Lovable revenue, those two companies got to nine figures in revenue in like low single-digit years. So, you know, Producer Claude will give us some idea of that. And that's what people are banking on is

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:07Jason Calacanis?

  Replit, Cursor, and Lovable-like growth.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it can get disconnected from reality because people aren't betting on last year's valuation or last year's revenue. They're not even looking at this year's.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Looking at-

• 7:22Jason Calacanis?

  They're gonna look at next year's.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:24Jason Calacanis?

  And then give you a multiple on next year. So, in this scenario,

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Jason Calacanis?

  1 million to 10 million, they're gonna look at next year being 100 million or 50 million, five to 10 times growth. If it's actually trending in that way, you could get a 600 million. So I'm gonna say this company has 6 million in revenue.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Oh, actually, it's got more than that. 15 is the ARR number, according to Tech Wrench, and that's up 10x in the last year. So, 1.5 to 15, and then going by your 10 or 5x thing, Jason, there'll be about 75 million expected next year, which makes it rather cheap at 550, I think, if it pulls that off.

• 7:55Jason Calacanis?

  And I nailed it.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  10 points.

• 7:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's a 10x, it's a 10x growth company. So, tell us the name of the company one more time.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  CodeRabbit, and it's growing 20% per month right now. That was the other stat that blew me away. So you know, YC-style number attached to a company with an eight-figure revenue base. I love that. 8,000 customers, Scale Venture Partners led the round, Nvidia, CRV, Harmony Engineering Capital took part in it. So, really, really cool one. I am a fan, and I'm gonna talk to Matty, see if I can get them on the Twist 500.

• 8:26Jason Calacanis?

  Let's do it. Let's do it. The Twist500.com, where we are tracking the top 500 private companies. And, wow, thank you Producer Claude for this great statistic, Cursor and Lovable revenue, according to published reports. These are private companies, so it's hard to get to. But, yeah, at some point, the public reporting was that- We got to 500 million for Cursor and Lovable, as I mentioned, had hit 100. So these are amazing.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  And here's the chart, folks. If you want to see what this looks like, you can see in 2023, very little revenue, nigh zero. 2024, Cursor was getting big, Lovable was tiny. And then this year, they've become absolute Goliaths, as Jason said, in the nine-figure revenue range. So one of the fastest-growing categories, I think, in the history of technology.

• 9:14Jason Calacanis?

  I love the fact that producer Claude from Anthropic is now producing like beautiful output. You know, the output not just being text. If you look at the screenshot the team made on Cursor highlights and Lovable highlights, this is research that would have taken an analyst a couple of hours to pull together. And here it is.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, what's embarrassing, Jason, though, is that this is actually better graphic design than I could do for you. So even if I could do it in the same amount of time, it would look worse, which is actually terrifying because I make my money on a person who collects and presents information.

• 9:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and that's, we talked about it earlier at the top of the show, you have to kind of keep upping your game with analysis and having, bring more to the table if the facts are so easily obtainable. But Cursor founded in 2022, wow, 500 million in revenue. They got to 500 million in under three years. They got a $10 billion valuation. And then the Lovable highlights, man, 120 million in ARR. The question everybody has is the durability of this revenue. Is this durable? Or is it brittle revenue? And that's what we'll find out over time.

• 10:28Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, listen, we meet a lot of early-stage founders here at Launch, my investment company, and some, they don't have a lot of traction yet. They just have an idea. Maybe they haven't even finished their product. They've just got an MVP. But they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously. And you know what? We can't just wire money to your Gmail or your PayPal. That's not how it works, folks. We need to know that you're a legit and official business. We need to know your company is incorporated. That's why you need Northwest Registered Agent. It's the service that will help. Help you run your business the right way from day one in 10 clicks. And in under 10 minutes, you're going to file for your LLC or a C corp. If you're a startup, get a domain name, launch your official website, claim your business email,

• 11:10Jason Calacanis?

  and even fast track your trademark application, which some people forget to do. We're talking about more than just company formation. This is your entire identity as a business. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist and show the world you're in business. And make sure you use that URL slash twist so they know that we sent you. So I saw another robot folding laundry. People make fun of this.

• 11:39Jason Calacanis?

  Knowing what I know about robotics, it's like one of the hardest tasks. Why? It takes a lot of dexterity to do it well. And clothes are incredibly variable. Here's your video of a robot folding laundry. Now I've been watching these robots attempt to do this for a decade or more. But this one is getting it done. The number of people employed or spending their days folding clothes is the population of people who are not in college and throw their dryer stuff into a basket and then just pull it out of the dryer basket without folding it. But for everybody else, the other 90% of people, gosh, you know, they wear 10 outfits

• 12:24Jason Calacanis?

  a week or so, 20 items of clothing, there's 20 items of clothing that need to be folded. And this robot is doing a bang up job of folding laundry. And we have the founder with us, so.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  We do. So please welcome everyone to the show. It's Khan Darushis. He is the CEO of Weave Robotics. It's based out of San Francisco in my old stomping grounds in the Soma neighborhood. And critically, Jason, this is not a humanoid robot. It's what I call a partial humanoid robot. It's got a base with wheels and then there's a stick and then there's arms. So we've taken away some of the complexity, abstracted it away, but it does fold laundry very quickly. Khan, welcome to the show.

• 12:59Jason Calacanis?

  Con, you heard my little intro here about how hard it is to fold laundry. Maybe you could tell us why you picked this task for your startup and exactly how hard it was to do this 10 years ago and why it's gotten, I wouldn't say easy, but it's certainly easier. Take us through the startup and why you chose this vertical.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  For sure. At Weave Robotics, we are building robots that we wanted to see in our homes, but for everyone. And the reason laundry is a core use case for us is because it is something that a lot of people have to spend time doing. It is linear time. It just like the more laundry you have, the more time it takes. And it's something that people have shied away from many years because it was hard. And the reason it's hard is fabrics are very challenging. It's very hard to simulate. They can be in infinitely many configurations. It's not like, you know, your phone where it's either upside down or topside down. It's, there's just so many intricacies of it.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  There's different fabrics, different patterns on it. And yeah, 10 years ago, this was much more challenging because we didn't have like the backbone that's forming now a lot of the architectures for robotic learning. Things like BLM that have been trained on internet scale data give us really good semantic information to build off of. And yeah, we built the first version of this robot just in our living room and trained it on our own architecture with data that we collected just when it was just Evan and I, my best friend. And we got it to fold t-shirts for the first time. And ever since then, we've basically been very excited about, sorry, we've been very

• 14:45Speaker 02

  excited about how much progress we've been able to make with latest methods.

• 14:50Jason Calacanis?

  So what will the cost of this be? And when will it be available for purchase is what the audience is thinking about right now. And then take us through the second, third and fourth use cases that you're, you know, essentially what the only other category here is basically Roombas, I think, for home robotics. So this is a really interesting second act, but there's nothing that says you couldn't put a Roomba as the base of this and have it clean the floors as it walks around and picks up your dirty laundry.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, great questions. Well, we opened up for pre-orders last year. We opened up for a small cohort of 30. Those sold out pretty instantaneously. And as for the cost, this is a first of its kind premium product that like nobody has really established this product category. So it's going to be in the tens of thousands of dollars for this first cohort of customers. And as we've in-house much of our design, we've been able to kind of like take that price down as much as possible because the end goal is to not just ship 30 of these things, but hundreds and then thousands.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  How far can you get that price down in the first couple of generations? Does it get down to single digit thousands or is it still going to be eight figures?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  In the first couple of generations, there's definitely a path to single digits.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Okay. That's encouraging.

• 16:16Jason Calacanis?

  Right now, you sold the first 30 for 15K or something crazy like that?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  Well, our customers put down a reservation fee and the final price will be basically when they, when they receive the robots, that's when it'll be.

• 16:32Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So not announced yet, but you're saying tens of thousands. So it could be upwards of 20K for this robot to start.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Correct, greater than 10K.

• 16:42Jason Calacanis?

  Greater than 10K, okay. And take us through how it does what it does when you design a product like this. Cause we had Elon, who's working on Optimus, obviously at the All In Summit last week. And I had asked him like, how is it going? And he said, he is like dealing with the actuators. I don't know if you saw his, his take on it, just how hard it was and, you know, finding these, he has to build them, but are you building all these actuators or is it a more narrow set of constraints here because it has this, you know, more narrow purpose?

• 17:20Speaker 02

  It's a great question. We've in-house much of our design and to make sure that we don't get kind of like bottlenecked by different actuators, et cetera, we've made it so that it's as modular as possible. So we've actually dual sourced different actuators from different vendors. And at the same time, we've established really good relationships with both of these vendors such that we can actually customize the actuators for our use cases. And yeah, this kind of allows us to focus on the portions of the design that really matter towards the product and build up on actuators that are already working really well.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  But you're using essentially two finger actuators versus a full human hand. What's the, is there a material downside in the laundry use case only having kind of grabbers?

• 18:12Speaker 02

  Two good questions. Just to clarify one thing. So the grippers are our own design. That's one of the, I think that's our second iteration of the gripper that we've done. The motor that's driving that gripper, the actuator is the one that we off the shelf.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  As for grippers versus hands, I'll, I'll, I'll give you kind of like a secret that's in plain sight. If you watch the, a lot of the videos that have been done with hands, especially with folding laundry, it's usually they're doing this. The, the reason we started with grippers is to keep the complexity of the problem low so that we can focus on the portion of the problem that matters, which is being able to fold laundry. And as you can see in the video, you know, we had to come up with a different protocol because we don't have like all these different fingers on it. But at the same time, it, it

• 19:03Speaker 02

  works, it works on any article. It generalizes to different fabrics and this allows us to ship as opposed to, you know, kick the can down the road.

• 19:17Jason Calacanis?

  Super interesting. When you went to investors with this idea, you must have got a range of feedback. Many of them probably have scar tissue in robotics investments from the 90s and into the 2000s as venture firms. How did you convince them that this was a, you know, investment opportunity that was worth taking the risk on? Extremely high price point, extremely small audience for that price point, but obviously so much great potential.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, people being excited by us having, I think, the first like, public demo of t-shirt folding that was out of the lab and then YC Demo Day definitely helped that they saw a path to it. But at the same time, yeah, like robotics is hard. It's one of the hardest problems there is, right? It's fully the entirety of the stack. So there's definitely skepticism, but at the same time, we told them the same thing that is true, which is, we're going to work on this problem. We're going to solve it. This problem matters. We're not going to shy away from this. We're going to build the robots that everybody wants in their home. And we're not going to, you know, like,

• 20:33Speaker 02

  oh, we'll do this other thing before because it sounds better on paper, etc. And the investors that believed in us basically saw that we'll be able to do it.

• 20:48Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:30Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:48Speaker 01

  Khan, is there a version of this that you would sell to maybe a laundromat as opposed to someone in their own home? Because I could see that customer base having access to more capital than your average family.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, also, great question. I mean, the, um, one of the announcements that we very recently made just last Friday was, um, we announced a partnership with Tumble, which is like a great end-to-end laundry service provider, many different locations in the US. They basically take your dirty laundry off of your doorstep and bring you back clean folded laundry to your doorstep. And, um, our robots are now folding laundry for their customers. And we're really excited about that. Tumble's also really excited about it. And yeah, like, there's definitely like a stepping stone there that happens that allows us to validate the entirety of our stack,

• 22:39Speaker 02

  our robots, uh, while also providing real value in the meantime, as opposed to keeping the robots in the office and like proving things out there.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  I, I see.

• 22:49Jason Calacanis?

  Honestly, go ahead, Alex.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  No, no, please, Jason.

• 22:52Jason Calacanis?

  Well, uh, earlier I'd asked, um, in my barrage of questions for you, because I'm so excited about your startup, um, second, third, fourth, things you could do. Uh, obviously going and finding the laundry laying on the floor and bringing it to the laundry room should be possible. Sorting it, whites, not colors. You, you got wheels on this thing. And, uh, opening and closing a, a dryer door seems beyond the capabilities of the pinchers. And those are kind of hard, but you could. See a world where this pulls a bunch of dirty socks off the floor and dumps them into the washer and dryer eventually. So maybe what are the second and third applications

• 23:35Jason Calacanis?

  people are asking you for that might be cards you turn over in the coming years?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Good questions. I wouldn't bet on not being able to open up a washer and dryer door. But as far as like future use cases, like as you mentioned, laundry is a huge set of things, like being able to sort it, being able to sort it by the different members of the household. We're definitely focused on making laundry as seamless as possible. And after that, there's a whole slew of tidy up tasks that we want to do, picking up toys off the ground, pet toys, socks, putting things into a hamper so that you don't have to do that, too. And there's also just being your eyes and ears in your home while you're

• 24:22Speaker 02

  away, right? Like, did I leave the stove on? Can you turn it off if that's the case? Is the window open? Can you try to close it if so? These are already things that we're building upon. We just haven't publicly shared too much on that yet. And at the same time, wiping surfaces is definitely on the roadmap as well.

• 24:43Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, yes. Something my daughters, I make them do is, yeah, you gotta put stuff in the dishwasher, you gotta wipe the table, somebody gotta mop the floor. There's all those possibilities. Now, you must have done your competitive research. I remember seeing Foldymate, a very weird device. Maybe one of our producers could throw it up on the screen. This form factor was very interesting to me because you basically throw stuff into the top of it and then it does it and comes out in the bottom. Let me talk about their approach versus yours, why you chose your approach versus theirs.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you know, the hardest portion of folding t-shirts, long sleeves, anything, is getting it from this random state that you pick it up from in a crumpled state into a flat state. We don't realize it as we're folding because we're really good at it. And but it it takes up most of the time and it takes up most of the the thought. So devices like these basically make it so that that is not a problem because you have to pass your T-shirts in in that easy configuration one by one. At that point, it is still a linear time operation. It doesn't, you know, matter that it doesn't do the last portion of the fault for you.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Because all that matters is you you still have to sit there with like a hamper in hand and like feed the thing T-shirts. It's still helpful for some people to have some of these devices, but yeah, our robot does its sent end.

• 26:14Jason Calacanis?

  How do you train it? So, you know, everybody's house is significantly different, but computer vision is super robust now. And so, you know, doing computer vision or LiDAR or whatever it happens to be to organize, hey, this is what the house is, and then naming each room. And then every time a piece of clothing comes up, you know, being able to pull up an app and just say, that's dad, that's mom, that's daughter, that's little Johnny's, and, you know, this is their room, this is their draw. I have like some very interesting security cameras that let you, it shows you faces. And then you just put names on them.

• 26:55Jason Calacanis?

  And then now, when somebody comes to any of my properties, it's I get an alert. This person is at the door or a known person is at the door. Would you like to make them known? It's like, oh, yeah, that's the person who maintains the pool. So we put pool cleaner on it. And it even is now getting to the point of like license plates, you know, at the gate. And these new gates, controllers, Alex, if you have a gate at your house or ranch, can you can say this license plate is allowed to come onto the property on this day, this hour, or for the next six months, and then it times out. So you can get rid of people ringing the gate bell if it is, in fact, the license plate and the car model and the face of the person.

• 27:40Jason Calacanis?

  So how do you do that piece, Khan, of, you know, training it? Or is that something you're working on?

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good question. I think forwarding between different family members is definitely a longer term thing for us. I think initially, we will kind of rely a bit on our customers to kind of like make sure that like whatever is in this hamper is whatever you want to be folded together at first. But at the same time, we haven't shared too much publicly, but we are, we have been working on kind of like the flow of interacting with the robot and what the app looks like, what onboarding is going to look like, and how you're going to assign different articles of clothing to different people. We'll have more to share on that soon, but it's definitely on our minds. But we're starting with a more simplified version of the problem.

• 28:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, here's the hamper. This is Johnny's hamper. This is Jane's hamper. This is Dad's. This is Mom's. That just totally makes it easy. But of course, if it's in Dad's hamper, then you know, you start to learn Dad's sizes, you learn his brands, so many different ways to just have this become automated. What a great idea. You've picked a really hard challenge, but an important one, and we wish you great success with it. Thanks for coming on the program.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Thanks, Con.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 28:59Jason Calacanis?

  Appreciate you.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  And if you're listening to this and want to take a look at it, it's Weave robotics dot com. Though, Jason, I have to say, it'd be great.

• 29:06Jason Calacanis?

  Weave robotics dot com, if you want to put in a preorder or sign up for their email list. And people always ask me, how can you support a startup if you're not investing money in it? Yeah, just giving them a shout out on social media, or signing up for their email list, giving feedback, and then eventually buying the product. If you're a fan of startups and you want to see these things continue, that's why I always have no problem buying, you know, the 1.0 of a product, using it. And even if I don't wind up using it, I feel good that I contributed to the startup's, you know, iteration. The Roadster, when Elon started selling the Roadster, he said, you know, if you buy this car, is it worth 150K? You have other options. You could buy two cars. But if you look at it as an investment

• 29:50Jason Calacanis?

  in the future of Tesla and eventually getting to a Model 3, you can also feel proud about that.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Buy early, buy often, support your local startup. It doesn't hurt anybody, and it helps the overall ecosystem.

• 30:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:47Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:10Speaker 01

  So I think probably the biggest news story out today is that it appears that TikTok is going to survive. We got a lot of notes recently about how this deal is coming together. So in the next 30 to 45 days, Jason, we're expecting to see a deal between China and the US that will allow for TikTok to continue operating here in the States. It appears that Oracle, Silver Lake, and Andreessen Horowitz will end up with about 80% of the company. I presume Oracle will remain its kind of cloud host here in the United States. The interesting thing, the thing that surprised me, and I'd love to get your take on this, is that the algorithm is not being fully sold to the future US entity. It's going to remain in Chinese hands. Now, as I understand it, the US company is going to have some say in how it's used.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  But there used to be a red line in which the algorithm had to be fully sold. And it does not appear to be the case in the final accounting. So your thoughts on this? Do we blink? Did we find the right deal here?

• 32:05Jason Calacanis?

  It has to get divested and the algorithm needs to be eventually replaced so that something this powerful in terms of influence has some accountability. I think we're going to look back on this era and look at algorithms as something we should have regulated. And I'm not a big huge fan of regulation. I know. That's a big statement. Yeah, I think they're so powerful and their ability to steer your belief systems. And that was my main objection to China owning this is that if you want people to have a

• 32:45Jason Calacanis?

  certain position on an international conflict like Russia invading Ukraine or the tragic situation in Israel and Gaza, you could, just with the most convincing thing in the world, short video clips, like video clips are incredibly persuasive. When you see a video clip, your mind, because we're visual beings. Sure. Are incredibly influenced. This is why documentary films have been known, for better or worse, to be so influential. They can change an entire society. Just people see a, you know, a 60 Minutes piece or about, you know, tobacco companies,

• 33:30Jason Calacanis?

  which maybe The Insider was based on. You know, it could change how the entire country views the cigarette companies. And so who controls that algorithm and to what end? I think a lot of the political division we're seeing in our country today is because of social media and mainstream media. Mainstream media learned early on, if you pick a side, you lose half the audience, but the audience you gain can become so rabid that it's worth, you know, just picking half the audience to get 80% of it. See MSNBC, Fox, NPR, or, you know, any of the classic GOP, you know, radio hosts, Rush

• 34:15Jason Calacanis?

  Limbach. I was thinking Rush. Yeah. Yeah. So then you take it another step, which is, we're just going to...

• 34:24Jason Calacanis?

  Tickle your outrage and that to young people's brains, you could make them think anything. And in fact, adults could be swayed. Every time I watch a documentary, I just have like a massive warning signal up where I'm like, this director is manipulating me to some end. They're either trying to make this incredibly entertaining, emotionally provocative, whatever it happens to be. And so I think algorithms should be removable, swappable and transparent.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  There should be required time series feed that you can opt into as to avoid the algorithm feeding you things. But I think you make a great point on documentaries and their ability to influence, because one thing that I've also seen that worries me in this broader vein is things that look like documentaries that aren't. My spouse is a huge fan of things on Netflix that explain a topic. And I had to be like, okay, but this was all approved by Billie Eilish's team. This is not a third party group going in to try to understand her. This is her presenting herself to you using clips and voiceover and things that make it look like Ken Burns was somewhere in the room, but it's not a documentary. It's a hagiography, right? Which is different. So that's another thing that scares me. But yes, in the case of TikTok though,

• 35:41Speaker 01

  I think that algorithm transparency will be huge. So I'm hoping that, you know, Oracle and Andreessen and Silver Lake step up to the plate and build something that we can take a look at. And then I hope YouTube and X and Reddit and everyone else kind of follows suit. Transparency here will be huge.

• 35:57Jason Calacanis?

  X has already done that. They released their algorithm and

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Did they keep getting updates? That's cool.

• 36:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they released it just 10 days ago, I think. And when Elon released it and he open sourced it, he said, I'm doing this because I think our algorithm kind of sucks and I want it to get better. And, you know, I've had conversations with him about, you know, publicly, and he's talked about it. I mean, I've had these conversations literally on X would be really great to BYOA, bring your own algorithm. And then when you then have an algorithm store. So this is what I pitched the social media companies on is create an algorithm store where I can buy, you know, for five bucks or a dollar, just like I can buy an app or a ringtone, an algorithm.

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  And I might want an algorithm that is world positive, that is fact checked. I might want one that's chaotic. I might want one that's the trending news. I might want one that's the most engaged news that doesn't have a lot of views. So lots of comments, lots of back and forth, but not a lot of views, right? Those would be like emerging conversations, all kinds of interesting things you could do. But I think these things are evil as constructed today. I'll put them in the category of evil because I think the people making them and who are deploying them, the meta corporation across their different platforms and TikTok are doing it with absolutely no conscience.

• 37:28Jason Calacanis?

  So anyway, it all comes back to these algorithms, which are dangerous. And I think they're polluting people's minds in a way that is super dangerous. We need to have a regulation that the algorithm breaks the 230.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Section 230 protections.

• 37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I think the algorithm should break section 230 because it's an editorial decision that is more powerful than a human doing it because it's micro targeted and it never sleeps. Unless it breaks it unless you give consumer choice. So let that sink in, just like the bundling of a search engine with a browser could create antitrust issues unless you give people a choice. So when you load certain browsers, they will say, which search engine do you want to use? Or at least give you the ability to go into the settings and say, I want Bing, I want DuckDuckGo, I want Google, I want perplexity, I'm going to pick it. That's like a very common sense solution here, which is every 30 days, it shows you your algorithm.

• 38:30Jason Calacanis?

  It shows you how, what the, what, it gives you a report card of what the algorithm thinks you like. You like Corvettes, you like heavy metal, you like full self-driving, you know, whatever. You like Soprano slips. It should just tell you what it's doing. And then they pretend like, oh, we can't tell you what it's doing. Of course you can. Of course. That's where regulation, common sense, regulation would be very helpful here.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Well, I hope we get some of that when the TikTok deal winds down. But Jason, we do have someone who's very good at taking advantage of social media algorithms to get attention to their efforts. So I want to bring up our next guest. I want to bring up Eric Jackson from E M J Capital. Now, we've talked about Open Door on the show before, Jason. We've talked about so-called meme stocks on the show before. I don't think we've yet had an activist investor perform their campaign in the streets. So Eric Jackson is here. He's protesting outside of Drake's house every morning, trying to get to the Canadian entrepreneur and rapper to buy a share of Open Door, talking his book in the best possible way. Eric, welcome to the show.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. Great to be with you.

• 39:33Jason Calacanis?

  Eric, how would you describe what you do for a living? This is a full-time job. What do you do for a living? And, you know, I'm obviously running into you now on the socials because I YOLO'd into Open and quite publicly did it. So tell us, what do you do for a living? Who are you? And how would you describe your job?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  Well, I would describe myself as a hedge fund manager. So I kind of got my start 20 years ago with Terry Semel at Yahoo. Basically, I had been, I did a PhD at Columbia Business School in Strategy and Management. I decided I didn't want to be an academic. I got a job, that was like during dot com. So I got a job offer to work at a software startup in Toronto, like in March 2000, and loved that for four years, did management consulting after that. And then, but I'd heard of activist investing when I was actually a PhD student. And I'd

• 40:36Speaker 03

  kind of always been intrigued by it. And I was, I was living down in Naples, Florida, living in this like condo and reading the Wall Street Journal one day, and I read about this guy, Brad Gerlinghaus. Who wrote the Peanut Butter Manifesto and how Yahoo was so kind of screwed up. It was all these different directions and stuff. And I thought this would be a perfect company to do an activist campaign on. But I don't have an activist hedge fund. So, but this was oh six, oh seven. So like, you know, Facebook was just getting started, YouTube and blogging, you know, web two dot O and all the rest. And so I said, well, maybe, you know, like I, as this like retail shareholder, I could start, I could leverage social media and actually conduct my own activist campaign.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  And so I went to the Office Depot in North Naples. I bought like a $35 webcam to stick into my like brick of a laptop. And then I got up on a Sunday morning when my wife was still asleep because I was embarrassed she was going to catch me doing this. And like on the guest bed, like recorded myself making a YouTube seven minute video, like my manifesto for turning around Yahoo and uploaded it to YouTube. That was on a Sunday and like by the Thursday, the New York Times had written an article about me, you know, basically saying this is like a man bites dog story, you know? And, you know, everybody loves a good, you know, topical company like Yahoo was. That was kind of like going after the Kardashians at the time in tech. And so.

• 42:02Jason Calacanis?

  But did you wind up making money from that trade? Did you, or did you just learn a hell of a lot?

• 42:06Speaker 03

  I just, well, it kind of became 10 years of my life because it went on and on. I mean, first I was like lobbying for them to accept the Microsoft deal, which they didn't.

• 42:14Jason Calacanis?

  Forty billion dollars, right?

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. And then, but then, you know, we went through like this cavalcade of CEOs. Like there was Jerry Yang and Carol Bartz and then Scott Thompson. You remember him, you know, and like he got fired for fetching his computer science degree from Stone Hill College and all this kind of stuff. And then Dan Lo, you know, and meanwhile, we get Carl Icahn rides into the rescue. Apparently the smart guy is going to figure it out. He failed and he was gone. Then Dan Lo comes in, was a smart activist, smart money, you know, from Wall Street. Hire, appoint Mr. Mayor, not, not, not the best choice. I mean, she was like buzzy at the time, but obviously couldn't run a company.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  She knew, she had some ideas around product that she had learned at Google, but yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Which led to, what was the big acquisition she did?

• 43:01Jason Calacanis?

  Tumblr.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  Tumblr, yeah.

• 43:03Jason Calacanis?

  Couple of billion dollars. And then they told her famously a couple of like months into it, like, by the way, do you know this thing is filled with porn? She was like, what?

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Right.

• 43:13Jason Calacanis?

  Turn that off. And then they turned it off.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  And then that was the end of Tumblr.

• 43:18Jason Calacanis?

  There's a dull content on this open publishing platform.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Shockingly enough, but if you don't know what happened there, here's a headline. How Tumblr went from a $1 billion Yahoo payday to a $3 million fire sale, which is a 99.7% I think reduction in value.

• 43:34Jason Calacanis?

  What a disaster. So, okay, you learn a bunch there.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  So I learned a lot. I had a friend in Naples who was like, he was a 51 year old retired hedge fund manager living in Naples at the time. And he said, you know, you've got to start your own fund, you know, here, here's how you do it and so forth. And so I did and friends and family and put a fund together, but I thinking I was going to do activism, but it's pretty tough to do activism with like a $2 million hedge fund or a 20, even a $20 million hedge fund, right? As I soon found out, because the press attention with Yahoo was as important as the dollars that were behind me at the time. And so I eventually like I latched on to some guy in New York who had like a smallish activist fund and did a, did a kind of Yahoo round two with Marissa, 90 page like PowerPoint, you know,

• 44:20Speaker 03

  kind of campaign against her and then one against Philippe Daimon at Paramount. But then I kind of clashed with the, the New Yorker who didn't like the fact that I was getting asked to go on CNBC more than he was. And, and then I met a billionaire who had like, I'd come to know through Yahoo, like he wasn't a billionaire when I first met him, but he was like, Eric, I love what you're doing. You got like an interesting point of view on, on public companies. How about I give you some money from my family office to manage? But just one request, like, can you not do the activism? Because, you know, what happens if some intrepid like Wall Street Journal reporter figures out that I gave you money? And then Eric's coming out and saying like, Marissa's terrible as a CEO, and it turns out I've got a partnership with Marissa. That was just, it's just a bad

• 45:05Speaker 03

  look. So how about you just do pure passive investing? So I, I said, great. Give him the money, sign me up. And I started doing, you know, investing in the Twilio's of like the last decade and the Roku's and the Carvana's and every hot news, you know, tech startup that came public, you know, I was in and we, I was. Shooting the lights out, killing it. And then 2021 comes along and 2022. And I realized that, oh, the macro is important. Oh, I guess like Toyota just doesn't go up forever. And I got my sort of head handed to me, Kathy Wood style, in those years. And unfortunately, the billionaire took his money out at the end of 22.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  And so he was like 99% of my AEW. So like I was sort of figuring out what I'm, what am I gonna do? I got four kids, I got two dogs, you know, my wife to support and everything, what's gonna happen? So I, I but decided not to shut down my hedge fund, though. So I had like lawyers and all these people I was paying telling me, Eric, you know, you gotta shut it down. It's hopeless and stuff. And, you know, it's sort of, you built it, you paid for this infrastructure that you're supposed to be managing millions and hundreds of millions, not just like scraping by. But I didn't want to do that. Oh, I also had this like up and down performance. And they said, you know, you know, the good way to, you know, get away from your, you know, choppy track record, you just shut your hedge fund down. And then like six months from now, you know,

• 46:29Speaker 03

  start a new one. And then you don't have to show your track record. And every, no, no one's the wiser. And that's what everybody does who's got like tear up a performance and stuff. And I was like, ah, it doesn't feel right and so forth. And so I just sort of like, I built, I started building an AI team at my fund. I mean, I started with one guy and then two guys and three guys. And I, I felt like, you know, eventually AI is gonna, you know, revolutionize hedge funds, just like it's gonna revolutionize every other industry. I might as well try to do something unique and different here on my little hedge fund and try to figure something out. And then I'll market myself and so forth. And but we had like, oh, ups and down months. And, you know, again, like all these, the fund directors in the Cayman Islands were like, what is going on?

• 47:11Speaker 03

  You know, you're up 40% one month, you're down 60% one month. What's the point, Eric? But I just sort of kept on, kept on. And then, you know, like my big hit was that I got into Carvana in May of 23, when it had gone from 400 bucks to $3.50 in December 22.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  And now it's come all the way back to 400. And I

• 47:35Jason Calacanis?

  What did you see there? Like, just concisely, what was the big insight of buying something that had lost 99% of its value and was in most people's minds circling the drain?

• 47:49Speaker 03

  To be honest, when I was back as a PhD student at Columbia, I'd done this like big study of corporate governance and all, you know, at the time McKinsey had paid my professor all this money to do a research because everyone at that time and still today says, oh, you know, maybe diversity on the board is good. Maybe having a younger board is good and linked to better performance. Maybe having, you know, this type of background and that type of background is better. And but nobody had actually studied it and actually seen what is linked to better performance. You know, upper, you know, from, from a, you know,

• 48:23Jason Calacanis?

  A director's perspective. You put directors on, what does that say about the culture of the company? Are they founders who have skin in the game? Or is it like some of these other ones where it's performative and they're getting, what, 250K a year, 500K a year in cash comp? You know, and then they're just doing it for the money. I know those directors because they will ping me sometimes. They want to be in a hot startups board. And I'm like, what is this person actually adding to? What are they bringing to the table? So what did the research show?

• 48:55Speaker 03

  McKinsey gave me all this money. I hired like five Columbia College kids and they had, I had to send them down to the World Trade Center to the SEC library and they had to physically photocopy like the, the actual, you know, prospectuses from all these public companies. And we had to code all this data about their ages of the directors and comp and like, how did they get paid? Was it stock options? Was it in cash comp and all this kind of stuff? Anyway, the big net result was the only thing that mattered, none of this diversity stuff mattered, none of, you know, all these like common prescriptions. The only thing that mattered was skin in the game. And by skin in the game, I mean, not RSUs given to people, not found money, but actually directors who dug into their own pocket with their own money, after tax money, and had actually bought stock.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  And it didn't. It didn't matter. No, sometimes it was a million dollars worth of stock. Sometimes it was a hundred thousand dollars worth of stock. But you just wanted to see evidence of interest and belief in that company through those share purchases. And so the one thing I saw at Carvana in 2022 is that on the way down from $400 down to $3.50, Ernie Garcia Jr., who's, you know, he's wealthy, right? His dad was wealthy, he's wealthy, okay? He was sort of like born on second base or whatever. But he bought $70 million, seven zero, of Carvana stock on the way down in one tranche at $50 million at $50 a share in March of 22, and another tranche in June of 22 at $20 a share.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  And then the stock just kept dropping, like it didn't stop until it was $3.50. The other thing that piqued my interest, which I never saw once in any of those SEC filings from 25 years ago, and I never have seen it today, is that I noticed this chief product officer for Carvana, a guy named Dan Gill, had bought $3 million of stock himself in Thanksgiving of 2022, when the stock was $7.50. And it just so happened that he followed me on Twitter. So I DM'd him and I said, could I give you a call? I'd love to chat. And he said, sure. And I started talking to him and it turns out he's Canadian like me. But he lives in Santa Monica now, and so we're catching up about that.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  And then I said, I got to tell you, I never see chief product officers spending $3 million. I said, like, I know, if that was me, if I was in your shoes, and I came home and told my wife, you know, hey, honey, you know this company Carvana where I work, where like 90% of our wealth is tied up in the stock price of Carvana, and it's gone from $400 to, you know, $7.50. What I want to do is I want to take $3 million of our own money and put it in more Carvana shares. I honestly don't know if I would have won that argument with her, especially like, you know, she probably said...

• 51:40Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to diversify. I want to consolidate more. I want to be more concentrated in this one giant stock. So this is an incredible insight. So then that leads us to...

• 51:51Speaker 03

  He said, like, I really believe in Ernie. I know it's gonna be tough. You know, it's not, it's not a layup that we're getting back to 400. You know, we have a lot of issues that we have to deal with. But, you know, we've known each other since Stanford. Everybody else on the team knows each other. When I heard him say that, I just said, it's gonna happen for sure. For sure, these guys are gonna come back. And all the hedge fund bros on Twitter, anonymous accounts, they were dancing on the grave of Carvana. They're like, these guys are a bunch of criminals and all this kind of stuff. Nobody said anything positive. I didn't see anything positive about Carvana until the thing was above $300 a share.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  That's a great segue to Open Door, because I feel like for a long time, people have been dancing on that grave. And you, on the other hand, have a very different thesis. So Eric, why don't you tell us what caught your eye about it and when you bought it?

• 52:35Speaker 03

  I think it's a very similar company, Carvana. Like, one's revolutionizing used cars, going direct, getting rid of the, you know, used car dealerships that you used to have to go to, to buy and sell your used car. The other is obviously trying to disrupt the traditional agent and go direct to you. Both have needed a lot of debt to kind of build that. Both were encouraged by Wall Street to kind of grow, grow, grow, you know, at all costs, you know, growth first, profits second. And then both got hit over the head when interest rates jacked up so much in, you know, '21 and '22. And so, and then both got left for debt. And I just thought that both would eventually prove that they could be profitable with their direct approach, just like Uber.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, Jason, you would know this better than I do. But, I mean, as recently as like '22, you know, like, three years ago, I remember it would be common, you'd flip on CNBC and say, they'll never be profitable at this business. It's impossible to make money at ride sharing through delivery.

• 53:35Jason Calacanis?

  We, you know, as the early investors in the company, had had conversations about, okay, we're gonna lose $3 a ride, $2 a ride. It's gonna increase people's, you know, adoption of the technology and increase market share. And we're gonna go quickly around the world. And if people can get a ride for $5, and the subway's $2.50, or the bus is $3, wow, they can kind of do that math in their head and give it a shot. And then, once they've got it on their phone, okay, well, you know, now you got a rainy day, or you had a couple of drinks after work, and you're like, you know what, I just want to get home safely. I'm gonna take an Uber. And I went on CNBC, and Deirdre Bosa was coming at me so hard. And I said, Deirdre, do you think?

• 54:19Jason Calacanis?

  Anybody is going to stop using Uber if their $12 ride is 14 or 15. And she was like, pause for a second. And she was like, maybe? And I was like, nobody.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 54:30Jason Calacanis?

  Nobody, just like nobody who paid $9 for Netflix is going to unsubscribe at $14. You can, you can, you have pricing power. If it's a great service, you can just add to it. And I said, if they did a billion rides, and the CNBC did it, if they did a billion rides and they lost 2 billion, just do the math. They lost $2 per ride. Let's say they make, they add $2 to every ride. Now they're profitable at 2 billion. What do you think of the business? And it was at 20 bucks a share, 30 bucks a share? I bought more shares at 30.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:02Jason Calacanis?

  I bought more shares at 30. I bought more Robinhood at 12. And, you know, these weird dislocations do happen. So what's the state of it now? And what role does creating like an army, like an open army, you know? And what's the difference between your approach and say meme stocks where AMC and GameStop? You're like, well, wait a second. Those seem like terrible businesses at their core that have been disrupted, blockbuster, whatever, that they're just going to have a really hard time coming back. So what's the difference here with Open?

• 55:39Speaker 03

  Well, Open had terrible management and kind of arguably a lackadaisical board. And a much worse management than Carvana did. And this stock hit an all time low at 51 cents on June 25th. So we're not even three months removed from this. And the stock is now over 10 bucks today. So we've 20x in like less than three months. But it's not because of brilliant management. It's not, and there wasn't any buying. In fact, it was the opposite. Everyone was RSU dumping. Carrie Wheeler, who was the former CEO, was just constantly selling. She sold a big bunch of shares under a 10B51 plan at 56 cents a share. It was kind of disgusting. So anyway, I built, I did my analysis. I said, you know, obviously macro, you know, rate cuts are coming. That's going to help their business a lot.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  And they had, they had indicated that they were about to have their first EBITDA positive quarter in the first time in Three years. And so that's they got to get to steady state profitability. But I could see some like things that were positive on the horizon and they and they unlike Carvana. They have no competition left nationally in iBuying. Redfin got out of it. Zillow got out of it. So think about Uber if there was no Lyft, you know, and the potential pricing power there. Now, obviously, they can't just do iBuying. There has to be something else as well. And so I was always a believer and think this is true. That like with Carvana, they don't make most of their money from the buying and selling of cars. It's finance and interest that like 80% of their EBITDA, 20% margin, you know, comes from finance and interest. With with Open Door, it could be mortgage and title.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  You know, they've sort of made sort of half half assed attempts at it before, but not not not really. And so I come out with this like tweet on July 14th, when it was like 88 cents. I built my position maybe like 73, 74 cents. I came out with this tweet storm that basically said, you know, here's my case for Open. And I think three years from now, they get back to steady state profitability. There'll be a rerating of the stock, just like there has been with Carvana on a forward price to sales basis. This thing should be $82 a share. And it was like, holy cow, $82 for an 88 cent stock that's about to, you know, risk being delisted on NASDAQ and so forth. It's just caused a huge buzz. People immediately sort of fixated on this odd number of 82, like it just like, why 82?

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Why not 100? Why not 75? Like, why? Explain this to me.

• 57:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but you built a model and that's the number that came out of the model.

• 57:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So anyway, that but and then it was a week, you know, the thing just sort of took off. And within 10 days, like it hit five bucks, it, you know, got halted on the NASDAQ. There was like 2 billion shares traded one day. They only have 700 million shares outstanding.

• 58:11Jason Calacanis?

  Because you have so many retail investors on Robinhood. This is like the Robinhood effect that people can just very quickly make.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  There was that and there was the Carvana angle, I think, was significant. And the fact that I had called Carvana, I think, definitely gave me credibility. And I heard from so many people, not just in the US, that was the other shocking thing. Open Door is only in the US. I'd say 75% of the retail supporters are outside the US. And they all said the same thing. They all said, I missed Carvana. I'm not going to miss this one. I'm not going to. This is generational wealth opportunity, for sure, for sure.

• 58:43Jason Calacanis?

  So. But one of the things that seems to happen when this FOMO occurs and you've got a bunch of lunatics who I watched them and I'm like, you know what? I actually know Keith Rupaul, I know the business, I like the business, I've had the founders on before. I'm going to YOLO into this and I think that there could be a turnaround here. And I was aware of your work. So I was like, yeah, sure. I now make bets to learn. It's a very strange thing to do, but like when I was experimenting with prediction markets, I was like, let me just place some small bets on prediction markets to learn and see while I have skin in the game, now you have my attention. I think a lot of people have started doing this. They're like, I'll just buy a thousand dollars worth of something, or $10,000 worth of

• 59:27Jason Calacanis?

  something, or 500, whatever they can do that's de minimis. And then they have their attention. They watch it go up and down every day. And then something happened in the last couple of weeks where the fact that this started to turn around and there was some attention enthusiasm on it, essentially a dead brand. All the old investors and a new CEO emerged and Keith Rupaul went on CNBC and he started talking about it. So maybe you talk about what happens when you identify something and then, you know, people with gravitas get involved.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  Well, the one thing I did learn from 10 years of, you know, beating my brain in with Yahoo is all the tricks that that board tried to play with me. And they tried to ostracize me and say, Eric's just an idiot up in Canada. What does he know? He doesn't have the long-term view. Like, I was in the stock for 10 years and I didn't have a long-term view on Yahoo. You know, like, we have a plan, we know what we're doing. It's all part of a plan, the fact that our stock is like doing nothing for seven years. And so I didn't want to repeat that same, you know, same stuff. And I knew Keith, you know, obviously he wrote the business plan. I had enormous respect for him. You know, I'd never met him until a couple of weeks ago, but my dream of all dreams

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  was that one day, you know, I could convince Keith to come back in and join the board of this company. Because I know that there are just certain people that have, you know, bring with them a certain magic pixie dust and that gets sprinkled over the company. And I knew That Keith could do that. I knew he would attract other talented, you know, people to the, to the team and so forth. And I started to notice as I tweeted about it, that Keith was liking my tweets and, and then saying supportive things. And so I, you know, just was started getting more and more locked at the hip with Keith. And I knew that if that happened, then the open door would be flummoxed because they could no longer say, these guys don't get it. Keith or Roy doesn't get it because he's the guy who wrote the business plan. So they would, you know, have to hopefully come around.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  And, you know, that's what ended up happening. My, and, and Keith just got more and more energized. I had the chance to meet him just a couple of weeks ago in, in New York, in Soho, and just spent an hour with him and just hearing about, you know, exchanging ideas about where we think the business can go and the possibilities. And it, you know, literally goosebumps. And so the fact then that suddenly he's back on the board, he's a chair, Eric Wu, a co-founder is back on the board. And immediately they bring in Kaz, uh, who was the CEO of Shopify to be the CEO. I don't think people, you know, I was in New York just a couple of nights ago and I was at like some cocktail party and all people go talk about is, can you believe they got Kaz to run?

• 1:02:05Jason Calacanis?

  They got a significant CEO and then you architected, or they architected, I should say. I believe the deal for him that is reminiscent of say Elon's original deal with Tesla. And now the new one, which is, hey, if the stock hits certain prices, you get certain compensation. So you, you only win if the shareholders win.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  I mean, it was mind blowing to me that anybody put up a fuss about Elon's thing in the first place. Cause I remember when that whole thing was up in the media, I could, I could pull a CNBC clip from the day that that deal was announced in 2018 or 19, or whatever it was. And there were these anchors in Davos, Switzerland, that day, talking about it, laughing, saying, there's no way he will ever achieve this. Of course, you know, and, and so that was the point of view at the time that he was given this call. And then to go back later and try to say like, oh, this is unfair. I mean,

• 1:02:58Jason Calacanis?

  Every, this is like to your thesis of do the board members have skin in the game? It should be required that when you join. Join the board of these companies, you have to pay for some shares and put some skin in the game. And if you don't, like, why are you here? You're some academic or you're, you know, I don't know, you check a box or something. It's just not.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  Well, I had, I've had a conversation, I won't say his name here, because I, you know, he's a good guy. But I had a heated discussion with, with one of the directors of Open Door. Who said, you say I didn't buy shares, I bought shares in Open Door. I said, when did you buy shares? I didn't, I haven't seen the SEC filings that said that. Oh, it was in 2016. When it was private, you bought shares? Yeah, I said, but I don't know, I'm talking about when it's a public company. Well, my, my, my firm, my, my firm, my VC firm, you know, bought shares. I said, that's other people's money, that's not your money. Oh, have you seen my GP commit? Of course it's my, you know, I had to, I had to buy. I said, it's not the same.

• 1:03:50Jason Calacanis?

  GP commit might be low single digits of the fund. So there could be some millions of dollars they have, but I do think, yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  I said, just do 50,000, just do 100,000, just show faith, just show the shareholders that you are. Everybody, all the, all these retail people, they, all they care about is this woman Carrie was dumping shares at 56 cents a share to, to us retail. So let's, let's see a little, little sign that you're on our side.

• 1:04:17Jason Calacanis?

  There was a moment where Dara bought, I think, 10 million dollars in Uber shares. And it was probably in the 30s. And so you have to just wonder like, okay, the CEO of the company believes that this is a good deal. And he's going to double or triple his money. And then you look at his comp package, you know, like, oh, 8 million dollars is a significant number for him of, as you said earlier, post-tax dollars. And, you know, that to me was another great sign. All right, listen, continued success with it, I load into it. I, I went in and as I publicly said, I'm going to buy this thing. I know it's going to work, so I'm just going to sell a couple of shares as this thing pops in the next six months to cover my base. And then I'll have free shares. It happened in the next five days.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  I appreciate that, you cranberried in, I believe was your words.

• 1:05:01Jason Calacanis?

  Cranberry, in Vegas, it's 25K chip.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  I have, I have, I have one more request, and I said the same to Keith. I said the same to Keith.

• 1:05:07Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if I'm joining the board.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  We, we, we, we want Chamath back.

• 1:05:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  Bring him home.

• 1:05:13Jason Calacanis?

  Best DC.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  Bring him home, you know, bring him home. I don't know why he hasn't tweeted about it. He hasn't talked about it. A lot of people criticize him and say, oh, you know, IPOV or C or whatever it was, you know, he should have stuck around or whatever. I have the highest respect for him. Another, another bright Canadian, by the way, I'll point out, but I will say everybody loves the redemption arc. You can't tell me that Keith Roy does not love the redemption arc going on right now. In some ways, I think Open Door must be his, his, his favorite of all his private holdings. This has got to be his most energizing. I think, I think Chamath would find the same.

• 1:05:47Jason Calacanis?

  That would be very interesting.

• 1:05:48Speaker 03

  Put in a good word.

• 1:05:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  Put in a good word for me.

• 1:05:50Jason Calacanis?

  Continued success. And are you going to do another one of these this year? I was looking at Nextdoor, which I had YOLO'd into like a year or two ago. And I'm like, God, I love that company. The founder's back. It's such a great product. Like, mm, I just feel like Nextdoor has some of that potential.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  I've, I've, I've been pitched on Nextdoor. I get five pitches a day, private DMs, people saying, hey, can you pump my bags in this or pump my bags in that?

• 1:06:14Jason Calacanis?

  Pumping bags, but what's, what do you look at and go, what's a killer product?

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  I do, I do have an announcement. I think I'm going to be making it next week of my next 100 bagger. So, you know, watch for that and I'll, I'll DM it to you or whatever. So to make sure you see it. It's a good company. It's not, it's not a screw up company where I'm going to be Marissa marrying the CEO or something like that. So I'm, I'm really, really excited about it. And my, my hope had been to like, find one of these, you know, once every six months. I mean, that's obviously tough in the public markets to find 100 backers, especially all, all these private companies stay private longer, but.

• 1:06:47Jason Calacanis?

  I think there's a playbook emerging, which is incompetent, non-skin in the game individuals running companies with, you know, no downside. They're basically got no downside. And if you can, you know, have people join these companies and say, hey, you do have some downside. You've been asking you to put some millions of dollars in and your time, but the upside could be really great. That's actually a really good playbook. I think what you're doing is an important function in the market, which is identifying people who are not aligned properly. All right. Good luck with everything, Eric. Great. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Thanks, Eric.

• 1:07:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Great job, Eric. And I saw Waymo tap a lift for their fleet management in New York City. Yeah, I, this is a really interesting one. There were two Uber stories back to back. Yesterday Uber and Tesla did a partnership for freight. So this is a very big story. Everybody said, oh, Tesla and Uber will never join forces. Well, there you have it. And then people thought Lyft was, you know, dead and circling the drain. And they get Nashville. You can explain all of these things. When there is a big opportunity like autonomy, and it's competitive, if I'm Waymo, I want to be on all platforms.

• 1:08:04Jason Calacanis?

  Just like if I owned a hotel chain, if I own the W Hotels, am I going to be on hotels.com and not Expedia? Or I'm going to be on Expedia and not this other platform, Hotel Tonight? I'm going to be on every platform and I'm going to try to negotiate the best possible deal. Conversely, if I'm Expedia, am I only taking, you know, Marriott's and I'm not taking Holiday Inn's? Of course not. So what a lot of the, you know, Tesla Q or, you know, Tesla Bulls or Waymo Bulls, Waymo people criticizing them, what they don't realize is it's a dynamic marketplace that is global with many different product offerings. Zoox will eventually be part of

• 1:08:44Jason Calacanis?

  the Uber network and the Lyft network. Lyft will have, you know, Lucids and Neuro on it eventually. If you have one of these assets, you would want it to have full utilization. You wouldn't do an exclusive unless there was some incredible reason to do so. And exclusives very rarely exist. If you look at the DoorDash exclusives, or Uber trying to do exclusives for food, eventually all these folks are like, yeah, you know, we did an exclusive for two years to get, I don't know, McDonald's or Starbucks on the platform. But I think you can get Starbucks on all the platforms now.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, I do recall there was a time you could only get Mission Chinese in San Francisco on DoorDash. So I was an entirely Uber Eats guy and then DoorDash for that one restaurant. I remember hating them for that exclusive. But yeah, super effective. So Jason, this podcast, a lot of people watch it on YouTube. We do a live stream, of course, everywhere around the internet, but people have really taken to video podcasts as kind of the new format. So audio is still quite big, but YouTube has noticed that people are doing this. I think they said that they got 100 million hours of podcasts consumed daily as of July over on YouTube. So not a huge surprise. YouTube is rolling out new tools. And I think we might actually use these because they could help with some of our editing requirements. What they're going to roll out is an AI workspace that makes

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  suggestions about clips to cut for social media, which is something that we've been talking about internally, making better short clips. We talked about TikTok earlier on in the show. Yeah. And a feature that's going to help audio podcasters make videos so they can be on YouTube in a more engaging format. So leveraging video and getting more video podcasts out, a great use of AI, I think.

• 1:10:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So a tool that let you take an audio only podcast, like say Adam Curry's No Agenda, and then just create supplemental visuals based on what they're talking about, or just something that looked good and had like a wave on it. You could very easily get those podcasts onto YouTube. I don't know what percentage of podcasts are just audio based still, but there's a number of them. And that would be like, really amazing. Generative AI to make compelling graphics, or just any kind of graphic. I mean, even if it was just a logo with a sound wave, that would be better than not having them on YouTube because YouTube is so ubiquitous and the algorithm's so good. I would love to make it my primary podcast player.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Did you ever see those lyric videos that bands with lower budgets put out when they drop an album? So they can't make it a lot of music videos. I mean, just give me a like a lyric video for a podcast. Just put, use the AI tools, transcribe it, put that on the screen. I can read while I listen. I love that.

• 1:11:21Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. It's been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. You can sign up for our newsletter on Substack. Just search for This Week in Startups over there. And then we go live there. There's a nice chat room. You can follow me on LinkedIn. We go live there. And yeah, there's a subreddit. We don't really check it too often. Probably should. But we're going to start the Discord up again and probably move from This Week in Startup Slack, which is just not the right software for this. I think everybody's kind of hanging out in Discord now. So we'll be over in Discord soon for community stuff. We're hiring a, speaking of video editors, we need somebody in Austin. Don't have to have a college degree. Do you have to be creative? Do you need to know how to do cap cuts?

• 1:12:03Jason Calacanis?

  So if you email [email protected] and just send us some samples, you know, we'll hire you in the office, eat some barbecue with us, hang out, make clips of the show and help us edit the show, produce the show. We're looking for somebody. So we'll see you all next time on The Sweet Startup. Bye bye. Bye.