5,000+ Tech Workers Laid Off This Week. It's Just The Beginning. | E2286

This Week In Startups is made possible by: IM8 Health - https://IM8health.com/TWIST Every - Every.io Sentry - https://Sentry.io/TWIST Banks don't want to hand over their data to AI labs. So David Moscatelli built a $250,000 box that runs AI on-prem. He already has 1,600 pre-orders. On today's episode of TWiST, Jason and Alex sit down with the Go Abacus founder and Yanez's Jose Caldera to unpack how regulated industries are getting AI without the cloud, why Bittensor subnet 54 is incentivizing miners to attack identity systems, and why Cloudflare just laid off 20% of its workforce in the same week it raised guidance. The show closes with Jason explaining what it means to build an AI-first startup, and how workers can derisk their future employment! Guest Links: Go Abacus Go1 direct link David Moscatelli on LinkedIn Yanez Bittensor Subnet 54 on TAOstats Jose Caldera on LinkedIn LAUNCH Links: Founder University Founder University Japan application portal News Links: Cloudflare lays off 20% of its staff Coinbase cuts 14% of its staff Block post on how it is rebuilding its company Block's earnings, including its raised guidance Anthropic's massive upcoming funding round WHOOP's new on-demand clinicians Stripe Atlas's growth Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction: Jason in Brooklyn, Knicks playoffs 2:30 Go Abacus joins: AI infrastructure for regulated industries 3:25 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 4:00 The Go1: 2,000-user on-prem AI appliance 7:04 Pricing the Go1: How far does $250,000 go? 7:24 1,600 orders and the hardware delivery challenge 10:14 Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST 20:23 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io 27:22 Chicago tech scene and in-office culture 30:09 IM8 Health: Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to https://IM8health.com/twist and use the code TWiST to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order. 35:11 Yanez joins: How to prove personhood and uniqueness 38:32 How biometric capture and bio-keys work 40:05 Agent delegation: proving humans authorized AI agents 44:19 Bittensor Subnet 54 and incentivizing adversarial miners 47:11 Founder University Japan Cohort 2 applications open 49:15 Tech layoffs: Cloudflare cuts 20%, Coinbase cuts 14%, Block raises guidance 1:02:14 Anthropic's $50B round at $900B pre-money 1:04:22 WHOOP adds on-demand clinicians 1:06:42 Federalism, state-level regulation, and AI policy 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 Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So here's the problem. You have banks, credit unions, hospitals that want to use AI, but they are not interested in sending their data to any of the public AI providers. They say, how do we use AI, but locally within our network? So none of our data leaves our infrastructure.

• 0:17Jason Calacanis?

  You can make your own decision. For me, if you look at the record of some of the executives at some of the companies, it might make one wonder. And if there's only one way to really know if your information is being shared or not, which is to not share it.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  25, 30 days ago, and we have over 1,600 orders of this device.

• 0:34Jason Calacanis?

  I wouldn't trust Biden or Kamala or Trump or J D Vance with AI regulation for everything. Some god kings in Washington DC who are on the grift, who are getting paid by these lobbyists. That system's broken.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  The executive branch, to your point about executive power, control over what AI models I can use, terrifies me to no end, Jason. This week in startups is brought to you by IMH Health. Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to im8health.com/twist and use the code TWIST to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets, and 10% off your order. Every. For all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io. And Sentry. Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST.

• 1:31Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to Twist for May 8, 2026. I am at my mom and dad's brownstone. Got to see them for the full week. Got to take in four Knicks games, Atlanta, New York, New York, and tonight I'll be in Philly, or when you're listening to this, I will have been in Philly. Acquired courtside for two out of four. It's a really hard thing to do these days, but I am really excited for my Knicks and I'm really excited for today's episode.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, Knicks are up 2-0 over the Sixers, right?

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and it takes four wins. You play three series in order to get to the finals. And so we have to win 12 games to get to the finals, obviously. And we're halfway there, six of 12. Halfway, not bad, still a long way to go. Mission not accomplished, but we really want to get to the finals and then we'll have to strategize from there because we have some great, incredible folks that we're going to be competing against in the finals. Either the Spurs or OKC. But let's get to the show. We have a lot of great guests and we have a lot of news. So we're going to try to whip through this docket for everybody. I know everybody's got a lot of comments. And at the end of the show, we'll be doing the plugs for the first time today. We're going to be doing the AI plugs. So listen to the end of the show for the AI plugs. Let's get started.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  All right. First up, we have David Moscatelli. He is the founder of a company called Go Abacus. It's a launched back startup that wants to deploy on-prem AI for regulated industries. Jason, they have a thing called the Go One. It's a big bunch of GPUs in a box. And I heard that they may have another one coming out, but the idea is how do we get AI in the door of companies that can't use Azure, AWS, OpenAI's APIs? That's the plan. So David, welcome to the show. Good to have you here.

• 3:06Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.

• 3:08Jason Calacanis?

  Now, the name of the startup, the domain is Go Abacus, but you just go by Abacus, yeah?

• 3:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have an arch nemesis, Jason. So we had to differentiate by adding the go, which pleased our advantage. We say go healthcare, go banking, go finance, go Abacus.

• 3:23Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Love it. And so before we get started here, always remember to start your Plaid, record everything. And Alex has his on his wrist right there. You need to get the Plaid Note PIN S, amazing product. If you go to plaud.ai/twist and use the code TWIST, you're going to get 10% off. Alex does it all the time because I'm constantly giving him notes on how to be an amazing co-host.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, just how to get better and better. Thanks. We applaud Plaid for sponsoring independent media like This Week in Startups. David, we met, I guess, is it two years now? You were to launch, which launch accelerator class did you go to?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  I think it was LA 33, but I don't know, Jason, because every day is like a year for me. So it's one of those.

• 4:07Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. And maybe just give us an idea of what you're building in as plain English as you can. You know, we always work on that really simple sentence and we worked with you really hard in all of our startups to present. These startups so well. And one of the great things about, I think, our accelerator and founder university, Alex, if I give myself a pat on the back here, is that we really help founders communicate what they're doing and why it's important. So you'll see that when David sort of explains it to us versus other folks who come on the podcast and then I have to re-explain it in plain English. David, what's the mission here? Who are your customers? How do you make money?

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Okay, so here's where I disappoint Jason and the entire team. So we, as a company, what I like to say is we're AI infrastructure for regulated industries. Now, when I say that, people go, what's infrastructure? And what do you mean by regulated industries? So here's the problem. You have banks, credit unions, hospitals that want to use AI, but they're not interested in sending their data to any of the public AI providers. OpenAI, Claude, I think they're fantastic companies, but it's just not in their wheelhouse. So they say, how do we use AI but locally within our network? So none of our data leaves our infrastructure. And how do we box in the cost?

• 5:27Speaker 00

  In other words, with those guys, you're paying on usage. You know, if you're a bank or a credit union or an insurance company, that's a no-go for you. You don't like a variable annuity every month. You want a fixed price. Okay, so they want to accomplish those two things. And then that's what we do at GoAdvocus, is we provide that on-prem infrastructure through hardware and software so that they consume AI in a safe and reliable way.

• 5:51Jason Calacanis?

  And you know, this is something, Alex, we've talked about here over and over again when it comes to running local models, running OpenClaw. And how do we think about all this incredible data I have on startups? We do 2,000, you know, we do about 50 to 100 first calls with founders every week. We have all that data. That data is stored in Notion and other places. We have AI provided to us from them, but we're always thinking, hmm, should this be training, you know, other people's models? And do we even believe them that it's not? Do they even have control over their models? Are these trustworthy companies? You know, listen, you can make your own decision.

• 6:32Jason Calacanis?

  For me, if you look at the record of some of the executives at some of the companies, it might make one wonder, you know, and the history of the internet writ large, Alex, is. Privacy is a game people play. And if there's only one way to really know if your information is being shared or not, which is to not share it.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:52Jason Calacanis?

  That is the only way to know. So I think this is what corporations really want is to have it on prem. And now you have a hardware solution, a software solution. Let's get into the nitty gritty and then Alex, you can tee up your first question.

• 7:06Speaker 00

  That's right. So we have a piece of hardware. It's called the Go One. We came out with that about 25, 30 days ago, and we have over 1,600 orders of this device. So pray for me, everybody on the call.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Hardware is a completely different business. You know, and we've had all sorts of people call. So we've had health, fitness companies call us. We had one guy who does luxury homes for famous celebrities. He wants to buy one of these to put in the box, put in the house because celebrities don't want their data for their tech-enabled home going to any of the cloud providers. So there's been a whole bunch of ventures that I could have never have anticipated. But I think, you know, our core value prop is we have a piece of hardware, which is the Go One. Everything you need to consume AI is in that device. That device can support up to 2,000 concurrent users at one time. Okay, we ship that device directly to our clients.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  They unbox that and in about 15 minutes, they're up and running with on-prem AI. How do we do that? Well, we preconfigure the software and pre-install it on the device. What's the software? We call it Go One OS. It's a custom developed operating system that enables the enterprise to have AI and connect to their data. And then that device connects to all the PC terminals of each employee within the organization. So they can communicate with that device. We replace that device every year to have the most up-to-date chipset. And in the device, there's redundant systems. So there's three power supply units. There's duplicate GPUs, duplicate CPUs. We do that to maintain a certain service metric with the device as we deploy it to our clients.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  They can be chained together. So if you want more than 2,000 users, you can 468, etc.

• 8:54Jason Calacanis?

  So you have a service level agreement. You want to make sure you hit that 99.59s and you're basically mirroring duplexing is the term when I was a network engineer we used. But suffice it to say, if a power supply or a card goes out, it's going to still be up and running. And you can you can daisy chain them. So you could have unlimited number of users. And I think that means on a security basis, if it's in on prem, you could say, hey, only these IP addresses, only these specific MAC addresses, the specific hardware, the specific network cards can access it, which is a level of security that you really want. If you had, you know, Justin Bieber's home network on it, I'm just making up a celebrity's name. Go ahead, Alex.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  So the yearly refresh is very interesting to me. What does it cost to buy a Go1? And then do I have to repay you once a year? Because I presume that newer shares are going to cost more, it's going to depreciate while I own it and so forth.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  It's a good question, Alex. And since I have some of our investors on the phone, E. Jason, I have to be careful how I answer this question. So I replace them every year because I want them to have the latest and greatest hardware. And I'm trying to avoid the expense of sending out a technician, Alex. So I have redundant systems and I replace the box every year. I don't have to send out the technician because on the basis of our stress testing, the chances of failure is incredibly low. Okay, that's the main reason. The second reason.

• 10:14Jason Calacanis?

  It's the worst nightmare of every founder. You've built a product. Everything's working great. Then real users start flooding in and suddenly it all breaks. What a disaster. You need to get it back up and running and you got to do that fast. You're looking like an amateur. That's why you need a partner like Sentry. Applications can break in many different ways, but Sentry sees everything. You'll get all the relevant details like stack traces, commits, releases, and even the developers who push that problem code in the first place. With Sentry, you're not going to be jumping around between different tools, trying to figure out what happened. And SEER, Sentry's AI debugging agent, uses all this data and context to identify the root cause of the problem and suggest a fix.

• 10:55Jason Calacanis?

  It can even take a look at your code before it ships and warn you if any problems are likely. Try SEER and For free. If you're a This Week in Startups listener at sentry.io/twist, use the code TWIST for $240 in Sentry credits. Make sure you use that code. Make sure you use that URL, sentry.io/twist, so they know your Uncle J Cal sent you.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  The chip technology is changing rapidly, and we want to make sure that our clients have the latest and greatest stuff. So one of the only pushbacks to on-prem as well as technology evolves, if I have this static thing, how am I keeping pace with what's coming out? And so we have a bunch of ways that we do that, both software and hardware. But on the hardware side, we want them to have the best experience possible. And so we change it out every year. We send them a new box. They migrate the old box to the new one. They wipe the old box. They put the old box back in the box it came and they ship it back to us and then we decommission it.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  What am I, so do I pay one main upfront price? And then, you know, a different amount every year? Do I pay the same amount every year? Tell me about the, the price I'm going to pay as a bank here.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a really good deal. So you have an upfront fee, which is CapEx. Right? So it's a capital expenditure. Then you have a monthly service fee. The box refreshes are included in that initial CapEx expenditure.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  So every year when we refresh it, there's no additional fee. It's included as part of the service. If anything fails, any of those redundant systems fails, we get a notification of a failure and we immediately ship out a new box. So that's all included in the price.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Now, these yearly refreshes, is that how often I, as a customer who has a Go1 app at my company, can expect to have the models that I can access refreshed? Or do those update more quickly than the hardware refreshes?

• 12:41Speaker 00

  That's a fantastic question. So we, the Go1 OS includes our own proprietary models. Now, I know, Alex, you're thinking, okay, David, you don't have millions of dollars. How have you done that?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  You don't have tens of billions of dollars.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  There we go. So we actually, as a company, started in 2018, Alex. Back then, this was pre LLM. It was NLP, question-answer matching. And back then, we had the thumbs up and thumbs down button. Now, some, some dude decided to call that reinforced human learning. We call it thumbs up, thumbs down. So back then, people were really optimistic and they spent a lot of time writing very, you know, editorial about why a question was good and why it was bad. So we had 30 million of those queries. Right as data in financial services. That was our base model training.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Now, our core model, we ship out every six months and our core model in the Go1 OS is a collection of tiny models, Alex. So we call those SLMs, small language models.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  From three billion to seven billion. Each of those models specializes in a very specific task. So in banking, the things that folks are trying to do are not, they don't change very often. They're very specific and they're, and they're very deterministic. Okay. So we have a series of specialized models and we have an orchestrator on top. That orchestrator orchestrates to a model, right? And then that model performs the task. Okay. So that's our model apparatus.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  So what I haven't heard you say is we have a large LLM that you can pick between. Like I'm thinking because this is on prem, it's going to be mostly open source, open weight models. DPC, Kimmy, yeah, what are we talking?

• 14:31Speaker 00

  So we can, but that's not our preference. So you absolutely can install a localized model, but we have our own models that we've trained. Now, just to kind of talk about this, you know, again, back to the money, how do we do it? Well, each of our clients has our on-prem system deployed, right? At night, when our clients are not using their system, this is in their SLA, we batch train on their data and then we take, we take the weights from that training, not the underlying content, just the weights and it sends to us every night. So we're decentralizing, we call it fractional reserve training. The more clients we have, the more clients that have the Go1, the more training we have in our network, that training then comes back to us.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  So we're able to spread the cost of training across all of our clients, across each industry. And because our models are much smaller, they're faster and they're way less expensive to train. OpenAI and Claude, they don't know if you're going to write a poem or a sonnet. So they have to have massive parameters. Does that make sense?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Can I ask a really nerdy question about this? So for the customer, the unit is CapEx and they pay you a retain.

• 15:38Jason Calacanis?

  Trainer, when you're doing the training across customer hardware, how do you figure that out in accounting terms? Does that, is that a, a cost of goods sold? Or is that like them giving you income? I can't figure out where the value is flowing there. It's tricky.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  That's a good question. So on our contracts, we have a monthly price and we say, hey, client, we love you. If you agree to share your weights with us, not the data, just the weights. Cause if, you know, if I could put my computer scientist hat on for a second, and LLM is a CSV file with weights and software to run those weights. Hate to demystify it for everyone. That's what it is. So we just want the weight. So we say, if you, if you're willing to share the weights with us, we'll give you 20% off each month for the life of your contract.

• 16:25Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Okay. Or we'll discount the price of a go one by 50%, right? And so that almost always does the trick. Not every time. We do have clients that say, nope, not doing that. And that's completely fine. But we have a fair number of clients that opt into that.

• 16:38Jason Calacanis?

  Do we get the price of the go one? Is this like a hundred thousand, $200,000? It sounds like this should be pretty expensive. It's got eight of those cards. Those cards are 5K each, I think. So there's, I mean, I just, off the top of my head, there's 50K in cards. And then there's gotta be 25K in power supplies and memory and chips and whatever. So what's the ballpark here? And is that where the margin is or the margin in the service? Yeah. What, what can people expect, you know, out of the gate to be paying a year? Quarter million dollars, half million dollars? Where does this start at? Cause this is not a, you know, roll your own kind of situation. This is a high level SLA. This is, you know, but it's not a hundred million dollar, $10 million install from, you know, a frontier model company that's got a side hustle.

• 17:20Jason Calacanis?

  Like I had the, I had the founder of Mistral on the pod and they do like on prem themselves, but I gotta think their on prem starts at 10 million or 20 million before they even get out of bed.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Exactly right. So the go one, just as a capex item, starts at 250,000. The go one max, which is coming out, which supports 8,000 concurrent users, that starts at $350,000. Now, most clients choose to amortize that over the life of the contract. And if you think about the Math, Jason, two hundred fifty thousand divided by two thousand users from limited AI. You could ask a million questions, ten million questions, a hundred million questions. It does not matter. The price doesn't change. Your per user cost is pretty reasonable.

• 18:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  You know, you know, you're talking about, it's kind of a steal in terms of price.

• 18:07Jason Calacanis?

  Hundreds of dollar, low hundreds of dollars per user, maybe.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 18:11Jason Calacanis?

  Is what a pro account, you know, consumer pro account costs, two fifty a year, three fifty a year, something in that range. And I think this is, Alex, something we learned when we were deploying open claw agents or doing vibe coding is to get the most out of these products. And to get the most out of AI, the caps make you concerned, you know, it's kind of like being a chef where you're like, hey, this is, these are white truffles, this is foie gras, this is Toro. You can't get creative because this stuff is, you know, a hundred dollars an ounce, two hundred dollars an ounce, you're dealing with caviar. So you, you can't waste it. Whereas, you know, if you were making meatloaf or, or you're making some, you know, omelet, you can go all day long.

• 18:54Jason Calacanis?

  Eggs cost, you know, twenty five cents each and, you know, when you're buying them wholesale. So people can have a lot of creativity there. And you can experiment. That's, I think, the magic of what Go Abacus is doing here is Go Abacus has a product that gives you unlimited usage. And the, the next blocker is you're like, oh my God, do I want to have access to my data? That's another psychological blocker. So you think about those two blockers. In order to get value from AI, you can't be watching the register and be scared. Oh my God, what is this agent going to cost? And you can't be scared, oh my God, what if like, you know, Go Abacus is, we have Go Abacus's cap table, we have Go Abacus's due diligence on, you know, uh, in a location. We, we have two factor authentication, we've got encrypted, we got all this stuff.

• 19:37Jason Calacanis?

  We, we had a, we, we don't want to have a situation where David calls me one day and says, hey, by the way, somebody did a search in, you know, chat GPT and our cap table came up because they asked, what's the cap table of Go Abacus? I know this sounds fantastical, but remember when, uh, what was the, the first image generation company that broke out? And they were indexing Getty Images. And when they started making images of things, the, the Getty Images logo started coming up. It was the, and then Getty Images sued them because they were like, hey, uh, Hate to tell you, but not only did you get caught red handed, not only did you steal our images, you're now doing trademark infringement because your goddamn slop AI.

• 20:21Jason Calacanis?

  It was stable diffusion, I believe. Am I correct, Alex?

• 20:23Speaker 02

  I believe that's right.

• 20:24Jason Calacanis?

  I've been doing this job for decades now. Not a lot of people have worked with more startups than me. Over 600 investments, but honestly, every.io might be the exception because every.io is working with every new startup. It's the all in one finance, banking and HR app. They understand startups and they're now at over 1,000 startups. And that means first time founders working on their pre seed rounds, but also veteran teams who've raised a series A or beyond. They can partner with every and they are. And why are they partnering with them? Just to scale up their business, build out their teams, take care of things that are not core to your product or your service. That means banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, everything you need to run your company is done in one place by one trusted partner.

• 21:09Jason Calacanis?

  And they're going to give you 3% cash back on all company purchases sent directly to your bank account. So it's time to visit every.io and get back to focusing on what really matters for your business. Every.io is going to help you do that. E V E R Y dot I O.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Talk about an embarrassing moment, but I do want to say, Jason, right now we're good. So I asked ChatGPT, what is the cap table of GoAbacus? And it says, there does not appear to be a fully public capitalization table for GoAbacus. So you're, uh, actually it may have gotten the wrong company now that I look at it. But anyways, uh, so far, so good on that front. Let's do some math though, Jason, because I think you're making a good point about, about usage and costs. The, if GoAbacus is correct and people do want this because they do want to have, you know, meter free AI. The money is huge. 1,600 go ones at a minimum of 250 apiece is $400 million. So David, how long is it going to take you to deliver all those units? Because either you just made the new biggest hardware company in the world, or it's going to take a couple of quarters to get those shipped.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  This is where, you know, I have to talk to our board and, you know, I'd be, I'd become the pseudo board therapist. They call me late at night worried and I talk them off the ledge. So hardware is.

• 22:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's supposed to be the other way. I just want to point out that the founder having to talk the VCs in the port of the ledge. Note to the, I may need to get on this board. I may, you know, you always have David. I don't do boards anymore because we have too many portfolio companies. You can always push the button. There's the bat signal and you can say the Jake Albat signal. If you need me to come to a board meeting, I will come with Thor's hammer and Captain America's shield and level set. If you need me to come, I will come.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  I love that. I take you up on that.

• 22:52Jason Calacanis?

  Press the button anytime.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  But yeah, they're worried like, well, David, how are you going to ship this? Well, the good news about enterprise is, you know, when they decide to purchase these items, it's not like, okay, we added it to the cart. We hit buy, we put it in our credit card checkout and it's like shit. There's like a three or four month delay, alignment meetings. IT wants to talk about where it's going to go. How is it going to ship? Like, can we rack it? How do we do that? You know, we have a, you know, a script file that we send out that like collects their network configuration so we can pre-install it. So what am I trying to say, Alex? We have some lead time. That lead time does two things for us. It, it, it removes a lot of the risk around supply chain. You know, we have time to get the parts that we need. And then the second thing is we have time to build, build the thing.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  You know, now building the thing is a struggle. You know, I'm, I'm a founder, so I love this stuff. I geek out about it. Yes, I'm, I'm there helping build go ones. We've purchased these robotic arms that help us do it.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Do you have a picture of your factory? I didn't know you guys were using robotic arms because if you have one handy, I would love to see this. Jason, we do love a factory shop.

• 23:59Jason Calacanis?

  One of the issues with hyper growth startups is the accounts receivable can exceed the operational capital, which then there is two solutions. You can get a venture debt line or just a debt line in general, factoring, whatever. But the better thing to do, and listen, I'm not on the board. I mean, I think we have a board seat, but I think the better thing for us to do in this situation, if I was going to do a little mini, you know, pow wow here, is we should allow people who pay in full. To move to the top of the list and then people put a deposit down, go next. So there's two options. If you really need this, you put a full deposit down. That's one VIP list. That's the VIP list.

• 24:41Jason Calacanis?

  And then the second is you put a deposit down, we call you. How do I know this is a great strategy? This is what Elon did with the signature series. When I bought signature 16 of the Roadster, I put 150K deposit down when I bought the Model S, serial number one and serial number 73. I had to put 150K down for each. So he got 450K of, you know, my money into the company to be operating capital. I took the risk, but I got the reward. And that's really what you should do is just tell folks, listen, you know, if you put a full deposit down, yeah. So because you're taking a deposit of what, 20%, 50%?

• 25:15Speaker 00

  It depends. Some clients surprisingly are paying upfront, which is great. A lot of them are capitalized, get monthly.

• 25:22Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, right. Because they want to depreciate. Yeah. So there's bonus depreciation. Thanks to our incredible, amazing, wonderful, extraordinary, insert a couple more compliments here. President Trump, you always got to do that, just to stay in good standing. You know, he did like this capital depreciation, which was very good for this kind of thing. Yeah. I don't know where it is now. For what is the business depreciation in 2026 is a 60%? You can just write off immediately. It's not 100%, I don't think.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  It's nice. I know that.

• 25:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It was like 100% I think in the first year. And then I think it goes down 90, 80, 10 or something.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  For 2026 businesses can utilize 100% bonus depreciation for eligible newer used assets, machinery, equipment, software and certain vehicles.

• 26:04Jason Calacanis?

  So it's 100%. Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  That's, uh.

• 26:06Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Great for business.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  My taxes didn't get, my personal taxes didn't get such a lovely boost. I'm jealous.

• 26:12Jason Calacanis?

  You do have that actually. You have, well, no, you have a, or you have a corporation. So what that means is if you bought a MacBook or whatever, you could depreciate the whole cost now as opposed to putting it over five years. So that would now you're, look at you, you're like, huh? So if you want to stimulate the economy, you know, independent of what you think President Trump or Biden or Kamala, whatever, when you do this depreciation, what you get is a massive rush to, you know, to build businesses. So a data center or, you know, putting a go abacus or two in, people get a little more frisky. They invest a little bit more, they get off the sidelines because if you're going to pay your taxes anyway, let's say even with your, you know, one man, two, two-person operation.

• 26:58Jason Calacanis?

  You know, if you have to pay 50K in taxes this year, and I said, well, you could buy 10K of, you know, laptops for everybody and a Mac Studio, and you don't have to pay taxes on that, you'd be like, oh, wow, it's 35% off, it's 40% off.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:13Jason Calacanis?

  It's pretty juicy. And it does get people off the sidelines.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Totally in favor of Jason, 1,000%. If I hadn't seen the recent news that the US now has debt greater than GDP, I would be totally in favor. I want to ask before we let David go about Chicago, because this company is based in, really, my original technology hub. I have a lot of affection for Chicago, but I haven't been there in a hot minute. So what's the startup scene like? How active are VCs? Did Chicago finally get some later-stage investors? Talk to me.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  Okay, so Alex, you know, I tried to ask my parents tactfully once, like, why do we live here? Like, you could have chosen any place, like, but you chose here. And I never got like a straight answer out of them. But I've never really regretted living here because it's just like, it's kind of a work city. People here work. And it has that Midwestern vibe. And so I just love it in Chicago. I know that, I know there are other places in the world that are fantastic too, but Chicago's always home to me. In terms of the tech scene, Alex, this is a corny answer, but it's true. I'm working, so I don't know.

• 28:20Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. That's the right answer.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't go to those.

• 28:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what about hiring? I mean, I do think there's been a number of companies that have left. Obviously, people are going to certain states for tax reasons, for freedom reasons, for, so I wonder if there's a, I know there's been some big companies there from Groupon to others. So there is talent there. Do you have an in-office culture or remote?

• 28:42Speaker 00

  We have an in-office culture. I was remote for a long time, Jason, but then it's just easier when they're right next to you. And you could say, hey, man, let's talk about this.

• 28:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  You know, so we have two offices that we go between Merchandise Smart and Fulton Market. So it's an office culture. In terms of the talent, there's a lot of talent out here. There's a ton of talent that we're tapping into. And, you know, I love San Francisco, but when I've tried to recruit. From there, I love you, San Francisco. I love everyone from San Francisco. A lot of the folks that we try and hire, like they want these crazy high salaries and I think they deserve them. But there's like a certain caliber of work that you have to execute on to get that salary.

• 29:19Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  And I'm like,

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  They're also a bit mercenary. You know, when you've been through this, like, you know, through three or four cycles, it's just like four year vest and the loyalty to the company is second to the next opportunity. So there's a group of folks who just flowed between, you know, they started at Google, they went to Meta, they did Uber, now they're at Anthropic, whatever. And, you know, if they leave some shares on the table because, you know, they can work Anthropic off of SpaceX, off of OpenAI, and say, hey, you got to make up for what, you know, I'm leaving on the table, you know, they're more than willing to do that. So I think it's a really smart to be the big fish in a smaller pond and then have continuity. And that's what I found. People love living in Austin.

• 30:06Jason Calacanis?

  I think of 23 people, I'm down to like maybe five, including Alex, who are remote. I like to stay active, you know, I'm getting a little older, but I've started drinking IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials and it is delicious. I'm starting to notice a real shift. I drink it every morning and I just feel less tired, right? Which allows me to really, you know, catch up and attack the day. IM8's Daily Ultimate Essentials packs the benefits of 16 different supplements into one tasty drink. It's loaded with 92 nutrient-rich ingredients, including vitamins, minerals, adaptogens, along with pre, pro, and postbiotics. It's giving me a great energy boost. It calms your digestion and it's an easy habit to stick with because it tastes delicious.

• 30:49Jason Calacanis?

  So start feeling like your best self every day with IM8. Go to im8health.com/twist and use the code TWIST to get a free welcome kit, five free chaveral sachets and 10% off your order. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. And what I said to people, I think it was two years ago, you probably remember Alex, I just said, if you're an ultra high performer, E, H, P. If you're an EHP, ultra-high performer, you can stay remote. Anybody else has to return to office. And then, over time, people who were not in the top, and I said, people said, what's the ultra-high performer? I said, for our organization, it's the top one-third, because everybody's a high performer. Ultra-high is the top third.

• 31:34Jason Calacanis?

  Alex would be in the top third. You know, Matt, who's our top sales guy, he's in the top third. Heidi, top, you know, hardest working person. So, you know, I make an exception for them. Everybody else, I was just like, we'll see. And now, I got everybody in office. It works better. You can actually build a culture. And then, you know, like, hey, you're like, hey, why does Alex get to work from home? Why does Heidi get to work from home? It's like, look at the performance. All right, listen, we got to drop you off, David. Continued success. I hope we've been helpful to you. You went to Founder University, then you went to the Accelerator. So you're one of, you know, the true success stories in the, you know, Jake Howe portfolio collection. I'm so proud of you. I think we also did a syndicate, too.

• 32:17Jason Calacanis?

  So you, you are literally the trifecta of the vision I had, which is podcasts, Founder University, Accelerator Syndicate, which is like, hey, over the life of a company, how could we be helpful? Knowledge and community from the podcasts. Founder University, community, knowledge, maybe a small check. Accelerator, okay, now we're definitely in business together. We're introducing you to as many great investors. It's got my name on it. People might give you a meeting or two because of that. And then, finally, Syndicate. Okay, we can scale with you, you know, and keep our prorata, sometimes even go super prorata. So just absolutely great to be on that trifecta of a journey with you, David. Very just, I mean, we knew you were going to be successful, but this is a level of success, you know, up there with Micro One and Thalamus and, you know, TaxGPT.

• 33:02Jason Calacanis?

  We've got a number of breakout companies right now and just really excited for GoAbacus. No, just, I mean, here's the good news. GoAbacus is hiring selectively in Chicago for killers. [email protected] will get you directly to the CEO. If you're extraordinary, if you think you can add value, you know, hey. This is a great rocket ship to get on now.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Alex. I have to say, I feel like my life is now complete because Jason said he's proud of me. My next goal is to get Mike Savitos to say he's proud of me.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Oh, good, good luck.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  If I could get that, then I would be complete. I feel like that's gonna be much harder.

• 33:41Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I've been working for him since the early 90s and he's still held that. I think he might have said it this year. He might have said, "I'm proud of you." Because I'm mature just a little bit. Okay, great job, David. We'll drop you off.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  I have to do a little, a little interstitial before we bring up.

• 33:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, please.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Okay, so David said that they have offices in the merchandise mart, which does not sound cool. But I want to just make a little, little note here. This is the Chicago Merchandise Mart. If you're on the audio version, imagine a building that is so large. It is the only building, I think, in the US, aside from the Pentagon, that has its own zip code. And we were talking about.

• 34:15Jason Calacanis?

  My lord.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Right? Right?

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Who builds a building like that? It must have a giant courtyard, right? So in order to get all the sunlight in there, or is it just that deep?

• 34:28Speaker 02

  Merchandise Mart from the top. I'll see what I can find here.

• 34:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, if you do. You know what? It might have been a factory building, therefore they didn't. But in today's regulations, you need to have light coming in. So the depth and the footprint of that building is so deep, they must have air shoots. So when they built those in... No, it might. Look, there's a cutout there.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  There might be a cutout, but it is deep and thick. And what it's for, I think, in Chicago, should be putting every single startup in that building. You want to build community?

• 35:00Jason Calacanis?

  That would do it.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Density.

• 35:01Jason Calacanis?

  Density is it.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  You have the building. Just stuff it full of tech companies. Next up on the show, we have Jose Caldera. He is the founder of Yanaz, which is a bit tensor-backed company of sorts, Jason. Rebranded from Yanaz Compliance, if you're on the Googles. And what does it do? Well, it wants to help people determine if a human is present, if a unique human is present, and how to ensure that when an agent is out in the world, the human that gave it permission to go out and do things for it is legitimate. So Jose, you're solving personhood and uniqueness on the internet. Welcome to the show.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Hi, so you're here. I appreciate the time, Jason and Alex. Yeah, so it's a... It's a thing that we need all to wrestle with. Moving forward, trying to make sure that every participant that you have, every one that is in this call, that is actually a human and is actually unique. Some challenges that we never thought we would face, but something that we have to deal on a daily basis now.

• 36:00Jason Calacanis?

  Who is the customer here? Who needs to figure out identity and needs to do it through a service like this? There are, I know some services, Alex, I don't know which they are, but sometimes when I'm doing a transaction online, it asks me to take a picture of myself, I think for age verification now. I'm trying to remember what platform recently did this. I know the dating apps do it, so I didn't experience it there, but I did experience it on, oh, I think I may have experienced it when I was doing Clear or TSA Pre. It might have been TSA Pre where they took a picture of you. And then I did an age verification really where it, oh, it might have been TikTok. That was what it was. I went live on TikTok recently and it did a scan of my face and it said, I'm just doing an age thing.

• 36:45Jason Calacanis?

  And it was like, okay, you're old dude. And it let me start live. So who's using this? What are they using it for?

• 36:51Speaker 03

  The notion that you need to figure out whether you're dealing with a human, it's everywhere. So if you think about CAPTCHA's, you know, when CAPTCHA was about, it was really about trying to figure out whether the person that you're interacting with was a live human, right? So you would answer a little bit of a challenge. And then by answering that challenge, then you proved yourself that you were there and you were a human. And of course, across the years, that has become a little bit of a nuance and people are looking for alternatives. So I don't know how to do this. So who's the user? Everyone. Every organization needs and moving forward is going to have to make a distinction in between whether you're dealing with a bot or whether you're dealing with an actual human.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  And that is different in a way from the types of identity verification systems that you were describing before, where you actually have to prove in a way that you are who you say you are, right? And I think there is a distinction there because as we move forward, the use of Identity data in identity systems to kind of deal with fraud and so on are going to be very challenged because of the growth of the fake attacks.

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  What I would take from that as an investor is the service is new. We don't have too many customers right now or we don't know who the customers are using it. Do we have like known customers using it?

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Our, our, our system?

• 38:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 03

  So we, we are in alpha state for this product. And we have about five projects that are coming live soon.

• 38:19Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 38:19Speaker 03

  But one of them are DeFi protocols, peer to peer, moving money, data wallets, that, that kind of product, that kind of industry.

• 38:29Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So crypto really wants this kind of solution and they understand the crypto ecosystem. And you would just do this through an API. So I'm using, I have an app, I'm Robin Hood or, you know, I've got an app, it's a dating app. I would just hit it with an API and then it proves that it's a human. Correct?

• 38:45Speaker 03

  Well, you, you would have at some point to, the, the solution is biometric based. So at some point you have to capture those biometrics and then a challenge to those biometrics. So there has to, you have to do a challenge and a capture. So that means that you are going to sort of hand it off, if you will, to an application that is going to do this verification and the capture of it.

• 39:05Jason Calacanis?

  And that's the miners on the other side are coming up with algorithms to do that? And that's their role?

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Ah, close. How's that hidden?

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Yes. So, so the miner is, so when you're trying to prove that you are a human, right? You need to prove that, well, you're not an AI generated content. You are, you are there. So the, what the miners are doing for us is generating the synthetic identity data that we use to challenge these models. So in a way, our models for detection, our models to prove that you are there, that you're a real participant, are always being attacked by our miners. And that's, that's their function. Their function is to attack our system every day as hard as they can so that we can build better and better and better, better detection. So we can keep the arm phrase basically going in, in that way.

• 39:53Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  I think it's really, really cool. And the agentic use case here is why I'm really excited because I would love to be able to delegate to my agent, the fact that I, Alex, the human, have given it responsibilities and permissions to interact with my data and financial information. So talk to me about how delegation comes into this and how quickly you think you're going to be able to serve customers in the AI space.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is a fantastic case, right? Because agent world is growing very fast, very, and is supposed to exponentially grow within the next year, especially in the e-commerce world. So the idea that you can go and say, these are my agents and I'm authorizing these agents to do this type of activities is something that is going to be fundamental on the other side to prove that Jose actually did this transaction, right? So if you go to a merchant and you go and say, hey, I bought my $1,000 computer or my $3,000 computer, and it was an agent that did it, but you can actually tie that agent and give authorization to that. That gives the merchant on the other side the tools required to say, I know for a fact

• 40:58Speaker 03

  that this agent was authorized to do this transaction on behalf of a human. And that's where the connection into the agent world is going to come. And that is just an example within the commerce ecosystem. But this is true for everything, right? This is true for if you want to sign, say, a contract and you have an agent that is signing that contract on your behalf. You want to make sure that that agent has a chain of custody in terms of the authorization. And one of the things that this technology gives you the ability to is to give that chain of non-repudiation in line, right?

• 41:30Jason Calacanis?

  Let's show the video. Alex, we have a video, yeah? And then we'll give another question.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  We do have a video. This is from our friends at Vayanas and I'm pulling it up right now. Here it is.

• 41:39Jason Calacanis?

  Video is worth 10,000 words and you get broadcasted if you want.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so basically what you're looking at is a registration concept here is how somebody registers and how the application is capturing your biometrics. And then those biometrics are being processed, cryptographically processed inside your device. And then we generate this privacy preserving set of biokeys that we store in a decentralized registry in that. And then when that person comes in either to validate itself or try to register again, we can tell whether there is already has been registered or not. And that's what the uniqueness is about, right? That you are a unique person in here. So when you are doing things like, you know, voting, when you're doing things like, uh, try to, to, to say, okay, I'm going to give rewards to this particular human.

• 42:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  You actually have to make sure that that human is unique, that you don't have twenty, hundred identities attached to the same human.

• 42:34Jason Calacanis?

  This is what I want for my X.com account and what I try to do with subscriptions. I have two thousand subscribers out of my one point two million followers. So sometimes when I don't have time to like, look at my replies, I just, I'm like, this is going to be a spicy tweet. I'll just let the one dollar a month that goes to charity subscribers post. And by the way, some of them are people who are like MAGA, America first trolls, whatever. They hate me. And they pay a dollar a month to dunk on me, but I'm like, at least I know there's a hurdle here and it can't be. There, nobody has two thousand of them because that would be all two thousand of my subscribers. But I would love to say, hey, anybody who's a subscriber, a blue checkmark and who, when they post their post, it recognizes their human.

• 43:19Jason Calacanis?

  And I think that's what's coming next to X is they're going to do their own version of this proof of human. Because social networks are getting filled with AI slop. My replies, I can tell when something's AI slop and it's so easy to do because you just have a, a virtual machine come up, you log in, it's looks, it's moving a mouse around, it's reading tweets randomly and then it replies. And comes up with a spicy reply. And then of course they get followers, yada, yada. It's very hard for them to detect, but proof of human. Man, that's going to really change everything and that would just be wonderful. I mean, I don't mind doing that. And in Korea, you have to have a social security number, the equivalent in order to join a social network. Now that might be too much for Americans. We might still want

• 44:03Jason Calacanis?

  to have the ability to have an anonymous or semi pseudo anonymous thing. But, you know, for consumers to have that level of control, only show humans in my feed. I think a lot of people would click it. If I could say on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, et cetera, only show humans, only show human written posts. My god, I would love it. So Jose continued success. What subnet number are you?

• 44:25Speaker 03

  We're subnet 54.

• 44:26Jason Calacanis?

  How long have you had that subnet? And maybe explain to people how they can participate in the subnet if they're technical or non-technical and they're just building an app.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  So we launched in June of last year. We saw BitTensor as a great opportunity to create this network of decentralized attackers into our models. And that's what lured us into BitTensor. How do you take an advantage of all these scientists across the world to do this? So the current miners is, as you know, is a permissionless environment. So everybody could be a miner, everybody could be producing data. And we have the incentives, the protocol has incentives to bring these miners into the protocol.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  So with that, then we are opening the challenge every time. The incentive algorithm, so BitTensor is a network of incentives. So basically, the miners are incentivized, we give them money and they try to break our systems. And that's kind of the cycle of it. And this is that ever, I mean, that's the reason why we can be, you know, hard organized, that we can actually get a leg up of the froster because, well, we are inviting all of them into trying to break our systems before we build the protections in the solution that we provide to the market.

• 45:52Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome. And the market cap is but $9, $10 million right now. So if people want to understand why I'm excited about BitTensor, I consider BitTensor my own little Y Combinator launch accelerator tech stars. There's 128 of these subnets currently. They have to fight to be one of the subnets. They have these tiny market caps. You can participate on the subnet level, you can participate on the Tau level and buy Tau. And we'll see where this winds up. If Jose doesn't build and deliver, you lose the subnet. If he does deliver, the market cap goes up. It's the Wild West, it's permissionless, disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. But when I see, and now we've had, I think, 20 different subnets, maybe 10 or 20 different

• 46:36Jason Calacanis?

  subnets here on the program, Steelcore Capital, my partner Mark Jeffrey's working on that. You know, they're investing in the subnets, I've invested in the tower on the top. I don't know, Alex, if you bought a little tower on the side or not yet?

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Actually, it's on my, it's on my shortlist once I get, it's a long story. No, no, I have an old legacy Citibank account that I can't access that has like 11K in it. I'm just gonna-

• 46:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yolo, Yolo, five dimes in, yeah. So anyway, I, I think it's like an interesting project. It could go to zero, it could go to the moon, probably winds up somewhere between those two. Jose, thanks for coming on the program.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jose.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  No, what they really want is Rapid Fire Founder University Japan applications are now open for cohort two.

• 47:18Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, well, that's going to be June 7th, uh, when we close the applications. It starts July 21st. I know that because I'll be in Tokyo in July, uh, which is going to be a blast. And I'm really excited because I'm going to bring the fam. You can apply at tokyo-launch.co. The program graduates in October in San Francisco, so the top companies from that program come to America and get to meet a bunch of people here. It's a great program. It's our second one. We do it in partnership with our friends at Jetro. Uh, and what else can I tell you? You know, you, if you're, I think in terms of, um, what qualifies you to be in it, you can go to the website. They basically want people who

• 48:00Jason Calacanis?

  are in Japan, uh, or citizens of Japan or based in Japan. Go get the details at the website, tokyo-launch.co. We'll see you there.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  It's gonna be fantastic. How did cohort one go?

• 48:09Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it was incredible. We had, uh, 60 great companies. The top 10 came to America and- You know, they're incredibly innovative and something magical happened in Japan over the last decade. It used to be your parents pushed you really hard to go get a safe job. There's a term called a salaryman, a little gender bias there, but a salaryman as a concept means you go work for a company for 30, 40 years, you get your retirement, you're loyal to the company, company's loyal to you. That's every parent's dream. And kids who said, I want to go work at a startup, the parents would be like, oh, my God, that doesn't sound

• 48:46Jason Calacanis?

  safe. Today, because they have so many jobs available in those, you know, large corporations, young people have said, why not do a startup? Why not join a startup? And the big corporation job will always be there. Right. So if I want to flip to become a salaryman or woman, I have that as my safety school. But my primary, I really, the going for the brass ring is now doing a startup. So that culturally is amazing, which is why I'm investing my time there. If it was 10 or 20 years ago, when, you know, it was kind of hard to get people in Japan to think that way, think startup first, the entire planet is going

• 49:27Jason Calacanis?

  startup first. Why? Layoffs. Tech layoffs, which I think is a good segue.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yep, we'll start there. So this week, we saw layoffs from CloudFlare. We saw layoffs from Coinbase, and we got some updated news from Block, the fintech company that went through massive layoffs earlier this year. Couple of quick notes here, Jason. CloudFlare is cutting, I think something like 11% of its staff, a large number. And they said that their AI use has gone up by 600% in the last three months. They are trying to re-architect their company for the, quote, "agentic AI era." Coinbase, similar idea. They want smaller teams. They want managers that are ICs as well. They want to have fewer layers. And we're hearing it again and again and again. Every tech company wants to get smaller and faster. Jason, I'm kind of blown away, though, by how many people are getting fired.

• 50:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Coinbase is 14%, and that just happened. That's 700 people. Block was 4,000 people in February. That was 40%. Crypto.com, 12%.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  CloudFlare is 20%, not 11%. Sorry, I got my numbers mixed up there.

• 50:29Jason Calacanis?

  No problem. And so these are not insignificant layoffs. And now, certain people are going to want to say these companies were bloated. Certainly, that was true. And we saw that starting in the post-COVID era. They had run up too many employees and everybody started the layoffs then. That would be 21, 22, 23 layoffs. Now, when we look at 24, 25, 26 layoffs, a lot of that is people who weren't brave enough or didn't want to take the medicine back then for being bloated. But now it's clearly AI. It's clearly AI related. Now, are some people using the cover of AI to make themselves feel better about it?

• 51:13Speaker 02

  100%.

• 51:14Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so multiple things can be true. I am not a partisan. I am not trying to defend the Trump administration. I don't have a horse in the race. I'm a moderate independent. You know, Alex, you're a little bit left. Some of my other friends are a little bit right. I'm straight down the middle here. I can tell you exactly what's going on. It used to be that deploying people was how you won. You could use capital and you could use people. Talent and capital were two vectors for beating people. That's now switched. What is the playbook for founders today at scale? It's not the Google playbook and the Facebook playbook of we're just going to hire everybody

• 51:57Jason Calacanis?

  smart and figure it out later. And it wasn't, we're going to raise as much money as possible and figure it out later, ala Uber. Now, we're moving into a new era where it's infrastructure and AI as a weapon. The people deploying AI the fastest are getting the gains the fastest, which increases their margin, which means they're more profitable, which means their stocks go up, which means they have higher value RSUs to give to the most elite employees. And that's the virtuous cycle. Or... You use that capital to build infrastructure that gives you a definitive advantage like we're seeing the hyperscalers do, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Google,

• 52:40Jason Calacanis?

  whether it's Elon with Colossus one and two, and now having Cursor and Anthropic as their customers. So let's let that sit for a minute. And what you'll understand is the people who are making AI, the people participating in AI, understand the application of AI 100, 1,000 times better than legacy companies. Therefore, they are the canaries in the coal mine. And Block restated their earnings forecast, correct, Alex? Explain that piece of this, because I believe that that is the key piece.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  As you can see, we are raising our full year guidance to reflect our strong execution and increased expectations for the remainder of the year. Why does this matter in the context of what Jason just said? Well, the company went through massive layoffs earlier this year, partially predicated around AI. And it said in the same document that as of early April, 100% of Block employees are using AI tools to do their work. Production code changes per engineer are up over 2.5x. So the company cut, it refactored how it ran, and now it is seeing results that are both better internally, how it operates with the engineers and so forth, and in terms of financial outcomes. So it's kind of a very quick validation, Jason, of the things they were saying in March. And I think a validation of your point about how quickly things are changing. The thing that I want to narrow

• 54:03Speaker 02

  down on, though, is if you're a startup, you're already building a relatively small team, right? If you're a Series A company, you don't have 1,000 employees to cut. So what does, in your view, Jason, the perfect or ideal startup setup look like in terms of people, investment, and AI at maybe the seed and Series A level? I want to just make this operational.

• 54:24Jason Calacanis?

  Well, if we get to the operational basis, it's Use AI, be AI first, or don't work here. And so I right now have a company where I would say I'm at 20%. I probably have four team members who are AI first. And I am going to give the edict this year, by the end of the year, AI first, or this isn't the place for you.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Can you define AI first here? Because I think we use that almost a bit too much.

• 54:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, very, very simple. Any task you're doing, you have to ask AI first.

• 55:00Jason Calacanis?

  How could I do this task better? And then any task that you do over and over again, you have to work with AI to let AI do that task, or at least attempt to. So frequently, you see me doing this with the team because you are seeing me behind the scenes. And I'll have somebody say, yeah, okay, I don't know how to do that. And I'm like, boom, want to shoot myself. And I'm like, okay, here's what you do. Ask AI, how do I make, you know, social media clips for this podcast more effective? Then the next level of thinking is, that's like you learning with the AI. The next level of thinking is, here are our last 10 YouTube clips.

• 55:44Jason Calacanis?

  Please vet them, create a scoring system for that. Please run that scoring system against this, you know, Google Sheet or this RSS feed, and then send a report every day. And take your SkillsMD file and run every Sunday, a deep learning of every way that people have talked about that's different than last week on how to make better titles and better thumbnails and just increase the, you know, engagement with your content. And then tell me every week how that skill changed. So you're like managing the agent and you're managing yourself with AI. I still have people on my team. The majority of my team is not doing this. And the excuse is, well, I'm busy, I'm doing other things and oh, I didn't get to it.

• 56:28Jason Calacanis?

  If you don't have the time to get to it, you don't have a job. That's what startups are doing now. That's what Block has done. Block specifically said 100% of employees are using this. And the real headline is not like, you know, us talking about this. It's the brass tacks. So that's what I was trying to get you to, which is Q1 2026 earnings per share. Block earned 85 cents per share versus 68, which was expected and 56 a year ago. That's roughly 26%.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  Did you say beat guidance or when they raised guidance?

• 56:57Jason Calacanis?

  Whatever it is, the earnings are going up.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  So just to get to brass tacks here.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 57:02Jason Calacanis?

  Their forecast, Block raised its 2026 adjusted EPS guidance from 3.85 a share to about 3.85 a share, which is 62% higher than the 2025. Separately, analysts estimate show earnings expected to grow from roughly 2.22 per share to 3.33, about 50% next year. So what's happening is the, all of this is now dropping to the bottom line. And once one set of founders have now set the bogey, they've said, we're going to increase earnings dramatically. You're starting to see the earnings guidance go up and the costs stay the same. That is the

• 57:43Jason Calacanis?

  key here. And it is a prisoner's dilemma for anybody who wants to be loyal to their lollygagging employees, or even their average employees. I know I sound like a manic capitalist here. I'm just telling you how people think in Silicon Valley, how people think in corporate America, and how people think on Wall Street. If there is a gain to be had, you have no choice but to take it. That's capitalism.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:08Jason Calacanis?

  Because if you don't take it, your competitor takes it, their earnings go up, they can attract the best talent, you can't. They get more investment because people believe in the management team more, and then people stop believing in you. This is the prisoner's dilemma. This is the savageness of it. So how does one counter this if you're an employee who's been laid off? Go ahead, Alex.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Go super deep on AI, build stuff yourself, and show your future employer that you can kick ass and don't need help.

• 58:37Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, not to make this personal, but you worked at TechCrunch. TechCrunch got bought by private equity, it got sold three or four times in like 18 months. I don't know how many people have owned this thing.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  It was brutal.

• 58:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's like a hot potato. I'm guessing you're doing plus or minus the same as you are, but you're independent now, correct?

• 58:54Speaker 02

  In terms of total work?

• 58:55Jason Calacanis?

  Total compensation, your total revenue versus being, you know, having one, one revenue stream with like TechCrunch versus now having multi-revenue streams.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  By the end of this year, I will be. Right now, I'm still building up towards it. But yeah, I'm, I'm gonna get there. Yeah.

• 59:10Jason Calacanis?

  So let's take a pause there and say, hey. You're seeing this in journalism over and over and over again. The top folks start a Substack, they do a podcast, they collaborate on podcasts like we're doing. And they basically become independent startup founders. The only way you will solve this problem, whether you're a graduate or you've been laid off, is to study your previous employer, look for what was too small. If you've been laid off by Block, by other people, very simple playbook. Find two or three people who were also laid off, maybe even five or six, and say, hey, let's have a meeting, let's get revenge on the person who laid us off. Get a chip on your shoulder, do a revenge startup.

• 59:52Jason Calacanis?

  Look at your previous employer and say, what opportunities were they screwing up? What opportunities weren't they taking? What projects would they never get to? What did we learn from running that company that was smart and what was dumb? Yep. Brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm. Try, you know, making three different products. Excuse me. You can leave that into the short. Try making three different products and put them in the order in which you think they'll succeed. If you try the first one and it gets traction, keep going. If it doesn't, kill it, do the second one. If that gets traction, then double down. And double down until something breaks out and can cover your six people or three people cofounders' salaries. And then you're independent of them. And that's where the economy is going. There will be a Cambrian, and it's happening already.

• 1:00:37Jason Calacanis?

  There's a Cambrian explosion of startups right now at independent contractors. It is the future. The future is independent contractors, independent solo startups, startups of two or three, making low hundreds of thousands to low millions per employee. And you know what? It's like the Wild West. This is like America at its greatest. It's like going west. Go west, young man, and go prospect. Get your 40 acres and a mule. Get your, get your gold mine going. You know, try to, you know, sell shovels. Do whatever you gotta do and get your claim. Go stake your claim, folks. This is the opportunity. You can look at it like a victim or you can look at it as an opportunity.

• 1:01:21Jason Calacanis?

  This is the greatest opportunity to stake your claim.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  Another thing that I saw, Jason, very recently was that Stripe, which has an Atlas program, which I use kind of as a proxy for people who want to start companies. I used Stripe Atlas to build my A R C. This chart shows how many people are incorporating using Stripe Atlas. Again, single data point, one company's information, caveat, caveat, caveat. But we are seeing from previously a steady ramp up to a massive step function change in the first quarter of this year. Jason, if this holds across the broader U.S. economy, you're dead on.

• 1:01:54Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and actually pull the chart up again. It started actually in 25. You started to see a 10, 20% increase each quarter in 2025. So if we look at Q1 2025 to Q1 2024, that looks like 10%. And then the next quarter, Q2, it looks like a massive, you know, growth. Now, some of this could be the marketing, as you said, with your disclaimers of Stripe Atlas. They could have put more marketing into it or whatever. They could have lowered their fee. You know, they could be beating their competitors. Who knows? But this is, I think, what you'd see across the board from anybody in corporations. It's an undeniable trend. And so, yeah, go get it, folks. All right, lightning round, last story.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  Anthropic, $50 billion at a $900 billion pre-money valuation. The F T reports that its revenue is about to reach a $45 billion annualized run rate. Expensive, cheap? How would you rate that round?

• 1:02:45Jason Calacanis?

  If they continue adding, you know, a billion or 2 billion or 3 billion every month, you know, we could be sitting here in six months with another 10, 20 billion in revenue. Maybe they end the year at 50 or 60. So, you know, this is going to get them into eventually the mag seven, you know, territory. Right now, they're a fraction of that. Compared to Amazon, Google, you know, and the people who are doing, you know, 50 billion a quarter, 100 billion a quarter. So, you know, there are some very big companies out there, but I think it's fait accompli that they will, if there is an addition to the Mac 7, they will be in. And then I would say, obviously SpaceX will be behind them

• 1:03:27Jason Calacanis?

  and SpaceX plus Tesla will rocket to the number one position or number two position in the Mac 7, which I think is, you know, fait accompli as well. And so congratulations to them. I'm not buying shares at that level. I think all of these are going to trade cheaper in a year or two after. So if you were going to buy shares in these companies, right now, I think you're paying well above market and there's risk factors. I think after they IPO, you know, like many great companies, they'll be trading below their IPO price. You'll be able to get in on them later.

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, here's the thing. Do you know who owns a lot of Anthropic shares? Every single major tech company that you already own in your index funds.

• 1:04:04Jason Calacanis?

  Amazon owns 20%, right?

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Right. And you know what I own a lot of in my index funds? Amazon. I feel like people talk about like, oh, we almost had an OpenAI if you weren't an early investor. Not really. I've owned Microsoft shares through my index funds since the first time they put a dollar into that company.

• 1:04:18Jason Calacanis?

  You have exposure if you own those. You have exposure if you own Nvidia because they're a big customer. There's a lot of proxies here.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:04:23Jason Calacanis?

  Last story. What's our last story?

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  All right. So Whoop, everyone's favorite fitness wearable is bringing clinicians into their application via video chat. Now, part of this is going to be an add-on cost if you want to talk to these people live. But Jason, I'm curious, what do you think about these doctors on demand?

• 1:04:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is a major sea change. Aura, Function, Superpower, and Whoop are all at the forefront of consumer-led healthcare. And while everybody is hand wringing about the, you know, universal healthcare, the technology industry is coming up in the back of the race and they're rebuilding the stack. road.co/twist to get your GLPs. Tell them your uncle J Cal sent you. All of these are leading to consumer-led healthcare. And Whoop now lets you do blood panels in it. They have an AI in it. And now, you know, I want a doctor. I can afford to have, you know, like a, you know, high-end concierge doctor.

• 1:05:26Jason Calacanis?

  I've had them two or three times in the past. And those costs generally 20 to 50K a year. There's some super ones that might be 100K a year for a family. But this is going to give people the ability. I'm going to guess it's $300 a consultation, $200 consultation. I don't think it will get covered by insurance. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, who knows? But it doesn't matter because if your copay is 5,000 or whatever your deductible is, this stuff is so cheap comparatively to the cost of healthcare that I think people are going to start rolling their own. And I can't wait because, listen, if I'm, I want my doctor to start with my whoop data. I want them to start with my blood panel from Function or Superpower. I want them to start with my eight sleep data.

• 1:06:10Jason Calacanis?

  But they won't, they generally won't. And then how do you get them the data? You know, inside these products, you can take screenshots. I want a whoop first doctor. I want an eight sleep first doctor. I want a peptide first doctor, a blood test first doctor. Superpower has a concierge that's kind of like a consultant, but not a doctor. Maybe they added one. This is going to change everything. And I've been thinking about states' rights a whole bunch. As we've watched this country go, you know, you know, so divided over the years. I think the state that provides universal healthcare, I think we should get rid of healthcare from the federal government. The federal government should give some amount of money to each state to deploy as they wish, which I think is kind of how it works already.

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  Block grants and so forth.

• 1:06:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think we should break this up state by state. And if a state wants to attract people, let's say you're Idaho and you know, you got a big push to get people to go there and you're trying to, you know, get people to move there. You could create universal healthcare or you could say, hey, everybody who lives here gets a blood panel, gets a whoop, gets a GLP, gets a thousand dollars in, you know, these kinds of services as part of being a citizen here and paying your taxes. We need to have 50 different competitive states going at it. Just like we have 50 different states fighting it out for data centers, for, you know, different headquarters of companies, tax breaks, etc. The federalization of this country and executive power is killing this country.

• 1:07:38Jason Calacanis?

  The absolute ridiculous amount of debt we're going into is killing this country. The only way to fight it is to fight against federalism and to let it be 50 different experiments going on. I'm pretty sure you agree with me on this, Alex.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  Well, I just want to understand it because you're talking about the federal government spending money to give it to the states, let them run their own experiments. So to me, it still feels a little federal.

• 1:08:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, or you deprecate that over some period of time and you let them collect it themselves. So your federal tax goes down, the federal government gets smaller, they, you know, like the Department of Education on a federal level, it's not working. You know, the healthcare at a federal level, it's not working. It's too big, it's too unruly. And then what you have is the states gaming the federal government and corruption at all levels, from federal down to state cities, we're seeing it everywhere. It's not just a blue state thing, it's everywhere. In Texas, we had a bunch of, you know, I know the Republicans are doing a really good job of exposing California, Minnesota, but we have a bunch of this fraud in Texas as well.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Florida too.

• 1:08:41Jason Calacanis?

  Florida has it. I mean, it might not be as acute. Putting it all aside, there's too much fraud, there's too much gaming of the system. If it's a distributed system, it's going to be easier to control because you have local control. The local politicians are going to fight harder and they're going to be closer to their constituents who are going to knock them out of their position in terms of local governance if taxes keep going up and they'll be fighting to bring them down. Too much federalism, the federal government has to get smaller and then we have to give the regions the ability, the states, the ability to fight and innovate, whether it's on housing, healthcare, or education. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  You heard it here first, Jason Calacanis comes out and endorses state-level AI regulation.

• 1:09:25Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, yes, I mean, thank you for pointing that out. I do think there are things and, you know... David Sacks and I have a big difference here. I wouldn't trust Biden or Kamala or Trump or JD Vance with AI regulation for everything. We have poker regulation by state. Is it a bummer that you can't go to one poker site and everybody's done? Yes, but each state getting to decide gives them some, you know, gives us some ability to test it. Cannabis regulation, gambling, gay marriage. Listen, I know that we all have strong feelings about these. But being able to pick the state you want to live in across 50 different ones to the one that matches your particular

• 1:10:06Jason Calacanis?

  view of how the world should be. That's beautiful. That's great. That's called choice. And so if we broke apart the AI regulation. Yeah, I don't think we need to regulate models on a city by city or state by state basis, but for self-driving? Sure, why not? Why not have states have the right to decide what they want to do? For employment issues, licensing of taxis, whatever. I know it's unfair. Listen, I'm a big shareholder in a lot of these companies doing ride sharing and full self-driving. But if, you know, Massachusetts and New York and California and Texas have different views of this. I went through this already with Uber. Texas, you know, I'm sorry, Nevada took a long time to get Uber. People fought it in different states.

• 1:10:50Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, vive la difference. Better to have that than to have some god kings in Washington DC who are on the grift, who are getting paid by these lobbyists. That system's broken. We know that system's broken. So why not let the states have at it? I just, the older I get and the more I see the corruption, the more I see the executive power getting abused, the more I want more independence and more state sovereignty.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  I wrote about this the other day and I completely agree.

• 1:11:17Jason Calacanis?

  Caution, optimism.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I just, there's a lot of talk right now about AI regulation. I didn't bring it up just to be slightly annoying, but more to the point that the White House is floating some ideas about kind of having pre-release rights to AI models and then people freaked out and they're walking that back. But even that hint of giving not Congress, because I think that would be slightly different, the executive branch, to your point about executive power, control over what AI models I can use terrifies me to no end, Jason. No interest in that. Pass. Thank you.

• 1:11:45Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Yeah, we just not where we want to live, right?

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Not where we want to go.

• 1:11:49Jason Calacanis?

  Not where we want to go.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Long live capitalism, long live democracy and feminism, because that gives power to the states.

• 1:11:55Jason Calacanis?

  All right, and we'll see you next time, Monday.

• 1:11:59Jason Calacanis?

  That's twist. Bye bye.