We asked 3 VCs: would you invest in Elizabeth Holmes’ next startup? | E2353

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Today’s show: Elizabeth Holmes remains in prison for defrauding Theranos investors, even as she stars in the hit Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim documentary “You Can See Everything.” But we’re asking the real question: After all the very public accusations… the hit pieces in the press and the Hulu drama series picking apart the scandal… would tech investors and VCs be willing to back her NEXT startup, if the numbers were right? On today’s TWiST roundtable, Jason Calacanis is joined by Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures), Paige Finn Doherty (Behind Genius Ventures), and Jenny Fielding (Everywhere Ventures). In addition to reviews of the movie tech insiders can’t stop talking about, they cover why every seed portfolio needs a little bit of fraud, how diligence scales with check size, having trademark rights to your own voice, and the pro rata rights debate that’s still raging over Valar Atomics’ lawsuit with seed investors Day One Ventures. Guests Sam Lessin on X: https://x.com/lessin Slow Ventures: https://slow.co/ Paige Finn Doherty on X: https://x.com/paigefinnn Behind Genius Ventures: https://www.behindgeniusventures.com/ Jenny Fielding on X: https://x.com/jefielding Everywhere Ventures: https://www.everywhere.vc/ Relevant Links OpenSnow: https://opensnow.com/ “You Can See Everything” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvW_N5p1q44 HBO Max “The Rehearsal” trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fjPFt8cpic Elizabeth Holmes moves to halfway house in 2027 (ABC7): https://abc7.com/story/elizabeth-holmes-scheduled-move-halfway-house-august-2027/19862832/ Billy Evans’ blood-testing startup Haemanthus (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/10/elizabeth-holmes-partner-reportedly-fundraising-for-new-blood-testing-startup/ Polymarket: Oscars 2027 Best Picture: https://polymarket.com/event/oscars-2027-best-picture-winner-20260727173620857 Kalshi: Oscars 2027 Best Documentary: https://kalshi.com/markets/kxoscardocu/event/kxoscardocu-27 Charlie Javice sentenced to 7 years (NBC News): https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/charlie-javice-sentenced-7-years-prison-fraudulent-175m-sale-financial-rcna234536 Trump pardons Nikola founder Trevor Milton (Axios): https://www.axios.com/2025/03/28/trump-pardons-nikola-founder-trevor-milton Sequoia writes its FTX stake down to zero (Fortune): https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-sequoia-writes-down-214-million-investment-to-zero-venture-capital-crypto Who lost money on Theranos? (Fortune): https://fortune.com/2018/05/04/theranos-investment-lost “Barbarians at the Gate” on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Barbarians-Gate-Fall-RJR-Nabisco/dp/B08YP9MDHX a16z backs Adam Neumann’s Flow (Commercial Observer): https://commercialobserver.com/2022/08/adam-neumann-350m-backing-andreessen-horowitz/ Martin Shkreli lifetime pharma ban (FTC): https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/statement-chair-lina-m-khan-ruling-judge-denise-l-cote-federal-trade-commission-et-al-v-vyera Isaia Taylor post announcing Valar suit: https://x.com/isaiah_p_taylor/status/2108679133467414855 Day One Ventures response: https://x.com/mashadrokova/status/2108732979191390528 ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace: https://elevenlabs.io/iconic-marketplace Apple Corps vs. Apple Computer, a history (MacTech): https://www.mactech.com/2004/04/09/a-history-of-the-apple-vs-apple-dispute Cameo for Business: https://www.cameo.com/business Nox Metals: https://noxmetals.co Electric Plant Company: https://www.electricplant.co/ Ablieration: https://abliteration.ai/ Timestamps: 0:00 Our new “This Week in VC” newsletter 2:15 Panel intro: Sam Lessin, Paige Doherty, Jenny Fielding 8:09 Why gambling loses appeal for VCs 11:02 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 16:18 DigitalOcean - Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today - and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50% 17:35 Best moments from “You Can See Everything” 21:42 Unreliable narrators and unknowable situations 24:41 Living in a post-truth moment 30:02 Due diligence horror stories 32:45 Odoo: The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://odoo.com/twist 34:50 The VCs remember their fraud investments 38:39 How LAUNCH trains founders to prep for diligence 44:31 How Elizabeth Holmes kept raising money 54:54 Would you invest in an Elizabeth Holmes company? 57:27 Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business. 1:02:28 Why seed funds need pro rata rights 1:09:02 When “founder friendly” means rolling over 1:16:25 The three investor relationships: team, founders, LPs 1:21:02 ElevenLabs “Archer” voice controversy 1:27:16 How NIL deals reshaped college sports 1:33:54 Cameo for Business and long-tail celeb endorsements 1:35:51 Portfolio company shoutouts Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.com/ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons 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 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Star slash RVC Roundtable, which we call This Week in VC. We're building brands over here, trying to provide value to you. You would think that This Week in VC Roundtable is the roundtable that every investor wants to listen to. And sure, investors listen to it, but what I'm finding out is the founders are listening. They're like, hmm, what are you guys thinking on the other side of the table? Because we're trying to get work done, and I have three incredible, active, in the game, in the arena, dare I say, investors, and they're not only in the arena placing bets, but they're willing to talk about it.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  And that is my four quadrant chart there, Sam Lessin, is a willingness to talk and actually doing the job. Sometimes I find people who are doing the job of early-stage venture capitalists, et cetera, but they're unwilling to talk. Then I meet people, Sam. They're willing to talk, but they're not writing checks today.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  You gotta do it both.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  It's a simple two, it's the four quadrant. I didn't get an MBA. You have an MBA, Sam?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  No, God, no.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  No, so we don't, Sam, if they had just told us, if you want to sound credible, just make a four quadrant chart, I would have started a long time ago.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Well, Jason, I didn't get an MBA, but I unfortunately did work for a banking company for the first years of my career. So I'm very familiar with making a quadrant chart.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Yes, and this is, if you put a couple of those into the report, you're going to make a little extra chatter. As part of this, we're starting a new newsletter, This Week in VC, and Lon's writing it and leading the team. We're hiring two full-time writers. We're not poaching from the information. Don't worry, Sam.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  He got all those, Justin's got all these incredible writers. It's getting very, it's getting very sharp-alboed now. Again, tech journalism doing great, but it's called This Week in VC, and we're just, it's like one thing. I'm a big fan in editorial products being one thing. So all we're doing is behind the deal. Every week, we're going to go behind the deal. We're not going to try to break the news. Your bot's going to tell you about the breaking news. What we're going to do is just do a deep dive and what happened in that deal? Who was involved in it? The mechanics, the due diligence, and you'll tell us if it's good or not. Go to thisweekinvc.substack.com. All right, Lon, all right. Lon, introduce our incredible guest. I already tipped the cards here with one of my favorites, Sam Lessin. And we got to get some turns in this season, Sam. I gotta, I gotta get some turns in with you.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, we're, start ski season, we'll see whether El Nino delivers or not.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  I mean, it's either going to deliver a washout, or we're all going to be firing off beacons and power shoots.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  It's not going to be the middle. It's like, it's a, it's a binary outcome year.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  It's crazy. And for people who don't understand, explain to them, Sam, what has got all of us on pins and needles in the community here?

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Well, look, in the end, if you're a skier, you know it's an El Nino year because you're on open snow, where there's a new hot take on it every day, but no one can decide whether it's going to be a great season or a terrible season because you're going to get a lot of precipitation. The question is, where does it fall? And how much global warming do we have?

• 3:06Speaker 02

  And what do the prediction markets say?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  You know, I was actually thinking, I, it's funny you mention that. I think there is definitely a business to be had in an options market around, specifically for consumers around skiing in snow.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  I mean.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Like the insurance thing, like how restaurants.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  People have done it, climate, but I think specifically, if you told me, you could argue for the sake of the regulators, that this is all about income smoothing for resorts and then.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  And not just degenerate gambling.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Degenerate gambling, right?

• 3:37Speaker 00

  No, I mean, this, okay, Lon, introduce the guest, and this is a great first topic. Go ahead. You're already speaking with him from Slow Ventures. He's a general partner over there, also a columnist for The Information. Sam Lessin is joining us. Sam, thanks for being here. Also, we've got founding partner of Behind Genius Ventures, a pre-seed and seed venture capital firm that invests in technical storytellers. Paige Doherty is here. And finally, from Everywhere Ventures, she's the managing partner. They're a global pre-seed venture capital firm investing in companies working on money, health, and work. Jenny Fielding is joining us. There's your panel, Jason. I mean, it's incredible, and just full disclosure, and this is a completely unnecessary disclosure, Jenny.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  I'm just disclosing this so I can basically let everybody know, not that I'm prone to do that, that I do have a business relationship with Polly Market. They do sponsor things I do, and they're partners, and I am a shareholder. So I just want to make sure that last part, that I'm a shareholder.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Fine, I'm a shareholder in Kalshi.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Okay, so just, we just got to put it on the table, Sam. We both have epic runs going with these prediction markets. But we, we were starting before the intros there.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  This is a really interesting idea. The original concept behind these prediction markets, I think it was Intrade was the original one at the end of Web 2, or maybe Web 2.0. The idea was, I think, you know, hey, you're the canonical example, you're a farmer, and you want to take a hedge against, is it going to be a good season or a bad season? So you kind of bet against yourself having a good season. So if you have a bad season, you make a little bit of money. In the skiing concept here, Sam, you and I book Hokkaido, we're going in Iseko. We're going to be in, you know, Tahoe, whatever it is, and now we've dropped 20, 30 dime skis on this trip.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Or if it's backcountry, 40, 50 dime skis, and we need to get a little insurance on the other side, right?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  So first, I mean, I always love the prediction markets because I'm like a nerd who like read too much Hayek in college. Like Hayek is my favorite, and like, you know, Frederick Hayek's whole thing is markets are information machines. Don't screw with markets because the world's way too complicated for anyone to understand. So you need a pure machine, like, so you need a bidding system. You need a way to place financial bids in order to understand what the hell is going on in the world, right? So I think the real key of Polly Market, Kalshi, et cetera, is there should be a market in everything because that's actually how you can pump information through the world, understand what's going on, right? You know, then the insurance and the hedging, like, look, yes, like, there's been 1,000 takes on this. I've always wanted, Jason, what about you?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  To me, what I always wanted was imagine a flight from San Francisco.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Which says, okay, you booked the ticket on for a Friday.

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Or for a Wednesday, and you say, we're just going to go wherever the snow's best.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I don't care where we go. Like, what does it matter to me?

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Powder chasing.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Pure powder chasing. And like, literally, if you, I bet you could fill a whole airplane with skiers and just say, where are you going? It's like, I don't care, right?

• 6:45Speaker 00

  Bring your skis.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  We're going to go wherever the snow's best, and you just go. So there's like all sorts of fun takes, but it is a fun thing where you're like, to your point, you're locking in, we have a ski home in Wyoming. Like, you're making commitments to places, but then you, you know, you want to be able, you want some flexibility in that system. Or at least a hedge of some sort.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  Paige, I know you're, you're on your, are you on your third fund now, or are you doing the second?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  You're going into the third.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  I'm on my third fund. Yeah, we just started investing out of it.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Congratulations. That's awesome. I just thought, you know, like, if you're a first-time investor, like, when you're on your first one, imagine if we could be like, you raise your first $10 million microfund, and then you bet $1 million that you're going to return under 2X or something, and you get seven to one odds. And you can kind of fill it, you can kind of bet against yourself hitting the hurdle, and.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  That would be crazy.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  It's, it's like when I go to Knicks games, this is how degenerate I am. I went to like the finals games. I'm like, I'm paying a lot of money for these seats, and I'm like, let's make it even more exciting. I'm going to bet the cost of the seats. So I started betting the cost of the seats on the Knicks postseason, which my seats are not cheap. I won every time.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  No way.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  I went to like 11 of the 16 wins, or 10 of the 16 wins, they didn't lose once, but.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  But it's a little, it's a little dark to, to bet against your own fund.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  I didn't bet against myself. I bet for the Knicks to win, so I was doubling down.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  It's funny, I actually have a, like, I'm not a gambler on these types of things. And I'll tell you why, Jason. I'm not sure if you feel the same way as, or anyone, is like, to me, I look at this, and I'm like, one, I'm a professional gambler. Like, this is literally what I do financially. So it's not, it's like, I spend all of my time gambling on long odds, interesting, weird things. And so I don't need, I don't get like incremental enjoyment from it. Two, when you kind of look at the dollar, I have a problem, which is the amount of money I'm willing to bet is not enough to emotionally move the needle for me.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  And so as a result, it just seems stupid. You know what I mean? Like, it's kind of the way I look at it. It's like, you could make it a system where you're betting a meaningful enough amount of money that you feel something, but it is not, that doesn't like, it doesn't register for me on this.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  I can help you with this. This is a dosing issue. This is a dosing issue.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  I will, I will say, I saw, I know we're going to talk about it later, but we taught, we, the last bet I did place, and I did bet, put a bet down recently, was I went to the LA premiere of the Nathan Fielder movie, which I've now seen twice. It's incredible. And I did walk out and put money on it for Best Picture, which was a great long odds.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Oh, what is that? I'll pull the Polly Market up for a long odds of that. Okay. Jenny, are you, do you experience moments of gambling and desire to get additional juice, as we say in the business, when you're not betting on hitting a one, you know, one of your portfolio companies hitting 2X, 200X to make up for the ones that return 0X, which is 80%.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Well, unfortunately, I live in New York, which I think has argued that these sites are unlicensed gambling operations.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  How dare they?

• 10:00Speaker 00

  No. Okay, you have enough action. You're getting enough action.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  You don't just go to New Jersey like everyone else to do it?

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just, you just gotta take the PATH train. Just get on the PATH train and zip over there. And just sit on a bench on the other side at Hoboken, place your bets, and then come back. This is incredible.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  I guess I'm old enough to remember the credit default swap meltdown, so I do have a little, you know, PTSD on that and, you know.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  You know who I got into this? Lonnie Donnie. My newsreader, Lon, the professional newsly, looks like Mandy Patankin over there, look at Greg, by the way. He now is placing bets. He's, in the group chat, he's like, you know, I was thinking Andor and maybe, he's got all his-

• 10:47Speaker 04

  If you guys would listen to me, I called Sinner's winning Best Cinematography at the Oscars like so early last year. I like 5X'd my money on that one. And then I told you John Malkovich is gonna win Best Actor this year. No one, believe me, it's already up. He's in like the 40% now, so.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Okay, before we do anything else and I lose any more bets I could place, I'm gonna take my Plaid out. It's on the back of my phone. I'm a back-of-the-phone kinda guy, cuz I like to put it on the table when I'm taking meetings. Hey, can you mind if I take some notes here? But for ski season, I wear the pin that you see Lon wearing. I wear the pin the whole day cuz like sometimes I go out on my own. That's rule number one of skiing. Don't go out on your own. I do that two out of three days, but I stay on-peace. Mostly when I'm skiing alone and I talk to myself, like a lunatic. I stop. I have a little piece of whatever energy bar, Sam, and then I talk, oh, I got a great idea, boom, boom, boom. Then I come back, end of the day, sinks, I'm all set.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  But then do you like, is your skiing pre-tax then? Is that your plan?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  I think I'm working. Yes, I think I'm work- I mean, if there was a way for me, I, yeah, if we became, hold on a second here, Sam. If we became investors in Open Snow, Open Snow is like 50 bucks a year, and it's a bunch of meteorologists, and you can sort it by like whatever you have your ticket, you know, your icon or your epic. But most importantly, you can just snow it by the, you can, you can sort the snow by three to five days. So you just look like, hey, three to five days out, five to 10 days out, what's it looking like in terms of, you know, snow? Oh, and like, that's how I wound up going to Japan so many times, cuz I would just put it there and they'd be like, yeah, Japan's this 1 through 14, and then we'll talk about Alaska and Canada and, you know, somewhere in Europe.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  And I was just like, Konichiwa, mother, I'm going to Japan. Open, if we own 20% of Open Snow and we did market research.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, can't you just own 1% of Open Snow and do the same thing?

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Okay, sure, I'm just trying to think, you know.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Can't you claw your own Open Snow?

• 12:47Speaker 03

  He's thinking big, Sam, he's thinking big.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Oh, wait, no, if we clawed our own Open Snow.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 00

  And then we start selling and then we, this is a-

• 12:54Speaker 04

  Think of the, think of the tax losses you could generate.

• 12:57Speaker 00

  Oh my god, that's so great. This is when you know you spent way too much time thinking about financing taxes.

• 13:04Speaker 04

  If you wanna have great ideas like this on the slopes, capture it all on your Plaid and send it to your team. Check it out at plaud.ai/twist and use the code TWIST to get 10% off. You could put that money right into your Open Snow clone that you're gonna use for tax purposes.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Take that 10%, you could put it on, you can see everything.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  You could put it on, you could see everything. For Best Picture, it's like 19% on Polymarket right now, Jason, so.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  For Best Picture, not, for Best Doc, it's, hold on, Best Doc, it's gotta be 98.5.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's dominating the Best Doc. It's in second place on the Best Picture list, The Odyssey.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  Which, to be clear, a documentary has never even been nominated for Best Picture, so that's like probably over, but it should win.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  The Odyssey is currently your, your number one. Oh, no, this is, this is documentary. It's got 73% of the Best Documentary vote.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  I'm still putting 10 dimes on that.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Naza, that's the, Naza's the Palestinian, the, it's like Israeli soldiers talking about Palestine, that's number-

• 14:03Speaker 00

  Even the Academy Awards are not woke and stupid enough to not give You Can See Everything the-

• 14:09Speaker 04

  We'll see.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  They hate tech more than they love them.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  25% chance that that's not right, Jason. That's exactly what, that's what Hayek would tell you, is that the Academy has a 25% chance of exactly being that.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  Oh, god, I just, I'm trying to think of how woke they are. It's, is it, so, wait, Naza is about Gaza? Is Naza about Gaza?

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Naza's number two, yeah, that's the, it was made by an Israeli-Palestinian duo and it's-

• 14:35Speaker 00

  It's about that conflict.

• 14:36Speaker 04

  Interviews with IDF soldiers where they talk about the horrors of war.

• 14:42Speaker 00

  This is actually quite a conundrum here in terms of betting. This is where gamblers have to start thinking about it. In their twisted, crazy, insane, Los Angeles, West Side, Malibu, Santa Monica, you know, version of the world, which do they wanna virtue signal more? They hate tech people.

• 15:03Speaker 04

  Ooh, good question.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Or the conflict in the Middle East. Where do they wanna make their stand?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  But I don't think, the Elizabeth Holmes thing isn't, I, it's not about tech.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  I know, I'm thinking in their mind.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Human condition, it is. I agree, it is, it starts off about Theranos and then it just becomes like life in a post-rural society.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Have you seen it or no?

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  Okay, Paige and Jenny, have, oh my god.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, we all saw it.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  So wait a second, what are we doing? Why don't we just make this number one? Here, we're here, we're here, we're all here. We all saw it in the first five days. I love it. I saw it on Saturday. This is fantastic.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  I mean, my, my big question is, can Elizabeth Holmes win Best Actress?

• 15:45Speaker 04

  She should be eligible.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Okay, and fair warning, we're gonna do spoilers for-

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Spoilers will be-

• 15:51Speaker 00

  This is gonna be super spoilers for 10 minutes.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  You can see everything.

• 15:54Speaker 00

  In 10, so somebody set the countdown clock, 10 minutes, in 10 minutes, we'll be off this. If I, if it winds up being 14, just take out 12 there and use Chris Williamson's voice clone on 11 Labs to replace me with his voice and Northern England voice saying it's 14 minutes, so 14 minutes left.

• 16:14Speaker 04

  You gotta do that H instead of H, H.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  H, yes. Most of the top AI models out there from the biggest labs can handle your jobs. We all know that. But for savvy founders, what actually determines your speed and your spend, very important, is the infrastructure running underneath those models, not the models themselves. If you wanna stay fast and you want to have speed on your side while keeping your costs in check, so you don't run out of runway for your startup, it's time to look at Digital Ocean's inference engine. Digital Ocean's entire cloud platform was built from scratch for AI tasks, so you get a real noticeable jump in performance without piecing together a patchwork from dozens of vendors. So it's easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. It's not complicated.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  And you're not gonna get hit with massive unpredictable invoices at the end of each month. Man, the token shock is real. And Digital Ocean is already running many of the best and most prominent AI apps, including Hippocratic Ideogram. Everybody is using Digital Ocean's inference engine. If you want to understand what building on a true AI-native platform looks like, go to do.co/twist. Start building on Digital Ocean's AI-native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. That's do.co/twist. Okay, Jenny.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  I mean, is it really a documentary? Because, you know, if you've seen it, it's really like a docu-drama, right? Cuz the whole second half, so I mean, there could be an argument.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Even the first half, I'm not like, I'm sure. All right, so here's my question, here's my question. What was the best, funniest, most impactful, just scene you can't, moment you can't stop thinking about from the film excluding full frontal nudity scenes? So excluding any full frontal nudity scenes, you cannot pick that.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  That part is crazy.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I would argue that we all, we all agree.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  So Sam, I saw Sam was gonna go for it. I'm preempting the joke. You cannot pick, you pick it as number two. You can't pick it as number one. Jenny, you're, I gave you a little filibuster here. What is the moment in the film?

• 18:23Speaker 02

  I think we all agree it's the Who's on First.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  I agree. I mean, that's the scene that will be remembered from the film, but I also know it's kinda like a mid-answer, because it's like, everyone agree, like that is-

• 18:32Speaker 00

  This consensus answer.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  That's a consensus answer.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  It's so good, though. Don't call me mid. I think it's really good.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  I don't want you mid. It's an incredible scene. I'm just saying like-

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Okay, I, I think my favorite scene was Amanda and Billy duking it out. He's like insulting her, she's insulting him, Nathan just sitting there like-

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Nathan. Paige just looked at the camera in a creepy way like Nathan Fielder does.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  I was like, I can't believe this is happening. And then like, the whole theater gasped when he was like, yeah, of course I have power of attorney. Like, I can do whatever I want. I can speak for her. I was like, whoa.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Bam bam bam. I, I gotta say Wine Amanda, like Wine Mom Amanda, is peak Amanda. Like, she gets three glasses of Chardonnay in her and she is off the reservation.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  The, the scene, or the line that he said that I, I like took some, took some notes as I was watching. It was like, I have vengeance in my heart. I was like,

• 19:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yes.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  There's, there's a

• 19:38Speaker 03

  That was crazy.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  There is one, like, it's kind of a subtle moment, but I think it's very significant. When Amanda's there, she's with Nathan and Billy when, when Elizabeth calls them from prison. And Amanda goes,

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Amanda goes, did you know I was gonna be here? And Elizabeth goes, I don't know if I knew. I don't know. It's like, what is that? How do you not know if you knew something like that? She's taking this to a next level.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  I feel like she didn't know, like, because I feel like Nathan, it was like, how would that have been coordinated for her to know? But it was also like, such a funny moment because Amanda in that moment was like, oh, my gosh, like, you're, you're like, you're so wonderful. And, it was just like this moment of it transformed from Elizabeth being like, a character in her head that she was playing. It's like, oh, my gosh, like, I'm actually speaking to the mother of these children who I'm like, sitting here with her family. That was brilliant.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  So I, I, I've actually seen the film twice now because I went to the LA premiere last minute when a friend, I think, who was involved in the movie messaged me, I think, thinking I could never possibly make it and said, hey, I have an extra ticket.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  And you were like, yes.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  And I was like, I hopped on a plane and I was there for it. And I got to say hi to Nathan after it and kind of hear his talk track. And then I saw it again this weekend with friends. I'll give a different answer. I love the scene towards the very end. Where they're sitting down in front of the fireplace and they're trying to figure out what the one word was.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  The one word change. Because the thing like, it's a really interesting story. There's incredible ride. Nathan's an amazing thing. I think, I honestly think though, when it comes to like, how do you think about the human condition, what you can and can't know, an untrustworthy narrator and like perspective? It's just an incredibly brilliant film. Like, it's not even about Theranos in my mind. Like, it's about like something mu- and I just

• 21:27Speaker 00

  What is it about?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  I, I think it's about the human, you know, you know, my base, my best analogy.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Part of the human condition. Let's get more specific.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  You know, my, my analogy was, you guys remember hilariously, at least Paige, I think is too young for this, but Jason, you're an old man like me. Like, you remember the movie The Usual Suspects?

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Of course, of course. Yes, Kaiser Soze.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Classic movie.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  To me, this was, it's the same story, right? It's the story of an untrustworthy narrator, right? It's the story of the human condition where you don't really ever know what someone's else is in their head, the limits of knowledge, the limits of the human experience.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  The elusiveness of truth. Yes.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the illusion, I mean, this is like a fa- and like, for what it's worth, we'll like, just for fun, bridge this completely unnecessarily to our Hayekian prediction market thing, right? Which is like, it's basically all about what can and can't you know in reality, right? In a lot of ways. And markets are one way to try to like, meet each other and understand reality. This is like a hugely brilliant commentary on the unknowability of humans. And I, I just, I absolutely loved it. But it, to me, it's like, the funniest commentary I've seen online is people who are like, I've seen people on Twitter be like incensed, being like, Nathan, this movie is terrible. Nathan's a totally untrustworthy narrator. And you're like,

• 22:43Speaker 03

  That's the whole point.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Well, yes.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  Lon, you are my cinephile. I always loved having Lon around for the last 20 years just to chew the fat over films. Did you, and you've been adjacent and in, in fact, the technology industry and around entrepreneurs incessantly.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  What's your, what's your, what's your moment? I'll even let you go to, your moment or two. And please, not the full frontal moment, if that's in your top two. I just, that to me, I was like, what is this thing? I'm, I'm confounded. Why am I going to an R rated documentary? What's gonna happen in this film?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Can't be for language. No, it just was because of another reason.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, one thing that really stood out, as a Nathan fan, the moment that he and Amanda go to the Del Mar house, like they go back there.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:32Speaker 04

  That, that moment, I knew where it was going. I was like, oh, my God, he's gonna Fielder method this. He's gonna like, figure, like recreate.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Explain Fielder method for people who don't know.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  That's from the show, the HBO show, he did the rehearsal where he has actors follow around real people and just like, study them intensely for days to learn everything about like, how they behave and what they do. And then he creates like, real life simulations with those actors trying to as closely as they can recreate the, the person that they followed around for a few days, whether it was a janitor or, you know, a person working at a smoothie place or Elizabeth Holmes or whatever. And so he's sort of doing that again here where he brings actors together, Amanda Seyfried and Christopher Abbott to play Billy. And he sort of recreates these moments he couldn't capture on camera with the actors to try to like,

• 24:24Speaker 04

  dig into the truth a little deeper. And once I figured out that's where it was going, it's such a brilliant idea, a way to bring together like, the comedy he's done in the past with this new concept. In that moment, I was just like, this is, this is a great, this is a great movie. This is a perfect use. But I also, I mean, to just pivot off of what Sam was saying, I think we're, we're sort of living in this post-truth moment right now, where they bring up Charlie Kirk during the movie, who's like a perfect example of that. Like, you're, you could

• 24:51Speaker 00

  They brought him up when the Billy Evans, her husband, and I think it's confirmed that they're married. I hear people saying they're partners, married, whatever. He says, why do you think I carry a gun every day? My friend was at a screening with Billy Evans. That, he said that Billy Evans was sitting in front of him. That my friend and the two people sitting next to him looked at each other, just Billy Evans gonna go postal in the theater? It was like, oh, my God, Billy Evans is in, but we were in, they were in Austin, where everybody has a gun in the movie theater. So

• 25:20Speaker 01

  That's true. That's true.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  It's, it's kind of, yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I, I just, I feel like that's really the tension that it's about. It's like, well, you know, like, everybody has a different opinion on Charlie Kirk and we're constantly arguing about it, but we're never, we're never gonna get anywhere. You, you can't convince somebody else of your perspective. They can't convince you of theirs. There's no more objectivity. We all just have our own media bubbles and our own narratives that we accept. Obviously, like on All In, I think, Jason, you encounter this all the time. And I think that, to me, that's what the movie was about. Like, at a certain point, it's like, you're faced with this choice of like, give up or you're just gonna obsess about this difference forever. And we all wanna like, put in front of somebody like, see your lie, here's the truth, look at the evidence. And you just like, a Donald Trump or an Elizabeth Holmes just isn't gonna accept that.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  I, I tried to explain this when I did a little press where I went on the Bulwark and some other things. And I was like, guys, let me explain to you how business works. You have a business objective. Then you look at a problem, like say, in administration, like say, a regulator. And then you look at the possible solutions for solving regulations. And so when Tim Cook brings a gold bar or gives $25 million worth of Apple to build a ballroom, he's trying to solve a problem around the import of iPhones. And that is a, on the selection, menu selection. He just picked what's the clearest path. And that path was $32 million, which is nothing. Like, the cost of the gold bar plus the cost of this, plus a little jet fuel to come to a couple of

• 26:49Speaker 00

  boondoggles and sit next to whoever. And it's very simple. Okay. I, I, I look at this in four parts. Obviously, Elizabeth Holmes is the, the principal character here, or ostensibly the principal character. You can debate it, actually.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  It's almost Billy.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  It's, yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  See, that's the, I'm go-

• 27:06Speaker 03

  It's almost Billy, yeah.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Correct. So with her, I had such a great, like, oh, that encapsulates all my discussions for 30 years in technology, from when I was a journalist, all the way to being an investor and podcaster in between. Which is, the, the device can run any test conversation. The device can run any test. The platform can run any test. You just have to, like, in the machine, have built the test, but the platform in the thing can run any test. Like, okay, yes, the car, the car can drive itself.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it could call the cloud. It could do the cartridge test if you've invented the cartridge test. Yeah.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  And, and the car can drive itself. I've been hearing this since DARPA's like first challenge. A car can drive itself. Yes, the car drove itself. Now, in the first DARPA example, it drove itself into a ditch and exploded on fire, but the car drove itself. And now is that fake it to your maker or complete delusion? But the fact that he was able to do, that was the who's on first discussion.

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  So he has this discussion with her and he starts to go mad, like Abbott. And, or no, Costello, who's trying, Costello's trying to explain who's on each base. And Abbott's like, I don't get it.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, but Abbott is the guy.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  He's Costello and she's making him lose his mind. So can I, you understand when you say it can run, the device can run any test. That means it could run all these tasks. And she's like,

• 28:35Speaker 00

  I've never lied and it's like, okay. So that moment to me, I could just watch that over and over again. Go ahead, Sam.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  I would say the two things on that. One is like, it's easy to lose sight because the movie is so brilliant. The fact that like, she clearly very intentionally was lying her ass off. You know what I mean? Like the, the movie is art, right? And the movie is incredible from that perspective. But if you go back to the record and some of the fun things have been resurfacing of the absolutely batshit stuff. She definitively said, right, earlier in her career when she was, it's like, it is, I think people like will come away from this in a lot of ways. Very sympathetic of what's reality and like, is it, and I think it's a very deep, interesting film. But I also think you gotta go back to like the brass facts here and there's plenty of them around. And like, she was making up insane stuff, right? And selling it like for sure. So like there, she was absolutely.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  That's, that's what's interesting about the movie is he doesn't use those examples, right?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Way, way over the line, right? Like this is not like a matter of interpretation.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  The military is using our, you know, you could easily disprove that. And it's not a semantic thing about the word can. And so, you know, it's kind of interesting.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  But that moment is clearly the moment where she pitched Rupert Murdoch or pick other old white guy investor. We should, yeah, the, the platform can run any test. And Rupert Murdoch is like, here's a hundred billion dollars. His other family office is like, here's a hundred million dollars, Joe Schultz, whoever. They're like, of course I'll join the board.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  Nathan brings up General Madison.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Whoever. Yeah. They're all just like, yeah, okay, we're in. And, and as far as this, we, your capital is concerned, this is why due diligence matters. And somebody has to at some point use the product or pull. And we can go around the horn here and tell horror stories of due diligence where you find out. And we might as well just do it now and get it out of the way. The moment in due diligence, when you have your Nathan Fielder moment and the founder told you X or the salesperson told you Y. Or the director of revenue said C in a board meeting. And then you find out what that actually meant. Like, I think this has been a maddening thing for me.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  But I also think, Jason, I think that's true, but look, to, to be devil's advocate for a fun conversation. Look, I think we probably run about a 1% oops, it was fraud rate at our fund.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. I would say for sure. That's a min, minimum.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Hilariously, like we get, I get, um, like, you know, prisoner number X, Y, Z updates. For like some of these investments, it's generally like hyper fraudulent. Like it just happens.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  And like, to me, the interesting thing that people, with this whole due diligence thing, right? Especially as seed, right? Is like, you, one, and I think if you have no fraud in your portfolio, you're probably not being creative enough.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Not being aggressive, not saying yes enough. Correct.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Two, like you have a lot of fraud. There should be some fraud, right?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  I think two and a half percent, just like credit cards. Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you just accept that. And then two, it's like, due diligence, like there are things where like the reason it's unfundable, right? Or the number is super cheap is because it is incredibly hard to diligence. And actually, if you think about dollars deployed versus return potential, you want to make not stupid decisions. But I actually think it's like overstated to be like, oh, well, like, you know, you just didn't do your homework. I, I think it scales with the size of check, right?

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Correct. At a 25K check, which we write 25K checks, you should base it on the individual and how they present and the team.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  It's just math. Like you can't afford that much due diligence if you're writing a hundred thousand dollar check.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  If you're writing a hundred million dollar check or a billion dollar check.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Can't afford to not do it.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  And the thing that's interesting about that, right? It goes like the seed is designed to mostly light money on fire and sometimes make a lot of money. Historically, growth was designed to like, don't lose money and make less money.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. We need the one X locked.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  The thing that gets weird and has gotten weird is one, is the upper limit on what people's imaginations has been released, right? All of a sudden you have these numbers which sound big on paper, right? But the asymmetry, people are pretending it's like C. I mean, that was the thing with Theranos. People were writing a hundred million dollar checks that were effectively seed checks. And they got mad. And like, that's the confusion, I think.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  That, that's the dissidence. Yeah. Odoo is the all in one management software that brings everything you need into one easy to use platform. And founders already know it's going to save a lot of their valuable time. But I want to spend just a few minutes exploring one of these real apps with you that you get access to when you sign up for Odoo. Let's check out Odoo Discuss. This is where Odoo brings together all of your text conversations, your voice notes, your documents, and any other updates you have into one easy to scan dashboard. No more deep dive searches, trying to find the specific message you remember reading the other day, or flipping between 18 tabs to make sure every member of the team is up to date. Nope. Odoo helps you record and transcribe meetings and calls right in your sidebar with results automatically updated once they're ready.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yes. Odoo Discuss built into the platform. So if you're still cobbling together your back office across five different apps, get started today at Odoo.com/twist. And your first app is free. That's the right price. That's O D O O dot com slash twist. Give it a shot. All right. Go ahead, Paige. Uh, what's your, what's your view here on the due diligence in relation to this first moment of my four moments? That we can learn from, on making the, making the connection between what we do for a living and this incredible piece of cinema. Diligence is the first stop. Paige, you're, you're early in your career. You're under 10 years. Have you had a moment of abject terror, fear, frustration in the diligence window?

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Um, I mean, I think the thing I keep going back to is what I learned in computer science is like, there are no dumb questions. So if you as an investor are like, that doesn't sound right. And this might be a super dumb question and I'm going to ask it very simply. And I might ask it like multiple times, but I don't get a clear answer. That's like always what I go back to in diligence is like continuing to ask those questions that may feel weird or obvious. Um, and like seeing how someone responds is the approach that I've taken.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Any moments of fraud, just without saying the name of the company, obviously, or whether it's an investor or not?

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Say the name of it.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Or yeah, I could.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  Sam, you want to, yeah, you want to name Sam?

• 34:54Speaker 02

  No, I'm, I'm happy to give an example, not say the name, but, um, I think when it happens, especially at the early stage, you know, we're all, I think everyone here, we're investing in founders and it's happened to me once. I've invested in 350 companies. It's only been once that I know. And it was because I just fundamentally had such a, um, like belief and conviction in this founder, right? And that I overlooked things I shouldn't have overlooked. So now.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Such as you overlooked?

• 35:22Speaker 02

  A hundred million dollar check. Um, I did not do enough reference checks on this person because I had such a great kind of like chemistry with him. And it just like, I really wanted to believe, right? And I had, I, we did some references and we heard some things and you know, a bad reference doesn't mean we don't write the check. So we kind of went in eyes wide open, but I should have done like a couple of extra calls, but I just had developed so much conviction. Now, to your point, it was like a 50K check. And so that's, you know, very different than a hundred million dollar check. But I think what everyone kind of gets wrong is, um, we all do this in our lives and our firms. Like, you know, if we're actually being honest, when you want to get a deal through, when you want to believe, you sometimes overlook.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  You suspend, you suspend disbelief. Yes, of course. You suspend disbelief.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  I'll be, I'll name names because it's fun. Okay.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  So we've been, somebody check my Arizona mission insurance here. Thank you.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  The, we've been involved, and again, this is just my recollections.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's just random recollections.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  We've been involved in three, three cases that I remember to be quite fraudulent where there are people in jail. One was a company that hilariously was, this is my favorite one because it's so ironic. It was a company that was doing Uber for on-demand background checks. So the Uber for background test company ended up being fraudulent. I was like, this is like too good, right?

• 36:45Speaker 00

  We're, we're a trust, we're, we're, we're operating in the trust-based economy.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  The second, the second one, the second one was, um, the poop you bought. A company that like triple billed insurance on your poop sampling. Um, this was what, and then the third is actually a very.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  You're saying they were full of shit?

• 37:05Speaker 01

  They were full of shit. And the third one was a very famous one, actually, because it's been all over the news, which was, uh, the JP Morgan fake customers one.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Oh, yes. Female founder.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yep. Charlie Dervis. And here's the funny thing about all three of those, when I think about them in terms of things you can check or not check. I'm sure for two, and at least for one other, they were small checks we put in alongside VCs we love and trusted effectively. And so it was one of those things where like, talk about the diligence. The diligence was, we love these people. They think this founder is great. They're doing it. And like, we're sidecaring it and coming along for the ride.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  You're drafting on their diligence. You're doing.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  And like, on one hand, the easy thing to say is we'll do your own homework, you stupid people. Sure, we can get into all of that, but I, I don't know. Like, I think the reality is, is like, it's a market. There's a lot going on, you know, relationships matter a lot. Will the next time that person sends me a deal, I'd probably check a little bit more. Yeah. But like, it's not, you know, I think it's like a more complicated system. It's not so black and white, like most things.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  I, I can tell you by interviews I've done, I had Trevor Milton on the program, famously of the, uh, trucking company. And he was like, it was very clear there were like a couple of moments that were incongruous. And those moments got played at his trial. Now, he's since gotten a pardon. And that was obviously completely valid and completely vindicates him on all of the shenanigans that were proven in court. This is the most valid pardon that's ever been paid for, bought and paid for. If it was in fact bought and paid.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  Nicola was the, was the company.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Nicola was it. But you know, this is the one that famously like pushed the car down the road and I'm, you know, there's eight ways to Sunday that he is innocent. But you know, I found a hack for this. I have an associates in training program. We train people to be associates. You know, it's, it doesn't pay particularly well, but you, you learn a heck of a lot and you get quick, uh, you get quick, um, advances in your career. And so I have extra capacity at the diligence phase. So what I do is, we tell people even at the seed stage, this is the diligence process. Here's a module on how you can learn about it. Now, these things don't apply to you because obviously you don't have 12 months of P and L's. And you don't have three years of taxes, but you, you, you have been around, so you should have filed your taxes last year. Did you?

• 39:19Speaker 00

  And we just say, yes, send us the tax return. Send us the top level of your bank statements, whatever it is. And we say, we're, we're doing this not because any of these are going to necessarily kill the deal. We just want to train you. It's like a training thing on diligence and we'll try to get 30, 40, 50% through what you will experience that series A. So at least you know how to make a diligence folder and it almost never results in us not making the 25K, 125K. Okay. Second.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Can't, can't colleges do this?

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Not really. Uh, but you can build software to do it where, because the biggest part of it is asking for the doc. Asking for these 10 docs, getting seven, then asking for eight, nine, and 10, then getting nine, or getting half of nine, then getting 10, then getting eight, but I misunderstood what eight was. You know, and it's that back and forth on the last three things. And that's when you start going into Columbo mode. Cause I always tell everybody like, what's not in the packet? It's like, credit card statements aren't in there. And I'm like, guess what? This person's been flying first class and bringing their spouse with them. And they put their apartment on there. You know, they're paying for their apartment with venture dollars.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  That reminds me of the good old The Barbarians, The Gate story. You know, this is one of those famous stories in.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  A great HBO series, great book.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  With RJR Nabisco, where they, they kept doing the work. And there was this person flying on the RJR Nabisco planes all over the country, R. Mutt. And they couldn't figure out who R. Mutt was. It wasn't a director or whatever. Turned out to be the dog.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  They were flying the dog around.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  The CEO's dog around was R. Mutt.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  All right, so insert Chris Williams here. We're still gonna keep talking about this movie and how it relates to venture capital. I haven't failed to stay over the whole show, Lon. My second moment.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Why not?

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Um, is a Billy Evans moment. And you could just do all the Billy Evans moments. And I met Billy.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  A number of times. Um, Free Break interviewed him at the All In Summit, uh, which is now Sarge Guevara. And this is a joint Nate, Nathan Fielder slash Billy Evans. Elizabeth Holmes is making scrambled eggs as if she's got a handicap and is in some way mentally deficient. I've never seen a more performative, inadequate scrambling of eggs.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Wow, so this message, so you're, you're taking Elizabeth, you're taking Billy's side that she needed to have the eggs taken away from her.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  I, I would not have approached it like Billy.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  I'm in a relationship. I have a 20 year plus marriage. We're 20 years as of this summer. So I understand that when one spouse and a partner are, has a note for the other partner, you gotta pick your battles here. There's times to give a note, there's times to not give a note.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  But she's scrambling the eggs in a way that would never actually scramble the eggs. Like, these eggs are not being scrambled properly. This is an improper scramble of the eggs. And there's a note to be given here. But instead of giving the note, um, oh, do you want me? This is how I do it. Oh, honey, um, you know, I, I worked at a restaurant and they show me a way to scramble the eggs three times faster and they come out so much better. If you want to learn it, it's kind of mind blowing. You gotta present it in the proper way.

• 42:25Speaker 04

  Rather than just grabbing.

• 42:26Speaker 00

  Billy Evans just grabs the ball from her hands and starts doing it. And then Nathan Fielder calls them out on it. And now you're like, wait a second. And I don't know what minute that was, Lon. Was that 15 minutes into the film?

• 42:40Speaker 04

  It's not very far in. It's when you're first getting to, to meet them and see them together, yeah.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  So I'm seeing this and it is like triggering so many things. I'm like, number one, this is a trap. She's passive, she's passively aggressively scrambling those eggs.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, maybe.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  He fell for the trap.

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 42:56Speaker 00

  He whips them out of her. You have to be in a relationship for more than 10 or 20 years to understand. He's now falling for the trap, ripping them out. And then Nathan Fielder decides this is no longer a documentary. I'm, I'm in, I'm in this relationship. It's a throuple.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  It's a throuple, full on throuple right now. And I, and that's what it was. The romantic undertones between Elizabeth Holmes and Nathan Fielder and the flirtation between Elizabeth Holmes and Amanda Seyfried.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  Seyfried.

• 43:29Speaker 00

  All of these things were incredibly palatable if you were paying attention. There was sexual tension between all of these parties. And then you start to say, wait a second, what, what is the nexus going on here?

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Nathan and Amanda.

• 43:41Speaker 00

  And it is Elizabeth Holmes is pulling people into interesting relationships with everybody. Everybody is a target of her being inadequate and needing some help? Getting the help.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 43:58Speaker 00

  In any number of ways from Amanda, or I trust you to Nathan. Will you jump in the water with me? Will you go in there? Will you take the plunge? So this was a sociopathic moment realized on all parties.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I love this tweet. Pull, pull it up, Jacob. Uh, this is what 4DX does in the theater when Billy is, uh, beating the eggs.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Maybe I'm over indexing and projecting into this, but Jenny, you are nodding. But when I bring up this moment, did you notice this? And did you notice also the relationship? And maybe this speaks to her charisma and why she was able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars without ever showing the product, which is the charisma of the founder, which you talked about yourself. You fell for, we all do. Did you feel that she was creating these moments to get people to attach and help her? That she maybe wasn't able to get something done and she needed some help?

• 44:58Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. I mean, that's the clearest message that I got was this was a huge manipulation. And I thought she did a brilliant job and should get the Oscar. Cause this is like totally antithetical to any other images that you've seen, videos that you've seen of her or anything that you've, you know, read or heard. And it's all to, you know, evoke, um, you know, empathy for her. And I think she did a great job. I felt it.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I'm wondering about Sam Balwani. We have no Balwani. There's no Balwani here, Sam. There's no Balwani in this story. But does Sam Balwani have these moments of getting pulled in to help Elizabeth kind of cross the chasm?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Look, I, I think that, so at the LA premiere, um, they did a little Q and A afterwards where Nathan was talking. And what he basically said was one of those interesting things about the film is there's a small crew of them that were doing it in the house the whole time. And they would go home every night after kind of having done it. And the most interesting part was they would try to compare notes on what they saw, they thought they had just seen. And no one working on the film agreed. Like, the whole interesting part was they'd go home and like look, talk about the day and talk about their film. And they would all have completely different interpretations.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  Rashomon? It was Rashomon.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  This is the Rashomon effect. They all saw an event and they could not get alignment on what just happened that day in the documentary.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  And again, I don't think that's speaking out of school because it was a reasonably public setting after. But like, I, to me, that's like both story, like, this is like not, again, it's not about Elizabeth Holmes. It's funny, like, I actually don't have the same interpretation of it, but that's like, that's the brilliance of the whole thing. Right? And that's why, again, like, I think the biggest argument you could make is that this is not at all a documentary. It's just an incredible movie, right? Is the way I would put it.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  I think the most interesting thing I noticed is when you talk about Elizabeth's magnetisms, like pull people into help her, is at the end of the movie, Amanda asked Nathan, like, oh, are you leaving things out that Elizabeth said? And even in a way that they ended up editing the film together, you can kind of see like Nathan really like warms to and cares about Elizabeth. And I feel like that comes through in like the way the story was portrayed. And almost like, uh, I guess like, you kind of think Billy's the villain until the end where it's like, oh, you know, they, they relinquish profits on this movie.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  And so you're kind, I, I feel like I was kind of just like left wondering, it's almost like, um, how Nathan's feelings developed over the film.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Do you think he fell for her? Or do you think that's him being an actor and a performance artist?

• 47:39Speaker 03

  It was like a romantic, I don't, I, I didn't like interpret it in a romantic way. It's just like more to Sam's point of like the human condition. Like you spend a lot of time with someone and you come to care for them.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  You get sucked in.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  It was just like, yeah, which is like a very, it was just like very complicated.

• 47:55Speaker 00

  It's complicated.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  So I thought her, her question was so good though. It was like right on the nose.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  I, that was my Amanda moment. My Amanda moment was getting called out there. Um, and then my, my Billy Evans moment was a subtle one. And there's so many Billy Evans moments in this thing. You almost wonder if it's the Billy Evans story.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  There's that one part where he's like, oh, now we're using lasers. And then you cut to his license plate and it just says lasers.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  So good.

• 48:24Speaker 04

  What a, what a cut. Incredible.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Uh, I, when, um, when he's, it's just like a funny red one. When he's like shows empathy to, uh, Nathan that he understands what he's experiencing in his frustration with trying to understand Elizabeth. And he's now in this throuple, because it was very clearly turning into a throuple. This was very much throuple dynamics, which I know nothing about. But if I was in a throuple, this is my imaginary one, which is two of the people who are dealing with the alpha are going to commiserate, right? And so Elizabeth's the alpha here. And he's like, I, I, I know what you're thinking. And Nathan snaps. He's like, no, you don't.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  I was like, oh my God, this is throttle dynamics. Like, I, I know what you're experiencing with the other person in this triangle. And he's like, no, you don't know. And I was like, oh, the triangle is moving in all different directions. I thought this was a love story in many ways. There's just, it was very romantic, what was happening around this. That awkward moment, like, right before she goes to prison, where Nathan is like, do you want me to leave you two alone so you can be intimate? It's your last time. And they don't. It's like, yeah, it's like, very awkward. Nobody's really saying anything. And then later. But I think that was the point. They were leaving it out there for him to say, I think we all should maybe have a last moment together. The sexual tension. And then Billy and I will carry on while you're in prison.

• 49:58Speaker 00

  But then later, it almost feels like. I don't know what's going on in this. Then later Billy feels the need to overcompensate because he has that whole, like, actually, it's been 900, I've been keeping track of exactly the days since we've had sex, it's been 900 days. Yes. All right. Like, it's just so much going on. There's so much. What a rich. We got one final one here. And then Lon, I'm sure you have a very good question, just cinema wise, that you can pose to us. But what is the, what is the outcome now for Elizabeth Holmes, who will be in a halfway house next year, I understand? Yes. And then will be shortly thereafter be out of, because she's been in jail for five years, I think something in that range. She had an 11 year sentence. They cut like half the sentence or a third of it because Trump did a thing for white collar criminals, like, or for, to, to, to get

• 50:43Speaker 00

  people who are nonviolent out of jail faster. Okay, fair enough. And then there's like a couple of years you can do if you're a good citizen at a halfway house. And I don't know exactly how that works, but I think you have to be there. The movie is in, in like, sort of later 2023. That's when she goes in. And then the two years later part would be like mid 2025, late 2025. So that would, yeah, it's been like, three years, like, maybe a little over three years she's been in jail? That makes no sense then. I think then she's going to do three years in the halfway house. And then you got six years of 11 years served. I think that's what's happening. But Balwani is going to get out. He's going to have a lot to say. I don't know if he's going to get Roger, not Roger

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Moore, Michael Moore, sorry, Michael Moore, the other Moore. Michael Moore does his version of Mattel. But what happens now? What, what happens now, Jessica, with, what is the redemption arc for Elizabeth Holmes post coming out of jail? Because she's obviously starting another company. Sarah knows 2.0, right? Isn't that? So what is the, what, give, just sketch it out. What is the potential outcome here? If we're sitting here in five years, recapping this, and she's on the pod, you know, talking to us, what's, what's the outcome here five years from now? How are we looking at Elizabeth Holmes? What is she

• 52:03Speaker 00

  doing? Is she hosting a podcast about, for, for people who were falsely accused of white collar crimes or crimes?

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Don't we love her redemption story better than anything else in Silicon Valley? Right? Haven't we seen many folks, you know, come back? So I think she'll be back.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, I think she's done. Look, you know, Adam Neumann has kind of rebuilt an empire in a different direction for himself. But one, he had personally taken an insane amount of capital off the table. So he had a lot to work with. And two, we never went to jail.

• 52:39Speaker 00

  He had a bankroll. He didn't commit a crime.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Well, he also built a, he built a product that worked.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  We Work is a great product. Arguably.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  It's a good product.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  We Work changed our industry massively. Before this, Sam and I used to have to put a $250,000 line of credit down to rent, to get a three year lease on a space we didn't need.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, there's a spectrum between overpromising, financial ridiculousness, models that make no sense, all the way.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  Community EBITDA.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  Community based EBITDA.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Community EBITDA.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  And look, I would put, I would, I put this with a lot of complicated feelings, like Elon is on the spectrum. Like, there's a lot of people on this spectrum between explicit fraud, right? And like, pushing really hard.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Crazy gold, self-driving, which we experience every day.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  I mean, like, the, the most classic Elon example was funding secured, if you remember that one, right? We're just like, ew, like, that's a real borderline call there, right?

• 53:34Speaker 00

  I mean, he got a yes from a person. So, you know, I've had.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  I'm just saying, I'm not, I'm not here to litigate it. I think Elon's just a super complicated.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Half my founders have called me and said, we just closed the series A. And I'm like, okay, great, send the term sheet. They're like, we don't have a term sheet. But I just got the verbal. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to need to see the term sheet.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  It's a big spectrum. And I think the reality is like, Silicon Valley, like everything else, it has a lot of WWE elements to it, like narrative storytelling, who's the heel, who's the hero? The heel can become the hero, the hero can become the heel. You don't want to be in the middle. There's a lot of things that, personally, I think Elizabeth Holmes is like, the level, when you get into the details, right? And you really look at this eyes wide, not, not as art, but as like, what happened? I do think the line Nathan says of like, no one will ever trust you again is accurate, right? And I think.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  I totally disagree. She found a husband in like, her worst moments of despair. And.

• 54:27Speaker 00

  I mean, to make two babies before she was going to jail. She had those babies immediately.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  I can't, I don't think, let's put it this way. Adam Neumann, can his next company gets funded by A16Z? That's not going to happen for Elizabeth Holmes, is my bet. I could be wrong. I'm happy to be wrong about that. But like, I, I think that there's, that's my personal bet, is that she's done. But who knows? You've seen stranger things in history. She definitely has a lot of brand recognition.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  You're not, okay, so you're out. Sam, you're out. Even if they showed, okay. But Sam, if she showed you a machine that did these 10 tests perfectly at a 10th of the price, and the valuation was bargain basement, because nobody would touch it, you can get in, you could buy 10% of it for 3 million bucks, and she's, you've got the audit, and your best bio person went in there and said, Sam, I know this sounds crazy, but she figured it out for these 10 tests. You're out.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  I don't do hard tech. I don't do hard tech. And I don't do hardware. So it'd be easy pass. But it's a, if you told me, Jason, here was the pattern, which is, if she called me and said, hey, 10% of 3 million bucks, and then someone else called me and said, I'll buy your shares tomorrow at a 50x markup. As a capitalist, I might have to take the trade and the risk on the trade, but I would not be a holder of Elizabeth Holmes.

• 55:47Speaker 00

  I love the honesty. I love the honesty. You're, you're here for a quick flip. Go ahead, Jenny. Same scenario, Jenny.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  I would take, I would take an in out trade on Elizabeth Holmes' company.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  You'll triple up, quadruple up, and take the reputation.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  There's a lot of things, there's a lot of things in the market right now, which I think are interesting trades and terrible investments. Because there's, it's very hard to justify why you would want to hold them for five years, right? That's very different in the private markets, like, than historically has been the case. It's very tantalizing, because there's a lot of trading to be done.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  So you'll take the reputation hit for a 50x. We know the line now. Okay. If it was a 10x, you're not taking the reputation.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  I don't think it's a reputation hit if you're in and out, and it's a greater fool on a private market with a system.

• 56:24Speaker 00

  I see. Maybe at a dinner party, somebody has to say, you, can you explain this? I saw the doc.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  No, what I would say, no, again, I wouldn't, and here's the interesting, maybe subtle moralistic distinction. I don't, wouldn't take that company public. But my view is like, the beauty of the private markets is like, it's a do your own homework, everyone's just.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  Sophisticated investors. Okay, fair enough. I like it. I like, now I know. So when you're sending me a company, and you're like, hey, I gotta wrap this up here. It's my first fund. I gotta, I gotta get the secondary trade. I need to take, I need to do my diligence. Yes. We all need to do our diligence.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, look, in all honesty, as someone who has sold a lot of secondary and private companies, because we're a small fund with long things, yeah, there's absolutely an adverse, anyone calls you and tells you they're selling in the private market, whatever reason they're telling you for, there is an adverse selection to that. And you better be doing your own homework. And like, and like, the reality is, I've done that, and, and things that I've appreciated enormously after I've done it to other private investors. I've also done it at high watermarks plenty of times in my career.

• 57:26Speaker 00

  Yes. Here's a common founder scenario. You're looking over your sales numbers at the end of the quarter. And hey, your team, they're at risk of meeting their quota. This kind of thing happens all the time. You can't figure out what the specific problem is without taking a closer look at all of the data. Not long ago, that meant pulling it all in from across the entire organization, a time consuming ordeal. But now today, there's Rippling AI. Rippling is already built on your real time people and business data. That means Rippling AI pulls metrics from both their data and your CRM into one dashboard. And then you get to see how close you are to hitting quota. And you can figure out the root of the problem of why you're not getting there. Maybe it's the marketing. Maybe it's the targets they're going after. You can break down all of

• 58:10Speaker 00

  that, revenue by region, by customer size, all of that important information is going to be at your fingertips in seconds with Rippling AI. When you're running a company, you have important questions that need immediate answers. That means ASAP, as in right now, as in yesterday. So if you're ready to rule your business, head to rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and take complex actions across your startup. Paige, you get, you get the call from Elizabeth Holmes. She says, oh, I saw you. On the podcast, you're great on social media. I feel like we vibe. I need help and I got this incredible new startup. Would you take the meeting?

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Oh, would I take the meeting is a different question.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  I'm starting with that.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  I don't know if I'd like.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  So you take the meeting.

• 58:54Speaker 03

  Invest. Yeah, but I, I think, I mean, one of the huge questions I have is like, where does she get $452 million to pay back the investors? Like, I, I think like, yeah, that's a big question I have that I don't think people have really.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  You said it kept some of the proceeds from the film. That would have helped.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Honestly?

• 59:14Speaker 03

  I was kind of, I was kind of thinking that. I was like, okay, like, I feel like that made sense. Um, I feel like she could go on like a public figure arc of like telling her own version of the story, especially off the back of this film. I feel like I don't.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  I feel like a hundred percent of investors would take that meeting.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Of course you get the meeting. It's a really entertaining meeting.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  It's a great, great story.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  Well, that's why I was trying to, I was, I was trying to lead the witness page here. You take the meeting.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  I know you were. Are you baiting me, Jason? You're baiting me.

• 59:48Speaker 00

  I'm just, I'm getting you on the hook. And then the next question is, you have this incredible valuation and your most trusted advisor says, I'm putting in twice as much as you, you know, your mentor.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Most trusted advisor.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Whoever's been giving you the best advice, an LP in your fund, and they say, you know what, Paige, I'm an LP in your fund. I'm 10% of your fund. I'm also investing in this round. Uh, I had my people diligence it. Here's their diligence. It works. And this is going to be the redemption arc of the century. You got to get in here. This is Steve Jobs coming back to Apple in around.

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  My heart, my heart is saying, oh.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  I feel like I'm my, just like, uh, my body is just making this feeling like, uh, which I don't like to be.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Uh, this is why.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  You're so young. You haven't lost enough money in your life yet. Once you've lost enough money, you feel nothing.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Wait till you're an empty shell like Sam and you just only feel things when you're scared.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  I've like, uh, certainly seen, seen my share of companies that have gone under and navigated that. So I, I don't think it's that for me. It's more like, when I think about people who I want to have a 10 year relationship with, this is like a very track record, very tricky track record to be like, um, this is, yeah, someone I would want.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  You don't have to be on the board.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  But that's how I think about like every investment that we make.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  Okay, Paige, they say we'll sign an NDA and, uh, to never disclose that you own shares and we've got a blocker. We've got a little blocker company here. We got a blocker. You can just be in here blind. Nobody knows.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  There's so many other awesome founders.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Don't, don't, don't fall for my Jedi mind tricks.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  Don't worry. I was like, I'm sticking with, with my feelings.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  I love the fact that you're like, I just, my body's telling me no, like every port fabric of my being says, do not go near.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Good word for engaging in that question. So.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  No, but it is, I'll tell you.

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  It's an interesting question. Like I was, I want to answer it honestly.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  This is an inevitability. In five years, we'll be sitting here and she will have a working. I'm going to go off.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Wait, is there not anything that like prevents her from starting a company again? Cause I feel.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  She might have a lifetime ban. Who knows? I.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  Cause like Martin, Martin Scully, like, I feel like served what five years and then got out of prison and couldn't.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I have a feeling she's going to figure out a way to solve a biotech problem with AI or be joined somebody who can, who can't get funded, whatever. And she's going to actually solve a real problem in the world.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  And she's going to become obsessed with that redemption arc. I don't know whether it works or not.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  I mean, that makes sense.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  A bad.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  I'll take the under on it.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  You're taking the under, okay. Five years out of prison, she has a working prototype product.

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  On October 9th, Valor Atomic CEO Isaiah Taylor announced the company sued early investors, Day One Ventures. Valor, they're a nuclear energy startup, building small scale nuclear reactors that power AI data centers. They're early, the early stage fund, Day One Ventures invested a million dollars in the seed round, 15 million in the series A. According to Taylor, this stake now fully diluted accounts for less than 5% of the company. Sequoia led a billion dollar series B at a $6 billion valuation. That closed on August 3rd and Day One wanted to take part claiming pro rata rights. So the dispute is happening over an amendment which was made the day before that deal closed that removed spring back rights. Those of course dictate that if a majority investor waives pro rata but buys shares anyway, then the waiver is canceled and original pro rata rights

• 1:03:22Speaker 04

  spring back into effect. Uh, Day One's GP, Masha Butcher responded on X saying that Valor agreed Day One's right to join future rounds could not be eliminated without their consent. She went on to claim that Valor demanded Day One waive all future pro rata rights despite four of the six major investors joining without waiving.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  All right, listen, uh, Sam, I know you need to bounce.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  I need to bounce.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  You need to bounce, but it's always fun. And let me get this last thing for you. There's been a big debate about, big debate about pro rata. And oh, we should get rid of pro rata. Well, why do we even have that? They have to earn it everywhere. I, I think I know where you and I sit on this, but just concisely, why is it important for seed, early stage funds to have pro rata in terms of portfolio construction, et cetera? And then why is there this argument to get rid of the concept of pro rata? Why is this even becoming a discussion again? Cause it happens every six years.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  This is so simple. Like, look, what I always tell founders is, and we do this very explicitly before we invest. You say, hey, these docs have pro rata rights in them, right? They're not pro rata rights contingent on other people. They're not pro rata rights that, that kind of, you know, die after a round. They're pro rata rights. If you do not like that and don't really want to honor that, then do not do business with us. Go do business with someone else, right? It's very, very simple. And the reason is because the seed business model doesn't work without pro rata rights. Like straight up, we're, we're business nerds and like, it just doesn't work. And I like to call founders that these matter to us. It's just, once in a blue moon, a founder will call me a round or two later and say, hey.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  Hey.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  We're doing great. We've made you a bunch of money. Your position's amazing.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  Got an ask.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  We need you to cut your pro rata rights for XYZ. And I said, that's great. You'll be hearing from my lawyers. Like to me, this is completely non-negotiable. Now, there's an interesting, there, there is two, by the way, earlier in our career, we screwed this up and I can name several companies and thinking one in particular where we had that and Sequoia pushed us around and we like stepped back from that and I'll never do that again, right? Is the upshot. There's a learning curve to it. But to me, it's like, you said, someone said earlier, like, there's always another company. To me, it's simple. It's like, we're just not going to do business without those and we're having, and people are like, but you would never sue a founder. I'm like, yeah, I would, right? Um, you know, like, and like, you need to believe that. And I, I'm crazy enough to do it.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  Now, here's the only problem is the seed markets are getting really complicated right now more than ever because there are people like us. I'm a financial seed investor. I want to make money on my, I'm a capitalist, right? There's also mega funds that don't give a fuck. They're just buying option cards and don't care, right? Cause they're actually just buying for future looks. There is not a financial buyer. There's also increasingly, it'll be more after this wave of, um, of AI companies going out.

• 1:06:09Speaker 00

  Feel good investors.

• 1:06:10Speaker 01

  A shitload of doing it for fun, people with real money.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  YOLO.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  And so the problem is while we will always say that's it, there will be other investors who will say, look, you know, get, who cares? Like, we're just having fun here. And, and my basic view on it is simple, which is like, I just, I care about the business. I like, believe in like sustainable, growable, good seed business. If my involvement isn't worth real pro rata rights, then like, I'm happy to not be involved. It'll like be upshot. But for me, they're completely ironclad and important and I will fight for them forever.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right. Sam Lessin, thanks for coming on the program. I'll let you go. We'll drop you off and we're going to continue here.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Bye, Sam.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  With Paige and Jenny. Uh, it, it is, I think, critical, uh, too, like, uh, Sam, people tried to bully me and we have a board seat option that we keep if we own over 10% of a company in perpetuity, perpetuity, and we fight for those rights and we tell people on the way in, hey, we're, we're literally your first investor. Here's what's going to happen. At some point they'll come for us and they'll try to take our rights away. The only person left in the stack after us is you. We're the last line of defense. We're the bulwark. We're the last fence before they can go kick you out of the company. You want to defend us so we can defend you. I'd give them that little speech and 90

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  plus percent of the time, that's enough to not have this conversation. And then, uh, what I always tell founders is we're not giving up any contractual rights. You can have the new lead investor who's trying to bully you. Call me directly and say they want to try to F Jake, Jason Calacanis. And then I just want them to tell me to my face on a Zoom call, why they want to do that. And when I put that out there and then I say, and if you don't want to do it, I know who the lead investor is because you're asking me to sign the documents. I'm calling them. So it's going to happen either way. And I just text the person because I have their phone numbers typically, or I'll just take their email, which I can easily get and I'll, I message it to them. Hi, it's Jason Calacanis. Uh, I was, we invested four years ago in this company. I understand you're leading the round. Congratulations. It's an amazing company.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Let me know if you have any questions during your diligence, et cetera. Really happy to get to work with you. My understanding is you're trying to take our rights away. If that is correct, will you please call me so we can discuss why you want to take away our rights? Cause we would not do the opposite to you. And they write back, oh, we're not trying to take your rights away. And then I take a screenshot of that and I send it to the founder. They're not trying to take our screen, our rights away. And then we're done. And we're done.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  I love it.

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  And that's why I have podcasts too, so that I can tell this story and then I can credibly, and then I invite the person on the podcast. And I'm like, why don't you come on the pod? So when you see a new person on the pod, investor, there's a non-zero chance that we had some interaction like this.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  I mean, you and I have been doing this long enough that we've seen the cycles of like, what founder friendly, you know, means, and they correlate with how much money is flooding into, you know, the market, right? So now we're in, uh, you know, point of the market. There's a lot of money and I think we're back to this, what founder friendly is equated to is just rolling over, you know, for every investor. And I don't understand this whole line of like, prorata needs to be earned. I, I just literally did not understand that. It's a piece of paper. It's a contract. Um, you wouldn't take back my shares. So why are you taking back my prorata, which you agreed to?

• 1:09:25Speaker 00

  The protective provisions are earned by the nature of the fact that you invest in the company when they were pre-revenue. That's when you actually earned them.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I thought what was fascinating about this debate was the comments, which, you know, a lot of founders kind of chimed in, in support of, you know, um, not having the prorata, but then a lot of investors did too. And so I thought that was kind of

• 1:09:45Speaker 00

  That's marketing.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that was an interesting spin. Um, but there was one, uh, guy who actually know, um, and, um, Kevin Moore, and he actually wrote fuck Sequoia. Um, and I think that that's, you know, you kind of laid it out, but that's, you know, people don't always understand that it's a lot of pressure from the fund that's coming in to the founder. And a lot of these founders are first time founders and they think they're going to lose the deal, right? They think they're going to lose out on the round. And so it's a little bit, you know, more existential for them. They don't understand that.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  Which, uh, this is the key point, Jenny, and which is why I say to the founder, I'm going to go to A, B, and C, people you know that I have a relationship because you've seen me on podcasts with them and you've seen us, you know, many years of friendship and playfulness online. I'm going to go to A, B, and C, and I'm going to get you a better deal. And you don't have to take it, but I'm, I'm going to take this term sheet and I'm going to shop it on your behalf. Uh, and they're like, well, I'm not allowed to shop it. I'm like, key word in that sentence is you're not allowed to shop it. I can shop whatever the I want. I'm taking this term sheet from this venture firm and I'm going to circulate it to these three other people. And I'm just going to tell them that they should contact you. So if you do get contacted by famous person, famous person, famous person, friend of J Cal, legendary investor, you might want to take the call just in case these people

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  drop out. And you just, you can just call people's bluff on this. Uh, but you are right. Founders who get nervous.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  So it's founders get nervous and then, you know, micro funds and small, you know, people with small funds also get nervous that they're going, their reputation is at stake. So I think a lot of it is just bad behavior from, you know, the larger funds, just like.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Bad behavior from larger funds. And if you're a smaller fund, don't get bullied is the lesson. And you just got to call them out on it. Why are you trying to bully me? I would not do this to you. And don't you want to see me in business? Cause I got here three years before you and the company wouldn't be where it is today if I didn't take that risk. So why do you want to screw me? I need this.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  And it's also short sighted because we are their deal flow. I mean, we, we, we call these guys all the time, sending them, you know, our pre-seed deals. And so it is

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  Okay, Paige.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  Short term.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  I was going to say, I think like, one of the biggest elements of this is just educating the founder. Like obviously you have a direct relationship with the founder on like, why these terms matter? Because I think a lot of the times you can read the document, you sign it and like, maybe there's not a broader discussion on like, what the context of the importance of those terms really is. Um, like, yeah. So I, I would say like, that's something that I think about a lot is the importance of it. But from our perspective, like, we're a small fund. We mainly do initial checks in, in the very rare occasions where we double down. Uh, sometimes we don't even have prorata rights. We've just like earned that through the relationship that we have with the founder. And I foresee that changing

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  as funds get larger and like spending more time thinking about it. Um, but I think Jenny said this earlier, like a contract is a contract. So.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  And, and I will add one more player in here who I've found increasingly annoying, and that is the lawyers. Um, and the lawyers kind of coaching the founders not to give prorata at the onset, um, and/or, you know, push it back.

• 1:12:54Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I've had to call a few lawyers, to your point, Jason, of, of calling the investors. I've had to call a few lawyers that I work with and say like, why, you know, why are you?

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  I had one lawyer from my lawyer at a very notable firm, and the other lawyer was trying to bully me. And I just told the other lawyer to pound salt. I was like, by the way, he's saying, you don't have founder friendly terms, because we have, also have a super prorata option for people coming out of our accelerator, which now Andreessen Horowitz has in Speedrun and YC added to their, uh, optionality. So people literally copied my super prorata, which was, hey, if you come to our, um, accelerator, uh, we want the option to put 250K in the next two rounds. And that'd be just our option and it's, it's going to be less than 10% of the round. So why wouldn't you do that? But we just want to put a number on it. So it's 250 or whatever our actual prorata is, whichever we choose. And, uh, you know, they, they tried to bully me and say, take it out. I

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  said, hey, dumb dumb, do you know who, he said, who gave you this? Who wrote this? Not founder friendly. I said, hey, dumb dumb, you might want to go across the hall. Your colleague who's a partner at the firm wrote it.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  And it was like, the call's coming from within the house. And, uh, yeah, then I just, I was like, why am I even talking to this dipshit attorney on the phone who's trying to bully me? I'm like, you, you're, you're an attorney. You're, you're just here to do paperwork and give good advice. Do that. Then I called the founder. I said, here's what you need to know. Your attorney is giving you bad advice. They're trying to bully me. I'm selling my shares on the open market. And then if you need my help, I'm busy with my companies. If you don't want to be partners with me, I have other companies I'm partners with, I will put the energy I'm putting into your amazing company into them. And I can sell the shares in this company. You can buy them back from me at whatever the next round is, or I'll sell it to somebody else in the next round. It's a hot deal anyway.

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  And we can part ways. Life is short. You don't need to have me on your team. But I have 1.7 million followers on Twitter and you do ask me for a retweet three times a week. So if you're asking me for literally 150 retweets a year, understand, so is every other portfolio company. So are people who are not portfolio companies. And I have to pick and choose how many retweets I do a week. And it's not guaranteed for everybody. I just do it based on who I have a great relationship with and which I, which of these tweets are great to my audience. Uh, in this case, I can't believe that the founder would do this to their earliest investor. I'm with the earliest investor. I think the founder should just say to Sequoia,

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  and I have a deep relationship with Sequoia. Um, hey, we, we, we really want to honor our earliest investors. And when we get further along in this adventure, um, somebody will want to take your prorata. We're not going to do that either. So it's what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

• 1:15:40Speaker 04

  Could you just unpack for me? Cause I saw when this story first broke, I don't know that much about, I was trying to catch up and sort of learn about it. It felt like the overwhelming, like not just investors, other founders was the opposite side that all of you have staked out, which is that investors should be pro founder.

• 1:15:56Speaker 00

  Because people are cowards.

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  And like this is.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  It's because people are cowards and it's easier to say, I'm the most pro founder. Therefore, um, I'm going to put out a flag. I'll waive all my rights. I'm just happy to be along for the ride. What you're hearing, I think, when you have a granular discussion about this, is people who are serious investors who want to do it for their career, would like to have their LPs respected and their LPs rights respected. And they are balancing three relationships. I have three relationships. I have to balance my team. I have to make sure my team is like as good as they can be, right? That's like priority one is my team. So I try to have the best team possible and motivated and professional development and make sure they're awesome. That's because everything flows from the team. And that

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  might sound incongruous. People put founder first. I actually put my team first, even above the founders. Then, because my team services the founders. So after my team, we have to service the founders and equally service the LPs. Because if we screw the LPs and we don't get returns, then they don't return for the next fund. Then we can't help the next generation. And, and that's the very easy part of this and why the whole ecosystem, but people, and I responded like two or three times to this whole discussion. You, you just want to make sure that we don't undercut the pre-seed and seed ecosystem.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  Because people like Paige, people like Jenny, people like myself, people like Sam Lessin, and Y Combinator tech stars and angels, if you screw all those people, who's going to do that work? Who's going to help companies get to year five and $25 million in revenue? It's not going to be these big giant funds. It's not going to be Andreessen Horowitz. It's not going to be Sequoia necessarily. I mean, they have ARC, which is great. And and Andreessen Horowitz has Speedrun, great. But as Sam said, that's just them trying to get options on the future. You, you really want to have a vibrant, uh, seed ecosystem where 90% of the startups go to zero and people like us spend the time with those companies, knowing that 90% go to zero or return $0. They, they want the opposite. They

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  want 90% of the companies to return the initial investment and then some. They have a different view of the of the strikeout rate. So but you know what I did? I throw up this harmonic I did. Harmonic is one of our great partners and a great product that everybody who's in venture or startups should have a subscription to. I said, give me the funding timelines of Nicola, FTX, and Theranos, and who participated in each round. Now, you could do this on any LLM. You just won't get correct data. It will hallucinate and give you bad data. Harmonic actually has the real data that they've curated over, you know, and cleaned, and they have it very tightly put into this product. And so here you can see Theranos, 786 million tracked, and you can see each of the different

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  investors. And what's very interesting about this is you don't see any of the top funds. Threshold Ventures, formerly Draper Fisher-Jervisson led. That's Tim Draper, who was neighbors with her. But then you go down here, and I don't know any of these firms. I don't know any of them.

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a lot of family offices, and then the Walton family and Walgreens. And yeah, so they were going, and insurers, too. Blue Cross, Blue Shield Venture Partners.

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  And the real story is FTX. Now you go to FTX, 1.7 billion tracked. And you start looking at like, you know, who was in this? And that Series B was 2021, peak, peak crypto hype. And you got Sequoia, SoftBank, Tomo Bravo, Insight, MultiCoin, Coinbase, Circle. I mean, it was everybody. And and those people had, and then you have Series B1, BlackRock, Iconic, Sequoia.

• 1:19:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  Temasek, which is the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund, every, IVP.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  And then you go to Series C, SoftBank. And what was happening here was Altimeter, Brad Gerson was in that Series B. Everybody who was investing at an, you know, almost a $20 billion valuation, $18 billion valuation year, they had drafted off everybody else's due diligence, and they were all in a, they were all in a collective delusion that, hey, all these great names are in it. Everybody's diligence did, and a lot of them have since come back and said, hey, I just want to let our LPs know, we've, LPs know, we failed you here. We didn't do enough diligence. We were drafting off of other deal came together quickly. And this is why diligence is important, especially at these levels.

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  If you want to check out Harmonic yourself, you should try it. Harmonic.ai. That's where you're going to look. Harmonic.ai.

• 1:20:42Speaker 00

  Is there anything else on the docket you guys want to?

• 1:20:44Speaker 04

  We can talk about Otter AI. We could talk about Ramp. There's that Town. They have Townies as their AI assistant model. And then Elon Musk says money is no longer relevant. Did you guys hear about that?

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  Okay. In that case.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  I thought the Eleven Labs situation with the Chris Williamson was pretty interesting, the AI voice generator platform.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  Hey, what, give us the the brief tea up here, Elon. This is another Theranos-like, you can see everything situation for me because I had to do a mea culpa on it. My initial reaction was incorrect.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, so last week, podcaster Chris Williamson accused Eleven Labs of stealing his voice. Eleven Labs has said they use a different voice actor that just sounds a bit like Chris. The actual voice actor behind Eleven Labs's Archer voice has now posted a video. He's saying Chris Williamson's claim that the Archer clone is him is a misunderstanding. Archer is a professional voice clone. It took about an hour of his audio. He's now claiming that this is going to hurt his royalties. He wants an apology from Chris Williamson for accusing him of being a stolen voice. We could, Jacob, if you want to pull that up from yesterday, we could take a listen to the the side by sides again and see what everybody thinks.

• 1:21:56Speaker 05

  A friend of mine sent me a link to a YouTube video. I want you to listen to this clip and tell me if anything sounds familiar. It's been over 12 years since the disappearance of Flight MH370. Three massive searches, more than $200 million spent. And on March 8, 2026.

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  Incredible.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  Ocean Infinity officially called off their last search. Naturally, I was a little bothered. I mean.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  Slightly different, slightly different. The guy in Eleven Labs has a bit of a lisp.

• 1:22:29Speaker 00

  Yes. So here's, here's the thing, Jenny. You saw this. Where did you come out on this when you saw this? Because this is like one of these stories that goes by and then more emerges. So now you always have to be thoughtful about like, okay, reality, what is the actual reality here? As in the Theranos, you can see everything to end cap that. But what was your initial take? And then where do you sit now on this?

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  My initial take was just we're in very confusing times when it comes to AI, right? You can't copyright your voice, only the things and the content that you can say, except now there's, you know, some right of publicity that does refer to people's control of their name, their image, their likeness, and their voice. So it's being, I think, litigated in real time. So I find that fascinating, but I don't think we really have an answer. Obviously, ripping someone's voice off sucks, and we're going to increasingly see that through deep fakes and other likenesses through AI. But I don't think we have a clear answer from the courts, to tell you the truth, the truth.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Okay, Paige, did you have a take?

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Um, wait, I'm curious, Jason, if this happened to you, because I feel like your voice is like.

• 1:23:33Speaker 00

  It literally has happened to me. Somebody made dog podcasters and like three or four fans send it to me and said, oh, wow, this is you. And I was like.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  Sounds a lot like you.

• 1:23:43Speaker 00

  And it was not me. I mean, the resemblance of me and the bulldog was spot on.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  There's so much audio of you.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  And the voice was spot on, but I did not do it.

• 1:23:52Speaker 04

  I think there's just so much audio of you podcasting.

• 1:23:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. Well, I was like, I was like, um, I mean, because like, I run a podcast. I've done 99 episodes. I'm filming the 100th on Monday. I have a lot of audio of myself online, but I haven't had a situation like this. So I was curious for like, what your take on it is.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So thank you for that. That was very generous of you. Look at you, great on the ground table. Very good. You're very professional. They're passing the ball. I like pass the ball to her, she passes it back. I'm like, okay, I got an open shot. Here we go. So my take on it is get permission and compensate me. It is, the right of publicity has been around for a long time. There have actually been stops and starts of this. The original one was people would hire celebrity impersonators and then have them do commercials. Hey, it's Arnold. You need to have a Snapple. It's delicious. Get to the helicopter and have a Snapple. Diet Snapple is incredible. And it'd be like, ah, it's so obviously a fake, but you are kind of trading on his name.

• 1:24:53Speaker 00

  And so people stopped doing that, or they said, the following is the celebrity impersonation. Then they play the ad, or at the end, they say that. And people lost these sound alikes. So the right of publicity means you can't use me to sell your thing. Matthew McConaughey now famously has been.

• 1:25:10Speaker 03

  The Claude readout.

• 1:25:11Speaker 00

  He's literally like explicitly taking the steps to make it known that he's trademarking it. I'm going to do, or, you know, protecting it. I'm going to do the same thing. And then I would love to be in Eleven Labs.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  You should explain that, how public figures now are taking a trademark because they can't do a copyright. But that's interesting.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  It's like state law base, right? It's like different in every state.

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  It's, no, no, this is federal. And so in the federal IP protection, anything you create has copyright built in. Trademark is a different protection. Trademark is around a mark, like a logo. And, you know, Apple can, as a generic word in the dictionary, they can own computers, but they can't open, own music. And Apple Music famously was the Beatles label. And then when Apple got into music, when they were in computers, Apple, the Beatles, like started going after them. And then they made an agreement. Then they actually broke the agreement. You can look up that whole history. So, and then there's the right to publicity, which is you can't take a clip from me here. If I said, you know, man, I love this, you know, 8 o'clock coffee, you can't go clip

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  that and then put it in an ad campaign. Because that's my right to my publicity for me to make money. Nor can you, like, even if I was wearing your clothes, like, and this on social media gets a little dicey. People will take, I've had this happen multiple times. Somebody took me and put me in an ad campaign because I had mentioned their product. And I said, hey, you know, I charge 25% of whatever you're, you know, a base fee of X and 25% of whatever you spent on ads. So if you spend a million on ads, I need 250. And, you know, here's my attorney, and you can settle up with them or whatever. And they had spent a small amount, but they did settle it. And I need to have that on the record because I read ads on here. I just read the Harmonic ad or the Claude, the ad for the Claude pin and their partners, they spend money for that.

• 1:27:00Speaker 00

  If somebody goes and steals that, then it deludes them. Why would they pay for it? Why don't they just steal it? Or why don't they just make a fake ad? So anyway, I have to police this on the margins, but, you know, it's not like, people are generally respectful of that. It's just like.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  It's great.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Speaker 03

  So I guess it's like interesting with the transition in like college sports and NIL. It's becoming like, I guess, like the regulations are becoming more clear around name, image, and likeness.

• 1:27:29Speaker 00

  That is a new thing. Yeah. So if you want to use the players on your team, I don't know how they're handling it.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  So they all have agents. Like I was just, I got invited to the president of SCSU's house for the homecoming dinner, and she was talking about how much that, that like college sports has changed as a result. So like each player has an individual agent, the school like negotiate directly with the different agents. But it's quite interesting. Like, I didn't realize how dramatically it had changed that.

• 1:28:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was like a big controversy because they were making billions of dollars, and the students were getting none. That felt tremendously unfair because they're risking their whole careers. And then why would they say in college when they could go into the pros? So they were losing people after a year. People go direct, like Kobe Bryant, I think, was the first to go from high school to directly into the league. And many people followed suit because why would you risk it if you're that talented? So I think they actually opted into that. But then I would think how they get used. So when it comes to like the jersey sales in the NBA, everybody gets their, gets an equal share in that. All the players get the same amount. The worst player in the league who plays no minutes, who's a backup, gets paid the same as Jalen Brunson, or, you know, LeBron James, even though LeBron James.

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  Selling fewer jerseys, but sure.

• 1:28:47Speaker 00

  Selling no jerseys.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  They make the same per jersey, you know?

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  No, no. They make the same in that they just divide it up equally. Then you can, so jersey sales is like centralized through the thing. So they just say, we're going to split that. And that's what their union negotiated. Now, if LeBron wants to do a signature deal for Nikes, like Michael Jordan famously did, they do that independently. So all those contours have to be figured out. What's in the league's purview, what's outside of it? And then there were, like, people were wanting to wear their sneakers during the game. They had to work out that, you know? Does the team sell their sneakers, their sneaker deal? Does the league sell the sneaker deal? Does the individual sell the sneaker deal? And they had to just like adjudicate all that. But in the Chris Williamson one, I thought, oh, Chris makes the case, I'm with Chris, obviously.

• 1:29:36Speaker 00

  And I said to Eleven Labs, sure, apologize. Then I saw the, this other guys, and I was like, wait a second. Chris made a mistake. And what it is, is that MH370 video, that was done, I believe, this is where I stand currently in the truth, and I could be proven wrong again. That MH370 video was made with open source or some platform based on Chris's voice. So Chris is right, somebody stole his voice. Where he's wrong is that the 11 Labs one was clearly made as an alternative to Chris, in my mind. They were like, let's make somebody who sounds like Chris, but isn't Chris.

• 1:30:12Speaker 04

  It kind of doesn't really sound that much like it. When you listen to the archer voice, I feel like-

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  But I still think it was inspired by. I still think inspired by.

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  Different North England voice, and we're all Americans who are like, British, British guy, that's what they sound like.

• 1:30:27Speaker 00

  That may be true, but I think the reason they made that was they're like, we need an iconic voice like his. We need an iconic voice like this person, like that person. So they're gonna do somebody who's like, who's a famous female English accent, who played-

• 1:30:45Speaker 04

  Catherine Zeta Jones. She's Welsh, but close enough. Emily Blunt.

• 1:30:49Speaker 00

  Sure. They're gonna be like, get us something like Emily Blunt, and this person, and Michael Douglas, Greed is Good.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  So Jason, should Paige and I trademark our voices? Because after all these episodes, we're gonna be like, yeah, I mean, it's a sort of an agent.

• 1:31:04Speaker 00

  It's a good question. The way, there's a very simple way to test this, is to put your cloned voice on 11 Labs with a price, and see if there's a market for it. And then if you ever decide you don't want to, take it down.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Great, Paige will-

• 1:31:18Speaker 00

  Which is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna put my voice on 11 Labs. I'm officially making that a thing. So that people will be able to use it. And I will do it in the celebrity one. I'm gonna do it in the celebrity one.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  Let's trademark it first. I'm gonna do it again. Let's trademark ours first. So let's get a good lawyer, spend a lot of money, trademark, and then put it down.

• 1:31:35Speaker 00

  I think actually, the copyright is like already in there, the right to publicity is already in there and baked. I think you're just kind of codifying it, so that you can very quickly send it. It's kind of like when you have a trademark and somebody does it, they say, oh, send us your trademark. So the highest order is like, if you can send the trademark to YouTube, or whatever platform you're trying to get stuff taken down on it, goes faster. Like, you can just prove it's your IP that much faster. But I think what I want to do is do it like, the celebrity voices where you request it. And I asked my team to do this. I don't know if they got it done yet. But, team, did we get that done? I asked you to request some pricing to do an intro. Did we get-

• 1:32:10Speaker 04

  Jacob has reached out to them, but we have not, it's not done.

• 1:32:13Speaker 00

  We reached out to them through the website, like as official clients? Or we reached out to their PR department? That's the key. I wanted to reach out like a customer. I just want to make sure we didn't try to do through the inquiry form.

• 1:32:24Speaker 04

  Through the inquiry form.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  Not, really? And in 24 hours, nothing? I wonder how long we're waiting. Anyway, the way it works, Paige, on their site is you can, there's like, yeah, I think it was Elvis's voice there, or somebody, like there's some famous dead people?

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  It's, Michael Caine was a big one. They've got a lot of fictional characters. Stan Lee, yes, Hasbro has a deal. So you could get like Optimus Prime, or Megatron, or their kind of fictional characters. Maya Angelou was another one. Here's Celia Cruz, you can see his other, Judy Garland.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  Judy Garland. So scroll down in how it works. So this is to get commercial usage rights. License legendary voices with confidence. Every approval includes commercial rights for premium storytelling across media. Scroll down. There is a thing where they explain how this works. You submit like your usage. So when we submit for talent, does it ask you what your usage is, and how many people? Yeah, so you pick the talent.

• 1:33:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, the name, the email, social media links, short biography, anything new.

• 1:33:21Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's where we put in who we are. Scroll down. Is there anything else? Okay. So then I think you start the conversation with them, and then they're gonna look at what your use case is. So if I say, I want to use this on the Super Bowl, and there's 100 million people watching it, you get X price. If you say, I want to put it on my podcast, and it has 100,000 viewers, and This Week in Startups, and, you know, gonna do an intro, and we only want it for, you know, a year, and then we'll take it down, it'd be a different price, right? And so, and there's probably like a base price of $5,000. By the way, this, this is also being done by Cameo. Cameo had so many people who wanted to have somebody say, oh, you're listening to the This Week in Venture Capital Roundtable,

• 1:34:04Speaker 00

  and I'm some reality star. You could do that for 1,500 bucks, for 1,000 bucks. And they're more than happy to do it, because those people are not getting called to do commercials. They're like in the long tail. Nobody's asking them to do a commercial. They're happy to get 1,000 bucks. And if you bake it in, they don't care if it's in there forever. So you can, you have to look, see where it says for business? So if you click for business, you can go here. And if you scroll down, it will explain it. Keep going. There's someplace where they explain it. So you find the face, they do the request, and, okay, with our licensing, you can use your celebrity content almost anywhere online, your website, any social media platform, underpaid, email and text, even with integrity. Scroll down. And

• 1:34:48Speaker 00

  then it should have like, like, oh, pricing. No frills pricing. Yeah, so it's like, see, it's $5,000 for Lindsay Lohan. So if you want Lindsay Lohan to talk about your crypto product-

• 1:34:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, but for a celebrity endorsement, that's not so bad.

• 1:35:02Speaker 02

  That seems quite reasonable.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  Well, and I think the devil's in the details here. Like, there's things she won't say. She won't say, this is the best coffee I've ever had. She might say, people say this is the best coffee. So when people do ads, and I do the ad read on this podcast, we will have a little nuance. Like, don't make me say something that's a claim. So you don't want me saying like, I don't know, this cap table software kicks this cap table software's ass. F them. What you can say is, according to a research report by Gartner, this cap table software is rated 9.7, number one for 2026. And I always tell people like, please don't say something derogatory. If you want to say something derogatory about competitors, run an ad that you do the voiceover. And don't drag me into the battle, because

• 1:35:47Speaker 00

  I don't want to have that founder calling me and saying, why did you diss us in your ad? All right, another amazing episode. Paige, you got a favorite company you want to give a shout out to right now, or a most recent investment? This isn't mean you don't like your other portfolio companies. This just means, hey, we made this investment recently, or they closed around, and we want to give them some shine.

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  Um, I would love to shout out Nox Metals. We're a pre-seed and seed stage investor in their company, and they recently announced they hit 25 million in annualized revenue a year.

• 1:36:14Speaker 00

  Spell it. Spell in the domain name.

• 1:36:16Speaker 03

  N-O-X-M-E-T-A-L-S.co.

• 1:36:21Speaker 00

  Nox Metals.

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're buying metal? Actually, so we just did a factory tour with them in Detroit with some of our LPs. One of our LPs actually ordered metal at the factory and got it delivered to them two hours, like after they ordered it, which was very cool.

• 1:36:37Speaker 00

  So if you need a metal in some form, you can buy metal. You're not getting metal on-

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  Whatever you want.

• 1:36:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're not getting this on-

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  It can go to space.

• 1:36:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. You're not getting this up Amazon. This is like, the Amazon of metals. There you go. I mean, and people can now do CAD and get custom metals? They could like, make it in this shape for me?

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  Um, they, so they mainly focus on metal servicing, which is basically when an end manufacturer wants a smaller block of metal, but they can't buy directly from the mills, because you have to place like enormous orders. And so they built like a whole software around it, written like a million lines of code to build basically like everything that you would need to build an AI-native metal servicing company. Amazing company.

• 1:37:21Speaker 00

  Genius. Jenny, you got a company you'd love to give a shout out to here? Particularly got a new product service, or otherwise doing well in the world?

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Got a really fun one. They just announced 11 million dollar seed round, and they're a talking plant company. Imagine that. So I backed this founder in his last company. He comes from a long lineage of plant and, what do you call that? Greenhouse family. And he has now created something which is called Plant Intelligence. So they translate plants' electric signals into insights. And obviously, you can use that for a whole host of things, including interior landscaping, but also like carbon accounting. So very cool, very wacky idea. I mean, imagine a founder sitting in front of you pitching that. But going back to like, you know, investing in the founder, back to his last company,

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  the guy knows plants, and was the first investor in this one, and he just raised a nice round. So shout out to Electric Plants.

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  That's so cool. It's like, can you talk to them?

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  I mean, coming soon. Coming soon to a greenhouse near you.

• 1:38:31Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty cool.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  So this is an interesting one. Let's pull it up on the screen here. Obliteration. So Obliteration came on the podcast. You know, there's a lot of guardrails and things put around open source AI, or just frontier models. And if you're doing cybersecurity, you need obliteration.ai, because you need the unfiltered, unconstrained model. So where can you get these things? Well, you need a place that will host it for you and trust you. So if you're a trusted partner, you can do cybersecurity with Obliteration, have an unconstrained model, and you build up your harness, you build up your rule set.

• 1:39:16Speaker 00

  And so it is for high-risk industries, LLMs for high-risk industries. The AI is gonna do what you allow it to do. You set the rules. You set the constraints. So with great power comes great responsibility, and obliteration.ai is where you will do that. And congratulations to them to being accepted to A16 Speedrun. We have now sent, although the guy who's running it, I think he still blocks me. I was like, we sent seven people to your program, and they went to ours. And I just had Ben Harwitz on the program, but the guy who was running it is blocking me. And I was like, trying to retweet his retweet. I'm like, what

• 1:39:59Speaker 00

  did I say 10 years ago that made the guy running it? I mean, this is when you, when you spout off for 20 years on podcasts, who sometimes people will just be like, I've heard enough of this guy. So, anyway, congratulations to my partners at A16Z. Ben Harwitz on All In last week, and then the person running Speedrun blocking me. We'll invite, why don't we, whoever's blocking me from Speedrun, let's have them on the pod. The person running it, we'll have them on the pod.

• 1:40:24Speaker 04

  We'll take a look.

• 1:40:25Speaker 03

  We're gonna duke it out.

• 1:40:26Speaker 00

  No, just, I mean, I can't be-

• 1:40:29Speaker 03

  Just a friendly hello.

• 1:40:30Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, like, how am I in a blocking battle on a social media account, and I don't even understand why? Like, life is short. We're all here to like, help these founders. Like, just, and if I, and by the way, the converse is true. If I blocked somebody like 15 years ago, and I don't remember, I, just please email me, Jason Akalakana, and I'll unblock you. I'll give you a, what is it called? What'd they give Nicola? Hall Pass? Yeah, it's in that zone, sort of, okay. I was thinking more, a pardon, more like what Trump does. And Biden, Pardon Palooza. We'll see everybody next time. Bye-bye.