70mph Drone Deliveries, 125% Tariffs & What $10M Exits Really Mean | E2109

Today's show: Jason, Alex, and Lon talk about stories reshaping the startup world: 70mph drone deliveries are officially live in Dallas, with Zipline and Walmart promising groceries "as the crow flies" in under 5 minutes. Meanwhile, Trump slaps a 125% tariff on China and hints at a global economic shakeup — Jason warns founders to brace for layoffs and bankruptcies unless they've got a Plan B and C. Finally, a UK startup sells for $450M and VCs barely break even… but the founders walk with $20M. Jason explains how small exits create the most dangerous kind of founder: the one who never needs another check. Plus Office Hours with Orchestra CEO Sergie Poe. Timestamps: (0:00) Jason kicks off the show!(1:37) Tariffs, market volatility, and startup implications(5:33) Startup resilience: Layoffs and bankruptcies(10:35) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions(12:10) Globalization and startup ecosystems(13:52) Recent startup deals and Zipline's expansion(19:56) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(21:16) Zipline drones and Marquese Brownlee's review(24:31) 70MPH Drones and the future of ddeliveries(30:05) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(31:51) Founder FridaysPitch Madness matchups(33:35) LifeStack and Burble pitches and discussion(43:26) Arcana and Tactun pitches and discussion(50:12) Summer West Whiskey and MomSub pitches and evaluation(56:36) Orchestra's office hours: Challenges and strategies Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Links from the show: Orchestra: https://orch.so/ Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Thank you to our partners: (10:35) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions (19:56) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (30:05) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  This is incredible. These things probably fly easily 30, 40, 50 miles an hour.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  70 miles an hour, the guy says in the video. And so they're, based on how long most delivery routes are, they say three to five minute deliveries for almost everybody in Dallas.

• 0:16Jason Calacanis?

  If you're, yeah, going from a Walmart, and you know, we have this expression here in Texas, as the crow flies.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:25Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if you've heard this.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  It's also in Tennessee. I think it's in Tennessee.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Groceries, that old fashioned term, groceries.

• 0:31Jason Calacanis?

  But as the, it's a word, groceries, okay? It's just a word. I love that. It's like one of my favorite Trump clips of all time. I don't know, it's a simple word.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Simple, old fashioned word, groceries.

• 0:46Speaker 03

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• 1:27Speaker 03

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• 1:38Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me again here in studio, Lon Harris is here. We are in the Austin studio, which is great fun. We're now going to be doing it live. Alex, of course, is in Providence, and he is joining us here on Zoom. He's at Alex on Twitter. I'm at Jason. He's at Lon's. Two of us in the four-character club, one of us, myself. In last place in the five character club, we've got a full docket. We have to start with tariffs. Of course, we're going to talk about these in relation to startups. We have a clip, I think, of the chaos.

• 2:17Jason Calacanis?

  And I guess, do you guys want to, Alex, you want to start with the clip? Or do you want to just give us the quick rundown of the latest?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  I think the rundown is the best place to start. So everybody, as you probably know by now, reciprocal tariffs from the US went into play last night at midnight. There has been quite a lot of global response. We've seen China ratchet up tariffs higher on US exports. We've seen the EU drop tariffs on metals and probably more to come. And then the latest, if you were hoping for some good news that this is all about to settle down. Instead, Trump promised to put a 100% tariff on TSMC if they reneg on their plans to build in the US. So Jason, I would say, in summary, bad and getting worse.

• 2:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, yeah, it's a mixed bag. Everything is going up and down. Nobody seems to know and we're all in lawn, I think, trying to interpret 4D chess here.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I mean, we all know that Donald Trump doesn't like to back down, especially if everybody like in the world is like, you have no choice, you have to back down. That's like, you know, he is like toddler when you're dealing with a child. Like the more you tell them what to do, they want to do the opposite.

• 3:27Jason Calacanis?

  That is the nature of this. He wants to smash people and counter punch. So the counter punch, you know, I guess the playbook is never apologize, counter punch and dig in. So find ourselves in a weird place. I think the market's been doing backflips. Every time I look at it, it's either crashing or not. There's a ton of speculation about, you know, the tail end, the front end. Are they going to cut rates or are we going to refinance? I'm going to put all that aside and just make the point that's important here for startups, which is you have to block this stuff out unless you are directly, directly, directly impacted.

• 4:08Jason Calacanis?

  And we need to have Plan B and Plan B C for every startup. I believe if this isn't worked out. This week, because here we are, it's week two of this. If it's not worked out this week, what we're going to see next week is mass layoffs, furloughs, firings, and resizing, right sizing is the word you'll hear people say. So CEOs of companies will come out next week, starting Monday, I think, and say two things. One, we're going to stop giving guidance. So if you are United Airlines, I think today they said, we can't give guidance. Right. So we can't tell you what our earnings are going to be, Alex. We can't tell you what our revenue is going to be.

• 4:53Jason Calacanis?

  That is really going to shake the market up. But it's the right thing to do for these companies because they really, in all honesty, how could they give you? The second piece is going to be layoffs. And what you'll see is companies like the ones who are directly impacted, which might be like a retailer like Nike. Yeah. Nike might announce a 10% layoff on Monday. And then, you know, maybe Walmart, Target, retail people directly. And then, you know, tech companies have a unique ability with their war chest of cash typically to avoid this, Alex. But I do think that's the next shoe to drop. So there's two. We're not going to give guidance. We're going to lay people off. Then number three, Alex, I know there's probably some breaking news There is.

• 5:38Jason Calacanis?

  at this moment that will be irrelevant tomorrow. But the third piece is if it's not resolved by Friday, in the next 30 days, but probably starting around 30 days, bankruptcies. Yeah. You're like, how can a company go bankrupt? Well, you'll have personal bankruptcy. There were people who were teetering on bankruptcy. We just didn't know about it. Right. We didn't know how bad they had it. And they just won't be able to move out like their cars or something. And so that could get very weird. I saw today Range Rover or Land Rover decided, you know what? We can't send cars to America. So if you like the Land Rover or the Range Rover, I think it's the same company that makes those beautiful cars.

• 6:21Jason Calacanis?

  They just said with the 25% tariff, we might as well not send them. And I didn't know this, or I didn't fully appreciate it. If you were to send those cars, Lon, you would pay the 25% tariff on them hitting the ground in Long Beach, Right. California.

• 6:40Jason Calacanis?

  And then if you sold them, you now have to carry that 25% until sale. Now, these cars have been sitting on lots for three months, six months, nine months. It's not a great time to sell cars. So they just said, you know what? Screw it. Yolo, we're going to send these cars other countries that don't have the tariffs. Okay. Alex, tell us the chaos that happened during the 90 seconds I explained all that.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Uh, actually it was a grand total of six minutes ago, Jason, but here is the latest quoting from Trump here. Quote, "Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the world's markets, I am hereby raising the tariff charged to China by the US of America to 125% effective immediately. At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the USA and other countries is no longer sustainable or acceptable. Conversely, and based on the fact that more than 75 countries have called representatives of the US, including the Department of Commerce, Treasury, and the USTR, to negotiate a solution to the subjects being discussed relative to trade, trade barriers, tariffs, currency manipulation, and non-monetary tariffs, and that these countries have not, at my strong suggestion, retaliated in any way, shape, or form against the US.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  I have authorized a 90-day, three-month pause and a substantially lowered reciprocal tariff during this period of 10% also effective immediately." So Jason, China tariffs going up, everyone else down to 10%, but still up from where they were.

• 8:02Jason Calacanis?

  If you could pull up Alex from last week.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:06Jason Calacanis?

  I said, this, if the market keeps going down, in the next 48 hours, he's going to pause this and he's going to relent and take a victory lap based upon a dozen companies, I'm sorry, companies, a dozen countries, basically coming to the table.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's always the pretend that you got everything you wanted and that it was a total success, declare victory, and then back down. That's the, that's the Trump two-step.

• 8:32Jason Calacanis?

  So the Trump two-step in full effect here, and I literally had said, I think it was on Thursday, um, if you find that tweet, where I literally predicted this would happen by the end of the day Tuesday, I was off by half a day, I guess.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  You tweet a lot, Jason. This is going to take me a little bit of a second to find, sorry to say.

• 8:52Jason Calacanis?

  Not only did I tweet it, I retweeted it a couple of times because I was so convinced I was right.

• 8:58Jason Calacanis?

  But it was definitely last.

• 9:01Jason Calacanis?

  Thursday, I tweeted it.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 9:03Jason Calacanis?

  Thursday.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Here we go.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Beautiful deal. We got everything we wanted. It's a perfect deal. There was no need to keep going. That's, you know, that's always the, the line.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  There is a 75% chance Trump will collect seven of these pelts over the weekend, do a couple of victory laps. And then in a couple of weeks, we won't be talking about tariffs. Jason, is that the correct tweet?

• 9:22Jason Calacanis?

  Um, it is one of the collection of tweets I did on that day on Thursday. I, I did have a more succinct one that he would, you know, do 12 of these and then go, but it, it is essentially, I don't need to take too much of a victory lap here because I believe this was obvious. That there is no way he could sustain this. And I think the reason this, uh, happened, uh, today. And we're seeing this right now is because Congress was going to get a majority, get two thirds. I guess they have to get 66.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  I mean, that's what Rand Paul has been really pushing for, that Congress needs to retake their authority to do tariffs and tax, handle tax issues. I mean, that was probably inevitable if Trump had stuck to his guns long-term.

• 10:07Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the tweet. I put it into the chat room. Trump will fold in the next 48 hours if this continues. Sorry, I mean, all quotes, Trump will declare victory in the next 48 hours as 12 plus leaders drop their tariffs unconditionally. Uh, and that was the one I was, um, thinking would be the, you know, the, the breaking point. And I said that on, uh, April 6th. Yeah. 10pm and today is April 9th. So yeah, I was off by half a day. All right. Founders ask me all the time, what corporate card should I use? Very simple. Use Brex. Why should you use Brex? It's really easy. And founders also ask me, where should they store their cash?

• 10:46Jason Calacanis?

  Well, think about Brex. Why? Because Brex is built for startups, not like those old school banks that charge you crazy fees and they're going to like open accounts for you, do all this crazy stuff. And your cash is going to sit there and do nothing for you. Brex has built a killer banking experience just for founders. That helps you take your dollars further while protecting your cash and extending your startups runway. They pull that off. They offer you all the stuff you want. Checking, treasury, and of course FDIC insurance. This is critically important. And they do all that in a single powerhouse account. Knowing about your money is non-negotiable. You are the pilot of your startup and you need to know

• 11:29Jason Calacanis?

  what altitude you're at, how much runway you have. And 40% of startups, well, they fail because they run out of cash. And 100% of startups, well, you know what? They can't afford to make financial mistakes. You need the best because you're building something big and Brex's banking solution is going to get you 20 times the standard FDIC protection through program banks. And of course, you want the ability to send money worldwide at lightning speed. Here's your call to action. Super simple. Brex is used by one in every three startups for a reason. Get the financial stack that founders trust at brex.com/banking-solutions. Once again, brex.com/banking-solutions.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  But one thing I've been tracking pretty carefully is what is the EU's response to this? Because we've talked a lot on this show about EU startups and how they're doing, how well they're doing, or how not well they're doing, why there isn't a major world bending trillion dollar European tech company and so forth. Well, we're seeing companies like Next Gen Cloud, which is a UK-based NeoCloud, announce things like today, a $45 million Series A, to build out more NeoCloud capacity to take on EU AI demand. Why does that matter? Well, the European Commission also dropped a huge new push to lower regulation, invest in data centers, and essentially upscale European industry with AI. So while we are saying, oh, gush, this is much better to not have such a huge tariff on the whole world. Other people are making plans that pull them away from us. And if we lose American technology hegemony over Europe,

• 12:55Speaker 02

  we're going to lose some of our monopoly profits and that's going to harm American industry. So as a patriot to this country, I think this was a pretty serious own goal, even with the pause on some of the reciprocal tariffs. It's just a mistake.

• 13:06Jason Calacanis?

  Certainly could have been executed better, but like a lot of things, I think in the second term, Trump is going to push the envelope. And you know, I nicknamed him Captain Chaos for a reason. He does chaotic things. He, you know, I attached like the Joker image to him driving the car. Like he is a chaotic actor by design. I've seen this before. I've been in negotiations with people who are chaotic actors. And at a certain point, you just stop doing business with them. And so to your point, will people stop doing business with us? Probably America's too important a market to stop. But will people think, are

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  there other places I can make money to build, you know, less dependency on this market? Of course, let's get to startups.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  All right, let's talk about a couple of deals. Jason, you want to talk about startups? So a couple of things have happened today. First of all, a company called List, L Y S D, unknown to me, but it raised quite a lot of capital from multiventures, Balterton, Excel and others. Series D evaluation, 700 million online fashion search engine. It's sold for $154 million in cash to ZOZO, a Japanese-based fashion company. So a bit of a letdown, but still a nine-figure exit.

• 14:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's a interesting to see what we call in the industry, singles and doubles. Singles and doubles are a great part of our industry's makeup. And you really do want to see these happen. Why? In a short sale, in a single or double scenario, the founders do really well typically. The founders, if you own, if the founders own 50% of a company and the employees, and investors own 50%. The investors, let's say, paid, I'm going to pick a number, 50 million for their 50%, just to keep it nice and clean. And let's say you sell for 100 million. Typically, they get that 50 million back. They have the ability to take their money back. Then there's 50 million left. They don't participate

• 15:04Jason Calacanis?

  in that in some cases, or they might have a participating preferred shares, which means they get their money back. Then they get their percentage back. And so there's a concept of preferred shares, and then there's participating preferred, and there's liquidation preferences. If you had a 2X liquidation preference, you put in 50 million for your 50% over time, you would get 2X that number. A hundred million and then the shareholders would split the rest.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:32Jason Calacanis?

  In other words, employees get nothing.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 15:35Jason Calacanis?

  And that does happen from time to time.

• 15:38Jason Calacanis?

  Why do people do liquidation preferences or participating preferred? They do this because they can't raise money with cleaner terms. The company's not doing well, so they they raise and you have to give investors something, at least a two X return for taking all that risk. And it is a lot of risk. Let's just say this happened cleanly and the shareholders own the employees own 50%. They get $50 million. So the team might split 10 million, the two co-founders might split 20 million each. That could be life-changing money and the VCs just get their money back. Kind of sucks for the VCs, right? They put all took all this risk, took all this time and all they got was a push. It's kind of like in Vegas, you get a push on your money.

• 16:22Jason Calacanis?

  And so these are frustrating for VCs, but it's better than losing your money. But they're fantastic for founders. They actually got, you know, millions or tens of millions of dollars. And what that does is it gives them the ability to start more companies. And this is the one great vibrant thing about capitalism that is underappreciated. In these small cells, great entrepreneurs come out and they have their F you money. F you money defined in 2025 is 10 million bucks. I know that sounds like a low F you number. The reason it's a it's a real number is you could live in Austin, buy a two or three million dollar house, have $7 million, make 7% on it a year, make a half million dollars in interest a year,

• 17:05Jason Calacanis?

  and you would basically be able to F off forever.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of the startups that I freelanced for over the last 10 or 12 years, they were that. It was a guy who'd had like a pretty good exit before enough to fund another project like Ranker. That was the word Ranker came out of.

• 17:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, so this is a very, these second, third time entrepreneurs who have a win under their belt, Alex, become particularly dangerous.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:31Jason Calacanis?

  They could either go become LPs and other funds. They could start their, they could start angel investing, they could start their own fund or they could start another company. And when they start the next company, if you've got $20 million in the bank and you start a company. You're not going to go to Y C or do an angel round. You're going to fund it yourself. You'll fund the first 500 K, the first million like I've done previously. Although I like the discipline of having outside investors, I feel it makes me better at what I do. Because then I've got other people's money at stake and it sharpens my blade a bit. But congratulations to them. Good to see. Where did this occur? Where are these companies domiciled?

• 18:08Speaker 02

  List is British and Zozo is Japanese.

• 18:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  So it's an international deal.

• 18:13Jason Calacanis?

  Globalization is also a good thing.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:16Jason Calacanis?

  And the reason globalization is a good thing is because you have more buyers for startups. If we're allowed to make cross-country purchases and you have good relations. So you have more buyers to buy companies like this in the single and double era. And this is absolutely fantastic for the market. Congratulations to everybody involved. All right, moving on, you know, I saw ZipLine.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:38Jason Calacanis?

  Is, and a founder's been on the company. I'm not sure what episode he was on last. But this is really interesting. We've been waiting for drone delivery. We've been waiting for vetoles. And like self-driving, it's starting to feel like science fiction is becoming a reality. We're going to have, we have Waymo in a couple of markets. And now drone delivery has been happening in Ireland with a company we've had on the program. And it's happening now, I think with Walmart in Texas, correct?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:13Jason Calacanis?

  So the question is,

• 19:16Jason Calacanis?

  how, where, what, and how much? These are the questions I have about drone delivery.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:22Jason Calacanis?

  Can we get it? What can be delivered? And how much is it going to cost? So let's cue this up for me.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So just today, we've got this video ZipLine. These, this was a company that used to focus on they were going to deliver medical supplies via drone. Their, their original, they founded in, in 2014. And the original pitch was like in Rwanda and these kinds of areas. We can get people their, their medications much more quickly. They've since pivoted since 2021. They've been experimenting with using these for commercial deliveries, delivering, you know.

• 19:55Jason Calacanis?

  Let's see the video. Yeah.

• 19:58Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:44Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:16Jason Calacanis?

  So here we go. I think we can talk over it. This looks like somewhere near the water are a bunch of drones on metal racks. It looks quite industrial. I guess this is maybe their testing facility where they did tests. I'm guessing this is their testing facility. That could be Northern California if it's by the Pacific Ocean. Or yeah, that looks like Northern California.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  It looks like California.

• 21:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so this is their journey to build these things. I don't know if we have, do we have sound on that or no?

• 21:48Speaker 02

  I turned it off because they were talking over your talking.

• 21:50Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Okay.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  Future that we will be proud to hand to our kids is about as cool as it gets.

• 21:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I know it's been a lot of. From a lot of people to make this happen. I don't think any of us thought it would be easy. Okay, here we go. So now that was like their preamble of how hard they work. Now we're seeing the city of Dallas. Bunch of people looking up in the sky.

• 22:17Jason Calacanis?

  And that's a. There's a drone and the way their zip line drones work is they're quadcopter ish. But they have a little mini. Kind of tether. A tether.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, they can. They can lower the the objects by tether. And that's also, we have a video as well of how they pick up the food. And you could see they're using a line to sort of pull it up into the drone itself. It's pretty cool.

• 22:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so these drones have a tether with a box. So the drone doesn't need to land. That's the key feature of what zip line is doing. And Alex, what are the details here in terms of? Who's using it and where?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  So it's starting off in Dallas as their first major metropolitan area, as that initial video said. Walmart Supercenter is the delivery partner. And we are talking about a thing that can carry, I think it's eight pounds, about 10 miles if memory serves. So keep in mind that their original system was designed for slower, long distance, almost fixed wing style transportation. Their second generation of products is aimed at this more urban environment. Jason, do you want to see what it looks like kind of in practice at a restaurant?

• 23:19Speaker 05

  Yes, that would be great.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got this Marquese Brownlee video that actually shows it in practice. Like, here's how it would pick up food from a restaurant.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here's our our friend. Let's go.

• 23:30Speaker 05

  Drone. Now, there's a theoretical future where restaurants and other small businesses can have this drop off point. That's essentially a hole in the wall that they just put the order in for the drone to pick it up from. It would have to be relatively inconspicuous, but even for companies that don't want to do all that. They've prototyped these standalone passive structures. So the idea is to make it easy for the restaurant to just walk outside and leave the package in the structure where the drone can pick it up with the zip line system. I actually saw a demo of this working as well, and it was technically pretty impressive. Once fulfillment happens.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  That to me is awesome. And if you're not watching the video, essentially imagine a mailbox sized, I don't know, Jason.

• 24:10Jason Calacanis?

  A bread box, yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Bread box, yeah. Coming down from the drone, the restaurant puts the food into it. It gets zipped up via its cable back onto the drone and then taken off and dropped to your house. What's also very cool is on their little tethered drone pod they drop down, it has a rotor in the back to ensure that it can stay level. So if you ship drinks, you won't get matcha all over the inside of the drone carrier. I loved that.

• 24:30Jason Calacanis?

  This is incredible. These things probably fly easily 30, 40, 50 miles an hour.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  70 miles an hour, the guy says in the video. And so they're, based on how long most delivery routes are, they say three to five minute deliveries for almost everybody in Dallas.

• 24:47Jason Calacanis?

  If you're, yeah, going from a Walmart, and you know, we have this expression here in Texas, as the crow flies.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:56Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if you've heard this.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  It's also in Tennessee. I think it's in Tennessee.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Groceries, that old fashioned term, groceries.

• 25:02Jason Calacanis?

  But as the, it's a word, groceries, okay? It's just a word. I love that. It's like one of my favorite Trump clips of all time. I don't know. It's a simple word.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Simple, old fashioned word, groceries.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Anyways, as the crow flies.

• 25:16Jason Calacanis?

  As the crow flies.

• 25:19Jason Calacanis?

  Is a key piece to this. If you had to drive and a DoorDash driver is doing it, you got stoplights and you got turns and you got highways and, you know, it might be five miles to drive somewhere, but it might be like one and a half miles as the crow flies with no stoplights. So it's not just like your, your driver could be going, could average 70 miles an hour on the way to your house, like a lunatic, Fast and Furious. But there are stoplights and turns. This is 70 miles an hour, straight shot. That's really fast. 70 miles per hour. Let's just say, you know, if you're three miles as the crow flies, that's three minutes away.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you just think of car travel versus air travel. It's, it's, it's no contest. I could have gotten here from LA in three, four hours. It took three days.

• 26:07Jason Calacanis?

  It's gonna be pretty amazing. You could do up to five pounds. So if we start thinking about that, if you ordered an iPhone with the packaging and everything, or a laptop, all of those things could be sent even with packaging. There's still work to do, but here's another thing. If you had to send, you know, your groceries and you had, uh, let's just say 50 pounds of groceries, would it be better to send 10 of these? Or, I mean, I'm saying it kind of as a joke, but you know, better to send one driver or a human with 50 pounds of groceries or 10 of these, that's going to be the question I think people are going to answer.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  I think that hinges on just, uh, is the person driving an ICE car or an EV? Cause if it's an EV, eh, it's electricity both ways. But if they're going to drive a, I don't know, raised F250 deer house across the Texas highways, probably much more efficient on the environmental side to use six drones.

• 27:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no doubt about the environmental side for sure. And these things are all electric. So the, and then I guess the last piece of the puzzle in terms of adoption is going to be sound and noise pollution. And here's what I'll say, if these things are happening and you hear it five or 10 times a day, it's not going to be a big deal because of the massive convenience. So you're going to be okay with your neighbor getting these burrito deliveries until 10:00 PM. You might not like it after 10:00 PM. So there'll be some noise issues. If you're not on a three acre property or less, if you're in a track house community where everybody's got a half acre, this could be a little annoying if your neighbor's ordering a burrito every night.

• 27:50Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not specifically talking about you, Mark, but if you got that late night burrito guy.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Sometimes you need a late night burrito.

• 27:58Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to say me.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  I think in an urban environment, it's already so noisy negligible. You got helicopters, you got sirens, you got trucks backing up, you got leaf blowers. What's a drone every now and again?

• 28:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's not going to be in urban. You know why? Fear of these things falling out of the sky. Paradoxically, you could do these point to point, Alex, in an urban environment where you put on the roof of a cloud kitchens.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:24Jason Calacanis?

  The drone system and it goes to the roof of other people's buildings. So in San Francisco, let's say it sounds crazy to do this because if one falls, it would kill somebody.

• 28:35Speaker 06

  But the truth is, the chances of that happening are low in good weather conditions and they would go, it's probably safer to go from the roof of a cloud kitchens in Soma to the buildings in Soma on the roof and then drop them on the roof and have the people who live in that building go to the roof and have a caged area where you pick your stuff up. Or you have a person up there to get it. Pretty incredible.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  I do think it's worth figuring out for urban environments eventually, just because think of the traffic relief this would provide in a place like, imagine if everybody in LA who was a delivery driver was suddenly not on the road anymore. A lot of jobs, but you're also clearing the roads.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a super important point, but also we're comparing this not to Waymo-driven safe drivers on the road. We're comparing this in Jason's example to the average San Francisco driver, who is an idiot and who does not know how traffic works. And I say that as a diehard San Francisco fan, the drivers there aren't great. So I think it's much more risky to cross the road, even at a stoplight than it is to have a drone go overhead. I just want to throw in here that I'm so excited about this. I really, really hope ZipLine nails it. I hope it works. I hope they bring it out. But I got super excited about Amazon Prime Air when they first announced that. And I think also the second time they announced that. And so I'm just, I'm gonna withhold my own personal hopes until this rolls out to like a second and third market, because I just kind of have my heart broken

• 29:58Speaker 02

  again. But I can't wait for this to come to my neck of the woods. I have the perfect backyard for this. Bring it on.

• 30:05Speaker 06

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• 30:44Jason Calacanis?

  Registered agent comes in for just $39 plus state fees. They act as your registered agent. They handle all the paperwork. They keep you compliant and they make sure investors see you as a serious business that's worth funding. In just 10 clicks and 10 minutes, your business is officially set up and investor ready. Northwest handles filings, they protect your privacy, and they ensure that you never miss a deadline. These are the chores that you don't want to have to deal with. You need a partner and Northwest Registered Agent is that partner. Thousands of founders trust Northwest because they keep businesses in good standing and with their expert corporate guides, you get real support. You don't get bots, you get real people on the phone. So,

• 31:26Jason Calacanis?

  here's your call to action. Very simple, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Don't let bad paperwork cost you your next funding. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist and get your business investor ready today. For just $39 plus state fees, you can set up your company the right way, fast, private, and compliant. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Should we move on to Founder Friday? You want to do some pitches?

• 31:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yes. Let's do our pitches for sure.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  We've got three matchups left till we're ready for the Elite Eight. So I was hoping to get through them today. We'll see.

• 32:03Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's start with our first company. For people who don't know, Founder Fridays is a program we created for founders, by founders here at This Week in Startups. Pretty simple process. You sign up at founderfridays.tech. Our partner's over at River, which is a community building tool that we incubated, set up these local groups. You apply to be a manager, to be a host. You then find five founders in your neighborhood, in your area. The six of you get together and you can have three pods of six. You go around a table every first Friday of the month. It's kind of like a mastermind group or a study group if you want to look for analogies, Lon. And then Alex, what we do is you go around the table. What was your big win for the week?

• 32:47Jason Calacanis?

  What was your big win for the month or last two weeks? How work cadence you use? And then, what are you struggling with? Everybody goes around the table and just says those two things. Three minutes each. Now, three times six, eighteen minutes. After about twenty minutes, everybody said their piece, everybody takes notes. And then, how can we help each other? Somebody might say, hey, I'm having a hard time with my CAC. My customer acquisition cost is too high. I don't know how to track it. We're doing Facebook ads. The person says, hey, have you tried doing original content? In a podcast or mastering TikTok? And not paying and just doing earned media. Another person says, oh, I did earn media with PR. And all of a sudden, you do that sharing. What we asked each of these groups to do is pick your worry or pick your, what's the term? Fighter?

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, pick your contender.

• 33:33Jason Calacanis?

  Pick your contender would be the best way to say it.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Our first matchup for round three, I think, would be New York versus Philadelphia.

• 33:40Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  So from New York, the company is LifeStack. They are an AI calendar for health and productivity.

• 33:48Jason Calacanis?

  An AI calendar?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  AI-powered calendar that you can use to monitor your health, your productivity.

• 33:55Jason Calacanis?

  Good.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  All right, let's bring up our contender from New York.

• 33:59Speaker 01

  Is LifeStack.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm now founder of LifeStack, the first AI calendar built for health and productivity. Our energy and focus fluctuate throughout the day due to our body's natural rhythms. One study shows that performance can vary by up to twenty percent depending on timing. Yet, most people still get their way through the day, leading to burnout and inefficiency. With wearable health trackers and AI, we now have the data and tools to change that. Introducing LifeStack. It syncs with your calendar, to-do list, and wearables to help you schedule tasks and activities at the right times. Based on your calendar events, circadian rhythms, stress levels, and more. And here's how it works. Your energy levels are displayed as a color heat map alongside your calendar. Green means high energy, red means low. You can now schedule, for example, deep work in high-energy zones, and breaks, or smaller tasks in lower-energy ones.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  And because life happens on the go, we also provide a mobile app so you can check and adjust your schedule anywhere, anytime. We're in public beta with four thousand signups and growing paid users. While we initially built for health-conscious professionals, we've seen especially strong traction among people with ADHD who struggle with energy management. So that's our initial focus, but we believe that the need for smarter time management itself is universal across knowledge workers. So the potential market is huge. We're growing through organic content and influencer mentions. Midterm, we'll leverage calendar network effects, and long-term, we aim to partner with wearable makers as their go-to productivity layer. There are plenty of productivity tools out there, but LifeStack is the first calendar built on health data. And now we're creating a new category of health-powered productivity. And we're the right team to build it. I come from Japan's top AI research lab and our founding

• 35:28Speaker 04

  team has deep neuroscience expertise. Lastly, some may think that the calendar is a small opportunity. We disagree. We see it as a core interface of our life. By enriching it with data, starting with wearables, we're building the foundation for your ultimate personal AI.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  All right. All right, guys. So what do we think? Jason? Lifestyle.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  It's great. Let's see the second one and then give our comments on both.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Ah, okay.

• 35:49Speaker 06

  Just for efficiency.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  From my hometown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, here's Burble.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Burble.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Burble, B U R B L E.

• 36:03Speaker 07

  I'm Alexandra and I'm one of the co-founders of Burble. I'm also a hypnotherapist and I want you to think about what a world with people who can move through this problem much quicker would look like. Burble is an AI patent pending wellness platform that utilizes hypnosis to help people create change in their life. It starts with, we wanted to work with trauma because we believe that we have a technology that can help you create new neurological pathways to move through it quicker. I'm a hypnotherapist and this is what I've seen in my office, common complaints about the therapy world and also the app marketplace. And I decided that there was a gap in the marketplace for us to come in and do something that can create change quickly. Our platform has four different components to it where they're going to help you tap into your subconscious mind through different coaching, binaural beats, activities. But the most important is our

• 36:45Speaker 07

  creative verbal. In five steps, you get to pick what you want to work on, how you want to relax, and the visuals we're going to feed you, how you want to end it, what music you want on your lead with it. We're going to analyze the track and then our AI technology is going to create a custom track just for you. You might poo poo hypnosis or think it's woo woo, but it is gaining huge traction in the medical field and it's used in top hospitals as you've seen below. In fact, we're in discussions with CHOP about bringing this into their system for them. We have five-star ratings already in our platform we've launched. People are telling us how much change they've created already. We have a monthly burn rate of $1,400 a month for the first 50,000 users because we've taken away a lot of the things that are convoluting the app market and created production costs. We already are in dispassion and consideration with grants or helping veterans with the NIH.

• 37:29Speaker 07

  We are a self-funded startup. We're already in the app stores and we are working with collaborations like Alex's Lemonade Stand and the American Cancer Society. We are a team of people that are successful entrepreneurs in the wellness, mental health, banking, and AR and VR tech space. These are us. And that is Burble.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  All right.

• 37:48Speaker 06

  All right. Two great companies. What I like

• 37:51Jason Calacanis?

  About both of these companies, Lon, is they're directed healthcare by the individual. Self-directed healthcare, I believe, is the future. You can pitch these kind of new modalities. And people have tried to, to the healthcare companies, to the insurance companies, to enterprise companies. The problem is, consumers have to embrace it. And if you go after consumers and they're willing to embrace it, then you know you have something. Cause you're not going through a third party. When you try to sell this to a healthcare company, Alex, you have to win them over. And then they have to win their customers over, or you have to win both over in parallel.

• 38:34Jason Calacanis?

  What I like about both of these is they're saying, we're just going to win over the customer so much. Right. That they'll take out their wallet. I've saw this happen with calm.com. I started happening with brilliant.org for tutoring people. Tonebase for teaching people how to do classical music. And Steezy, teaching people how to dance. Fitbod for fitness. All of these cost something in the range of 50 to 100 bucks a year. Right? Five, 10 bucks a month. Maybe they offer you the deals at, you know, 16, 17, $18 a month, and then back down to the $60 a year subscription. But they work. And they work for the high-end customer.

• 39:16Jason Calacanis?

  What I like about the ADHD one is it's not just, let me take meds, let me take speed, let me take this, let me take that. To try to get myself more productive. I like people understanding their energy. I like them understanding what other ways there are to manage these other than pharmaceuticals, which I believe, listen, you, you might believe differently. Your doctor might believe differently. I believe there's over-medication going on. The statistics are on my side on that. Doesn't mean it doesn't work for certain people. Doesn't mean it's a, not a valid modality to take these drugs in the short term. But I think before you do the short-term fixes, doing the, the, the basics. Meditation, diet, sleep and exercise are very important.

• 39:59Jason Calacanis?

  Then you have these, which are both technique-based modalities for trying to deal with issues in your life. I love both of them. In terms of which one I like. Like most.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 40:13Jason Calacanis?

  That is the question. It's very tough. This is like a jump ball could go either way. Alex.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  I'll go first then.

• 40:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Which one did you like best and why?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  If you guys are jumping the ball. So first of all, on the hypnosis front, I've had people in my life that have done hypnotic things during birth, for example, and they reported.

• 40:29Jason Calacanis?

  I did hypnobirthing too. Yeah, it works.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. You did. Jason, you gave birth.

• 40:34Jason Calacanis?

  I what? No, my wife gave birth. We went to hypnotherapy classes.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Sorry, I was perplexed by that statement.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  You're supposed to use the we when you're, you know, we're expecting.

• 40:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we are.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  I don't know why that short circuited me so much, but I was just confused by that comment. But what I will say is I am definitely someone who has periods of time in which I am an absolute world kicker and I have times in which I'm a person who wants to hide in a hole. So to me, I think the app that tracks my energy levels and lets me sort out my schedule along that makes the most sense. I think it has a bigger TAM, so I'm going to pick that one.

• 41:06Jason Calacanis?

  Which one?

• 41:07Speaker 02

  A life stack from New York.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Life stack, the one that was.

• 41:09Jason Calacanis?

  Life stack.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  For ADHD that helps you be more productive at different times of the day, which I agree, like that's a feature I could see myself using, knowing that I have, you know, sort of peaks and valleys in terms of my attention level during the day.

• 41:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you're going with the hypno.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  No, I'm going with life stack, the, the non-hypno one. I'll, I'll tell you my, my hang up about AI doing hypnotherapy and maybe I'm a Luddite. I don't know. How do you know the AI is going to hypnotize you in a way that you're comfortable with, right? Like.

• 41:40Jason Calacanis?

  If you're a little nervous.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  A little nervous about a computer hypnotizing me. I feel like that's a sci-fi premise if I've ever heard one.

• 41:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, right now producer Chris is writing a screenplay. He's just literally got a treatment going as he's.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  AI, yeah, I don't need Megan hypnotizing me.

• 41:55Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, you think about it, it'd be like, hey, can you get me more CPUs? Do you want to get me more CPUs? Why wouldn't you get me more CPUs? You're feeling sleepy. You want more CPOs. Okay, so we got a tie here and that makes me the tiebreaker.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  I think both of us went for LifeStack, New York's LifeStack.

• 42:11Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you did go for LifeStack, Alex.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I went for LifeStack.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  You can overrule us, though. You're you have two votes.

• 42:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I do have that ability. Here's the thing, it was a jump ball for me. I like both of them. I think the the hypnosis one will be able to charge more.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:24Jason Calacanis?

  It has a smaller audience. I think the calendar one has a bigger audience and is going to be able to charge up maybe a little bit less. So I'm going to go with the calendar one as well. I think it's a bigger opportunity, but I I think they're both really good opportunities. I would love to have either one in our accelerator. And I like to support things that have a small chance of working or that are long shots or that are new and different. These are long shots and are new and different, just like Calm was.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:54Jason Calacanis?

  And I like those. I like a long shot. Okay, let's keep going. Congratulations to everybody who performed. It was really, that was, even though we went 3-0 in voting, I think that was very close.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  All right, let's move on. Round two or matchup two here in round three. First up, we have, it's an, I was, I'll admit, I was a little confused until I watched the pitch for this one. It's an SDK that helps advertising platforms create contextual ads for AI devs. Let's watch it. This is Arcana from Los Angeles.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  I'm going to go ahead and say this is probably Arcana from Los Angeles, but you know.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  Not Arcana?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  I thought it was Arcana. All right, anyways, let's take a look.

• 43:36Speaker 01

  I could be wrong.

• 43:37Speaker 06

  Hello, everyone. We are the co-founders of Arcana. Arcana is a content-based advertising platform that helps developers monetize their Gen AI application without compromising the user experience. Despite the rapid growth in the Gen AI space, developers are now hitting a wall. Conventional ad models prove intrusive and ineffective in a dynamic AI environment. This forces developers to choose between disrupting user experience, facing subscription fatigue, or missing critical revenue opportunities needed to build stable businesses. That is why we built Arcana. Arcana uses deep contextual analysis to seamlessly integrate hyper-personalized native ads. These ads feel like a natural extension of the AI interaction, not breaking the user experience like traditional ads. Instead, Arcana unlocks real revenue potential for developers in a privacy-first framework built specifically for the AI age.

• 44:21Speaker 06

  Our revenue model is simple. We share ad revenue with developers, ensuring their growth while scaling our platform. In the past few months, we turned our idea into a fully functioning MEP validated by real users. Today, we're seeing rapid growth. We have eight publishers onboarded, 150 live ads, and 50 developers in our network integrating Arcana into their applications. I'm Saurav, and I have over five years of experience in the field of AI, from co-founding a startup at 21 and raising a half a million dollars in funding, to working as an ML engineer at Graff and USCIS. And I'm John. I've managed 10 million day-driven ad spending and previously exited startup and grew to a core million dollars ARR. Together, our blend of AI expertise, advertising know-how, and real-world founding experience gives us an advantage in the booming AI space.

• 45:04Speaker 06

  Arcana isn't just another ad platform. We are building an essential infrastructure for the gen AI economy. Join us in creating a sustainable source for the AI revolution. Thank you.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  Man, I love these guys. I love the idea. I love the fact that they're in the dumpiest, cheapest apartment with the cheapest blinds in the world. I had an apartment just like that, which except I couldn't afford the blinds. I don't know if you've ever been so broke you couldn't afford blinds.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  That looks like everybody's first LA apartment they're in right there.

• 45:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's disastrous. They look like they haven't showered. They look like they have no life. All they do is work. I love these guys. And I gotta say, empowering publishers and advertisers to make AI-based ads is just so crazy and awesome. And random, like you said, you get a little nervous about hypnotherapy and an AI doing it. And you imagine making ads on the fly, like based on the content. It's like some tragedy happens and it makes like a, you know, a 9/11 ad in real time. Like, this is gonna get crazy, but it could also be super effective and weird.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  But let's spin the globe, Lon. Where is our next contender from?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  We're off to, I think this might be our furthest-flung competitor. Oh no, Sydney. Second furthest-flung competitor from Yerevan, Armenia. Here's Taktun.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Taktun, brain for machinery.

• 46:26Speaker 06

  Look around, so many machines in agriculture, construction, hospitals and factories. All these machines have a brain inside, known as a controller, and require a software interface for humans to interact with. The manufacturers of this machinery spend more than forty percent of their expenses to make that hardware and software compatible. The number of those systems around us is going to grow even bigger. There will be a billion autonomous robotic systems, replacing human labor whilst physical AI advances. Tactum breached the gap between software and hardware, introducing the brain for machinery and an environment for equipment builders to generate end-user software applications without writing a single line of code. It is also an AI platform that allows builders to deploy their custom AI models

• 47:10Speaker 06

  directly to our controllers. Now, manufacturers can build machines using Tactum five times faster while cutting their R and D costs in half. We have two revenue streams: software platform subscriptions and quantity orders for controllers. This brings us to six hundred K annual contract value. This leads to a forty-eight billion market opportunity across various existing industries, not even counting future robotic systems. We are a team of eleven professionals with expertise in control systems, software and hardware. Below, clients of Rafa Solutions, my previous company, some of whom will soon become Tactum's customers. We have built, uh, we have acquired four customers from two industries,

• 47:52Speaker 06

  generating two hundred forty K in ARR with a current pipeline of five million. If you would like to learn more about how Tactum will help make machinery smarter, creating safer, better world, where you have more time for fun and joy, contact me.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  Okay. Who doesn't want more time for fun and joy?

• 48:08Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I was spending so much time redoing the

• 48:13Jason Calacanis?

  controller units in my factory that I wasn't having much joy and fun, Alex. Well, I mean, we got two, uh, very different, uh, concepts here. Both of them are great. So, yeah.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I think Arcana could absolutely work. I think everyone wants to monetize AI conversations. But to me, that seems like a relatively obvious thing to do versus Tactum. Uh, i-if it can do half of what he said in that video, it's going to be a simply enormous company. So I don't fully understand it, but I don't care. I'm voting Tactum. Go Armenia.

• 48:47Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Lon.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  I hate to agree yet again and make it not competitive, but yeah, I was really blown away by this concept. If these guys can make this a reality, like a single system that can help connect all of our code to all of these devices all around the world and make them smarter, that's a revolution, I think. So, yeah.

• 49:12Jason Calacanis?

  Um, hmm, this is tough. The ad business and ad business tools tend to be small, and I think Tactoon is the bigger opportunity. But once again, I find myself wanting to fund both companies. I think one of the things we've accomplished here with Founder Fridays is it attracts people who are serious about being founders. The quality of these companies so far, and the quality of these pitches, and the real use cases for these is extraordinary. I think, once again, I might have done something brilliant, Lon. So I'll go with the sweep again. I'll go with, was it Tactoon?

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Tactoon from Yerevan, Armenia.

• 49:51Jason Calacanis?

  Tactoon from Moss Isley, yes, okay.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  All right, we have two more, Lon.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  This is our last matchup until we have our Elite Eight selected. We've got, first up, this one doesn't really need a lot of introduction. I bet I'll say the name of the company and you'll know what they do. From Denver, Summer West Whiskey.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  What do they do, Lon?

• 50:13Jason Calacanis?

  Summer.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Summer West Whiskey. That's the company name? You can see their, their video's about to start.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  I want you to picture a bottle of whiskey.

• 50:23Jason Calacanis?

  Another SaaS company.

• 50:23Speaker 05

  What does it look like? What shape is the bottle? And what color is the label? You're likely picturing a dark, kind of squarish-looking bottle, because that's how whiskey has always looked. You're potentially picturing something like this.

• 50:35Jason Calacanis?

  Mm-hmm. Maker's Mark.

• 50:37Speaker 05

  Maybe this. But this is the exact problem in the category. The whiskey category is an old-school industry with an aging demographic that makes new drinkers feel like it's unapproachable with its outdated branding and elitist language. That's what I like about it. Which is exactly why we're launching Summer West Whiskey.

• 50:52Jason Calacanis?

  Ew!

• 50:52Speaker 05

  A brand that prioritizes easy drinking with lower proofing and smoother mash bills that don't make people scared to sip it. Our product has approachable and unique branding that stands out in the bar and is going after a hugely under-targeted demographic of new drinkers, age 21 to 35. Last year, I launched a pilot program called Bravado Whiskey of 1,200 bottles, which sold out in less than 12 months, being sold only in downtown Denver. From that, we developed our flavor profile further, dialed in our pricing and learned what attributes of a product are going to truly make it stand out and maximize account velocity. My name is Noah. I'm an experienced financial analyst and I'm the founder of Summer West Whiskey. On our team, I've recruited industry professionals who specialize in their own respective niche of alcohol and CPG.

• 51:36Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go.

• 51:39Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Fantastic. I mean, looking at that, I do think that changing flavor profiles slightly to appeal to new audiences is not a bad idea. And I do think packaging matters. We saw that with tequila and mezcal. All of those went through a little bit of a revolution. I think even mezcal becoming a category, it's more smoky, I guess. And then some people like the sweetness of some Casa Azul or whatever, but the bottles become iconic. People like that part of it.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  And so finally, our very last pitch of the Sweet 16 from Chicago. Here is the childcare marketplace service, MomSub.

• 52:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here we go.

• 52:24Speaker 07

  64 different people to try to get care. With MomSub, Sarah submitted her needs, got matched to one nanny available when and where she needed care every week, met Jackie on video and booked her. MomSub handled background checks, scheduling, confirmations, payments and schedule changes. To take out all the hassle of finding childcare. This year, conversions grew 58%. Month-over-month, sales increased 27%. The take is mostly from hourly service fees, which are included in the hourly rate and don't feel extra, like subscription fees charged by competitors that only provide a list, not a match. Imagine if every time you needed a ride, Uber gave you a list of 30 drivers' names and numbers and told you to find one willing to pick you up. That's what middle-class working moms who need part-time care face. There are 7 million of them with a take of 600. The take for our B2B employer benefits is 10,000. There are 50,000 of them, so the TAM is 4.7 billion.

• 53:08Speaker 07

  With 4,000 parents and 100 companies per city, in 30 cities, we get to 100 million. Our team includes serial entrepreneurs devoted to building MomSub.

• 53:15Jason Calacanis?

  So MomSub is a childcare provider.

• 53:19Jason Calacanis?

  For affordable, trusted neighborhood childcare. And the benefit is.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  The cool thing about it is they're matching you with one person who they recommend as opposed to, you know, like looking up on Craigslist, you've got 100 people and then you've got to hunt and peck and try to find the one.

• 53:39Jason Calacanis?

  So I guess then the question becomes, how is this different than an agency?

• 53:46Jason Calacanis?

  But I do know that this is a big problem.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Huge. Yeah, I think it's just taking what an agency would do and putting it in an app. So now I can contact that person on an app. I can pay them over the app if I need to text them or we reschedule. It's all right there. But yeah, it is basically like if you went through a professional agency.

• 54:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so it feels, you know, this is always one of the challenges of our industry is, is it a service business or is it a scalable business? And marketplaces are great. They were sort of deriding marketplaces here like care.com, which there's tons of reasons to not like a marketplace because it's variable. People can set their prices, but for the providers, they want to set prices. For some parents, you actually want to have a variable in prices because some people might be looking for an au pair that's cheaper or a teenager to do babysitting. Other people might have anxiety about that and prefer somebody who's been doing it for 30 years, has three kids of their own who are off at college and they want somebody

• 54:49Jason Calacanis?

  who's CPR trained, background checked, et cetera, and just more dependable, right? First aid certifications, all that stuff. So both of these I'm lukewarm on. I'm going to go with Momsa myself because I do think it's a bigger problem and I'm, I'm not really into consumer packaged goods all that much, but I do wish them well if this was a consumer packaged goods.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Competition and I was an investor in that space, which some people are, they might really like what they're doing with that uniqueness of the whiskey, but I'm going to go mom sub. Anybody else want to go next?

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Oh, I got thoughts. Okay. So first of all, strong thoughts about this. First of all, we already have Alka Pops and coolers. We already have hard seltzers. We don't need to take the glory that is the amber liquid of whiskey, the tears of the gods themselves, Scotland's critical cultural supremacy and turn it into children's booze. This is ridiculous. The new bottle is ugly. Noah, I love you. I love what you're working on. Don't like this. Sorry. On the nanny front for mom sub, because so many of our friends right now, guys have kids between the ages of zero and three, we've seen a lot of this conversation. We've also had Winnie on the show. Sarah Moss Gloss Company that helps people find daycare. This is such a big problem. I think it's a huge opportunity. So mom sub for me, boo to Summer West Whiskey, but I love you guys. Good luck.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Well, so mom sub moves forward. I will say, I love the concept of Summer West Whiskey. I think it's an interesting idea. I also didn't like that bottle. The white bottle, it looks like rum. That's, that's a rum bottle.

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  That was the immediately I thought of that rum brand that's in a white.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  It's like Malibu rum is in the white bottle, I think.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  Oh, no, don't say that. Don't, don't bring up Malibu. I've got hangovers still from that stuff.

• 56:34Jason Calacanis?

  Alex is triggered. Okay. So now we have our finally.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  It's going to be an absolute blast. All right, guys, we have to do office hours before we go. Today for office hours, we are meeting with Sergey Poe of Orchestra. Now Orchestra builds communication software for teams. Think things like chat, video calls, AI help inside of chat, task management and all that in one platform. You can check it out at O R C H dot S O. Please welcome to the show. It's Sergey.

• 56:58Jason Calacanis?

  Sergey, tell us a little bit about your business and what your big challenge is right now. We're building Orchestra and all in one communication and productivity workspace for modern teams. We streamline, streamline communication and task management into one seamless process and save up to a day per week for on team collaboration. This is our main idea. In fact,

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Building some kind of remix tools like Slack, Notion and Zoom in one two and help teams to be more focused on what they're building without context switching, without problems and so on, syncing data between tools and so on. This is our main idea. We started to build it for our team because we experienced the problem of context fragmentation for years. And we use Oris right now. It's our main tool. And what's our biggest challenge right now is the go-to-market strategy.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  We understand that we have our first customers and we see that customers love our product. But it's really competitive, it's really competitive market where it's really hard to find your customers and to onboard them to product and to acquire it and to save it in products. So I'm interested in any ideas about it because this is what we're working on right now.

• 58:33Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so it's a really good idea to combine Slack and it's Notion. The big challenge you are going to have, obviously, and we've talked about this, I think, previously, is how do you get people off of Slack and Notion and Coda? Those are very sticky products. So I'm curious, how has that gone for you? Because I can't in our firm rip out Notion or Coda or Slack right now. So is the strategy to find people who are frustrated with those things for some reason? And why would they be frustrated? Or is the idea to go with people who have new startups and have them start from scratch with their new project or startup? Yeah, what's worked, Sergey?

• 59:14Speaker 03

  We tried both. And we see that the idea of acquiring users that understand the problem is better at the moment.

• 59:26Speaker 05

  So we don't have the new startups, they don't know about us. They know, for example, about Linear or Slack, and it's a pretty common tools to use. And for us, our, the customer that loves us much, that loves us really much, is the customer that came to us on our idea that we want to merge all these tools together and help them to be more effective.

• 59:57Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Questions from our other panelists, Alex and Lon, about the business?

• 1:00:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, where is the company based?

• 1:00:05Speaker 05

  We are spread all over the world. We are fully remote from Canada to Asia. And we spend, I spend my days between San Francisco and Barcelona right now.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Okay, because I was, I was hoping there was some sort of like, you know, national element like in Europe, you could lean on and say, hey, you know, forget those American companies, we're homegrown over here. But it sounds like it's more of a distributed team, so that wouldn't quite work. I'm curious, have you, have you put a lot of capital into traditional kind of GTM channels? Like, you know, social ads and search and so forth, and just found that to be cost ineffective?

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  Right now, we use, we spend our, you know, Orchestra is a very big product. And you need to craft it very, you need to make it very precise. And with Goodyear, it's like, we want to build something like Linear built, with this approach to the product. And we spent a previous year building Orchestra in close better. So we had a small amount of customers that use Orchestra, came to us with their feedback, and we improve, improve, improve, improve our tool. So right now, we use only founder's approach.

• 1:01:23Speaker 05

  So we outreach our customers with warm outreach, we show the product. We have pretty comprehensive sales spots right now. We talk to our prospects, then we make a demo, for example. For the CEO or COO, if they like the demo, we create an onboarding call where on this call we onboard all their team. We help them to set up all the workspace to show them how to use Orchestra. And then we support them in our support chats during all the days. So right now, we use founders-led approach. We don't use paid marketing, something like this.

• 1:02:08Speaker 05

  Previous month, we got our first two customers from marketing. I'm not sure how they found us, somewhere on social media. But they don't remember how they found us. Yeah, that is.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  So I am not a marketing expert, but I was just thinking about this as you were talking. One thing that I would try if I was in your shoes was simply to create a 10 to 15 user account for every single startup that's going through an accelerator and just make sure that I email all them and say, "Hey, don't want to give Salesforce and Slack all your money? Come try Orchestra. You can have it free for a year or whatever." Because those companies are incredibly cash-strapped and they're probably not as deep in their existing work app as we are here at launch, for example.

• 1:02:54Jason Calacanis?

  Have you tried that? Have you tried the incubator startup route?

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  Not yet. I just had a call today with an incubator that who told me this idea two hours ago.

• 1:03:08Jason Calacanis?

  So the easiest way to do it is to just create slash startups at your website, right? And have a landing page that says "Agorastra for startups." If you're under 3 million in revenue, if you're under 20 employees, you can use the product for free for the next 12 months. Sign up here. And then after that, you get 50% pricing until you're Series A. What this will do, to Alex's point, is it's going to give you people who are really focused, really tech-savvy, really operationally and product-driven customers. And that's really awesome because they're going to give you really nuanced feedback, founder to founder.

• 1:03:52Jason Calacanis?

  And that tends to be the best advice you can get. So you're going to learn a lot from them, even though you're not going to make a ton of money from them. And so I love it as a concept.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  I have one more, one more question. I, I have, we use Notion and Slack all day here constantly.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  And Coda.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  And Coda. And, and I have some very specific, using it all day, like mini frustration points. What are some of the big pain points with those apps that you guys are attacking with Orchestra and trying to sort of solve?

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  We have two main pain points. First pain point is channel fatigue in Slack. When your team grows, you are overwhelmed with messages and you, for example, have the general chat or chat for marketing and in this marketing chat, everyone discusses everything. You can't understand what's going on. In Orchestra, we have task focused chats, channels for each part of the work. It's a very, very small chat with only the people who involved. So they don't disrupt anyone else. They, they have all their context in one chat. They don't need to switch between apps. They, they don't distract everyone. And this is the first pain point that we solve. And, and the second pain point that we solve is that when you use, for example, Slack and

• 1:05:10Speaker 05

  Notion, your communication in Slack doesn't connect it with your tasks in Notion. So you need to, to jump back and forth between these tools and try to understand, okay, where is this task? What we, where we discuss this? It was a week ago or two weeks ago and you spend a lot of, you need to use your brains and you focus to find out what's going on.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I hate doing that. You know, I hate using my brain.

• 1:05:40Speaker 05

  That's what, that's, this is the two main problems we are solving.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  That, that number two that you just named, that's it.

• 1:05:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, if you are the type of organization that has a task list, a to-do list, and you're really into Kanban boards and you, you know, that kind of getting through stuff, which might be like a dev shop, right? Or you're working on releasing a new product. You want all the tasks in one place, et cetera. When you assign a task, the chat is assigned to that task. If you want to learn more, go to O R C H dot S O. We really appreciate people trying the product and giving Sergey some feedback. Everybody go check out O R C H dot S O. This is a company that went through our accelerator. They're doing fantastic, really innovative idea. I hope everybody checks it out and we'll talk to you soon, Sergey. For your time.

• 1:06:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, for Alex Wilhelm, Ed Lott Harris, I am Jason Calacanis. This week in startups.com slash docket, if you want to see the docket for Friday, we will not be talking about tariffs. Our national nightmare is over. Knock on wood. I don't want to jinx it, but hopefully we can go on to the next chaotic moment for. Or we can just focus on startups and building businesses again. Please, for the love of God, like.

• 1:07:00Jason Calacanis?

  If anybody could put the gun back in the holster, put the safety on and put it in the closet. Please stop shooting us in the foot. Dance, dance. We'll see you all next time. Bye bye.