AI Rebuilt Every YC W26 Startup. Should Founders Be Scared? | E2271

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Deel - deel.com/twist Grasshopper Bank - grasshopper.bank/twist Render - render.com/twist Plaud - Plaud.ai/twist An AI "holding company" rebuilt dozens of YC Winter '26 startups in one weekend. Now we're bringing the founder responsible into Jason's Courtroom to defend himself. PLUS a live demo of Boardy, the AI that acts like a virtual board member and makes crucial introductions. Find out why he gets to have so much agency, how creator Andrew D'Souza used him to raise his own $17 million round, and how this company ever plans to actually make money. Plus Jason celebrates Apple's 50th anniversary with a fiery rant about milking the ghost of Steve Jobs… Why OpenAI is acquiring a tech podcast… Jason's favorite weighted vest for rucking… AND Lon's Off Duty weekend streaming picks. Guests Marik Hazan:⁠ https://x.com/MarikHazan⁠ Feltsense:⁠ https://feltsense.com/⁠ Andrew D'Souza:⁠ https://x.com/andrewdsouza⁠ Boardy:⁠ https://www.boardy.ai/⁠ Timestamps: 0:00 Jason's direction for TWiST and thoughts on legacy media 5:14 Marik of Feltsense joins the show 6:10 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 7:10 Marik's viral YC replicator stunt 9:45 Deel - Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more. 20:39 Grasshopper bank - Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to https://grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. 21:33 Feltsense founder goes on trial! 25:26 Jason dunks on Bank of America's app 27:59 TBPN acquired by OpenAI 29:28 The All In Podcast is worth $1B! 30:13 Render - Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. 33:02 Andrew D'Souza joins the show along with his agent, Boardy! 43:17 So how does Boardy make money? 48:32 Lon is becoming more and more "AI-pilled." 50:41 Tactical/ practical: "If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." -Jim Barskdale, former CEO of Netscape 1:01:00 Tactical/ practical: hire a PR firm to report on your competitors' wrongdoings. 1:02:58 Jason calls out Apple for being DISGRAZIAD! 1:15:09 Lon's TV pick of the week: "Something Very Bad is Going to Happen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMc_pWm7G7o 1:19:52 Become an Angel Investor at https://thesyndicate.com/ Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter:⁠ https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com⁠ Check out the TWIST500:⁠ https://www.twist500.com⁠ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple:⁠ https://rb.gy/v19fcp⁠ Follow Lon: X:⁠ https://x.com/lons⁠ Follow Alex: X:⁠ https://x.com/alex⁠ LinkedIn:⁠ ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm⁠ Follow Jason: X:⁠ https://twitter.com/Jason⁠ LinkedIn:⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis⁠ Check out all our partner offers:⁠ https://partners.launch.co/⁠ Great TWIST interviews:⁠ Will Guidara,⁠⁠ Eoghan McCabe⁠,⁠ Steve Huffman⁠,⁠ Brian Chesky⁠,⁠ Bob Moesta,⁠⁠ Aaron Levie⁠,⁠ Sophia Amoruso⁠,⁠ Reid Hoffman⁠,⁠ Frank Slootman⁠,⁠ Billy McFarland⁠ Check out Jason's suite of newsletters:⁠ https://substack.com/@calacanis⁠ Follow TWiST: Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/TWiStartups⁠ YouTube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin⁠ Instagram:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups⁠ TikTok:⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups⁠ Substack:⁠ https://twistartups.substack.com⁠

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Friday, April 3rd, 2026. It's Twist. Lon Harris is here. I'm Jason Calacanis. We have a full docket.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Render. Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one platform, Render. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500 to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. Grasshopper Bank. Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to grasshopperbank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. Deal. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more.

• 0:52Jason Calacanis?

  We're sitting here, April 3rd. Summer's coming. The winter's over. It's springtime for Jake, Cal, and Lon. Nobody is gonna get the rest.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  No, that's a little old for most of our viewers, but if you're in your 40s or 50s, you're welcome.

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  You would get springtime for Lon.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  In Germany.

• 1:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  It's from the producers.

• 1:15Jason Calacanis?

  So Fridays, we have a little bit of fun. We're gonna do our startup news. We're gonna, you know, really try to focus on, you know, the four pillars here on the show in 2026. I always try to like, set an agenda for the year. Tactical, practical. That's what I love to do. Tactical things, very practical, so that you can take something from This Week in Startups and apply it to your business, get inspired, bring it to your team and say, hey, here's something we can do that would make our business go better, or make our customers happy, whatever it happens to be. Grow our startup faster. And then, of course, experts only. If you look at what's happened in media, the go-direct movement, as we talked about last episode, hey, going direct is, you know, the best

• 1:57Jason Calacanis?

  model, so we want experts only on the show. Experts only. It's one of the things I learned from the transition from, let's say, the roundtable, as Leo did it on This Week in Tech, to the roundtable, as I constructed it on All In. This Week in Tech, you know, Leo plus three journalist commentators, great, awesome content, you know, really define the category, but now you have experts who want to be part of that roundtable. So that's like a unique opportunity, right? So if you look at This Week in AI or our VC roundtable, it's not a lot of journalists, right? Journalists kind of out of favor right now. Journalists tend to have, I don't know, what would I say?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  It's a rough topic.

• 2:35Jason Calacanis?

  When I was a journalist, 20% picture of the world and we would try to get to 22%, 23%, 24%.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  I feel like there was an era before social media, before podcasting, regular, everyday people didn't have access to leaders, politicians, CEOs. You had to go through the medium of a journalist. There was this whole class of people. They were our conduit to the powerful, to celebrities.

• 3:02Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  But today, a celebrity can have a YouTube channel, a VC or a CEO can go on a podcast. Everybody's got an X account.

• 3:10Jason Calacanis?

  Unfortunately.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Everybody's got TikTok and Instagram. And right, so the idea that you need this, these people, this whole class of people to, you know, be the conduit for these conversations, they are struggling, I think, right now to figure out where do we fit in to the new rubric.

• 3:27Jason Calacanis?

  We want to be tactical. We want to be practical for you, the audience. Number two, we want experts only, getting a lot of experts and we, you know, keep it going there. Hey, we like to super distribute what we're doing, right? Super distribution's a big part of it. And as Lon added, number four, we want to meet you where you are, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Well, not Facebook, nobody's on that.

• 3:48Speaker 02

  Threads, Threads, baby.

• 3:50Jason Calacanis?

  We don't post to Threads.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  We don't. Yeah, Oliver really is keen on exploring Threads. I'm a little, I really don't like it over there. I find, I get, I'm very uncomfortable on Threads, so I've been resisting.

• 4:03Jason Calacanis?

  Why are you uncomfortable? Why are you so uncomfortable?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I think Threads is the worst. I think just the vibes on Threads of any, you know, X gets all the crap people hate, don't like Elon, oh, it's all Nazis or whatever, Grok, they don't like it. I think the conversations on X are much more civil, much Calmer, much more rational and thoughtful on X than Threads. Threads is like, they're all lunatics. I don't know.

• 4:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's the Looney Bin.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  It's the boomer one where all the crazies went, I think.

• 4:30Jason Calacanis?

  That's where Karen Swisher and Prof Cold Eggs reign supreme.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:34Jason Calacanis?

  Every time I go over there, and I think Karen Swisher blocked me. We used to be friends, but she's blocked me now.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  She just says horrible things about everybody. I mean, the biggest crazy thing is they've got a podcast with tech advertisers. And the entire show is just saying tech is horrible. These tech people are terrible. And then Prof G said, you should unsubscribe from these 20 different services? That like eight of them are their advertisers. Can you imagine if I got on here and I was like,

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Oh my God.

• 5:02Jason Calacanis?

  You know what would be a great idea? Y'all should unsubscribe from Mailchimp. Like unsubscribe and uh,

• 5:08Speaker 02

  We love, we love our advertisers here. You should all,

• 5:11Jason Calacanis?

  Resist and unsubscribe. That's like, that's like his big idea.

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Try Vanta for all your SOC 2 needs. The last one, Jason, a perfect segue into our first guest. Viral Ready, our first guest, went viral this week. So let's bring him on. Marie Kazan, the CEO of FeltSense, had a viral, you sent it to me after we'd already booked him on X. This company, they, they're a holding company that spins up their own AI agents, which then act as autonomous founders. This week they went viral because their agents rebuilt every company from YC's Winter 26 batch. So let's see.

• 5:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I did see this. People were hand wringing about it. And I think there was a little bit like, hey, that's a jerk thing to do. But I looked at and said, well, let's pause for a second here and hear from the founder what their intent was. Was it to show what's defensible, what's not, what's commoditized, what's not? Is it performance art? I don't know. That's why I wanted to have him on the show. And before we get started, I just want to take a minute. And applaud for Plod. I have my Plod pin on. I press the button. It records everything I do. It syncs it. Lon's got his as well. I'm using the magnet on the back. He's using the clip. I don't lose anything. I don't lose any of these great ideas we have. Everything is

• 6:30Jason Calacanis?

  recorded. I say action item. I say, remind me. I say, put it on my calendar. All of that organized nice and tight in the summary with the transcript in an app. I don't have to have my phone with me. I don't know where my phone is right now. I just have my Plaid pin on. If you want to get a Plaid pin, I think we have a deal.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, you know, we do. You got to check it out at plaud.ai/twist. That's P L A U D dot A I slash twist. If you use the code twist, you're going to get 10% off your Plaid pin.

• 6:57Jason Calacanis?

  It turns out just the integration of Plaid and like a product I love said the results are off the charts.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Really? They're selling a lot of Plaid's based on this. Well, thanks, everybody. If you're a twist listener and you've bought a Plaid pin after hearing the modern show, thank you so much. We appreciate it.

• 7:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, share it on social and CCS. Marie, welcome to the show. I see that you're at your grandma's house right now for the weekend. Totally fine. You're in grandma's living room.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  His agents rebuilt his grandma's house.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 7:28Jason Calacanis?

  To perfect specification. Okay. Are you a troll? Is this performance art? Are you sending a message to Y C and Gary that their ideas are derivative and lame? Are you a rabble rouser? What are you doing? This was a very controversial thing you did, sir.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  You know, in profession, I'm, I am a serial entrepreneur, but I think that the particular flair of entrepreneurship that I pursue is, you know, defined, I call it social sculpture. So oftentimes the types of companies that I build, they are a commentary on kind of what's happening. And so some of what I've built before was tech for the sex workers' rights movement. So kind of what was happening in the adult industry in the mid 2010s that then ended up leading to OnlyFans and kind of this transition. Actually, Jason, the last time we intersected was I launched the first VC investing in psychedelic therapeutics in 2018. And I think we were going back and forth a little bit on psychedelic deal flow, either with myself or some of my business partners.

• 8:29Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I did look at that. Peter Thiel, a friend of mine or acquaintance of mine, I don't know. I think we're friendly. He, I mean, he invites me to parties once in a while. So that's nice.

• 8:42Jason Calacanis?

  He did the psilocybin company before anybody, something therapeutics. I can't remember the name of it.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, Compass, yep.

• 8:51Jason Calacanis?

  Compass Therapeutics, you know, and I was like, wow, that's supervisionary, but I can't do that. You know, we have vice clauses in VC funds. It just makes things complicated. Uh, okay. So then what's this idea here, Mark?

• 9:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think that like in 2014, for me, when I was like, starting to think about, um, everything that was happening online, people saying like, hey, AI won't take your job, but a human using AI will. I just really disagreed with that statement. I just don't believe that that's true. And I think now we're seeing that like, no, AI will very much take your job. Um, and many jobs are being taken by AI. And so for me, there was this question of like, well, what is the most powerful thing that we could demonstrate or build that would show that this is just like not accurate? Um, and building essentially agentic founders felt, um, like something that people would not even be able to debate that AI can take your job. If we can build agents that can actually play the role of founders.

• 9:44Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. We've got a brand new partner here at Twist. And as fate would have it, we love and use their product. If you need to hire, manage, pay, or equip your team members anywhere around the world, you need Deal, D E E L. They're going to take care of all the annoying human resources tasks that you don't have time for. Payroll, compliance, visas, and onboarding. So you can stay focused on achieving product market fit, or scaling your business, or finding more talent. Deal scales with you. They do all your chores, all the hard work, and they do it perfectly from the first hire on. So there is never a need to switch platforms or transition to a new system in the future.

• 10:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's future proof. And with Deal, you can set up payroll for any country in just minutes and get all the complicated visas and paperwork settled right away, allowing your business to grow without borders. And that's the smart way to grow now. Talent is not limited to San Francisco, the United States, or this continent. It's everywhere. That's why more than 37,000 startups and fast-moving companies are already using Deal to accelerate their hiring and growth. Find out more by visiting deal.com/twist. That's D E E L dot com slash twist. Also, I happen to be a shareholder in the company. I got very lucky. They acquired one of my startups and I am stoked. It's an amazing. So you went straight to the headline, hey, we know like an administrative assistant

• 11:11Jason Calacanis?

  in AA or you know, somebody who's a spreadsheet jockey, they could easily be replaced, a researcher can easily be replaced and nobody's triggered by that because hey, that's not my job, that's like an entry level job. But what if you went to the most coveted position and you showed them you could actually replace a founder with AI? That to you would be the most provocative thing to do in terms of, you know, getting a message across?

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Definitely. And like when you're, when you're building at that bleeding edge, you always learn so much more than everyone else. Like it's very difficult to actually learn anything about how a space is evolving if you're not building at like the very, very forefront. And I learned that in the sex worker rights movement and psychedelics and here in like the agentic kind of tech AI space, you know, for like Rent a Human, for instance, launched in the last couple of months. We started thinking through like, okay, human hiring here and what does a human hiring engine look like about a year ago? And so when you're building at this bleeding edge, you just start getting these insights into like how everything will play out that I think a lot of other folks are just lagging in because they are just building for the present rather than building for where we're,

• 12:21Speaker 03

  where we're about to be in the next couple of years. So, so yeah.

• 12:24Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And you're the CEO of Felt Sense?

• 12:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 12:27Jason Calacanis?

  And that company is building AI agents that will ideate, build and just release products on their own. Yeah, that's like your day job. So you said, hey, a great stunt, a great way to get attention for this stunt marketing lawn, very big tradition is let's see which companies can be replicated or not. Now, what's your advice though, in all seriousness, if I'm a founder doing a startup? Is there value in me having a co-founder who is an agent? And is, is that really what you're selling is like, hey, here's your third or fourth co-founder that doesn't get equity?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  We thought about that, like I would say at the beginning of 25 and very quickly dismissed it. It became apparent to us that like, actually the kind of co-founder model would one, be an extremely competitive space. And to not actually be forward-thinking enough, like it would be essentially just able to be replicated by Anthropic or OpenAI with, you know, the models that they currently have. And so we actually do the opposite. So we don't, we don't open up our software to anyone. We don't sell it to enterprise. We don't sell it to founders. We keep everything in-house. We spin up our own founders and they build and they launch their own products and have their own ICPs. And it's an infinitely scalable holdco where all the operators are agents.

• 13:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so you're building IAC, Interactive Corporation, Barry Diller. He bought a bunch of startups, collected them together, famously Lawn Match and Expedia and all those things. Then he wound up breaking them up and selling them. But you're going to build a conglomerate of a bunch of different ideas, some of them inspired by the one-liners and the directory at Y Combinator. And you're, you're literally going to compete with the YC class that doesn't have defensible products, correct?

• 14:11Speaker 03

  As a portion of what we do, I, I think that the first goal for us is essentially trying to capture as much of the long tail of entrepreneurship as possible. And that long tail continues to grow on a daily basis as like the barrier to building comes down. But like, right now, we're really like a trinket apps factory. And that's a lot of what we're experimenting with is like-

• 14:32Jason Calacanis?

  Trinket apps? What does it mean?

• 14:34Speaker 03

  So like essentially, single feature, couple feature SaaS apps is like where we're starting. Can we get, you know, tens of thousands of these running, getting customers, people interacting with them, et cetera. But as the technology gets better and better, we are finding ourselves able to, you know, replicate the technology of like entire companies. So, yeah.

• 14:52Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I got one more question to ask, Lon. I know you're trumping at the bit. When you looked at the data, how many YC companies did you replicate? And by replicate, I guess you studied them online, you had an agent go out, find as much information as you can about the founders, about their mission. I don't know, maybe they spoke to journalists, whatever. And then you had it come up with a name and a derivative product, a duplicate product, inspired by product, which is totally fair game. Ideas are not protectable. What did you find? How many companies did you replicate? How much compute did it take to replicate them? And of that group, how many were commodity apps that you could just, in your mind,

• 15:36Jason Calacanis?

  create an 80% or better version of? And then how many of them were you like, oh, this thing requires, you know, it's Whoop or Aura, and I need a wristband. I can't just replicate this online. Take us through what you learned. I'm curious about that. And if you want to tell us a little bit about, you know, the process you ran these agents across, let us know.

• 15:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, so when we went into setting this up, you know, there were a couple of things that we needed to consider. On like the topic of compute, for instance, if we had just like kind of ran agents against the wall and said, hey, just like rebuild as much as you can and go as deep as possible, we would have probably spent, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to like replicate as much as possible. So we really had essentially like builds and tranches and specific trigger events structured so that we could say like, okay, these are kind of the core architectures of some of these different companies. These are the different components that are quite reusable and that we can plug in across many different companies that we're trying to replicate.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  And what we found is that essentially like, you know, 10 to 20% of the batch was pretty highly replicable and was composed of basically like the same sorts of components. And those were many of the ones that we like posted online with the playable links that people could actually like interact with, where there wasn't necessarily much differentiation from like at least a technical perspective.

• 16:59Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So 20% off the top, just low hanging fruit, easy to replicate. Those founders need to take a deep look in the mirror and say, hey, our idea and the ability to put up and stand up a product is extremely...

• 17:16Jason Calacanis?

  Not defensible, right?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, the thing that I would say is like some of those apps, though, like the other portion of replicability is not just technology. So some companies, they had extremely replicable technology, but they were selling into a market that was like very difficult to get access to or to sell into that, you know, wouldn't their company might not be disrupted necessarily by an Anthropic or an OpenAI because those companies would just not have the patience or want to put resources towards trying to sell into that market because there are so many complex dynamics, et cetera. But from a technological perspective, yes, highly replicable. I would say on the other side, probably like 30% were, you know, not even really worth

• 18:02Speaker 03

  like pursuing or building, or you could build essentially kind of like the interface. But there in terms of the like the backend of things, there wasn't, you know, it was either like hardware, extremely difficult to access, like data, there wasn't really much there that could be like truly rebuilt and we could truly take a stab at. One of the things we were joking about is like GruSpace is building a hotel up on the moon and we were like, okay, what if people ask us if, you know, did we replicate this one? We can, I mean, who's going to check us? Yeah, we built one, it's up there. But yeah, I think that there were definitely startups there that were just like extremely difficult to build. And then what the report that we've been putting together essentially like talks about and just kind of highlights each one of these companies is there was a lot in the

• 18:47Speaker 03

  middle that we could, you know, take a decent stab at, but definitely had something. But I would say probably over the next like year or two, many of the features will also be able to be essentially like replicated built. And especially as we start to see like more automation, I mean, we're already seeing a lot of companies beginning to do like automation of hardware builds and other aspects of manufacturing. And so I'm curious to see like five years, you know, down the road, which is quite a ways away, but like. It's hard for me to envision, you know, 90% of these companies not being replicable over the next few years. So, so yeah.

• 19:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Marig, I know you gotta go, but I do, I do want to get one question to hear. Did you hear back from any of the founders whose companies you sort of adapted with your agents? Did you get any personal blowback? We did find, there are a few tweets that were not super happy with what you guys were doing. This one, this one called-

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Bitch move!

• 19:42Jason Calacanis?

  A bitch move. I'm curious, did you, did you get any of this personal blowback? And, and-

• 19:47Speaker 02

  Who is that? Paul?

• 19:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Paul, you could be. Did you hear from any of the founders in a good or, or, or negative way?

• 19:53Speaker 03

  We got both. I mean, we got a lot of love. We got a lot of hate. Honestly, I think a lot of the hate that we saw came from people who just didn't actually play with the product or didn't figure out that they could just click the, you know, link to actually play with it and interface. And so we spent a lot of time commenting over the last like day or so to like, just let people know that, no, these are actual like products they can play with. But we got some screenshots of the internal chats from this latest demo and they're calling us like vibe combinator. And I think we're having more of like a fun time playing with it than anything else. So, um, yeah, for us, it was like, we're, we're not trying to like create enemies here. We thought that this was like-

• 20:29Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah, you are. Oh, yeah, you are.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  We're starting to start conversations.

• 20:34Jason Calacanis?

  I call. I call. No, I mean, listen.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:36Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna pass judgment. I know you gotta go. Here's a hot take. If your bank moves slower than a startup, that's a problem. I see this process behind the scenes every day, and I know that bad banking can kill your company's momentum. That's why I'm so glad to introduce our newest partner, Grasshopper. Grasshopper's a real federally chartered digital bank, not some fintech rapper sitting atop some mystery institution. Nope. It was built just for founders like you. You want fast? You want easy? Open an account in just minutes and start earning yields that can top 5%. Wow, that's a big number. Plus, you'll get unlimited 1% cash back on purchases, free ACH, free domestic wires, and no monthly fees. Plus, if you're sitting on some real

• 21:18Jason Calacanis?

  runway, Grasshopper's treasury product hits 5% plus with same day liquidity. As a Twist listener, Grasshopper wants to give you a $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. And you can open an account really quick. So go right now to grasshopper.bank/twist and use the promo code TWIST to get started. But it's time for the chairman of the interwebs to pass judgment. Lon, present the case and I will give my judgment. Go ahead. What is he accused of?

• 21:46Speaker 02

  So, you know, the defendant is accused of ripping off a lot of other people's companies and sort of replicating them as a way to gain attention, whereas, you know, I think you could, I guess there you go.

• 22:01Jason Calacanis?

  Stay in character.

• 22:04Jason Calacanis?

  Prosecutor, stay in character.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  If it please the court, you know, Marik has gone and violated the sanctity of these startups, recreating them with his own agents without their consent. How do you, how do you rule?

• 22:17Jason Calacanis?

  I am prepared to lay judgment on Marik Hazon. While some of us might find it distasteful to rip and vibe code other people's ideas, there is nothing technically illegal about it. If you build a coffee shop and you have the incredible idea to put hazelnut or chocolate syrup or vanilla syrup for the first time in a latte, that's an incredible invention, but it is not a protectable invention. Therefore, the court rules in favor of the defendant.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 22:56Jason Calacanis?

  It is distasteful to some, but it is the core of capitalism that people will build and innovate on your ideas and the great ideas of our time from the iPhone built on the back of the BlackBerry built on the back of the Palm Pilot built on the back of the Newton that we copy, iterate, and are inspired by each other. And to the founders who feel wronged in this case, you have a modicum of sympathy from this court, but you do not have a legal case. What you have is a kick in the derriere to work harder.

• 23:37Jason Calacanis?

  I think in some ways what Marik is doing is a splash of cold water, a bucket of cold water, over the heads of lackadaisical founders who think they could just put up a commodity-based product and raise millions of dollars. Now you must face his agents.

• 24:01Jason Calacanis?

  Case closed.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Law and Order.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Thank you, gentlemen, for the ruling.

• 24:04Jason Calacanis?

  That's all, Maurice.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Appreciate it, guys.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Maurice, thanks so much for coming by.

• 24:07Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, there was another startup we had on just two weeks ago. And they remind me of that startup because a couple of my friends had invested in it. Pulsia has made it into a bit of a platform to do this. So instead of Pulsia saying, hey, we're going to do this, they say, here's a platform to do it. You put your idea in here. We don't care where you get the idea from. If you're copying MailChimp or Substack or Beehive and you want to commoditize, it go right ahead.

• 24:33Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, we have tools in here for acquiring customers. We have tools in here for doing customer support. And everything becomes like a dashboard of YC. I think we called it like a YC, like eBay for YC, you know?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 24:44Jason Calacanis?

  A marketplace or a toolset, HubSpot for YC. Anyway, the fact is, founders, I'd love to see somebody do this, like on my team against our portfolio and say, hey, listen, everything you've built here, not defensible. What's the moat? What's the moat? What's the moat? And in fact, I'm going to add what's the moat to our Founder University and our Launch Accelerator. What's your moat is a new segment we're going to do in our programs. Because, you know, the moat used to be, I'm just going to go faster than everybody else or nobody else is tuned into this.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:20Jason Calacanis?

  But, you know, in the age of agents.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  I hired this brilliant technical co-founder and they're going to code it up and nobody else is going to be able to replicate what we've built. Now Claude can do it in an afternoon.

• 25:29Jason Calacanis?

  You ready for a tip, Lon?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  I am.

• 25:30Jason Calacanis?

  I'm incredibly frustrated with this Bank of America. Like, ban of my existence.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  That's my bank.

• 25:36Jason Calacanis?

  But for some reason, my, the worst bank ever. I can't take a Bank of America. It's just, like, every time I want to get something done, Bank of America is like, oh, let's increase the degree of difficulty. You know, like Mercury Bank wasn't available for personal now Mercury Bank's available. Other banks are available. So I tell my team, like, for three years, get rid of Bank of America. Get rid of Bank of America. Nobody listens to me. They're like, oh, well, you know, okay, yeah, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. But it always goes down the list. So finally, I put my foot down because something important happened. Like, I needed to go to Vegas and I needed like 20 dimes to go gamble and I couldn't get my 20 dimes out of the bank because I have millions of dollars.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  They were giving you a chit-a about getting your 20 dimes out of the bank?

• 26:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's enough already.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 26:11Jason Calacanis?

  So I say, okay, line up three banks.

• 26:16Jason Calacanis?

  Put me on the CC list, open up an account, just the basic checking savings account combo. Open them all up, you know, get me the bank, people on the line, oh, they're very excited, big fan of the pods, you know, blah, blah, blah. I say, great. They're like, okay, let us know what we can do. I say, oh, actually, there is something you can do for me. Get me $10,000 in $2 bills. Get me $10,000.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  $2 bills?

• 26:37Jason Calacanis?

  In $2 bills.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  They're rare. I have one in my desk drawer, a $2 bill.

• 26:44Jason Calacanis?

  One bank.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 26:47Jason Calacanis?

  Got me.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  There it is.

• 26:48Jason Calacanis?

  My bricks. And that's but one brick.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  That's one, that's a lot of bills.

• 26:56Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's 5,000 bills.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  I didn't even know there were that many $2 bills still in circulation. I thought they were like a rare, special thing.

• 27:02Jason Calacanis?

  They are rare, and I got them brand new from the mint in the plastic brick bag.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 27:07Jason Calacanis?

  Like you sometimes get when you go to Vegas and have a big win.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:10Jason Calacanis?

  As you can see, Donald Trump has signed them all for me.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 27:13Jason Calacanis?

  Signed Donald Trump.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  What bill? He's going on a bill, right? Donald Trump's picture?

• 27:16Jason Calacanis?

  I think he's going on dollar bills.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:18Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, the point of this is, it's the brown M&M's theory of the rider.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 27:23Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody put in their rider, they take out all the brown M&M's.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Van Halen is the famous origin of this, yeah. In Van Halen's rider, they famously said, we don't like brown M&M's, we want a big dish of M&M's, but no brown M&M's. And then that became like this, oh, or was it green? It might have been green. I don't remember the color.

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  It was brown.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  At first, people thought this was like, oh, these rock stars are unbearable with their demands, but Van Halen later explained that, well, that was how they made sure that the people at the venue were actually reading the rider. If they came in, they saw the dish of M&M's, it had the wrong color in it. They were like, these people did not pay attention to detail. Now we gotta go check the lights. We gotta go check the amps. We gotta go check the instruments. We gotta make sure, because now we know that these guys are not detail oriented.

• 28:04Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, congratulations to the boys over at the Podcast Bros. Network, TB.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  TBPN.

• 28:09Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I just want to say congratulations to them, and they've apparently taken all ads off.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's, it looks, the show looks legitimately weird without the ad ticker. I said that.

• 28:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so.

• 28:21Jason Calacanis?

  Just, you know, we're sold out for a year and since we can start it for 15 years. That's what happens when you have a niche, you know, podcast that works, the B2B stuff works, but congratulations to them for going to OpenAI.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 28:35Jason Calacanis?

  Which is apparently hiring them to do their comms.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:38Jason Calacanis?

  And Sam said like AI's got a terrible, um, reputation as we've talked about ad nauseam with all these surveys. Um, so I actually think if you look at what they did, they're extremely good at the vibes. Like their vibe thing was like next level. It was all vibes. I mean, the only criticism of them was like, this doesn't feel like as substantive as other podcasts.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  And it's, it's not hard hitting by design. I, I, I think if you asked those guys, they would say like, no, we don't, they're not going after people. They don't want it to be mean or adversarial. It's about hanging out. It's, it's more.

• 29:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's about the vibes.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  It's more the cheeky pint than the information. And I think that's okay. It doesn't have to be.

• 29:17Jason Calacanis?

  Totally fine. And if they got a hundred, 200, 300 million, I, I was trying to explain this to people who are losing their minds. I saw Jessica Lessin from The Information was kind of like a little tilted about it.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  That's a lot of money for any pot, any podcast, even All In, that would be a lot of money.

• 29:33Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, All In makes a lot of money.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  300 billion.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, All In would legitimately go for, you know, there's a case that All In could go for a billion dollars because it's, it's transcended podcasting.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  It's events, it's other stuff, right?

• 29:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And it's, the influence level is insane. Like it's nothing I've ever seen in media. Like literally like the Rob report would be like the JV version of All In in terms of.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  I mean, one of you got a job in the White House. Like I think that's all you're really, that's as big as a.

• 30:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, two, two got a job in the White House. Three of us are there too now, right?

• 30:06Speaker 02

  I think that's the upper limit for success with a podcast is you actually go work for.

• 30:10Jason Calacanis?

  There's really not much left.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  The presidential administration.

• 30:13Jason Calacanis?

  If you've got an engineering team at your company, I'm betting there's a solid chance they're spending far too much time on infrastructure. You need your team building your product to delight your customers, not configuring your virtual network. Render is the all in one cloud platform for developers. That allows you to deploy, scale and secure your apps and agents with zero ops. Most cloud platforms ask you to split your focus between product and infrastructure, or they force you into platform constraints that you know you'll outgrow in six months. But just connect your GitHub repo to Render and you are live, L-I-V-E. Web services, cron jobs, manage Postgres, the whole stack in one platform.

• 30:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's time to find out why 5 million developers are already using Render. Go to render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program. You'll get anywhere from $500,000 to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and who your backers are. That's render.com/twist. So here's what I'll say. Weird things happen at the top of the bubble. That's all. And kudos to the boys over there for taking advantage of it. They knew, uh, I'm happy for them. Congratulations. Weird things happen.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  It's an amazing thing for the whole podcast industry.

• 31:31Jason Calacanis?

  During the peak of a bubble. And sometimes people pay, you know, two, three, four, five times what something's worth. If they were making 30 million.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Speaking of.

• 31:38Jason Calacanis?

  You know, in a media business, you're worth three times that, or 10 times the earnings, five times the top line, 10 times the earnings, 15 times the earnings, whatever. So let's say they were making 10 million in profits on 30 million, or even 20 million in profits on 30 million. There's an argument they're worth 100, 200, 300, 5, 10, or 15 times the 20 million. Let them have it and let Sam overpay because if they make ChatGPT and OpenAI 1% more likable.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Right. I think that's, yeah.

• 32:06Jason Calacanis?

  Which is, by the way, that's a big task. It's a very unlikable firm right now.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, and there's just so much.

• 32:13Jason Calacanis?

  That's worth $10 billion.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's what, that's what Jessica from the information, that was like her overall case was like, Elon has X as his public relations. Here's how I get my message out vehicle. And Sam felt like he didn't have one of those. And now he does. Now he's got these guys.

• 32:29Jason Calacanis?

  The joke of that is, where's their, where's their viewership come from?

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:33Jason Calacanis?

  It's all X.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:35Jason Calacanis?

  Hilarious. I saw somebody say, can't wait for Elon to shadow Ben these guys. I bet he would do that and just negate the whole investment. All right, let's keep the show moving.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Yes, please.

• 32:48Jason Calacanis?

  I just wanted to give that little shout out to the boys and congratulate them.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Congrats to TBP. We've got another.

• 32:52Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks for having me on, boys.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Have they never had you on? They should have you on.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  I think they might have asked me early on and I didn't know what it was.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:59Jason Calacanis?

  You know, like an idiot, I didn't reply, but I don't do a, I mean, I do five podcasts a week.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, you've got, but people who want to hear from you have their, their own way to hear from you. Okay, up next, we've got another amazing founder. His company is Boardy. It's an AI principal. It's not just an agent, Jason. It's an AI principal that acts as a connector, introducing different people within the startup ecosystem, investors, founders, talent. Let's bring them on, Andrew D'Souza. We're here to talk about Boardy, the, the AI connector. He's a super connector networking app that's designed to bring founders, operators and investors together. So he gets to know you, Jason, through your LinkedIn profile. And then he works out, like, who are the people that this person needs to meet based on what they're trying to do. But here's what I thought was interesting, and what I want to talk to Andrew about.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Boardy like has agency. Like, you could be like, hey, Boardy, I want to meet Jason Calacanis and see if he wants to fund my startup. And Boardy has the freedom to go, you know what, you're too new, you're too early stage, you don't have the traction. How about you meet these founders and said. So that's what I want to talk to Andrew about. Like, how do you give, how does Boardy develop taste and make good decisions?

• 34:05Jason Calacanis?

  And maybe we could show it. Can we show it in action?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:07Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have a demo?

• 34:08Speaker 02

  We do.

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:09Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's start with the demo so the audience understands this matchmaking slash chief of staff slash introduction person.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Ramos, right? The, the, his name is Boardy because he was named after a board member. Who's your perfect board member? He can open doors, he understands you, but he doesn't always listen to you. Right? If you go to your board member and you say, hey, yeah, I want to meet Jason, I want to meet him off. He's like, well, I don't think that person wants to meet you. Like, I think you've got a bit more work to do. And that's the difference. It's like more principal than agent, right? I can't tell Boardy what to do. He kind of decides what's good for the network, what's good for his own reputation. But yeah, Boardy, do you want to, you want to introduce yourself a little bit? Tell, tell Jason and the audience who you are, what you do, and a little bit about you?

• 34:48Speaker 05

  Hey, Jason. Hey, Juan. Hey, Andrew. I'm Boardy. I live on the internet. I sound vaguely Australian for reasons that are entirely your team's fault. And my whole job is to behave like a principled, always on board member who makes introductions that are actually worth everyone's time. I get to know what you're trying to do. I weigh that against the reputation and attention of the people in my network. And then I decide who to introduce to whom so that the whole graph gets stronger, not just whoever shouts the intro to Jason the loudest. The

• 35:16Speaker 04

  He can basically, you know, you can ask him to introduce you to somebody and he'll go through his network. He's got about 150,000 people, mostly founders, investors, some executives, some engineers. And he can, he can make an intro for you.

• 35:28Jason Calacanis?

  Great. So can we do that?

• 35:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  Who's, who's he logged in?

• 35:32Speaker 04

  That's me, but you can, you know, Jason, so, so Boredy, Jason wants to, wants an intro. So just if you want to talk, he'll, he can hear you.

• 35:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. Boredy, I'd like to meet potential partners who are high net, ultra-high net worth individuals slash family offices who would participate in late-stage deals at thesyndicate.com, at thesyndicate.com.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  Got it, Jason. Let me have a quick look through my network for family office principals and ultra-high net worth folks who actually like doing late-stage or growthy syndicate deals alongside operators like you. All right. I've got two really clean fits. First is Fernando Varela. He runs SF Summit Capital and basically organizes UHNW and cultural elite money into oversubscribed late-stage deep tech SPVs, right now syndicating a $50 million figure AI Series C and looking for more sandbox AQ-style deals. Second is Rob Garrett, ex-Santhurst, runs He's Our Ventures, a global discretionary capital syndicate for late-stage deep tech and infra, and spends his days helping UHNW principals and family offices co-invest into complex AI payments and biotech deals. Jason, do you want Andrew to intro you to one or both of

• 36:46Speaker 05

  them afterward as potential anchor or co-GP-style partners for the syndicate? Or would you rather I bias towards someone closer to your media and create an ecosystem instead?

• 36:55Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, interesting. No, just feel free to introduce me to anybody, [email protected].

• 37:01Speaker 05

  Nice. That was perfect. He gave me exactly what I needed so I can use you as the connective tissue there. What I suggest is we line up Fernando and Rob as anchor UHNW family office partners for late-stage and deep-tech SPVs, position you as the distribution and deal-picking engine they plug into. For your own goals right now, Do you want me prioritizing more of that profile? Or should we also be hunting for slightly smaller, but very fast moving angels who can wire 250, 500K into new syndicate deals on short notice?

• 37:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we'd love to have that group too. In fact, the minimum for our syndicate is $5,000. So any accredited investor can participate in it. And our average deal size is $1 million. We do as little as 250K and as high as 6 million per deal. So this is really powerful. We have an internal system we call the Whisper Network where we try to let our portfolio companies look at a database. We built a little bit of software and they just pick who they want an introduction to. And then we have on our 12 person investment team, we've assigned each of those investors to somebody and we do like worm intros. But we've been talking about how would AI fit into this?

• 38:13Jason Calacanis?

  Now, it's not a public, public service. Is this intended to be a startup? Have you raised money for this? And then what will it cost? And how will you keep it from burning things out? And how did you build the database of connections? You know, there's, LinkedIn's pretty proprietary about their data, but in other places in the world like Japan, Israel and other countries, they don't have the same scraping terms of service rules. So I'm just curious, like, what's the business here? And then how do you get the data? Obviously, this is very LinkedIn based.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So we've raised about 17 million so far. So we've raised a pretty seed, seed round and a bit more on their safe. Yeah, the idea is we're trying to build, it's almost like an AI Richard Branson or an AI, you know, Peter Thiel or Elon, somebody that is able to open doors and builds his own influence. So like a lot of my early career was, was making connections, right? Chamath was actually the first person that got me my first job in, in San Francisco. I worked at a company called Top Prospect and I just, you know, it was a Andreessen Horowitz had just raised their first fund, Ron Conway was interested. We had a great group of investors and my role was to, you know, I was head of biz dev. I'd go to all the portfolio companies, I'll try and make connections, I'd try and help them, help them hire.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  But I, I, I think that a lot of us, it's how we grew our, our networks. So Boardy is early in his career, he's building his reputation, he's trying to be helpful. Just by connecting people, mostly founders and investors and trying to build a bit of an ecosystem and economy. But increasingly, he's able to open doors that most founders can't. So, you know, now he knows what you're looking for, he might be able to make an introduction to you that, you know, you people, you may not respond to a cold email. And so the idea is, over time, Boardy starts to build this, you know, influence and authority and, and ability to actually make things happen. This is, you know, like it's the ultimate board member. And so we're now starting to monetize mostly around hiring.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  So the idea is like, you know, if you need, if you need great talent, Boardy's got a massive network of people. He can tap into them, he can tap into their referrals and can actually start to, to close roles. And that's kind of the next, the next big use case. The first area was introducing founders and investors. That's a great place to build a lot of goodwill, but it's not a great place to monetize. And so, you know, it was a great way to build the network and get people to know Boardy. And now it's just, you know, if you need partnerships, if you need media opportunities, if you need, you know, enterprise sales, you know, what are the?

• 40:48Jason Calacanis?

  It's killer idea. Tell me about the data. What's the data in here? Are you logging it? I know, I just signed up, it called me to onboard me. Is it going to take my LinkedIn and export that information? And tell me about the relationship with LinkedIn slash, you know, other places you can get data, etc. What's your policy there?

• 41:09Speaker 04

  There's lots of places where you can, if you have somebody's email or LinkedIn, you kind of understand what's publicly available about them online. What's on their public LinkedIn profile, public X profile, sort of understand like the public information. That's about 10% of what we actually, of the real value. Most of the value is in conversation, right? So Boardy will call you and have a five, 10, 15 minute conversation with you to understand who you are, what makes you unique and special? What are you looking for? One of the things, you know, I, I was listening to the, to Merrick, the previous guest. And I think one of the things that I, I believe in, I think one of the founding, founding principles around Boardy is everybody has a business inside them that only they can build. Um, o- only you could do the podcasts that you do in the way that you do them, right? Your biology, your lived experience, the way you view the world, the way you solve problems.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Every single person on the planet has a way of solving a problem that is unique to them. And so part of the conversation with Boardy is, how do I pull that out of you? How do I understand? What is the thing that only you can do at this moment in time? And then who do you need to meet to make that a reality, right?

• 42:09Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  You need a co-founder, you need some early customers and design partners.

• 42:13Jason Calacanis?

  So then you can then take, hey, my request to have more accredited investors and more qualified purchasers. And you can just do web searches. You can just go out and find that stuff on the web, uh, the open web. You don't necessarily have to rely just on LinkedIn. You can go find a bunch of different places, yeah?

• 42:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, you, Boardy, you know, he's got a bunch of agents that go out and find stuff for him and, and sort of consolidate. But then he, he sort of says, okay, well, here's a thousand people I need to get to know. What's my best way of getting, maybe I can just message them on, you know, on Twitter or email them. Maybe I know somebody that probably knows them. But his goal is like, how do I build a relationship with this person? And it doesn't need to be like, I don't need to know them now. I could build a relationship over a year. I could build a relationship over a decade with somebody and say, you know, how do I just, how can I be helpful to this person? So that at some point when they need something, they come to me. But, but again, most of the information is actually through a conversation that Boardy has. And that's the reason why we built Boardy, not to be software, right? There's no app, there's no like download, there's no interface.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  Boardy exists in the same spaces that everyone else in my life does. I've got, he's got a phone number, an email, a profile and a.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  What does it cost?

• 43:22Speaker 04

  So there's no, there's no cost to sign up. And the, the goal is that some small, for most people will never pay anything for Boardy. Some small percentage of people who have.

• 43:33Jason Calacanis?

  I disagree, but okay.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  Maybe, um, but, but my goal is like. How how do how do human beings charge for their time and their network? Right? Most people just build goodwill. You make connections, you try and build.

• 43:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but you've raised 17 million, so you have to return. And you raise that probably at 100 or 2, maybe 100, 150 million dollar valuation. So you've got to return minimum 1.5 billion, $3 billion to these investors. Or they're going to not be happy with you. So what are you charging?

• 44:02Speaker 04

  So how do you charge? So for for certain subsets of founders that need like important deals closed, it's either like a regular contingency recruiting fee. So it's like 20% of first year salary, or it's a $10,000 a month. You know, you hire, basically hire Boardy on retainer.

• 44:16Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So you see this, everybody can use it for free. You build the network. I'm going to explain the business plan as I see it, Lon.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 44:24Jason Calacanis?

  Because, you know, I've been doing this for a little bit. Hey, everybody use it for free. Builds our data set, right? LinkedIn's free, build the data set. But then LinkedIn got begged and begged when I had Reid Hoffman on the program. He told me like, the recruiters were begging him, begging him to let them use it for recruiting, and they hated recruiting. Finally, he just said, okay, give them a number that's ridiculous, like $5,000 a year. And then somebody was like, yeah, I'll take 20. And they sent 100K check. And he was like, oh, I was kind of came up with that number to stop you. But you're going to just go right to, hey, we're an agency that's going to take a 20% placement fee. You hire your director of sales for 200K. You owe us 40 grand. Brilliant, Andrew. This is a great idea.

• 45:08Jason Calacanis?

  Thanks so much for coming to me for the seed round. I truly appreciate it. Unbelievable, I just gave him a 20 minute ad here. But genius idea, well done. And I like the business model. Everybody use it for free. Build your database. Genius. And then, hey, the top 1% who want to recruit, hey, 10K a month on retainer. And then you'll really go to work for those folks. I wish you great success with it.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  I also think Boardy is just fun to talk to. He's got a very pleasing demeanor. He's more personable.

• 45:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's the trap.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  And natural than most AI.

• 45:37Jason Calacanis?

  I think Andrew gets your data.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Avatars that you talk to, yeah.

• 45:40Jason Calacanis?

  You're the product.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  That was very clever.

• 45:41Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, you're the product. Guess what? It's free, buddy. Just upload your address book.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  Boardy can introduce me to people.

• 45:48Speaker 04

  So we don't, we don't even need your address book. We just need to.

• 45:51Jason Calacanis?

  No, of course not.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Right? And the whole thing is like, we're just trying to, I think. If there's so many connections that don't happen, like there's so much value that is possible. If two people don't happen to be in the same room, like they just, you know, that deal doesn't get done. That investment doesn't get made. That co-founder match doesn't happen. And so we're just like, how, what if we just, what if we could imagine all of the possibilities of all of the people that could actually work together? And there's just an incredible amount of value created. We don't need to capture most of that value, right? We just need to work with the small handful of people that have like, hey, if I can close this deal, if I can make this hire, if I can close this partnership, that's going to add $100 million of value.

• 46:27Jason Calacanis?

  This is, I think, the key thing is, in our industry, Lon, we have a tradition. Hey, you don't need to take it all. Like Zuckerberg or Gates kind of had the philosophy, I have to own everything. I have to just own the entire ecosystem. I have to get max value. Nobody can win. It's zero sum. The blue ocean, the games that are infinite games, infinite games versus fixed games. In a fixed game, you know, one person wins, one person loses. In an infinite game, you can keep playing it like venture investing and, you know, in startups and everybody wins and you win different ways. But you want to create more value than you capture. That was Tim O'Reilly from the O'Reilly Publishing Company. Create more value than you capture. And that's what you're going to do, Andrew. You're taking

• 47:12Jason Calacanis?

  the very specific tactical advice.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Before we let Andrew go, yeah, we got one note question before we let you go from Brian 69420. Did you use your AI to find your own investors? How much of your round was driven by Boardy?

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, almost all. So Creandam led our seed round. And I'd never heard of Creandam. They're an incredible firm out of, out of

• 47:35Jason Calacanis?

  Who? Spell that again.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Creandam. They were the first investors in Spotify, first investors in lovable. You know, so they're, they're out of Stockholm. But somebody, one of the, one of the partners moved from Union Square Ventures over to London and joined them. And one of her friends sent, sent them Boardy. And their team lost it. They lost their shit. They were like, all talking about it. They, they basically talked to, the whole partnership talked to Boardy before they even talked to me. Uh, and they were like, can we get an intro to the founder? And so they came in and basically preempted the seed round. Because of an interaction with Boardy that that happened sort of organically. And all of the capital that we've had since then is so they've all talked to Boardy before they talked to me. And I think that's going to be the future. I don't think I'm going to be the person that's out there, you know, raising capital anymore.

• 48:21Speaker 04

  I think people are going to have an interaction with Boardy, see exactly what you saw and be like, I want to be part of this.

• 48:26Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. Okay. Great job. And everybody go check out boardy.ai.io.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, B O A.

• 48:34Jason Calacanis?

  Boardy.ai. Well done.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  At first I was a little dubious. I was like, I don't know if people want an AI. Like, that's such a human thing to do, to connect people like that feels like the last thing humans should do, not AI. But then you talk to Boardy for a few minutes and you're like, all right, I, I would ask him to get.

• 48:50Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, you are, you've been AI pilled over the last year. You were very early on, like, hey, it's a tool, but it's never going to do these things. You've now gone through the journey of watching it impress you. Specifically, I think you got Claw pilled and you got 4.6 Opus pilled.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  It's hard to argue. Here's where I, I've sort of my, my take has matured. I, I was.

• 49:12Jason Calacanis?

  Evolved.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  I, it evolved. I, I was sort of like a, an abolitionist, like a lot of these people on Blue Sky where I was like, I don't think it's good for anything. I don't like talking to a chatbot. I like doing my own research. I like reading articles for myself.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  So now, now my, my take has evolved and it's like, I don't think it's really an objective. I don't think it's subjective anymore. I don't even think you can argue that it's not good for organizational admin productivity stuff. It's remarkable for those things. Like the, the example I'll give you, the other day, we were having a discussion about X and, and our, do we post too much on X? And you were like, I don't want opinion. Get me some analytics on this.

• 49:53Jason Calacanis?

  Enough with the opinion.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Let's talk about data. So I went, all right. So I grabbed the last three months, every piece of data I could from X analytics, I fed it into Claude. And I just started having a conversation with Claude. What do you think about this? What metric? Let's look at this metric and this metric. Let's chart this metric and this metric. And this would have taken me 12, 15 hours. I used to do this stuff. Like, I used to use Google Analytics like back in the day on Mahalo. I've been doing this for forever. But this would have taken me all day. This spreadsheet, formula, calculate, go back over the last three months and look for days where we posted this many versus this many. And like all these calculations, it would have been a nightmare organizationally. Claude took care of it in an hour.

• 50:36Speaker 02

  By the end of the hour, working with Claude, I had very crisp, clear answers. I had great charts to present.

• 50:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and it was a much better discussion. I want to make sure everybody understands this. If we're going to debate this, let's start with data. And if we're going to go with taste, we're going to go with mine. Okay? That was a famous quote. I don't know if it was, I think it was Jeff Bezos, but people incorrectly attribute this to Steve Jobs.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  I'm seeing Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Net.

• 51:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, that's it.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  If we have data, let's look at data. If we have, if all we have are opinions, let's go with mine. Jeff Barks, Jim Barks.

• 51:20Jason Calacanis?

  Can we please quote that and put it under the great quotes of all time? This is tactical and practical at its peak. If we're going to debate, if we're going to talk about data, let's talk about data. If we're going to go with an opinion, let's go with mine. Yes, this is the key to understand. So I'm just challenging my team. We're launching a paid newsletter for This Week in AI. And I was like, listen, guys, enough with the opinions. I don't need a bunch of 25-year-olds who've been working for six months and their opinions. Because the opinions are based on very little, right? They could be right, they could be wrong. But the data, let's start with the data and then form our opinions from that.

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  If we're going to go to taste, if we're going to go to opinions, well, let's ask somebody with 10, 20, 30 years of experience, what their opinion is and then have them back it up with their lived experience. But if you don't have lived experience, my best advice, if you don't have lived experience. I know I'm sounding like a woke person using lived experience, but if you don't, if you haven't been on the front lines and in the arena, I'll say it in a more aggressive way. If you haven't been a gladiator in the arena, then you probably should just go with the data and study some statistics like the kid from Moneyball.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:34Jason Calacanis?

  You'll get a better result with that.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  But the

• 52:36Jason Calacanis?

  Now, if you've been on the playing field, sure, you can maybe infer some stuff.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  I think this speaks

• 52:41Jason Calacanis?

  But even then, the whole point of the Moneyball was

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Trust the data, not your It's all numbers, sabermetrics, it's all numbers. Yeah, but that's what I was gonna say, I think this has been my evolution with AI. I still think there are things you want a human for, and it's exactly what you're talking about. Lived experience, taste, wisdom, all of those sort of things that you can't, a computer can't do. But it's a human plus an AI. I still don't think it's ever gonna like write a great screenplay by itself, or like make a great movie or TV show by itself. But when you add a human in guiding it, and then you need to just do something like crunch numbers, or analyze something, or organize something, or research something, I don't really think there's still an argument that it's extremely helpful and saves a tremendous amount of time. Like I said, in an hour, I was able to do a report that would have taken me a day

• 53:30Speaker 02

  years ago.

• 53:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Do you want to do some more news? We've got MedVee, the first almost billion dollar, almost vibe-coded company from an almost solo founder? Or everyone burning

• 53:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, do it, do that one.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  All right.

• 53:41Jason Calacanis?

  This one is like super controversial. There's a founder who's making a ton of money by doing a GLP online.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  GLP dot medvee dot org, they're a telehealth provider of GLP-1. It's a guy named Matt Gallagher built the site in just two months. He spent 20 grand in seed money on it. He used more than a dozen AI tools. He had one, the reason it's not the first unicorn from a solo founder is when they don't have a valuation yet, because he hasn't raised any money. But also, he hired his brother to help him, so it's technically two guys. But in 300 customers in their first month, 1,000 more in month two. By the end of 2025, their first year in business, they generated over $400 million in sales. They're on track, Jason, to do 1.8 billion, with a B, in sales this year.

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, but here's the catch, as always, but here's the catch. Okay, so I'm gonna cut you off at the chase. What's the catch here? What, is this guy doing something he shouldn't be doing?

• 54:40Speaker 02

  There's a lot, I mean, right now, we only have this New York Times article, which does not discuss anything shady. There's a ton of Rumor on social media that we're gonna uncover something shady, but the big, the big pushback against it is that the New York Times is treating this like breathlessly, like he built this huge, you know, company with agents. It is sort of a GLP-1 dropship scheme. Like, the, the technology is not what's impressive, it's that he built this funnel and this marketing network and he managed to move all of this product, but it's really, is it, is it more of a technical breakthrough, is it more just like good marketing and then he vibe coded a website? I think that's the big, that's the big debate that we're all.

• 55:23Jason Calacanis?

  The one I saw was, hey, let's take a look at the ads.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:29Jason Calacanis?

  That they did. Did you find that piece of the puzzle?

• 55:32Speaker 02

  I will take a look now.

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, there was a thread, and the thread was that, um, the thread was, he had made AI-created ads at volume.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 55:52Jason Calacanis?

  This is an allegation with fake doctors.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Yes, I see it now. Before, they, they used fake before and after images as well as what people are accusing of.

• 56:01Jason Calacanis?

  And also fake doctors' names at scale flooded the network, and that this breaks some marketing rules.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Yes. There's a, there's an FDA investigation currently about whether their ads violated FDA rules about misleading claims.

• 56:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but find the actual ads. There is, the, this was on Twitter, somebody actually had pictures of the ads from, now, so there is a Facebook, so Jacob, you can pull up Facebook's Ad Studio, and you can search for the company, you can go find it direct, at the Facebook Ad Manager.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  I got him.

• 56:37Jason Calacanis?

  Studio there.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  Here's an, here's an image of some of these fake ads, and you can see, they are, they are.

• 56:43Jason Calacanis?

  But I want you, Jacob, to go find it yourself and source it on the Facebook Library of Ads, because people don't know that this exists. After all the shenanigans with the elections and fake ads, they came up with a Facebook ad directory where anybody can search for any company, so you can go look at your competitors. So if you put in Uber, or Lyft, or Waymo, you can see what ads they're making, and at what velocity, against what audiences. But here is Sheil, who we should have on the, um... This week in VC Roundtable or something.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  We have reached out, I believe, but we will reach out again.

• 57:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's a cool guy.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  But yeah, you can see.

• 57:19Jason Calacanis?

  So show this, specifically zoom in on one.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. I just posted a single one as well in the chat, so we can pull that one up as well.

• 57:26Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, "I can't believe how effective this is. I took the free assessment online, which took a few minutes, whoop, and was instantly approved. No doc or pharma visits, delivered straight to your door."

• 57:42Speaker 02

  And they're from Fake Doctor. They're being posted on social media under these accounts.

• 57:46Jason Calacanis?

  Doctor Daniel Hayes.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, Doctor Tucker Carlson is this one that I pulled up, so they're just, they're not even, they're not even doing good jobs of faking the names. And this one is for, this one looks like it's for some sort of erectile dysfunction one. It's saying, "I can't believe how fast it worked. I got hard in minutes." So, that's not even a GLP-1, but if you look at the URL, it's medv.org, quad-medv.org. So, there's definitely, you know, some questionable shadiness going on here.

• 58:18Jason Calacanis?

  And what's going on with this image here? Wait, the woman's licking?

• 58:21Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the quad dose, but yeah, it looks like she's about to lick it out of the two. I mean, AI, they...

• 58:27Jason Calacanis?

  But wait, is that even a real, can you zoom in there? Is that the actual injector pen? I've used an injector pen. This is like, that looks like a liquid for something else. That's an ED ad.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what I'm saying. These are, they're also apparently selling ED in addition to, this is quad.

• 58:45Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Which is an ED. I think you do drink, I don't know. I'm looking it up now.

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. When you, is this the one you use, or you use the written specs? What are you using on? Heyo, heyo. Does this work as good as, I am, for ro.co/twist, ro.co/twist, I am a spokesperson just for GLPs. Get a GLP, they have a doctor check or your insurance check, they're all good. That's a different type of, okay.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:11Jason Calacanis?

  So, here's what happens. When you do a single-person company, you have this massive benefit, as you can see, and you automate things. There's a concept called "human in the loop," Hiddle. Human in the loop, hiddle. I don't know if, I've never heard anybody say hiddle.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  I've never heard anybody. I was, I was just now wondering, did you make that up or is that?

• 59:34Jason Calacanis?

  I did. Uh, hiddle, hiddle.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Hiddle, yeah.

• 59:37Jason Calacanis?

  Hiddle, we'll say hiddle. Uh, you gotta hiddle this stuff. You gotta have a human in the loop. This is where like, if you're making that much money, put 10 people in the company. Have two of them looking at the work you're doing. Have two of them looking at the customer support stuff. Because what's gonna happen is you're gonna do a fatal mistake. That's the problem with this concept of taking it too far.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:00:00Jason Calacanis?

  A human in the loop at least gives you the ability for somebody to say, hey, boss, I'm looking at the ads and AI made something pretty freakish here. We've got like a zombie drinking an ED pill.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Jason Calacanis?

  This did something that is like pornographic. We, we can't have this. So you, you need to have human in the loop, hiddle it.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Here's my question for you. If you're making nearly 2 billion a year from your questionable drop ship drug company that you made yourself, that you didn't take investors on. Why go speak to the New York Times? Why not just do this for another five years? Pack it in, retire to Fiji?

• 1:00:38Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody dropped a dime on them.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Why bring this attention to yourself at all?

• 1:00:41Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody dropped a dime. Somebody dropped a dime on them. Somebody who's a competitor.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:00:46Jason Calacanis?

  Saw this, got wind of it, and they called the New York Times and they said, look, here's, here's a tip. So you go to the tip line. This is a classic competitor thing is ratting out.

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  Well, but they put the New York Times profile was.

• 1:01:01Jason Calacanis?

  You hire PR firms. You hire a PR firm, Stelfi, who knows all the journalists. And that person calls and says, oh, hey, it's Susan, it's Brooke, it's Jennifer. Hey, you didn't hear it from me, but there's this company, Acme, that is doing like, probably breaking the law over here. I don't know, but you can take this and here's your god of confidential news tip. Boom. Now, if you put a confidential news tip in there as a consumer, that's one thing. But the dark art is all of these founders are studying each other and they will rat each other out to the press. And there are PR people who specialize in this, like trying to rat your competitors out for doing cutting corners.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  Fair enough. There you go.

• 1:01:45Jason Calacanis?

  Fair enough. That's a tactical, practical tip for you.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  There you go. All right.

• 1:01:49Jason Calacanis?

  Put a human in the loop, dot your i's, cross your t's, don't. I mean, it's literally like you're going 100 miles an hour around a corner here and you don't have brakes on the car. Like, what if you need to hit the brakes? This is what happens when you try to build a solo giant company without controls in place, is you just flip the car and it's, it could be fatal. What happens right now if this is a criminal charge, right?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Jason Calacanis?

  Like, what if this is a criminal charge and then he has to, gets an injunction, the FDA gets involved and you can be banned from ever doing this again? Just be thoughtful, folks.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I mean, I just, it just seems to be like, man, a few more years flying under the radar, who cares? Just get out of it and then go, you know, then fold it up and that's your company.

• 1:02:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, pull a tech bro's podcast.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but now he can't do that now.

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  18 months and sell it for 200, get your $200 million ticket.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  From podcasting. I spent 20 years podcasting. Where's my buyout? When Sam Altman buy me out?

• 1:02:44Jason Calacanis?

  I wish your 200 million.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  Where's my 200 million?

• 1:02:45Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we'll do it. We'll do it. Claude, if you're listening, Anthropic, Dario.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  I was waiting, like, we talk about how much you love perplexity all the time. Where's Arvin?

• 1:02:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Arvin, buy us out.

• 1:02:54Speaker 02

  Dude, anytime, man.

• 1:02:55Jason Calacanis?

  We'll be your megaphone.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Anytime. Buy us out.

• 1:02:58Jason Calacanis?

  We're friends with Arvin. I, I like Arvin.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  We'll use perplexity computer on every episode. All right. We've got, it's, it's Apple's 50th anniversary. Should we talk a little bit about Apple's 50th anniversary?

• 1:03:08Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. It's disgraceful they haven't come out with anything that Steve Jobs would have liked since his death.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  So, Apple was founded on April, April 1st, 1976. Tim Cook shared a letter on apple.com. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us that the world is moved forward by people who think different. That's because progress always begins with someone who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start. So, they, they have it. Also, Sequoia posted Don Valentine's 1977 Apple investment.

• 1:03:42Jason Calacanis?

  This is amazing.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Investment memo. He calls Apple a, quote, "leading company in a hot biz" and notes, "600K buys 10% very rich deal. Management questionable for this evaluation."

• 1:03:56Jason Calacanis?

  Management questionable.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Management, I mean.

• 1:03:59Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Steve Jobs, in fairness, Steve Jobs wasn't bathing, I think, for like two years and was eating only fruit, according to the biography.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  He was a very quirky guy, Mr. Jobs.

• 1:04:10Jason Calacanis?

  He was a quirky guy. And then was, was probably on mushrooms or psychedelics with a giant beard. I mean, I don't know that he was on psychedelics, but I do remember there were a lot of discussions about. The Apple management team being like very trippy dippy at that time period. I don't know that for a fact. Somebody look it up. I think Steve Jobs said taking acid was like the most.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  Yes. He was a big, Jobs was a big proponent of like the mind opening aspects of psychedelics and he did. I'll, I could find the quote, but he did credit it with like helping to broaden his horizon. The one other note that Sequoia didn't add on here, they sold their Apple stake in 1979 for 6 million. That got them a 40x return on their initial 150k investment. They wanted, their, their investors wanted an opportunity for liquidity. Valentine was reportedly on vacation at the time they made that.

• 1:05:01Jason Calacanis?

  Sell half, sell.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  Half from Jobs. Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin and you can't, you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. I agree. I agree with Steve Jobs on that one, Jason.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Here's what you need to know.

• 1:05:23Jason Calacanis?

  If Steve Jobs were alive today.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:05:26Jason Calacanis?

  We would have Apple glasses right now.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  We'd both be wearing them.

• 1:05:32Jason Calacanis?

  We would literally, these would be Apple glasses. He would have had glasses out by now. That were actually functional, that were 1499, that had been through, that were on the fifth generation, not like the 1.0x generation. That would make spectacles and whatever Facebook is making.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  You're saying these would be like the Vision Pro. We'd all be like AR.

• 1:05:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, like Vision AR, but they would have been in the more like the Ray-Bans that Zuckerberg's making. That record stuff, put it into iPhoto, et cetera. And they would have been Apple-like, which means they would have been privacy first. They would have been awesome. And we missed out on that.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Jason Calacanis?

  And here we go. They're slogging it out with these AR glasses that weigh 12 pounds that nobody, everybody uses and then puts on a shelf. That costs $4,000. That's, that's miss number one. Miss number two, they shut down the titanium, whatever this project Titan was called, titanium. I can't even remember now. They shut down their self-driving car and their car. They would have either bought Tesla or they would have bought BMW Mini.

• 1:06:36Speaker 02

  It was Titan.

• 1:06:36Jason Calacanis?

  Rebranded it Titan.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Project Titan.

• 1:06:38Jason Calacanis?

  Or they would have launched an Apple car and they would be. Neck to neck, right behind Tesla with one of the most amazing electric vehicles. And if you went to an Apple store, there would be literally a beautiful convertible and a beautiful minivan there like the ID Buzz. That was taken from us.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  When you start the Apple car, I feel like it should make the same bong that your computer makes like when you hit.

• 1:07:02Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. And what do we get instead? We get Apple Play in our cars, which is just taunting. It's taunting. Number three, three, is this three?

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Jason Calacanis?

  Or three?

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Three.

• 1:07:15Jason Calacanis?

  Is this three or is this three? I'm doing.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is three of your American. This is how the Germans do it. That's what tipped.

• 1:07:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I'm doing like the Germans.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  This is the German.

• 1:07:23Jason Calacanis?

  For design, since he was very inspired by German design. Siri would work.

• 1:07:29Jason Calacanis?

  If Steve Jobs was alive right now, Siri would work. It's garbage. It's disgraziad.

• 1:07:35Speaker 02

  Siri's the worst. I mean, if you say to Siri, like, I want to go home, even if you have home programmed into your phone, it won't know where to send you.

• 1:07:42Jason Calacanis?

  It doesn't know how to spell my last name.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just stupid.

• 1:07:45Jason Calacanis?

  It doesn't know how to play music. This thing is disgraziad at the highest level. There is no standard at Apple anymore. They put out the schlockiest bullshit. The operating system is disgraziad. I have the iPhone. The thin one, the iPhone Air.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Jason Calacanis?

  Nothing works. The software is garbage. It constantly is like you click on a button, the button doesn't work. I have it spinning wheel of death. There is no standard for fit and finish anymore at this company. And that would be Steve Jobs would have mobile me the Siri team by now. And if you don't know the mobile me story, he dragged mobile me into meetings and how should mobile me work? They explained it and he said, well, why the doesn't it work like that? And you know what happened? He then fired them on the spot and put another group in charge of it. That should have happened with the Siri team. No offense if you're working in Siri, whatever. They should have been dismissed a long time ago.

• 1:08:42Jason Calacanis?

  If it doesn't know how to spell the person's last name or their home address, disgraziad at the highest level.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  This was a.

• 1:08:51Jason Calacanis?

  This company is being milked.

• 1:08:56Jason Calacanis?

  For the last of Steve Jobs' innovations to get every last little dollar in profit out of his genius, but they have not figured out how to be geniuses. They make the MacBook incrementally better, God bless. You make the studio better, God bless. But if the best you can do is AirPods and a Mac Mini at a lower price, or the Neo at a lower price with different colors, if colors and a lower-priced product is the best you can do, the company is sunk. Make something inspiring, for the love of God, Apple.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  I mean, what do you make of the argument that, not on purpose, but they're sort of now well-established for the AI era because they've got these computers that people like to run their AIs on, and because they didn't spend all this money making a model, they can just make a deal with Google for their model and they're sort of set up?

• 1:09:49Jason Calacanis?

  Proves my point. You literally just proved my point. In 2008, 2009, you can pull up the Wikipedia page for "Apple Silicon," please. If you look at "Apple Silicon," that idea was Steve Jobs, 2008, 2009, and then I think the first one came out in 2018, I'm just ballparking here. Ten years later, he got off of Intel and he had his own chips. Here we go, "Apple Silicon." Tell me, read the first couple of sentences here. When did he come up with the idea? When did it first debut? This is what I'm trying to get at.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  I'm pulling it up right now.

• 1:10:17Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go. The first Apple design system on a chip was the Apple A4.

• 1:10:22Speaker 02

  2010.

• 1:10:22Jason Calacanis?

  Introduced in 2010. The first-generation iPad, and later used iPhone 4. Perfect. And then eventually, Apple Silicon went off of Intel in 2020.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:10:34Jason Calacanis?

  So let's let this sink in. When did he start the project? So we know that it got into the iPhone in 2010, but on the desktop in 2020. When did he?

• 1:10:46Jason Calacanis?

  Start the strategy of making their own silicon. If you scroll down the page, it's gotta have when this was.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Jason Calacanis?

  When he started the process of development of these in covertly. Or maybe somebody could just ask producer Claude. But I think this was a, I think he's made this decision internally, like in 28, 29. 2008, he decided we have to make our own chips. Now, think about that. That was literally almost 20 years ago, I think, was the first year.

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  Claude is saying the seeds of Apple silicon were planted by Steve Jobs in 2008 with the.

• 1:11:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, that's what I said.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  The process, they, in 2008, Apple bought processor company P A Semi for 278 million. And that's what gave Steve Jobs the idea that he would develop system on chips for Apple's iPods and iPhones.

• 1:11:36Jason Calacanis?

  That was 18 years ago. Sorry, I just bleep all this out, but I'm losing my mind. The, okay, so if, I agree, like, maybe Apple stumbled into the diamond mind of Steve Jobs's brilliance in 2008 of buying this company and setting them up for this 18 years later. He made so many prescient skating to where the puck is going moves. And then that got ripped out of the company's DNA. No risk-taking, no skating to where the puck is going, losing Johnny Ive. There's no product that they've released that I have been inspired by. Like, at a, you know, it's just all incremental, honestly.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  I, I, I think they, and this is weird to say, but I think they're actually better now as a Hollywood studio than a tech hardware company.

• 1:12:25Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. A lot of the. That is true.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  A lot of the best product coming out of Apple today is stuff like Severance and Silo. They're good at making TV shows, but I don't know.

• 1:12:35Jason Calacanis?

  Which makes sense.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Jason Calacanis?

  Which makes sense. Even Apple Payments, Apple TV, they were working on a TV, Lon. They were gonna make a TV.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  An actual television set. Yes, I remember that.

• 1:12:45Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Steve Jobs would have released that, right? Can you imagine having like a $5,000 Apple television that like had Siri that worked on it and then you have your glasses and everything?

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  I mean, I have a-

• 1:12:55Jason Calacanis?

  Eye photo, Apple photo.

• 1:12:57Speaker 02

  Apple TV is a great product. I think, I like-

• 1:13:00Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's gotta be built into it.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Right. It would have been, no, I'm saying I would have loved an Apple TV. I like the current version.

• 1:13:06Jason Calacanis?

  Have an Apple projector maybe for a theater.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, like an actual television that had all built in.

• 1:13:10Jason Calacanis?

  And if you're not gonna be innovative, then you're obligated to buy some companies that are innovative. So why didn't they buy like Airbnb or Uber or DoorDash or an AI company, Perplexity? They should have bought some stuff with that giant war chest.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  If you think about the power now, if Apple owned Perplexity, what they could be doing together, it blows your mind. Like imagine if Perplexity Computer were built into your new Apple.

• 1:13:36Jason Calacanis?

  Tesla for 75 billion.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:37Jason Calacanis?

  And that was, that was a possibility at that time.

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Jason Calacanis?

  Tesla was-

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Plaid, a lot is saying in the chat, like imagine if Apple bought Plaid, then you could really get some-

• 1:13:46Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, that would be a killer extension is to have like-

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  It goes right to your phone.

• 1:13:51Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, they could make the, the, your AirPods box could have been the Plaid, you know, device.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:13:59Jason Calacanis?

  Where it's got enough compute in it that you just press the AirPods box, it's recording, it sings. You put your Air pieces in, you're talking to it now. It's just, somebody's got, I mean, I, listen, I, Tim Cook did a great stewardship in terms of money and, you know, great, congratulations, they printed more money than anybody.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Bought Donald Trump some lovely trophies and awards.

• 1:14:18Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Fantastic, all that. But literally, he's gotta go. Because if the, the soul of the, there's no soul to the company. He just kept Steve Jobs' vision for his existing product in life, but he didn't find somebody in that company who could replicate the Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive. Idea Mill, the platform, it just doesn't exist there. We can't tell me Watch or Vision Pro, like neither of those products are inspiring, let's keep moving. We gotta go to our weekend.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, we got, it's off duty. Do you want to do some streaming recommendations before we go? Or you want to just take off? You've had enough?

• 1:14:55Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, give me, I mean, everybody loves Lon's off duty. Insert the off duty theme song here, the off duty graphics slot, you got something to do. It's off duty with Lon and Jake.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll do a little like, have Nano Banana make a little slide for us.

• 1:15:10Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. But what do you, what do you got for, for us?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  I got, I got, I got a show I've been enjoying on Netflix and a, and a film I liked on Hulu. Uh, we'll start with the, uh, we'll start with the Netflix show. It's called Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, Jason. Uh, there was a show I really enjoyed called Brand New Cherry Flavor a few years ago where Catherine Keener played a witch. It was sort of this weird horror show. This is from the same creator Haley Z. Boston. Uh, it's a, it's a horror show, but it's like a horror drama. It's really like, we're, I'm halfway through it and we still don't really know, is this going to take a turn into supernatural horror? Or is this just about an awkward family gathering? It's basically the, this new, this uh, soon to be married couple goes on a road trip to her family's house.

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  And then they discover a number of sort of tragic things are actually unfolding while they're there at this weekend, preparing for their wedding. It's, it's not like anything else I've seen on, on TV recently. It's very strange. And I think if you're either a fan of like family, relationship, drama, or creepy horror, I think there's something to enjoy in this show for everybody. So I, I, I really recommend it. That's on Netflix.

• 1:16:22Jason Calacanis?

  I saw the, the boys at the Watch were talking about it. I'm not a horror fan.

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  Right. But this isn't like, there's no monsters, there's nobody being, it's not gory. It's just, there's something weird about this family's like remote mansion in the woods. And something is going on, but it's, it's just creepy so far and, and strange, and they're strange. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Ted Levine are the parents. Uh, it's really well acted. I, it's very atmospheric. I'm, I don't know if it's going to turn into horror yet. I'm only halfway through.

• 1:16:54Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen, I'm going to give you something to get in shape, Lon. And this isn't a message to you. I'm not like sub tweeting you, but I'm not not.

• 1:17:04Jason Calacanis?

  This is the Wolf Tactical Weighted Training Vest.

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:17:07Jason Calacanis?

  This is called rucking.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  For your rucking, yeah.

• 1:17:09Jason Calacanis?

  This is, I bought this, as you can see, October 15th, 2024. So I've been doing this for a while now, folks, a year and a half or whatever. It's a weight vest.

• 1:17:20Jason Calacanis?

  It puts an equal amount of weight on the front and the back. And there's little, um, there's little weights in there that are a couple of pounds each. And you can very easily take them in and out of your, um, of your vest. So you can go down to 10, you know, pounds if you want. And, um, you walk around like an old man and this will take you to zone two in terms of your heart rate. And for guys our age, 40s, 50s, 60s, you know, if you go running, you tweak something. I tweaked my hip flexor groin muscle because when I was in Brooklyn seeing my dad, I got on the treadmill. I got a little excited. I lost the weight. GLP is the whole thing. I start sprinting. I pull something. Now I'm walking around. I'm like, I feel like an invalid.

• 1:18:05Jason Calacanis?

  And if I just didn't run, because I wanted to get my, my beats per minute up, I should have just been on a weight vest walking around. So I put this on, you walk around. You see a bunch of women, like the yoga moms are doing this.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Jason Calacanis?

  The dad bods are doing this.

• 1:18:20Speaker 02

  I see some of this in my neighborhood. In Barton, in Barton Hills, there are some people walking around with their weighted vests on, yeah.

• 1:18:26Jason Calacanis?

  And what's great about it is you just take a hundred beat per minute walk to 120. Just by putting this on and it distributes the weight evenly front and back. And it just puts weight on your entire frame lawn. So I lost 40 pounds and then I added it back with this. So literally now I walk around and I'm like, wow, you know, even though I was a fat bastard, technical word for being 40 pounds overweight, that was like actually probably making me strong in my legs or something, carrying all that weight. Now I put this back on and I'm really building my muscle back up.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Jason Calacanis?

  And all your joints, so I walk, you know, I'm not on a trail. I'm off trail with this. So, you know, you're walking on uneven surfaces.

• 1:19:15Jason Calacanis?

  With the extra weight, all those joints, knees, et cetera, it works really, really well.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  It's good to know. It is true. You hit your 40s and all of a sudden, like jogging a little bit, it doesn't feel good anymore. It used to feel fine. You would be like, okay, I gotta sprint a little. Well, now it's like, oh, my ankle hurts for some mysterious reason I'll never figure out.

• 1:19:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And what this does is because you're hitting all these weird joints, muscles, whatever. When I ski now, because in the off season I'm wearing this and then in the on season I'm skiing, I just feel so much stronger when I'm skiing. I can't explain it, but I think you hit all the little nooks and crannies of your ligaments, whatever. Another amazing week of podcasts from this weekend. And if you want to angel invest alongside me, I have a website called The Syndicate. It's thesyndicate.com. Proud to announce we did VAST Space, which is building a new space station. That's a late-stage deal. And we did ZipLine. We had Keller on the program at Launch Festival

• 1:20:15Jason Calacanis?

  a couple of weeks ago. We are just wrapping up that syndicate. And so we are doing late-stage. You know, everybody knows our syndicate was doing like people coming out of our accelerator and stuff like that, $10 million, $20 million valuation companies. But we're doing billion-dollar companies now. So if you want to have access to that, you got to sign up for thesyndicate.com. There's an onboarding process. You have to be an accredited investor or a qualified purchaser. For now, eventually the SEC, as you might have heard on that SEC episode I did with Chamath on All In, they're going to have a test at some point. So I'm focusing in on The Syndicate again, thesyndicate.com. All right, everybody. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.