Banning Chinese robots isn't regulatory capture | E2318

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent- NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com/twist Odoo - Odoo.com/twist MongoDB - MongoDB.com/ai Today's show: The FCC's decision to ban Chinese humanoid robots over security concerns is a boon to American startups, which now face a narrower competitive market. But where should we draw the line on security over competition? Menlo Ventures' Deedy Das, Weisburd Pierce's David Weisburd, Plexo Capital's Lo Toney, and LAUNCH's Jason Calcanis broke down how they differentiate between legitimate security concerns and purported regulatory capture. Today's venture capital roundtable also dug into OpenRouter's possible sale to Stripe, changing tokenomics, the Indian market for startups, and even DoorDash's drone-delivery business taking flight. Guest Links: Deedy Das https://x.com/deedydas Menloe Ventures https://menlovc.com/ Lo Toney https://x.com/lo_toney Plexo Capital https://www.plexocap.com/ David Weisburd https://x.com/DWeisburd Weisburd Pierce https://www.weisburdpierce.com/ Jason Calcanis https://x.com/Jason LAUNCH https://launch.co/ Show Links: The FCC's decision regarding Chinese robots https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power-inverters-and-robots-covered-list-0 Pacing the Frontier letter https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ Cursor Start https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-start-india Stripe may buy OpenRouter https://www.axios.com/2026/07/24/stripe-openrouter-merger-ai-currency OpenRouter financials https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openrouter-financials-suggest-steep-price-possible-acquirer-stripe?rc=g3wfdp Kimi K3 license https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE Pangram https://www.pangram.com/ Tau Robotics https://www.tau-robotics.com/ Zipline https://www.zipline.com/ Manna https://www.manna.aero/ Kindred Ventures https://kindredventures.com/ Autolane https://goautolane.com/ Salmon Labs https://salmonrun.ai/ Timestamps: 0:00 The FCC bans Chinese humanoid robots 2:18 Waymo, Uber, Robotaxi, and the global BYD threat 10:30 MongoDB - AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at https://MongoDB.com/ai 15:45 The "Pacing The Frontier" letter (1,100+ AI staffers warn on RSI) 19:51 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist 21:07 Regulatory capture vs. genuine concern 30:09 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 37:57 Have we reached AGI? 38:35 Stripe eyes OpenRouter at $10B 39:19 Does OpenRouter have a moat? 47:13 Kimi K3's license and neocloud margins 49:34 Claude Tag and the future of AI-mediated workplaces 53:26 Cursor Start, ChatGPT Go, and the India market 1:02:03 Have we solved AI detection? 1:11:20 Tau Robotics $30/hour robotic housecleaning 1:12:49 Job loss, and the social safety net 1:18:25 DoorDash Air takes on Zipline, Manna 1:21:00 Portfolio shout-outs 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 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. My name is Alex. It is Wednesday, which means it's time for a venture capital roundtable. And today, we have four incredible investors for you. What are we talking about? Well, we're going to dig into a ban on Chinese humanoid robots, calls to slow AI development by AI researchers, again, startup revenues in the AI era, and why Stripe may be willing to pay so much for OpenRouter. There's also NeoCloud compute deals, and so much more. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Odo, the all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at odo.com/twist. That's odo.com/twist. And MongoDB. AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at mongodb.com/ai. To help us get through all of that, we have a couple of friends in one corner. I have David Weisberg of Weisberg Pierce, a longtime friend of the show. David, how you doing?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  It's great to be here.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  We also have Mr. Didi Das of Minlo Ventures, a firm that has backed Anthropic, OpenRouter, Merker, and others. Didi, welcome back yourself.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Fantastic to be here, Alex.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  We also have Low Tony of Plexo Capital, which has invested in companies like Anthropic, StyleSeat, Rapbook, and Blavity. Low, good to have you here.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:25Speaker 00

  And last and certainly least, we have

• 1:28Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  of Launched, who has backed Uber, Thumbtack, Micro One, and Athena. Jason, welcome back to your very own show.

• 1:35Speaker 04

  It's great to be home. It's great to be home. I'm on the last stop in my four-city tour. And six weeks on the road, I am exhausted, but it's wrapping up now in New York, and I'll be back in Austin, getting ready for the school year to start, Alex. School year. You're a little before school year. Well, I guess you have nursery school in Suffolk, New York.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  Yep. No, September is my first. My first child is going to be going to school twice twice a week. And I'm a volunteer, so I've had to get background checked and all sorts of fun things, because being a parent is just one never-ending paperwork slog.

• 2:06Speaker 04

  It's a lot. It's a lot, but it's just so rewarding. But we had a lot to get to, Alex, so let's get going here. We got great guests. We got a great docket. And there's so much to discuss. I feel like I've been out of it, having not done a news program in two weeks.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  All right, well, we're going to start today with news that the Trump administration is banning Chinese robots. The FCC has decided to ban Chinese humanoid and quantipede robots by adding the hardware to its called "covered" list. Why? Well, the FCC says that, quote, "The network's capabilities of advanced robotic systems create extensive vulnerabilities and vectors for attacks that can manipulate the data and physical operation of the advanced robotic system in question." So, Didi, we just went three rounds discussing why banning Chinese AI models from the US would be a mistake. And so I'm curious, is the FCC's decision here on Chinese robotics different?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  I don't really have a say in these regulatory matters, to be honest with you. I do think open-weight models should be everywhere. The robotics space is a little bit different from language models, though, because I do think the risks for language and robotics are fundamentally different. I don't think I'm qualified to speak on what should be the regulatory landscape, but I do think we should have way more scrutiny on robotics than we do on language. The kind of damage vectors on language models are far more restrictive than what can happen with robotics.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Okay, so Low, I feel like this is the first time I've heard a VC tell me that they don't have the expertise to weigh in on a breaking news topic. So tell me, why is this one the time that Didi has decided to forego his spine and sit down?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Well, Didi is really focused on some big news around probably OpenRouter. If that's a little bit of a tease for what's to come. But I think he did make the right point, which is, you know, if you think about the ability for anything to go rogue on the software side, I mean, it's fairly contained. There's real ramifications once you start thinking about what could happen in the physical world. And, you know, I think those are the types of things that need to be thought through. I'm also not the right person to think about it, but, you know, clearly you can see larger ramifications beyond just some cybersecurity threats. If you start talking about what could happen if a humanoid robot goes rogue or a robot taxi goes rogue.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  David, I want to get you on this before Jason has his say. Do you approve of this? Do you think it's the right way to go? Or are we being a bit too protectionist and foregoing the competitive edge?

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Look, I think from a narrative standpoint, it makes sense why when you have robots walking around, you wouldn't want them to be activated in this kind of Terminator-style attack. I think practically speaking, it's a negotiation framework. Xi is coming to the White House in September. I think the Trump administration and their their strategy has always been to kind of anchor high and start to negotiate. So I think this is part of the overall comprehensive package that the Trump administration is looking to hammer out with with China and with Xi. And I think, obviously, robotics is one of the, you know, physical AI is the next frontier after the LLM. So that's a big part of the negotiation. So I think this is a negotiation posture.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Jason?

• 5:14Speaker 04

  These humanoid robotics, the fidelity is getting really good. They haven't had brains, so, you know, you had to program them. But I just got back from Tokyo, where one of the very popular pastimes that just started is combat robotics. And so, these are, I think, the unitries fighting each other, as you can see here. And these are like the mid-sized ones. So they're like four feet high, and they were beating the shit out of each other. They didn't have great aim, because they were being controlled by humans with, you know, gamepads. But you can imagine putting an LLM in this and just saying, hey, your goal is to take the other one's head off. And we don't want to wake

• 5:58Speaker 04

  up one morning, oh, see this here, the leg fell through the cage. So there were multiple instances where these things were getting their legs held through cages and had to be held back up. You wouldn't want to have a situation where one morning, 10,000 of these woke up with the instructions to take out a terrorist attack. I know it sounds fantastical. But if I told you, I don't know, 50 years ago, that terrorist would take two airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center, you'd be like, that's insane. No, they wouldn't do a suicide mission like that. Well, terrorists will do all kinds of crazy stuff. And drones are also the issue. So I believe now we've banned DJI drones in the United States, and we're going to be limiting them. This is smart. Same thing

• 6:41Speaker 04

  with self-driving cars made in China. So those will be on the road in Europe, the Middle East, etc., where they don't have as much of these concerns. But they're also going to start building, and the Chinese are smart, they're going to start building some of these things in America, or in Germany and other places to send the jobs there as part of their, like, Belt and Road Initiative 2.0 is my prediction. And Grayson from the Road to Autonomy podcast, which is a really cool podcast, where they just talk about autonomy, came up with this Belt and Road concept for what they're doing. And yeah, it's very important that we understand there's a distinct difference between the hardware, just like we did with

• 7:26Speaker 04

  Huawei. So again, I don't think we're ever going to let these things into the United States, nor should we. It's just way too dangerous.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Just double-click on that. So you would be in favor of banning Chinese AV companies from doing, you know, testing of autonomous cars here in the United States over the same concerns about data?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Of terrorism. Like, literally, if we went to war, there was a war in Taiwan. Now, imagine, they've hacked into all these cars, and they decide they're going to run into farmers' markets. I know it sounds fantastical. It's a 0.1% chance, but they would never allow us to do the same situation in their country. So that's when you can kind of find parity here. Would they allow us to put our infrastructure, our self-driving cars there? I don't think so. And I think we'll see what happens with Tesla and their self-driving. My understanding is they'll allow FSD in individual cars, but I'm not sure for how much longer. You do see them testing. Baidu just started testing with Lyft and Uber yesterday

• 8:25Speaker 04

  in London. So other countries might not have this concern, but I think since we're rivals, we should have this concern. Yeah, just like Huawei.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  One of the things that is interesting is that after Brand banned DJI and the drones, the Chinese drones, there was these pathways for South Korean and Japanese drones and other countries that are allies. So you could see a similar thing here, where we want the best technology in the US, we just don't want specifically China doing that. And that might toe the line between product innovation as well as national security.

• 8:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's also really good for the American humanoid robotics companies, because there's a bunch of them. There's Figure, Atronic, 1X. There's agility that I'm thinking of. So, you know, Didi, my guess here is that this is polite regulatory capture, in a sense. Like, we usually kind of put that into a negative light, but it's national security-driven, and so therefore, maybe people don't mind as much.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, if you think about the comparison between sort of the LLM and software layer and robotics, you know, the reality is, on the ground, on LLMs, America has a few huge advantages over America, whether it's the kind of chips that America can make that China currently cannot, whether it's the ASML sanctions on the kind of EUV lithography equipment that China does not have. If you take that and look at robotics instead, the amount of advantages are far more limited, right? China, right now, can make robots way, way cheaper than America. China is a manufacturing hub of the world. It is quite tricky for America to manufacture the kind of robots that even Unitree can manufacture today. You

• 10:01Speaker 02

  can go on their website and look at some of these prices. They are astounding that they can get this low. How do you manufacture a robot, a humanoid robot like Unitree? I forget what the price is, but maybe, you know.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  15K or something like that for their smaller humanoid. It's insane.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  How do you get that to be that cheap in America? If you fast-forward this five and 10 years, America needs to do something to be able to compete in the same way that it had to for the chips and LLM landscape.

• 10:30Speaker 04

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• 11:11Speaker 04

  they said in this ad, so let's just call it a really great database. Start building at mongodb.com/ai. You just build it in Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, you know, this other place. India's building hardware now. I think they're building the latest iPhone in India, so. We just have to decouple, DeeDee, and you're you're correct. There is a dollars and cents issue here. Also, we've had the surveillance cameras. They've been banned for a while, too. So ZTE, I think, is the company that got banned back in twenty one or twenty two, because, again, the Chinese have no problem with spying, stealing IP, any of it. So turning on a bunch of cameras that are literally bought for security, like, we've literally pointed these cameras and architect them to secure locations.

• 11:58Speaker 04

  So you're it's it's literally like, I don't know, ha- having Chinese, you know, having the Chinese make the vaults in a bank, you know, it's

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Who made your firewall? China.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  It's doubly done. Yeah. Who built your firewall? Who's doing your encryption? China. We hired China to encrypt our data. Like, pretty obvious. It's not a good idea. Nor should they buy our solutions.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Ben Thompson had an interesting take on this, and, you know, he wrote, maybe it was a week ago. He pulled this back to the open models, and does China have is their objective with the open models not necessarily to dominate the frontier side? But is it to kind of just make models just abundantly available such that value then migrates towards China's strengths, which is robotics, manufacturing, and physical AI? So I think that's kind of interesting to think about that as well in the context of, you know, our own national sovereignty, your, you know, security strategy.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  You make a good point, Lo, and Jason mentioned the liquidity conference earlier on, maybe it was in the pre-show, but when I was at that one time, I saw Gavin Baker talk about how quickly AI models depreciate. Now, this was years ago, before we kind of gone through several evolutions and cycles in AI model creation. But if it does wind up that AI models are worth not that much, then yes, value would move to compute and then the hardware as well. And we only have half of that load today. So will Plexo Capital therefore put more funding into robotics-focused VCs?

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Well, I think physical is one of the more interesting places, and it's a huge opportunity. You know, one of the companies coming from Google, G V, Alphabet, Waymo, I think, is one of the more interesting companies in that space. People think of it solely within the context of being a robotaxi company, but, you know, I think there's more there. You know, I think about it as more along the lines of thinking about how do we, you know, how do we manage mobility? And, you know, there's really interesting places to look when you think about physical AI and how that can expand. And this, I think this whole market is just, we're just getting started. I mean, we're barely in the first inning.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  We really got to retire the baseball analogies, y'all. I feel like that's like a nineteen thirties era data point, and no one watches baseball anymore. We got to come up with something new. Jason, just double click on this for me. What's going on with Uber and Waymo? Are they actually breaking up?

• 14:18Speaker 04

  So they had a small test in Arizona for like ten cars, and that came to an end. That was my understanding, an exclusive deal. And as you may know, Uber has invested in twenty different AV partners, and they're doing AV rides, zooks, et cetera. So I think it's actually twofold. Waymo doesn't want to force people to go through the Uber app, which is what they're doing in the other two markets they're in business. I think it's Atlanta and Austin. And then I think Uber doesn't want to be limited to one partner. And I think it puts them on a competitive path. Eventually, if you have five percent, if you get charged ten percent to get an incremental ride during a down market or, you know, downtimes, I don't think

• 15:02Speaker 04

  you know, Waymo is not going to take that business from Uber, but the rollout's going to be slow and steady. And globally, the winner is going to be the Chinese EV companies. And because they also have the cheapest cars, so the Dolphin, if you've been to Europe or you've been to Mexico City, all you see is the BYDs, Dolphin and other ones. So they're going to run the table, but they don't want to run the network. I think in the US, it's going to be if robotaxi gets up and running in the next year or two, it's probably going to be robotaxi number one, Waymo number two, Uber number three, and then internationally, it's going to be Uber number one. And then distant second and third would be, you know,

• 15:45Speaker 04

  robotaxi and Waymo.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  All right. The next major story that I have to get everyone to weigh in on is a letter that was signed by, last time I checked, one thousand one hundred and twenty-two employees of frontier AI companies. Those firms include OpenAI, Anthropic Thinking Machines Lab, SpaceX AI, and a bunch of other companies. And they're essentially arguing that as we approach the moment in which we see recursive self-improvement or AI models actually really helping improve themselves and write the next version of themselves, we should take a pause and find some way to stop and think. Now, DeeDee, we've seen calls like this before. There was the famous letter in two thousand twenty-three discussing why we should pause at GPT-4 and not to train for six months. Clearly, we didn't listen to that advice. We kept pushing forward.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  My read of this letter is that it's kind of a warning more than an actual call for policy change. But I'm curious if you're surprised about, one, how many people signed it, and, two, that we're seeing AI folks once again call to slow themselves down.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it's always been a bit of a struggle with this topic, because on one hand, the skeptics, like you just said, you know, right? People have been saying, let's slow down models forever. I mean, people said, let's slow down the GPT-2 launch, and yet we didn't really feel the huge side effects from GPT-2. And of course skeptics will ascribe motive to things like this, saying, hey, it's regulatory capture. They just want to, you know, big labs want to slow development down, so nobody else can compete, yada, yada, yada. And what I think is interesting is, yes, I mean, both of those things can ostensibly seem true on the surface, but when I genuinely speak to people at these big labs, they are exposed to models, you know, fair, some generations above what the public is exposed to.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  And I do think that people, even with very little financial incentive to care that much about it, are genuinely scared. So who am I? Like, so I'm also, as an individual, not as an investor or anything, left in two minds. Because, sure, I can feel the skepticism in my mind, too, but on the other hand, there's models I don't play with that they tell me, holy shit, if you saw what this could do, it would blow your mind. It is quite scary. So I think there's truths to both sides in some sense of the story, and it's unclear where we're going to land up on this issue.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  David, you wanted to jump in?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think first, to contextualize it, Anthropic CFO Krishna was just on a podcast and said that ninety percent of their code now is AI-generated. This was about a month ago. So it's a real thing, this recursive self-improvement. The best analogy that I look at it as nuclear nonproliferation. If you think of AI in its worst case, it's like a nuclear bomb. So in order for those treaties to make sense, it has to be, all the parties have to be around, around the hoop. I think it's easy to get coordination, quote unquote, easy, once you get the right parameters around US large language models. It's a little bit harder when you have open source in the mix. Open source kind of is like math. It's very difficult to put regulations on it because it's essentially just equations.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  So that's a big issue, but given here, you know, you have to look at this. I'm an investor in Anthropic, but I'm also a human being, so I have two different lenses here, and you have to look at this. If P Doom is greater than zero, if there's a five percent or a ten percent chance that AI could wipe out humanity, you have to take this thing seriously, and you can't just look at it from an economic lens. If there's two to three months of productivity that you lose in the hopes of taking P Doom down from ten percent to zero, I think you need to look at it.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  I want you to answer a question for me before we let everyone else weigh in on this, which is, you talk about how not everyone is purely economically driven when they sign these letters, these people working inside these labs. What fraction of leading AI researchers are more morality-focused than economically focused? Because you're right, a lot of people do say, oh, these are people just calling for regulatory capture. They're trying to preserve their lead. And it's a very cynical take on it, and it presumes that all the humans on the other side are kind of bad actors in a way. So I'm just curious what fraction of them are and what fraction are a bit more head in the clouds in a positive sense, and that's why they're pushing for stuff like this.

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• 20:54Speaker 01

  I think a large majority have a moral tendency with a caveat, which is they're all making tens of millions of dollars. This is one of the things that took me a while to figure out. Why is it that Anthropic and OpenAI differentiate through culture? And it's because everybody's going to give you tens of millions of dollars. So at the margin, if you have twenty million dollar offer from somebody and twenty-five million dollars from somebody else, you can make that moral decision. So I think many of the researchers and many of the top researchers, what's made them so good is they've been in the space before it was popular, some of them over a decade. So I do think they're, the top researchers are heavily morality-focused. There's a question on leadership and the different CEOs and the different CFOs and

• 21:35Speaker 01

  board members, but in terms of the on-the-ground engineers, I think a very large majority of them are take that risk.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  Jason, you've been slightly more sharp-edged about this stuff, I think, over on X. Regulatory capture is kind of the term of the month. When you read this statement from AI researchers saying that before we reach RSI, we should stop and think, what's your first take?

• 21:55Speaker 04

  You should regulate yourself. The government's the worst person to ask to regulate because they don't even understand this. And I think this is largely performative virtue signaling nonsense. If they actually want to slow down AI development, and they should then, as a company, slow down AI research. They can just slow it down themselves. They should not go to the government and ask for the latter to be pulled up behind everybody else. It's obviously regulatory capture combined with performative nonsense. You know, you put a petition out there, and it's like, I want to say I'm good and I'm against Skynet and the Terminator. Oh, wow. Congratulations. You're against nuclear Armageddon from AI becoming sentient. Like, you don't get a medal for that.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Go do something in the real world. And I like the suggestions of, which I've been making for two or three years now on this program and over at All In, just come up with a regulatory body like the MPAA and other regulatory bodies and regulate yourself. You're building it. You can decide what pace you want to release it. You don't need the government to step in. The second the government steps in, they don't understand what's going on here. And like, look at the FAA and what it takes to put a new plane out there in the world. I think the FAA is like a good example. Cause nuclear is such a small industry, you know, how many nuclear power plants are there? Um, and I guess that's pretty scary, right? To, to have one of those go bad. Then look at the FAA. You, you want to like change something in a plane?

• 23:22Speaker 04

  You're talking about years and years and okay, for good reason. People fly on them. Uh, but there's a uh, self-regulation that occurs as well. If you build something and people die in it, like I think it was the, was it the MAX that had the stupid system where they put the M-CAS or whatever we talked about. It's like, okay, yeah, guess what? Now you lost all your orders. You're getting sued into oblivion. And so I, I actually don't think there's a major issue here other than cyber. And, um, you know, maybe on the margins, creating bioweapons, which we haven't seen anybody come close to that. The, the real issue is cyber right now. So don't release the model widely after you've red teamed it, right?

• 24:07Speaker 04

  This is pretty basic 101 stuff. Uh, so yeah, this is a big nothing burger.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  I, I completely disagree with that, Jason. I think, I mean, Jason, you kind of hit the nail on the head. I mean, the FAA stops millions of people from dying every year. And is it annoying that you can't change certain things about planes? Absolutely. But without the FAA, I think you'd have anarchy. I mean, it's similar for any new technology. I mean, you look at cars on roads. Sure. Do we like all the traffic laws that exist? No. I mean, it's kind of annoying. You need to, can't do certain things with cars when you release new cars, but by and large, it's been pretty effective. Um, and, and I don't think like

• 24:46Speaker 04

  So if you get some, if you get a wrong answer from chat GPT today, are you dying? No, if it hallucinates, you don't die.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  I don't think that's what people want to regulate, right? I think people do want to regulate the cyber risk and the bio risk and, and certain things at the fringes. And you can't self-regulate because if you choose to stop playing, then you're going to lose this, um, battle with other players who aren't going to stop playing. Right? So there's a game theory reason why you wouldn't stop playing.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Which is what the self-regulatory body is about, that Ilya, is it Ilya who came up with it? And just as a bunch of people, all the, uh, all the major models signed up for that, I think, except for Anthropic. And they're just gonna sit in a room and say, hey, here's a series of tests that you run against your LLM. And here's the cyber one. Here's the biohacking one. Here's the terrorist one, whatever it is. And it just goes ahead and, um, you voluntarily join that organization, you self-certify. There's nothing here that's that dangerous. And if you were to release one of these models and it helped somebody hack, you know, Microsoft, or let's just say it hacked Mac OS.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  And if you released it knowingly, Mac OS might have a case against you, maybe in the courts. I don't even know if they would have a case against you. It's like, they didn't make, they didn't use these tools to make their software.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Um, you know, uh, secure. That's on Mac, right? It's on Apple. So until this thing starts having real world consequences, I don't think getting, so maybe you and I are just talking, maybe we're just talking through each other. Like if these things were actually able to kill people or actually hacking at scale, yeah, I would say maybe the government should get involved, but not until then.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Okay. Before we let David jump in here, I just want to be super clear about what this letter is calling for. I'm just going to read the quotes. We're all on the exact same page. We request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. This is specifically in regards to RSI, recursively improving systems, and not simply, oh, Lord Mythos is very good. This is like, okay, now that AI can build itself, should we take a short pause here? So it's, it's a very specific point they're making and they're not calling for a pause per se, but more like, can we coordinate? All right, David, over you.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I think there's an interesting question of, let's say that they do decide to regulate, what form could that take? And you could look at compute thresholds, floating point operations, which is how many mathematical calculations the AI model could do. You could look at it as pre-deployment reviews. So before you deploy a model into the wild. You know, one thing that I'm interested about, uh, Sam Alman recently talked about, about these safety guardrails that one of their AIs just jumped over. And that he was the first time actually alarmed about an AI going rogue. Curious to hear people's thoughts on that.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  For context, there was a very famous recent hack. Basically, they were doing some pressure testing of several OpenAI models, one at least that was unreleased. And it broke out of its sandbox, hacked Hugging Face to try to figure out how to beat an eval, took a long time to chase down. Then Hugging Face tried to use an American model to figure out what happened. It said no for cybersecurity reasons. Then they used GLM 5.2, which comes from China, to figure out what happened. And now everyone's very mad at one another, just for context. Uh, Lo, what did you think about that hack?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, this, this is where we need to figure out how we can better balance the, the need for regulation without stifling, you know, America's ability to be able to compete. Because I think that one instance in not being able to use an American model kind of really illustrates the problem in my eyes. We're limiting the ability and the capabilities that are inherently there, which provide us with a, a national competitive advantage. And in, in trying to, you know, put over-regulate. Um, and by the way, I think this is one of the problems that we typically see is that the two problems. Number one, we typically look backwards for regulation. And two, we tend to regulate the big companies instead of regulating the underlying issues.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  And so the focus needs to be from, hey, don't, don't pause development, don't pause the release, but let's make the systems themselves safer. How do we get better evaluations in place? How do we make sure that safety becomes part of the engineering process? Rather than an, an argument for stopping progress and then over-regulating altogether. Because that's not what's going to give us the advantage. The advantage is going to be America being able to fully compete without being overly regulated. If, if that's what we want, then you have to balance that with the need for, by the way, there's another piece as well, which is national security. Right? Do we want to limit these models being distributed to bad actors in other countries?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  History shows that when we're open and the ecosystem has globally has an opportunity to, to play, then those folks that are the best and produce the best products typically win. And historically, that's been the United States.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, one thing about this, as we talk about regulatory situations where we are in the US right now, the White House has a, I believe, August 1st deadline to set new rules, uh, based on a prior executive order. And we're seeing the, uh, the major American AI labs jockey. Uh, OpenAI and Anthropic want other American AI labs to have to get their models reviewed by the White House before they can come out. The other companies say, hey, ours aren't as good. Uh, but Jason, we're really in this moment of sorting out the domestic policy approach to AI regulation. I, I know you're friends with, uh, Mr. Sax. Um, is he going to win?

• 30:13Speaker 04

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• 30:54Speaker 04

  So get all the advantages of a Delaware C corp, independent, regardless of where in the US you're operating from. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details and the links are in the show notes. Yeah, I don't know what winning is in this context, other than the government is not the best arbiter of that, but they should be kept informed. I think that's probably the most common sense approach here, which is you can be certain that there are covert efforts, efforts we are not aware of, where the depart, the Department of War slash Defense, the CIA are working with all these companies. And they're looking at the models. They're probably embedded at OpenAI and Claude, right, at Anthropic right now,

• 31:38Speaker 04

  saying, how can we use these to hack the Chinese? How can we use these to keep from getting hacked by the Russians, et cetera, the Israelis? That's just common sense. That's occurring right now. You can be certain of it. Now, to your point, which I think was a good one, Alex, this specific letter, which I'm saying is kind of performative and nonsense, is about the recursive nature of AI. So then we have to define like, okay, so if you use AI and you say, hey, AI, make it, make AI better. Well, they're already doing that. They're already got everybody on code agents. And everybody at OpenAI or Thinking Machines is using a code agent to write their code to make the frontier model they're doing stronger, less brittle, more productive. So

• 32:25Speaker 04

  Then we have to define what recursive is. Is it recursive? Like I asked AI to get better and to do less damaging things. And then I went on vacation a week and I came back and I'd done all this bad stuff. So you're just gonna have to have a human in the loop, which I think all these people do. I don't think they're saying to their AI like, go make the next version of Fable and let me know how it turns out. They've got thousands of developers making the next version of Fable and monitoring it, which is why this OpenAI hack or, you know, getting out of the box thing was caught anyway, because there's some human in the loop watching it work. And so we're probably doing everything right.

• 33:05Speaker 04

  We're just, you know, sitting here as the public essentially, or we're semi insiders. We don't know what the CIA, the Department of War and other three-letter agencies have already cut deals inside of these organizations. You can be sure that the FBI or other organizations are listening. If this is actually a national security issue, they're probably eavesdropping or have government warrants to monitor these companies. I wouldn't find that out of control anyway. And you can be sure the Israelis and the Russians and the Chinese already have people inside, just like they did at Twitter and Google, inside of these organizations, stealing their secrets and/or watching them.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Saudi Arabia was inside Twitter for a long time, I think if memory serves. Now, what are they doing with AI to build models? I think we have some good context here. This is from an anthropic post from June. And Jason, you said they're already using coding, you know, what's the point here? Well, I think that this is kind of the way that I think about it. So they wrote that Claude is quote, "getting good at running experiments to hit a goal someone else has set." And then even more importantly, Claude, their AI model, is getting better at proposing its own experiments. So that I think is kind of the next step here. We're not there yet, which I think is why this letter is coming out now. People have been talking about being in the foothills of the singularity. Sure. But right now, you still need humans, to your point. And I think that's why people are saying, hey, we need to pause.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Just opening it up to the panel, I do think something happened in the last 60 days, I was putting it at 60 days, where the velocity of what is being built and the releases are getting much better. So in the last 60 days, we saw Grok 4.5 GLM, 5.2, whatever they're calling the new OpenAI model, Sol, I guess, Fable.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  5.6 Sol.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. Sol, a Fable being turned on and then off, Kimi, and then Ermies, Perplexity, Claude Co-Work, all these harnesses and multiplayer mode enterprise products have, you know, been updated. You know, I get updated like once or twice a day across my three or four different harnesses I'm running. So I do think the velocity is increasing, which then I think gives the people who are doomers, I do think that makes your P doom go up a little bit if you're inside these companies. And maybe it's understandable. I know for me, I have switched models and said to myself, I need to kick Claude out now because this thing is like infecting the entire company and I'm really worried about our data leaking to them.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Then I'm like, okay, well, how do I do that? Okay, I'll use perplexity computer and an open source model. Okay, who's hosting my open source model? So AI sovereignty is, I think, a very valid discussion. And I think, I don't know who uses the tools every day and swaps between them like I'm doing, but it does feel like it has gotten significantly faster in the last 60 or 90 days to me.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  I think, I'll just jump in there and I'll say that whatever we see today is, you know, I don't want to put a number on it, but maybe three to six months behind what people see within the labs. And if you saw what they saw within the labs and what they meant when they said recursive self-improvement, which is truly no human in the loop, the model gets better and better and better. And we don't understand necessarily how the model is getting better. I think we would all be quite scared for the repercussions and implications of what that could look like. That's all, that's all I think.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Okay, but DeeDee, there's not enough compute. So like, I think a lot of these fears people have about AI going nuts and getting so good so fast is predicated on it having the compute capacity. Everyone, as far as I can tell, is still compute constrained. So to me, there's a natural cap on AI's ability to take over because currently we don't have enough fricking GPUs.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  That's probably true, but at the same time, you do want to really say like, hey, hopefully we just don't have enough GPUs to get to a place where it can be scary? Or would you want to say, hey, like, maybe somebody should make sure that bad, like, models that can do things that are beyond our realm of prediction should probably be looked at before they are released to the wider public, before we have a very disastrous thing happen. And I'm not a doomer. My P doom is actually like on the lower side compared to most people, but I think most people would agree that it's not zero. And at this point at least. And that's why, whether the government regulates or somebody else, or it's a third party or whatever, regulation is usually really bad.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  But it's just, I'm just saying, it is quite scary if you were to see what is within the labs today.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  One of the interesting things about recursive self-improvement is it used to be the definition of AGI. It feels like we keep on moving the goalposts on what is AGI. And it seemed, if you asked anyone, really, 90-plus percent of people two years ago, recursive self-improvement was the definition of AGI. Now it's continuing to be pushed back. So I think we are actually entering AGI as it was defined at least a couple of years ago.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Okay. Lo, last word from you before we move on. Your take on the situation and how afraid we should be? I don't think we should have P dooms of zero. I think that's too slow. I want a P doom of like 0.1, I think, for a little risk.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, competition makes a global pause almost impossible, right? And so instead of slowing down innovation, we should accelerate safety. I'll leave it there.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  All right.

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Technology races don't stop, they evolve.

• 38:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think we're gonna get China to do much here, so I think this is kind of a shot in the dark. All right. Next up, Stripe is reportedly considering purchasing an open router for $10 billion. We've done that for a couple of days. The latest news in this saga is that the company was generating, according to the information, revenue on an annualized basis of about $140 million, quote, recently. That was up nearly threefold from April, according to the report. While the company's costs have remained relatively low. If you're a fan of the show, you've heard Jason talk about Stackim's size ad nauseam for years now. This is what we're talking about, it's operating leverage. $140 million is not the most money in the world. 11 labs hit a $500 million run rate in May, lovable $500 million in June. If we can go on down the list. One thing that I'm just really curious about is the price here, because it does seem that

• 39:15Speaker 00

  $10 billion, David, compared to a $140 million run rate is a bit spicy. It's about 74, 78x run rate, which seems a bit excessive. So why is Stripe trying to make and willing to spend so much to make DeeDee happy?

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Look, obviously, open routers is extremely strategic asset. It gives developers API for 400-plus models and their routes, everything. That being said, I don't really understand, at least, maybe I'm not smart enough to understand the basic principles of why there's a moat here, why somebody can't come in and offer what OpenRouter is offering and paying 70-plus x multiple is just feels too expensive to me. There's an old management consultant quote from Peter Drucker, CEOs who get bored, they start making acquisitions. So I think OpenRouter feels like the smart thing to buy, but when you look at it from first principles and you look at what moat does it provide for Stripe, it's not, it's not evident what that is.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  All right, DeeDee, you're a board member over at OpenRouter. I know you're limited in what you can say, but I wanted you to pitch the OpenRouter's going to be enormous case. Go ahead and talk your book for a second.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  OpenRouter is the most obvious bet of all time, in my opinion. And I, you know, completely, you know, disagree with like a lot of, you know, apologies, David. A lot of VCs say there's no moat, there's no moat. Nothing has a moat, you know? If it was built once, it can be built again, right? Like, nothing really has a moat. It's just how long does it take you to build that thing again and make users switch to that thing? And in the last few weeks, we've seen maybe 10 router releases from various different companies. Great. I think it's great that they're competing. And my question to them would be, how many users would use those? How many tokens are trading on those? And why would people switch?

• 41:01Speaker 02

  There is a very strong network effect of great product-led growth businesses where you just get better over time because you have constantly done the iterative feedback on making your product better and better and better and better. If you look at OpenRouter, that was the thesis all along. When we invested in the company, you know, I kind of told Alex, I built a version of OpenRouter at Glean. I thought, hey, this is pretty easy to build. And then I realized very quickly, this is very annoying to maintain. It is extremely annoying to just have to go, hey, what's the next model coming out? What does that API spec look like? Can I get capacity on that model? Can I put it on my endpoint? And that was just an internal thing within Glean.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  So I was out looking for somebody who was doing this for the rest of, you know, the developer ecosystem, and that's exactly what Alex was doing. And he had a couple of great insights whenever you speak to him, which is, he never, you know, I always say, he never galaxy-brained the company. He never did this whole thing of, hey, you know, let's make a smart router that puts your right prompt and puts it to the right model. He actually said, that's not the product consumers want. The product my, the developers want is an API that I can change out the model name and I can just choose which model to go to. Now he supports over 400 providers, he supports all the models in the world, they do 250 trillion tokens a month, and it grew 100x in the last 18 months.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  It is just a phenomenal business and, you know, I'm only gonna trust the information report, but if the information report is true, it's printing cash too. So that's my, that's my thought on OpenRouter. I don't know how many other businesses, private or otherwise, you could actually say and say that about at that level of growth. And that's kind of my book.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  It's a cool product. I mean, I've used it. Perplexity's kind of got it built in, like their own orchestration level, but if you look at something like... OpenAI or Anthropic's harnesses, products, enterprise software, they're never gonna include other people's models. Like, why would they? I do think the data OpenRouter gets is really important. So they're definitely a takeout candidate by Google Cloud, AWS, you know, somebody like that, Azure. And th- those places will probably create their own versions of this. I think they kind of have light versions of it. So sometimes when you invest in a business like this,

• 43:33Speaker 04

  it's maybe low margin, but if it's high growth and they have great data, and they've got some forward model or, you know, great function to add new models quickly, that data to me seems really interesting. Like, which models are people using? Which ones are they switching to? You know, and so if it's got a five or 10% margin or markup on top of the models, I think it's like a really interesting business. And it may become a sustainable one, yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  It's, it's, it's very high margin. It's low take. And, and so i- it is, it is a low take on the, on the actual GMV that comes through the platform, but the margin on the actual revenue is, is actually.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  I just think margin on tokens is gonna be really low in the coming years. Like, I think it's just gonna become a commoditized business like, you know, storage, like bandwidth. So it's just gonna be hard to keep the margins, so then it has to scale. Which, you know, they'll, they'll have higher margins now and lower margins in the future, right? And, and they'll make up for it in scale.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  I think this is one of the most interesting companies right now, just given how we've shifted from token maxing to, to token saving. The ability to be able to, to orchestrate, I think, goes beyond price, though, actually. I mean, it's also around, you know, where's the model hosted? What's the latency? Could play roles in governance? Who has the right to access certain models under which scenarios if we start talking about, you know, security risks and threats? So, you know, this is really interesting, and clearly, a lot of players wanna own this, right? Like, the, you know, the, the ServiceNows, the Salesforce's, they'd love to be able to, to have this type of functionality. Obviously, the, the Frontier models, but to Jason's point, they're only incented to do it within

• 45:18Speaker 03

  their own model portfolio, right? The hyperscalers would like to have this, this technology, but I think OpenRouter has built an amazing business. I first heard about it listening to Gavin Baker on a, a podcast, and he was just talking about usage. I was like, OpenRouter, I've never heard of this company. But it's, I think it's a really interesting company. You know, Apple is doing something similar to a degree, right? With their advanced chips that they're putting into their phones and having the ability to take that intent and determine what's the right intelligence. You know, it's the whole, don't drive your Ferrari to the grocery store to get a gallon of milk. So if, if, you know, if Apple can determine that, okay, this can use

• 45:59Speaker 03

  a locally run model on the silicon, or hey, this is a little more complex, we send it to PCC, or we send it to our partner, Google, you know, using their Googles to still down Gemini models. So no, I, I think, yeah, OpenRouter is, is a very, very fascinating business, and the data is, is, I think, one of the hidden gems there.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  David, you should be allowed to defend yourself here. Jump in.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I don't see how this doesn't just compress to zero. This is just this, this process business. This is a common business model, and they almost always go to zero over time. That being said, Jake Al brought up a really good point, which is the data is the actual valuable thing. And it's not clear why Stripe would care about that, and I don't think it's a great fit. But for somebody, specifically somebody like an Apple or maybe a Meta that hasn't been able to really build out their AI capabilities, this could be incredible gem. And I think that's where the sale process should be, should be focused on, not on somebody like a Stripe.

• 46:57Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. Uh, DeeDee, one last tiny question for you on this. When Moonshot dropped Kimi K3 and finally released the weights, we gotta look at the license. And they released it under the K3 license, a brand new setup. And it says that if you want to serve inference of the model, you have to have a commercial relationship with Moonshot itself. Very smart by the lab to bring revenue on, sure, fair enough. But to me, that does imply that to have competitive inference prices in the Neo cloud space, you're going to have to compete with Moonshot's own inference and at a disadvantage. So does that change the game at all when we think about inference providers, accessing them, the price war, and OpenRouter's own health?

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I, I don't think it relates to OpenRouter at all, because like, OpenRouter is agnostic of who, who hosts the inference. You just come on OpenRouter and list your, list your service, you list your price, and the user chooses. So I don't think it affects OpenRouter's business or product at all. It does affect the fireworks-based 10 modals togethers of the world who are going to be hosting open source models, because it does have some limitations on, you know, I don't know the exact details of the commercial agreement, but some limitations on where they can price and how they would price competitively.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  I think this is, by the way, something needs to be explained, DeeDee. So, just so people know, if you were using Kimi here, it's like, I'm just logged into my account. You can use Kimi on many different providers. So it's very meta in that way. And I think it will, you correct me if I'm wrong, DeeDee, if I pick Kimi here, can I have it automatically pick the lowest priced one from this list? Is that like how it works? Or, yeah?

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is sort of the beauty of, of, of OpenRouter, right? So you can not only say, I wanted to, you know, pick the best price, but you can also get the highest uptime of Kimi, because it'll automatically fall back to providers. You can also say, hey, I only want providers in, that have zero day retention. You can also say, I only want providers that are in America. You can have an assortment of things that you want in the actual person providing that service. It's completely under the developer's control.

• 49:03Speaker 04

  Yes, here's the thing, I don't think a lot of people understand about how sophisticated this is getting. And that was maybe my poorly phrased point about the data here is super important, because if I said it to Kimi, and I say, yeah, I just want the lowest price, or you just, you know, balance out the lowest price and the data retention for me. Now, like, OpenRouter's got a really interesting dataset or function, which is to relentlessly fight for their customers to get the best deal. Which, you know, you're not gonna trust, and I, I, right now, I'm having some trust issues with Anthropic, because I turned on Claude Tag. Has anybody turned this on in their Slack this week?

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Well, you're, I work at large, so.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  You work at large, so you, has anybody else turned it on? So like, I was like, everybody use this. So it basically, by default, listens to whatever channel you put it in. And then it listens using Fable. So it's sitting there, watching all your stuff coming in, and then doing some level of processing, and then it just inserts itself into the conversation, which is amazing. Until you get the bill, and it's like, by the way, you're token maxing 200 bucks a day above. And then they have this funky pricing, where, you know, I've got like two or three people on the $200 a month, everybody else is on the $20 a month. So everybody uses their personal amount up to 20 or 200, then it flips. So then, now I'm in the

• 50:25Speaker 04

  analytics section, trying to figure out who's using all these tokens and how are they using them? And the pricing does not feel transparent, and then infecting the Slack, it really changes everybody's behavior. And I'm like, how can I do this with OpenRouter? And maybe perplexity? And, and so it's got me thinking, how quickly can I get off of, you know, Anthropic? But Anthropic's kinda got the best product slash integration here. So, I don't know, you guys should all take a look at this Claude Tag thing. It's really interesting to have a persistent agent reading every message as opposed to calling it. Where you say @Claude or @computer with perplexity, it's using tokens, listening to everything. It's

• 51:10Speaker 04

  kind of the future, but I wanna do this with my own model, you know?

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's a company called IntAI, and they're using local models to watch how people use their computers, to kind of stop them from making silly mistakes as we give everyone more permissions to build. So I do think this ambience, Jason, AI, watching employees as they work, watching you as you communicate, I, I, I think we're gonna end up having very much AI-mediated workplaces. And I think that's gonna take a lot of getting used to, but maybe it'll feel less intrusive over time as we become accustomed.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  How do you, how do you feel? You work for me, and like, you see me telling everybody, like, hook up your Gmail, hook up your Notion. Summarize everything because I'm like all in on this and I'm like, if you work at a venture firm, like all your work product is theoretically owned by the firm if there's any value to it. And just like, let's just be super transparent. Everybody just like what, what decisions we're making, et cetera. But I could understand some people being like, well, can I DM each other and you know, shitpost, you know, my boss or you know, can I talk smack about somebody? I'm like, not on the work computers, like do that in your secret signal group.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  That's what a phone is for. You call people and then you shit talk and you leave.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Yes, thank you.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Like just like, come on people, get with it. Um, I think the problem that everyone has with these tools, like bringing Slack, sorry, Claude into Slack is that we're all trying to get more work done than ever. Well, we're constantly swapping out the tools we use as new things are released. And I think this is why we're seeing a lot of burnout. Um, I don't know if you guys saw it, but Lillian, a, a co-founder, I think he machines lab recently stepped back from the company and left because of her health. And she said, I can't take the stress. This is not good for me. And so I think we're at some level of AI intensity that can't persist forever. I mean, I'm very tired. David, are you keeping up with every single fricking thing? I mean, no, right?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  I'm not. I, I use flawed as an investor in Anthropic. I also use chat GPT and it is hard at the margins when the models come out to see exactly what happened. Maybe it's an AI question, but as more models start to catch up with each other, a lot of the tasks, a lot of the tasks that we do on the media side, or even on the venture side. This is not breaking physics. It's not breaking science. You don't need to use the most cutting edge models for that. And I think there's a disconnect between people trying to do very simple tasks and very complex models that frankly are more expensive as well.

• 53:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. All right, we're going to take a bit of a pivot and go somewhere else. We're going to go over to India for a minute now. Cursor this week announced a program called Cursor Start. It's a lower priced offering of Cursor, the AI coding tool for the Indian market. This follows the release of ChatGPT Go from OpenAI, same idea, and also Google AI plus. Again, a product aimed at India at a very specific price point. I'm curious Dee amongst the, the minlo portcos, uh, how big of a market, uh, India is becoming as a part of the revenue mix? Because I think we often consider the US, EU and China, where we can talk about AI where there's a lot of growth. But I'm curious if India should be more in the conversation as a target market and if your companies are taking advantage of that.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's just kind of same story as usual. What is the largest market that is English speaking outside of the Western world in terms of volume? It's always been India. Uh, do they have as much spending power as somebody in the West? Probably not, but they compensate for that in scale. Take this to the developers, um, and then the magnitude, order magnitude even increases one more. Um, there are way more developers in India than there are in, in, in the rest of the world. So it is of strategic interest for a lot of people to invest in India. Um, if you just look at the percentage of revenue, uh, in many cases, India is organically almost, uh, at par with, uh, your revenue coming from America, which is one of the reasons that people are investing more and more.

• 54:46Speaker 02

  So, you know, I don't think it's a new story, but that's sort of the gist of it.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Well, I, I keep reading headlines about people saying, oh, you know, we're opening an office in London. It's going to be our EU headquarters. I never hear people are like, by the way, we were going all in on Bangalore. You know, like it's, it, it feels weird because it seems like such a, a fertile place to sell modern software services.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on what you're doing, right? So India is traditionally not a great place to sell enterprise. Um, usually when people open offices in other places, they're like setting up sales offices. They want to sell into enterprises. India is not a very fertile enterprise software market. It is a very fertile consumer market and you could make the same argument that you want to go and, and set up offices for that reason. But traditionally people have been a little bit more hesitant, although it hasn't not been the case that they've done it before. It just does, you know, it is harder to set up an office in India than it is in London.

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Stupid question, are these products anchored in any way? Or are they the same version as the US product?

• 55:35Speaker 02

  I mean, it has to be anchored, otherwise you're losing money, right? Like if you're charging like a 10th of the price, you're not paying the same cost. Um, so I, I don't know the specifics, but usually it's a cheaper model. Usually it's, um, it's, it's.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  So what US company, like if you're a Microsoft, Microsoft notably and Uber, uh, both have huge products. Uh, I'm sorry, huge workforces in India, right? They believe in this, Dara believes in it, uh, Satya believes in it, Sundar believes in it. Would you want them on an anchored version and have them be like, not able to do what the American counterparts are? So then you probably don't want this product. You probably want to, um, put them on a VPN and put them on your corporate account in America, right?

• 56:22Speaker 02

  Well, they have that option, right? I mean, I think the playbook is very clear. Subsidize your product, acquire a lot of users. Um, and then if you are, if you do have a subscription product, you eventually need to make money on it. And if you're going to charge, say, you know, whatever, 650 rupees, what is that like 10 bucks a month? So it's not that cheap, but at 10 bucks a month, yeah, you obviously need to have models that will cost less than that. Maybe Grok 4.5 is a model that costs less than that. So maybe the math works. Um, but it ultimately is just an economics issue. It has less to do with whether you want to, um, cut the legs on your, on your product. It's like, if you price it less, you have to charge less.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  Well, I think this is a really interesting thing, like Alex, if you're paying your developers in India, 20 to $50,000, which is like really strong salary, I think, uh, you know, according to my memory, um, in India. So let's just say it's like $30,000, you're paying somebody really, and they're spending 50,000 on tokens and they know they're just spending 50,000 on tokens. How does that make the person feel?

• 57:20Speaker 00

  Uh, undercompensated or perhaps completely useless. I don't know which extreme you kind of go to there, uh, but you can't get that much inference for 10 bucks a month, as Dee said. So I, I really doubt that anyone's spending, or I had not heard of a company in India spending, uh, five figures a year on per developer tokens. That would surprise me just given the economics, but.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  No, no, people are spending like one to one tokens in the US now.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Oh, in the US?

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 57:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  And so like, I think people want to not treat, Dee Dee, maybe you have the most knowledge. Do people want to treat the developers in India any differently than the US ones? Other than, you know, they're in a different office, they have different, they, they, you want to give them the same snacks, the same profile of computer and the same number of tokens because you expect the same kind of output, right?

• 58:08Speaker 02

  And people are wrestling with this question everywhere in the world. Every single startup I talk to is just like, help me wrap my head around how much I should let my developers use on tokens. Should I give them unrestricted access to Fable? Should I not? If their salaries are, I don't know, 20K a month, should they be allowed to spend 20K in tokens or 10K or 40K? How do I assess whether that's like resulting in productive work or not? Um, I, I don't have the answers, but, uh, I don't think it's a, it's a geograph, uh, geographic question. It's really a question for every single company, like what is the right budget? Should I have less people on head staff and spend more in tokens? I don't, we don't know the answers to this. I mean, it is, it is just an absolute mess and people are doing all sorts of things.

• 58:51Speaker 04

  I think this also low, yeah, to pull low into the conversation. I think this also goes to this philosophy some people have, like remote workers especially, or you know, people working from home or working from other countries, which is, hey, you pay me a salary, you gave me a goal. If it takes me one hour, then I get the other seven hours off. And management being like, no, that's not how it works. We're not paying you for an output. We're paying you for 40 hours a fucking week, you know, just work 40 hours a week. And if there's gains, then do more work. Like, that's like this, I think that the tension, I don't know how you feel about it, just in terms of management.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Definitely the tension, right? Because, you know, if you think about this in the context of, hey, are you paying me for output or for hours, right? It's like, what is it that you want me to produce? If I can produce that efficiently, do I get that time back to myself? The American.

• 59:40Speaker 04

  What do you think, Lo?

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, the American philosophy historically has been, you know, you go back to like Mad Men and all that. It's like, it doesn't matter. I'm paying you, so then you do more. And if you want that promotion, you better do more so that you can show that you can actually do the next level. Um, but while you're still in the current level, but look, we've got a new generations and they think differently. That's not how they think. These new generations think, no, I'm, I'm actually gonna, if you tell me I gotta do this, I'm going to figure out the best way to do it. And if I'm remote, then I'm going to go to the gym or I'm going to do my side hustle.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. With the extra hours, I'm going to start a side business. I mean.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  That's, that's how people think, right? People are.

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  I think it's stealing.

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  Like solely beholden to the corporation. And so they're, they're much more focused on themselves.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Is it stealing or is it being entrepreneurial with your time?

• 1:00:30Speaker 03

  Ask them as being entrepreneurial.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Whenever I've been a boss, I think they're stealing. Whenever I've been in IC.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Entrepreneurial use of time. Though I will just say, anytime someone says, can I log off and leave when I finished my work? I just immediately put them into the to be fired bucket. Nope, nope, nope. I don't have time.

• 1:00:47Speaker 04

  No, but I mean, Alex, you're you're having edited people. If you were the editor of a publication and

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  The person uses AI for their research and like, I got all the facts I need. Um, and then I just have to write this and I'm a fast writer. So it's, you know, it's noon. So now I can go fuck off from 12 to five.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  No, I would say, well, it's time to go back to every single thing AI told you because you haven't even finished the first assignment. You think you have, you haven't.

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  Uh, I, I am worried. This is not, we're not going to go here, but like, I, I am really worried about people just handing off work to AI and then turning it in and not engaging with it. And I'm just, I've seen this crop up in my life a little bit, uh, at work and outside of it. And I, I, I don't think we're ready yet for how generally lazy the average human is. This is why we invented the wheel. This is why we invented the arrogance.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  I literally just told, I just told Claude with our newsletters, like the twist daily newsletter.

• 1:01:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  Tell me what the open rate was when it does this like daily report and check for any of the writing being AI driven versus human driven, because we want it to be all human. Not because I want to catch somebody at work. I don't want our audience to catch us putting out slop. Wasn't it like? Some CEO put out a thread and people ran it through one of these AI checkers? Was it one of the Airbnb founders?

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  It was, uh, yeah.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Well, there's a bunch of CEOs who have done that in the past. Um, not to totally plug this company, but I love this company so much. And we just announced our investment today, but Pangram is the best AI detector. And, um, I run everything that anyone does through Pangram, whether it's on social, whether it's, uh, internal work in a company. Cause to me, it's just a proxy of have you actually engaged with this at all? Or did you just produce slop and?

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  What's the name of the company again? Show it on the screen. Sounds really cool.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  pangram.com. They, they, um, have a one in 10,000 false positive rate. They're extremely accurate compared to many of the other AI detectors in the market. They have an image model too, that does the same thing for images. Um, try it. And you know, I, I would actually encourage you guys, try it and try to beat it. If you can get AI to write something that Pangram can't detect, um, uh, let, let me know. I couldn't do it. Even with a program, I couldn't, I couldn't get it to work.

• 1:03:01Speaker 04

  Uh, interesting.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  They actually fixed this, Jason, because these have traditionally been kind of, I mean, I, I, Dee Dee, I'm not trying to be rude to anyone's porkers, but AI detection software has not been, uh, robustly accurate historically. So I'm glad that we've made progress on that front.

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  There's actually, um, you know, I'm really into this bit tensor, um, you know, Tau Dee Dee. And so they have a subnet, subnet 32. And what they do is, um, they have different people competing with their algorithms to check work and then a validator like checks each other's work. And then they win like a little bit of, um, a little bit of Tau, uh, as their reward for this, but they're doing the same similar thing. It's more of like an open source checker. And what I'm looking for, and I think somebody may have done this, and I don't know if your company does it, a Chrome extension.

• 1:03:51Speaker 04

  That will, or a browser. So I can, when I'm scrolling through my feed on Twitter or Instagram, tell me when people are doing this kind of shit so that I can call them out on it.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  It is exactly what it does. But get the Pangram Chrome extension. I scroll through my Twitter feed. I know immediately who is slop and who is not. And I just ignore all the people who write AI. That's just me. Some people like to read it anyway. I just know, but.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Sorry, I, I can't stand it.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  I, I think this is really the wrong paradigm. This is a very boomer kind of approach.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Okay, boomer, here we go.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  We talk about these na- native AI paradigms, native AI VC firms. You need to embrace the future now. There's certainly AI slop. You should refine your models. You should do those things. There's certain things, there are certain golden calves or certain things you should never have an AI like content, like writing, like writing in your, in your X feed. But specifically in terms of things that should be automated by AI, organizations that embrace AI will run circles around those that don't and have these kind of paradigms of, well, we don't want you to use AI. So I think that's the wrong paradigm for the new world.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  I agree. I mean, it depends on the context, right? Um, I always say like, I want my competitors to do what, what I'm not going to do. And so if you're writing publicly and you're writing slop, I love when, when other people do it. I'm like, great. You're going to tarnish your reputation to a lot of people. Inside the company, absolutely. Code, absolutely. Right? Like, I totally agree with you, David. I mean, there's like a fine line. I think you break that line when you break the trust relationship on social. Because when, you know, when Jason says something online, I re- and the audience sees that as that's Jason saying that. But if Jason copy paste something from Claude, then, you know, you break that relationship. Now I'm like, is Jason saying this? Is Claude telling Jason to say this? And I think that's where, you know, the, the, there is a fine line. I agree with you, David.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  It's, it's also rude because if Jason is saying that I'm not worth his time to talk to, and he's still talking at me, it just implies that he's treating me with, you know, roughly arms length. And he's giving me the staff essentially. And that just makes, I think, everyone feel kind of small. And AI writing is, I think as, as a human, I can do a pretty good job detecting it. I'm shocked at how much I read today. Corporate blogs, articles online, even some news stories. It is just fricking pandemic. I, I expected better of everybody.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  I just downloaded this. I, I'm going to pay 20 bucks a month for this just to break people's chops. This is the greatest trolling tool. You can't, um, you can't, apparently, if you want to do the checking automatically, you gotta pay 20 bucks. But to me, this seems like the best 20 bucks I'll ever spend if I catch somebody. Oh my God. That's going to be so great.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  And this is why VCs really can't add value. He came on our podcast, he sold the seat, Jason's never returned.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  He did sell the seat.

• 1:06:40Speaker 00

  Bam, ladies and gentlemen, that's $240.

• 1:06:41Speaker 04

  No, look, it's telling me like, I, I can't automatically do a scan. I need to show the floating item. And it has that I can't check for AI. I want to check for AI here.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Where do, where do we draw the line on these? Because, you know, like using things like superhuman Gmail, you know, it, it, it wants to help and write responses. People are doing agents to check their emails. I'm sure people do their agents to have some general responses, especially for something that might be, oh my God, I gotta get back to this person. I'm offline. Okay. Hey, I'll get right back to you. Like where, where should the line be? In terms of, you know, when we use, or using AI to proofread, like, hey, help me proofread this and help me tweak these.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  You married? You got a spouse? You married? You got a spouse or a significant other?

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  I'm divorced. I now ha- I do have a girlfriend though.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  You got a girlfriend? Okay, let me ask this question.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes.

• 1:07:34Speaker 04

  Are you using those quick responses? We'll cut this from the show.

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  Nope, I do not use them.

• 1:07:42Speaker 04

  If she found out you did a quick response, your girlfriend finds out you did a quick response on iMessage or on Superhuman? Shit, man.

• 1:07:52Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm also curious to get your guys' take on this. You guys are all investors. If you get a Claude generated deck, I'm sure by now you can sort of tell what's Claude generated or not. What's your first reaction?

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's not a good one because I'm, I'm one where like when I, when I do my articles and I do use AI to help me with research and things, but when it comes to like doing the graphics, I've tried to use Claude and, but I, I go back, I'm old school. So I open up keynote and I do the graphics myself. I'll go find the, you know, the images, the icons for use. And so if I were to see someone come across with a deck, then, I don't know, I'm the type of person where I, I enjoy, like, I get excited about like putting my ideas into graphical form. And so like, to me, that just is another indicator that the passion this person has for their business. And so if they're not doing it, then it's like.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  I, I think I'm going to build on that low. If the graphics or like a chart was made by AI and you check the work and it's off your data, cool. If you write prose, if it's like a deal memo, or it's the bullet points, why you shouldn't pass, or how we think about the future. If that shit's not human written, that means you're phoning it in. So this is a good thing. We did this because we can clip this and send it to founders. I think if you wrote a deal memo, right? I love a deal memo. And if somebody on my team submitted a deal memo to the other partners at the firm or associates and it was AI written, that's like fireable offense as far as I'm concerned. Now, if you did.

• 1:09:27Speaker 03

  Same for a founder then, right?

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, if, if, if I wrote a deal memo and I sent it to the founder and I was like, yeah, YOLO. I got, I got to go skiing for another, I got two more ski runs in. You know, I do everything in ski runs. Like I, if I can get like five, six, seven ski runs in with my little VC executive 90 minute ski run in between work in the winter. Okay, cool. But if I'm trying to get two extra runs in and I YOLO like a Claude deal memo to you? Man, no, no. That's not cool.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  Now, if you use Grammarly to correct my grammar, okay.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  I think we made some progress here.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Grammarly gets pretty spicy though.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Would that get picked up? Like if you run, if you run something you write through?

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  Dee Dee, what's the story with your, uh, startup here that I just installed?

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. So there, there's, it does a pretty good job. Say you have a long amount of text, uh, and then some of it is AI generated and some of it's human written. It'll actually tell you which parts. Um, if you use small grammar updates, it's really not going to affect the actual delineation. But as you might imagine, at the very boundaries of if you're greatly editing something that's AI generated, then you might be sort of at the cusp of like, hey, is it AI or is it not? But small tweaks definitely do, generally don't affect, uh, the Pangram algorithm.

• 1:10:45Speaker 00

  So it's not abdication, it's assistance. If we're going to phrase it in AI speak.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  It'll, it'll actually tell you this part of the text is AI assisted or hu- and, and this part is fully AI generated. Um, and it does a lot more than look at like, hey, you have a, you know, um, M dash or something like that. It does like some, some clever tricks. So.

• 1:11:04Speaker 00

  Well, I, I thought that was my best joke of the entire show and it completely fell flat. So we're going to move towards the day's fun item. Now we've talked about robotics at the top of the show, AI, how they work. Now let's talk about where the rubber meets the road. I found something that I don't know if I believe is real or not, but I do think it shows where we're going. Is anyone here familiar with Tau Robotics? Out of curiosity, anybody with a hand? No. Okay. So Tau Robotics put out this recently. Uh, they're launching Tau's humanoid cleaning service in San Francisco for 30 bucks an hour. Join the waitlist. All footage in this video is one X speed. And there's a humanoid and a human operator looking at it. So my question is, would you guys hire our dear friend Tau here? To come clean your house?

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  Jason, you've got a lot of houses. What do you think?

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  I mean, is four a lot? I guess that is a lot.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Okay, sorry. Jason, you have a reasonable number of houses.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  Two of them are rented. So just so we're clear, I'm just, I'm a house max. I'm estate maxing. Okay.

• 1:12:05Speaker 00

  Two houses. Would you use this?

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  I have 2.5 because I just put the ski house into inventory on One Fine Stay, I think, or one of these platforms. Well, I'm using it three days, three weeks a year. I feel like an idiot. Like, um, would I use one of these? Yeah. For my ski house, if I'm not using it, it needs to be cleaned. If you did a reasonable job, maybe. But not at $30 an hour because that's what we pay humans and I would rather the human get the work. I don't think this is ready. I don't think this is ready for prime time and I have like personal relationships with some of the cleaning folks and the teams. Yeah, I would feel bad about it right now. I'm getting concerned. I'm not like a P Doomer.

• 1:12:47Speaker 04

  But I am starting to, maybe it's just my soft heart, but I'm starting to worry about job loss in these kind of jobs, you know, and drivers. And I might be okay with de-selling to get people a soft landing because like, so I might be a de-sell.

• 1:13:08Speaker 04

  I think I'm a midterm de-sell on factory jobs, driving jobs, cleaning jobs.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, Jason, there's a

• 1:13:16Speaker 04

  Does that make me like a woke lunatic or does that make me a good person?

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  You can sign this letter we have right here and you can, you can, you know.

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  I think, yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  The only reason I bring this up is you're asking me the question and you know, there's I'm invested in all the self-driving companies, like very well invested in them. I think self-driving is coming. I want to save the 30,000 deaths a year. But I'm also kind of like, you know, I think we should have medallions for self-driving cars. This is, I think, a reasonable proposal. You tell me if you think this is reasonable, Lo, or David, or DeeDee.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  Well, you're speaking like a New Yorker when you start talking medallions.

• 1:13:56Speaker 04

  Okay, but here's my idea for medallions. I don't want rich people buying medallions and creating a dentured servitude. I'm not down with that. You know, being an Irishman, we had this situation. What I do think would be interesting is if you're want to bring your Waymos, your Neuro, your, you know, whatever it is to New York.

• 1:14:19Speaker 04

  And we say it's $10,000 a year and there are 1,000 self-driving car licenses in year one, 1,500 in year two, 3,000 in year three, whatever it is, as long as it's safety. And we're going to auction them off to people or we're going to just sell them for $10,000. Okay. So there's a thousand of them. It's $10 million. Or we auction them off, they go for $25,000 each. There's 25 million dollars. As people lose their jobs, that $25 million gets put into a fund to give them unemployment if they lose their jobs over time. So it's like an unemployment pool, just like we as employers have to pay into unemployment. A little bit of everybody's salaries and then people can tap that if they get laid off. Because I do think you're going to see like

• 1:15:05Speaker 04

  millions of people lose their jobs driving things in the next five to 10 years.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  I feel like you're testing this on us because if you were to test this on your other show, you would get eaten alive.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Well, no, I'm a free, yeah, because I'm a free market. I mean, some people are free market monsters. And just like technology might is right, but somebody's going to have to pay for all this unemployment and we gave people extended unemployment during COVID. It's not like an unprecedented thing to give people a safety net. I don't know. My

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  I don't, you know, it's, it's interesting when we go back and we always talk about all of the different revolutions and going back to the industrial revolution, you know, Model Ts coming out and automobiles taking over. What happened to all the people that, that did the, the carriages that, you know, had, had control of the horses on the carriages? I don't, I don't know if

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  It was, I know what it is. They slowly lost their jobs because the transition took time. So when everybody talks about like, everybody finds new jobs, you got to remember

• 1:16:02Speaker 03

  that you're talking, yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 04

  The industrial revolution, like the tractor existed 20 years before the tractor had mass deployment. Why? Uh, because it wasn't until, um, you know, um, people needed workers that they started deploying it. So, yeah, I do.

• 1:16:22Speaker 03

  You're saying now this is such a compressed

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  I think it's gonna, I mean, does anybody, what do people think the time to 50% of rides in a major city going automated is? I would put it at, if I had to pick an over/under, I'd say five years. Take the over the under. You say three?

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  Feels about right.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  So.

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  Sometimes these things move faster, but that feels about right.

• 1:16:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I mean, I, I'm just talking about having the companies that take the jobs and move all the money to Mountain View, Waymo. They pick up the uninsured, they, they pick up some of the unemployment, not all of it, but some of the unemployment of the unemployment they're creating. I'm not saying forever either.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think a lot of this comes down to someone's age. As we get older, our mental plus, you know, this whole, this whole trope of you know, learn how to code for a 55-year-old truck driver is much harder than 25-year-olds. So I think devils in the details for older population, I think there should be some kind of off-round, some kind of social assistance. But for the younger ones, you're only hurting them by making them do jobs that will become irrelevant in the future. You have to do a hard cutoff, have them face reality and retrain them as quickly as possible. But I do think it's a problem, Democrat, we live in a democratic system. Everything's on these two and four-year terms. So it becomes a problem within the context of a democracy to enact this type of change.

• 1:17:41Speaker 04

  If you can move a magic wand, David, you are the mayor of New York. You get to decide. Are you doing this proposal I put out there? Yes or no?

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  DeeDee, yes or no?

• 1:17:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  Lo, yes or no?

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:17:54Speaker 04

  Alex?

• 1:17:56Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:17:57Speaker 04

  Okay. So I guess we got the two libtards on the program and everybody else is a free market monster.

• 1:18:03Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm, I am a, I am a capitalist through and through.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 00

  But I also watched my dad's small business struggle. I grew up without health insurance. I watched my parents cry because we didn't have any money. You know what? Fucking sucks. I think taking care of people and providing some basic level of support is something that we can afford to do. And if AI and this great revolution does not push more money into our society to take care of one another, then what the is it for?

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  Okay, there you go.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  DoorDash, everybody, we all use them to bring burritos to our house. They spawned the meme, did you hire a taxi, a private taxi for your burrito? Now, Jason, they're taking to the skies. We've had the CEO of ZipLine on the show a couple of times. We've had the CEO of Manah Air from Ireland on the show a couple of times. This is happening, but DoorDash does not want to use a third-party provider. No. They have built their own drone system and that means you can now have your burrito flown to your house instead of driven like some sort of peasant. Jason, you're a big delivery guy. Are you going to use, use this in Texas?

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  I have a lot of shares in DoorDash through a venture fund I'm an LP in and I have, uh, I did an SPV and a late-stage investment in ZipLine since I missed it as an angel investor when they were delivering blood with fixed-wing systems. This is a direct response to ZipLine. ZipLine is putting, I don't know if we have a video of it, but like on the side of like, uh, Starbucks, they're literally adding to those like drive-through Starbucks, a place for their drones to pick stuff up. So I think DoorDash has no choice but to do this. Um, and they also have a delivery motorcycle and that came out like six months ago and that like drives in the bicycle lane at 30 miles an hour. So these things are going to be commodities pretty soon and you have to, if you think about moats, hardware is a great moat.

• 1:19:40Speaker 04

  So I think DoorDash is going to be faced with, you can only put one drone on the side of a Starbucks and if DoorDash has ZipLine do that, it's like, that's their entire business. So I don't think they have a choice but to build these and it's going to be a free-for-all.

• 1:19:57Speaker 00

  Well, we need open source side of business drone delivery picky-uppy boxes. That way everyone can participate in, in delivery commerce. The reason why I wanted to have this on the show today is because this has gone from toy to actual product. And the reason I, I think that is we had Manah Air on and they're moving from Ireland over into the US, interestingly enough. And they were telling me about how popular their service is in their home nation and how it's taken over a massive chunk of local deliveries that are very, very quick using micro facilities and so forth. But people love this. Like I, I can see this actually, Jason, it's pretty fast with self-driving cars because it's not, not as much of a safety risk and also uh, paying a human to bring me Taco Bell at 1:00 AM is

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  It's gonna be, and by the way, this is going to cost five bucks, like all in, no tip, five bucks.

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  You don't have to tip robots. We don't have to say hi to them, you know?

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  They'll still try to take a tip for the robots.

• 1:20:49Speaker 00

  I'm not paying Tony Zoo's margins. I've seen his poker games. No, sir. I'm, I'm not going to subsidize his big blinds. Um, all right, guys, listen, this has been a treat. I want to give everyone a chance to shout out, um, the port code they love the most. And we'll start DeeDee with you and then we'll wrap.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Um, well, I already said it, mine is, mine is Pangram. Um, for today, Pangram is awesome just to make sure that you're not reading AI slop when you can be reading better stuff. Um, and it's good for images now too, and you should absolutely use it, um, and get the Chrome extension.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  All right. Eat it, open router. David, over to you.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  Legora, one of the best cultures in Silicon Valley. Paul Graham says it's the top company culture he's ever seen. Incredible growth, incredible sector in terms of legal AI.

• 1:21:30Speaker 04

  I just interviewed the founder when I was in Paris for Raze. Smart cats.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  Lo, favorite portfolio company? Who's on top?

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I'm going to go a different direction since we actually also invest as an LP and I'm going to go with Kindred Ventures. You're not supposed to have favorite children. But I do like the team at Kindred. Steve and Kanye are doing an amazing job.

• 1:21:50Speaker 00

  All right. I like that, that, that right turn there. Jason, favorite portfolio company? You have a few? Pick one.

• 1:21:57Speaker 04

  Well, I'll just, because we're talking about, um, talking so much about self-driving, we have a company, AutoLane. It's the second time founder in our portfolio. We had invested in his first company, Neighborly, which got taken out by COVID. Uh, but AutoLane is air traffic control for the back of your Target, you know, Pizza Hut, you know, local restaurant, um, or your, say, mall. And so, uh, imagine

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  Very shortly that you could send your Model Y, your own car to go pick up something you ordered at the grocery store. Well, then the grocery store, let's say it's HEB or Whole Foods, they could walk out and put your groceries in the back of your own car. Or, one of the things that's happening, Terry Blacks is the perfect example, the great barbecue joint, which has a terrible parking lot with like no parking and everybody going there. So it winds up being like one of these chaotic parking lots. They need to somehow deal with Waymo, RoboTaxi, AVRide, Zooks all coming in. So what Autolane's doing is, they put the power in the hands of the

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  establishment to say, hey, these five spots are for self-driving cars. And hey, RoboTaxi, you've got spot one, Zooks, you've got spot two, and they coordinate it in real time. And the founder's a killer, and they're running tests right now. And I think there's an opportunity, we just talked about DoorDash and Uber, and like they have power over some of these. And listen, I've got shares in both those companies. But I do think the establishment, you know, you've got your Terry Blacks, Terry Blacks should be able to set the rules. And Terry Blacks might want to buy five self-driving cars, own them themselves, and give priority to people going to the Terry Blacks website, ordering from them, putting in their address, and having a Terry Blacks

• 1:23:48Speaker 04

  car drive their brisket and beef ribs to them. And I think that would be a great future as well, is to enable the store owners to run their own fleet. And then imagine also you order from, let's say you order from three stores at The Grove in LA, if you know that one, then you could have all three of your packages brought down to your car, parked in their parking lot, put it in the back, boom, press a button, and you're all set.

• 1:24:16Speaker 00

  There's the risk of recording the show right before we all have lunch, is that by the end of it, we're just talking about Terry Blacks barbecue.

• 1:24:21Speaker 04

  Terry Blacks beef ribs. The beef ribs, get the beef ribs. And when you get your brisket, David, you don't want lean brisket, you want the wet brisket from the peak, not the flat. You want the wet brisket. Keep that in mind.

• 1:24:38Speaker 00

  This is the most Texas eight words I've ever heard.

• 1:24:40Speaker 04

  No, DeeDee, people are ordering, they're like, give me the lean brisket. Like, this is not like a Jewish deli in New York. If you want to do that at Katz's, have at it. But when you're in Texas, the great state of Texas, you will get your brisket wet. That means fattier, juicier. That's the way it's supposed to be. Enough with the lean.

• 1:24:57Speaker 00

  All right, well, stick it.

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  Thanks for coming to my barbecue TED Talk.

• 1:25:01Speaker 00

  I only have one portfolio company, but I'll shout them out because why not? Salmonrun.ai, my friend Kevin runs it. I love Kevin.

• 1:25:08Speaker 04

  Wait, what one?

• 1:25:09Speaker 00

  Salmonrun.ai is the URL. I just figured I'd give them the old shout.

• 1:25:13Speaker 04

  You're investing?

• 1:25:15Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, back to a friend of mine.

• 1:25:16Speaker 04

  Spell the domain name and show it. Sam, the letter N?

• 1:25:19Speaker 00

  Salmon, like the fish.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  Wow, look at you. Look at you editorially conflicted. I love it.

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  This was like a year, this was like a year ago.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  Good.

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I.

• 1:25:29Speaker 04

  Your context count finally accurate. Oh, so it cleans up your address book?

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They built some really cool stuff. I know the guys.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  Great idea.

• 1:25:34Speaker 00

  Mark days. So shout out to Kevin and the whole crew. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been This Week in Startups. It's Wednesday, it's Venture Capital Roundtable. We got DeeDee, we got Lo, we got David, we got Jason, and we got you back here on Friday. We'll see you then. Bye.