DeepSeek Rattles Markets + SailPoint's Going Public… again? | E2077

Today's show: A $6M open-source AI model from China, DeepSeek, sends shockwaves through Wall Street, wiping billions off NVIDIA's market cap and forcing a rethink on AI infrastructure spending. We explore the 25% surge in startup shutdowns, the lessons from leaner teams, and why some companies just couldn't make the runway. Plus, SailPoint returns to the public markets saddled with $1.6B in debt—what does this say about private equity's "buy, fix, and flip" strategy? Don't miss this deep dive into the latest tech and startup news! * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show. (1:58) DeepSeek's market impact and Project Stargate (4:18) Innovation, H100 GPUs, and open-source AI models (8:41) Jevons paradox, Pat Gelsinger's analogy, and AI efficiency (10:03) Northwest Registered Agent. For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. (13:25) AI's benefits for startups and privacy concerns (19:32) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain: https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (19:51) AI optimization vs. hardware consumption (22:20) OpenAI's revenue, valuation, and NVIDIA's market value (30:13) LinkedIn Jobs. Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist (33:21) Unified AI digital assistants and DeepSeq's new model (35:01) AI's role in venture capital and team size reduction (41:04) China's influence and DeepSeek's market impact (43:22) Startup shutdowns and potential for increased M&A activity (53:02) Nvidia's historical analysis, risks of leverage, and SailPoint's IPO * 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 Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:03) Northwest Registered Agent. For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will handle your complete business identity. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. (19:32) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain: https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST (30:13) LinkedIn Jobs. Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Jason, you're talking about the amount of money in play here. Look how much things have changed just today. Nvidia has been dethroned overnight by DeepSeek and is now the third most valuable company compared to the first.

• 0:11Jason Calacanis?

  Crazy.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  That is such a change.

• 0:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Wow, that's mind blowing to me.

• 0:16Jason Calacanis?

  The AI trade, give it the AI trade.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  Take us away.

• 0:20Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today. Squarespace, turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to linkedin.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

• 1:00Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's Monday, January 27th. A day that will live in infamy or intrigue, or it will be a footnote in the history of AI. But we have a lot of hand wringing going on. We have a story here that we touched on on Friday that seems to have captured the imagination of everybody in our industry and geopolitics. And you know, it's a big story when it actually hits like the Sunday shows or it starts to hit mainstream consciousness. But China has, as everybody knows, who listens to this program, released a model for $6 million

• 1:44Jason Calacanis?

  with old iron, maybe sort of, that could be revolutionary or it could just be a little smoke and mirrors. So we're going to get into it here and it could be both of those things, all of those things. And how are you, Alex?

• 1:58Speaker 00

  I'm doing really good. You know, I was a little bit offline yesterday, but I woke up very early this morning, hyped and stoked and ready to go. And the first tweet I saw was NASDAQ off 5% over. And I was like, oh, man. All right.

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  Here we go.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Let's go.

• 2:12Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the AI trade giveth and the AI trade taketh away. The DeepSeek project has shaken the public markets, specifically Nvidia, I think, because what this project, we'll see how true it is, has done more than anything is made people question the need for capex spending at the Apex Capex spending announcements, which happened at the end of the inauguration with Masayoshi Son, as all Apex funding announcements do. When Masayoshi comes in.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  You know, you've reached the peak, man.

• 2:51Jason Calacanis?

  That's it. You're at the top of our eras. That's the peak. That's the top tick. When Masayoshi comes, he puts that little straw in the camel's back.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  And then just snaps in half. So what are we talking about? Project Stargate, the plan that was announced very recently to invest $100 billion now and up to $500 billion, Jason, over the next couple of years. Essentially, a massive data center build out. And also Meta last week dropped, and we talked about this, I think it was on Friday as well. A $60 billion to $65 billion capex spend for this year. A 2 gigawatt data center so large it would take up a big chunk of Manhattan. And now all of that seems ever so slightly silly because DeepSeek has shown that you can make models that are very high quality and can challenge the state of the art for what is considered to be a much lower price stack. Now, you said $6 million earlier. You're referring to the white paper that DeepSeek put out. I read the same thing.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  There has been discussions about what's included in that price point. Should it be 6 million? I say, great, 10x it, 60 million, still cheap compared to what we've seen out there in the market. But if you can do things more cheaply, Jason, the gist there is not really the dollar amount, but just how much compute you need to make it happen. And if you need less compute, then well, maybe your data centers are more like financial albatrosses that will depreciate versus a way forward. So we've had a flip from look at the money we're spending, therefore take us seriously, to look at the money we're spending on data centers. Perhaps we took it ourselves too seriously.

• 4:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and there is a number. Of interesting ways in which they did this in terms of building the model and how it's executed. And that's all in the paper. I think how they did it is interesting, of course, and I think leveling up the conversation. The question becomes, and we actually had this discussion here, which is when you have constraint, when you have limited resources, you get clever. So we call this sort of MacGyver it. If you remember the TV show, for those of you, there was a guy MacGyver who would, you know, basically stop a rogue nuke with gum and a paper clip and basically proved, hey, you can get a lot accomplished with a small amount of resources if you put your mind to it.

• 5:01Jason Calacanis?

  And so this is what survival is like. This is what happens when you ban H100s being sold into China. Is they take what they have and they do the best you can. Now, there is a bunch of, and I think, Scale AI CEO at DAVO said, you know, they have a bunch of H100s in China. All these ones that go to, which was it Taiwan or the Philippines? There's one or two markets where a lot of these get sold.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  Singapore, I think is another.

• 5:31Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Singapore, yeah. So 20% of the H1s, 100s gets sold in Singapore, but Singapore is not using 20% of H100s. So where do they wind up is always the question. So like many things that occur in China, it's a black box. There might be more to the story. Putting that aside, it's an accomplishment. It's a white paper. It's open sourced. So the experts seem to think this is largely legit. Yeah, that's the consensus is like, hey, this is not faked in some way. And then the next card that turned over was, well, maybe they ingested other models to make this model. To which I say, okay.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  So.

• 6:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that sounds like they stole something, but they're all building off each other and, okay, maybe. But the output is still the same. And then I saw that the DeepSeek app was number one in the App Store. Ahead of some other, which by the way, you can just pay like an outside firm five grand and do that. So it's pretty easy to game the app. So don't read too much into that, but this is now game on because if the Chinese want to prove a point to us about AI exceptionalism to have a hedge fund manager with but a handful of scientists and engineers in their spare time, basically make something that races up the charts for a small amount of money. Well, what does that say about all this crazy investment we're doing?

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Well, it goes to show that right now, some very smart people with access to at least some GPUs in quantity, whatever level of quality they were, whatever, can do quite a lot. And to me, the biggest point that that makes is a little bit less about China versus US, but about the fact that we are nowhere near having wrung out all the possible gains, all the possible improvements. I read the white paper, Jason, and I'm not going to lie. When I'm reading through about how they use pure reinforcement learning and different types of cold start data and supervised fine tuning through rejection sampling. Okay, I'm not gonna lie, that's not where I spend my time.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  So I'm not going to pretend to know every single word here, but when we're dealing with open source stuff, it just doesn't get held in the same kind of national grip. So to me, these improvements will filter into the US market, we'll learn from them. And then the question becomes, is there any advantage to after we've ingested and digested these upgrades and improvements to having a lot of GPUs? Because if there is, then with deep seeks learnings, we're going to be able to accelerate very quickly. And some people are arguing that really this will make the Project Stargate effort and therefore XAI, Supercomputer and Anthropic and Amazon, et cetera, even more valuable. Gary Tan said that the news makes Project Stargate, I think 30X more valuable in his view, clearly hyperbolic, but like directionally interesting.

• 8:17Jason Calacanis?

  There's a new paradox, you know, everybody who's in intellectual circles, if you want to win the social media game, if you want to win the argument, introduce a new paradox, a new framework for thinking, a new cognitive biases. And Jevon's paradox seems to be the one that Satya Nadella brought up, I guess, late at night. So he was up late and thinking about. Or maybe that would be

• 8:41Speaker 00

  I think everyone was up late thinking about this.

• 8:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:44Jason Calacanis?

  To know this. So when you go to your next dinner party, you can mention, yes, that's just Jevon's paradox.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So Jevon's paradox was originally put together to discuss energy consumption. And as energy got cheaper, people used more of it. So essentially, the idea behind Jevon's paradox is that when technological progress increases the efficiency of something, i.e. when your resources used, people use more of it. So essentially falling cost increases demand. So if AI, in this case, to kind of complete the point, becomes much cheaper, as DeepSeek showed with its relatively low-priced excellent model, it doesn't mean that it's going to collapse the industry. It means that we're going to use quite a lot more of it. Does that make sense, Jason?

• 9:22Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. We have a concept called induced traffic. I've talked about it here many times. And so people will consume more of something if it's more available. So when you had to go walk to a well and get water and pump it and bring it back to your house, and you had to walk to the other side of town, people did not have lawns and lawnmowers. But when they built pipes to your house with water and it was so cheap, people decided they would put sprinklers on their front lawns and make beautiful green patches of grass.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 9:56Jason Calacanis?

  That were non-native and they could look at and go, wow, look at that beautiful green grass as opposed to just seeing it seasonally. Hey, founders, you want to build the next great billion dollar business, right? Well, you're gonna need two things, a killer idea and a properly set up company. I can't help you pick the idea, but I can help you get your business started the right way with Northwest Registered Agent. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your business for just $39 plus state fees, one of the most affordable options out there. No hidden fees, no upsells, just a simple, straightforward process. And here's how it works. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, your LLC is officially formed and ready to operate. Northwest handles all the paperwork, fast, accurate and hassle-free.

• 10:41Jason Calacanis?

  So you can focus on building your business, not navigating all those crazy legal forms. Thousands of entrepreneurs trust Northwest Registered Agent. Because they make business formation affordable, efficient and stress free. And with their expert team standing by, you'll always have the support you need. So here's your call to action. Don't let paperwork hold you back from your entrepreneurial dreams. Get started today at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. That's northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. For just $39 plus state fees, your business could be up and running in no time at all. Get more value, more convenience and more peace of mind only with Northwest Registered Agent. So that's a great example of induced consumption there.

• 11:24Jason Calacanis?

  Same thing with when you make a freeway, people go, hey, wow, there's a freeway. I can get from Austin to Houston, Dallas, or you know, or San Antonio in X number of hours, minutes. And maybe we'll go there for a day trip, maybe we'll go see a concert there. Whereas if you had to take a dirt road, you'd be like, yeah, I'm not going there. I'll wait for the show to come here. I'll wait for the circus to come here. So that's essentially what people are now saying is, hey, if that iron is sitting there, we will use it for something. In our industry, I remember Dropbox and YouTube were based upon the premise that all this dark fiber and all of this storage had suddenly become really cheap. And it was plummeting in cost. Therefore, there was more available.

• 12:05Jason Calacanis?

  Therefore, the idea of hosting somebody's video for free on YouTube became viable. Whereas previously you had to pay every time somebody watched your video, you had to pay your hosting company for it. Yes. It became free. When it became free, then the entire concept of putting a vlog out like we're doing right now, a blog. Sure. And then eventually a podcast. People said, yeah, okay, we can do this. It's a, it's free. Now, if I had to pay a dollar for every time somebody, or 10 cents, or even a penny, every time somebody downloaded one of these podcasts, we'd be like, whoa, we've got to throttle this thing. So what happens to this extra capacity? I guess becomes the question. Yeah. Well, so I want to bring up another point along this line before we answer that question. So talked about Jevon's paradox, increasing efficient usage of something increases the demand for it.

• 12:50Jason Calacanis?

  So Pat Gelsinger, up until, you know, 48 minutes ago, Jason, the CEO of Intel, put out a very interesting tweet and he compared this moment to the gas life. So computing.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  Obey the gas law, making it dramatically cheaper will expand the market for it. So I actually am a little bit torn between pessimism and optimism here. Because on one hand, it's lovely to see such amazing technological improvements. But on the other hand, we worry about what we're going to do with all this hardware. I wonder if we're just going to end up, instead of having a decrease in demand, we've just brought the future forward a little bit.

• 13:25Jason Calacanis?

  That's correct. Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Okay, so in that case, then none of the capacity is wasted.

• 13:29Jason Calacanis?

  Because if they I don't, I mean, it's kind of like if you were to build extra apartments, you know, in a market where you had massive constraint. Would it cause damage or would it allow young people to get an apartment and be able to live alone? As opposed to five people living in an apartment like they did in, you know, the tenderloin district of San Francisco.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  And I love that analogy because who are the young people in this AI moment with all this capacity built on it? Improving AI models, startups.

• 13:58Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. Yeah. So that, you know, this idea that startups were not going to have access to H100s. You know, there might be so many H100s available. There might be so much capacity available if this gets easier and easier and easier to, you know, build these models. That, uh, yeah, startups will use one to do something that would be considered trivial.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 14:17Jason Calacanis?

  And so when we deploy these, we're going to, we're always thinking, well, how do we make the money back? Right? How do we make the money back? So with that $500 billion number, it's like, well, is there $500 billion in software revenue from AI available to make the money back? Uh, okay. Well, we replace every factory worker. If we replace every, you know, truck driver, I mean, you really start to have to think about these things. But now, hey, maybe you don't have to think about it as much and putting a bunch of CPU towards, you know, putting a filter on top of your photos, which is what happened with iPhones, you know, that the processing power was so great. We, we came up with some uses for it and that's where, that's where we're at right now. It's like, we can do.

• 14:59Jason Calacanis?

  Things that are seemingly unnecessary with this.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  Do you remember when filters were cool? Like I remember when Instagram was really little, like people would like pick that like kind of like purplish filters to make things look a little bit more kind of exotic. That was fun.

• 15:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it used to be done by a job known as a graphic designer. So if you had a photo of your family, you would, you could have a photographer take it as, because you didn't have access to a camera because they were very expensive.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:27Jason Calacanis?

  Then you would have a graphic designer touch it up and they would touch it up for 200 bucks. And then you'd have a Christmas card that you would go to a store and have printed.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 15:35Jason Calacanis?

  Now you just take a picture on your phone and send it to print and you're done. It's pretty great.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  That's a little bit different than the way things work now in which we upload our contact book to an online database, run that through the system we're purchasing cards from. And then they come free, filled out for us with everyone's address. Fantastic. Not at all a risk though, when it comes to um, uh, security. Now that I think about it, giving everyone's address over to some random company. Uh, but Jason, why don't we do a little demo? Why don't we show R1 in a couple of different contexts here? So what I have done is downloaded, uh, DeepSeek's R1 7 billion parameter model. And I am hosting it locally on my MacBook Pro. If you're curious, this is running a M3 Pro chip, but I think 12 or 16 gigabytes, something like that. So Jason, let's, let's ask it, you know, who is the president of China? And let's just see what it, see what it does here.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  What I want you to watch is how it talks to itself. So what it's going to do here is it's going to start to riff. All right. So user wants to know this, looking back at our history, let's think about this. I don't know why it's asking, giving me emojis. And it says the president of China is Xi Jinping. Very, very simple, pretty easy, took into account my, my prior context. Nothing there that's going to blow anyone's mind. Here is the DeepSeek interface and I'm running R1 as you can see right here. And I'm asking you the same question. And in testing, we discovered a relatively different set. Oh, it got cut off.

• 17:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  So what we have seen here is power of open source. The hosted version of DeepSeek R1 has clear lines around what it can and cannot. Answer clearly, President of China off the list, whereas the hosted version does not. What's cool though is you don't have to use the web one. You can just download it. It's open source and run it yourself. And so it strips away all that cruft. And I bring all this up to say that people are saying, oh, you know, it's a censored model. I can't do anything. Look at my screenshots. Well, yeah, or you can just download it. And I think that's incredibly powerful and needs to be discussed more.

• 17:33Jason Calacanis?

  At the early days of these with the image creation, a friend of mine, you know, they had these filters. You can't do celebrities. You can't do racy photos. And I had a friend who was like, hey, look, you can do anybody. You can do anybody and you could change somebody's gender. You could do this. You could do that. You can make somebody a squid person. So the censorship in the hosted versions, I think, is going to lead a lot of people to actually run this stuff locally and then privacy. I did see people were taking the Terms of Service. If you think TikTok is a hey, security issue. I mean, if you're using deep seek with any information, you got it at your head examined. Everything you're sending is going directly to the CCP. So I would recommend not using this.

• 18:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's probably got all kinds of the hosted version, certainly. Everything is being sent directly to servers in China, directly to the CCP and being used in using AI. So they're using AI to examine every photo you share, then correlate your IP address with your deep seek, and then build a dossier on every American and then take public sources of data, run it against geo-located data in ad networks. And they have so much information on every American. It's nuts. We need to really address all of that. But you know, big picture, the question is going to be, will this slow down hardware consumption? And I think that that is actually possible, that you might have the leaders of some company saying,

• 18:58Jason Calacanis?

  hey, let's spend the next dev cycles optimizing this and just making it run better on the existing footprint of hardware we have. And then when you're a capital allocator, you're looking at a pool of capital. Is this billion dollars better spent on more H100s? Or is this billion dollars better spent on more headcount? And what people might realize here is it might be better to hire more people to do more optimization on some aspect of what you're working on than buy the incremental H100s.

• 19:33Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:15Jason Calacanis?

  We're talking professional layouts, on-brand visuals, and premium content all ready to go day one. So here's your call to action. Start the year strong. Check out squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com/twist. That was always going to happen. At some point, people would say, hey, we're utilizing X percentage of this. We're out of training data. Let's optimize this. And then where would we deploy the capital better? How could the capital be deployed for a better return? And that's the key here. What I've always felt would happen is I think Gemini and Copilot at Microsoft is going to become a free product. Eventually, they're just going to say, you know what?

• 20:59Jason Calacanis?

  We can just abstract this cost into our existing business. And Apple, if they ever get their act together, which it seems like they're just going to draft off open source. If they ever get their act together, or they buy Claude or something like that, which I think is probably what will happen eventually. They'll just buy one of these language model teams. So they can just start on third base with a team. They will basically kill the market for paid products here. And what could you run the dev and the hosted versions down to? It might just be, you know, so de minimis at AWS, at Azure, at Google Cloud, you know, at Oracle's cloud, that people just go, you know what? There's not a business here, just like it's really hard to have a

• 21:43Jason Calacanis?

  Business in storage or transport, it's maybe this like thin layer that's free for everybody, which is good for humanity. I think that's the other thing. If you're thinking from a human perspective, like maybe we move to the geopolitical ramifications of this now.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 21:57Jason Calacanis?

  It's going to be very hard to constrain the Chinese. I mean, I do think we win ultimately, but it's going to be hard to constrain anybody by just limiting their access to H100s. They'll be able to get other chips. And when you constrain something, people get creative. So maybe they're making knockoff H100s and other kind of devices, other hardware platforms that will do the same thing. So.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  So you wanted this Josh Kushner to be pulled up because I think it does detail an interesting split in the world of venture. Mark Andreessen called Deepsea's work a gift to the world. And then, you know, Joshua Lux was pretty critical of that. And then here we have Joshua Kushner, or Josh Kushner, really, saying that, quote, "Pro-America technologists openly supporting a Chinese model that was trained off of leading US frontier models with chips that likely violate export controls and, according to their own Terms of Service, take US data back to China." And then he does the thinking emoji face. And Jason, I want you to explain what Josh is trying to say here. Decode the investor speak for the regulars.

• 23:00Jason Calacanis?

  You know how you can tell if an investor is talking their book?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  How?

• 23:04Jason Calacanis?

  They're tweeting.

• 23:07Jason Calacanis?

  They're tweeting. So what Josh is doing here is, you know, he is the last investor at the $150 billion ChatGPT round, a round I said could possibly be the peak valuation of OpenAI. I don't know if you remember me making that claim on All In and I made it here as well. So, you know, I've been thinking about this for a long time. When a company gets extremely overvalued and there's a lot of competition from extremely deep-pocketed people and the technology has open source going on, you start to look at it and go, hmm, I wonder if that is the highest valuation this company will ever reach because of this competition

• 23:47Jason Calacanis?

  and because so many people are going after the same price. And so there used to be a business in selling packaged. Browsers. You remember going and buying Netscape, the browser in package software, a comp USA on Fifth Avenue by the Public Library in Manhattan, like as a kid, just like, oh, wow, look Netscape in a box and then go get your five and a quarter inch floppy, three, 3.5 inch floppy and install it. You can't, you don't have to buy a browser anymore, right? There's not a business in owning the browser. So I think-

• 24:16Speaker 00

  Jason, before you go on, there's a company called Island that's making an enterprise browser with extra cybersecurity that's growing very quickly and it's on the Twist 500. But for regulars, you're dead on. Back to you.

• 24:26Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, so you're paying for security. So exactly. So you can build things around it and, you know, obviously people did a search engine around it and, you know, the people will pay for other things or pay other ways. So I think he's probably concerned about the fact that open source is just the ultimate headwind against a paid product. And this open source and this kind of progress coming from small teams, I think is probably going to make people wonder, should I invest in the next round of OpenAI? Should I give OpenAI the next 10 billion, 20 billion? And so it's quite possible this might be the peak OpenAI valuation and that would be pretty nerve wracking.

• 25:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's also probably pretty tweaking if people are saying like, just use this. Like, why would I pay for OpenAI? Just use this. Because remember that valuation gets backed into based on revenue and the revenue picture for OpenAI was surprisingly good. I mean, I would-

• 25:23Speaker 00

  They had 6 billion in revenue this year or-

• 25:27Jason Calacanis?

  I think it was last year. So, yeah, you know, it's hard to know because they keep talking about the run rate.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  It's a little fuzzy. You know, it wouldn't be fuzzy if they would just go fricking public. Like, do you know how annoyed they are with Databricks and their run rate versus ARR versus historical revenue numbers that I have to then tease out? Chest.

• 25:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. The other complications at OpenAI is, you know, the lawsuit. Switching to a public entity from a nonprofit. And if it is a nonprofit, the nonprofit is entitled to the increase in value. So I think they have to buy it for 150 billion because that's what its value was. Or, you know, somewhere close to that number before the flip happened. So maybe they investors only get from 150 billion forward. It's one of the most

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Convoluted.

• 26:13Jason Calacanis?

  Convoluted, yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  You ever think of Chinese F1 filing to list in the U.S.? And then they show the ownership chart. And it has like 40,000 boxes of like JVs and like dotted lines for control and like offshore. That's what OpenAI feels like to me. But what's interesting is that there's still some reasonable optimism out there from folks like Aaron Levie that we are seeing both high end and low end demand. So Jason, we talked about OpenAI and their operator product. This is essentially like computer use from Anthropic. And it's how it can like go there and play with your browser for you. Very expensive right now. And then Aaron Levie points out that DeepSeek is cheap and also blowing up. And he says, all this points to the race is only going to continue to accelerate.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  So my view is, I don't think we're going to have a data center overcapacity problem in five years. But maybe we might have our first period of time in which if all this shakes other people think we're not GPU or compute constrained. That would be interesting and not a catastrophe, I don't think. I just wonder if you were hoping that Nvidia would double again, you might be a little bit sad. But I, I, I'm not at all pessimistic about any of this. It just doesn't seem bad.

• 27:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, um, we'll, we'll see what the truth is around the model over time. And the, like you said earlier in the conversation, whatever, because this is an open source, because there's a paper, because they're sharing their innovations, it will get incorporated into. Any interesting techniques or approaches will get incorporated into our research. And we have the money to deploy the hardware in America. So why not have that as a potential runway? It's like having extra capacity, but this would Change, I think a lot of how people think about Nvidia, the stock and they were off double digits. Yeah. 10%

• 28:04Speaker 00

  15% at the, at the start of, at the start of the show, this is a chart of Nvidia's share price for the last week, inclusive of where we were earlier today. And it went from roughly, I don't know, Jason, 150 to about 120. And if you're a multi-trillion dollar company, each 1% decline of 1 trillion is 10 billion. So every point of 3 trillion is 30. And if you have a 10 to 15% drop, that's 300 to 450 billion dollars in deleted market cap in a day, which is a lot.

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  Almost 17% right now. So that's a lot.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  That's a lot, a lot, a lot. So there's going to be some putting up, I think Nvidia needs to show that demand's hot. I think that the closed source model companies now need to put up some big points on the board to show that they're not essentially dinosaurs that are trying to build something in closed source that's going to be open source. And you know what? That's going to be fun to do, fun to watch.

• 28:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think the operator product, which, you know, we've seen different versions of that, taking over the browser versions is going to be the feature of 2025. I think a lot of folks are going to look at, you know, repetitive tasks. And this was part of the thesis with our investment in Athena. Go to athenawow.com and get like a month off or something. They give a really good deal to my followers. And so, you know, if you're watching somebody do a repetitive task in their browser over and over again, you could basically anticipate what they're doing and build it out. So when you are building out the docket, go to thisweekinstartups.com slash docket, and you can see the docket we're working from. Let's say you're talking about Nvidia.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  And anytime you talk about Nvidia, you pop in a chart. It might just fire off a tab and say, you know, in the early version of it might say, insert chart from Y charts or wherever you use. And you say yes, or, and then next it would say inserting chart from Y charts, 10, 9, 8, and you can cancel it. But if you don't cancel, it doesn't. And then eventually you're going to wake up in the morning and it's going to be like, here are the five most important news stories of the day that we know Jason's been talking about, Chamot's been talking about, Satya has been talking about, this account's been talking about, that account's been talking about, and here are those stories. All right. Growing your business in 2025 comes down to really one thing.

• 30:19Jason Calacanis?

  How well can you hire? And we all know smart hiring starts with LinkedIn. LinkedIn gives you the strongest data and insights to find the right candidates faster. From unique skills and interests to connections you have in common. LinkedIn will help you hire with confidence. And here's why it works. There's a billion members on LinkedIn now. The march to a billion has happened. These people are across 200 plus countries and LinkedIn will connect you with the best talent. Period. End of story. 72% of small businesses say LinkedIn helps them find the right hires. And 86% of businesses get a qualified match within just 24 hours. Here's what makes LinkedIn so unique. It connects you to over 171 million professionals who aren't actively job hunting,

• 31:04Jason Calacanis?

  but they're open to new opportunities. That's kind of the magic, right? They're open to the possibility of joining your team and crushing it. This means you can reach top talent who aren't actively looking. It's a pool of candidates you simply can't find anywhere else. And we have hired so many of the most talented people I have on this week in startups, all in, and at launch, my, my investment firm. So knowing the right information about these candidates is going to just make you super confident. Just recently, we were hiring somebody I saw. We knew somebody in common and I sent them a DM. Hey, what do you think of this person's name? And I instantly got a DM back and that was super helpful to me. So when every hire matters, LinkedIn is the hiring partner you can trust.

• 31:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's how small businesses stay ahead, no matter how many hats the founders are wearing. I mean, listen, we're all busy. So here's your call to action. Grow your team in 2025 smart by finding your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free, LinkedIn.com/twist. That's LinkedIn.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. That would then basically take, I don't know, the next half of the docket and make it, you know, you're starting on second base, third base.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:16Jason Calacanis?

  That's really what this year is going to be about is those kind of repetitive tasks, being studied, then being anticipated, and then being done for you. Because there's so much capacity out there, why wouldn't it do it? And it might make you plenty stories for the docket or three versions of each and say, which one do you like best? And you say B, and you don't even say why you like it best. You say this one seems feels the best, or you might say, I like this, you know, sections. It gives you seven sections per item in the document and you click on it. Or it watches the show, it sees what you mentioned, and then it reinforcement learns it.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:51Jason Calacanis?

  So the idea of a producer would be contained in a browser agent.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Yes, but to make that work, I'm either going to need to use the same browser across all my devices logged into the same model, which you give a lot of power to the OS makers, Android and iOS, or I'm going to have to bring my own model via an app that I then use across all my platforms. The problem is, we want to have a unified AI digital assistant that knows me so it can do the reinforcement learning that you described about what I like to read and so forth. But the problem is I have such a fractured computing experience across Windows OS 10 or OS, macOS, sorry, now, and then also iOS. It's a little bit, it's going to be a while to get there, I think, actually.

• 33:33Jason Calacanis?

  If you see the value in it, you would then consolidate that usage and be logged into Chrome on your mobile, Chrome on your desktop. Like, these are the reasons people will actually switch an operating system is for a feature this powerful. I was using Chrome OS in our organization before you got here for a couple of years, and Zoom became such an important product, and Zoom sucks inside of a browser window. I mean, you can use it. Google Hangout sucks inside of a browser window that when COVID happened, I had to revert back. But in our offices, I put a Chrome box on the back of everybody's Dell monitor, and it was awesome because you didn't have all this bruff that you get with iOS, Apple Music, Photos, Messages, and we just were at work 100% focused on just work stuff.

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  And we all loved it because it was also very fast and crisp. It didn't crash. And it was just great to just always be in the browser and have this perfect operating system. And people didn't believe me, but then they saw me doing it. And I was like, guys, you can't believe how awesome Chrome OS is because I'd watched my, I'd watched kids using it and they had sent me a Chromebook. And one app, one killer app can make you switch. And Zoom was that killer app that made us go back to iOS.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Full desktop environments. Yeah. Before we move on from this and talk maybe just a little bit about what people are going to do, I just want to say that right before we came on air, DeepSeek dropped a new model.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Now, I haven't had a chance to look into this yet. It's called Janus Pro 7B. It makes images. They claim it has some cool features to it. We'll look into it, y'all. All this is to say that the parade, the rain on everyone's parade from DeepSeek is still raining. Like, the, I mean, it's, yeah.

• 35:19Jason Calacanis?

  Great to get a kick in the ass. It's good for the industry. I think America still wins the day. I think open source still wins the day. And that's my position. I'll stick to it. I think it's going to be open source all the way.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Ah, that's, that's interesting. Okay. I don't, I don't disagree with you.

• 35:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Now then, how the open source is implemented, there is an opportunity for somebody like you explained this browser company that we added to the TWIST 500, creating secure browsers, you know, virtual browsers, all that kind of stuff. It's been around for a while for, you know, people at, you know, the NSA or CIA. They have had these type of browsers all the time that are contained and firewalled, et cetera. So you can't jump from the browser into like, you know, the CIA systems because it's just a virtual machine. These are the things that are going to be the next card that drops, which is just like you loaded a version of this when we're talking about, hey, you're trusting it. Maybe our firm has a container of when we're all working, it's watching our desktops. Everybody understands,

• 36:22Jason Calacanis?

  like, don't do personal stuff here. It's, you know, you're on your, you're on your corporate machine. That's like the next card that's going to drop because then it would be like, there'd be some AI manager in the sky. Or AI Concierge in the sky that would be like, hey, by the way, you've been talking about this company on the podcast. There's a competitor to this company we're consider investing in. You should have a conversation with this person. That's where this all winds up is some god CEO in the sky, watching your whole organization run, watching other organizations run and saying, you know, at $10 million in revenue, you really need to have three more salespeople and two less customer success people. Or, hey, by the way, you could, they'd be like this like CEO coach. Maybe you don't need to have customer success anymore.

• 37:07Jason Calacanis?

  You're really like falling behind the standard on your FAQ and your automated systems and your training. Move some resources from customer support to training.

• 37:18Jason Calacanis?

  Like, this is not far away, is this guide in the cloud, this Sherpa.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  I'm imagining, like, what would this be for venture capitalists? Like, this is the third time you've tried to back a personal CRM startup. Every time you do this before, it's failed. Do you want to send the check? Click yes, click no.

• 37:34Jason Calacanis?

  This would be what you would do with the Crunchbase database is say, every time this company, you know, every time you get a company pitch, it goes, here are other companies that were funded. Here's why they said they failed. And then you would be talking to the founder and say, hey, you know, I know these other three companies failed in the space. What are your thoughts on that? Which clever VCs are doing right now when they're talking to a founder, they've got ChatGPT four open. Or before they get on the call, they're saying, hey, tell me about the competitive landscape. If this company were to fail, why would it fail? And that's why we're, you know, been building this database in Notion and Coda of our own experience interviewing startups and figuring out which one will work, just because it gives you a mental model, right? As we talked about before, you know, help your mental model.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  On the idea though, about Crunchbase and AI, I'll just point this out that I saw this this morning. Crunchbase.ai is coming, so I don't think it's impossible to see kind of where they're going to go with this. And I wonder if they can take their data and actually make something similar to what we're describing here, because it's going to be awesome. Final thought from me, it's gonna be one hell of a year and I'm very excited about it. I do think though, it's good that people are talking more about the socioeconomic impacts of AI. And earlier you said. Be very interesting. You're like, look, if we're thinking about proximal spend, will it go to more hardware, more people? You know, we spend a lot of time talking about AI productivity, efficiency gains, and I wonder if the money's not going to go to more H100s or more PhDs. I wonder if instead it's just going to go to

• 38:59Jason Calacanis?

  Profits?

• 39:00Speaker 00

  shareholders? Yeah, profits, dividends. I don't know.

• 39:04Jason Calacanis?

  That's what we, you know, we, we've been talking for a couple of years now about static team size. And then we talked about consolidation. We don't have exactly a term for it, but a CEO at Twilio was just talking about this sort of condensing of condensed team size. Let's go with that for now. And condensed team size would mean just using AI to slowly take a thousand person team to 900 next year, then 800, then 700. As you do that, those people could be paid if you're reducing costs 10% a year and you're growing revenue 10% a year.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:42Jason Calacanis?

  You've got this like perfect storm of earnings. The remaining people could get paid more. The, the dividends could be higher. And then we're going to just be sitting here with a one person company or like a 10 person company eventually. And the AI god in the sky running it.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:58Jason Calacanis?

  10 minions who are just there to, you know, make sure the thing doesn't go off track and dividends are going to be nuts. What do you think of that? I mean, let's go political conspiracy theory corner. The timing of this?

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Ah.

• 40:11Jason Calacanis?

  Is this, is the timing of this? Cause somebody brought that up in the, in our chat, you know, we've recorded this live. Go to youtube.com, search for this week in startups, hit the bell. On YouTube, Niren, N-I-R-E-N, says, Trump back in office coincidence? So there's been a lot of saber rattling.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  With China.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:30Jason Calacanis?

  Talk of a grand deal, the TikTok divestiture. And I'll just put it out there. I'm willing to run TikTok for 10% ownership and give Trump 90%.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  9%.

• 40:41Jason Calacanis?

  I'll go nine. I'll go eight.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Seven.

• 40:43Jason Calacanis?

  Six point. So I can name that too in 1% equity. So what do you think? Is there something to this? Is this coordinated where they're trying to rattle or shake? Uh, or maybe make a point to Trump and America and the great innovation engine known as capitalism?

• 41:03Speaker 00

  I see. The thing is that that is a convenient idea because it fits into everyone's idea that the Chinese central government is so all knowing that it would have insight into every single AI company could select a winner, could then foment a news cycle to drive down the value of US equities. Maybe they released V3 back in December, R1 came out in January, but it's more like they just had some breakthroughs and pulled off some real innovation. Now I expect China to try to make noise about this for sure. You mentioned bots being a way to send things up the app store chain. I wouldn't be shocked if there was some chicanery going around there, but the real conspiracy theory that I think everyone should hold on to, if you're going to have fun with them, is that keep in mind, DeepSeek is the subsidiary of a hedge fund.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  That hedge fund subsidiary just moved the market. So the funny conspiracy theory is that they shorted Nvidia, dropped the model and makes this cheaper and then made a lot of noise about it.

• 42:00Jason Calacanis?

  Hold on a second. So this whole thing could have been architected to create the greatest short of all time?

• 42:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, but that's a little bit like building a car that can fly just to drive around the block. Like, I mean, they did all, all the work to make an awesome AI model and then it happens to be so good that it changed the conversation. You, I don't know if you can see around enough corners to make that short trade a possibility, but they did move the market and hedge funds love to move the opposite direction because they're a hedge.

• 42:33Jason Calacanis?

  This feels like a theory worthy of double clicking on a bit. Uh, you know, who benefits is always the question you want to ask in those murder mysteries. Columbo, uh, what is it? Kibono? Who benefits? The timing here is just so delightful, uh, and so perfect first weekend for Trump. All these great wins. Big announcement for Masa. I mean, people knew that this announcement was coming and they might have had this done for a while and they've got to pick when to drop it. So hmm, interesting.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Project Stargate was cooking originally with Microsoft. Actually, if you go back and read the information's reporting, but I will say, what does China want to do? It wants to make the US probably a little bit less economically certain in itself and therefore less willing to shake up trade dynamics. So here's one way to do it. Okay, let's put this down for now and talk about a couple of other things. I want to talk about startup shutdowns, Jason. We've been talking about Bench and Lever and a number of other companies that have recently hit the wall, as it were. So TechCrunch has an interesting article out and they pulled some different data points from different providers of information to figure out how much did startup shutdowns accelerate last year?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  So Carta found a 25.6% increase in 2024 compared to 2023. Now, keep in mind, Carta's data is mostly US-based companies that happen to use their cap table management software. So it's a slice of the market, but still a 25% increase is a quarter. Fair enough. Angel List, according to the same TechCrunch story, shout out Julie Port, said that there were 364 shutdowns that they could see. That was up 56%. And then layoffs to FYI actually saw a decrease in shutdowns. So I would say two data points showing a pretty sharp increase in shutdown activity, one showing something a little bit flatter. I'm curious, what is the chatter on startup shutdowns this year, Jason? We've talked a lot about IPOs and M&A, but I'm curious what's the back channel on where this is going?

• 44:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so I think a lot of startups were holding on, trying to survive through really high valuations that they had raised money at. They had war chests and they did round after round of layoffs from peak Zerp era to now. And if you survived, the thesis was, hey, maybe you could either thrive or get to the M&A finish line. And so I think that's what's happening here is we're seeing that some people who tried to hold on were not able to get there. They just ran out of lift, right? They had a certain amount. Of altitude to get to the airport and they were they were out of fuel. So they were gliding.

• 45:09Jason Calacanis?

  And so all those gliders, you know, coming in either at the runway, laying everybody off, selling the asset. Or in some cases, just mismanaged and didn't, you know, land the plane properly. I'm trying to be graceful here, but you know, when you have three years of runway and you know how to land the plane gracefully. The board and the CEO and the management team did something wrong. They probably hoped against hope that they can raise a round. And so they didn't cut their spending and they didn't pursue M and A in a really thoughtful way. So whenever you see like these things blow up spectacularly, you're like, wait a second. They raised 200 million and then they still crash into the side of the mountain. Like, how does that happen?

• 45:52Jason Calacanis?

  Usually that happens, there's some conflict at the board level where one group wants to keep going for it. And they say, hey, we'll raise around, we'll raise around. And then the round shows up and the round is incredibly punitive. It's what's called pay to play. So if you don't put money in, you lose your shares or your shares get turned into common. You get diluted, crammed down rounds, another way to say it. And so when these kind of things happen, it's usually because the founder and the board were like, oh, we're so close. We got this white knight, we're going to close this round. And then it doesn't happen. All of a sudden it's like, oh, we can't make the runway, boss. What are we doing? It's like, okay, we're ditching. And that's what we're seeing is a bunch of people ditching planes.

• 46:32Jason Calacanis?

  And then of course, what happens is the VCs just leave the board and focus on their winners because it's a power law business anyway. So you can, you got a parachute. The VCs just parachute out. They're like, we're done. Now who's left on the plane? The employees, the angel investors, uh, you know, the management team, the founders, but sometimes the customers. And yeah, boom, just big hole in the ground. So it's part of the workout process whenever you have a crazy party like this is. Everybody takes a different approach. You know, my approach is always I, I, I fight till the, you know, dying breath. If the founder wants to fight, if the founder doesn't want to fight, well, then we just have to land

• 47:14Jason Calacanis?

  the plane and get people their severance and, you know, a dignified exit if possible, you know? And that's when you see all these tech crunch headlines that are like, oh, we had an amazing exit, you know, and the, the writers who are writing those stories, um, they don't have any insights. They don't usually get the actual details of it. But if there's no dollar amount announced, it's probably zero.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  It's or, or it's $4, but I want to go back to

• 47:43Jason Calacanis?

  Or maybe some common shares in the other company. So maybe, you know, uh, an Aqua hire of some, it's a saving faced acquisition.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  Throw a bone, make everyone happy. The point you made about successive rounds, having tons of runway and then never getting the company's burn rate to a level that made sense for the new market conditions. It, it, I think explains my question because I was looking at the same tech crunch article and Carta data says that 32% of shutdowns that they, they saw came from enterprise SaaS. And that surprised me a little bit because it feels like, it feels like a larger percentage than I would expect from companies that would have been building durable ARR compared to say consumer startups at the same time or biotech. But if you never got your cost structure under control, then having more ARR doesn't

• 48:32Speaker 00

  really matter because if you're plus 5 million ARR and you're losing 20 million a year, no one cares.

• 48:37Jason Calacanis?

  Precisely. So, you know, the, the SaaS model makes it easy, um, to get some number of people to get value from a business to business product to pay for it. Sometimes people through sheer force of charisma or will can sell a great story to another enterprise to get them to pay for it. But like you said, it could be upside, upside down. They're, they're spending $4 to make a dollar and the economics don't work out. Whereas in consumer or a biotech, it's binary. Either the product gets viral and takes off and people love it or it doesn't. And that goes for a medicine or a social network. Either it works or it doesn't. So you can Really have an easy time shutting it down. It's like, it didn't work, experiment failed, does not cure cancer,

• 49:18Jason Calacanis?

  does not grow virally. And you just move on, you know, it's like, we did a great job, you know, we worked hard and we move on. This is part of the power of our industry is that we can have this many short, this many shutdowns, this much seeming chaos in the portfolios and still wind up being a viable investment category, right? We're a viable industry, even with these big swings, missing and speaks volumes to our industry and how awesome it is for the world that we can just take chances after chances after chances and still be viable to get returns.

• 49:56Jason Calacanis?

  And so now with the end of the wrath of Lina Khan, if we can just let more M and A happen, we would see an even better outcome. So hopefully, the new regime that's in power now will just let it rip on M and A. That's what bankers think. That's the, that's the vibes in the banking community is, you know, let the games begin. Start sending out folders and packages and hey, who wants to buy this SaaS company? Who wants to buy that SaaS company? So that SaaS company you're talking about with five million in revenue, maybe, you know, there's 10 people on that team who are really great. And some other SaaS company wants to buy them or Benioff or Microsoft want the team and they want to make it a feature inside of Microsoft Office

• 50:40Jason Calacanis?

  or a feature inside of HubSpot or Salesforce. And now people will be like, it's worth doing that because we're not going to get to the finish line and have, you know, 24 months of lobbying regulators.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just, I remain very, very interested in how many Aqua hires we'll see this year, just given how much you've talked about static team size. There will always be outlier performers that people want to hire and will pay insane amounts of money for. The joke was that DeepSeek was spending $6 million to train a model and then that Meta had like 10 people getting paid that much per year to work on their own AI, whatever the case may be. But I just wonder if people are going to be willing to do salvage purchases to get people when they're cutting staff elsewhere. It just seems to be incongruous to me to have the static or condensed team size trend and then say, but we're going to see more M and A this year. So I think it's going to be much more focused on strategic

• 51:33Speaker 00

  products and then also technologies, which is different than than doing Aqua hires because I think there's fewer companies that have those that might be interesting to be purchased targets.

• 51:43Jason Calacanis?

  So you're right that they don't want to buy a thousand developers, but there's always a market for a really tight team. And the cost structure is so affordable now based on not having to bring over all these middle managers, like those things don't exist in these new companies. So they'll just cherry pick these five people, these five people, you know?

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Okay. That makes it better for seed companies though, because they're smaller already. There's less to cut, less cost structure to remove. They don't have their own. Yeah.

• 52:12Jason Calacanis?

  And and people will be open to it because it's like, oh, I can't get a job at the magnificent seven. So if our team can still work together, that seems like a pretty decent opportunity. And so they'll either go with their five person team and start a new company and bring this lean mean efficiency to a new product and a new cap table, or they will bring that lean mean team inside of a big enterprise, get paid big money. Uh, and they, the big enterprises don't have to be perfectly efficient. That's one of the pieces of good news. If you're going after a big prize, like say self-driving, you can be really inefficient getting there. If you're going after a big prize like AI, do you have or a cloud computing, you don't have to be

• 52:55Jason Calacanis?

  super uh efficient getting there. You can make a ton of mistakes because the, the, the prize at the end is so great.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  I'm reading um The Nvidia Way by Takeem and uh we were going to have Tay on the show, dirt. Uh, but as it turns out, there's some things going on that have taken his time away from us. So we will have him on shortly. But I bring that up because Nvidia made more mistakes early on than I thought. Like they, they made some pretty big mistakes early on, but at one point, we'll talk about this later, but like inclusion of sound in their graphics card, which led to a lot of compatibility issues nearly killed the company. Who knew? But now they are, you know, where they are. But Jason, you're talking about the amount of money in play here. Look how much things have changed just today. Nvidia has been dethroned overnight by DeepSeek and is now the third most valuable company compared to the first.

• 53:45Jason Calacanis?

  Crazy.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  That is such a change.

• 53:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Wow, that's mind blowing to me.

• 53:50Jason Calacanis?

  The AI trade, give it the AI trade.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Take it away.

• 53:53Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder if it's a buying opportunity. I don't know.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm going to keep on index funding, so I'll keep on buying no matter what. Ha, ha, ha.

• 53:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, this would be where stock picking goes wrong, because if you thought you could pick and you just bought the magnificent seven or an index, you'd be fine today. And if you just consolidated into Nvidia, you would have been great for three years, four years, and then, you know, but if you were the last person in, you would be down significantly.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Or if you were a, an absolute genius and you decided to purchase something akin to this, a 2X long Nvidia daily ETF, if you were holding that, I think you're gonna get 2Xed down. So maybe, uh, you know, maybe you're not smarter than the market, random person who's out there.

• 54:39Jason Calacanis?

  So that's using leverage to buy more Nvidia on top of the amount the capital owns is, yeah, wow.

• 54:47Speaker 00

  Leverage is fun when you're making money.

• 54:50Jason Calacanis?

  Careful, folks.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, be careful, folks.

• 54:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that was one of the things in Robinhood. I always was, you know, counseling to people who use Robinhood, like, the amount of cash you have and the amount of leverage you have in your account, like, I, I just go with the cash, right? Your buying power, you know, uh, is, it's fine to understand those concepts if you want to be an aggressive trader, but I, I kinda like them old school buy and hold for five or 10 years. Yeah, nice, nice way to live.

• 55:18Speaker 00

  What did Charlie Munger say? The three Ls that will trip up a man? And this is dated, so roll with me here, but he said it was liquor, ladies, and leverage.

• 55:27Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, there you go.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Just be careful.

• 55:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 00

  I'm gonna throw in one tiny, quick one before we go, Jason, which is that sale point is going public again. Uh, we missed this, I think, during the election brouhaha, because they dropped their S1 right before. For inauguration, so we were all a little bit busy. SailPoint, which people don't know, does identity management, security stuff, a bit like Okta, if you need an analogy, went private back in 2022 for 6.9 billion, sold to Tomma Bravo. And Jason, it is still growing. They are saying that their ARR was 813 million as of October of 2024. They've only dropped numbers through Q3 of 2024. I presume we'll get an updated S1 filing, including Q4 data.

• 56:09Jason Calacanis?

  So they were public.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 56:10Jason Calacanis?

  They were taken private for some number of years and then two, cleaned up and then brought back public, uh, which is probably what will happen with Zendesk or any number of these companies. The public markets don't believe in them. Somebody takes them private. Uh, I guess you get forced to have your shares bought because you get dragged along in many cases. And then boom, all of a sudden the company goes public again with a cleaner cap table, cleaner books, better earnings. No, none of those.

• 56:39Speaker 00

  No.

• 56:40Jason Calacanis?

  Because, because this is private equity. Jason, you think they're going to do that?

• 56:43Speaker 00

  So what I have here is their, uh, income statement through the first nine months of 2024, compared to the first nine months of 2023. And if you look down here, you'll note that there is this insanely huge interest expense. Wow. How did they spend $140 million in three quarters on interest alone? Well, as it turns out, uh, they had to take out a 1.59 billion dollar term loan when they were taken private to partially pay for the transaction and they've been paying through the news for ever since. So.

• 57:19Jason Calacanis?

  So they're, they got a giant loan. They bought their shares. They have interest expense that they have to pay down. So now the company is riddled with debt. It's going public. So if you're buying it now, you're buying it, uh, with a saddled with debt, which means.

• 57:36Speaker 00

  With that, yeah, it's, it's an insane, it's an insane thing. So, uh, their gross profit in that three quarter period was about 400 million and they spent 140 million of that on interest payments alone.

• 57:49Jason Calacanis?

  That's a hobbled.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Company.

• 57:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  We talked a lot about private equity, making things more efficient and, you know, turning around a business. And sometimes that does happen, but I really think that private equity managing to take a company private, using money that it will borrow to pay them back for it, getting paid interest along the way. And then using part of the public proceeds to pay themselves back more while enjoying the upside is, it seems extractive to me.

• 58:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  I know this is my bad capitalist moment, but this is one time when I'm like, I don't think levering up companies and taking them public again in a super unprofitable fashion is the best way to do business.

• 58:22Jason Calacanis?

  Not their problem, right? And if they're, they're selling, it's like, it's like that scene in Margin Call. Is it, was that the film?

• 58:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, Margin Call. We're selling at the fair market, willing buyer at a fair market price.

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, if people don't want to buy the company, they don't have to buy it. I wonder what that interest rate is, you know? That's where things get so interesting is like, you think like paying six or 7% for your mortgage is hard. These corporate loans are much higher, right? They're, they're 10, 15, 20%. Uh, so they, they might have any, they might be paying a really, really big coupon to the owners of that debt. And so that could be quite punitive if they took a billion dollars in debt to do this transaction.

• 59:03Speaker 00

  In the next 12 months, interest payments that relate to the term loan are estimated to be approximately 176.5 million, based on the interest rate of, actually, Jason, guess.

• 59:13Jason Calacanis?

  14%.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  Okay, 11.1.

• 59:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yeah, I mean, I knew it would be between 10 and 15, so it's basically like a credit card.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  Yes, a 1.6 billion dollar credit card. Holy crap.

• 59:22Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, and so I guess the question is if the company was growing.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 59:26Jason Calacanis?

  20, 30% a year, and you might be able to pay down some principal, depending on how much debt you had relative to the enterprise value. But you got to take that debt out, uh, based on the enterprise value, I guess. So, all right, everybody, this has been another amazing episode of This Week in Starps. We'll see you on Wednesday. Bye bye.