Coreweave IPO, AVRide & Digg is Back! | E2093

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today! Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up. Today's show: Jason and Alex cover CoreWeave's filing for a $35 billion IPO after explosive revenue growth. But with 77% of its revenue coming from just two customers, is it built to last? Meanwhile, AVRide is bringing autonomous Hyundai robotaxis to Uber in Dallas, pushing the self-driving revolution forward as Waymo scales to 200,000 weekly rides. And finally, Digg is back! Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian are reviving the iconic social news platform, using AI-powered moderation to tackle Reddit's biggest challenge. Tune in as Jason and Alex break it all down! Timestamps: (0:00) Episode teaser(1:34) Jason's South by Southwest appearances & All In fan meetups(4:17) Digg relaunch, history, and Kevin Rose's AI strategy(10:05) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(11:43) Jason's involvement with Digg's revival and lessons learned(15:02) Using Reddit for startup communities(20:00) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(22:07) Kevin Rose's journey and ketamine therapy(24:18) CoreWeave's public filing, clients, and revenue growth(29:52) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up.(34:22) CoreWeave's potential acquisition and investor IRR(40:45) Using LLMs for financial analysis and political funding discussion(46:19) CoreWeave data centers and AV Ride partnership with Uber(50:18) Challenges in electric bikes and healthcare startups(53:10) Novo Nordisk's direct-to-consumer strategy with Wegovy(57:28) Future of healthcare and Brian Johnson's health regimen(1:05:52) Challenges and excitement in the autonomous vehicle industry Links from episode: Check out digg: https://digg.com/ Check out AVRide: https://www.avride.ai/robot Check out the Mozi app: https://www.mozi.app/ Check out Nerd Crawler: https://www.nerdcrawler.com/ Check out article about Novo Nordisk and Wegovy: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/05/novo-nordisk-goes-direct-to-consumer-with-wegovy-what-it-means-for-obesity-rival-eli-lilly.html 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: (10:05) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(20:00) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(29:52) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up. Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman 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

  I want to talk just for a minute about CoreWeave filing to go public. Jason, we've been talking about NeoCloud's, these GPU hyperscalers that are buying up, you know, billions of dollars worth of gear. It's a pretty interesting company. You ever open an S1 and not know what you're going to see? Because that's

• 0:16Jason Calacanis?

  Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, let's talk about it. So this, for those folks who are on the audio version, I'm going to pull up the income statement. Jason, you and I love an income statement. But I just want to say that CoreWeave's revenue grew from a little bit under 16 million in 2022 to nearly 230 million in 2023. To

• 0:41Jason Calacanis?

  God.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  More than, yeah, exactly. More than 1.9 billion last year.

• 0:48Speaker 02

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• 1:30Speaker 02

  Visit hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's Wednesday, it's March 5th. He's Alex Wilhelm, I'm Jason Caliganis. The docket is so full that we should really just get started, but I wanted to let people know that I will be doing a bunch of different things at South by Southwest. I'm going to make a couple of appearances tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. I am going to do a Founder X fireside, and you guys can pull up the pages for this. We'll put all these notes somewhere. Where do these exist publicly?

• 2:05Speaker 00

  These are going to be in. We'll tweet them, and they're also going to be in the Twist 500 newsletter today in case people need to see it.

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so go to our Twitter handle, X, or our X handle, X.com/twiststartups, and we'll just post all this information there. But tomorrow, my friend Adeo from the Founders Institute is doing a Founder X fireside, 10 a.m. And that's at the McCombs School of Business at UT. It's limited, but if you really wanted to go, maybe you email Maddie at launch.co and she'll get you in. Uh, Bill Gurley is going to interview me at South by Southwest at 4:00 PM on Friday. You have to have a ticket. And that was a really great thing. Bill called me and he said, Hey, I'm doing a fireside chat on Friday at South by Southwest at 4:00 PM. And I was like, Oh, do you want me to interview you? I had favors calling for me to be the interviewer. He said, No, I wanted to interview. He said, I want to interview you. Ah, so I was like, Oh, well, that's a great honor.

• 2:55Jason Calacanis?

  So, um, I'm going to talk about venture capital, startup trends, moving to Austin, All In Launch Podcasts. On Saturday night, March 8th, 7:00 PM, I will be doing Dignation Live, uh, plus the Tim Ferriss Show is happening, plus Mix Master Mike, uh, from the Beastie Boys, their DJ. Uh, All In is doing an event. It's sold out on March 13th, 2025, but I will tweet, um, one free ticket to my followers. So look for that. We'll do it from the This Week in Startups account. So follow the This Week in Startups account. Maddie, give away one free ticket. I'm going to do a Q and A with the All In Fan Meetup and the This Week in Startups Fan

• 3:39Jason Calacanis?

  Meetup on March 12th at Cosmic Pickle in Austin. You got to sign up for that. We'll put the RSVP link. It's on river.io. If you go to getriver.io, you'll find it. So this will be a Q and A with me. It'll be on our Twitter account. It's at Cosmic Pickle, which is kind of a fun food truck location. 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM on March 12th. March 12th is what day of the week?

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Wednesday.

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  Wednesday, Wednesday, Wednesday. And that's it. All right. So what do we have on the docket? Let's, let's figure out what we could choose from here. There's always so many great things on the docket and you can follow along. Thisweekinstartups.com/docket to see the docket in real time.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Well, the question just Jason is, do you want to start with, uh, with the main meal? Or do you want to have some fun and do some more light fun, like poppy topics? Cause we actually have a mix today of like serious financial news and also Digg is back.

• 4:29Jason Calacanis?

  Let's start with Dig. I have inside information.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  Okay, we have a cut down of the Dig video, Jason, announcing the return of the platform and it's two people. So why don't you play that first and then I'll hand you the

• 4:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we can talk over it a little bit.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 4:43Jason Calacanis?

  I watched it this morning. It's quite nostalgic.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  It is.

• 4:48Jason Calacanis?

  If you were a web 2.0, baby, this means a lot to you. There's Kevin Rose, now a gray beard.

• 4:57Jason Calacanis?

  And

• 5:00Jason Calacanis?

  they peer behind it and you see Alex from Reddit is now partnering with Kevin on

• 5:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so

• 5:14Jason Calacanis?

  Dig's gonna be back. For people who don't know what Dig is, it was similar to Reddit. I think one of them launched a couple of months before the other. I think it might have been Dig then Reddit. Um, and they were social aggregators was the category. Social aggregators were, hey, you put it in a link, the community talks about the link. And then people click on it and they voted up, like I you dig it. Zuckerberg stole the Dig concept and then made the like button from it. And then this made everybody put on their websites, a little snippet for the like button or the dig button. What that did was it gave Facebook all the data of who was visiting your website. So it was actually a data play for advertising.

• 5:54Jason Calacanis?

  But then the idea would be if you liked it on, you know, this TechCrunch article and Gadget article, you could automatically share it to Facebook, etc. It created a bit of chaos. Dig went out of business, it got sold in a fire sale. A company called Buy Sell Ads bought the remnants of it, Dig.com. They kept it alive for a little bit. Somehow Kevin was able to buy it out and as many people know, for some reason, the owners of Reddit.

• 6:23Jason Calacanis?

  Have beef with Alexis and they didn't include him in the S1.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Yes. So Alexis Ohanian, best known Jason Still, I would say, as one of the Reddit boys. Since then, has done quite a lot of things in the venture community, most recently 776. And it's to me, this reads as a, I have been removed from the Reddit legacy. I'm now going to go team up with my arch rival and take another shot at this. But I also feel like it's the right time for something that is a bit more community driven. This is why I love subreddits because they're, they're small niche and lovely. But if it did come back out and do what Dig used to do, which was create really like a tech meme for the web, with all the top stuff you need to go see, I think we could use that. Because it's not based on an algorithm. It's not based on an ever been scrolling feed, I don't think.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  So I'm, I mean, I was stoked, I think is the, is the word here. I was a big Dig guy back in the day. So.

• 7:18Jason Calacanis?

  I love Dig. For people who don't know the history, when I had Engadget, I was, you know, let's just say, I was on a heater, had raised some money from Mark Cuban and I saw this Dig thing. Kevin had just used an outside developer, spent like $5,000 on it, but I saw it was sending like, I don't know, 1,000 people a day to Engadget and Autoblog and Joystick and our other blogs. And then it was, you know, 2,000 a day, 5,000 a day. And so I said, hey, let's get sushi kid. And I took him for sushi in Santa Monica. He was working at Tech TV or G4 TV or whatever. And he's a couple of years younger than me. And I said, hey, I'll, I'll buy this off you for a million bucks

• 8:00Jason Calacanis?

  in cash. And I had talked to Mark Cuban and I said, Mark, if you give me the million bucks in cash, can we buy this and put it as part of Weblogs Inc. Because it's sending so much traffic, it'd be like a great, like another blog or part of it.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  And Jason, let me, let me pause you. A million dollars back then was money. Like that was.

• 8:15Jason Calacanis?

  I was going to give him a million straight up for it, for, for basically a website that he had spent $5,000 building. So he had to think about it. He, he smartly declined and raised money from a couple of folks. It was super interesting. And then when Buy Sell Ads bought it, I, I talked to the guy over there who was selling some ads for Insights newsletters back when we had a newsletter business. And he would sell into some of the inventory and I asked him if he would sell it to me and. Then I was going to give it back to Kevin. So I was like, gonna try to buy it and then try to, and I had pitched Kevin on like, hey, maybe you want to start this up again. I think, I think there could be something for it. There's another interesting app out. I don't know if it's publicly available now. It's called

• 8:58Jason Calacanis?

  Mozi, M-O-Z-I. It's by Evan Williams, a friend of mine.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Ah, I saw this.

• 9:02Jason Calacanis?

  It's basically a new take on low, mobile, local social. So I have it open here and I see everybody in my address book and I see that my friend, Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter and Amanda from the league and other people from my phone book are going to be at South by Southwest next week. And I can also see the other events that Evan Williams has put in. I won't say where he's planning to travel to, but my friend Dave Samuel, a VC, put in his trip. Now, I didn't know he was going to this foreign country, but he's going to be in a similar foreign country to me. So I should trade notes with him on that foreign country. I say this because I think there's an opportunity to build smaller

• 9:44Jason Calacanis?

  social networks now that Twitter, Facebook, Meta, Threads, Blue Sky, I mean, the whole thing has been just shaken up and it's basically been ripped apart and balkanized. And I think people are looking for more authenticity, less politics. So it was a sort of interesting moment.

• 10:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:49Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:29Jason Calacanis?

  So go to northwestregisteredagent.com/twist to start your business today. Full disclosure, I am an advisor and shareholder in the new DIG.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 11:41Jason Calacanis?

  Just tiny, but I offered it to Kevin and said, hey, I would love to, you know, help in some way. And he said, oh, would you be an advisor? I said, sure. I don't know exactly what that means I'll do, but I agree to it. And I will be emceeing, I will be emceeing the DIG Nation revival on Saturday night. At Mohawk in Austin. So I will be introducing Kevin and Alex, and then a bunch of our friends who will from the old web 2.0 days will be coming on stage to say a few words. So he's like, hey, would you come on stage and say a few words? I said, I'll do better. I'll be your hype man. Would you like me to emcee the event? Cause you know, it's, it's always awkward when you introduce yourself, right? But to have somebody else introduce you is cool. And the cooler the person who introduces you, like the cooler it is. So I told Kevin like, and you know, hey, I'd love to introduce you guys.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  I want to throw in some notes about why now though, because I think this is the question you said, you talked to Kevin about this. Why don't we bring it back in a post? I think it was on the times. Kevin said, quote, "Just recently, we've hit an inflection point where AI can become a helpful co-pilot to users and moderators, not replacing human conversation, but rather augmenting it, allowing users to dig deeper while at the same time removing a lot of the repetitive burden for moderators." And what Kevin did was interesting. He took thousands of dollars and ran like surveys on Reddit, asking subreddit moderators what their pain points were. And then tried to build against that. So to me, that is brilliant research. And the time is now because of AI advances. So I mean, I'm never going to stop being a Reddit user,

• 13:08Speaker 00

  but I would love to also have another place where I can have fun and honestly upload cool stuff. So my little nerd is singing, Jason.

• 13:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's, it's super cool. Congratulations to the team. Um, for Alexis, little revenge startup never hurts. For K-Ro, like fantastic to be back in the game with a brand that meant a lot to people. I think he's got unfinished business there because people don't remember, um, dig for version four. Kevin was under a lot of pressure from venture capitalists. And this is where the founder lesson comes in. The VC community was like, you have to compete with Facebook. So they redid dig and it was going to use machine learning and make everybody's homepage unique, which is an interesting idea. So they were trying to copy like that feed as opposed to having one canonical feed.

• 13:59Jason Calacanis?

  And they spent months and months and years doing it, millions of dollars. And you know what? Reddit never changed its design. You go to Reddit today, I think they've had one design refresh in almost whatever it is, 15, 20 years. That was just very modest, like just a little bit of polish. It feels kind of the same in UX, you know, left-hand column, right-hand column, main column. And, you know, they didn't even have an app for many years. There was like some many third-party apps that would, you know, do Reddit. And now they've done, uh, but what Reddit did focus on was the quality of conversations, getting revenue figured out, figuring out mod tools. So of course there's work to be done on the mod tools.

• 14:38Jason Calacanis?

  There always is, but they really did a great job of not getting off track and knowing what they were. Sometimes the best thing to do in a startup is knowing you have product market fit and make the main feature, make the main feature two or three percent better every month. And then if you make it three percent better every month, every three years, it'll be twice as good. What was the main feature of dig? It was high-quality conversations and surfacing the best conversations and making the largest footprint of subreddits. In other words, topics. And so I recently fired up the All In Official subreddit. You can show it. It's chaotic, but it's better than like some of the rogue ones where they just like are podcast haters.

• 15:23Jason Calacanis?

  So that's kind of a genre is hating, hate, listening to podcasts and trashing them. So we created an official one. It's a little bit messy, but it's in the top 10%. We have a This Week in Startups one, TWI Startups. And the TWI Startups one is the one you should show. I think it's now in the top 50%, so go ahead and search for This Week in Startups or TWI Startups. And join our subreddit. We're starting to post there and have conversations with the fans. I also started a Jay Trading one, et cetera. Which one are you showing?

• 15:52Speaker 00

  This is the This Week in Startups Reddit.

• 15:54Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect. So we're in the top 48%. We were top 52% last week, so it's growing. I'd like to get it into the top 10% and then you can follow me. I think I'm Jason Calacanis or maybe Jason M. Calacanis. I think Reddit's a great place for startups to hang out. And so there's the entrepreneur community, which I'll go into sometimes and answer questions. People don't believe it's me. And there's the startups community. So those three, I think four are worth checking out. The two podcasts, All In Official, This Week in Startups, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship and Startups. And the actual, there's a, there's another one like All In Podcasts or some weird one

• 16:35Jason Calacanis?

  that they blocked me from because I would write comments and correct the hate sometimes when I, because you know, I subscribe to it. So it comes up on my feed and they would say like Jay Cal owns Solana. But I actually don't own Solana. I said it on the pod. You know, just like little cleanups here and there of things that were factually incorrect, but they blocked me.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  I, I, I think, so I was shown the unofficial All In subreddit via the Reddit algorithm. Who knows? I like technology and podcasts and such. And I was like, this is,

• 17:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's dark.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  This is a, this is, but it's not, it's not always Jason dark. It's actually, I mean, I think Chamot gets most of the stick.

• 17:11Jason Calacanis?

  Well, whenever you get like micro famous, which is like what I call my level of fame, it's like micro fame. Big podcast fame comes after like, reality TV on the Bravo network fame. So like, we're like just under Real Housewives of, I don't know. Pick a

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Well, that show's coming to Rhode Island, so watch out world.

• 17:34Jason Calacanis?

  Real Housewives of Rhode Island, then podcasters. But, yeah, it's a little more informative. It's a little, it's a little more cavalier for the podcast. But yes, they, they pick something to go after you for. So for Chamath, it's always SPACs. For Saks, it's always Ukraine. For me,

• 17:54Jason Calacanis?

  it's having TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, which is like, I mean, if you call balls and strikes, they'll, they'll say you have TDS. But putting it all aside, Reddit is a great place for founders to hang out. Why? I think you can build a great community over there. So I am working with the startups in our accelerator, and I'm doing it personally. And we have a Slack channel. So I created for my founders, a Reddit channel in our Slack. And I said, hey, why don't we all just talk about Reddit here and best practices? I wonder if every startup should start their own Reddit about either the topic they're in, like if you're, we have a really cool comic book company that takes that prints from comic books, artists, and the, it turns out you had Nerdcrawler.

• 18:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you can pull it up. This is the coolest startup. I'm so excited to be an investor in it. So Nerdcrawler, and let's have him on the pod, really cool guy. It turns out, you know, if you draw Wolverine for a Marvel comic, you get to keep the original artwork, because they pay you so little. You get that original piece of artwork you printed, and you can do whatever you want with it. You can gift it to somebody, you could sell it. Now, you, you can't like, make your own Wolverine comic, obviously, that's their IP. But you can go there and bid on like, the original sketches. And so, and you can even commission ones. It's a really cool website. And so imagine Nerdcrawler created a Reddit called Nerdcrawler, or they did one just based on comic book art, right?

• 19:24Jason Calacanis?

  So I think you can do both. So we have this week in startups, but there's also startups and entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship or entrepreneurs. And I participate in those, but we didn't start them. But if those weren't created, I would have created startups, right?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think having your own subreddit makes a lot of sense. I think every brand needs to have its own pizzazz and its own like fanbase that goes out and kind of fights for it. I think that's the arrow of capitalism we're in. So if you don't own your subreddit, as the all in pod learned accidentally, other people will make it for you and then you'll have no control and then it can become a suspect.

• 20:00Jason Calacanis?

  Founders, let's be real. Let's keep it a buck. Finding great developers is hard. It's like one of the hardest things you have to do in our industry, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup. But here's the good news. I got a tip that's going to save you time, money, and a ton of headaches. You need to check out lemon.io. Lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers who can help you. They have done all the work to find and vet great developers who are experienced, who are results oriented, and who charge competitive rate. Great developers we know are hard to find and integrate into your team. So lemon.io will handle all of that for you. They're only going to offer you handpicked developers with

• 20:44Jason Calacanis?

  at least three years of experience. And if something goes wrong, lemon.io will find you a replacement developer ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they have told me they've had a great experience. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.io/twist and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. So stop burning money. Hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io/twist. And then they'll even ban you. So they're slandering and banning you. So you can't even reply. It's like super crazy.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Yes, that's lovely.

• 21:24Jason Calacanis?

  So it's all good. I mean, it's part of being micro famous. That's what I tell everybody.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  Jealous. You're gonna go and do Dignation because, and this is a slight confession, but I was like a Dignation superfan back in the day.

• 21:36Jason Calacanis?

  Like to have a beverage back in the day.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Yes, I did.

• 21:38Jason Calacanis?

  It was a beverage based thing. And it was so funny. I remember, I remember they had the last episode. And actually Lon Harris was there. I was there. It was in, um, Los Angeles. They had this final episode. And I remember Kevin Pollak went Lon went. I was there. A bunch of our friends from LA. I remember talking to Kevin about it. And he's like, yeah, I just don't know if I want to be 40 or 50 years old drinking beer. You know, and doing this like, it was kind of like a brotastic pod with Alex.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Albrecht.

• 22:07Jason Calacanis?

  Albrecht, who was a really cool actor from LA. And, um. Yeah, anyway, long story short, he was kind of limiting that. Then they started Dignation up again. They've done like maybe five or 10 episodes. And, uh, I just had this funny moment. They're not drinking beer. They're drinking really expensive wine because they've both done so well for themselves. So.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  That's really funny, actually.

• 22:28Jason Calacanis?

  It's kind of funny. Yeah. Uh, but Kevin is a really, you know, he's watch, having grown up with Kevin, I might be a couple of years older than him. Uh, but watching, you know, his journey as an entrepreneur investor, done a lot of really, I think, important work in the world. He did an interesting thing on his Kevin Rose podcast where he's been dealing with anxiety. He's been public about it. So that's what I'm talking about it. And he, I think he had been dealing with some anxiety or something. And he, uh, did ketamine therapy, like, you know, like recreational. You know, at a club, uh, you know, in London in the nineties ketamine.

• 23:01Speaker 00

  That's a very specific reference.

• 23:04Jason Calacanis?

  Just like, you know, I remember when I was a kid, they would talk about, you know, in New York, they would talk about people going into K holes and. Not my bag, but, um, in London. And I was like, that sounds like a really scary thing to do. It's a horse tranquilizer. Anyway, um, he did a ketamine injection and went, you know, this is in like clinic. Had to deal with the, the anxiety he had. And he said he had a profound impact. So he literally recorded himself going under. He didn't record the whole trip, uh, the journey, I think was what they would call it. Uh, and then he came mad of it and he talked about it and he edited it down a little bit and just talked about how it had an impact for him, which I thought was very brave. And so I just want to give him a shout out for that as well.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Also, he was at GV for a while and now he's at True Ventures. Is that right?

• 23:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think that was the journey. And I don't know if he's like a full time partner at True or like what you would call a venture partner.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:56Jason Calacanis?

  So a venture partner like might do a deal a year or maybe every two or three years. So you're kind of affiliated, you might get a small salary, token salary or no salary, but then you would get carry on your specific deals or maybe a little bit of the overall calorie. It's a way to have people who are like Kevin, you know, busy, but they still want to, you know, dip a toe and they might have a great network. So congratulations to those guys. What else is in the news?

• 24:19Speaker 00

  I want to talk just for a minute about CoreWeave filing to go public. Jason, we've been talking about NeoCloud's, these GPU hyperscalers that are buying up, you know, billions of dollars worth of gear. And CoreWeave reporting kind of came out over the weekend that the listing was coming. I think Bloomberg reported they're looking at like a 35 possible billion dollar valuation might raise for Billy. And it's a pretty interesting company. You ever open an S1 and not know what you're going to see? Because that's, that's how this one felt to me.

• 24:49Jason Calacanis?

  Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, let's talk about it. So this, for those folks who are on the audio version, I'm going to pull up the income statement. Jason, you and I love an income statement. But I just want to say that CoreWeave's revenue grew from a little bit under 16 million in 2022 to nearly 230 million in 2023.

• 25:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, God.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  To more than, yeah, exactly. More than 1.9 billion last year.

• 25:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, we got a pause for here. This is like 15x year over year. And then almost whatever, 8x. And you know, these are big, these are big consequential numbers.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:31Jason Calacanis?

  And they, they lost almost a billion dollars in 2024, making that 2 billion, right? If I'm reading that, net loss from continuing operations. So I'm sure that includes the depreciation of these giant, you know, investments. But what you're seeing here is, my understanding is they got in early, you can correct me if I'm wrong.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 25:51Jason Calacanis?

  Into the NeoCloud space. NeoCloud, new cloud, Neo being new, is just a fancy way of saying a GPU cloud. So let's just call it what it is. It's a GPU cloud. We won't use the fancy name. So they, I think they ordered a lot of GPUs early. Then, think about the timing. ChatGPT 3.5 comes out, what date? And, and that's kind of like the starter's pistol for, we all gotta get as many GPUs going. I think that was probably in 2020, was it the September of 2022 that it came out? And we're now-

• 26:27Speaker 00

  In or around there, yeah.

• 26:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Look it up, so we can, we can put a pin in it. Because I consider, like, a lot of the modern day LLM craze. It comes not from the 2, 2.5. It was really, I think, the 3.5 that people were like, wait a second, this thing's pretty darn tootin' good.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  So chatgpt.com came out in November of 22 and chatgpt 3.5 came out also, yeah. So that was November of 22.

• 26:54Jason Calacanis?

  So I think that's when they put it on the web, right? And, and let the public use it because it wasn't super embarrassing. You know, it still was embarrassing and people would screenshot it, making mistakes, everything. And you can still do that to this day. I saw somebody tweeted that Grok thinks that it's an 85% chance that Trump is a Russian agent. Which, you know, just so you know how these things work, they pull in a bunch of data.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:19Jason Calacanis?

  And then they spit it back out. It's not actual intelligence. It is like moments of thoughtfulness or moments of impressiveness. But it is not fact-checked or factually correct all the time. And if there's something disputed or unknown. You know, something like Grok or ChatGPT could pick up, you know, a blog post about allegations and then spit that back out to you as an allegation. Or somebody notable might have said, I think it's an 85% chance on like a CNN transcript somewhere that got ingested. And maybe that's the only data it's got, so it spits it back out.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Okay, but isn't, is Polly Market really any different than that, just done with humans instead of an LLM?

• 28:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yes. Okay. It's interesting you say that because they are both making claims or trying to predict things. Sure. They're both capable of predictions, but in one case, people are, have skin in the game. And in one case, they just have GPUs in the game. The point being, uh, CoreWeave had a bunch of GPUs when everybody needed to catch up. They had pre-ordered them. And I think then it would be like having an ice cream stand. You know, in Dubai, in a prime location and you got this great, amazing ice cream stand. And then Dubai is built around you and you own a water park with an incredible ice cream stand. It's like, yeah, we're very popular now. And it's like, yeah, it used to be 10 people a day and now it's 10,000.

• 28:48Jason Calacanis?

  Well, timing can be, timing, you know, is everything, as they say in life. And I think Core Weave's timing is great. They had to get out though, right? Because they had so many loans. Weren't they the ones doing these crazy loans against the GPUs?

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:02Jason Calacanis?

  So that's.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  I have a chart here of their indebtedness, which I'll pull up and then I'm going to tell you why they're going public now. So this is just the balance sheet showing their cash and then their various types of debt. They have two delayed draw term loan facilities, Jason, a term loan facility. And then they have some OEM deals and a revolver that's currently not being used. What matters here is that this term loan facility, which is about a billion dollars worth of debt, matures at the end of this year calendar. So the company was looking at essentially a billion dollar outflow of cash. And they don't want to raise more debt. So what do you do? Well, you fundraise and an IPO is a fundraising mechanism. And they say specifically in their S1 that apart from, you know, general corporate uses and so forth,

• 29:46Speaker 00

  they're paying that loan off entirely. So that's going to take care of that and reduce their leverage a little bit.

• 29:52Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:37Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:20Jason Calacanis?

  I think a lot of what we're probably seeing here is

• 31:25Jason Calacanis?

  there, they, when you see that kind of revenue growth, it's probably not,

• 31:33Jason Calacanis?

  you know, a large number of clients, it's probably a large client or two. So my guess is there's a well or two in that revenue jump, or maybe three?

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Yes, dead on. Yeah. So I, oh, I thought you were teeing me up just to like read off my notes.

• 31:51Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, I'm not teeing you up. I didn't, I didn't read all the notes today. I'll be totally honest.

• 31:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Oh, no. Well, you know what that means? Detention. No, I'm kidding. You're dead on, Jason. So in 2022, the company's top three customers were 41% of revenue. In 2023, that scaled to 73%.

• 32:11Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  In 2024, two customers were 77% of the company's business, of which Microsoft was 62% last year alone.

• 32:20Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so that's actually probably something they would put in risks. That's a major client dependency.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  And you know your friends over at the BG2 Pod?

• 32:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Brad Gersner and

• 32:36Jason Calacanis?

  Bill Gurley.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  Bill Gurley, thank you.

• 32:37Jason Calacanis?

  Was interviewing me Friday at 4:00 PM at South by Southwest on March 7th, in two days, 48 hours from now.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Teamwork. Um, Satya Nell, CEO of Microsoft, went on that podcast and talked about things. And he said that the CoreWeave deal was a one-time thing. So, so, right. So you begin to, on one hand, the company's gross margins have improved to the mid 70s. Fantastic. Uh, it's adjusted to operating income, pretty solid. It's adjusted EBITDA, pretty solid. The company puts all of its depreciation costs in its technology and infine line item very clearly, so you can know exactly where all the costs are going. The growth out of this world, but it spent like $7 billion, $8 billion last year on gear and its chief customer wants to leave.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  And so on one hand, Jason, I'm so impressed with this company. And on the other hand, I'm kind of thinking, is this just a temporary blip based on Microsoft not having enough GPUs? At the moment you mentioned, which was ChatGPT. Hmm, I don't know.

• 33:34Jason Calacanis?

  I, um.

• 33:37Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. So fascinating, I would say. I'm guessing the issue is that, um, they needed more capacity because of the ChatGPT deal.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:48Jason Calacanis?

  And Azure, I wonder if th- those GPUs are part of the Azure cloud, you know, and, and they're just abstracting them. So when you buy from Azure, it's using the CoreWeave cloud. Do you think that's what's happening?

• 34:00Speaker 00

  That's my guess, or they're offloading some of OpenAI's, uh, compute they committed to OpenAI off under CoreWeave would be another guess of mine.

• 34:08Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. Fantastic. Um. I think this company will get bought. I'll be totally honest. Um, you have AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle in a race.

• 34:22Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if those companies are investors, but sometimes you will see strategics come in. So I don't know if any of them had the presence of mind. Or the CEO of CoreWeave had the presence of mind to pitch them on investment, but, um, you know, that would be a very smart acquisition to take this customer base off there. And here we have CoreWeave's Class A shares, Nvidia owns 6%, that's a round-tripping type craziness, right? Fidelity, which does private markets and Publix. And by the way, they just came out with a cap table competitor that's quite good.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 35:00Jason Calacanis?

  And yeah, I know this because they're going to be doing a little advertising on this podcast as cap table software companies sometimes do, but they're kind of undercutting the market. And you're like, why is Fidelity dipping down into cap tables of year one startups? And it's like, oh, those startups grow up and then Fidelity has active investor bases, like family offices and high net worth individuals like myself. And sometimes they will offer someone like myself or a family office, you know, shares in something like CoreWeave, right? You know, three years ago, two years ago. So there's this whole thing that's happening with the stay private longer movement we talked about over and over again, where they, well, this new group of individuals wants access

• 35:44Jason Calacanis?

  to privates, high net worths, family offices, not just other folks. And then you have here Magnetar Financial. Is that a?

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Hedge fund based out of Illinois.

• 35:56Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's crazy. So, um, yeah, you know, sometimes a unknown or a little known firm will make early-stage investments, know they have a winner and keep investing. My guess is Magnetar Financial, which I've never heard of, doesn't mean it's not like a well-known firm, but I'm not in the private equity world. I bet you they were early investors and often investors.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  That is correct both ways. Yes.

• 36:21Jason Calacanis?

  It is?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So after 2,000 episodes, I kind of can, I know what I'm talking about.

• 36:30Jason Calacanis?

  So what happens in these situations is you invest in something like, I didn't do this with Uber or Robinhood because they didn't have a chip stack back then. I was a one and done investor, but I watched. Bill Gurley did the Series A, Mayfield, Sherwin do the Series B, et cetera. Any of those other investments would have been fantastic investments. Then they would have been five or 6,000 X, they would have been 500 X or 200 X. Which, by the way, most venture capitalists, the best investment they ever make in their career is 100 or 200 X.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  A 200 bagger is one for the, the personal achievement board. Yeah.

• 37:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, that would be, and, and for me, I have those like 500 X, 200 X and things like a Robin Hood or a COM, et cetera. But what you want to be able to do is place that second and third bet. And so we corrected that with COM, I only did one bet as well, but we owned 5 and a half percent of the company. But then with a company like Gran, a company that went through our accelerator, I think we made five bets over time. Company became worth a billion. We were actually able to sell, I think, 18 million dollars in secondary. And when it hit a billion and, you know, that was peak Zerp, we timed it perfectly. But we made multiple bets because we just saw the revenue tripling or doubling every year.

• 37:44Jason Calacanis?

  When you see revenue doubling or tripling every year, probably not happening by accident. And so that's when you would place a second or third bet. This becomes a challenge for me when we are, when you have a portfolio of 400 companies. Everybody thinks that we should follow on.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:05Jason Calacanis?

  With every investment and we tell them, well, we only have like five, one in 20 companies gets a follow on investment. It's a bit of a competition for that very scarce resource in a small seed fund for the reserve dollars. And, uh, you know, right now, unless you have two and a half, three, four times year over year revenue, you probably wouldn't hit that benchmark that we've explained to our LPs is why we would do that. The most famous version of this was WhatsApp and Sequoia. WhatsApp offered Sequoia, Sequoia offered WhatsApp preemptive funding.

• 38:37Jason Calacanis?

  I think three or four times. And I think that fund that Sequoia did might be a 30, 20 or 30x fund. I know this because I'm in it. I happen to be an LP in that fund. And so this is one of the great things that can happen in a venture fund. If you know you have a winner, keep betting on the winner because they're so rare. And so there's just a little behind the scenes of what you can interpret when somebody owns 30%. And you don't see other investors there. That was the other notable thing. Where are the other investors?

• 39:04Speaker 00

  So that's an interesting question, Jason. And I was trying to chase that down, but there's been so many secondary transactions, debt rounds and so forth. It seems that everyone else kind of got diluted quite a lot that it came on later. It did have some money from Goldman and such people that are kind of like IPO hunting. But just so everyone knows, CoreWeave is again tipped for a $35 billion valuation and a $4 billion raise. That's their goal. We'll see what they get to. I'm watching this like a hawk because I'm so excited by it.

• 39:33Jason Calacanis?

  What was the last round of funding? If it's going to be a $35 billion IPO, you said?

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, let me just pull up so I don't talk out of turn here.

• 39:40Jason Calacanis?

  Last round was. So just so people understand, these late-stage investors, they might invest at 20 billion, 25, 30 billion, even 32 billion. You're like, well, why are they? Or even 35. So why are they investing at, you know, just below the IPO amount? Well, they might be long-term betters and they're just securing their position for the next five years. Or they might be, in fact, doing something interesting, which is they just see this as a one or two-year investment. So if they got in at 25 or 15, 20, 25 in the last couple of years, they're only planning on holding it for one to three years, as opposed to a venture capitalist with our winners now, you tend to hold your winners 10 to 15 years before they might go.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  So to answer your question, the final data point in the Crunchbase database of a material round into the company was actually a secondary transaction. It was in November of 2024, $650 million at a $23 billion post.

• 40:41Jason Calacanis?

  So I nailed it. So that was 2023, right? 23 billion?

• 40:45Speaker 00

  No, 24. So that was last November.

• 40:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. So here's a thing I want you to do. Just for fun, pull up your favorite LLM, doesn't matter which one it is, and just type, what's the IRR on?

• 40:58Jason Calacanis?

  Investing 650 million at a $23 billion valuation and exiting two years later at 35 billion. And we will get a very interesting explanation of that.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  Just to be sure, what is the IRR of investing at a $23 billion valuation and exiting at 35 billion two years later?

• 41:24Jason Calacanis?

  And you just have to put the amount that you invested.

• 41:27Speaker 00

  Okay, I've invested, I'm gonna say 100 million. And I'm using GPT 4.5 for this, in case anyone's curious.

• 41:36Jason Calacanis?

  What it will do is it should explain to you the formula, there's like a really crazy formula. Most people IRR, it's actually a formula in most modern spreadsheets. So you don't actually have to do this crazy extensive formula. But it will give you the percentage you made each year. So in this case, going from 23 to 35 is obviously a 10, 12 billion dollar increase, which is a 50% increase from when you invested. So that's not 25% each year, because that would be more.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  It's 23.4%.

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So there you go.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  And actually, this is, this is totally off topic, but I didn't get the big breakdown of a formula. Maybe I should have used 01, 03, or one of the other ones.

• 42:16Jason Calacanis?

  Say, show your work and explain to me how you calculated it, and it will show it to you. So if you wanted to be a venture capitalist, these were very hard things to do. Is understand how all this works. Now I'm training new people, I'm like, what's the IRR? And they're like, I don't know how to do that. I'm like, chat GPT it. Use Gemini, whatever you prefer, Grok.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  But this is what it did instead, and I think this is very interesting. So I'm gonna pull this up, I just pulled a screenshot into Chrome here. But if you click on this little blue button, it brings up an analysis window, which is entirely distinct. And then it just kind of broke down the math that I did, and it wrote out the formulas in how you would do it if you're writing code versus doing math on the chalkboard.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing.

• 42:54Speaker 00

  But that's very cool. I hadn't seen that before. Welcome to Twist, where we do it live.

• 42:59Jason Calacanis?

  We'll do it live. The reason I'm doing this with you is because you can do some of this sort of higher end analysis. And I was doing it the other day on an investment. That's going to pay 42% IRR each year of three years. So it was basically like, hey, it's clear Americans don't have the desire to fund a war in Europe, even as economically checked notes, very profitable. And then I put there, uh, like we spent or we leased loaned. I don't know if people remember these arguments I had with Sacks, you know, over, hey, we leased loaned these weapons. We're going to get the money back. Like, that's the intent. If it was just a gift, we wouldn't have gone through the paperwork of a lease loan. And Biden said that over and over. But you know how politics are and political people, I'm an independent, I'm not on either side.

• 43:43Jason Calacanis?

  I call balls and strikes, just your friendly reminder. Sacks obviously is a diehard Republican. He's the definition of partisan because he's actually in the party and he's in the administration. So he used to tell me, oh, we're never going to get that money back. Well, here we are. Trump is demanding not the 175 billion back. He says he wants 500 billion back. So it turns out Trump is the best investor. He beat Nancy Pelosi and myself over the last couple of years in terms of IRR.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Well, Jason, not to get political, because I know we're trying to get the show focused on startups, but this mineral deal has not been fully signed yet. So we're going to have to wait and see.

• 44:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, I'm obviously making the joke that he's going to get it done. But, you know, even if he gets it done at half the amount, the IRR drops down to 20%.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:26Jason Calacanis?

  The US is, you know, what's the interest rate right now on treasuries that we would have gotten on the money?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  For?

• 44:33Jason Calacanis?

  It turns out weapons, technology, selling weapons on loans and leases, you might be able to make a pretty penny.

• 44:41Speaker 00

  You might be able to make a pretty penny.

• 44:42Jason Calacanis?

  And then somebody DM'd me and they're like, how dare you, whatever. And I'm like, do you not understand the concept of like satire or, you know, any of this? Like, obviously I'm not making an equivalency that we try to make 42% and start wars based on it. I'm just talking about

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:01Jason Calacanis?

  the cynical nature of folks being like, oh, we gave somebody a loan and a lease on weapons. We're never going to get it back. And then the very next president who they're supporting is insisting not only do we get it back, but we get it back not with interest, but with interest that would make a mobster blush and say, pump the brakes, like, that's, that's too much. You don't want to, you don't want to, you want to, you know, slowly bleed them out. You don't want to kill them, like. Forty-two percent interest is nuts.

• 45:36Speaker 00

  We gotta work on your, uh, your bloodletting analogies when it comes to nations under attack. But I hear you and I do think that absolutely what we need is a sarcasm font for the internet. Uh, that would solve all these problems and I'm being sarcastic when I say that, but at Tech Ranch, we had a, a piece of software we use called Convo, Jason. It was kinda like Yama internally. And we had a rule, which was no jokes on Convo because consistently people would make a joke and everyone would get it wrong or miss it. And so we just had to, sometimes it just, uh, it's tough. I did not read those tweets as, I read them as tongue in cheek versus satirical for what it's worth. But yeah.

• 46:18Jason Calacanis?

  But here we are. Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Here we are. Uh, last thing on core, we were moving on, but this is a chart, Jason, a map, sorry, of where their data centers are, Europe, North America. I think that Oracle is the, the buyer here of the clause you mentioned. That's my guess. If they don't, if they don't go public at their values and they want, I think it's Oracle because I think they're hungry for a place at the table and they're tired of being the database company with more lawyers than customers.

• 46:43Jason Calacanis?

  They are very big on, uh, cloud computing right now and, uh, they are being very aggressive in their approach. So if you are looking to move clouds, I can tell you they are like looking to beat everybody, uh, in terms of how much they're willing to spend, uh, to get you as a customer and discounts.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually I, I wrote some of our ads back in the day for, for Oracle and I, now I'm remembering all their little sales points. Anyways, um, he, this is a tweet from someone that I know rather well. His name's Jason and he's talking to someone from a company called AV Ride about their upcoming partnership with Uber. And I think this is a, a pretty big news story. For folks who don't know, AV Ride, um, is the spinout, Jason, of Yandex, which had to deal with Uber back in the day and then they got sanctioned and then da, da, da, da, da, da. Anyways, AV Ride's doing autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots and they announced a deal with Hyundai that's gonna bring them into the Uber app in Dallas, I believe. And I think this is fantastic.

• 47:42Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. Yeah. It's, um, I, I don't remember AV Ride. There are so many AV players, um, doing this, but there it is. AV Ride. Uh, you can pull up their website, beautiful looking cars. Um. And that's a Hyundai. Yeah. So these is AV Ride a Hyundai company or owned by Hyundai or partially owned or they're just using Hyundai's as their base vehicle?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  I think they're using Hyundai's as their base vehicle and I'm pretty sure Hyundai wants a play here to avoid being relegated to the dust of history. I don't know if they are a direct investor, would not shock me if they were, but they're going to be working with the IONIQ 5, which is their, it's, it's an electronic mini SUV, I want to say. And I've seen a bunch of these around Providence. They're, they're popular amongst the yuppies.

• 48:31Jason Calacanis?

  And they also have the robot delivery service that goes on the sidewalk. I see on their website. I don't know if you're pulling up the website.

• 48:38Speaker 00

  Oh, I, I pulled it up and put it and took it down, but I'll put it back up again.

• 48:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no problem.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  So here is the cute little robot that they do. They have partnerships.

• 48:44Jason Calacanis?

  If you click on that robot page, it's kind of cool. If you scroll down, if you click from the navigation on the robot page, you know, it looks like a little mini R2-D2, four wheels. You put a package in it. It really got lighter on the top, but they have this like really interesting thing where it's showing you what it sees. And I think these things, I'm trying to think at what speed, if you got hit by one of these things, you would, you know, obviously at 30 miles an hour, that's no bueno.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:14Jason Calacanis?

  I wonder what the speed, these max speed of something on the sidewalk. So if somebody was running at top speed, that would be a five minute mile. They'd be going 12 miles per hour. So 12 miles per hour, if somebody ran into you at that speed, that would not be pleasant. So it's probably these things that can only go up to five miles an hour. They need to have some cushions on them or an airbag, I guess, if they went faster. So they're not going to do that. Five miles an hour means it probably can go 10 blocks, which is half a mile.

• 49:45Jason Calacanis?

  You know, in 10 minutes or something. So that's kind of an, or five or 10 minutes. They're probably good for five or 10 minute. You know, deliveries, which is probably a 10. If you do, if you do a block a minute.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:55Jason Calacanis?

  Three miles an hour. Yeah, sure.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  I don't know the AV ride top speed, but I just found some information reporting about robots from Serv, a company we've talked to here on the show.

• 50:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  And a new drivetrain allowed them to up their speed from seven miles per hour to 11, which is quite a lot, 60% gain. I don't know if I'm in favor of 11 miles per hour on sidewalks, but that gives another data point to your thought experiment.

• 50:18Jason Calacanis?

  It will depend on how often they crash into people. And you know what? If you're in New York, if you haven't experienced the electric bikes in New York, people don't know this, but a lot of the bike rides are done with electric bikes. I have these electric bikes. If you type in any of the electric bikes, like if you type in Rad Power Bike, which I have one of, really cool bike, and you say unlock speed, you could unlock the speed. I think it's typically fixed at 20 miles an hour. You could unlock it to go to about 30.

• 50:48Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 50:49Jason Calacanis?

  Other kits, you know, listen, you can go 30, you can go 50 miles an hour on a bike. I love the Rad Power Bikes, but not an advertiser. I didn't get a free bike. I paid for them, but they're very cool, especially like off terrain. You see those thick chunky tires.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:02Jason Calacanis?

  But they're, they're, they're a pretty penny. I have, I had the one that let me take my daughters on it and they loved it. Pull up the, pull up the version for the family wagon. You would like this. It's got like a little cage you can put on the back and your kids can sit in the cage. My daughters went crazy for this when they were younger and I would drive it around. I would drive it from Hillsborough down to San Mateo. It's got this like little box in the back.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Oh, I found it. Okay. I was looking for something different. So you're talking about the Rad wagon, which I believe.

• 51:29Jason Calacanis?

  The Rad wagon, in addition to a Rad Power Bike. I had two of them. I liked them so much, but I bought these. So you see that one's got the little seat in the back. You can sit there and then they have a cage option where you, and the accessories, you can put a cage on it and they can kind of sit in a little cage where they can hold on to bars and it kind of protects them a little bit. You know, it's, it's super nice and a very cool product. Highly recommend it.

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  But there are other ones you can buy that can go 40, 50 miles an hour. And in New York, there are people definitely doing this. And then they pop onto the street. It's completely unregulated. It's chaos. It is what it is.

• 52:08Jason Calacanis?

  But I do think. They'll compare the number of times those things crash into people.

• 52:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:14Jason Calacanis?

  And knock them out and you can get seriously hurt. Like getting hit by a bike at speed is, that's dangerous.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  That's really dangerous, but higher center of gravity. So my, my hope is that these things end up just barking your shins.

• 52:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they just tear your ACL up and they just rip out your meniscus. When you get hit from the side in the knees.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Well, I hope that doesn't happen. I mean, I mean, here's my, my.

• 52:37Jason Calacanis?

  What are the chances of these things hitting you? They must have a collision alert.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:41Jason Calacanis?

  They must know. So it would have to be like, somebody jumps out into the middle of the sidewalk, you know, from between two cars or something, but I think it would see it before you. Anyway, I think these robots are going to be a big win. I don't know why these haven't taken over a city yet. But man, how crazy would this be if it was only a dollar to deliver your food as opposed to 10?

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 53:04Jason Calacanis?

  Big game changer, I think.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  I'd weigh 30 pounds more and I would be two thirds burrito.

• 53:10Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we'll just send you some monjano. You know what I saw in related startup news? Yeah, breaking story. I heard it on CNBC when I was getting out of the shower. You can look it up. Over Nordis is going to do direct to consumer, D to C. Uh, Ozempic, monjano, Wegovy, whatever, at half the price. This is nuts. So I think there's a lot of websites. I just joined one which does your blood work and puts it on into a. I just ran this service. I wouldn't say which one it is, because there's two founders of these two competing services and they both offered me free products and ah, I was just, it was like one of these situations where I asked on Twitter like, which is better, this or this?

• 53:56Jason Calacanis?

  And I just signed up for whichever, I just signed up for one that my friend had told me about. The other one was like, oh my God, we want you to use ours. And anyway, what it does is these, there are these new services where you do your own directed healthcare. I did a blood draw last week. They put my data online. I have a concierge and this is like better service than I was getting from a concierge doctor in San Francisco. I was paying for my entire family, I think 30,000 a year. It seems like a big number, but again, imagine you're rich. It's not a big number to be able to have a doctor visit your house.

• 54:32Jason Calacanis?

  When your kids are sick. So that's where you get a concierge doctor.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  The difference between my family and your family, apart from one or two zeros, is that my spouse is a doctor and a pediatrician. So like, got one at home for free.

• 54:44Jason Calacanis?

  What you're and your spouse, I'm assuming, I never asked you this, if you're comfortable, they work at a hospital or at a clinic or?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  They work at a clinic that's part of a hospital. Yeah.

• 54:55Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. Now imagine, you know, she gets 10 years under her belt and there's 10 families who would give her $30,000 a year. It's 300,000 out of the gate to come to their house, you know, to give them personalized medicine. You can actually probably do 200 as one practitioner. Cause if 10 families call you a week, that's 20 a week. That means you're doing four calls a day, basically five days a week. Um, so that's how these things wind up, uh, immersing themselves. Long story short, they had in their, they had, they have an RX section where you can get, you know, the compounding pharmacy version of Wegovy's, you know, you know, all that stuff,

• 55:38Jason Calacanis?

  plus peptides, plus, plus, plus. So what you're going to start to see is they're going to take that concierge doctor. And by the way, if you use somebody like Peter Attia or those really high end people, I, I think that's like well into the six figures is what I was told. I don't know if it's true or not. I'm not speaking specifically about Peter Attia, but other ones, you know, there are billionaires or centimillionaires who, you know, spend a quarter million dollars a year, a hundred million, a hundred thousand dollars a year on these kinds of services. Those are being abstracted down into, um, I think a thou- maybe 3,000 per family. So 90% less than I was paying. If I put five people on it

• 56:17Jason Calacanis?

  for 700, five people for a thousand dollars each, you know, with all the tests that you can do, boom. Uh, so, and then they track all your data in a beautiful interface over time. This is where healthcare is going to move. If you're spending. 10, 20K on these kind of services. What we saw in the pandemic where people could do therapy, other things through remote telemedicine or get, you know, a Z-Pak. That's going to be productized and it is being productized right now. And I think it's going to change the world because what it will do is high end people will just say, you know what, I'll just pay cash. I'll just pay cash. It's easier. Give me the, and I think I might have this myself personally.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  Um, my partner takes care of most of it, but I think I took the highest deductible, maybe 5,000 a year or 10,000 a year.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 57:07Jason Calacanis?

  So we basically have, I guess catastrophic.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is what you want.

• 57:11Jason Calacanis?

  Which is fine with me, um, because I think it's, I'd rather direct it myself and, and whatever. So Novo Nordisk, maybe you could just read a little bit, uh, the opening, uh, graph or two of what, what this means. Cause a lot of startups, right? Hims, Roman are doing the, and the direct to consumer.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. And I even have a friend who uses a compounding pharmacy or at least did, uh, before. But here's from CNBC. Novo Nordisk Wednesday said it will offer its weight loss drug, drug Wegovy for less than half of its usual price per month through a new D to C option. The cash pay offering is available to millions of patients without insurance coverage for the blockbuster injection. So a couple of things. One, it's 500 bucks a month, which is apparently less than half of what it currently costs. So savings is good. Still not cheap enough for the average middle-class family, I'd say. But if you're one step above that, this is now in your, in your remit. And also insurance coverage of GLP-1s is straining budgets for like Medicaid and such.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  I, my father-in-law does Medicaid policy, so I, I hear drips and drabs. Um, but a lower cost offering, direct to consumer, get around the insurance companies. This makes great sense to me. And here's the funny thing, Jason. Don't people stay on GLP-1s? So is Novo Nordisk about to have a 600, $500 a month set of consumers in the U.S. just shipping them money?

• 58:36Jason Calacanis?

  I think this, you know, if you, if you were to compare it to struggling with obesity, which I did for, you know, 15 years.

• 58:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:44Jason Calacanis?

  And shout out to Kevin Rose. I found out about Ozempic because Kevin Rose was experimenting with it four years ago, like during the pandemic and I wouldn't have lost the, the weight if I hadn't heard him talk about it. He didn't exactly endorse it, but he just talked about his experience with it. I think these things are going to change the world. Talk to your doctor. Don't take medical advice from a podcaster slash venture capitalist slash blogger from Brooklyn. But I do think they will get down to a hundred bucks a month and there'll be a 90% margin for them. And I do think a lot of people will be on them for life or a low dose of them. I just saw Brian Johnson started, who was on the program when he had his finance company back in the day. You can pull up what episode that was, but what

• 59:27Jason Calacanis?

  was Brian Johnson's company? But he's the guy who has the Do Not Die Blueprint service. Now, he started a regimen. He talked about publicly of it. Not, he, he doesn't have any weight to lose, but he did it for all the other things that it helps with. And so there's going to, there's a lot of research. You know, I made my own decision based on, there were so many, here it is. What, what was this company?

• 59:50Speaker 00

  Uh, Braintree?

• 59:51Jason Calacanis?

  Braintree, right. He sold this for a bunch of money. Just find like a still of him somewhere in there. Scrub to a still. This is, when was he on? Back in 2015. There's me. I'm a little chubby. And look at how different Brian Johnson looks now.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, compared to that. He's probably, his face is so much thinner now and he's in such better shape, but he's still like, it was a really nice guy. I gotta go back and listen to this episode. What episode number is it from 2015?

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  That is...

• 1:00:17Jason Calacanis?

  We used to number them. We still number them, but I, I don't know if we have the number in the title, but um, just search for Brian Johnson.

• 1:00:24Speaker 00

  It's from September 18th, 2015. We don't have an episode number on this and I can't count that fast, but I just Googled Brian Johnson This Week in Startups and it came right up. So if you're listening, you can find it.

• 1:00:36Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. Uh, all right. So we have any founder, uh, so this is amazing, by the way. I just want to say AV Ride. I also saw it today and I tweeted today about my belief system when it comes to AV Rides and Uber's role in all of this. So I am talking my book. I'm long Uber since, you know, being the third investor.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, but here's, here's your tweet. Do you want to run us through it?

• 1:01:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, I said to Balaji, a different Balaji who works at Uber, excited to see Uber partner with so many amazing FSD players to deploy this technology widely. They were announcing, they were announcing Austin Waymo, which is going to be a huge hit and launched yesterday. If you want to use it, you have to go to your settings and in your settings, there is autonomous rides and join. And so you can just look that up or Google it, but you'll find it in settings and you have to opt in to get those rides and then they will start showing you them more often.

• 1:01:33Jason Calacanis?

  If you think about how hard this rollout is going to be for autonomous and how long it's going to take. And what's important here for me, this goes beyond my personal net worth, you know, and my shares in Uber and I have exposure. I won't say which companies, but you can be sure I have exposure to every one of the companies. So no matter who wins, I'm going to win. Yeah. It doesn't matter if Uber is first, second or third place. If they win gold, silver or bronze, it's going to be a spectacular win for me. I don't think anybody would argue they're not going to be one of the top three. And if Tesla wins and if Google wins, I have exposure to everything. So don't worry about Jake. Here's what I think is important. This is going to save a lot of lives and trust is going to be important.

• 1:02:18Jason Calacanis?

  My best advice to the market is to be thoughtful in the rollout and only do what is extremely, extremely safe. We cannot have another Uber crash like they had in Arizona with a safety driver playing Candy Crush, where tragically a woman was killed. It was a homeless woman walking across an eight lane freeway with a bicycle at night. The goddamn safety driver who was getting paid a pretty penny, and I'm very angry about this because of the loss of life, not just that one woman's loss of life, but you have to look at the actuary tables, Alex, I think, and say, how many lives were not saved because that set back autonomy?

• 1:03:00Jason Calacanis?

  And how much further along would autonomy be if Cruz didn't drag that person and then cover it up? So goddamn Cruz, whoever did that cover up, not only did you drag that poor woman,

• 1:03:12Jason Calacanis?

  not only did this safety driver kill this woman.

• 1:03:17Jason Calacanis?

  Think about all the lives and, you know, people who could have, could have been hit by cars that would have been saved. I'm coming to this from the purest place possible, which is saving lives and then enabling more people to be able to take safe rides and have more transportation options, which is, you know, virtuous and great for everybody. You know, if you're a nanny or a teacher and, you know, you, you want to be able to, um, you know, teach somewhere and you can lower the price. That helps, right? Cause then that nanny or teacher can send their kids to school and, and make a little bit more money or whatever it is, or get to their school with less pain and suffering because they had to take three buses, you know, and they could have gone direct instead of taking some crazy route.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  So I just want to clarify here. Um, because of the safety driver playing Candy Crush, you killed the woman, my nanny is more expensive. I see. Now I'm mad too. I joke.

• 1:04:05Jason Calacanis?

  All of this is like, you gotta think in systems, right? I, I've been around long enough to know that, you know, one mistake can have repercussions. They, they call it the butterfly effect, the ripple effect, you know, you throw a ripple in a pond. So this can work for positive and work for negative. The positive here is if everybody in the industry joins forces and works together to roll it out safely. I know everybody's in competition, but there, there's no rush here. And if the rush means another person dies and we set it back, like, let's not go 10 step backwards to make two step forward and get, you know, whatever. So be thoughtful, be cautious.

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Go as fast as we can without killing people and that will save the maximum number of lives. I'm actually, all jokes aside, in complete agreement here. And I think the actuarial table point, which shows that self-driving cars have fewer engagements of emergency braking, blah, blah, blah. Faster please, but safely.

• 1:05:05Jason Calacanis?

  And what Uber's doing, I think is the greatest thing ever. Uber doesn't need to open their platform up. They could just buy one of these companies. Uh, cause these companies are worth, you know, with three to $50 billion. They can buy one. They could open source everything and, you know, start their own project. They obviously have, but they've decided to say to 10 players, 15 players come on the platform. And of the 15 players they invited, I think 10 or 12 have said, yes. Uber will do great taking 20% of each ride and giving 80% to that other company. Great business for everybody. So I'm very excited about that possibility.

• 1:05:43Jason Calacanis?

  I wish Zooks and Tesla would consider running pilots with Uber or both. You know, I don't care. Do pilots with both and let's get the maximum number of on the road and the maximum utilization. This can't work if these things are only utilized for a small percentage of the time. And it's not going to work for, you know, if Tesla and Zooks want to build their own app in these markets and they don't have critical mass and they don't have human drivers to fall back on during peak times, then those apps are worthless because the times you need it, it'll be a 30 minute wait time. What we learned at Uber was it has to be under five minutes

• 1:06:27Jason Calacanis?

  or people are just not going to use it or they're not going to regularly use it. They will not rely on something when the wait times are, you know, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 minutes. It's got to be five minutes or less. It's not going to be five minutes or less in Waymo, as we've seen, or Uber, you know, unless they do it in a very dense area and it's certainly not going to be that way during rush hour or when you need it most. Okay, that's it. I'm very excited about all these different players joining together.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, last note on this, we didn't get to it. I forget when this data point came out, Monday last week, but Waymo is now over 200,000 paid rides per week, which is up 50K per week from before. Incrementally, we're still moving, but I can't wait until we get an update and it's another zero versus a smaller addition, but everything seems to be accelerating in self-driving. Jason from Tesla to everyone else. And so I'm just so bullish, so excited. And this is one of those, those great things right now in the world that isn't political, that's just doing well. We can all enjoy it. Everyone has a big old hug for self-driving. Oh, thank God. I can't wait.

• 1:07:26Jason Calacanis?

  It's totally awesome. I'm trying to get my follower count up. I have 475 followers right now. It's I'm user slash Jason Calacanis, just my first name, last name, reddit.com slash user slash Jason Calacanis, or you just type in Reddit Jason Calacanis, and you should get to my profile page. And then you'll see everything I'm talking about

• 1:07:49Jason Calacanis?

  on Reddit, and you can join the discussions I'm in. So you see my comments and then follow me. I'm a 475 followers. So let's get me up to 1,000. That would be super helpful. Thanks to my fam.

• 1:07:58Speaker 00

  Can I, can I just say that Jason's Reddit account was born on June 6th, 2013, making it 12 years old nearly. Very impressive. There's this other guy, Alex Wilhelm.

• 1:08:09Jason Calacanis?

  I have another one, Jason M. Calacanis, or I have another one that's like, oh, no, I have another one. That's like my secret one with my old alias, which I won't give here. But what's yours, Alex?

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  Alex Wilhelm, and mine was born June 19th, 2008, a solid half decade before Mr. Calacanis. So I'm gonna take two nerd points.

• 1:08:27Jason Calacanis?

  That's because I created a second one, Alex Wilhelm.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  If we can't compete and throw popcorn at each other, Jason, what's the point of a podcast?

• 1:08:34Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Do we have the, do we put the link in for Alex? And the, we didn't put the link in, but we'll put the link in the show notes.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  Better to know yours.

• 1:08:42Jason Calacanis?

  We'll see you all next time on This Week in Star Wars. Bye bye.