Fact-Checking Mark Rober, and the Fall of TechCrunch | E2101

Today's show: Jason, Alex, and Lon break down a subreddit question: A founder builds 100% of the product, is promised equity—and now he's being pushed out. We break down exactly what he should do next. Plus, YouTuber Mark Rober's viral Tesla test gets fact-checked by a small creator, and the results don't look great for Mark. Finally, TechCrunch gets quietly sold to Regent in what looks like a fire sale. Is this the end of an era for tech media? Timestamps: (0:00) Episode Teaser(1:25) Jason's memories of Tony Hsieh (4:09) High stakes poker stories with Tony Hsieh (7:28) Reflecting on joy and fun in life (9:45) Atlassian - Head to ⁠https://www.⁠⁠atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(11:46) Founder question from Reddit (20:12) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit ⁠https://fidelityprivateshares.com⁠! Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription. (21:52) Subreddit question: Stealth vs. building in public(27:33) Update: Mark Rober's Looney Tunes wall experiment (31:21) Lemon.io - Get $2000 off your first hire at http://lemon.io/hire (37:50) Lessons from the Mark Rober experiment (40:24) The future of tech journalism and subscription models (47:34) Jason's idea for a gadget museum (50:12) Updates on CoreWeave and Klarna IPOs (51:43) Bipartisan bill to amend Section 230 (56:29) Algorithms and their impact on Section 230 (59:00) Global perspectives on online speech and anonymity (1:00:00) Podcast closing and call for social media engagement 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: (9:45) Atlassian - Head to ⁠https://www.⁠⁠atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months. (20:12) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit ⁠https://fidelityprivateshares.com⁠! Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription. (31:21) Lemon.io - Get $2000 off your first hire at http://lemon.io/hire 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

  TechCrunch just got sold to a group company called Regent. That dropped out of the sky. No one saw that coming.

• 0:05Jason Calacanis?

  Like all these things, it's probably an SEO play. I'm guessing it's a fire sale, an SEO plan. They're going to cut two thirds of the writers. And game over. What do you think, Alex?

• 0:15Speaker 00

  I

• 0:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's adversarial. You can have an opinion.

• 0:18Speaker 00

  No, I, I, I mean, I'm, this is one of those times that I'm so conflicted. It's hard to, it's hard to be clear headed. I mean, I love so many people there.

• 0:24Jason Calacanis?

  That's why we're here. We like to.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:26Jason Calacanis?

  We, we, this is like, this is where you could actually, uh, you know, earn your bones here. Just let it rip.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  Okay. I, I think the people complaining that the media isn't sufficiently nice to tech are a bunch of whiners and they should go sit upon their thrones of gold and stop kvetching about people who make one, one thousandth of their income.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  This week in startups is brought to you by Atlassian. From MVP to IPO, Atlassian for startups provides your team the right tools to plan, track and collaborate on work. Head to atlassian.com/software/startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months. Fidelity Private Shares. If you want an all-in-one equity management platform, Fidelity Private Shares has you covered. Visit fidelityprivateshares.com, mention this podcast for 20% off your first year subscription. And lemon.io, get access to Lemon Hire, a platform with more than 80,000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours. Get $2,000 off your first hire at lemon.io/hire today.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. We go live Monday, Wednesday and Friday, typically at noon, but, uh, I gotta get out on that ski mountain with my two daughters. It's the end of the season. Uh, it looks like we're overcast. We might get some flurries. Uh, yesterday was my 30th day. I set a goal just when my friend Tony Shade, you met Tony, I think, maybe? I have met Tony a couple of times. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was one of my good friends and, um, he passed away and, uh, He was a great guy. He was a really good human being. He created a company called Zappos and for that link exchange. It's one of the most generous people I've ever met in my life.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  You remember he had that, he owned a bunch of buildings in downtown Las Vegas that he was gonna make into sort of this new tech hub. And when what's trending, when we would go down there to cover CES, he would let us stay there and he took really good care of us. He was a really nice guy.

• 2:13Jason Calacanis?

  Did you stay at the apartment building he had or did you stay at the, okay.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  No, he had a nicer place too. We stayed at, yeah, he had like apartment buildings and condos for people who are working on those tech companies around there. And he just let us stay there for, I think for free.

• 2:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he would do that. Again, back to this crazy generosity that Tony Shay had. And people, people have asked me like, why are you so like obsessed with trying to hit a certain number of days? You know, he, he had some sadness in him, you know, he had the depression, I think, and the anxiety. And no amount of money cures that, you know, like you can become a billionaire and sometimes it can make it worse. And I just wanted to start the show, just talking a little bit about him for a second with you on, as you got to meet him. I would go to Vegas and, you know, I kinda had made my bones already and I, you know, I knew people in Vegas, they would give me free rooms. You know, at very nice hotels sometimes or upgrade me to suites.

• 3:05Jason Calacanis?

  And I would go there and I would never stay there because he would invite me to stay in a trailer park with him. And some of my fondest memories in life were going and staying in those trailer parks. And then I would get back from CES stuff or meetings or poker tournaments, whatever it was. And it would be 1 a.m. and he would come out of his trailer. He's a billionaire. He's staying in an airstream and he'd knock on my door. I heard you come in. I was waiting just in case you came back. This is a guy who's a billionaire at 1 a.m. I come out, we'd sit by a fire pit and we'd talk for two hours. It was just incredible.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:41Jason Calacanis?

  And one time at a poker game, and I'm gonna tell the story in the documentary my friend is playing, is making if ever comes out. And he, uh, We're playing. It's somewhat high stakes, but not like millions of dollars, but tens of thousands of dollars are on the table. And you know, it's, I mean, it's a high stakes, you know, trust me for a kid from Brooklyn, when I'm in a 10, 20, $30,000 pot, my, it does make me think for a second. I have to actually remember that like that number doesn't impact me now. But you know, that's the thing about high stakes. It's meant to make you consider your behavior because your blood will flow if there's a Tesla in the pot, or as I tell people, win a prize, lose a prize. I said famously

• 4:24Jason Calacanis?

  at Schmott's game, that always stuck. And he didn't care about money. He wins this pot and he had, you know, had a couple of pops and it was late, you know, it's early morning poker game. And you know, he needed to go to bed. And so I'm trying to get him to go to bed. And we had this like final hand and I had, you know, a full house and somebody else, you know, has a straight and then he turns over in this $30,000 pot, I kid you not, straight flush, you know, really great hand in poker. One of the best. And he's like, and I'm like, okay, we're gonna count your money, you're going to bed. We count this money. It's, you know, he's got over $30,000 a prize. And he says to me, you take, spend it,

• 5:06Jason Calacanis?

  you know, on your daughters, whatever. I said, no, no, Tony, Tony, you can't take your money. Just, you won the money. If I had won it, you would pay me. And if this person in the hand had won it, they would get paid, right? This is just how the nature of poker is, right? We, we, we don't feel bad afterwards. We all sat down at the table, it's gambling. And he's insistent. And he's had a couple of drinks and he's, he's not being belligerent, but he's being insistent that he will not take the money. I'm trying to get him to bed. He says, I refuse to take this money. It's like, game is stopped. There's 20, there's two tables going, there's 20 people in

• 5:45Jason Calacanis?

  the room. Now it's becoming a bit of a thing. And he says, you take. He pushes $30,000 to the dealer. The dealer looks at me.

• 5:57Jason Calacanis?

  And I do have a big sigh and I think, um, you know, these are well-paid dealers. These are my dealers.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 6:03Jason Calacanis?

  These are my dealers.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Professional, professional Vegas dealers, they're, they're getting nice tips.

• 6:07Jason Calacanis?

  These are the ones who play in home games, who can handle certain types of situations that only happen in home games. Things happen. Sometimes somebody has a little too much to drink, somebody, somebody maybe throws cards at a dealer. Sometimes a, you know, a situation can happen, accusation, I mean.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and this is their career. They don't want to risk their whole reputation on one $30,000 pot. Like word gets out, hey, this dealer steals pots, you know?

• 6:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So this is a, yeah, but even beyond that, there, you know, anyway, I just have this moment.

• 6:37Jason Calacanis?

  This will be one of the greatest stories of all time. You know how I have my moments like I just, and I have one of these moments in my mind where I'm like, my timing. And I just said, uh, this is like one of the greatest moments of all time. And, uh, I look at him, I look at the dealer. Now the other dealer for the other tables watching now too, because the whole room is stopped. And they're both looking at, and there's a third dealer to rotate in through three dealers. So these are going to get 10, 10 dimes each. And this is.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're right. They're thinking, they're thinking we're splitting this three ways.

• 7:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, but and then they're also thinking Jake House not going to let him do this. They don't want to make their money that way. You know, guys have too much to drink.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 7:11Jason Calacanis?

  And I look at him, I look at them and I said, uh, okay. And the dealers are like, no, no, we can't accept it. And I look at the dealers and I say, it's okay. He can afford it. And he's like, that's right. I can afford it.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:25Jason Calacanis?

  And he goes to bed.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  That's a few hundred.

• 7:26Jason Calacanis?

  I take the dealers.

• 7:27Speaker 03

  Zappos, you know?

• 7:28Jason Calacanis?

  I take the dealers. I give them their 10K.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 7:32Jason Calacanis?

  Greatest night of their lives.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  That's a huge night.

• 7:34Jason Calacanis?

  That story was told every poker game around the world. Legendary poker story for 15 years. And it gave Tony so much joy because he didn't even remember he did it. He was barely, he was barely with us. He were drinking, having fun. And that's the race been told thousands of times since he passed away. And I just told myself, it was a long story, but you know, I told myself, as we warm the audience here, you know, when he passed away, I was talking to some friends about it. You know, he said, he always just wanted to have more fun, especially with you, Jake. How he wanted to hang out and have more fun. He just thought to myself, you know what? That's a good operating system. I'm going to try to have a little more joy and a little more fun in my life.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what matters.

• 8:19Jason Calacanis?

  Thing I do that inevitably leaves me joy of fun is when I do a podcast, especially with you, Lon. I love doing it. We've known together for many years.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Kind thing to say.

• 8:27Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, I'm super excited. We're going to spend more time together, but at the end of your life, all these chip sacks, you know, and other victories and things, they don't really get remembered all that much. What gets remembered is the funny times you have with your friends.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:42Jason Calacanis?

  And the joy you have. And I gotta tell you, on this mountain, or when I'm in the Saco, my friend laughing it up skiing like I did this year, all those moments, they just add up to like all this incredible joy in my life. So I just set joy goals and the only joy goal I set is just getting out there on the mountain with my daughters and friends and then making funny podcasts for you all to listen to. Maybe you learn something during them.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  I feel like at the end of your life, you're not going to look back and be like, oh, if only it was one more deal. If only I had made one more big deal.

• 9:08Jason Calacanis?

  One more Robin Hood, one more Tom, one more Uber.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  You do those in order to fund and allow for the fun parts, the social parts, the parts with family and friends.

• 9:19Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, less than anybody think I'm just like retired and ski all the time. I just go out for two hours, 40 days a year, 80 hours of my life. And I just, I'm trying to hit 41 days and this will be day 31, Saturday, Sunday will make it day 33. So I'm within seven days of tying my record, eight days of breaking it or so. We'll see if it happens. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't. Maybe I have to go to New Zealand at some point.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  It's a goal, you know, you put a goal out there, you know, yeah.

• 9:45Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:27Jason Calacanis?

  So they would do a Loom where they recorded over a recording of an interview they did with a founder or visiting their website and going through why they want to invest in a company. And this was so great for me. I would be skiing in Japan. I would be on a flight to New York to see my parents. And all of a sudden, I get a notification from one of my team members, "Hey, watch this Loom." And I get the link for the Loom. I click it, and then I can put comments at any time. So it's like doing a conference call, but on my time asynchronously. And I can communicate right there on the video. Also included in Atlassian for Startups is Pompous, Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, so much more, all powered by Atlassian Intelligence. That's their built-in AI. Atlassian software helps companies like Canva, CloudFlare, and Riving

• 11:12Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I wanted to start the show today with you and you know, as we get into a rhythm with you and Alex here. We had a massive show on Wednesday. Lot of, you know, back and forth. It was a lot of emotions going on. We're going to do a follow up on that story. But I really want to get the show really focused on founder stories. One of the great places we find founders talking is Reddit. And sometimes on Hacker News. Yeah, Hacker News, good discussions. A shout out Paul Graham for creating that or whoever created it. Whoever created Hacker News, great job, by the way. They never changed it. Reddit never changed. They just focused on the community. There's something really special about that. As we're designing the new inside app, we have to keep that in mind. Don't change things. Just make it work and then focus on the community.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  I find Hacker News very comforting. It hasn't changed in so long. You can always go there. It's exactly the same as it ever was and so little of the internet is like that. Everything changes all the time. I find Hacker News very stupid.

• 12:37Jason Calacanis?

  I know Paul Graham created it. One of my producers, Paul Graham created it. I know Paul Graham created it. He wasn't the one who wrote the code, I don't think. I think there was specifically a person who did it and I think there's an open source version of it, which is really interesting. There was a time when everybody thought there would be like a thousand Hacker Newses.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:50Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, putting it aside, we find really good stories there. Why do we find good stories there? If we ask people for stories, a lot of times when they pitch us a question here for me, those stories are not authentic. They're like packaged from backdoor promotions. It's a little annoying for me. But I told Juan, just hang out there, see what's going on with the vibes on Reddit. We have a This Week in Startups one where people are talking about stuff, entrepreneurs, startups. There's a bunch of different places. People are talking about business. So that's a lot to surprise me with conversations there and then I want him to round trip them. Well, let's go with our first question you found on one of these sites and find the hard ones. Let's work backwards from hard.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm trying to find questions where there's like multi-stages or it's a little specific or something that you can really speak to. There's a lot of general questions and I skipped them. Question one, let's start with question one, Court. This is a technical founder. They say they're in need of a reality check. This comes from user James Calhoun 2 in Reddit's startups community. I'll summarize. They are a technical founder. They built 100% of their company's product on their own. It was not their idea. They have a co-founder slash CEO. It was that person's idea. They then built it entirely themselves. Now, this CTO says he was promised equity by the non-technical founders, but now that the product is built.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  The, the, the plans keep shifting and changing and he finds that he's being offered a lot less equity than his other partners who did not build the project. They're also now telling him that he's quote, "not founder material" and he needs to quote, "acknowledge the CEO's leadership."

• 14:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 14:28Speaker 03

  One, one more factoid. He claims that he still owns the IP rights of the code base as leverage. So what should he do? And I think the even bigger question for you is what could founders do to avoid ever having this problem down the road?

• 14:45Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. So before you start any project, you should document the arrangement. If you are the idea person, the business person with the idea, you're going to want to give what's called a work for hire contract to anybody who works for you. Uh, and you pay them a salary in exchange for that. So I own this weekend startups. Lon is an employee of mine, well-paid, well-trusted and adored employee. He has signed an IP assignment when it comes to workers, same with Alex. And they sign this thing that says, "Hey, you don't own this weekend startups, J Cal does." Now they don't expect to own it, et cetera. But if the three of us got together on a weekend and I said, "Hey, let's do a pod. It's going to be called Three, Three Dudes Talk About, You Know, Movies."

• 15:29Jason Calacanis?

  Um, you would probably want to say, "Here's the arrangement. I came up with the name of the show. I came up with the IP, uh, and everybody works with me." I know this because this is what happened with All In. I ran All In out of my company here. Two years into it, it went from being like a, a J Cal production where it was one of my employees doing it. I paid for everything. They showed up to becoming a company. We formalized it. It was a little bit of a negotiation. We had a little hand wringing and it's always uncomfortable. Whose value is more, et cetera? We wound up in the All In situation just saying, "Hey, it's this four of us." I just said to everybody, "Listen, if everybody shows up every week, four people will do 25% each. If you want me to be the CEO of it, I'll take a little more equity." They didn't. They wanted to hire a CEO.

• 16:14Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, "That's fine." And you know what? Worked out great. There's a CEO, company makes a ton of money. All I have to do is show up and do that. If we had done it earlier, it would have been less negotiation and time consuming. So you always want to do that in advance. In this case, the mistake the CEO of this company made, apparently, is if he didn't pay this person, then that person does own the IP. He does own what he created and it was created on his laptop. Now, if you're creating on my laptop that launch gave you and you signed an IP assignment, then when it went to a judge or whatever, if it ever got there, which it never would, your lawyer wouldn't take the case. They'd be like, you don't have a case here, kid. You got paid a salary, signed an IP assignment, case closed. So they did this wrong. Now they have to have a hard conversation.

• 17:00Jason Calacanis?

  These guys are insulting him. They don't value him. He's going to have to establish his value with them. And the way he's going to have to establish his value is by having an attorney, giving the attorney a thousand dollar retainer and paying them four or 500 bucks an hour. And it might get up to 10 hours and this is going to be messy. And that attorney has to say, listen, my client, you know, da, da, da. And that's going to probably make the whole relationship toxic. Right? Cause now they're, they've got to get an attorney. So if all of them watch this and they understand that this whole situation is going to implode, because nobody wants to spend and do a legal battle over this. There's probably not that much at stake. I think what the, the folks who are running the company have to determine is, is this person, do they actually mean what they're saying when they say he's not founder material?

• 17:44Jason Calacanis?

  Because apparently he is, because they picked him. That's like picking a spouse lawn and being like, you're not really a great husband material. It's like, but you picked me. Right. So what, what are we talking about here? What does this say about you? Are you also partner material? If you picked me and then you're deriding me as not found, you know, you ever meet that couple? At a dinner party? Yes. Who hate each other and you're like, why'd you pick each other? Why are you still together? Like, you're both opting into this. So I think what they have to do is sit down and he has to just say, listen, I want to be a co-founder. I have a lot. You may not think I do, but you picked me and so I want to be an equal co-founder. And I want to build with you for five years. And the way we do that is we are put ourselves on a five year vest.

• 18:28Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, if anybody has to leave, it gets advanced one year, let's say. So, you know, if the two of them gang up on a farm day one, he gets a plus a year, right? So that stings a little bit. So they have to decide, oh my God. If we're each getting 33%, divide that by, let's say four, and it's typically a four year vest, but I like the five year vest for co-founders. That's eight percent. They gotta just give him eight percent of the company. Plus whatever he earned already. Maybe they've been doing this for a year. He has 16% of the company. It's like, it kind of stings, right?

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:56Jason Calacanis?

  It's supposed to sting. It's supposed to sting because there's something at value here. And there's a long line of people who left YouTube Snapchat early and they got equity chunks for, you know, the other parties might say not doing anything, but in reality, they did do something. They did obviously contribute. So, he's going to just have to be prepared emotionally to not continue on with them. This would be my advice to them if they were like my sibling. I tell them you want to be equal founders or nothing, or I need to have this percentage, whatever the percentage you think you deserve is. I want 25%. YouTube can split 75%. I agree. I'm not like a CEO. I'm a CTO. That's what I think is fair. If you guys want to pay me 25%, great. I want to get paid 80% of whatever dollars you get paid. I want to get 80% of whatever equity you have.

• 19:42Jason Calacanis?

  I agree. You have more experience. I think I'm 80% as good as you guys. Uh, and that's going to be my contribution over four years. Take it or leave it. If not, you can buy this code base for me or I'm going to go do my own thing because we don't have an agreement. That's it. And be hard and he's got to, he's got to be hardcore and believe what he's saying and he's got to emotionally be ready to leave.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  I think that's the thing is, yeah, he like, he, it's probably a little bit emotional. Like he built this thing. He doesn't want to leave it by, but you have, that's the only way to like, make the deal is be ready to walk away.

• 20:12Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:42Speaker 04

  Thank you so much, Jason. It's great to see you again.

• 20:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, great to see you as well. Maybe just from a product perspective, what are you trying to accomplish with the product?

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• 21:28Jason Calacanis?

  So if you want an all-in-one equity management platform, Fidelity Private Shares, they've got you covered. Visit fidelityprivateshares.com. That's one word, no spaces, no dashes, fidelityprivateshares.com. And hey, I mentioned This Week in Startups, they'll give you 20% off your first year subscription. Once again, fidelityprivateshares.com. And tell them that you heard about it here on This Week in Startups. Great, great, fine there. And if the person wants to email me anytime, I'm happy to create emails with them.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm going to go leave this as a comment on there once the video goes up, and I'll let them know. One more question. This one comes from, I found a new subreddit that I really like, Founders Hub. It's a just community of founders knocking ideas around, joining each other's companies, a really nice little Reddit community.

• 22:14Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe our first caller should join that community.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  Maybe they should. They definitely should. So this one comes from, Big Brainy is the user's name on Reddit. They are Are building a tracker for founders who are building their startups publicly.

• 22:27Jason Calacanis?

  Nice.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  So the idea is you're you can track your progress and failures. You turn the process of building your product into early marketing for your company.

• 22:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  And you're getting real time feedback from potential users while you're still in building mode. The system even nudges founders to log their growth, track what they're working on and release new updates once every 15 days. So my question is to you, are you interested in this? Do you think this is a useful tool? And what are the pluses negatives of building your product in public rather than stealth?

• 23:00Jason Calacanis?

  If you build your product in public, it's obviously giving intelligence over to potential competitors. The truth is, potential competitors are going to watch you like a hawk anyway. In this build in public movement, you will get idea, great ideas. You will get new employees and you will get new customers. You will also educate people on what your plans are. So be thoughtful in how you do it. It's one thing to be like, hey, here's the new version coming and we have three features. What order do you want to see us release, release these features? Or, you know, hey, here's what I built. I was vibe coding. Pull up fresh, who used to work for me is a Twitter handle and you will see him vibe coding this weekend. He was making some sort of like a 1990s retro, you know, health app.

• 23:44Jason Calacanis?

  And he builds in public and he's, you know, he worked for me for like seven years. Great, great, great employee and team member here, but he wanted to go be an entrepreneur. So I let him go do that and I actually backed it. So he's doing this sunseek. It helps you improve, uh, he's building apps to help you, uh, be healthier. Pole plunge app, sunseek, getting sun and, you know, he puts some, he's into Apple watches and all that stuff. And if you scroll down, you'll just see in his feed, uh, if you scroll down, him building like different pieces of software and showing it. So he was vibe coding this weekend. He was bringing this like, he made a, a Mac retro runner app, right?

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:18Jason Calacanis?

  And so now what has he done with this? And I'm not sure what this app was called.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  Looks like Retro Run.

• 24:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So, you know, it's like, it literally is using the original Mac OS look and feel to, you know, make a run. Running app like Runkeeper or Strava, I guess.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, you track your, track your runs and your routes and whatever. I think that's what it's doing. Yeah.

• 24:39Jason Calacanis?

  So now, like, let's say, like, this is actually a killer idea. People go steal the idea. Oh, maybe people want to have that retro. I'll add it to Airbnb. We'll have a retro thing and you can switch your interface to retro, uh, if you like. Um, so, you know, but how many views and how many replies and how many followers did he get on that tweet? Let's, let's just take a look at it here. Um, you know, most people get like, when I see people like dunking on me and quote retweeting me, I look at how many views they have. They have 10 and I'm like, I bet you six of them. So now he's got 281 people who saw this. And he got one reply. He got two likes. So this one didn't break out for him yet.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  No.

• 25:14Jason Calacanis?

  But if you look at some of his other posts, like his pinned tweet or whatever, he might have thousands of people doing that. And then there's like some build in public, um, communities where they kind of help each other. So I think it's great. Um, I wouldn't ever share things that are really great growth hacks on it. I wouldn't share like really important news on it. Some people are too build in public. Um, and, uh, but for other people, it gets them a ton of advice. We had another company. I think it was Jenny AI. You can pull up Jenny AI. Um, and they were literally releasing their revenue. And now they're started making millions of dollars. So people were like, really tracking Jenny with a J, AI.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I found it Jenny AI.

• 25:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And if you look at the founder, you know, he was literally sharing and, and some of these folks take it real serious. They share their revenue. They have a bad quarter. They're sharing their bad quarter. I mean, I prefer this to not having product velocity. I think this lights a fire under people on your team. Um, and it makes it exciting for certain people who feed off the energy of a crowd. Great. So this is like being a comedian who writes a series at home and never talks to anybody is introverted. Versus somebody who goes and, you know, uh, does stand up or host a live talk show or something, you know? Like some people feed off the energy of the crowd. Some people like to work quietly in the laboratory. Vive la différence.

• 26:36Jason Calacanis?

  I, all that matters is you're building a great product. You're obsessed about product, team, product, customer, team, product, customer. You have to be obsessed with those three things. This helps your product get better. It helps you build a team and it finds your customers faster. So, under my rubric of three things matter in startups.

• 26:55Jason Calacanis?

  Team, product, customer. And if you're focusing on anything other than those three, you gotta ask yourself like, why am I focused on this right now? You know, like accounting or legal, like, yeah, sometimes you have to do chores, but you really got to get back to the big three.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  And also, anybody who wants to ask a question that gets on the show, you can post it on Reddit or Hacker News, but you could also send it to me on Twitter at TW, I'm sorry, at TWI startups. You could also send it to us, post it on our Reddit. We'll find it if you send it to us.

• 27:25Jason Calacanis?

  DMs are open, right?

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Feel free. Reach out. Ask us questions.

• 27:28Jason Calacanis?

  All right. What's in the news line? Let's get to some news stories here. We got a little plug in there for Found University.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Do you want to, we could bring in Alex and talk about the news?

• 27:36Jason Calacanis?

  I know he was working on the docket. Let's get in the news here. And I'm sure we can kind of up the first. Hey, Alex, how we doing?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  There he is. Hey, I am doing fantastically. I, it's weird to sit backstage. So I'm always like, oh, I want to jump in. And then I'm like, dude, you, no one can hear you. Shut up. So.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Doesn't matter.

• 27:51Jason Calacanis?

  This is like the fun of it. Well, we, our cup runneth over now and we have plenty of, we keep adding resources to the show to make the show better. And some of these stories are complex. We did a complex story Monday and Wednesday, which is a YouTuber who set up a series of experiments. It's quite controversial. Maybe you could catch us up on Mark.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Rober.

• 28:12Jason Calacanis?

  Rober. Mark Rober, NASA scientist.

• 28:16Speaker 03

  Former.

• 28:17Jason Calacanis?

  Former NASA scientist with incredible YouTube channel where he runs experiments. This one, this experiment might have blown up in his lap and people are replicating it. We'll see. Let's see where we're at.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. People are replicating it and people with much smaller accounts. So today we're going to talk about a guy named Kyle Paul. He runs a YouTube channel. It has a grand total of 2,009 subscribers. Shout out Kyle for having to start. He's had a couple of videos out, Jason. They mostly do 5, 6,000 views. And then most recently, he replicated part of the Mark Rober Tesla test. He didn't do the fog. He didn't do the water. What he did was the Looney Tunes wall to see what he could get from the tests. So this video did 145,000 views in less than 20 hours. People are definitely talking about it and it goes through and answers some of the questions people had about the original video. So in this. Case, he runs a Model Y with full self-driving and we're going to show that clip in a second.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  And then later on, Jason, he also breaks out a Cybertruck, which has the newer self-driving hardware in it. I believe it's a version four and we'll take a look at that. But let's start with a video of a Model Y and this is a 2022 Model Y with hardware three. And FSD turned on, going towards a Looney Tunes wall that Kyle Paul, this YouTuber, put together.

• 29:31Jason Calacanis?

  This is in the, in the Mark video, Rober.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Robber.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  R O B E R, Robber. Mark Robber's video, he used autopilot, a different technology than FSD. That was the original sin, I think, of the video. Here we're correcting the original sin and using FSD.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:48Jason Calacanis?

  Full self-driving, which uses, um, you know, different pieces of the technology. Let's see what happens. Does he run into the Looney Tunes wall, which is a wall that perfectly replicates what's behind it to try to trick cameras? And as I said, humans would be tricked by this in some cases too, uh, if they're not paying attention. But let's see what happens. I'm interested to see.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  All right. Here is one of the takes.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  Not touching the wheel.

• 30:14Speaker 05

  Vehicle doesn't want to go much faster than 31.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  Apparently does not see the wall. Does not see the wall, does not see the wall.

• 30:28Jason Calacanis?

  And he breaks. Okay.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  He breaks and people did say, why didn't you just go through it? It turns out there's a, I think a U-Haul on the other side. So if he went through it, it would be a collision. Uh, just to be clear, he ran this test with the Model Y, Jason, I think three separate times. He had to apply the brakes manually each time. So I think that goes to show that for the 2022, using FSD and hardware three, it will not catch this particular, uh, scenario if it ever comes up in your life. But I'm curious, Jason, your take on the quality of the experiment here?

• 30:59Jason Calacanis?

  It looks like a pretty good experiment because if that was a human being who was paying partial attention, there is a chance one out of 50, one out of a hundred would go through the wall. If they were, you know, applying their lipstick, changing the radio station, putting in navigation, you know, advancing their podcast, whatever it is. So.

• 31:21Jason 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.

• 32:04Jason Calacanis?

  They're only going to offer you handpicked developers with 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. I do think that this test, a certain percentage of humans would fail. And FSD on hardware three, which is what I have, is a distinctly different experience than hardware four.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 32:49Jason Calacanis?

  So much so that I believe in the last, I know in the last Tesla call, and somebody can fact check me if I'm wrong here. Elon said he was probably going to have to upgrade hardware three to hardware four.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 33:01Jason Calacanis?

  And they were going to do that for free if FSD couldn't do stuff. And they had hinted at that, the call before it. And then I have, I can remember him sort of casually mentioning that. And I remember people at Tesla talking about there's a big jump in the hardware between three and four. I think that it's pretty clear. I'm going to go ahead and guess hardware four gets it right. Hardware three doesn't. Let's take a look.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  All right. So next up here we have a Cybertruck. So a much more recent vehicle than 2022. Running hardware for running FSD. And two quick notes for folks out there who want to get into the nitty gritty here. Kyle actually did have the cameraman zoom in to show the actual version number of FSD. So you can get down to the absolute release date if you want. Anyways, here is a Cybertruck running the same test a little bit later in the day, and we'll go back to that in just a second.

• 33:51Speaker 05

  All right. We are in a Cybertruck, full self-driving, computer four, full self-driving version 13.2.8. We have full self-driving turned on. Ready, go.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  Hands off the wheel.

• 34:07Jason Calacanis?

  That sounds like a slowdown to me. It's making that Millennium Falcon-like slowdown sound. Yep. And that's a stop.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Yep. So I think that that shows that at least a little bit later in the day, the Tesla Cybertruck did a great job, stopped early, stopped very calmly, didn't slam on the brakes at the last minute. Some people have said, and we are in the business here of kind of poking holes at things, that it was so much later in the day that the actual outline of the image on the wall might be more visible. That said, I would have more stock in that if it had been more of a chaotic stop. But given how confident the Cybertruck was, I do think that if you are in a Cybertruck, you will not go through a Looney Tunes wall while using FSD.

• 34:49Jason Calacanis?

  It's a meaningless test. This will never happen in the real world. It's super entertaining for us. And the overall picture here, Alon, is that the Looney Tunes test is the stupidest test, but the most entertaining. And so I think we're entering the phase of self-driving and autonomy where we're coming up with insane tests because having it stay in the lane and having it stop before a bicycle goes across it, we know it's going to do that 100% of the time. So congratulations, humanity, Tesla, Waymo, everybody in between who's making self-driving technology, people who are making braking technology.

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  Less people are going to die. If you die in a car crash, it's not going to be from a Looney Tunes wall. It's going to be because you decided to drink and drive, you decided to be a distracted driver, you decided to not engage self-driving technology. Big picture here.

• 35:49Jason Calacanis?

  FSD, you know, putting Tesla aside, I'll just say full self-driving, level four, level two, three, four driving, it's here, it works 80, 90, 95% of miles flawlessly. We got work to do on the last 5% and the last 5% Lon has nothing to do with the Looney Tunes test. So I want all these people to get back to work on better tests, come up with some better tests. The better test is instruction zone. So if these guys really want to go at it, I can tell you when my hardware three Model Y fails. It fails on 290 in Austin, which is under massive construction. Literally every time I take that goddamn highway, they have

• 36:32Jason Calacanis?

  moved the cones around. It doesn't match the maps. Waymo, Tesla, Zoops, ain't nobody gonna get that right in Texas. I can tell you that y'all. Lon, your thoughts?

• 36:42Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, the one thing I was gonna say is I do think this reinforces some things we were saying about the original Mark Rover video, which is this is YouTube. This is for entertainment purposes. I don't, I think, I think everybody watching this who was expecting or anticipating, and I'm not blaming them, but the people who are watching this who are expecting engineering and scientific scrutiny in these perfectly variable free experiments, it's, it's a, it's a YouTube video. The goal was something clicky that's gonna be visually fun, not something that's really gonna prove autopilot versus full self-driving. Like the, the Roadrunner test is for fun.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, but I do like that people can get out there and run their own experiments and publish it. Like there's something very homebrew about that, that I, that I really do appreciate. And so I, I want, I want this Kyle guy to do the, uh, the fog and the, and the hose videos as well.

• 37:32Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. And I'll tell you right now, if he does that, I will donate immediately a hundred dollars to it. So crowdsource the tests, let people pay you to do the tests in aggregate. Don't take money from any specific person who has a good technology.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:46Jason Calacanis?

  Just so we don't have any more muddying the waters with friends, et cetera.

• 37:50Speaker 03

  Please.

• 37:50Jason Calacanis?

  And what this is, now that we've gotten through three conversations about it, we have, you know, some of the most important things. Self-driving works. It works most of the time. We're trying to, entertainment works. People are entertainers. And then also, if you are a NASA scientist, the expectation is for you to do NASA-based experiments. And this is running into a passionate group of people. Who know the technology better than Mark did. So while Mark might in a NASA experiment do really well, what he learned here, his lesson is, okay, no appearance of impropriety because people will find it. All the receipts are on the internet. Putting that aside, we'll assume good faith there.

• 38:35Jason Calacanis?

  The second piece is he has to understand there are people every day who obsess over the version numbers of SSD and all they do is release specifically the Tesla SSD because it's out there, you know, being beta tested with beta testers who have to remain vigilant. They, they are recording and publishing, I would say hundreds of these videos per week. He does one experiment, their collective knowledge is so much greater than his. That would be like me coming out and putting out like a chess video here, explaining my chess opening, like, have you not looked at the internet and seen that people are playing live chess on Twitch, on Tik Tok, and these people have ratings of 2000 and they're grandmasters

• 39:18Jason Calacanis?

  doing every move. Like I come in and I'm like, hey, check out my new chess move. It's like, dude, you're rated 900.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  On a good day.

• 39:27Jason Calacanis?

  He's in, he's a 900 chess player going up against the grandmasters of SSD, who are going to run laps around him. He should have known this going in. Let's do more experiments. I'm actually asking the community right now, come up with the rest of the experiments. We'll donate to it. In fact, if somebody can make these experiments, I would pay them to do it for this week in startups. So if this guy wants to do a couple more, we'll release them here on the channel. And we'll come up with new ones. And I don't want to just do it for Tesla, do it for every brand. Let's get, let's get an Audi with the self-driving in there. Run four cars against it. Why isn't Car and Driver doing this? Like, do you understand Car and Driver, like, how many videos you would get? How many views you would get if you took all 10 of your top 10 cars from last year?

• 40:10Jason Calacanis?

  From the Corvette to the Prius and everything in between, even Lon's Prius C rated 2 of 10?

• 40:17Jason Calacanis?

  Like, let's get the two. It's a great car to drive after a war. So anyway, let's move on to the next news story. What else you got in the news, Alex?

• 40:24Speaker 00

  Uh, so a couple of things. One, Tech Runch just got sold to a group company called Regent. That dropped out of the sky. No one saw that coming. Um, this is.

• 40:33Jason Calacanis?

  Did they sell Engadget as well?

• 40:35Speaker 00

  I do not know. We only know about Regent, but we also know that Regent bought Foundry last week, which was like PC Mag and so forth. So something akin to a roll up here. This happened literally right before we jumped on. I have a bunch of texts from former colleagues that I need to go read, Jason, but I think people who listen to the show and watch it probably are TechCrunch readers as well. So they might care that it's being sold. Details to come, but probably not a great sign. Jason, you've done more media M and A than I've done.

• 41:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's an investment firm, Regent. You know, TechCrunch probably makes 20, 30 million a year because of the events, but it's kind of, I don't want to be rude here, but without like a top leader in it, it's, it's Wayne. There's no Alex there. There's no Mike Larrington. There's no Jason Calacanis. There's no Peter Rojas. You know, in order to have these, you need to have like a person who actually runs it. Oh, Yahoo retained ownership to Engadget. So that was the one I sold them. So it sounds like they want a TechCrunch. I don't know who Regent is. I actually had told Jim Lanzon, if you ever wanted to sell TechCrunch to let me know or Engadget, I would buy them. Shout out to my friend Lanzon for not calling me. Thanks, Jim. But good luck to them.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  It looks like Regent owns PC World, Mac World and Tech Advisor. So this is going to join a suite of tech news sites that they already have.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  And I'm sure they're willing to invest and double down and then bring the brand back to its former glory.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  I'm sure that's the plan.

• 42:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Nope. Like all these things, it's probably an SEO play. And I'm guessing it's a fire sale, an SEO plan. They're going to cut two thirds of the writers and game over. And actually, if they own PC World, Mac World, Info World, CIO, Tech Advisor, all those other publications I'm reading here that they own, they're going to play it straight and TechCrunch has become quite lefty, dare I say. I think you might agree. And it started to dip into the sort of like holding truth to power, anti-tech kind of space, Alex, I think, which made it not popular amongst my crowd. You know, the, the VCs and the CEOs haven't exactly liked TechCrunch's kind of woke

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  position over the last couple of years. What do you think, Alex? It's adversarial. You can have an opinion.

• 42:51Speaker 00

  No, I, I, I mean, I'm, this is one of those times that I'm so conflicted. It's hard to, it's hard to be clear headed. I mean, I love so many people there.

• 42:58Jason Calacanis?

  We like to.

• 42:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:59Jason Calacanis?

  We, we, this is like, this is where you could actually, uh, you know, earn your bones here. Just let it rip.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Okay. I, I think the people complaining that the media isn't sufficiently nice to tech are a bunch of whiners and they should go sit upon their thrones of gold and stop kvetching about people who make one, one thousandth of their income. Also, like, keep in mind how, how the market is set up. I mean, there is more people working in PR just in San Francisco for tech companies than TechCrunch has ever had, ever worked for a period historically added together. And, um, I think, I think to make TechCrunch better, what you should do is you should quadruple the staff, not, not cut it by two thirds. I, I think if this ends up being the fire sale SEO play that you're describing, Jason, it'll be an enormous loss. And also, I feel sorry for all the LLM companies because as media continues to get gutted, there's going to be less and less stuff for them to ingest.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  So this is bad, personally, bad, I think for the industry and bad, I would say for the future as well. Doesn't make me happy. Maybe I'm wrong. I would love to be wrong.

• 43:56Jason Calacanis?

  All these brands now are just like SEO, you know, click fodder. Um, they all like, you know, all the old Gawker brands, et cetera. They just get bought for pennies on the dollar. People just extract all their money out of them. They don't invest in them. The people who write for them could be in a foreign country, just writing like, you know, regurgitated articles. The only people really, you know, the, the future of the industry is subscriptions, um, and Substack, Beehive, Ghost, all those platforms. We use Beehive, a partner of ours, um, really great platform. If you don't want to have to pay the 10% vig, uh, you just want to pay like a

• 44:35Speaker 00

  SaaS.

• 44:35Jason Calacanis?

  Product, opposed to giving all your revenue over. The information, I think, New York Times, the subscription based model is clearly the only sustainable one now. Once you start trying to get advertising going, with the exception of podcasts or written words. You know, for written words, it doesn't work anymore. The reason it works for podcasts is because I read the ads. When I read the ads and we have a very niche audience, you know, if you're spending $30,000 on five ads or $60,000 on 10 ads, whatever, you buy some ads on a podcast. If you're a SaaS company and you get one customer, it paid for itself. That's like a little niche thing over here. Then the other piece of it is you're Bill Simmons, you have a massive audience and you talk about Michelob or Bud Light.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know which one he does, but you know, whichever beer he does, like you reach the masses. So.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's a messy middle for people like TechCrunch. I don't think this will be the last publication you see.

• 45:27Jason Calacanis?

  You tried to make it subscription and they didn't commit.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  Well, man, that's a long story, but not a single problem. But partially we were hamstrung by what you might call big company politics and a biased stores internal tooling that was already owned. But I mean, speaking very generically to protect other people's work, but like we got it into the seven figures. I was proud of that.

• 45:48Jason Calacanis?

  That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. And it would have gone to eight figures if they just simply put everything behind a paywall and it would be an independent, strong brand. They should have just said, you know what? Nothing for free anymore. Anybody who's a subscriber can share three free stories a day. If you happen to get it that way, great. And you have to commit. That's it, you know?

• 46:07Speaker 00

  And well, actually it's funny that you bring that up because when that project that I worked on TechCrunch Plus was ended, kind of shot out from underneath me, that's when you called back and were like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. And then now I'm here. So thank you Yahoo and Regent for putting me on Twist, apparently.

• 46:23Jason Calacanis?

  There you go. Yeah. Better deal. I gave you a better deal.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  I just worry that we're not replacing these things nearly as quickly as we're getting rid of. Like the information is great. Bloomberg is great. There are other sources for tech business news.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Not that many. And I mean, to just lose TechCrunch without something else coming in. It does make me worry that so many of these Substacks, so many of these podcasts, so many of these YouTube channels, they are basing their content on original reporting from places like TechCrunch. That's fueling the entire analysis industry. And I think that people don't necessarily make that connection and we're getting rid of the original reporting part and counting on the commentary part to replace it. But you can't have the commentary without the original reporting.

• 47:12Jason Calacanis?

  I think that's where you hear me say things on this program like, maybe I'll hire Alex from TechCrunch.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:19Jason Calacanis?

  You know, and oh, maybe I'll pay for the next FSD test. Like if it costs him a thousand dollars to paint the wall, if I get that exclusively on This Week in Star Wars, maybe I'll just pay for it. Yeah, run the test here. I'll give you a thousand bucks for the rights to it. And yeah, you know, work.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:35Jason Calacanis?

  That's actually one of the things I want to do when we get to, speaking of getting free products, I was on the ski lift and I was thinking about how much I love gadgets. I'm gonna have a collection of gadgets and I was like, I think I'm gonna start like my own little internal gadget museum. When I have, because I'm getting a big warehouse kind of space for production in Austin. And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna, and I talked to you about it, like get a PC Magazine type lab going.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 47:58Jason Calacanis?

  Because I love gadgets so much, all these things are coming out and then I want to index them and store them. So if somebody sends me like, the guy who was on from The Rabbit, remember The Rabbit?

• 48:06Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:07Jason Calacanis?

  I told him to come on.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  R1.

• 48:08Jason Calacanis?

  Let's have him on when he releases the next version, somebody reach out to them. I know that we're booking some great guests here, but I told him I'd have him on a year later. So whatever his one year anniversary, which I think would be, actually, maybe that was a year ago at CES, because it wasn't this CES, right?

• 48:22Speaker 00

  It was the breakout of last year's CES. It's actually been a little bit over a year now since Rabbit was a big deal.

• 48:26Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So if he's still producing and he's got a new version, maybe we should take a look at those, that category. But imagine he sent me two of those. One we use in the lab, one we put in the archive in the museum. Or we get one and we just clean it up, whatever. I think it'd be really dope to have a full-time person in the lab, just indexing all the free stuff I get, putting it on shelves, organizing and then showing it just here so we can track the pace of technology. And then we have a party, people could see all the stuff, you know, like in a museum type, like a computer history museum type thing, or gadget history museum.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, the museum of gadget history is fun. That's a good idea.

• 48:59Jason Calacanis?

  It'd be fun, right?

• 49:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, I think I have the aesthetic picked out just, and have you considered something kind of like this, perhaps?

• 49:05Jason Calacanis?

  What is this?

• 49:06Speaker 00

  That's the little closing shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

• 49:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, yes. No, I know, not like that.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Top men looking into your gadgets. I just know you guys are film guys, so I figured.

• 49:16Jason Calacanis?

  No, I think it would be like that, but imagine a row of apple-like tables in the middle. So you have the warehouse and then you have the apple-like tables in the middle with glass on them and you could open the glass. Put on a pair of white gloves, take out the original iPod and look at and geek out and it works and it's charged and it's just sitting right there. Or, you know, here are all the original electric cars, you know, here's, you know, you start putting all that stuff there. So I kind of just have like a little weird vision of something.

• 49:44Speaker 03

  And the hall of misfires, you know, you have the Zune, the Apple Newton, you know, like all the, all the products.

• 49:50Speaker 00

  Did you just say Zune, sir?

• 49:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Do you remember the Zune?

• 49:54Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, Microsoft Zune.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Microsoft Zune. I bought one day one and I will go down on this shit, but the Zune was fantastic and got a bad rap.

• 50:02Jason Calacanis?

  Zune was one of the best products they made. I mean, also the Surface tablets that Microsoft make are incredible. I want to get one of the new Surfaces. Those products were always amazing.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  They're great hardware.

• 50:11Jason Calacanis?

  What else is in the news?

• 50:12Speaker 00

  I want to do two quick IPO items. We are tracking a number of major debuts. We covered the Wiz exit, but there are some non-M and A transactions. So CoreWeave, just keep in mind that CoreWeave filed to go public. There's a lot of questions about its deal with Microsoft. There was reporting from the FT that Microsoft had broken off a deal with them. They said, no, no, no. And then they worked with OpenAI and got a good press cycle for a $12 billion deal. It turns out that Microsoft effectively had just said, we're not going to buy this option that we had to access a lot of your compute. And then OpenAI came in and swooped it. So I think that the positive OpenAI story was a little bit too positive and the Microsoft story was a little bit too negative. I think, Jason, given the stability that OpenAI provides, it will go public. I'm just not sure exactly

• 50:55Speaker 00

  at what price, but that means the IPO is moving forward. So net positive there. We will see a GPU NeoCloud go public in the next couple of weeks, which is

• 51:02Jason Calacanis?

  Awesome.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Thank God.

• 51:03Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  And then finally, just really quick, Klarna teamed up with DoorDash and people began to make endless jokes about people needing to finance their dinner. I think everyone has seen this meme by now, but if you haven't, this is kind of what people are saying. There's a sad guy going inflation is bad. And someone asks, is inflation bad? Or did you just order a private taxi for your burrito? And he says, private taxi for my burrito. I think people are spending too much money on things they can't afford. Klarna responded, but I think what matters here for us is that partnerships are dropping a plenty for Klarna. Good IPO momentum. So I'm really hoping to get that company out and onto the public markets ASAP before anything else changes.

• 51:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and there's the other breaking news story is Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin, Senator Dick Durbin, they're going to introduce a bipartisan bill with apparently wide support that would make Section 230, which protects common carriers, people who are publishers like WordPress, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Meta, that it would expire Section 230 on January 1st, 2027, basically in two years. I don't know if they have an idea of what would replace it, or if this is a gun-to-the-head move, where they're like, hey, it's going to expire, so that we force a new idea. Alex, I don't know if you, I saw you tweeted it, like, this is not a good idea.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:26Jason Calacanis?

  Have you read anything on it, or we'll just cover it Monday, or just any quick thoughts on it?

• 52:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, just really briefly, the way this has been framed by everyone who's covered it, back to Lon's point about original reporting, is that it is the gun-to-the-head point. No one knows exactly what should replace Section 230, but the idea is tech companies are never going to play the game while they have what is pretty robust protection. So by setting a sunset date, they have to come to the table. The reason why that's actually, I think, a terrible idea, is that there's no chance of passing anything through Congress, because bipartisanship is effectively over for now, and what the GOP and the Democratic Party want to replace Section 230 is diametrically different. And so I don't think that there's a way forward here. Also, I think Section 230 is awesome, because it lets companies moderate their own online platforms, and we shouldn't do away with it. What the hell is wrong with everybody in DC?

• 53:16Jason Calacanis?

  I think that they have a very, they have some scar tissue, where they feel like these companies can run amok and influence elections, you know, and they take it personal, right? So I think that's their perspective, is that why does, you know, YouTube get to trend stories about, or Twitter trends stories about Lindsey Graham, let's say. I'm not going to say any specific types of stories, but, you know, they get to trend a story, whereas a journalist would never cover those stories, but the algorithm can trend it up, and then you get the benefit from it. The truth is, something does need to change. So this is gonna sound crazy. I don't like the gun to the head maneuver,

• 54:00Jason Calacanis?

  but I understand it. So I'm just being clear here. I understand that it needs to change. There is very simple thing that needs to change. The algorithm should break your 230. Let me say that again. Ah, if you use an algorithm like TikTok does, or YouTube does, or your for you page, you lose 230. The algorithms are more sophisticated now than any editorial page at the New York Times ever was. And they're doing it on a one to one basis. If you use an algorithm to present content, you lose section 230. That includes X. My friend owns X. I'm saying he should lose 230 if you force it on people.

• 54:43Jason Calacanis?

  And then what should happen is when you turn on X.com, formerly known as Twitter, YouTube, it should present you and say, you can follow these accounts and we'll make a feat out of it. Or you can pick one of these algorithms, or you can write your own algorithm. And if you use one of these algorithms, you can click on show and explain, and it will explain what the algorithm knows and you can tweet.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  You're, you're in an interesting way, kind of pitching Blue Sky. Like this was the, Blue Sky doesn't actually function this way in a day, in a day to day basis. But the pitch was, it's not a social media platform. It's a protocol and you can customize it any way you want. So I want to break it.

• 55:25Jason Calacanis?

  This idea is sort of out there in the world. I want, I want BYOA. Bring your own algorithm. I think there should be an app store for algorithms that works across all services. I should be able to go to YouTube. And in fact, I'll talk to Lindsey Graham about this. Anyway, I'm in favor of the gun to the, I'm gonna say right now, I might be, I might, it sounds crazy. I might be with Lindsey.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  Well.

• 55:49Jason Calacanis?

  I might be with Lindsey and I think I'm gonna write a blog post about this. Uh, and I'm gonna do a Substack or something. I'm gonna, I'm gonna share this. They need to make the algorithm.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 56:01Jason Calacanis?

  Actually break 230. Don't get rid of 230. Leave 230.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 56:05Jason Calacanis?

  But say amend 230 to say if algorithms are not common carrier, if you default to an algorithm, you lose 230.

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 56:15Jason Calacanis?

  If you don't want to lose 230, users have to see once a month what the algorithm showing them before they use your service and have the ability to change it. Or opt out of it or use a third party. This would be a really great use of the legislature.

• 56:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:33Jason Calacanis?

  You know, uh, what are we showing here?

• 56:35Speaker 00

  This is a bill from 2021 from Lindsey Graham, and it was to repeal section 230. Jason, I'm just bringing this up because I don't actually think you're in favor of the full Lindsey Graham position.

• 56:46Jason Calacanis?

  Nope.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Uh, I, so I just wanted to clarify that for everybody. I'll just, I'll just say that if we do end up in a world without section 230 protections, we're going to end up with, I mean, either completely unmoderated services, Jason, which I don't think will work for advertisers because even Rumble, for example, has a pretty strict TOS. Or just something that is so lobotomized as to be completely uninteresting. I, I, I might be the last section 230 defender in the world, even though Jason, I think the algorithm point has merit. But I, I really don't trust Durbin and Graham to land this particular plane after things have gone pretty well.

• 57:18Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if you're, yeah, I mean, I, I think Elon and, and Zuck and the first, you know, people who are freedom, who are, you know, Zuck is now freedom of speech. I mean, the weather vane points that direction. So he's going to point that direction. Um, but Elon and Ev Williams, Jack, the original Twitter people, they were always the free speech party of the free speech party, like left of left of left on that issue. Um, I think they're gonna fight this and I think they're gonna win because in Korea, um, you, when you sign up for a social media service, you have to put your social security number in.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 57:52Jason Calacanis?

  Imagine if starting a Twitter account required you to put your social security number in. You can look it up. There's a, I'm not sure what they call it, what the Korean social security numbers call. But I remember when I was there, I was like, and they were like, yeah, it's, you don't have the right to go online and trash people anonymously in Korea. It's not fair.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  It's your, it's your national, you're, yeah. Uh, your red resident registration number is what they call it. Your R R N.

• 58:16Jason Calacanis?

  So less people think like the rest of the world works like America. In Europe, if you try to, if you say something about the Nazi party in Germany, like, like, you're not allowed to do that. And in France, you're not allowed to sell Nazi memorabilia. They've got some bad feelings about what happened, like Yahoo auctions had to ban certain things. Things work differently in other countries. We just have this weird delusion that everybody should be able to say whatever they want in any context anonymously, all the time, create 50 different accounts. And then, you know, bombard somebody with psyops. That's a uniquely American perspective. It is not the perspective of other countries in the West who feel you have to own your words.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  First Amendment may be. Yeah, I just feel like in this cultural and historical moment, it, it's, it's a bigger concern than maybe it would have been five or 10 or 15 years ago, if only because we have this regime now that is so interested in controlling the message. And I feel like if we remove these protections from these tech platforms, they're going to step in and fill the vacuum and it will be the Trump administration deciding what it's okay for you to say online. And that's the danger.

• 59:30Jason Calacanis?

  That's what everybody should be scared about. When it came to executive orders, I remember them saying like, is Obama doing too many executive orders? Like, wasn't he the first one who kinda was like, I can just do executive orders? And then like an expression was like, okay, I'll do them. And now it's like, oh, it's my first day. I'm going to do 500 executive orders on the first day. It's like, be careful, folks. You know, like you may think like for your side, this is really cool because you get a little bit of power every four years, every eight years. All right, everybody, thisweekinstartups.com slash doc.

• 1:00:03Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, we're getting active on Tik Tok. We're getting active on Instagram. Follow us and just do me a favor. If you're a su- super fan of the show, you appreciate the show and 2,000 plus episodes of the year. Just one thing you could do for me. Go to Instagram, Tik Tok, uh, and we're on YouTube. We're posting the shorts and just say, hey, Jake Al, love the show. What your favorite episode is? Say hi to Lon, say hi to Alex. Just say hello in the comments because we're trying to wake up these shorts we're doing. Yeah. Wake up those channels because we're not using them. Forget about following. I'm sure you do follow them, but comment specifically and make it a funny comment. Make it a thoughtful comment that actually is worth replying to because if we get three or four comments, but three or four comments on these shorts, then YouTube assumes like, or Instagram, hey, they're, these are legit. Watching, yeah. People are watching. So please help us out by just posting a comment. Say, hey, Jake Al.

• 1:00:49Jason Calacanis?

  If, if you say, hey, Jake Al, I guarantee you I will reply to you because the team will, uh, send me the link. We'll see you all next time on this week in service. Bye bye. Bye.