Open source is going to win it all: Harvey proves it | E2328

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Superhuman https://Superhuman.com Sentry https://sentry.io/twist Lightfield https://lightfield.app Today's show: Jason's been saying it for years now (and we've got an All In clip from 2023 to prove it). Open source will win the AI race. This week gives us a major evidence point, as $11B legal AI company Harvey released its own in-house model, trained on an open-weight Kimi K3 base. Harvey made a proprietary specialized solution without having to risk sharing its precious expert-compiled data with the major frontier labs. PLUS we're checking out the FREE AI dictation app Willow with co-founder Allan Guo, and finding out how he plans to compete with giants like Wispr Flow and Apple. AND we've got the Stanford student who built an automated golf cart and gave luminaries like Jensen Huang and Sam Altman rides around campus. Guests Allan Guo on X: https://x.com/_allanguo Willow: https://willowvoice.com/ Ethan Goodhart: https://x.com/EthanGoodhart Sign up for the Wind TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/zZqmhhwf Relevant Links CNBC: OpenAI "will be a public company in 2027": https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/19/open-ai-ipo-timing-2027-friar.html OpenAI Zero Data Retention Pledge: https://openai.com/index/our-commitment-to-zero-data-retention TWIST (June 2026): Jason comments on OpenAI and training data: https://youtu.be/o3eow1nTrcI?si=orungk7OmplOuyio&t=742 All In podcast (Feb 2023): Jason comments on open source vs. frontier models: https://youtu.be/PVgBWV2bvLs?si=j6y7sHS0wx9q09oa&t=5173 Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai/ Harvey Tenet Research Preview: https://www.harvey.ai/blog/post-training-update-harvey-tenet Fireworks AI: https://fireworks.ai/ Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/ Pipedrive: https://www.pipedrive.com/ Nvidia Jetson Thor: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-thor/ OpenAI shares Wind golf cart clip: https://www.tiktok.com/@openai/video/7645336713472134431 Starlink Mini: https://starlink.com/mini-product-us?srsltid=AfmBOorzM7arxhdzYAdDpH6RGD4LLg9WV_BFnEoLuYieuHuGSCjQTE1Y Toro mowers: https://www.toro.com/ 404 Media: https://www.404media.co/ Punchbowl News: https://punchbowl.news/ Semafor: https://www.semafor.com/ Skift: https://skift.com/ Newcomer: https://www.newcomer.co/ Deirdre Bosa on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@deebosa Electrek: Genesis GV90 review: https://electrek.co/2026/08/20/genesis-gv90-luxury-coach-doors-images/ Toyota Alphard gallery: https://global.toyota/en/mobility/toyota-brand/gallery/alphard.html The Clash "London Calling" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c Timestamps: 0:00 What is Jason's Grok Bot up to? 5:17 Systems over goals 9:43 Superhuman - Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing, and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Sign up to get the best in AI at https://Superhuman.com 13:08 OpenAI will go public soon 14:19 Top line ARR matters way less than churn 20:43 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST 29:55 Lightfield - Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you — it even prospects and books your meetings. Used by thousands of startups. Free at https://lightfield.app 30:52 Harvey launches Tenet 34:32 "Open source is going to win it all" 35:58 Allan Guo of Willow joins 39:18 Managing a single source of truth across a team 47:00 Lon and Jason love the Toyota Alphard 51:00 Stanford student and AV expert Ethan Goodhart joins 1:00:09 How Ethan got Jensen Huang to go for a ride 1:00:37 Punk Rock 101 1:06:24 Phoebe Gates' secret Harvard class Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Open source is going to win it all. Acme litigators and Delta litigators are both using Harvey, let's say. Harvey now is like, not only do we not trust OpenAI with this, we need to have our own model. Harvey was probably spending, if I had to guess, I'm gonna say 10 million a month with OpenAI.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  99% of their spend is coming off the frontier models. They don't want to give their intelligence to somebody who wants to build the final company.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Lightfield. Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you. It even prospects and books your meetings, used by thousands of startups. Free at lightfield.app. Sentry, your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST SUPERHUMAN. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Sign up to get the best in AI at superhuman.com.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. Roy Jay Kyle here with Lon Harris, episode 23. How is that even possible? It's like year 17 of the show.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  We're in sci-fi year numbers now. We're in sci-fi year.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  It's getting crazy. Just literally like, yeah, it feels like this Blade Runner or something like that. And it's appropriate, given how great these bots are doing. I just want to start the show off. You started playing with Grokbot.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  I got it. I owe Elon $200 now. I gotta pay. He's making me pony up.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, do it. You can sign up for a corporate account.

• 1:39Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, give us your explanation and what you're using it for. And then I'll tell you what I'm using it for.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  To me, it feels like when OpenClaw was brand new and you had us all sign up and we were all in Slack. It was what the promise of that was, but OpenClaw in a virtual machine and like some data center somewhere, it couldn't connect to everything it needed to connect to. It was too walled off. So it wasn't really that useful. You kept having to remind it things and log it in, this API key, that. Grokbot is automatic. You just tell it what you want. It can find whatever. It's got its own computer. Like just today, I asked it, you know, to look at the news and cross-reference it to X, which is a thing I always wanted Gaff, my old OpenClaw assistant, to do. But he couldn't ever get into X reliably. Would try to backdoor and it would never work.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  It was always very time consuming and painful. Grokbot just is like, hey, here, I'm gonna bring up my computer. It actually shows you what it's seeing. It goes, just log into X for me. I logged in through our This Week in AI account and it's just off to the rails. It sees everything I could see. It's logged in. It's pulling tweets. It's referencing things. It's very intuitive. You just need to tell it in plain language what you want. It's very impressive.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, the interface is really interesting. I'll just share mine. Who cares?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Let's see your Grokbot. Show us your Grokbot.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Well, here's my Grokbot and what I'm doing. So we have a thing, tactical and practical. If you make it rhyme, people will remember it. So I want to do more tactical and practical talks here on the show. And, you know, I've been just having a conversation with it, looking for, looking for you to make talks, startup founders focused on tactical and practical advice for them to scale their businesses, find product market fit and generally grow, hiring, sales, paid marketing, fundraising, content marketing, all that good stuff. And it just went to work finding these things and linking to them and building it out, building it out. And then I said, hey, well, give me other ideas for topics and then send it to the tactical practical room on Slack every 48 hours.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  And then ask Ismail and my team, who's in Tokyo right now, representing us for Founder University. And I want him to be part of this motion. And then I said, also, when you find a great speaker, I want you to give me their X account and LinkedIn accounts for the report. And then I said, please always send a Google sheet, yada, yada, yada. Like you said, you easily connect it. And it's just doing this every day for me. And then I asked it like, hey, do me a favor. Find me things on Hacker News and Reddit, because those are where founders are actually talking about their problems. Like, for example, it's like, here's AI unit economics, pricing, credits, token spend. And people really care about that. I hadn't thought about that as something that founders would be interested in. And this thing is running over and over.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Then I made an AI trends one every night for This Week in AI. Do a scan. Tell me what the top stories are. It's nailing it. Then I said, give me some competitive intelligence, right? And so I said, for our newsletter business, I'm so out of it. I want to know what every other organization is doing. Politico, Economist, Forbes, Axios, Semaphore. And it is going out, as you can see. And then I told it, follow all of the people who are the most important people in these organizations. And then you were talking about 404 Media the other day. I just asked it like, tell me about this publication. And it gave me all the founders. It gave me their LinkedIn, their X, their Blue Sky, their Mastodon. I follow them everywhere.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  And then I said, just tell me what they're talking about publicly. Then tell me all the event staff, because I want to hire some event staff. So I was like, okay, let's just figure out who's doing events at other publications. And this thing is just working for me over and over again. And it makes a report on just what people are doing at Skift, which I'm an investor in, Newcomer, Punchbowl. It found all these for me. I didn't have to tell it to find these. And it really is, it feels less brittle, which is weird to say, than OpenClaw, which was super brittle, broke all the time. Can't get on X, can't figure out LinkedIn.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  This thing is just rock solid. So for me, I am a fan of systems over goals. The goal is to have the best news stories here. The goal is to understand what other people are doing for events and newsletters, in case we want to incorporate it into what our plans are. My goal is to find another co-host here. Alex is, you know, working on his projects. And he'll be back for sitting in for me when I'm on vacation for time to time. But I need another co-host for all these pods. You're doing great, but you know, we just need to have a roster. So I was like, go find me everybody and then keep finding them. Figure out, you know, CNBC hosts who are getting laid off or who are no longer there.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  Find me people who are working for The Verge, other places, and no longer working there. Find me some talent and then figure out what their, I literally had it. Figure out what their politics are.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Figure out their DEI status. Figure out all this stuff, their point of view. Because like literally, when you co-host somebody, like now in today's environment, I have Molly Wood on. I lose like a third of the audience because they hate her lib stuff. I gain a third of the audience back because she's, you know, hates Trump and whatever. Same thing with Alex, back and forth, you. And I'm just like, just give me this overview. It's so great. It just gets it done. And then when you get back to your mobile phone, it's the same thing going on. It runs everything in the cloud. So unlike Claude co-orker, you have to have your app open and whatever. It's just running all the time.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've discovered Claude, it can be a little klugey trying to share things across networks, across people a lot of times, like, well, I can't see that. I can't share that. So far with Grokbot, it is all very, very seamless. And across multiple apps collating, collecting things. I've been very impressed with it so far. So I'm excited to spend the 200.

• 7:39Speaker 00

  So this is my little mini talk here. Systems over goals. What does it mean? You have a goal. You want to have, you want to find another co-host. You want to do more events and you want to hire an events production person. Okay, you want to have the best stories and you want to find really interesting speakers for, you know, Founder University and Launch Accelerator. That's the goal. Okay, what system can you build? And the system I built is for these to go do the research every day, real time, every other day, present it to somebody on my team, have that team member rank them, put it into a Google sheet. And then we have a whole bunch of other steps we do, which I won't get into because it gets kind of boring. But if we can remove, let's say, 10 hours of research a week,

• 8:24Speaker 00

  five hours of research a week, and then start with research that's better than human? Okay. Then if when we're inviting people, we can have it find them quicker, find their connections, invite them, book them on a date. That's typically three hours of work per guest. So finding the guest, every guest equals five to 10 hours of research. Every guest equals three hours of inviting multiple guests to get them involved. You put all that together. When a guest comes on this program, it represents five to 10 hours. The end. And that's what this stuff, and that's why goal, defining the goal is great. But then it's fine to give your bot that, whatever one you're using, your agent. But you want to build a system that doesn't break and doesn't require a human.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Uh, and the system then ensures it happens. Everybody has to become a systems thinker. What I found is creatives like yourself, Lon, less systems thinking, more systems thinking, less taste. And so now I'm figuring out as a leader, how to get the people with taste to learn systems thinking. And I've got to figure out, I don't have a solution yet. People who have systems to learn taste. And that's going to be the final piece for me is to have that taste algorithm.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  You know, which you and I have by default.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  For many years of experience, yeah.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  At my firm, launch, the pace never slows down. I'm doing my best to just try and keep up. And we've tried all the expected efficiency and productivity tools. And a lot of these apps end up adding friction and they slow you down. There's one tool that I am obsessed with and that every person in my company gets trained on and has to use from day one. It's called Superhuman Go. Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always around when you need it. It's context aware, so it knows what you're working on. And it works inside the apps and tools and websites that we already use. So no matter where we are in Slack or Notion, it's in our workflow. If you're trying to just quickly scan some notes before a big meeting, check your travel dates before you set a meeting, or hey, you

• 10:27Speaker 00

  need to get your grammar correct, or you want to have your emails nice and tight, all of that, Superhuman Go can jump in and help without needing a ton of ketchup or permissions. You know, I was an investor in Superhuman, Raul's company from back in the day, Grammarly, Coda, that's all come together to become Superhuman Go. Find out more, you're going to just go to superhuman.com. I love this product and I've loved it for years.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  I think it's interesting. It's the same kind of conversation we have a lot of the time with AI founders, especially on the This Week in AI show. It's, it's, it's about where does the human belong in the loop? We all get that we need a human in the loop. AI can't do it all by itself yet, maybe one day soon. But it's like, that's the strategy is like, where does the human need to be there? And where can you just kind of sit back and let the bot go? And I think it changes all the time.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  It's RL. It's in the reinforcement learning phase. And so like, I have an SDR bot that looks for who's sponsoring other podcasts, other events in business, in categories. And then it looks at our CRM system. I think we use Pipe Drive right now, although we'll probably move to just writing our own CRM system. Sorry to Pipe Drive, but that's what my team is advising me to do right now. I'm like, okay. So I'm gonna have to have a conversation with Pipe Drive. I don't think we're a major customer for them, but.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Nah, they'll be good. Their Pipe Drive's gonna be just fine. I believe in that.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  No, I want to talk to them about like, hey, is there a way for us to keep using this? You know, and does it have a good enough API and agentic stuff? So putting all that aside, I need to get like the sales team to look at what the agents are doing and give them feedback. And I always get resistance. Why do I have to do this? Is this necessary? I don't like to work this way. I have another modality of work. And I say, guys, let me just stop everybody right now. I have a new idea. This is a new idea, Lon.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Get ready to flip.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  Pretend I'm the founder and CEO of the company. Pretend.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Pretend, yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  And that I get to decide some things. And one of the things in this, you know, what do they call it in the Marvel Universe? Like a different timeline?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  The multiverse.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, like in this version of the multiverse, I actually have authority to make a strategic decision inside of the company I own 100% of.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  We're in Universe 420 or whatever. Yeah.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  In 420, yeah, Wolverine has the yellow costume and I'm the boss and I get to make a decision once in a while. And I'm in charge of my own company. So.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  They're old school. Our sales team, they're old, they're Willy Loman guys. They just want to get out there with the briefcase and the hat, door, door, door.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  They're just, they're literally going to the shoe repair shop.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  And the guy's like, oh, yeah, give me, give me the shoes. I got your other pair here. I put, I put the steel on them. This time they're not going to wear out as much.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're, they're dumping the dirt on the carpet and vacuuming it up.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, putting their foot in.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Might I interest you? All right. We got some news on the docket. There was a Harvey story. And then here we go with the IPOs again. But those are the two I wanted to cover.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  All right. Yeah. Well, let's start with OpenAI. They apparently were now told they're going to be a public company by 2027 or even sooner. In an all hands on Wednesday, CFO Sarah Fryer told staffers the AI lab plans to go public next year, maybe even this year. Here's, I thought her framing was really interesting. She frames it as the IPO, it's not a finish line. It is a milestone. It's another fundraise. She also noticed that the noted that the company has flexibility as they raised 122 billion in cash back in March. Open API, OpenAI confidentially filed their prospectus in June, but they're in a tight race for users and attention with rivals Anthropic. The latest volley, OpenAI

• 14:12Speaker 01

  now pledges not to retain data, Jason, from businesses that are using its models. Here's the quote.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  We've heard very loud and clear from businesses that this is important. They often have their own commitments that they have made to their customers. If you think about somebody who is serving other enterprises who are trusting them with incredibly sensitive data, that's Aliyah Howes, OpenAI's Head of Product Policy.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  We all know they're growing like weeds. What we actually need to know is what their churn is. Who's using it less? Who is hitting the brakes? And then why? And that data is not coming out. And it's not even coming out in the IPO. They're never going to share the churn data. When companies become very robust, they kind of get enough institutional holdings that a company like Netflix or Verizon has to start reporting on churn. I think these guys are going to be able to, Anthropic's of the world's, you know, Grok's of the world,

• 15:11Speaker 00

  OpenAI's, Anthropic's, they're not going to need to give us how many people are unsubscribing or how those trends are going for the major accounts.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  That's where I want to know the truth. The second place I want to know is how much does it cost to serve this stuff up?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, that's.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  You know that funny Italian guy who was on the show with the bad teeth laughing hysterical?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Laughing hysterically. Yeah, the meme. I saw you share this meme. Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  And I share this meme. You can pull it up.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  It's literally the guy doing the bit. And he's laughing about, he's paying, you know, 20 bucks a month or 200, he's paying 200 bucks a month for Anthropic's pro tier, 2,400 a year. And you can just play it in the background here.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm pulling it up right.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  It is, here he is. I run a quote all day, agents, the subagents, the works. Okay. End of the month, I check the meter. I check the meter. He slams a hand on the deck. Eight thousand dollars of compute.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  The audio is he's, he's like, he's almost like expiring from laughing so hard.

• 16:14Speaker 00

  It's so crazy. I'm gonna stop at 800.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  That's how he's screeching.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's like.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Then he goes on and on. I follow the money bottom rung, Anthropic. And then he goes on. I spend 71% cents of compute per dollar, $40 per dollar on me. And then he goes back to like Nvidia.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Microsoft and Nvidia. Yes. All, all the way up the stack, all of them paying one another. Yeah.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  That's when this whole thing is going to have to face the music.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  We're getting close to the face the music moment. I think because they know they have to face the music and explain profitability, they'll have a reasonable story. But there's a gap here between how much, you know, people are using and how much they're spending.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  And then there's some people talking, maxing. But I believe people now are watching the meter. People have started watching the meter. So this is exactly what I saw up close and personal with Uber. In the price wars between Lyft and Uber, and then there were other competitors like Sidecar, and then DoorDash, Grubhub, Postmates. They were, you know, talking about this incredible growth. They were moving to every city. But then we knew internally, hey, across these companies, we're losing $5 a ride.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  And there was two ways to understand this. Like, we're paying drivers a $500 bonus if they hit 100 rides a week. So if they do 100 rides, we'll give them 500 bucks, an extra $5 per ride. But that wasn't in the riding data. It was like a marketing bonus.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  But then Lyft was giving $600. And then the drivers are smart. They're like, oh, you guys are idiots. I'm going to, next week I'm doing Lyft. The week after I'm doing Uber, I hit my incentive. I flip to the next person. Okay, yeah. YOLO, I'll DoorDash.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  If it's possible to figure out a system with these gig apps, people are gonna work the system for sure. And one person figures it out and it's on Reddit and now everybody's working the system. Exactly.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Bingo. So what happens is over time, this is famous Deirdre Bosa moment. And we should play it in a future episode, whoever This Week in Startups archivist is. Where I said to her, Deirdre, you asked me the question, let me answer it. And she's great. And she's now doing her own spinoff and going to be a media entrepreneur. So congratulations to her. She is like, but they're money losing, they're money losing. I said, okay, let's look at the quarter. There was a billion rides. Incredible. They lost 2 billion. That's 1 billion rides divided into 2 billion is $2 per ride. It was like $6 per ride or $7 per ride. Everybody was losing.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  You pay 7 bucks for a ride. That was like, this should be $30 in a cab. Or, you know, $15 in a cab, whatever it was. They were losing that money to kill their competitors, build their base, attract investors, and essentially do marketing. Instead of giving the money to the network TV shows, the concept was, well, why don't we just give the money to the customers in the form of a discount, have them become addicted to this?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  And then we can slowly raise the price up to what it actually needs to be. We'll lose 20% of the people who will only use this service because of the discount. We'll keep the other 80%. Game over, right? So venture capital funded it. And instead of giving it to radio, TV, cable, magazines, newspaper ads, the internal discussion was, yeah, just pass this, just give it directly to the customer. That's what's happening right now with these enterprise products. That's going to unwind.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean,

• 19:44Speaker 00

  And when it does.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  With Uber, that makes a lot of sense. Like, we all did get addicted and got used to, like, if you go out night out, you don't want to drive drunk home. Just use Uber. We all, it got drilled into everybody's brains and now it's there permanently. With AI compute, though, there are these alternatives, models, there are other things you can do.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Highly competitive.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  So it doesn't feel exactly the same. Like, they're not, Anthropic's not killing all of its competitors and embedding in, like, you got to use Claude. Like, I'm perfectly happy with Grok Bot if it works better. You know, like, I don't think that's-

• 20:16Speaker 00

  And you will be perfectly hot, perfectly okay, in all likelihood, when Zuck comes out with something similar to Grok Bot, the easy to use assistant-

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  That just abstracts everything, let alone when new competitors come out and you can go on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and they will provision a bot and a harness. And there'll be an open source harness, like WordPress. It's just going to all come apart.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  And it's going to drive the, the margin out of this. Logs are an essential part of just about any tech startup. You need to keep your eyes on how your product is being used, and you definitely need to understand what happened when things go wrong. But logs are notoriously messy. It's especially hard to gather the insights you need when your logs, errors, and performance data all live in different tools. But now there's a solution, Sentry. Sentry's logs are trace connected and structured, allowing you to follow everything clearly and understand the context, even if you're a non-technical founder. Whether you're debugging your front end, back end, your mobile app, whatever it is, Sentry will give you the context you and your team need to get the problem fixed and to get on with your day. You've

• 21:24Speaker 00

  got other things you've got to focus on. That's why more than 4.5 million developers are already using Sentry, including amazing high-profile teams like Disney Plus and Anthropic. Learn more by going to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST to get $240 in Sentry credits. That's S-E-N-T-R-Y.io/twist. That's what I'm looking for. There was a moment in this story where you were talking about, give me the quote one more time, about, we hear loud and clear-

• 21:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  That people are, and then segue into the Harvey story with that.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yes. Here's, it's from Aaliyah Howes. She's OpenAI's Head of Product Policy. We've heard very loud and clear from businesses that this is important. They often have their own commitments that they have to make, that they have made to their customers. If you think about somebody who was serving other enterprises or trusting them with incredibly sensitive data. And so, that does segue very neatly into our other big story today, which is Harvey, the legal AI company, released their very first in-house proprietary model. It helps Harvey Software take on more tasks that were typically performed by lawyers. It is, Jason, a post-trained, open weight model built on top of Kimi K3. So, we did, we did, as you, as you requested, we did pull some clips. This is sort

• 22:40Speaker 01

  of what you've been predicting all along, which is application layer companies, companies that have this incredibly valuable expert data. They don't want to turn that over to the Anthropics and OpenAIs of the world. They're going to use it themselves to build their own models.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  Yes. And, did you say you have a clip?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I, we have two. You pick your pick. We have a twist clip on this, and we have an all-in clip on this. Dealer's choice.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  All right, I'll take a victory fat, but let's get it short here. Play it at like 1.5 speed.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  All right, Jake.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Let's get moving through this.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Let's take a look. Oh, well, yeah, here, we'll pull up the, the, the twist clip here, I believe, first.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Thank you for putting it on 1.5. Need a little bit of a haircut there? You need to start working on frontier model, you need to get off the frontier models and use open source ones and own your content and not educate them to the extent you can. And I believe that'll be the trend of 2027, is startups are already doing it. But if you give Sam Altman, who is a, you know, sharp-elfed guy, and he's got to figure out how to fill in a $1 trillion market cap, he's going to do exactly what Anthropic did, or Microsoft, or Facebook, which is, he's going to look at the applications coming in. All of those Y Combinator companies who give, who take that deal, they're studying every one of their token usage. They're studying what they're doing. And then they will pick the top five in terms of success and incorporate it as free product into their platform. This is your final warning. Don't trust the platforms. When somebody comes to you with free tokens, you know, free anything, there's no free in life. There's no free beer, there's no free pizza. There's always a price.

• 24:00Speaker 00

  And then the second one's from all in. Let me do a victory fat there.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. This one was right before July 4th, actually. This was the July 4th all-in. As you could tell from your casual, laid-back Honolulu vibes in the clip here.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. That's when I had my beard and everybody loved this when I was in Hawaii.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I gotta say, I think this is a good look. I'm not just trying to butter you. I think this is, I like this, this is a good J Cal. I think you should go with this one for a while.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  What do I, like a Tom Selleck-type situation in Hawaii?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  It's a little bit, it's a little Magnum P I, yeah.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  Okay, Magnum P I. To the platform. There is no free pizza. There's no free beer. When somebody like Sam Altman comes to you and says, here's some free tokens, your alarm should go up. Zuckerberg did the same thing. He said, hey, I'm going to give people a bunch of access, going to give them money, come to the Facebook platform. Nobody who went to bed with Microsoft in the 80s, Facebook in the 2000s, or Sam Altman now in, in the 2020s, did not wake up with their throat slit. This is a message to founders. If you partner with any of these people, they will slit your throat and take your business wholesale. There is nothing to discuss here. Don't trust them. Use your own models. Yeah, we'll link to it. You guys can go check it out.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  There's lots more. These are just the two that we could dig up 10 minutes before the show.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  This is, this is the system I want to build next, is like, I need to have an archive of Twist and an archive of All In with all of my opinions. And then I want our agent to look at how right or wrong I was and give me two lists. Here's, here's where you blew it. Here's your Professor Galloway moments. This is your Professor Galloway.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Your Mad Money Jim Cramer moments, yeah.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  This is my cra, yeah, my reverse Kramer, my Professor Cole takes. You totally blew it. And then here's your best J Cal.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Like the on fire.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  Nostrakonis. A Nostrakonis index?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  And a, and a Professor Galloway index. Give me those two.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  I do, for this week in AI, I do have a full, like, a Claude skill that we've trained on every episode, and I can just go in and ask it anything, and it's brilliant. It is a little time-consuming.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  But I want the bot to go through and say, give, make a summary of Jason's opinions, his hot takes from each episode, and then have an index just of the takes, not the full transcript.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:59Speaker 00

  So then, once you have the takes, then take the takes. How many times he said it? How did his take change over time?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Rate the takes. It's a take raider.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Rate the take. Then I want you to build, how did it change over time? So did my opinion on Apple, Facebook, whatever, change over time? What were the key moments? You know, was I hypocritical, you know, etc.? Then,

• 26:24Speaker 00

  based on the last six months of news, or three months of news, of what actually happened with Apple's product, did they ever launch a new iPhone? Remember, I was very critical of Tim Cook for a long period of time. Stock went up. He bought back all the stock, bought back half the equity in the company, I understand, like $100 billion, $200 billion in buyback. They never really came out with a killer product post the Steve Jobs roadmap. So, you know, right about that, no product ever emerged. Wrong about the stock price because it went. So I need that. So for my team, if you can do that, that would be amazing. And we're, we're working on this kind of stuff. So anyway,

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  What, what you're seeing with the Harvey thing, I said this two years ago. If you can find the two-year clip where I said, when I was in Tahoe skiing, and I think you pulled it for a previous all-in, and I said two years ago, there's a chance that, that open source is going to win the AI race. I said it two effing years ago. I think what we learned in 2023 was that the language models are starting to hit parity very quickly, and that the real value is going to be in, and it may even become commodities, and open source may win the day. So then, I think the winner is folks who have the training data. Give myself a pat on the back that you heard it live. That clip was like, I was shocked by

• 27:42Speaker 00

  that. I was like, really? Like, in the age of ChatGPT 3.5, 2.5? I said, on the pod-

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Filibus were here, but I said on the pod, open source is going to win the day. And we, I think we talked about that four weeks ago on All In or five weeks ago. That was like a very interesting moment because that's what's happened now. The, the evidence, so back to my like Jason's takes and just holding me accountable to my takes. And my professor ice cold takes Prof G and Macy's is going to beat Amazon and Uber and Tesla. And Robinhood are going to zero and buy foreign stocks, not US stocks, like all those terrible takes. I need to know when I had a bad take and when I had a great take, like a Nostrakonist level take. That was a Nostrakonist moment for me. Um, and anyway, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll play them.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  We'll find it for the VOD folks. I don't know if I can pull it up here live.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  So I had mentioned when I talked to lovable and 11 labs, they're huge, huge customers of the frontier labs. Frontier labs can get competitive with them, just like Figma and design cursor and Claude code. Figma and Claude design. They are, I, I kind of asked them on those interviews when I was in Paris in July. Hey, are you making your own models? Are you doing that kind of stuff? And they're like, yeah, you know, we're looking at that. Here it is, Harvey, pull up the story. Harvey is making their own model. They forked an open source model. They're doing their own training and they are working on behalf of their clients. This is the story.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Over the past six months, Harvey's research agenda has focused on two goals. One, building frontier legal intelligence using open weight models. And two, creating systems to allow law firms to build their own specialized models and their own intelligence. Today, we're sharing an update on that research effort, including initial results from our first post train model, which we're calling Harvey tenant. Harvey tenant is a Kimi K three base that we post train together with fireworks research for long horizon legal work. In addition, it incorporates harness improvements to make training and test execution more effective. Our initial work shows promising results for both performance and cost efficiency.

• 29:55Speaker 00

  I'm here with Keith Piris, the founder of Lightfield. They are an AI native CRM that builds and updates itself in real time from your email, your calendar, your Slack, your meeting notes, all those things that you keep misplacing. Welcome to the program, Keith.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Great to be here.

• 30:09Speaker 00

  Let's talk about Lightfield, your CRM that is AI first. What can I do with it now that I've got it installed? Now that it's pulled in all my data, what is it going to do for me? Because no CRM system ever had AI built in it.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  It's true. So the first thing we'll do is handle all of your busy work. You know, all of the, the, the emails you promised customers, all of the things that you were supposed to get to. It'll draft all of your follow up, send them on your behalf. Second, it's going to go and look at your happiest companies, your happiest customers, learn from your happiest customers through product usage, feedback sentiment, and generate you lists of new customers. It'll find contacts for you too. And then third, it'll draft communication for you to send to those folks over email, LinkedIn, uh, phone, whatever it is. So it'll sort of keep proactively building out your pipeline. And then last I would say, uh, this is maybe the most non CRM thing.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  It'll keep your entire company informed and what your customers want, need and are, are willing to buy. So you'll have tighter alignment across product and engineering.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  So lightfield.app is going to tell me what I'm doing right. It's going to tell me which customers I've forgotten about. And then everybody on the team doesn't have to be a slave to the CRM filling in all these fields. Go ahead and check out lightfield.app. Okay. So now you have to ask yourself, um, who were the original backers? Who?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I've looked this up.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  The original backers.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  I've, I've looked this up.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Of Harvey and who were their original, uh, frontier model providers? Who were, who were Harvey's original backers?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Um, I'm looking at this on harmonic.ai. Thanks to our friends at harmonic.ai for allowing me to so quickly pull that up. Uh, a $200 million investment. Oh, that's, that's, that's March. Yeah, March 25th, 2026, 200 million at 11 billion valuation co-led by GIC and Sequoia Capital with A16Z, Co2, Conviction.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  Go backwards.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  Elon Gill.

• 32:11Speaker 00

  Going back to the early rounds.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Who were, who were their? Early rounds is where we want to go to. That, see, this is what Harmonic is going to help us with.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  If you start getting early.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Earliest backers.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Original capital and original models both ran through this company.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  OpenAI was the day one believer. They led the $5 million seed round and also gave the founders early access to GPT-4, which was a massive head start in building legal specific fine tuning before anyone else had the model. There you go, Jason. Thanks to Harmonic AI.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Thank you, Harmonic. Yes. Thank you, Harmonic AI.

• 32:48Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  $5 million first investment.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  One of the OpenAI startup funds first for investments.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, they led the seed round.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  They led the seed round. Now here we are.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  It was the OpenAI startup fund. Uh, other early backers included Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, by the way.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Okay. Now let's just pause here, put the two stories together. Sarah Fryer, CFO of OpenAI says, hey, we hear you loud and clear.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Harvey's saying, hey, by the way, um, just want to let everybody know, six months ago, we started using these open source models. We started building our own and we're building our own for our clients so that our clients don't share the intelligence. So if you're a litigation firm A and your top competitor litigation firm B, so Acme litigators and Delta litigators are both using Harvey, let's say. Harvey now is like, not only do we not trust OpenAI with this, we need to have our own model. We need to build a fortress. We're going to, and we'll have our castle, it's going to have a big wall run. We're going to build two keeps. One keep for Acme litigators, one keep for Delta litigators.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  So y'all are going to get your own litigation data, all your internal memos, all your emails, all of your Zoom calls about this. We'll feed your local model for you, but it's not going to make it to our castle. You're in your own keep, defend your keep, and the two keeps will not share data.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  This is what's going to happen to the frontier models. When they go public, you're going to have this headwind of which of these customers Harvey was probably spending? If I had to guess, I'm going to say 10 million a month with OpenAI.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  I would say lovable or 11 labs or, you know, cursor, those level of companies also probably were spending 10 or 20 or 30 million dollars a month with the OpenAI's and anthropics of the world. Those customers, let me be clear, are going to move their spend. 99% of their spend is coming off the frontier models. And any spend they do have with the frontier models is likely, even if it's like 5% of the spend, to be them doing distillation. It's going to be them doing distillation. In other words, they're going to be spending $5 million a year or $1 million a month in order to pull information out of the frontier of models. Open source is going to win it all.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Open source is going to win it all.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  I'm saying it now definitively. Two and a half years ago, three years ago, I said, you know, open source could win it. Now I'm telling you, open source is going to win it all. What do I mean by win it all? The majority of tokens, the overwhelming majority of tokens in corporate America will not be on the frontier models. It will be inside those enterprises. Why? They don't want to give their intelligence to somebody who wants to build the final company. As Gavin Baker discussed two weeks ago on All In.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  If, if Anthropic is going to pop off at cocktail parties or internally telling people, and I believe it's true. They say it's not true. I believe Gavin.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  It sounds like something, it sounds like something they would say. It would, to me, it sounds like something I can imagine them saying is like, well, if we're being honest, there's a good chance we're going to be the last private company on earth. Like, I believe it. I believe it.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  Sure. Why, why, why wouldn't there be, I mean, there, there was a final company in Wally. It's a great science fiction premise that one company.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, buy and grow. I don't remember what it's called.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, buy and grow, whatever. It's like the, the Walmartification of everything.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Thank you to Jacob for that. We got a guest. I want to bring up our, our first guest. Uh, he's, he is the co-founder and CEO of the AI powered free. Uh, speaking of free, things that are free, the free AI powered voice dictation app Willow. Uh, please welcome Alan Guo. Thanks for joining us, Alan.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  We, we made, we made Alan wait, but Alan is here now.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  Uh, welcome to the program, Alan. This is a whisper competitor, free is the model. It's free to use. Well, then how do you make money?

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Hmm. Yeah, I'm happy to tell you more, Jason. First of all, I'm excited to be on this podcast because I heard that you're a big voice user. And I heard that you have a pedal.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  I have a pedal. I'm addicted to, uh, Whisperflow. I use Whisperflow constantly. So that's your competitor. That's who you got to displace now. Let's see what you can do here, Alan.

• 37:18Speaker 04

  So in this period of time, I'm going to have to convince you to use Willow.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, the other thing that I will say, Lon, I don't know if you noticed this, my Grammarly and my Notion are all trying to get in on the dictation game. So they also have dictation offerings and they're continuing to try to intercept this very important function. So Alan, are you going to demo the product here for us and tell us, you know, your innovation?

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  All right, demo or die. Here we go.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  So as a quick intro on what Willow is, we're a voice dictation product. We're a voice first interface for modern work. Similar to Whisper, we have a dictation product. You can speak, you can press a hotkey, it works, you can type anywhere.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  It's really, really magical. That's been really catching people's eyes, especially highly communication teams. There's a product called Scribe and Scribe is a step above dictation. You can think of it like a writing assistant. You tell it what you want to say, and then Willow writes it for you using her strong context. So I'm going to share my screen here.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Here's a demo. Someone said, you know, my dictation quality has gone down this week for some reason. Any idea what's happening with Willow?

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Okay, and this is a Gmail and you're responding.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  This could be like, um, you know, a customer support request.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  With dictation, as you know, you can press a hotkey and you can say, hey, Sarah, this is a test best Alan. And you can see you kind of dictate that.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  There it is. Very snappy.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  You know, less than 250 milliseconds, the most accurate dictation tool. With Scribe is which was, which is what I really want to show you. I don't even have to word for word dictate. I can just say, respond to her with our common troubleshooting tips.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  So this is like a snippet.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Look at that.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Coming from the corporate side of the snippet collection. Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Yes, and I press enter and it magically appears. And what I can also do is, you know, let's say that didn't solve her problem. I could just highlight that again and say, can you also add my calendar link? Just in case those following tips didn't work for her, so we can talk about it live. And there you go, and press enter there, and it even knows my calendar link.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  Very nice. Very nice. Well done.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Scribe here is that it has context, personalization, understanding. And this is something we've deployed across enterprises, airlines, customer support teams, sales teams. Where Scribe is an understanding of your knowledge base, of your context. And so teams right now are no longer even typing, they're not even dictating. And they're just saying, respond to this, respond to that, um, tell him X, Y, Z, and it's boom, it's there for you.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Who manages the canonical level of truth? Because I have been having this problem for a long time. I used to use like a text expander, like open source tool. It was like shareware and then I put it on group. It was remember when I had this lawn, it was like $10 a person in the company.

• 40:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yes.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  So I spent a hundred twenty bucks and I would like, I would write, hey, founders, thank you for applying to the launch accelerator. You didn't make the cut, but I want to make sure you understand you can send us your updates to [email protected]. We want to encourage you to do this. You can watch this week in startups, here's some codes for free credits from some of our partners. You had a whole thing, but I wanted consistency. Then I told Raul, a superhuman, please build snippets into the product. He eventually did, and then I said, I need it to be team player because I don't want mixed messages. So the, the challenge with what you're doing, I think, is if you have 10 people working in sales, and there you want them all giving people the same, you know, uh, language here, right?

• 40:59Speaker 00

  So how do you manage which one is the canonical, perfect version?

• 41:05Speaker 04

  Yes. So with customer support teams, they commonly have a number of documents that are sorts of truth that we will understand for them. And then we also have another aspect of this, which is auto learning. Over time, Willow picks up facts about yourself that you can write and then it learns in so it can rewrite. I also have a perfect example for you, Jason.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Perfectly meshed with what you just said, that you have to use a snippet for responding with who you are. This person just happened to say, uh, or you might be joining this week in startups. Can you tell me a little bit more about this guy called Jason?

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Oh, boy.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  What I'm going to do here is I'm going to say, yeah, um, that's great. You heard that. Can you, can you tell John more about who Jason is?

• 41:47Speaker 00

  Here we go. Yep. Here we go. Wikipedia page written by all my haters and jaders.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Maybe it's just Wikipedia. You don't know.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  Is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, angel investor, podcaster, best known as a third investor in Uber.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, third or fourth.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Perfect.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, previously worked at Weblog, sold it for 25 to 30 million. It's actually a true, that's a true number. Later back, Robin Khamdoum, Tack and Trello, true numbers today. He runs Launch, who's this week in startup costs. Okay. Yeah. Perfect. So yeah, this is great. Good job. So you, you put a, um, uh, level of interpretation and you still have to hit the send button. Great job. Great product. And so free to use, but then if you want to do multiplayer mode, that's when you turn on pricing, I guess?

• 42:28Speaker 04

  Yes. So what we've realized is that dictation is a commoditizing market.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  There's always difficult place to be as a founder.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  There's no doubt in my mind that within two, three years, Apple's going to get 70, 80% as good as dictation tools like Willow voice and other ones, AI dictation tools. And the reason is because, um, it's, it's, it's, it's going to be better built into your device, but it's only going to be 70, 80% as good because there's a level that we do that's more pro. Like we have auto learning, we have fine tune models that are smarter, that do correction, that do personalization. So it's always going to be a bit better, but when it's 70, 80% as good, a lot of people might not pay for this. And so rather than, um, getting eaten by this commoditization, we want to commoditize it first.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  We made speech to text that's faster than Wispr Flow, more accurate than Wispr Flow and other dictation tools.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Completely great. And we actually launched a comparison video, one showing Willow, our free version, and one showing other dictation products. And Whisper was better at formatting, better at correction, faster, more accurate than all those other ones. And our paid product is Scribe. So Scribe again is like a writing assistant writes for you as well as, you know, team plans, enterprise plans that they're saying.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Well, this is the playbook, Alan. Uh, is this your first startup?

• 43:50Speaker 04

  It is.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you learned one of the most important lessons. Number one, fight up. You want to fight with a competitor who's bigger and established. And two, your margin is my opportunity. So, you know, Whisper's charging for this, we'll make it free and we'll charge for something else, et cetera, et cetera. Great job. Good luck with it. Uh, and I will give it a try. And I will find out with my pedal if you are better than Whisper. And I'll let you know, if you can displace Whisper, that's going to be hard and I'm kind of addicted.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  You're a big Whisper user, heavy Whisper user.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Heavy Whisper. All right. Thanks, Alan. Where can people find out more? It's Willowvoice.com. Am I correct?

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Yes, Willowvoice.com is where they can try it out for free.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  All right. Well done, Alan. Congratulations on your success here. Again, this is the best thing possible for the ecosystem lawn and for entrepreneurs. This is, there's two tactical, practical things I'm going to tell you right now. Number one, you fight up. So if you're, um, Apple, you're not talking about Wispr Flow. If you're Wispr Flow, you're not talking about Willow Voice, but you can fight up, right? You can fight up. So if you're Willow, you want to fight with Whisper. If you're Whisper, you want to fight with Apple, right?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Fight up. And then if you're the bigger fish, never engage going down.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  Because you're taking the bait, you're taking the bait, you're feeding it to it.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  Same rule in comedy. Don't punch down, you punch up. You go for, you go for targets that are, that are a higher and better established than you. You don't make fun of people who are already lower status.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Yes, a very simple concept here. Um, and then second, your margin, my opportunity. So you just look at the roadmap. It's very simple to do. If the roadmap for dictation starts with crisp dictation, then it goes to interpretation, which is kind of what he's doing here, and you have this killer feature known as snippets. What should you do? And then you have team player mode, just make everything free. So if Whisper's watching this, they should just say, oh yeah, by the way, we added to our free version, whatever, you know, snippets and text expander tools. And here's like our robust one. What's really interesting to me is when these are all going to be done locally and built in with like very crisp local models. Right now they still go to the cloud. So when I use Whisper, man, it is flawless.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  It is tremendous when I'm at home. When I'm driving in the back country and hill country in Texas, the great state of Texas.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  The great state.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  And I'm going to the, watch the Knicks beat the Spurs in their own arena, win the NBA championship. And I started using Whisper and I had no connectivity. You know, it's like, oh, sending it to the cloud, coming back.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it's hill country. There's a lot, your, your connection isn't always perfect out there. It's not always perfect in ransom.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  Well, you know what I'm going to do now is, um, when I finally find my roadie, I'm getting a roadie to go with me on the road because I have so many road things that I do.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  I get my heavy things. I'm on a lot of the trips, but I'm not good with the heavy stuff.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, yeah, given where you're at with road.co slash twist.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Maybe, maybe with the GLP once, sometimes.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  What I would like to do is I'm going to get the Starlink Mini, like on the road one. And I'm going to, I want to get this executive van. I love the Alfred, uh, which I think I drove with you when we were in Japan.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  The Alfred, it's, yeah, when you take it, you take an Uber in Japan, they have these little commuter vans that they pick. Yeah, Jacob, find it.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Put it up, Jacob.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'll, I'll find one. They're, they're so neat. Like I feel like I would actually like drive one of these if you could be at the Toyota Alfred.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  I mean, it is the, the Toyota Alfred in the executive mode is like a minivan. There's lawn on his iPad Pro.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  In his suit, looking good. Look at how big these seats are. Unbelievable.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  It's very comfortable. You feel like you're, you've got a nice sort of distance from the drive. They're in their world, doing their thing, you're in the back doing your thing. It's very comfortable. I felt right at home in the Toyota Alfred. Why don't they have these in America?

• 47:40Speaker 00

  I literally tried to import one. You can't import them. I think they're getting there. Uh, Genesis, uh, 90 EV.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Just dropped. Literally, this just dropped and people are losing their mind over it. Let me show you this. So I have, I was literally going to import one of these and pay like a 50% import tax. You're not allowed to. But this is the Genesis GV90 that's coming out. So what this thing is going to do, it's an EV, goes 300 miles, whatever. You see, the doors look interesting, right?

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Boom. You open the doors, you can have the, you can have the captain's chairs face each other. See that?

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  Uh, they spin around. This is like the old G90, but this one is something slightly different. GV90, Genesis GV90 is what you're looking for. People are losing their minds over it. So that's what I want to get is one of these bad boys.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  Uh, and then put a Starlink on it and then I could just recapture, you know, whatever, an hour a day. But look at that. Oh.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Wow, that's nice.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Look at that. By the way, this, if you were to build a, like a Becker or something, automotive builds these for $400,000, literally four or 500,000, this is going to be like 100, 150, you know, to go crazy.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  It was like 150K was the, on the, on the page you were looking.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  Now, this is deceiving. You, you have like the chairs facing each other. Those two chairs are the captain's chairs for the driver and the copilot. And this is a parked car on the beach. What I want is an extended version of these with the four chairs.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 00

  Um, so then you could have six seater. Um, see, there's the steering wheel back here.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Anyway, if you're parked and you want to have a conversation, I don't know who's hanging out in their car.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  If you're living in your van, that's perfect.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  See, they just, they got it wrong. Um, in terms of like what actually is going to happen, but uh, it's gonna, it's coming next year. So there's your off duty from J Cal. Let's do our final guest and I gotta get the heck out of here.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we got one more guest. I will, I will pull them up now. Here we go. Uh, we actually, we discussed our next guest, uh, when their video went viral and we, you, you wanted to book them. So here they are. He's a Stanford computer science student and the designer of the self-driving robot taxi golf cart.

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  That you'll recall that all the, uh, all the high priests of AI and tech were riding around because they all hang out on the Stanford campus. Ethan Goodhart, thanks for being here, Ethan.

• 50:07Speaker 00

  All right, Ethan, what's going on? You're, uh, you're an undergrad, you're grad? What are you doing over there in Stanford?

• 50:11Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, technically undergrad. So I'll be a junior next year.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  All right. Incredibly hard to get in.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  He's a sophomore.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Incredibly hard to get into Stanford. So you're either brilliant or your parents built a building or you photoshopped yourself playing, uh, lacrosse. Uh, which, which one of those three? You're just a brilliant kid? Where are you from?

• 50:30Speaker 05

  I can definitely confirm that it's one of those three. Um, no building, unfortunately.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  No building. Okay. Narrowes it down. So did your parents Photoshop and, yeah, your generative AI to put you in a lacrosse video?

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Uh, I think the models were not, not.

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Not there yet. Okay. So you earned your way in. Where are you from originally?

• 50:46Speaker 05

  I'm from Atlanta originally.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Oh, all right. Well, that's good. See, I actually know people who are moving to smaller states. You want to know how crazy these parents are? And Ethan's nodding. Uh, maybe his parents left Manhattan for Atlanta to get him into Stanford. Some of these lunatic parents, look at the tables, Lon, of which states, because they want to have representation from every state, which state has the least number of, and they'll literally move to Nebraska, ruin their life, ruin their lives for two years, three years.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  George has got to be doing pretty good. I feel like George is competitive. Like West Virginia, that's where you'd go. Idaho, those are your.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  Ethan, it's true though, right?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Those are Stanford states.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  I've, yeah, I mean, that's not the reason I were in Atlanta.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  No.

• 51:29Speaker 05

  But, uh.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  But you have heard this.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, I have.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. This, this is the lunacy. Okay. So, uh, what are you, computer science, electro engineering, double? What are you doing?

• 51:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, pure computer science. Uh, this is my first like real hardware project.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Got it. So, uh, self-driving, uh, you know, Lon, my position has been 20 different companies of note are going to get there in the same 24-month period. Putting Waymo out of it, just starting this year and next year into 2028. My belief, Ethan, was 20 people figure it out. I think I'm good, like in the same 24-month period, we'll see 20 people figure it out. And when I saw Ethan's project, it said to me, I might have underestimated it by a magnitude. It might be 2,000 people figure it out in the same 36 months, just to extrapolate a little bit. Tell us what you built, Ethan, how long it took to build and just the fidelity of it versus the brittleness of it.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. I, probably the best project I've ever worked on in my life. Uh, first hardware project. We got the first prototype up in like two, three weeks. So we had a golf cart that could drive with some like very simple models. Um, obviously not as advanced as a, a Waymo or a Tesla. But, uh, yeah, we've kind of been working on it for a couple of months after that. And then.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  This is a standard golf cart and you built some kind of rig to go on or a harness, but not a.

• 52:58Speaker 05

  Harness, yeah.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  It's a physical harness that's going over the steering column. Yeah?

• 53:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. It's, it's, so it's retrofit. Um, we didn't modify any of the like internal electronics. This is all just placed on top of the golf cart.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:13Speaker 05

  Um, so it's like three front cameras, three back cameras, and then.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  No lidar, all cameras like Elon.

• 53:19Speaker 05

  No lidar.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 53:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Um, and so you take a stock one, you put cameras on it. What is the hardware stack? Because, you know, Elon's been working on this for a long time, uh, and building essentially the compute locally on the car to do exactly what you're doing here. So.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  I, I see there's kind of a box on the floorboard. So I'm assuming you have an Nvidia Spark or something down there doing this.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, we, we have a Nvidia Jetson Thor. That's wired directly to the battery of the golf cart.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Got it. Um, so that uses a decent amount of power. Um, and the golf carts are notorious for going, what, 50 miles in a day, 30 miles before charge? So how do you deal with that? Do you buy a bunch of anger batteries and just bolt them in?

• 54:06Speaker 05

  So right now, the, the range is a little bit limited. So and stuff is something we have to figure out, uh, in the future. But it, it's still very much in like testing phases.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  On the top, you got a Starlink, I see.

• 54:19Speaker 05

  Um, Starlink Mini, that's right.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Uh, what is that doing?

• 54:24Speaker 05

  Uh, so that allows us to do two things. Uh, it allows us to test out out inference. So we were exploring running some DLA's and more models in the cloud. And then it also allows us to have good connectivity to write code and ship code live to the golf cart while we're driving around campus.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  Um, so like I often work on it outside of my dorm and a lot of all-nighters in spring quarter, working on this. And I can like ship code live while I'm on the golf cart instead of having to like go back into a dorm room or classroom somewhere.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Okay. Aut, I mean, listen, it is, autonomous is on golf courses. Uh, people don't know this, but a lot of the, uh, grass being cut right now, Lon, and even in, uh, snow country, a lot of the snow being moved is being done by autonomous robots. The team will go, um, find a video or two about this. But even here in the great state of Texas, Ethan and I drive around and I see in the planned communities, robots cutting grass. Um, and that's in like hill country. That's here today. They're doing a lot of this, uh, golf courses. Uh, you made this as a proof of concept, but you know, you're, you're right next to Santill Road. There's so much money sloshing around. Is the idea to like go to golf courses

• 55:37Speaker 00

  and say, hey, we literally can help you bring the golf courses back. So here's the snow one. Check this out, Ethan. This thing's incredible.

• 55:45Speaker 05

  That's awesome.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Um, and so, you know, snow blowing is one year when we had a lot of storms up in, uh, Tahoe at my ski house, I got an incremental $12,000 bill because they're paying the people who shovel snow $70 an hour. They were literally getting paid $150,000 a year, Lon. And we had so much snow that it was going to collapse the houses. Therefore, there was no choice but to outbid everybody to save our houses. Anyway, these things are becoming, uh, standard operating procedure. Here's one on a golf course, um, using Toro, Toth Pro, Anonymous. And these things are really easy to set up. People love them. What's your plan? I mean,

• 56:31Speaker 00

  people asking you to build this for golf courses because you might have a situation where somebody stops and leaves their golf cart around, or they finish, you want to drive it back to get charged, whatever it is. Do you see this as a business?

• 56:44Speaker 05

  I think it's uncertain what the future of, of this was. This was a to point side project, which I think it's absolutely incredible that something with the scope now can just kind of be a side project. Uh, the future's uncertain, but there's definitely been a lot of interest from people in the golf world, also people just in the transportation world. So like people like Disney and other companies that have a lot of golf carts for transportation. Um, I think there's a lot of use cases for golf cars and.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  What can you, uh, if you were to iterate on this twice, get, you know, obviously this is like a custom sensor pack, but let's say you had 10 million in funding, you do, you get to, you know.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Number 500. What do you think it would cost to retrofit these? These golf carts cost 10 to 20K, depending on how fancy dancy they are. What, what do you think you can get the retrofit to, to have autonomous golf carts in the real world?

• 57:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, even the current version is quite cheap. So I won't say the exact number, but.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  Give us a ballpark.

• 57:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, where you could see a retrofit version of a kit like this, where you could sell for under a couple thousand dollars.

• 57:50Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 57:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  What software did you use? There's been a lot of talk about Nvidia and Uber and, um, this open source stack that they're providing because they want a, Uber obviously strategically wants open source driving. They want a fragmented market. They want every single car to have it so that Waymo or Uber or.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  You know, pick your company, Neuro, Pony AI, Wave, AV, Zoox, don't run away with it. They want it to be fragmented. And Nvidia wants to sell compute hardware. So it's good for them if the software is abstracted. Are you using their stack for software? Or did you write your own? Or are there other open source ones? Tell us about the self-driving software, the brains.

• 58:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, the software is by far the hardest part so far. We've ended up using our own software. And so we found that a lot of the open source models, surprisingly, were either way too large or didn't generalize well to the environment that we're driving on. Because it's a little bit different than the environment that most cars are driving on, given like the pedestrian density and tempers is very different.

• 58:58Speaker 05

  So there's also, there's also the question of the models being too big. So most of the models that have been much fine videos so far are actually like quite large and hard to run on even the like $4,000 GPU. And so we ended up using our own sort of approach and like custom CD approach.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  Love it. Listen, continued success. If you make it into a company, just save, uh, save a slice for your unc Jake out. You know, I'm, I'm good for like, you know, if, if I get on the cap table, I'm always good for like a ticket to, I don't know, an all in summit or something. I mean, it might be good for a retweet. This is what I gotta do, Lon. I gotta set, I'm like, I'm like 55 year old man, unc, talking with 20 year olds now, trying to get a slice on the cap table. What point is that desperate? Is it 65?

• 59:49Speaker 01

  No.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  Where it feels desperate or?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  You just graduate to becoming more and more senior, you know, like where you're

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Okay, like Vinod.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  People want you on the cap table even more because of your incredible reputation.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. So I get to, I'm in my Obi-Wan era right now, Ethan. That's a Star Wars reference. And then I guess Vinod is in the Yoda kind of timeframe on the timeline. Ethan, is there a place people can find out more? Is there a name to this company or a website or an open source project?

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's, the project name right now is Wind. So kind of like the wind that you feel blowing on your face.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  Okay. I love, great. You understand branding. Wind, self-driving golf cart. I'm going to try to find your domain. Do you have a domain?

• 1:00:32Speaker 05

  There's no domain, but if you go to my Twitter, there should be a link to. And then if you're in the Stanford area, you can come check it out.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  How'd you, uh, how did you get Jensen to take a ride? How did you finagle that? You had one of your props or your harangue?

• 1:00:45Speaker 05

  Well, he kind of, he was speaking on campus. And so we basically waited outside the lecture and said, hey, we built this self-driving golf cart.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  That's my guy. That's my guy. Ethan is learning the startup lessons.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  All these guys like punk rock.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  Ethan, punk rock was a style of music in the seventies. And what punk rock people did is they didn't give an F and they would just go do stuff. The Clash, have you heard of this band, The Clash? Be honest, Ethan.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  I haven't, no.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  It's killing me.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  I'm going to blow your mind, Ethan, right now.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  You've probably heard London Calling and just doesn't know that's the class.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  You and, this is going to score you a lot of points when you throw a party and you meet girls. At some point, this is going to happen for you at Stanford. You're going to throw a party, meet some girls or guys, whatever you into, they, them, no judgments. I know it's a whole thing.

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  But you're going to get an album and vinyl and you're going to get The Clash, London Calling. And just, you just do a Google search or you do your LLM search, go down the rabbit hole.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  The kids, they want Pink Pantheress or something, Jason.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  Then I want you to DJ and I want you to just play Rock the Casbar, London Calling. And then when you meet a chick or a guy, whatever you're into, again, no judgments here, I know it's like 2026, whatever you're into.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  I want you to just say like, yeah, just, I'm in kind of my Clash era, I'm reading it. Then I want you to get the London Call, put up London Calling. And I want you to get the original vinyl, spend like 30 bucks on it. I want you to get a T-shirt. Don't play it. I wanted you to give me the cover of London Calling.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  We're not, we're not allowed, we're going to get.

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  But we can show a little bit, but anyway.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  It's going to get us in trouble.

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  And I'm telling you, Ethan, you're going to listen to this while you're coding. It's going to break your brain and you're going to be able to code 40% better, listening to The Clash. Show the album cover, London Calling.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Does Jacob not know, Jacob might not know what you're talking about either.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  Jacob's like timing the.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  I might, I might have, there it is. There's the classic.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  You see this, Ethan? We see, you see this smashing? Yes. You see the, you see the art direction of this and he's smashing it? That's you in your startup. That's you intercepting Jensen, your punk rock. Okay. You're willing to break the rules. You don't give an F. You're willing to smash your guitar on stage and just let out all your emotions. The Clash, London Calling, come in at you on a two for Tuesday. All right, Ethan, get back to work and yeah. Is everybody cheating on there with AI? Tell me about the cheating, not you, but other people.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  I think there needs to be a real working of the educational system. I think it's evolved to the point where people kind of do the work that they want to do. They kind of pick and choose what parts of education they want to get out of it.

• 1:03:35Speaker 05

  So I think it's a lot different than how it was before.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  So if they, if they're not into this course, they just AI speedrun it. If they love the topic, they're like, I'm going to go acoustic and I'm going to really learn it. Is that what you're telling me?

• 1:03:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. I think for the most part that's, that's pretty accurate.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Can I be honest, Jason? I, I was already like, by college, I was sort of like that too. Like it was pretty easy. Some of these courses, you could sort of like microbiology, I wasn't super into it. You could just kind of figure out what was going to be on the task.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  You didn't have the tools to get an A in it. You, you would kind of cruise to a B.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Like a B, a B plus. Yeah. I could cruise to a B.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  These kids can just speed, you know, speed run it either way.

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  It wasn't like having claws. It was still like I had to do some of it myself.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  You know what I take from that, Ethan? The kids will be all right. I think the kids will be okay. Because here's the thing.

• 1:04:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  That's what adults are doing. They're like, this job is completely effing boring. My boss wants me to do a TPS report. That's an Office Space, a really good movie that you should see. And they're just like, I'll just speedrun this, give it to my boss, have, write some sycophantic answer, you know, ask my boss three questions, tell him it's brilliant. And then I'll actually do the work at work I actually like. Well, just everybody does that. You route around the stuff you don't like, you don't do your chores and you pay somebody to do your chores, in this case, AI. I like it. The kids will be all right, Ethan. Thanks for the honesty.

• 1:04:49Speaker 05

  I think, I think we live in a world where every young person has access to a superhuman software engineer, mathematician, expert in methods and physics all at the same time. So if that doesn't fire you up as a young person, I don't know.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. What are you going to do with this $300,000 in debt you're going into? What's your plan there to pay it back? Well, you got some scholarships. You look smart enough to get a scholarship. How much in debt do you think you'll be when you get out of this?

• 1:05:14Speaker 05

  Uh, it depends on how many, uh, how many self-driving golf carts they build, I guess.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  I'm going to give you a secret. When you go raise your round, here's what I want you to say. I'm going to give you the script. Okay? Don't tell your uncle Jason said this. Unc is going to give you some advice. You're closing that $3 million seed round. Here's what I want you to say. Listen, I want to give it all my energy. I got a little anxiety. This is like thing over here, my, my, my tuition is 140K. When we do the 3 million, would it be okay if I just sold 100K in secondary of my common shares to take it from 140 down to 40? So I'm not anxious about that. I can put my whole effort in. Boom, that becomes the ticket price to get in to your, you know, to your new company.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  That's a tactical and practical tip, right?

• 1:06:02Speaker 00

  There's a tactical and practical. Here's how to manipulate your seed investors. All right, brother. Good luck with everything. And yeah, when I'm next on campus, I'll be on campus in January, possibly.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Apparently this is where you have to hang out now, Jason. If you want to be.

• 1:06:17Speaker 00

  That's not, that's not now. That's always been.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  If you want deal flow, you gotta just be hanging out on the Stanford campus.

• 1:06:23Speaker 00

  If you, if you wind up going GSB route, Professor Pfeiffer, Prof. Pfeiffer does a course called Power. And there's a case study in it about this podcaster, blogger, kid from Brooklyn, who accumulated far too much power than he deserves.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  In Silicon Valley. And it's about me. And I go every year to talk to the students about accumulating power through media and other things. So good luck, Ethan. Hopefully I'll see you on campus.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ethan.

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, likewise. See you guys around.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Peace out.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  That's like that Harvard class that Bill Gates's daughter was in that teaches you how to manipulate people and cheat. Did you hear about that?

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Oh, how to, how to manipulate your stance on.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  No, it is apparently the rumor is there's a Harvard class that's about like how to rule the world through manipulation. It's like a secret, a secret class. And they say that, that, yeah, that Phoebe Gates was in it and that's where she learned.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  I think she's being railroaded, I'll be honest.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Really? Wow. Cause you were kind of on fire at first. You were.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  I think this might be like a, I think everybody's kind of trying to manipulate the attribution tag.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  And so I think.

• 1:07:30Speaker 01

  Well, that's undeniable.

• 1:07:31Speaker 00

  I'll be honest, if she wasn't Bill Gates's daughter and she was a dude, I'm going to be honest, like on two levels, nepo baby plus woman.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Speaker 00

  Plus let's, uh, she's like a, I think she's kind of like an Instagram influencer type. So that has a little baggage with it.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  And the cap table, it's Khloe Kardashian, it's Sydney Sweeney.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  It makes people resent it.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  People resent her for being a nepo baby, resent her for celebrity connections, resent her for her Instagram stuff. And if it had been a guy, same set of circumstances, I wonder. And I don't have all the details of it because it's a little bit like in, we'll see.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  None of us do.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  I'm guessing somebody might say to the founder, that's a really clever growth hack. Trying to get the attribution tag, uh, so you get the commission. Wow, it's a good growth hack.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  Cookie stuffing, they call it.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  They might be like, you should probably read the terms of services because you might be in a gray area. That might be how the conversation actually went down in my experience in a board meeting. Cause I've seen people go to the gray and have these kinds of situations. And I always say to them, it seems a little gray. Maybe we should read the terms of services and maybe back off this, you know, a little bit. It might be, you know, we could get in trouble for this. But there might, is this like a criminal legal case?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  I don't, I mean, I don't think so. No, and they stopped doing it as soon as the report came out that said they were doing it, they stopped doing it. So I, no, I don't think.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  Anyway, I want to adjudicate this case and I'm going to adjudicate this next week on this show. So I'll see you on Monday and I will put on my robe. This is This Week in Startups, thisweekinstartups.com, at TWI Startups. We'll see you next time. Bye, bye.