Founders Are Now Sending VCs a File Written for AI

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo: https://Odoo.com/twist Superhuman: https://superhuman.com/ Stripe: https://stripe.com/startups Athena: https://www.athena.com/jcal Plaud: https://Plaud.ai/twist Today’s show: Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer predicts that venture funds under $500M will raise less money this year than in any other year this past decade. LPs are piling into megafund platforms, while family offices skip commitments for SPVs. For everyone in between, he says, “the middle is cooked.” On a new TWiST VC roundtable, Lerer joins Jason Calacanis, Jenny Fielding (Everywhere Ventures) and D. A. Wallach (Time BioVentures) to discuss Beezer Clarkson’s data, showing that family offices now put 34% of their VC commitments into SPVs. OpenAI and Anthropic obviously skew those numbers a bit, but nonetheless, family offices increasingly want to “play venture capitalist” in hot late-stage deals. What about LPs who sit in five or more platform funds? Don’t they now own all the same companies? Plus D. A. warns about “freelance investment bankers” collecting SPV fees, Jason shares his 2% one-time SPV fee and his fights to protect pro rata, Jenny flags LPs asking managers for allocations in companies their funds don’t own, and lots more insights from our panel of insiders and experts. Guests Ben Lerer on X: https://x.com/benjlerer Lerer Hippeau: https://www.lererhippeau.com/ Jenny Fielding on X: https://x.com/jefielding Everywhere Ventures: https://www.everywhere.vc/ D. A. Wallach on X: https://x.com/dawallach Time BioVentures: https://www.timebioventures.com/ Relevant Links Haseeb Qureshi on founders shipping a company.md with their pitch: https://x.com/hosseeb/status/2120531493613400210 Travis Kalanick's Atoms raises $1.7B (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/22/travis-kalanicks-robotics-company-raises-1-7b-led-by-a16z/ Jelly, Everywhere Ventures' private market intelligence platform (beta waitlist): https://jelly.buildwitheverywhere.com/ Jack Dorsey takes on Slack with Buzz (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/21/jack-dorsey-is-taking-on-slack-with-buzz-a-group-chat-platform-for-teams-and-their-ai-agents/ Crosby raises a $60M Series B for its AI law firm (Global Legal Post): https://www.globallegalpost.com/news/cooley-backed-contract-review-start-up-crosby-raises-60m-in-fresh-funding-1011864931 Beezer Clarkson's thread: family offices put 34% of VC commitments into SPVs: https://x.com/Beezer232/status/2120231905618432314 Anthropic's IPO roadshow site and video: https://ipo.anthropic.com/us/ Anthropic sets an IPO price range of $70 to $78 per share (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/11/10/anthropic-sets-ipo-price-range-of-70-to-78-per-share-to-reach-an-implied-valuation-of-1-404-trillion/ Experts push back on Amodei's disease timeline (Moneywise via Yahoo Finance): https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/wildly-off-impossible-anthropics-dario-104000073.html D. A. Wallach on TBPN: https://x.com/tbpn/status/2118838400539361298 The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's GPU cluster to "cure, prevent or manage all diseases" (Engadget): https://www.engadget.com/the-chan-zuckerberg-initiative-is-building-a-massive-gpu-cluster-to-cure-prevent-or-manage-all-diseases-205454041.html Neuralink: https://neuralink.com LaunchPoint: https://www.launchpointhq.com Abliteration.ai is making a business out of removing AI guardrails (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/03/abliteration-ai-is-making-a-business-out-of-removing-ai-guardrails/ Timestamps: 0:00 AI is moving the ground under every startup’s feet 7:52 Plaud - If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 8:39 Why founders are shipping a company.md with their pitch 10:40 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 12:56 When you disagree with your AI 18:23 The one trait founders can’t game 19:20 Is VC still a profession in the future? 22:02 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://odoo.com/twist 31:40 Stripe - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on https://stripe.com/startups. 32:49 Distribution, data moats, and enterprise hardening 37:58 The AI law firm that charges for work, not time 47:14 Jason’s late-stage SPV program 52:02 Small funds are shrinking 59:32 Athena - Get $1,500 off your first EA at https://www.athena.com/jcal 1:00:50 Dario’s roadshow video highlights 1:09:25 Checking the panel’s P-Dario scores Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.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 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

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups, our venture capital roundtable. We do it every Wednesday live. We ship it later that night on Wednesday, sometimes Thursday morning. Really excited for our panel. DA Wallach is back for the third week in a row.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  Becoming my partner in crime here. He's from Time Bio Ventures. You can check out more about them at timebioventures.com. I'm an LP and things are going well, DA.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Thank you, Jason.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Stripe Startups. Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits, expert insights, and a focused community of builders. Apply today on stripe.com/startups. Odoo, the all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at o d o o dot com slash 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.

• 1:02Jason Calacanis?

  This fund is gonna do well, and I'm saving a slot for you in launch five so we can round-trip our LP interest in each other. Jenny Fielding is here. She's been on the program many times. Everywhere Ventures co-founder and managing partner. Tell us a little bit about Everywhere Ventures.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, early-stage pre-seed fund, investing across many health and work. And we've invested in 300 companies, so pretty active.

• 1:30Jason Calacanis?

  That is active. I'm assuming pre-seed and seed, yeah? Is the focus?

• 1:35Speaker 03

  No seed, just first money in. And honestly, it's a rare breed these days. So you do it, Jason, and a couple other people, but.

• 1:43Jason Calacanis?

  So you're trying to do what first round original value prop was. Put the first 250K into the seed rounds and have conviction.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  And the pre-seed, yeah. So typically, the rounds are a million dollars. Sometimes they're, you know, just a bunch of angels or a couple of microfunds get together. But these are almost like angel rounds, but we're institutionalizing that.

• 2:04Jason Calacanis?

  You know, it's very important that we have this in the market because everybody's a coward, Jenny. Everybody is like lemmings in our business, especially at the early stage. Oh, who's in? Who's leading? Yeah, let us know how the round develops is what a lot of VCs like to tell people. You tell them the opposite. Hey, this is a fit. We're putting the 250 in. We don't care who else is in, or we're not in. Am I correct in summarizing candidly?

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, and especially, you know, in these stages, if you think about, you know, some of the deep tech or the futuristic stuff, it seems like science experiments. And if we don't have people, you know, really at the earliest stages, like, how are these founders gonna come to be? Because most folks, they want to see a lot of traction.

• 2:49Jason Calacanis?

  And the very famous, the very famous Ben Lerer of Lear Hippo, managing partner, you know them, and they did Warby Parker back in the day, Venmo back in the day, ZipLine, not sure when you got into that. We did the more recent last two rounds ourselves.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  First check, baby, first check. Many, many moons ago, I was just a boy.

• 3:11Jason Calacanis?

  It's crazy because I, you know, met Keller and he pitched me that same round. I said, you're doing fixed-wing drones on a slingshot in Africa to deliver blood. Hardware is hard. This technology doesn't work. I don't understand the consumer base. We invest in American companies operating in America. I would love to donate to this, but it doesn't feel like a venture investment. I don't know how I'd explain it to my LPs, but you had the courage of your conviction.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Not even. We invested when it was a company building robots, toy robots for kids, pre-becoming a fixed-wing blood-delivery platform in Africa. So we were even stupider.

• 3:58Jason Calacanis?

  Right, and that's the key lesson here, DA. It's a key lesson for all of us, better to be dumb and lucky than to actually try to figure out what great founders are capable of. You knew he was a great founder.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Keller was always very special. I'm sure you felt that when you talked to him. And I think that, much like Jenny, we are also early-stage focused and believe that you, you know, we're wrong more than we're right. But, you know, you do this long enough and you get a feel for when you're sitting across the table from someone who's nuts and maybe gonna do things.

• 4:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, that is a key to what we do as investors at the earliest stage. We're betting on a team, and I don't know, it feels like maybe half of my companies pivot in a significant way because we are pre-seed investors as well. That tracks Jenny for you too?

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. In fact, like, I wish there was more data around it. It's hard to get. But I'd say in our portfolio, at least a third and some of our biggest companies have pivoted.

• 4:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's basically the successful ones are the ones that pivot. Explain why you think this is bad.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think, actually, interestingly, I'm not, I'm not, I'm making this up as I go, but I think you may see even more of it now because the ground is just moving beneath our feet in ways that it only does during a real sort of reshuffling and, you know, revolutionary moment in technology. And, you know, with what the foundation models are doing and the spaces they go into and how they move, it's just not clear what the enduring models and moats are gonna be. And so you bet on brilliant people early and they have a notion and they start building. And it turns out, you know, I would say that ZipLine is an interesting one because hardware companies doing wholesale pivots is obviously very difficult.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  You sort of have to start truly from scratch, whereas software companies with the pace of development right now, you can do something for six months, decide it's not the thing. You know, Cursor is like a pretty good example of this, right? I mean, we have lots of recent examples of things that ended up being very valuable very quickly and started as something else entirely. And I think you're gonna see more of that.

• 6:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, DA, does this happen in bioscience, biotech?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, biotech is a little tough to pivot, right? For some of the same reasons that hardware is, that maybe Ben was alluding to. And I think the reason for that is the fixed costs of taking things, particularly in the clinical trials, are just extreme by comparison. And so, once you start down a path, in particular, once you've selected the indication or the disease you want to go after, you're kind of locked in, at least through that first human trial. And so we do see quite a bit less pivoting at the later stages, but we see a lot of exploration in the early stages as companies try to take a technology or even a specific molecule and figure out where they can apply it with the greatest impact.

• 6:51Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I always tell founders when we invest, keep your eyes in the peripheral vision. Like, if you see something off to the side and you're interested, it's okay with me if you go explore it for a week or two weeks, you make an MVP, because, man, I see that happen all the time. Founder's like, wait, there's something over there. Our best returning investment in our fourth fund, Micro One, started. Crazy founder, Ali, I knew would be successful at something in life, was just using AI to figure out who was the best developer, who's in the 0.1% of developers. And then he's like, yeah, and by the way, I have friends over at this large language model company and they need data. So we took the developer data, we kind of packaged it up and we sold it to them.

• 7:33Jason Calacanis?

  And they want more data, so I think I'm gonna try to build them, you know, a way to get data to put into LOMs. They're at a billion dollars in revenue right now. And we invested at a $12 million valuation. Crazy.

• 7:49Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, a full-scale pivot. I'm gonna take a moment before it gets too late to put on my Plod device. Plod device. I'm gonna hit record and then I don't miss a moment here. Plod is an amazing hardware solution. You put a pin on it, you put it on the back of your computer, you record everything, uses amazing software. To summarize it, with hundreds of templates, and then you can connect it to all your AIs and do your to-do list, action items, all that great stuff. Check out Plod at plaud.ai/twist. Use the promo code TWIST. And they know we sent you, and they'll give you 10% off. Not that you guys need it, but you can get that. Hey, DA?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:26Jason Calacanis?

  You know, you're very good at finding interesting stories. I think you're a curator amongst curators.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 8:33Jason Calacanis?

  Might come from.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  I saw something this morning, in particular, that I wanted to throw to this group. The managing partner, founder of Dragonfly Ventures, smart guy, Haseem, or what is it? How's he spell his name? Haseeb Qureshi.

• 8:49Jason Calacanis?

  Haseeb Qureshi.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Pull up this tweet here. Haseeb Qureshi, look at what he said. He said founders are now sending them markdown files, company dot M D files that they can open up with their L O M of choice and utilize to basically grok everything about the company. So rather than a pitch deck or a video or doing a phone call, you can just pull up that markdown file and start asking it questions about the business. And I thought, wow, this is, this is a new thing. I, I have not yet encountered this and curious Ben and Jenny if, if either of you has.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll, I'll jump in here. So about a year ago, at everywhere, we have a full time engineer on our team. We started thinking about like, how do we optimize, you know, a small V C so that, you know, we show up and all the searches and founders know about us. And so we did a little bit of research and we saw that actually almost no, it was like 99% of the websites that we looked at of other V C firms weren't optimized for the agentic world, meaning that they didn't have F A Qs. They didn't have ghost pages and basically agents couldn't discover it because the way that they described their firm wasn't agent friendly. So we were, I think, among the first to kind of do that. And we actually saw the results, which was pretty interesting of just how that was surfaced

• 10:11Speaker 03

  about us being a pre seed fund and all of that. So we kind of jumped in early and I think that, you know, this was the second manifestation of it. If venture funds are going to do it, obviously startups are going to do it as well. And like, what a cool way to be able to prepare for a meeting before and kind of like self serve as you're getting to know founders and industries without having to set up a call and do all these things. So I think this is the next evolution of, you know, agentic venture and I'm all for it.

• 10:40Jason Calacanis?

  We talk about it every week on the pod. Startups have everyone using A I now, but a lot of users are still stuck in that chat bot zone, kind of using A I like it's fast research, but they aren't getting the kind of productivity boost that's possible when you give the models the right data and the right context. If this sounds like your company, it's time to check out Superhuman Go from the makers of the amazing Grammarly. With Superhuman Go, there's no need for endless copy and pasting of transcripts, moving over documents, writing prompts or switching tabs. Your A I is already present and ready to help in every email, document and spreadsheet. And it already knows enough about your company and your day to day tasks to provide real time saving assistance and not just vague suggestions.

• 11:25Jason Calacanis?

  Plus, Superhuman Go is proactive, helping you spot and prevent mistakes in your emails and documents before they go out to the real world. Give Superhuman a try for yourself at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  By the way, this seems just like a natural evolution. Everyone is clearly feeding all of these materials into some version of off the shelf or, you know, internally trained or whatever. Like everyone's got their own way that they're using A I to help them make decisions and help them get through work. And like, if you want to skip some steps and help us, fabulous. I don't know that we need it. I think we've, you know, built enough A I skills internally where we can, you know, ingest files that are not expressly built to be ingested and we're doing just fine. But I, I think I most agree with number three here and number four as being the thing

• 12:22Speaker 04

  that, like, I don't think you're saving me a lot of time, but like you're clearly expressing that you're leaning in. That will be gone in like six weeks when everyone starts doing it because they know that it's a signal that says something. But I think the neutral read is actually really the key to it, which is like, you're going to be a company that is going to, you're, you're comfortable trading on your merits.

• 12:50Speaker 04

  And like what you really are versus some like weird manufactured, like, you know, don't look in that room story. And so like, I think this is a good thing. I don't think it's like changing the world, but I'm, I'm all for it.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And Ben, I, there's a, an interesting thing that I know Josh Wolfe has said in the past from Lux Capital, great investor, very successful firm. Josh has said their biggest success stories historically have been companies that were highly contested among the partners in the investment committee meetings. In other words, you know, one or two people really wanted to do it and others absolutely hated it. And by contrast, the sort of consensus, yeah, this is an obvious bet ones have disappointed, relatively speaking. Now, if we're all going to be feeding presentation materials into our A I and respecting to

• 13:42Speaker 01

  some extent its opinion, I'm curious for, for you guys, like, how far are you willing to go against the A I? Are you at a point where you fed stuff in and it said, this is a terrible investment, never do it? Are you ever going to supersede it?

• 14:00Speaker 04

  So, so two things. One is we, we've all heard that, like, that adage about the contested deals or the great deals. I think Sequoia has also talked a lot about this in the past.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  If that's the case, then we should be concerned about this vintage for late stage companies. Because, you know, the companies that are getting access to the real late stage capital are all these like highly, highly consensus deals. Now, I can't speak to what actually happens in the partner meetings of these mega funds, but right now we're operating in a market where there's this belief that every, that like things are obvious. And so that's just like an interesting little tidbit around the edges of that. As far as the, the advice A I gives, we get really great analysis and good market mapping and, and good work.

• 14:50Speaker 04

  We actually find that the recommendations from A I are, no matter what we do, really disappointingly low conviction. And so we have a scoring system that we sort of play with internally where we like to score deals on a one through nine, no fives.

• 15:06Jason Calacanis?

  And one through nine, no fives because cowards pick fives. I do one through 10, no eights because cowards pick eights.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  Normally it's a world of no sevens, but we could talk about this separately, Jason. But I do think that there is, we, so we go and we put it in and we get scores between three, four, six and seven, almost 100% of the time, which is just like a pretty weak willed, you know, it's like a yes, but with reservations or no, but it, we could flip it if. And so I find the work to be very high quality. I find the actual answers to be not even particularly.

• 15:47Jason Calacanis?

  What are the variables? Give us a little hint. Don't give us the whole algorithm. I know it's proprietary.

• 15:51Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 15:52Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have some variables? Cause I'll give up a couple of variables for us.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  We have actually a number of variables that I couldn't even like, we're, we're scoring the founders domain expertise. We're found, we're scoring the founders willingness to be, to like how they deal with being challenged in the meeting. We score the quality.

• 16:14Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, wait, let's unpack that one. Do you want somebody who is brash or do you want somebody who listens thoughtfully and answers the question or both of those things? What, what do you?

• 16:23Speaker 04

  I, I, we want, we're, we continue to play with these and have multiple agents running that treat these a little bit differently. I mean, this is an imperfect world where we're screwing with this.

• 16:32Jason Calacanis?

  Alchemy.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  I think the idea is you want, I mean, the, I guess the like cliche is, you know, strong convictions loosely held or whatever, but you want people who can, you can have real challenging conversations with, who address those challenges head on, who don't skirt the subject, who are willing to acknowledge what they don't know. I think that like, I don't know that we have a different formula than anybody else in terms of talking to somebody who feels substantive and who feels, you know, at the same time passionate and not so insane and stubborn that like, we're never going to be able to work with them because they have no interest in hearing anyone else's voice.

• 17:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 04

  But we, and, and it's a, it's a bunch of these things that we score all at once to try to come out with some overall metric. And then of course, we also plug it into our fund model and how many positions we try to get. And it's gone back and studied all of our prior funds and where we find fund returners to try to pull out, not just is this a good deal, but does the math or the ownership work for our?

• 17:33Jason Calacanis?

  This is a key one, D A and Jenny. I have become cutthroat in my later years with the team who are like, this is a great thing and there's a hundred K available at this $20 million valuation. I'm like, so we own 50 basis points. Do the math. It's a, that's a $45 million fund. What does the outcome need to be for us if we get diluted 50% along the way? What does the outcome need to be? And it's like, oh, it has to be Uber and it has to be $140 billion. And I'm like, okay, not too many of those. So let's move on to the next deal and stay in touch with this founder. And they're like, oh, but can we put in a little? I'm like, if we put in a little, then I have to go back to the L P's and explain why we did this bet and didn't put in a lot. And it was a waste of our time because then we put the same amount of work into every founder.

• 18:19Jason Calacanis?

  The same amount of work into every founder, whether it could be a fund returner or not. So you really need to keep that sort of discipline in mind. I like the signal here. I don't like giving too much of my playbook away, Jenny. You know why? Because then people game it because they listen to the pods and they're like, ask their agents, "Hey, how can I get through J. Kyle's screening process? How can I get Sequoia's? And that's what I realized when I started this podcast over 15 years ago is every time I explain this stuff, six months later, it would be incorporated into people's pitches. And the gamesmanship became crazy. Now I just look for the indefatigable? Indefatigable? How do you pronounce that word?

• 19:00Speaker 03

  That's what I was gonna say. I think that

• 19:02Jason Calacanis?

  I need those founders.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  The number one thing we look for is resilience. And how do you game resilience? Right? That's through a series of interactions. And I mean, you can call them tests, but it's really about how that person responds. Right? And I think to Ben's point, right? You know, the challenges, the tip on the shoulder, these are all things that you evaluate. So I think resilience is a hard one to game.

• 19:23Jason Calacanis?

  I just gave everybody on the team.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  J. Kyle, right? You don't respond to the first 30 emails.

• 19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Right. I wait for 31 now.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Because you just want to make sure they've got that hustle. But I want to, I want to just like stick on this for a second because we can't, on the one hand, be perpetuating this story that AI is gonna solve every, gonna solve incredibly hard problems in the physical sciences, in biotech, in finance, and at the same time believe that it's not gonna be capable of rigorously evaluating companies and ultimately giving us a score other than four, five, or six. I mean, why do you guys, I mean, do you believe?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  And if so, why do you believe that we should have jobs past six months from now or a year from now? Because it seems like what we do as an analytical and risk-taking endeavor should not be beyond the reach of these AI projects if they really can fulfill the capacities that are promised.

• 20:34Jason Calacanis?

  I have the answer. The, remember Chamath started Capital as a Service? Put in all your SaaS metrics. We tell you if you're funded, we just give you the funding based on your metrics. Yeah. If, and if in music, you'd be like, oh, this is a banger. It's got a great hook and, you know, I like the solo here. If it was that easy, then it would be science. And then on the other side, you have art. And I always tell people what we do is alchemy. It's, it's some mystery in between those two things that takes a bit of instinct. And then once you're on the cap table, are you relentlessly supporting the founder and being the guide on the side, the, you know, warm ear who gives them encouragement, depending on what they need, or helps them problem solve?

• 21:16Jason Calacanis?

  So I think that function of just being a human who is enthusiastically on the cap table rooting for you, like if you can get really five or 10 really great humans in your, on your cap table who are like, yeah, we can do this. This is insurmountable odds. You can do this. How can we be helpful? I feel like that part of the job is the most human. But the analyst part, you probably right.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Look, I agree with you. There's, as we all know, there's the picking them and there's the working them.

• 21:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  And I agree with you. The work in them is irretrievably human.

• 21:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you're right. The, the analysis should be, you should be able to get great analysis that's better than most of the people on your team. But then maybe the conversation on top of that analysis then becomes the higher order bit like, hey, my, my algorithm says this, your algorithm says that in the partner meeting, right? Odoo is the all-in-one management software that brings together everything you need in one easy to use platform. It's a simple solution for founders. It's gonna save you a lot of time, but that's easy enough for me to say. Let's actually dig into one of the real apps you get access to when you sign up for Odoo. Odoo Purchase. This is where Odoo brings together all of your suppliers, price lists, purchase orders, and vendor performance stats into one simple dashboard.

• 22:27Jason Calacanis?

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• 22:58Speaker 04

  When we think about how we're using AI internally, it is in service of protecting the like real atomic unit of value, which for us is like a minute spent face-to-face with a founder, having, like building a real trusted relationship. And so how do we automate away all the rest of our job in order to actually make those human relationships matter and productive? And, you know, look, there is some like very grim future where founders would prefer an algorithm to be their investor in some way, I guess. But, and, and I, and I, by the way, I don't, I'm not afraid of the algorithm being a better picker.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  I actually embrace the idea that the algorithm is a better picker. I still don't think the algorithm is going to be able to build the relationships and build the trust. And, you know, I like to, the role that I like to fill, even though it's a little bit, it can be painful, is I want to be your first call on your worst day. And I don't think that AI is ever gonna replace that. And I think that not every founder wants it, but the founders that do will, you know, are gonna pick, you know, an investor that they want to have that sort of camaraderie with.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think venture capitalists are a profession of the future. Like, I don't think that this job will really exist. But I do think, you know, to Ben's point and yours, Jason, like the cheerleader, the coach, the psychiatrist, when you need one. I think these are things that are, you know, very basic to humanity, kind of going back to DA's original topic. And I'm not sure those are gonna go away, but I do think our job is gonna change.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  That's very, that's very interesting to me because it's, I, I, I totally agree with your points about these services that are provided by really great investors like the three of you. I won't include myself in that.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  I don't believe in services. I think that's all total BS.

• 25:03Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I don't mean, I mean, I mean, the, the

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Twitter and LinkedIn and all these founders saying like, you know, I want my investor to help me with introductions and products and all this stuff. And like, no, you're just literally at the early stage at like the pre-seed and seed, you need someone that's not gonna be destructive and who's gonna be your total cheerleader. I think that's

• 25:22Speaker 01

  So I, I'm talking about the service that, that Ben mentioned, which is being your first call on the worst day, you know, serving a governance function as things go further along and you need to make tough decisions, navigate the capital market. You could argue though, that all of those very human services, I mean, for lack of a better term, or, or value adds that VCs bring to the table.

• 25:44Jason Calacanis?

  Meat-based. They're meat-based, DA.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  These meat services are arguably highly overpaid by founders of successful companies. I mean, it's not unheard of for the, you know, for that early investor who's getting the first call on the worst day to make over a billion dollars if the company goes really well, right? And, you know, you, you can go hire the, the greatest performance coach in the world for much less than that. So if we do just sort of fast forward.

• 26:18Jason Calacanis?

  But that person also puts their reputation on the line. I think it's a good challenge, DA. But that person puts their reputation on the line and gives up decades of their lives to match capital with talent. And that is a very unique position in the world and is well worth the 20 or 25% that LPs pay for it. And it's well worth the 20, 30, 40% of the company that winds up being given to those LPs and that little sliver of carry that the, that people make it until, until such time is there's another funding source that does it better, that balances the LP need to deal with chaos.

• 26:59Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if you really think of what we do, LPs do not want to go into the muck and the chaotic nature of years one through five of these companies. If they did and they had to deal with the BS we have to deal with on the margins and the chaos and the fraud and the insanity, they would, they, they were like, yeah, that's way too gnarly for me. It's kind of like people who invest in movies or movie studios. There's like, there's some studio head and Bob Iger says, it's all gonna be okay. Well, I, I read in the paper that this, you know, this director just beat somebody up on set, did this crazy, nope, it's fine. We got 10 movies. This one gets delayed. It's okay. It's all gonna work out in the watching. I think that like plays a role in society.

• 27:44Jason Calacanis?

  And then you would ask the same question, DA. What's the point of these CEOs? What's the point of these founders? Like, can't we just put everything on autopilot and let somebody just? And I, I got pitched by a VC, very well-known, said, I want you to invest in this company. I said, okay, now you're just the founders. The founder's my, my partner. I said, what? He said, the founder vibe coded a startup and we're just building it in-house. So that was my first example of a VC finding a market, going after it doggedly and just writing the code themselves and being like, we don't have a founder for this. So we're just going to have one of the GPs be the founder.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I mean, this, look,

• 28:21Speaker 03

  Well, this is the next, the next topic. It's not going to tell you about the company that we're, that we're spinning out of everywhere.

• 28:27Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, what? Okay. It's a segue. I'll allow it. We're calling audible here. Jenny, over to you.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Well, it was such a good intro.

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  And by the way, it wasn't you who did this.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  No, I know. I know. But I'm not asking anyone to, I'm not thinking, I'm not asking anyone to invest.

• 28:42Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  I think the guys are gonna maybe pull up a visual, but, um, all right. So as a early-stage investor, a pre-seed investor, what do I spend most of my time doing with 300 portfolio companies? Making introductions to later-stage capital, helping my startups, you know, research who, you know, should, um, you know, who would be good investors, et cetera. So, you know, we spend so much time trying to do this. We actually put together a little platform. We built it in-house for ourselves. And then some of our friends wanted this and basically we have to beg, borrow and steal to get this data. As a small emerging manager, PitchBook is about $20,000 a seat. And wow, if you want the API integration, throw in another 15K.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  You know, then layer on, you know, things like Harmonic. I mean, these are all great products, but it gets to be quite expensive. So we built some of this in-house and now we've started to, we call it Jelly. Um, and we've started open sourcing it, um, and actually, you know, providing it to other managers and potentially selling it. So we have a beta. We announced it last week. We had got a thousand people on the list. Um, and it gives you some of the things that PitchBook doesn't give you, like, um, insights into what investors are talking about and thinking. Just if you look at this screen right here, you know, what is Jason talking about on Twitter? What's important to him? So as a founder, if you go pitch him, if you wanna get in touch with launch, you kinda know what's relevant.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  So we tried to synthesize things that we thought were relevant for us and our peers. So this is our first attempt at Everywhere as a venture fund to spin out a product. We are not raising money externally or hitting up, you know, our friends for money. Um, but we will be, you know, selling this product soon. We're having a ton of fun. Um, obviously us, like everyone, it sounds like, yeah, we're gonna sell it. I mean, you know, 20,000 versus, I don't know, you guys can tell me how much we should charge, like 50 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month?

• 30:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, this is,

• 30:42Speaker 03

  We're taking some input.

• 30:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this is like a very interesting moment in time. I don't know if you saw a similar thing, Ben, but, uh, let me replace this one. Uh, my friend Kevin Rose, who did DIG many years ago, uh, decided, I would like to have a better version of Slack. And he started building it and he just gave it for free to the world on GitHub. And, um, he, I said, how long did this take? He said, four to five hours a day for about a month. And I was like, hmm. Uh, and I, I said, how long would it take with Fable 2.0? Which obviously the answer is half as much, but I talked to him. I was like, are you gonna make this into a company? Because I kinda like the idea.

• 31:24Jason Calacanis?

  At the same time, Jack from Square launched his own version of Slack for developers. So Ben, is, what does this say about the future of incubation of ideas and startups and technology? Okay, there's so much exciting innovation happening every day in AI. And so many companies are just shipping all these amazing new tools. But hey, these AI startups pose several specific challenges. They require a lot of flexibility and an infrastructure that can scale up fast. Thankfully, Stripe Startups is here to help. Yes, our good friends over at Stripe are offering early-stage venture-backed startups access to a whole suite of perks.

• 32:06Jason Calacanis?

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• 32:38Speaker 02

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• 32:49Speaker 04

  Well, I think it says more than just incubation. It says something about more than just incubation. I think this is the, the great challenge of the market right now is somebody can go and build something that feels like it is in some way, shape or form at feature parity with Slack on nights and weekends. Um, now, I would say sort of a few things. One is obviously the sort of network effect and the distribution remains this important thing. The, you know, and the distribution providing a user base that then creates a data advantage. And so without a distribution or a data advantage, you know, you're really just vibe coding. I think there's another layer to this, which is the hardening of that system and building

• 33:31Speaker 04

  it so that it can really, truly support the sort of nuanced needs and the security concerns and the SOC 2 compliance and all the things that you need to build to go around a product that's actually enterprise-ready. Um, is, I think people like understate that they're like, I can go vibe code this thing quickly and, and actually building something that truly does what Slack does is not like, Kevin did not build that yet, but I'm sure he built something that's good enough for plenty of people. Um, and look, the reality is this is the great challenge of this space right now. And I think it's one of the reasons that you see the late-stage consolidate around companies that appear to have cracked the distribution and data moat because they go,

• 34:15Speaker 04

  it's gonna be hard to compete with this and I'm really, and I don't wanna make a bet on this other new team maybe figuring it out when there's gonna be 40 teams or 100 teams or 1,000 teams that can all go build the same thing. And so this is why instinct, like instinct has gotten into the zeitgeist and has the user pull and as a result is now worth 30 billion. I, you know, it doesn't matter what you think it's worth, like is now to someone,

• 34:41Jason Calacanis?

  Is it worth 30 billion?

• 34:44Speaker 04

  To someone, to somebody it is worth 30 billion dollars. And, and I think that that is, uh, like, you know, you fall, or you do fall into the too big to fail category or whatever it is. Even while Kevin goes and builds that Slack continues to perform exquisitely well, is probably the best buy that Salesforce has ever made. And so, you know, the SaaS apocalypse of it all hasn't happened yet. Is it gonna happen? In some categories, it may, but Slack also knows what AI is.

• 35:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 35:17Speaker 04

  And will probably use some of it.

• 35:19Speaker 03

  But don't you think it's cool, cool to be able to serve niche communities? Um, and I think that's what, that's what we're trying to do. We're not building this for all of private equity. We built Jelly for our peers, for people in venture capital, specifically who can't pay for, you know, this. And I feel like Kevin probably the same. He's not trying necessarily to kill Slack. Like he's trying to provide, um, something for the people that need something like this who are his peers, right? So I think, you know, the vibe coding, and I agree, you know, the security levels aren't there, but, um, how exciting that we can all, you know, serve like specific needs as opposed to generalized software of these niche communities.

• 35:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but Jenny, what happens if you sell 1,000 seats for $600 a year? And you're sitting there and you're like, huh? And you have 20 more feature ideas and you have four people working on this. You're, you're gonna wanna add a zero, right? You're gonna wanna add a zero. And I think that's the danger for the incumbents is that people are gonna come to this. And there was that famous expression, your margins are opportunity, DA? Like, I'm kinda looking at this going, well, if everything, you know, becomes free and then people, basically they're restarting the game of Slack. They're restarting the game of Figma and design. It's like, you know what? I can put something out there that my peers use. I get 1% market share and let's start the game over.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I, I just think it's an embodiment of the, you know, century-long trend of personalization in every industry. And to Jenny's point, she can make a, a version of a data platform that is really narrow-cast to the needs of venture capitalists that she knows as well as any of her peers or prospective customers. And then for us on the other side of the Zoom, the question becomes, is she trying to charge us more, you know, than, than would lead us to just build it ourselves, right? I mean, cause that's now the new game that everyone is playing is someone comes to you

• 37:23Speaker 01

  and says, look, I've taken a month for four hours a day to build this thing. And it's basically like, do you, do you too wanna spend four hours a day for the next month? Or would you rather just give me $20 a month? And, right, I mean,

• 37:39Jason Calacanis?

  So it's a great, okay, so I think I'm, I'm triangulating.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  It's all about pricing.

• 37:43Jason Calacanis?

  I literally, you took the word out of my mouth, uh, DA. Ben, is this literally just, we're gonna have to rethink pricing, uh, of products? If a version of Slack can be made, you know, and, and be offered at a flat rate instead of per seat, and then some startups are like, yeah, I wanna save that money. It's kinda like free cap table software.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  We, we announced a deal yesterday in a category where there's gonna be multiple players. It's an AI-first law firm where you pay for the work, not for the time.

• 38:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, give it a shout out.

• 38:14Speaker 04

  It's called Black Letter.

• 38:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Um, they're, you know, sort of Crosby was the first mover. We think that this is a fascinating team at a co here that we think is gonna do this in a really, Wonderful way and is building that, you know, the best technology in the space. I don't need to give too much of a.

• 38:31Jason Calacanis?

  Valuation $12 billion? They have three people at $12 billion?

• 38:34Speaker 04

  At least, at least. I mean, you know.

• 38:36Jason Calacanis?

  History price matters.

• 38:38Speaker 04

  But, but this is, this is an example of a model where you, where you rethink the model of an industry that's been around forever. We paid for people's time. Now we pay for the work. You want to go get a series B done? I'm going to charge you this much regardless of what, you know, I can guarantee you a quality product with a fixed price. People would prefer that. People would.

• 38:56Jason Calacanis?

  So disruptive.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  And look, I, I think one of the reasons that you have seen this move in the early stage that I'm sure everyone here who invests is seeing, which is this preference for younger founders, younger and younger and younger and younger founders. Because there is now such an emphasis on speed. And the idea being if, if, if, as you said, DA, it's like, well, you know, maybe, maybe I just want to go build this thing that Jenny's building. If it, if Jenny wants to charge me 20 and I can do it for 19, what's the point? I'll just build it myself. I think now we are favoring teams that we think are going to move faster and faster and faster and faster and be more and more AI pilled and have more like fleets of agents deployed

• 39:42Speaker 04

  and, and cover more ground more quickly because that is the advantage. That like the advantage is that the moats are smaller. And so we, we favor teams that are going to move faster and younger people tend to have less distractions in their life and need to sleep less and use more AI and all the things.

• 40:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's talk SPVs, SPVs versus funds. I think Jenny, you found this one?

• 40:08Speaker 03

  I did. So.

• 40:09Jason Calacanis?

  You tee it up for everybody here and then.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:11Jason Calacanis?

  Part of being a great panelist is to pick the person you want to pass it to. So.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Ooh, okay. Well, I think both of these guys are in a great perspective on this. So family offices put 34% of VC commitments into SPVs, up from 9% in 2019. So in other words, instead of putting money necessarily into their funds, we can extrapolate. They put that money into single purpose vehicles, which was kind of interesting. So I saw this on Twitter, Beezer Clarkson. So she's an LP. She was at Sapphire for many years and has invested in many funds.

• 40:56Jason Calacanis?

  Fund of funds, right?

• 40:56Speaker 03

  She has a fund of funds and she's very active, you know, in, in kind of talking about the inside baseball of what's happening on the LP front. She's great. You should go follow her. So she asked if the fundraising slowdown, which we're all experiencing and seeing, is capital leaving venture, basically just saying, you know, it's an underperforming asset or, you know, we're going to put our money elsewhere or just changing how it's invested, meaning into these single purpose vehicles where the LPs are investing directly into individual deals as opposed to spreading it into a fund. So super interesting. And the thread argues that limited distributions, you know,

• 41:36Speaker 03

  by LPs towards, you know, picking individual companies instead of making, you know, another 10 year fund commitment is kind of the trend of the, of the market. So I looked in my own LP base and we do have, you know, a number of family offices. And I would say this does actually track for us where our LPs are even more interested in our later stage deals, right? So these deals are more de-risk and, you know, less interested in, you know, putting money directly into funds. And so we felt that as a small manager, where they've kind of rebalanced where they're putting their money. And I think other emerging managers are feeling it as well. So I'd love to kind of, I'd love to hear from Ben, actually.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Cause I imagine when you started, you know, all those years ago, your fund, it was smaller and you had kind of maybe less institutions and kind of smaller folks. And if you've seen anything like this.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. So first of all, I think like the misleading thing about this is the percentage of that money that went into SPVs and OpenAI and Anthropic is enormous. And so this is not, this overstates that trend because you have two companies that in four years consumed more venture money than any companies in the history of humanity. And so these are like, that's one. And so I think it's really important to note that like, I don't think, by the way, I think this is a real trend. I just think that like, it's a little misleading when you have two company, usually the biggest and best companies don't just need

• 43:12Speaker 04

  constant infusions of tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars. And so like.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  And either, but either way, doesn't that mean that that's less money going into those emerging managers? Whatever the reason.

• 43:22Jason Calacanis?

  Well, maybe or maybe not, because it's a percentage. It could be Ben, that they're doing both and that this is like replacing something else in their portfolio. Maybe it's replacing some real estate investing. They're like, I'd rather lose some real estate money over here.

• 43:36Speaker 04

  No, no, no. But I think Jenny's right. People want more co-invest, particularly right now when we have this like fever pitch, national story about AI and companies that frankly, the average investor should not have any familiarity with. It are like an instinct is something that is like now a household name product for the people that run these family offices because it's national news. You have people chasing into these like into cognition or into these companies where there's just so much private demand. We just did this, you know, this new zipline round, like people coming out of the woodwork who want access to this company because it's this big sexy thing that feels inaccessible and all this money has been made in the private markets.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  And it's, I, I think when we see, you know, the bubble deflate or, or burst or whatever. Not that I don't believe that AI is like the, literally the best thing since sliced bread. I do. But like clearly some of this behavior, some of this stuff's going to work and some of it's not. Once we get to the point where some of it doesn't, you may lose a little enthusiasm around this. That's one side. The other side though, Jenny, is exactly what you said, which is there has been very little liquidity. People are like, this is an asset class where at least in the last, it, it underperformed for a few years relative to other asset classes. And in the last few years, the place where you've seen the great paper gains are at the very late stage.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  And so I don't fundamentally believe that that is the best place to invest. And my strategy would sort of like, you know, that's marketing for me, but it's also what I believe in, which is early stage investing. But I think that there is, right now, money is chasing into these things that have been compounding really quickly on paper and they look like they're the closest things to liquidity. And I totally understand why there's that drive. And I, you know, I think that you will see more and more family offices want to do co-invest and do direct because it's the sexy part and it feels like you get to play venture capitalist. I also think that good funds are going to be around.

• 45:42Jason Calacanis?

  DA?

• 45:42Speaker 03

  I mean, I would, I would, before I go to DA, I mean, I would just, if you, if you scroll down, there's another chart that says emerging managers closing a fund. And so in 2022, there were 927. In 2025, there were 448 and then 2026 through Q3, 211. Now you can argue there were too many funds. This is a correction and all of that. But it also, you know, indicates that less, it's less money. And I can say as an emerging manager and all of my peers, it's been hard. And you're going to see a decimation of a huge cohort of emerging managers that were not able to raise. So I think this also shows.

• 46:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's great Jenny for us. I, nothing would be more pleasing for that 927 number to go to 50. Just straight to 50.

• 46:30Speaker 04

  You're a monster.

• 46:32Jason Calacanis?

  There's 50 of us. We're all in it for life. We are all the true believers, Ben. We're not Johnny come latelys, Jane come latelys who think, oh, I could just raise a fund because this celebrity, you know, social influencer was able to raise one. I am so glad to flush the tourists out. All the tourists out. Enough of being in my city. This is like being an islander. Ben, you know, you live in Manhattan and then all of a sudden it becomes popular and it's like, oh, Knicks tickets get too hard. And trying to get your, you know, reservation at your local place gets too hard. I love it. I'm like an islander in Hawaii. You guys can come for Christmas, but get the hell out come January 1st. We want the island back.

• 47:16Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody out of here. I'm, this is happening in Niseko. It's happening in Tahoe. Everywhere I want to go skiing, it's happening. But I, I think it's really the, there is something going on here because our own LPs are asking us to get them into late stage deals. So what we did was we built two groups in the firm. We got a late stage group. We got the, the early stage. We do the early stage and then we do SPVs. We did vast space. You know, in terms of billion dollar valuation companies, we did vast space. We did Adams Travis's new company, which came out of cloud kitchens, which we were investors in previously. We did a zipline and we, we keep doing those deals as well. And it's really interesting. When we do a syndicate for an early stage company, it's 500.

• 48:02Jason Calacanis?

  K to three million. When we do it for one of these later stage, it's like five million or 10 million. We charge a 2% origination fee, you know, like a sourcing fee, and that's it one time. And then we take 20% carry. So I'm actually able, if we can put 100 million through this a year to have $2 million to pay for our team and actually make it work and my LPs want it. Now what's happening is I get on the phone. I had a call with a family office, very famous one. I explained to them strategy and I don't think they were a candidate for Launch Fund Five, like early stage, waiting 12 years for the fund to wrap up or 15. And they were like, you know, we really like your strategy. We think we also

• 48:42Jason Calacanis?

  want to be in the fund. So we kind of brought them into the showroom with the Corvette, you know, and then they were, or we brought them in with, you know, Roadster 2.0, but they were like, you know, I'll, I'll take that Model Y L2 as my daily driver. So I, I think most smart funds are going to figure out how to do both these. And when you have a hit, Jenny or DA, you're going to want to pop up an SPV. If you do, and you don't want to do the work, happy to split the carry with you and syndicate it to my syndicate.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Like, like we talked about last week, this, the, the new industry that I call freelance investment banking, which is people who maybe would have been raising those funds, right? The 927, some of those people who don't have a new emerging fund have just transitioned to the SPV business. And that's all they do is go around and try to broker these deals. I think the, the, the challenge, you know, Ben spoke to it a little bit, is that there's a perception that these late-stage private deals only go up and that they all work. And of course, that's not going to be the case in the final judgment. So I think it is important for LPs who are even listening to this pod, that they have the right comparator when they

• 49:52Speaker 01

  think about these things. When you're looking at a, you know, $8 billion private company raising a Series C through an SPV, you should be comparing that to public comps. You shouldn't be thinking about that as an alternative to doing an early-stage venture fund investment. The dispersion and the outcomes is going to be radically different. The valuations are radically different and the risk reward very different. So I think there's this sort of interesting convergence of incentives here, where for the freelance investment banker who would have been an emerging fund manager, this is a very easy way to clip fees without cross-collateralizing your investing. In other words, you don't need to be good at

• 50:35Speaker 01

  investing because every deal's its own bet and they have nothing to, to, to bear on each other.

• 50:40Jason Calacanis?

  And you don't have to, Ben, put in your, here's my first four funds performance. It's like, yeah, here's our first deal.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Right. And then, and then for the, for the, for the guy at the family office, or the girl at the family office, although it's unfortunately mainly guys, who want to take, you know, who the executive who wants to take a shot at one of these things, it's kind of a perfect product because they get to go and tell their principal and go to dinner parties and talk about this really innovative company instinct that they're, you know, it's cocktail party stuff, but it's not actually perceived as venture risk-taking. So you don't need to put your career on the line as the analyst at the family office.

• 51:20Jason Calacanis?

  Such a good analysis.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  But it gets to look like you're innovative.

• 51:22Jason Calacanis?

  Let's get Ben in and then Jenny.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  I mean, that was beautifully said. I just, no, I agree. I mean, it's just, you shouldn't think of these, by the way, I would say the same thing about LPs who talk about investing in Andreessen's new fund as the same thing as investing in, you know, the same asset classes, investing in the next LH fund. Like, we both fit into venture capital in some like gigantic, you know, very broad sense, but like, we're not in the same business. We need different kinds of outcomes. We, our funds are constructed differently. We're just like, it's because we both work in venture capital does not mean that like, for an LP, we should serve the same purpose. And we've seen the barbell, the barbell exists in venture

• 52:06Speaker 04

  more than ever before, right? And I think you've, you know, Jenny, to Jenny's point before, not just using for your emerging managers, I believe you will have less money raised by sub $500 million funds this year than in any year in the last decade. And so it's not just emerging, it's small funds are right now getting, getting smaller, getting forgotten largely. And everyone is plowing into these mega, mega, mega, mega, mega platforms. And in the short term, they've had unbelievable on paper performance because they're the, you know, they're just like

• 52:41Jason Calacanis?

  They're putting big dollars to work in late-stage markup deals.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  And some of these may be generating, some of this might like, like, they've been the ones that at least on paper are right the last two or three years. And so even LPs that have always, that are like long-term professional LPs that have only been early-stage focused and never wanted to do big funds are now going, hmm, maybe we should do some big funds. At the same time, I think there's a, a little thing happening where folks who are in four or five or six platforms are going, you know, I'm actually going to cut some of these because they're in all the same companies. And I now have six exposures to blank and I really don't need six.

• 53:16Jason Calacanis?

  And you're 2%. You're, they're all, I mean, it's regression to the mean. You're, you're just going to do the average very quickly and the average in venture is not pretty.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  And so they're going to move away. And I, I think you're going to continue to see a, a real market exist at the early, early stage and a real market exist in the mega fund space. And the mega fund space is going to take up almost all the capital, but there's still enough for great managers early. The middle

• 53:42Jason Calacanis?

  Protect your pro rata funds.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  The middle is cooked. Every, by the way, that is like so not a, like innovative thought that the middle is cooked. The middle is cooked.

• 53:51Jason Calacanis?

  The middle's cooked, of course. And they have no rights, right Jenny? You have to, as an early-stage fund, you have to write that side letter. You have to demand, you know, information rights, a board observer see, whatever it is, and of course, pro rata, or don't do the deal. And then when they try to erase your pro rata in later deals, you have to put your foot down and say, this is a contractual right that we have. We're not giving it up. And you really need to lock those things in. And I have had, you know, I'm now up to maybe a dozen discussions around people trying to wipe our pro rata out. I have won 11 of 12. 11 of 12. And then even in that 12th one, we didn't get it on one round. We got it on the next because they were like, well, it's convertible. So

• 54:31Jason Calacanis?

  technically you don't have it. And then I just told the founder, technically, I don't need to be an investor in your company. So why don't you just buy my shares and I'll go and focus on other companies. And he's like, yeah, well, I kind of need you to retweet stuff and introduce me to influential people. And I want to come on your podcast. And I was like, well, then why are you telling your lawyers to screw me? He's like, the lawyers told me to screw you, Jason. And I'm like, the lawyers work for you. Who pays the bill for the lawyers? He's like, I do.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  Don't get me started on the, the pro rata. But I was just going to say on the SPVs, like the evolution that I've seen, especially for small funds, but you know, maybe Ben can chime in on, on larger funds. It was always the case that as our companies, you know, got bigger and bigger, we had, you know, the inside insights. And so we were able to give an informed recommendation, I'd say to our LPs, right? Where we could say, we're doing an SPV, or you want an allocation, even if you want a direct one, and here's what we think of the company. And I think the evolution that we see, and we've seen it at everywhere, where LPs are coming to us and they're saying, I know that you're not an early investor in X company, but can you get us allocation? And so like, we can

• 55:41Speaker 03

  oftentimes because we're, you know, well-networked and we've got, you know, a lot of access, but we can't really give that recommendation, whether that is a good company or not. And so the thing that, you know, worries me is, you know, all of a sudden the LPs are becoming pickers. That's not primarily what they're set up to do. And they're, you know, have to do their own diligence, but we're somehow attached to it. So if that deal doesn't go well, it wasn't one of our portfolio companies, but we were kind of doing them a favor. So I'm seeing that evolution where fund managers, including ourselves, are now doing SPVs on deals that are not portfolio companies. And I think that's like a distinction that we've only seen maybe in the last, you know, couple of months, year.

• 56:20Jason Calacanis?

  The way I explained it, DA, to our LPs is, hey, we missed zip line. We knew the founder was great. We maintained a relationship with him. He came on this week in startups twice, you know, in the past three years. He's awesome. I invited him to come to the All In Summit, yada, yada. And he gave us an allocation. So we made a mistake. We missed it early, but we got it late. And they're like, this is great. And I, I have now started to craft my early-stage product, and you can crib this Jenny if you like, as, hey, we're going to get great returns. Look at our track record, but we're also going to be an early warning system for you. Look at what's breaking out in our portfolio. Talk to our team anytime you want. Call us up, ask us about companies and we'll be able to introduce you to the

• 57:03Jason Calacanis?

  founder and give you that early signal. So if you think about it like a data product that you just built, like, if they were in all four of our funds at the early stage, then they get all that data that could be important signal for them when they're actually making those later-stage decisions on different categories. It's definitely an interesting time to be alive. And the other thing that's going to happen with SPVs, you're going to see this in the next year or two, is a lot of lawsuits, a lot of lawsuits. People are doing off-book stuff, illegal stuff, unethical stuff. And then, you know, some people are charging 3%, 2% or 3% per year in origination fees every year. So you put money into this

• 57:45Jason Calacanis?

  company at 30 billion, 40 billion, and you're paying 3% on the 5 million you put in every year? Every, so when I said it's 2%, the, one of the family office said, per year? And I said, no, no, one time. They said, oh, okay. Cause we're paying 3% with this one, you know, for the next five, 10 years. And I'm like, so you're paying 20% in fees, 15, 20% if it gets distributed in the next 15 years? He said, yeah. I said, how does that make sense? They're like, yeah, we asked ourselves that same question, but we YOLO.

• 58:13Speaker 04

  But YOLO, totally. But like, it's

• 58:15Jason Calacanis?

  We needed to be in this thing. And then I talked to one of these guys who's doing it. He's like, yeah, it's the greatest business ever. Nobody questions it. And I, you know, I'm now making X millions in fees every year and I don't have to do any more.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  And people don't know if there are direct cap table or nesting SPVs. And I think there's just a lot of lack of transparency. And it's going to be interesting, I guess, when OpenAI and Anthropic, you know, go public and then we see some of the lawsuits or the misunderstandings of what people have thought.

• 58:43Jason Calacanis?

  Misunderstanding.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  They'll be like, oh, I'm locked up for 40 years. So I didn't really, I didn't see that.

• 58:50Jason Calacanis?

  This is another thing.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  This is all, I mean, and Jason, this, this also speaks to something we talked about on last week's episode, which is just the, the broken public market. If you've, I mean, these are the investors who should be investing in IPOs. And the fact that there are enough of them who want to be a part of these late-stage private companies tells me those companies are ready to go public.

• 59:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 59:15Speaker 01

  And the investors are out there and they shouldn't have to pay 2%, 3% a year to get into the company.

• 59:22Speaker 04

  With no access to information and...

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 59:25Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Listen, we got one more story I want to hit, which is the Anthropic preview. But before we do that, DA, before you tee that up, I just want to give a shout out to my friends at athena.com/jcal. I was the first investor in this company, the first investor in Thumbtack, Jonathan's company and Marco's company, and they are crushing it. I have two full-time human EAs. Now you say human EAs in the age of Grokbot and all these assistants and instinct. Yeah, totally makes sense. Why would you have humans? I pair them with Grokbots. So they are making Grokbots. They're talking to Grokbots. I'm in the same threads with them. I have two of them, seven days a week. I have two Athena assistants, seven

• 1:00:08Jason Calacanis?

  days a week. They work 12 hours a day, essentially 10, 10 to 12 hours a day. I have human coverage all the time and they know how to use AI tools. So now I am absurdly, absurdly productive. I use it for domestic stuff. I do it for the business and it works. For example, DA, I got bots who can find me all kinds of candidates, but LinkedIn doesn't let me write a personal email to them. So we're stuck, right? We have a blocker. So for now, we have a form letter from me that we send to 100 people a day who we're trying to hire in Austin. And it scales and then they keep it in a database. It is wonderful. Go to athena.com/jcal.

• 1:00:50Jason Calacanis?

  You get $2,000 off. Highly recommend. Chamath has them too. All right. DA, tell us all about the Anthropic IPO slash ethos slash humanity.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Let me, let me start. This is going to be a bit of a rant here.

• 1:01:06Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, rants allowed.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  I want to start, I want to start with two video clips and hopefully the, the team can pull them up. The first is, it's very self-serving. It's me.

• 1:01:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  It's me and I'm sorry to say it's me on another technology show last week.

• 1:01:21Jason Calacanis?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Very rough. There's, there's a mix of naivete and sophistication among the AI folks. So when they hear AI people say smart things, they go, cool. Yeah, let's run at it. Everyone respects Demis.

• 1:01:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  But when Demis says we're going to cure all diseases in 10 years, I think people who have, you know, two PhDs and have been doing this for 40 years, no, come on, man. Like, one, you're giving a sort of false hope.

• 1:01:45Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  To a lot of people who are legitimately out there suffering or have a loved one who's on death's doorstep.

• 1:01:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Speaker 04

  Like, that's a little messed up.

• 1:01:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yes.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  So, so I, I, and I, I got a lot of heat. Now, that answer was in response to being asked, basically, what to the, what do the old-school Big Pharma people think of the AI gunslingers? So that, that was not necessarily my opinion. It kind of is my opinion, but I was trying to reflect what the Big Pharma, old-school drug discoverers in general sort of think about the claims of the AI innovators. And then, within just a few days, and I got cooked for that online because people thought it was me saying I'm skeptical, which is like heresy. And then yesterday, or the day before, a video comes out from the Anthropic Roadshow of Dario saying the following.

• 1:02:39Speaker 05

  Look at things like cancer, Alzheimer's, heart disease, mental illness. These will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade. And I believe that the company which gets the risks right will also be the company that has the license to operate, that society trusts and society believes can build the benefits in the right way.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  So, so I think in Dario's comment, the saving grace is the phrase, "I think," because it reveals that he, he's acknowledging that is his opinion. And by the way, he's welcome to have any opinions he wants. And I, in a sense, do think he's sincere and I think he does believe a lot of things that I'm more skeptical of. And yet, I hate being put in this position, whereas someone who's dedicated my career now for a decade to trying to fix our broken healthcare system, to trying to come up with cures for patients, I hate being

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  put in the position of being a hater, being, being, sounding like a hater by being skeptical when Dario says, "All of these things that, that are afflicting your family and friends are going to be gone in 10 years." And I just don't know what to do with that. It's like, it's very frustrating.

• 1:04:10Jason Calacanis?

  Ben, what do you think here? What's your advice to DA, who's obviously dealing, dealing with some cognitive dissonance here? He knows that it's cap, right? It's, we're going to have mental health in 20, we're going to have mental health issues in 2036. If what I saw on the internet this past week is any remote indicator, there's still a lot of mentally ill people out there. So how would you deal with this dissonance that he's dealing with?

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  DA, I'm like, I'm vibing with all your stuff here. I, I, I feel the same way and I think it extends beyond this specific topic of, you know, making healthcare promises. But just in general, the idea that there is this like, get on the train and AI is going to save the whole world and it's the greatest thing ever. And like, you'll, all these deals, you should pay whatever they're worth and it doesn't matter. And like, and anybody else is, you're like a relic and you don't know anything and you're like, you know, you don't really get it. And I think that that is, that's, that's happened in, in the market in general. Just this idea that like, get in the deepest part of the deep end or get out of the pool.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  And it bothers me too, because I'm a total optimist. I've literally committed my life to investing in like insane ideas before there's any evidence that they should even exist. And yet I sometimes feel like the pessimist in the room because of the way that the, everyone is sort of like behaving. It's frustrating. I think that talking about

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  But don't you think you need to counter some of the doomerism that we have out there? And like, listen, I'm not advocating for not telling the truth, but like bringing glimmers of health, glimmers of hope and categories that matter like health. I do think it's important.

• 1:05:57Speaker 04

  This is like our politics. You're either, you're either like...

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  The average person doesn't know this. They're just thinking data centers are sucking our water. But like, what about all the amazing things that are going to happen to our day-to-day experience with healthcare providers? So, I don't know.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  This is politics though, because you have, you have, you're either a Trumper or a socialist. And it's like, and most people are like, I don't really want to be either of those things. What is going on here?

• 1:06:19Jason Calacanis?

  You just described my life for the last two years.

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  Can't we live somewhere in here? And I think that you have, you know, DA, that's like, I don't know which side that is, but it's like, AI will cure all of our ills or data centers are evil and we should not, and like, we have to get out of the business entirely. And the answer is like, both these people are a little nuts. And in the middle here is some version.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Like, how do you think it feels, and, and I don't mean to be grim here, how do you think it feels to be a late-stage cancer patient and watch that video? And, and you've got this, you've got this tech gunslinger telling you that, oh, you know, you're just, you're just five years too early, bro. Sorry. Like, you're just going to have to accept death because, you know, if I, if I just had another five years, my company is going to fix all of this.

• 1:07:06Jason Calacanis?

  DA, you are making a spectacular point. And two things can be true here. The doomers are lunatics. They don't know what they're talking about. They are suffering from delusions of grandeur. You remember when Han Solo came out of carbonite and he says, "I, I go to sleep for a, you know, for a little bit and then I wake up and everybody thinks they're a Jedi knight." Like, the Jedi have been gone for a long time. Like, these people actually believe that they are the engineers and they're engineering the future of life. And to get like, you know, a little bit spiritual and religious here, the greatest sin you can have against God is to think that you're God. Like, this is Adam and Eve, you know,

• 1:07:49Jason Calacanis?

  and Satan saying like, well, you made babies, so therefore you're the gods now and you forsake God. These people are absolute lunatics who think that they have created God. They have been one-shot it. They one-shot it themselves. No matter how great this product is, it's software. It's software.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Well, I just want to add one thing, which is, it's, we're investors, so it's, this is native to us to think in probabilities and in scenarios. And unfortunately, nobody has a crystal ball. So that's the best you can do when it comes to forecasting. But... Dario knows that, you know, he's got a PhD and he's a neuros, you know, he's a neuro.

• 1:08:26Jason Calacanis?

  He's one shotted, bro. He's one shotted.

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  And he went to, he went to Caltech. Why do these people, and by the way, the entire field of AI used to be called statistics.

• 1:08:36Jason Calacanis?

  Machine learning.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  So, so these are, these are, these are literally all statisticians who in their public communications have decided to give up on statistics. You know, why can't you just say, we think there's a 5% chance that we're going to cure all diseases in the next 10 years? And we think there's a 40% chance that this other middle of the road thing's going to happen. It's just all one or the other.

• 1:09:03Jason Calacanis?

  It's delusion. No, the, this group of people, the, these, this group of San Francisco people are literally been one shotted. They have delusions of grandeur. They've seen into the black magic. Guess the next word box. And they literally believe it will be recursive, solve every problem in the world. And there is evidence that every math problem is going to get solved. But you're right, DA, it's not going to reverse dad's prostate cancer or mom's Alzheimer's.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  Well, I hope it does. And, and we're, we're going to try, we're going to use all of it. But my question for this group is, how much, what probability does each of you put on the ultimate accelerationist view, on basically on, on the Dario view? I mean, we should acknowledge there's a chance that could happen. And that's what, part of what makes this all exciting.

• 1:09:53Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, wait, define what that is. Superintelligence solves all disease. We live forever?

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  We get RSI in the next couple of years. It solves everything. There's no Microsoft anymore because Claude Tools that they put a video out on yesterday just makes everything obsolete. The whole pharmaceutical industry becomes obsolete, venture capital, but everything. Just, everything is different. You should put all your money in Anthropic. Why do anything else?

• 1:10:18Jason Calacanis?

  Ben, what's your P? Well, it's not P doom, it's P paradise. What's your P paradise?

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  I think there's a

• 1:10:24Jason Calacanis?

  Utopia, P utopia.

• 1:10:26Speaker 04

  Extraordinarily low likelihood of this. I don't know how low, but I'm not

• 1:10:31Jason Calacanis?

  Low single digits? Under 1%?

• 1:10:32Speaker 04

  Lower than low single digits.

• 1:10:34Jason Calacanis?

  Basis points. Okay. Your P utopia is, I'm going to put it at 10 bips.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  I'm a little more positive on that.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think you may. Well, you're positive on the end of human, on the end of society?

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  No, on the, um, are we going to solve these problems in the way it's articulated?

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  You, you sort of pulled the thread a bit there. So there's a difference between are we going to like get good advancements in medicine? Or are we like, is Anthropic the final company?

• 1:11:03Jason Calacanis?

  As stated by DA, every problem in the world is solved. Humanity has no disease. All problems are solved in the next, basically just what Dario said. In 10 years, we solve all diseases. All diseases, mental health, Alzheimer's in under 10 years. Percentage chance of that?

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  Zero.

• 1:11:22Jason Calacanis?

  Zero. Okay. I'm with you. I'm at P 0001.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  Well, I'll take the over on that. I mean, listen, cancer is hundreds of diseases. And so is heart disease and mental illness. And, you know, discovery speed up doesn't make them all vanish on the same schedule.

• 1:11:38Jason Calacanis?

  Stated, as Dario stated, your P1, P Dario 1, PD1, PD2?

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  I'm gonna, yeah, I mean, I, I am hopeful that, um, this is going to happen.

• 1:11:50Jason Calacanis?

  In under 10 years, there's a timeline associated with this. DA, where do you put it? What is your P Dario? 10 years, all diseases are cured. He believes it.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  My, yeah, I think my P Dario

• 1:12:04Jason Calacanis?

  P Dario.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Is between 1 and 5%.

• 1:12:06Jason Calacanis?

  Really? That's, that's

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  I'll take that.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  And, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you, I'll tell you why. Because if, if you told me tomorrow, you're president of the United States, you need to assemble the cabinet. I'd go and I'd try to find the smartest people I could possibly find in every area. And Dario would probably be one of those people. Even if you just said, you need the AI cabinet. Of course you put, you get Dario, you get Zuck, you get Larry Page. I mean, don't forget, um, Zuck and Priscilla's philanthropy made the same promise. I don't know what it was, eight, 10 years ago then, right? We're, we're going to start Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and we're going to solve all disease. And they've been doing amazing work. They haven't solved all disease, but they've done a lot of really cool

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  molecular biology work and virtual cell work. I think if you talk to Larry and Sergey, they probably believe something kind of similar. So, and you go talk to Elon, he believes something kind of similar. So it's not that I, as the feeble investor, am there intellectually, but I have to put some weight on the smartest technologists that are on the planet today agreeing with this view. So I don't know how much I put on that, but that's why I say somewhere between 1 and 5%.

• 1:13:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Another amazing episode. Now, at the end of the episode, we always like to go around the horn and everybody gets to give a little shine. And you get to double down, Ben. You got your recent

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  I didn't, I wasn't trying earlier. I apologize.

• 1:13:43Jason Calacanis?

  A little double down's okay. DA's playing his best of clips from around the web. He's going to double dip it as well. Uh, DA, start with you. What, tell us about a, a company that you're excited about, that you, you placed a bet on. You placing a bet is a, is a big statement.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Well, really cool company. They actually based down there in Texas where you are, J Cal. And it's called Phantom Neuro. We invested in this company a few years ago. And what they've developed is an implantable device that can go right under a patient's skin and above their muscle. And what this can enable is folks who have had an upper limb amputation. Imagine you've lost your arm from the elbow down. You can get this implant right here in the amputation stump. And it can detect the nerve signals that you're sending from your brain to the forearm and hand that you no longer have. And thereby you can control a robotic prosthetic limb just by thinking about it.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Now, obviously, we're also investors in Neuralink. We love the BCI vision as well. But this is something that can be done in an outpatient minimally invasive procedure in less than an hour. And why I'm so excited about this is because they just finally, a few months ago, implanted the first patients in a study in Australia. And it's just remarkable when you do this kind of stuff to finally see the video of someone getting it and controlling a prosthetic limb effortlessly. And, um, so that, that's what makes this, you know, worth doing and, and keeps you going. And I, I was just super juiced about that.

• 1:15:22Jason Calacanis?

  It, it's incredible. And the total addressable market for this has to be millions of people, right? There's millions of people.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  There are a lot of amputees. And unfortunately, a lot of those amputees are veterans. And when you've got conflicts like the one in Ukraine today, it's just shocking how many folks come out of those episodes without an arm or a leg. And basically only have civil war era technology to, you know, to get on with their lives. So, I mean, the, the hook, you've, you've all seen people with the hook.

• 1:15:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Speaker 01

  And the reason people use the hook is because that is basically the best thing that's out there. And, um, and, and the issue's not been a lack of robotics, because robotic hands have gotten really cool. But it's the ability to control them.

• 1:16:11Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. Ben, what do you got?

• 1:16:13Speaker 04

  That is so cool. Yeah. This makes me happy. That's a, that's a cool company.

• 1:16:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's good to be

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  How early did you invest in that, DA?

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Um, we were, we were seed investor about three years ago.

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  That's really, really awesome. I'm going to do something that is, uh, probably not going to save the world, but it's a company I think is really cool and that

• 1:16:32Jason Calacanis?

  It's not the Mets, is it?

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  It's, I, I wish it was the Mets. Um, go to Launchpointhq.com.

• 1:16:38Jason Calacanis?

  Launchpoint, Launchpoint HQ.

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  They are, uh, allowing folks who want to grow their brands and find new customers, the ability to buy UGC the same way that you buy Facebook or you buy TikTok, um, with the same sort of targeting with, uh, where you could turn on real scale with UGC. And, uh, I won't get ahead of myself, but the, the pull is pretty insane on this one. And, um, the, basically the short version is, um, it works and it really works.

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  And if you're a brand, if you're a company who's trying to attract a bunch of new customers, you, there is a new channel to spend money at scale that is performant like Facebook or Google or Insta. Um, and, um, there's really, you go back to sort of like the Trade Desk many years ago, maybe more recently an AppLovin'. It's very rare that you find a real scaled platform to go and do performance marketing. And this is the first thing I've seen that looks like that. And if you look at the customers who are spending, you got your Micro One folks up there.

• 1:18:02Jason Calacanis?

  I saw that.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  It, it is brands that have, uh, real need to grow quickly and big budgets and

• 1:18:11Jason Calacanis?

  I see Uber there as well.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  Sophistication are, uh, are leaning in hard. So I think it's a really, I think it's an amazing company. Um, and, uh, and a

• 1:18:21Jason Calacanis?

  And these people all label it, hey, I'm doing a shout out for Micro One. Here's what they do. It's, they're making a little bit of money in this influencer economy.

• 1:18:30Speaker 04

  In some cases, they're making not a little bit of money. I think that there is a, you know, I don't want to like overdo it, but Uber created an entirely new workforce from people who were not professional drivers and, and, and found a way to make a living. And there are a very rapidly enlarged group of folks who are making a living doing this now because of Micro One.

• 1:18:53Jason Calacanis?

  Brilliant. Jenny, what do you got? What do you got?

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  Well, I already gave my pitch today on Jelly. So the last thing I'll say on that is, um, if you're an emerging manager or you have an interesting use case.

• 1:19:03Speaker 04

  I want to use Jelly. Yeah. Why don't you just send, you're in the chat.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, DA's on the, um, yeah. And we'll get you, Jason, um, Ben. And like, if you're a professor and you want to give this to your students, like we have lots of good use cases. So just, um, on the website, you can sign up or just message me, [email protected]. And we'll get you signed up on the beta and then launched later, um, this year. So that's it.

• 1:19:26Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, I'll give a shout out for a company we incubated, obliteration.ai. Uh, you probably have heard about obliterated models. Uh, they're able to do anything. They have all of the safety and guardrails off of them. Well, why would you invest in that? Well, it turns out when new models come out, uh, people who are trying to do cybersecurity and, and you know, you got to be vetted to use this product, um, you're, you're not allowed to use the new fable. You have to wait until your system's been hacked already. So if you're doing red teaming, et cetera, you can, uh, use Obliteration AI, uh, to use things like GLM-53, et cetera. Uh, and then it's up to you to build up the harness and the controls.

• 1:20:09Jason Calacanis?

  And so this is really transformative in giving the good guys and gals, uh, CSOs and their teams, uh, the ability to see what these models can do uh, without the guardrails on them in order to find, uh, all the leaks in their cybersecurity. So I'm really excited about this one. Uh, they went to launch and then they went to, uh, Speedrun, A16. We've had like, I don't know, 10 companies go from our accelerator to Speedrun now. And recent, and speaking about platforms, being incredibly aggressive with Speedrun. They will very quickly review your startups, Jenny, if you wanted to like have them go, you know, get that experience. They're very fast. Uh, I think they're really sticking it to, um,

• 1:20:54Jason Calacanis?

  Y Combinator a bit, creating a bit of a competitor, I will say. Founders are, you know, really, uh, evaluating them alongside YC. All right. Another amazing episode. DA, thank you. Ben?

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:21:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well done. Jenny, of course. Knocked it out of the park and we'll see you all next time. Bye, bye.