IPO Shakeups, NVIDIA's Big Bets & Must-Know Founder Hacks | E2085

Today's show: IPO shakeups, big AI moves, and essential founder hacks—this episode covers it all. Jason breaks down Robinhood's 6X stock surge and his strategy for $HOOD, plus the latest on tech IPOs as Turo pulls out and SailPoint surges. We dive into AI's open-source battle, with X.ai chasing a $10B raise and DeepSeek challenging Hugging Face. And for founders, Jason shares the startup golden rule you should break for success—plus, a brand-new startup idea he's willing to fund right now. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show.(1:51) The 'new' news cycle(2:17) Calming down during chaotic times(4:29) IPO updates: Turo and SailPoint, private equity, public markets, and M&A(9:37) Rental car business & sharing economy job creation (9:53) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(12:21) Robinhood's financial performance & fintech resurgence(18:08) NVIDIA's investment in WeRide & self-driving technology(20:02) Paddle. Go to https://www.paddle.com/twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee-free period. (21:28) Cooking, convenience, DoorDash, Uber, CloudKitchens & startup opportunities(25:45) Smart IoT devices & revisiting the mobile convenience stores idea(29:59) Lemon.io . Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(33:12) XAI's potential funding & AI's impact on consumer behavior(40:49) Revisiting failed startup ideas & founder hacks(47:18) Customer advisory councils: size, incentives, and roles(52:09) Humanoid robots & market competition in the next decade(58:51) OpenAI model selection & user experience(1:00:56) Founder University pitches compilation(1:13:56) Audience question: Addressing criticism on Trump and Elon Musk(1:17:26) Discussion on Palantir, bias, state of journalism, and investigative reporting * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (9:53) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www. Squarespace.com/TWIST(20:02) Paddle. Go to https://www.paddle.com/twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee-free period. (29:59) Lemon.io . Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist* Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what are the most frequently used staples? What if we put them into a truck? What if you park those trucks and the trucks can move?

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:09Jason Calacanis?

  So you could have a truck with a dude in it or a gal or a person.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  Gals, guys, everybody in between. Don't cancel me, but what if this truck existed and it was optimized? You open up an app and I, you know, I've got to tell Dara about this idea. Imagine you open the Uber app and the convenience stores were not convenience stores. They were convenience trucks. They had a refrigerator section, got everything else. And now I don't know if this is feasible. Somebody should definitely do it. If somebody wanted to make this as a business, I would be interested in a crazy logistics and tech person duo who want to do this. I put you in the incubator, give you a hundred twenty five K. Let's model it.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Paddle, self-serve software is global by default, but selling to every country is complicated. Paddle's merchant of record manages payments, sales tax, chargebacks and refunds. So you don't have to. Wherever you want to take your business, go there with Paddle. Go to paddle.com/twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee free period. And lemon.io. Get access to lemon hire, a platform with more than 80,000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours. Get $2,000 off your first hire at lemon.io/hire today.

• 1:26Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I've been doing this for 14 years and I'm more excited to do it today than I've ever been. With me, my loyal co-host, Alex Wilhelm. He's X.com/Alex. I'm X.com/Jason. And our editorial director, Lon Harris, is X.com/Lon. Follow us, interact with us on X. So we know what you want us to talk about. We have a full docket today. How are you doing, brother? It's Friday, Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, Happy Valentine's Day. Um, you know, Jason, I think I've finally reached the point when I'm now accustomed to the, to the new news cycle. You know, you call Trump Captain Chaos and I think it's like individual news stories no longer land like a grenade on my head. I'm like, oh, things are happening still, so I'm feeling pretty good. I'm hanging in there.

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Surviving.

• 2:17Jason Calacanis?

  You know, here's my advice. I've been giving this advice. A lot of people are losing their minds because.

• 2:24Jason Calacanis?

  You know, the world can seem like it's on fire at times. This is independent of Trump, but Trump is particularly good at, you know, maybe blowing a little oxygen on the fire that is planet Earth and making things seem even more chaotic. There's been a lot of talk about certain other podcasts losing their minds and going viral. And oh, my God, Karen is going crazy and this professor is going crazy. Listen, I got a lot of people in my life who are super lefty. They're freaking the F out right now. I get it. Let me calm everybody down. Everybody take a deep breath.

• 3:05Jason Calacanis?

  And release and understand the country got through four years of Trump, got through four years of Biden. The Trump people were losing their mind during Biden. The Biden left people are losing their mind during Trump. We got through those eight years and the only thing that happened was COVID, a conflict in Gaza, Israel, the Russian Ukraine war, and we went 16 trillion in debt. In other words, it was a complete utter disaster in the last eight years. The world's always going to be disaster. The Middle East will be on fire every year or two in different conflicts. The United States is going to swing left, right, up and down. It's always been this way. It'll always be that way. Why? Because we care so deeply in a democracy and we have freedom of speech and we can debate these things.

• 3:50Jason Calacanis?

  So remember, your family, your work, art, nature, it's all there for you. Your kids, other people's kids, your nieces, your nephews, enjoy all of that. Politics will always be there. It'll always be on fire, Alex. It's always going to make people anxious and just focus on your family and your work. And we got great work to do here, startups and founders, changing the world. And so much great stuff going on in capitalism that we both love. So let's focus on that. Whatever's going on in the world, it's gonna be fine, everybody. It's gonna be fine. Take a deep breath.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  If it's not fine, you can sue Jason for your $5 rebate and the check will be in the mail. But I'm glad you brought up the tech news cycle, Jason, because we have... Okay, today's been busy. I have a couple of quick hits we have to get through.

• 4:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Before we get into a couple of fun things.

• 4:44Jason Calacanis?

  Let's get to work.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  First of all, on the IPO front, Turo, a company that filed originally back in 2022 and was dropping regular S1A filings, has given up.

• 4:54Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  They have withdrawn, yes, today. They have pulled their IPO. It is over. They have walked away from the public markets.

• 5:00Jason Calacanis?

  That's interesting. Didn't see that coming. This is Turo, T-U-R-O, the car company that you rent from. You rent other people's cars. Airbnb of cars.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:08Jason Calacanis?

  I just used it.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  It's a good business. Oh, you did? What'd you get?

• 5:11Jason Calacanis?

  I rented a Model 3 for 50 bucks a day when I went to Tahoe for three weeks. It was a pretty good experience, I have to say. There was some, like, ski business that I guess rents cars as part of their side hustle. So I gave them, I don't know, for 20 days, like a thousand bucks and change, 1,100 bucks.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:32Jason Calacanis?

  And I got a Model 3. I barely used it. But if I had had to take Ubers when I did, it would have been, I think, slightly more. It didn't have snow tires on it, and there were some instances of snow. So I was a little bummed about that. But the owner was delightful to me. They were solid. I lost one of the card keys, whatever. You know, and I liked the service because on Turo, you deal directly with the owner.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:58Jason Calacanis?

  And I think people are pretty reasonable. They didn't, like, hit me up for extra money, except for the card that we lost. Anyway, Turo's a great company. They make a decent amount of money, right? They make a billion or more a year, right? Or they wouldn't have filed to go public.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  So they grew from Q1 to Q3 of 2023. The last data we have, they had 666 million in revenue. That grew to 722 in the first three quarters of 2020.

• 6:23Jason Calacanis?

  Slow growth.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Eight and a half percent. So profitable.

• 6:26Jason Calacanis?

  Slow growth.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Slow growth. And I think right now, the market just probably wasn't as excited about the company as they hoped. It's still worth, I mean, even if it's worth 1.5x trailing revenue, Jason, it's a billion dollar company. So shout out, but disappointment there. And I would say a little bit of a negative signal for near term IPOs. But on the other side of that coin, SailPoint is now again, a public company. We talked about it before on the show, raised its IPO price range from 19 to 21 to 21 to 23. And then Jason priced at the top of that $23 share, raised over a billion dollars. And as of the time you started to record, it was up to 2432 a share. So a successfully well priced IPO, just not a startup. This is a take private that's going back out again. So it's interesting, but not the thing that

• 7:12Speaker 01

  you and I talk about so much as the need for liquidity of still private companies. So data points there, one down, one up, maybe neutral overall.

• 7:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, listen, SailPoint is an established company with a solid revenue base. It was public, went private, and then public again. We see this sometimes, something is undervalued in the public markets. What are the CEOs? What does the board do? They buy back shares or they go private like Zendesk did, or like SailPoint did, cleaned it up, get it growing again, nice and private without having to tip your cards or deal with lawyers and the expense of being public and all the scrutiny that comes from being public. And so here they are, you know, they're back going out public. All the private equity guys get to cash in. And like you said, if they went public at $23 a share and it went to 24, they priced to perfection. It was only, was within, you know, low single digit points of being properly priced. I do think Toro, there could be another piece to this. Sometimes people

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  file to go public to initiate M and A. So what does that mean? Hey, you are considering buying my company and you know, it's, you haven't given me the right price. What do I do? I filed to go public. I get priced by the public markets. I get a bunch of offers and then people swoop in. Shortly before an IPL and buy something. So don't be surprised if Toro gets bought by Airbnb or Uber in the next 10 seconds.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Airbnb would make so much sense to me, just frankly, from a, from a personal use perspective. If I was flying to a city and I rented a room and they said, also, here's your car. I mean, that just makes sense to me.

• 8:40Jason Calacanis?

  I think a lot of the people who run an Airbnb also run Toros or get arounds. Because if you think about it, this was the shared economy. And if you have a, you know, a guest house and you got your old car. I was even thinking about this. I have the Model Y and I've put 40,000 miles on it and I'm, I'm going to get the new one. There's a new one. They refreshed it finally. It's called the Juniper or something. So I'm definitely going to get that and I'm going to upgrade. And I was like, do I upgrade or do I keep the old one? Because the resale value, the trading value might only be 20K on this car. So do I keep it? And I was like, wow, you know, if this thing rented for $75 a day and I rented it out 100 days a year,

• 9:24Jason Calacanis?

  200 days a year, I mean, it would be, I would basically have a free car. Now, I'm not going to do that because that would take work. But I, if you're at home and you want to become part of the FIRE movement, financial independence, retire early.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:37Jason Calacanis?

  This seems like a great light FIRE technique, which is keep your old cars, acquire old cars, bring them to cities like Austin or whatever during South by Southwest, or have them in Tahoe during ski season. I think this is a good way to make a living. Squarespace makes stunning professional websites ridiculously easy. It doesn't matter if you're just selling a product or a service. Maybe you're just sharing your ideas. Maybe you're an artist, maybe you're a consultant. Squarespace is going to give you all the tools to make this happen. And as you know, Squarespace is always adding cutting edge features. This is why I've been using it for over a decade. And Squarespace is actually the longest running partner here on this weekend service.

• 10:21Jason Calacanis?

  Because every time I need a new feature, Squarespace adds it. And the new AI tools are unbelievable. They have one called Design Intelligence. It's like having a world-class designer sitting next to you in your office and you just answer. A couple of questions and their AI builds you a fully customized site that's perfect for your brand, that's unique to you, and it does it in just minutes. Personalized layouts, on-brand visuals, premium content, it's all ready to go. So start your year off strong at Squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com/twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Squarespace.com/twist. Thank you to Squarespace for making such a great product that we use year after year at an affordable price. And we really appreciate

• 11:05Jason Calacanis?

  your partnership. This is a great way to make a living, as is, running an Airbnb, because you could work for a couple of hours a day running these things. You could have 10 of these cars. I think it actually, the math makes sense. And as we see jobs go away, job displacement, you know, if you're somebody who is an Uber driver and self-driving starts taking off, when some number of people are going to want to rent a car, when you can't take Ubers everywhere, that gets quite expensive. As I mentioned, I want, and it's not, you know, sometimes you have to wait. So this is actually a pretty good idea, I think, for new jobs. Being a shepherd and having a herd of cars that you rent out through Toro and Get Around, that's not a bad

• 11:48Jason Calacanis?

  business. So I like the economy, the sharing economy. I do think it should be a feature of Airbnb or Uber or DoorDash.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Still, though, I mean, growing to three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue in three quarters. I mean, I mean, that's, that's incredibly hard. So hats off to them. Now, Jason, you love Robinhood, and we've talked about the company here on the show. I want to just show a chart of Robinhood's results, because I think it underscores the boom we're seeing in fintech today. We're not going to spend a lot of time on earnings, but we did want to touch just briefly on a couple of things. So if you're watching the YouTube version, I'm about to blow your mind. Observe this chart, Mr. Calacanis. Check that out.

• 12:24Jason Calacanis?

  Let's take a looky poo here. Oh, my Lord. You know, I haven't sold the share of my Robinhood. I was a pre-launch investor. We distributed to our LP. So there's like a real lesson here for me. I could have held that money. When did they IPO? Was it three years ago? I like to distribute the shares in the IPO to our LPs immediately. What that does is, I distributed them, I think, in the teen, high teens, I think we distributed at $15 to $20, somewhere in that range.

• 12:53Jason Calacanis?

  And I was like, this stock is undervalued. I should hold the shares, which you can do as a fund manager, and then distribute them when it goes higher. But I consulted people in my orbit, consulted some LPs, and they're like, just let us make that decision. Well, now on paper, you know, that fund, I think, is at 1.4x DPI distributed, and then it's at like 4.9 on paper. And I'm not sure how much we distributed, but it was a decent portion of that 1.5 that we've achieved. If I had held it, if it was out at 15, and it's at 60 now, I would have 4x'd it.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:25Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my Lord. Now that fund would be like a 6, 7, 8x fund. So now I have to go to the LPs just to think practically and say, hey, when you're considering being an LP in the future, just know if you had held your shares, you would have been at, you know, I guess that fund now on paper might be a 4 or 5x DPI. In reality, distributed, it might be on paper like an 8, 9, or 10.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, I would have been like, so I mean, I am like, happy I personally didn't sell any shares. And I opened up my Morgan Stanley account the other day, or whatever account, I don't know, where I have those shares custodian. And I was like, oh, my God, I have millions of dollars worth of Robinhood from my carry from that investment. And I tweeted, and I tweeted, I'd never sell a share. And when I started doing J-Trading, which I'm going to bring back, I'm going to bring back J-Trading. And I'm going to bring it back aggressively, because I think I should just consolidate down to like five bets like Bill Ackman does. I went and I was like, you know, and I think the stock is undervalued. What do you do when a stock's undervalued? Pull up my tweet, I bought another 5,000 shares. I was like, you know, I have to buy 5,000 shares at 10 bucks a pop. It's 50 grand. You know what's happened?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  It's gone up.

• 14:30Jason Calacanis?

  Gone up 6x. I made another quarter milli.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Here it is.

• 14:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  It's a lot of emojis. Never sold the share of Robinhood app, and I was a pre-launch angel investor, J-Trade an additional 5,000 shares when they hit 10. Now it's 62, and that tweet 64 today. So I take it that when I hit you up for a raise in a few weeks, the answer's going to be Alex, we're going to give you five times as much.

• 14:51Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. I'm going to tell you what you should do. Take the money I'm already paying you and put it in Robinhood. That's exactly what's going to happen.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Just wait until it hits the S and P 500. Then it'll go into the index funds.

• 15:00Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, it's very important, I think, for people to really Understand when the mark you should have cash around should have some cash around for when markets bottom out. So that you can do things like, you know, and I guess, you know, nibble or, you know, buy when the market is down. I think keeping a cash position right now and not investment advice is wise. If you could have some cash around and things hit the floor and you think that they're undervalued, which I did in 2022 and I put like 1.6 million dollars into the market here live on the show. That 1.6 million I put in that I had just in a little retirement account or something. It's now worth like 3.5. I mean, I two and a half X did in two years. I think I'm good at as a public market investor and and Robin Hood was my six X.

• 15:43Jason Calacanis?

  And I think I have a six or seven X in Facebook. Now, I don't know if that's the case now. I think these stocks are fully valued right now. Um, and the price earnings ratio is.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Bargain.

• 15:53Jason Calacanis?

  But they the revenue went up massively is the point here.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely massively and driving that was an absolutely insane increase in the amount of money they derived from crypto trading. The company did well across a lot of different metrics, but that's the thing that really stood out to me. And also Coinbase had another killer quarter. If Robin Hood does well on crypto, Coinbase does well on crypto as well. All this, I think, fits under the rubric of fintech is back. People have been talking about that. And I really think these earnings underscore that point, Jason. It's probably about time.

• 16:22Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if you look at the stacked bar chart, equity in green, options in light green or lime, crypto in light gray, other in dark gray. And what you see here is they have a number of people buying equities. The equities from Q3 to Q4 doubled almost from 37 million to 61 million. And then the options went up 10%. Options and equities is kind of the same things, options in a more aggressive way. But hold my lord, you know, crypto went from 61 in Q3 and 81 million in Q2. The revenue derived from that to 358 in Q4. What I think this is, is the value of crypto went up.

• 17:05Jason Calacanis?

  And the number of people participating, right? Because this is transaction based revenue. So they get a percentage of the transaction. So if Bitcoin is trading at 100,000 a coin versus 33,000, it's three times more valuable to Robinhood in terms of their fee structure, I'm guessing. So I don't know how these transactions actually work here, if it's on holding or whatever. But people, obviously, the crypto business now inside of Robinhood is bigger than the equity business?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Then it, well, there's more transaction-based revenue from

• 17:39Jason Calacanis?

  Holy cow.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  crypto compared to equities and options. But Robinhood does have other businesses. They hold retirement accounts and they have a subscription business as well. But to me, this chart shows the power of patience. I mean, if you believed in crypto back in Q4 22, when it was a, what, a sixth or a fifth of revenue on the transaction basis, you might have to wait another eight quarters for it to pay off. But here it is, and I believe Vlad and co. are laughing all the way to the bank. So good for them.

• 18:06Jason Calacanis?

  They're doing great. Would love to have Vlad on.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Well, we will get Vlad on. Elsewhere in the realm of technology news of note that people need to know today, Jason, Nvidia updated its filings telling people what it owns shares in, no longer owns shares in server robotics or SoundHound AI, but it disclosed an equity position in a company called WeRide. And we've talked about WeRide here on the show. It is a Chinese self-driving company. And here was the market's response, Jason.

• 18:33Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my, that's, that's a little spiky poo. So WeRide went up to $31 a share from, looked like 17 overnight. And this is based on Nvidia putting some shine on it, yeah?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. So essentially investors are betting that because Nvidia is now investing in this company, that maybe there'll be a deal, maybe there'll be an acquisition, anything. Nvidia right now has public market pixie dust. Anything that it puts a little capital in, gets the pixie dust on it, people get really excited. I think this is good for self-driving because I think it boosts the value of WeRide, makes the whole sector look more interesting, huzzah. But it's, it's kind of rare to see a 94% gain in a stock in one day. That's not a meme stock.

• 19:18Jason Calacanis?

  You know, it's really interesting what's happening in self-driving. You have the realization, I think, across the board that moving people from point A to point B and moving things, your lunch, your Valentine's flowers, et cetera, and everything in between, you know, Amazon, et cetera, is a huge, huge part of the economy. Transportation is very big, logistics very big. And I think we're also recognizing that car ownership is going to change and habits are changing. And the habit that's changing is people want their food made in a cloud kitchen and brought to them. They don't want to cook. They don't want to deal with it.

• 20:03Jason Calacanis?

  Did you know you're required to pay digital sales tax wherever your customers are? Well, no one likes dealing with this type of administration, whether it's taxes or accounting, especially when you're in a busy startup. And that's why Paddle has stepped in to put your billing and your taxes on autopilot. Whether you're launching a SaaS product or maybe you've got an app, perhaps a game, you now can reach billions of people globally. That's the magic of the internet. It's the magic of the App Store and it's awesome. And it's one of the things, hey, as an investor, we love too. But this scaling brings tons of challenges. It's like taking payments in local currencies and navigating all those regional tax laws. They're complicated. Plus, you got to manage fraud. You got to manage refunds, right? And that's different in every market. And that's a massive headache that's going to slow you down

• 20:48Jason Calacanis?

  from doing, you know, important work with product market fit, hiring and raising money. So let me tell you, a messy payment stack is going to eat up all your time, all of your energy and money. These are big company problems that you're going to face even as a small company, and they compound every time you enter a new market. Well, Paddle was built to handle this for you. Hey, listen, maybe this is unsexy, but this is what building and scaling a startup is all about. Sometimes you got to do your chores and you need a partner. Paddle is going to be your merchant of record, your MOR, and they're going to handle payment localization, fraud prevention, tax compliance, customer billing support, so that you can grow faster. Hey, man, if you need to launch in a new country, you're done. You want to add a payment method? Easy. And you want to set local pricing and you want to do it intelligently? One click.

• 21:32Jason Calacanis?

  So here's your call to action. Wherever you want to take your business, go there with Paddle. Paddle.com/twist to get started with your exclusive fee-free period. That's paddle.com/twist to unlock your no-fee startup period.

• 21:46Jason Calacanis?

  You might like to cook. And I think as Travis said, I think when he was on All In, cooking might look like horseback riding. You used to have to do cooking. You used to have to ride a horse to get from point one. But now you could choose something more convenient than riding a horse from point A to point B.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:03Jason Calacanis?

  And I think people are, you know, this is why I think DoorDash, which I have equity in and have shares in. And so I'm talking my own book here. I think DoorDash is a very important company. I think Uber is a very important company. And I think Cloud Kitchens are very important companies. I own all three of those. And I would, I don't think I'm ever going to sell my own in these companies because they're so amazing at making people's lives more convenient and giving them more options. And really, if you're thinking about building a startup, think about something that sucks. Tell me something you did in the last 30 days that sucked, that you didn't enjoy. And then pause for a second and think, well, what were the parts of it that really sucked?

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So last night, when I was making our two year old her last bottle of the day, we ran out of milk. And it was late and very cold. And I did not want to go to the grocery store at 8pm. So this morning, I had to traipse my way to Trader Joe's at 8:02am where it had opened. And I got my ears frozen off and I wanted to scream punchball.

• 23:02Jason Calacanis?

  Great. So we'll sit here and meditate for about 10 seconds on this. This is a staple.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:10Jason Calacanis?

  This is something you need on a regular basis. So everybody's minds are already flowing. If you have a baby, you need milk. Some people consider milk a staple. Some people consider oat milk a staple, eggs, butter, cheese, bread, whatever it is. You know how you people used to get their milk? There was a milk delivery. And they would bring your bottles, they put it on your doorstep, it comes straight from the cow. I just ordered 10 pounds of meat from a local ranch. I paid $185, $18 for grass fed beef. If you guys know the prices, and grass beef is expensive, $18, $18.50 a pound, pretty good to have it delivered to your doorstep. I got osso buco. I got pecan slash bavette steak. I got a ribeye in there. I got some ground beef. It was a really nice package.

• 23:56Jason Calacanis?

  And I thought, huh, what a convenient thing. I should put this on subscription. So I'm going to have a subscription every month at the start of the month. And I think I trust these guys. I'll see how the meat is. So there you go. Really, what you need is you need a subscription to milk.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  So we have one, and that's the funniest thing because you're dead on. So there's a thing called Monroe Dairy here in the Northeast. And it's a little box that goes out of your house and you put in order on Thursday nights and they bring you all sorts of local, you know, like the cows get petted and it's great. But we just burned through all of our milk early because my family apparently can consume infinite amounts. But you're right that I could use a better bird.

• 24:37Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then here's another idea. You have identified another problem. The other problem is, okay, you have the subscription, but managing the consumption of the subscription is, you know, a problem down this problem stack. How do you solve that problem? Somebody created and pitched me on this, a smart egg container in your refrigerator. It was, this is during the IOT era. You put the eggs in this, it knows how many eggs you have, it reorders the eggs. We could do this for milk as well. You could have milk, you could have a camera inside your refrigerator that has where the staples go. You keep them in there. If it doesn't exist, you order it. Now that's

• 25:17Jason Calacanis?

  complicated, I know, but it is the eventuality that these things will be abstracted away from you. There was another product that Amazon made. It was a little IOT device and it had the logo of Tide on it. So if you were a Tide person, I forgot what they were called, but you would put the Tide logo on your washing machine and you would press the button when you ran out of Tide and would automatically put it in. Now AI is going to do this for you. Google's AI is extraordinary. Amazon is extraordinary. You can put things on subscribe and save. That's another interesting product. And you could also order, you know, from these things. The idea I've always wanted to do, Alex. Yeah, I had an idea for something called Mercury Club. I never did it. But if somebody

• 26:02Jason Calacanis?

  wants to do Mercury Club as a concept, I'm down. It was kind of like GoPro. It was kind of like Cosmo, Urban Fetch during the day, which was I was thinking about, well, what are the most frequently used staples? What if we put them? Into a truck. What if you park those trucks and the trucks can move?

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:22Jason Calacanis?

  So you could have a truck with a dude in it or a gal or a person.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 26:28Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. There was a, there was an executive order. What am I supposed to do?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Guys, I think guys is

• 26:34Jason Calacanis?

  Fellas, guys.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Neutral. Yeah. I think guys is pretty broad.

• 26:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:39Jason Calacanis?

  Gals, guys, everybody in between. Don't cancel me, but what if this truck existed and it was optimized? And it just, you open up an app and I, you know, I've got to tell Dara about this idea. Imagine you open the Uber app and the convenience stores were not convenience stores. They were convenience trucks. They had a refrigerator section, got everything else. And instead of being 45 minutes away from you, because you had that option, right? You could have gone on Uber Eats and ordered it in your town or DoorDash.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I, I could have, but I have, um, Uber Eats has gotten to the point where it's so much more expensive than me schloping myself that I, that

• 27:17Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fine.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  I can afford it, but I get angry about

• 27:19Jason Calacanis?

  The fees.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:21Jason Calacanis?

  It's a bit much, Dara. I think with lower fees because the truck would be out there. Now, I don't know if this is feasible. Somebody should definitely do it. If somebody wanted to make this as a business, I would be interested in a crazy logistics and tech person duo who want to do this. I put you in the incubator, give you a hundred 25K. Let's model it.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Okay. But also, do you recall Spoon Rocket?

• 27:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  From 2013?

• 27:41Jason Calacanis?

  This was a great idea.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  It was.

• 27:43Jason Calacanis?

  We invested in a company called Bento, somebody who had worked, worked for me, did Bento version of it. Explain this concept. And I think Chamak was in Spoon Rocket. This was so brilliant before Uber Eats.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  So you're, you're at the office and you're hungry and let's say it's 4:00 PM and you're going to be working a little bit late. What you don't want to do is pull up Uber Eats, pick up restaurant, go through the whole song and dance, and then have it arrive between, you know, 45 or an hour and a half later. Cause traffic, if you're at the office is bad. Spoon Rocket had a set number of meals they made each day. And then they put them into cars and then they had the cars out and about. So if you wanted food now, you could pull up Spoon Rocket app. And you could see the three or four options. You could click, bring me that one. And then they would just pull the car around and there it was. So at the TechCrunch office back in the day, we used this all the time. The economics didn't work out, but it was great for me.

• 28:32Jason Calacanis?

  The economics were so close. Bento also did this, and I remember the founder was so great. And he figured out, you know, at about nine o'clock, there would be some left. And what they did was, at 9:00 PM, they told everybody in the app, it's two for one at 9:00 PM. And in the app, you would have these cars, they would have the salads in a cool bag, or in a cooler. Then they figured out that there were warm bags. So they would make the food, they figured out how to make the food in a proper kitchen. You know, like in San Francisco, there's a lot of, I'm talking about regulations, a lot of regulations in San Francisco, worst place you can launch any business. I mean, literally, I think the most regulation ever is San Francisco. But they figured it out, they tested everything.

• 29:16Jason Calacanis?

  And then what they did was for the hot meals, you know, because hot meals, I think, could last two hours on a hot tray at a certain temperature, was the law. So the car leaves in the trunk, they would have 20 hot meals in a hot bag. Then, they wanted to make sure it was temperature, so they put a temperature IoT device in it, and they put a heating pack in it. So there were heating packs that you could connect to a mobile battery, and you could keep the thing warm. And then they eventually learned how to plug it into the cigarette lighter, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, this idea was really good, but it turns out, getting one of four meals in 10 minutes, not as good as getting one of 400 restaurants in 40 minutes.

• 30:01Jason Calacanis?

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

• 30:43Jason Calacanis?

  They're only going to offer you handpicked developers with at least three years of experience. And if something goes wrong, lemon.io will find you a replacement developer ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they have told me they've had a great experience. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.io/twist and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. So stop burning money. Hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io/twist. So people would rather, and that was the discovery they learned.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:22Jason Calacanis?

  There was also a pizza company. The pizza company had a mobile truck. It was called Zuma. And Zuma Pizza was the robotic pizza. I think SoftBank dumped a ton of money on them. The thing crashed and burned. And I looked at investing and it was only 60% effective. But all of these ideas are available to you as an entrepreneur, just by looking at your own life and saying, there's got to be a better way. And then, of course, you got to figure out economics, et cetera. And there is always new technology that could give you a second chance at making it work. So anyway.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  People who weren't around for the dash button thing, this is what they looked like. There was little buttons, you could put them on.

• 31:58Jason Calacanis?

  What year is that?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  This is 2019.

• 32:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so not too long.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, that's now five, six years ago, Jason. I hate to break it to you, but COVID.

• 32:08Jason Calacanis?

  Time is moving quick.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, time's moving quick. If you were curious, this is what the Zuma pizza trucks looked like. I, I think, you know, SoftBank got a lot of stick for the amount of money they put into this company. But, I mean, if you think about fast delivery, people love that, and people love pizza, literally the whole world around, I can kind of see the, the effort there.

• 32:29Jason Calacanis?

  That pizza truck, by the way, was a Domino's on wheels. The problem is, there's a Domino's every mile or two in America. So they were up against Domino's. If there's a Domino's every, you know, literally every five miles and, you know, any American suburb, which there seemed to be.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:45Jason Calacanis?

  And they're in like the dankest office space, you know, commercial space. They, they, they didn't have as big of an advantage as they needed to have.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  No, no, because the overhead for that dank office space is pretty low and maintaining cars is not that cheap, especially if they're commercial. I want to get back to the idea of finding, finding ideas, Jason, in our founder hacks section, but quickly before we get to that, right before we jumped on the show, there was some breaking news. I haven't had a chance to get into this much. But the news is that XAI is working on a potential $10 billion funding round that would value the company at about 75 billion. Now, details to come. We'll find out more. We'll figure out if it's Sequoia or Andreessen or Valor that will lead this round. But I think it goes to show that after all the deep sea hype, hysteria, enthusiasm, excitement, people that are building these systems are still looking to raise a lot of capital, to put a lot of capital to work

• 33:41Speaker 01

  on building the infra and the investment and the personnel they need to kind of stay on top of the market. So I view this as more of an endorsement of the AI market writ large than perhaps any individual company, but it is of course a big deal for XAI and its ambitions to take on Anthropic, OpenAI and other domestic and foreign AI companies.

• 34:00Jason Calacanis?

  There's a big prize at the end of the AI rainbow. And if you were going to place a bet on who might do well here. Elon's not the person to bet against. He's kind of the person you want to bet with. He gets it. He was early. He funded OpenAI and he's got a unique data set inside of Twitter. That's real time and powerful in the same way Reddit is, in the same way. And I saw Reddit actually took a dive. I think they had some search engine problems. I'm not sure if it recovered. And that lawsuit we talked about the other day, those lawsuits are going to keep happening. Content's going to do great. It could mean that these models.

• 34:41Jason Calacanis?

  Are gonna need more capital, not just for service, but also for content licensing. And I think there's a big prize right now. Search, I've moved half my searches to ChatGPT Gemini, etc. And doing research, you know, here on the show, other things, I've moved 100% of mine there. I used to ask people to do research for me. Now I just do it myself and I, and I use deep, deep research, etc. 20 bucks, 100 bucks a month. Personal or corporate is a no brainer. Every single person is going to spend between 200 and $1,000 a year on their AI language model.

• 35:26Jason Calacanis?

  That's every human being.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yes. Do you know what I, how I benchmark it? What do I currently pay for my cellphone service?

• 35:33Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  That's kind of my, my benchmark for what I think the max for consumers will be because I am still blown away with the fact that DeepSeek shot to the top of the App Store. And I know we have caveated that with you can game it and blah, blah, blah. But I think it goes to show that what consumers want is the fastest, cheapest, best AI model, period. And I bet you that in time that will cost something around 200 to 500 bucks a year. Maybe it's a family plan, but it's still going to be a lot of compute, but people just love it. Um, last note on AI models, Jason, before founder hacks, take a look at this chart and I was impressed. So this is from the fine folks over at Hugging Face. Um, we've talked about them, talked to them. They host a lot of the, the AI models out there. Great service, love it.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Uh, they have a chart here that shows how DeepSeek's R1 model became, quote, "the most liked model ever" on Hugging Face just a few weeks after release. It's been downloaded over 10 million times across its different variants. And if you're watching the YouTube version of this, you can see that the

• 36:29Jason Calacanis?

  What's the number two one? The blue one that catches up to it. The yellow one goes straight up. I see that.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Black Forest Labs Flux 1-Dev. So that was a image making model that I think, um, Grok used, if memory serves.

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  Likes and downloads, you know, on things like GitHub, people joining programs is an indicator of their future success or at least interest in it today. Uh, what we're learning, I think from DeepSeek is open source, I believe, is going to win the day.

• 37:06Jason Calacanis?

  Respectfully to everybody who's doing closed source, I think open source models are going to have such a distinct advantage that we could see a handful of winners, handful being less than five, in the closed source, and they'll have some advantages as well. And then we're going to see 200 open source projects being contributed to every day in every single niche possible. And it's going to be wild. It's going to be wild how effective these are. And open source is going to win, I believe. 60, 40, yeah.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  That tracks with me. I do think that OpenAI, Anthropic, et cetera, will have value down the road. But I think this is why when we see 157 or $300 billion attached to OpenAI, a little scared. But there's been an interesting shift out there when it comes to startups in AI, because if you go back a year, people were talking about, you know, GPT wrappers, and that's just a skin around a model, and that's not going to have long-term viability, long-term strength. But now it seems that people are talking about how all the value in the AI game is going to accrue to the application layer, which means building on top of models. So it seems that the thinking has gone entire 180 here.

• 38:18Jason Calacanis?

  Not for me. I said from the beginning, applications and brand are defensible. If you, we just talked about Airbnb, Turo, Uber, you know, these verbs, when you have a brand and a network effect, you know, and you're on people's phones, that is defensible. That does, whether it's Instagram with network effects, and already being installed, and people having their history in it, it's very hard to displace Instagram, very hard to displace DoorDash, Uber, and Airbnb in people's lives. I've always felt that AI is going to give every single category of consumer behavior, all those incumbents are going

• 38:59Jason Calacanis?

  to have to adopt AI, and when they do, it gives startups the chance to get in there and maybe displace them, compete with them, or replace them. Any of those are possibilities when a new technology comes out. You used to have, there was an Uber before Uber, there was a Taxi Magic app where you could text and get a cab to show up. It never worked. There was no GPS. It was over text. It sucked. But.

• 39:29Jason Calacanis?

  It was the same concept Taxi Magic. When GPS and the gorgeous iPhone came out, you actually had it work.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  So this is from 2008. Observe this iPhone 3G style thing. Look at that.

• 39:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Booking successfully. Use refresh button. You had to manually refresh. But this is in the age of like Ajax happening, isn't it?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:57Jason Calacanis?

  Pickup location, live updates, taxi dispatch, the driver's name, taxi point 13 model. It was like literally giving you line item updates on where your car was. Now GPS didn't exist, I don't think, at that time. So you couldn't put it on a map yet. GPS came somewhere or Google Maps and Apple Maps. I think it came on the second or third iteration of the iPhone, maybe iPhone 3 or 4. In other words, just because something's been tried and failed multiple times, does not mean it's going to succeed. As we just mentioned with Spoon, Rocket, Bento and those other.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Zoom, et cetera.

• 40:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, on demand. Skype was, you know, supposed to do what we're doing right here. And now Zoom, you know, figured it out. So an IRC people use before Slack. So there's a long list of inspirational gravestones.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:49Jason Calacanis?

  For you to look up. You get to that. This is a founder tip, a strategy. You go to the graveyard, you dig up a body, you reanimate it.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  That is the best segue possible to the founder hack that I'm most excited to share on the show.

• 41:03Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  One thing we're going to be doing over the next while is pulling out great tips for founders, things we find from people we know, we do find from awesome posts from venture capitalists. Pick your poison. We have our ears and eyes open. Jason, what I found today that I wanted to bring to the show is actually from the startups community over on Reddit, and it's from a thread entitled, "We built the wrong startup, broke a startup golden rule and pivoted into success." Essentially, this founder ended up building something for which they were not the ICP or ideal customer profile. Now, people often say build for what you know. So they broke that rule. I thought the post was very interesting, but here's the That really stood out to me that I wanted to pass along to everyone listening from this post. And we'll have a link to it in the show notes and on the YouTube.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  Quote, "Don't look for what's cool now. Look for what you would have wanted two years ago in your career. This will help you find better, less competitive opportunities that will probably be less sexy." But I feel like this is what you're saying. Find the pain point, but in this case, just look back a little bit because there might be fewer eyes looking at it, but probably still a pertinent place to play software.

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  I participate once in a while in the startups community. If you see, I think I'm Jason M. Calacanis on Reddit and I, you know, I load Reddit a couple of times a week. And so here's the thread in the startups community. Okay. So to summarize, they pivoted, but they didn't work on the ideal customer profile being them. They found another customer. Maybe highlight the section here and let's read it.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  So essentially they had, quote, "To ignore the dogma of needing to be your own ICP because right now we don't have the complex pricing models, global compliance headaches, or enterprise building workflows that our ideal customers do. So they couldn't dog food their product as much, but the idea of building for yourself doesn't always, always apply" was the gist here.

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So there is great startup advice. Build something that you need, dog food it yourself, force yourself to use it. So if you were DoorDash, you'd say, "I'm only going to eat what DoorDash can deliver." And you're like, "Okay, well, we've got a Tex Mex place and we got a Greek place. I really feel like sushi or ramen." Well, now the team's got to go out and find a ramen place to add to DoorDash. Okay, fine, fair enough. But if you're trying to build something for CFOs who have compliance issues on a global basis, well, you're going to need to go find those folks, interview them, do customer interviews, listen to them, maybe even

• 43:24Jason Calacanis?

  bear hug them. So this is a great point they're making. And a lot of times, not having experience is an advantage because you can come to a problem and say, "I don't work in the hotel business."

• 43:40Jason Calacanis?

  So I don't feel the need to provide a concierge and a front desk. And I don't think every room has to have a Bible and needs to be cleaned every day. Now, if you're in the hotel business, you're like, oh, my God, how many times do we have people calling for room service and the front desk and the concierge you have to have? Those are must haves in the eyes of a hotel executive. Those are must haves. You know, when Joe Gebbia and, you know, Brian are doing Airbnb, they're like, I need a place to stay that's cheap, that I can afford, and that's in this location where hotels don't exist.

• 44:20Jason Calacanis?

  So they could build Airbnb and anybody who was in the hotel business would never have done it because they'd say, okay, it's got to be 500 a night. They need to have a 24 hour concierge. We need to have room service available, stock the fridge, whatever it is. Fresh eyes can also help. You do not need to dog food your product. You just need to have empathy for a customer base. You need to be in contact with the customer base. And I'll make this even more specific. The way to get this done is to take five or six of your customers and build a customer advisory council, a customer advisory council, and you put them in WhatsApp. And you put three or four of your co-founders in there and you say, hey, we made a new feature. What do you think? And they debate it.

• 45:05Jason Calacanis?

  Now, they might send you on a custom software boondoggle where you're building something for one customer. But if you have five or 10 of them, they might say, this was good for me. And six of them say it's great. Four of them say they don't need it. Okay, move that up the priority list. 10 of 10, let's say you had 10 customers that 10 of 10 want it. Okay, you know, you got to build it. Most times, you know, the customers want you to take the top one, two, or three features and just make them better, faster, cheaper, increase in network effects. What are the features everybody uses every day?

• 45:42Jason Calacanis?

  On their iPhone, well, they make phone calls, they surf the web and they use messages. When you are watching a keynote and it's, you know, Apple's doing a keynote or Google's doing a keynote, what do you see them talk about all the time? Here's the new features of iMessage. We did for phones. We have new AirPods that do noise cancellation, that automatically pick up the phone when you nod your head. We do transcripts, we do FaceTime, we do filters in FaceTime. And oh, our new browser is faster. The battery lasts longer because the browser doesn't do it than our browser does X, Y and Z. They start with the most frequent use cases and making them better with every iteration of the phone.

• 46:26Jason Calacanis?

  That's another technique. Take the core feature, make it 10% better. Why? Because 100% of your customer base uses that core feature. On the case of Zoom, it would be the quality of the Zoom. Every time Zoom became easier to use and higher quality video, better audio. That's actually why Skype never worked.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  Well, Jason, they didn't even have to have high quality. They just had to have video calls that worked.

• 46:53Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Like that, the bar was on the ground in that case. And there was just, there was billions of dollars sitting there, but everyone thought that WebEx had it locked up.

• 47:00Jason Calacanis?

  And you know, WebEx was complicated. It didn't work. The software to install was kludgy. There were just so many blockers and when you did a video call, it didn't work as smoothly. So taking out friction, really understanding your, I like this as a, as a first foray into, um, what do we call in this segment?

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Founder hacks for now, until you come with a better, a better name. We have a question from Gary with two Rs. Jason, why wouldn't you want all customers suggesting and voting on directions instead of five to 10?

• 47:29Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great question. I'm talking about startups in year one or two. And you want to have a certain type of customer on your customer advisory council. You want the one who is spending money, is demanding, uses the product. And you can't possibly take a hun, advice from a hundred people, a thousand people. It's too many and you won't build a Relationship with them. What you could do is you could have 10 people in one WhatsApp chat, getting to know each other, getting to your team, then you launch a second one. Say, hey, I want you to be on our customer advisory council. You put them into a second one. How do I know this? Well, I started doing dinners because I wanted to understand our LP base a little bit better. And I wanted to understand the members of the syndicate. What did I do?

• 48:13Jason Calacanis?

  I had a dinner in New York at Mark's off Madison, great Italian place. My, my, my friend Mark Straussman over by Madison Park. I think a dozen people showed up. I put them into this group and signal and I talked to them regularly. Then I started Founder Fridays and you can go to founderfridays.tech, get a great tech domain name, tell them we sent you. Founder Fridays is eight founders in Los Angeles. I think the Los Angeles was actually up to like 30. And so they have four tables of six or eight, and then we have like 30 cities, but they're all in groups that are smaller. So you can actually have a conversation. The, the proper size of a dinner conversation is six people at a round table. When you get to eight, you have two conversations of four or three conversations of two or three.

• 48:57Jason Calacanis?

  So you just have to be thoughtful about how many people are in the conversation because it will lead to chaos. If you don't, if you, if you go above 10 in my expectation in a WhatsApp. I think once a WhatsApp group goes above 10, too chaotic. So.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Too chaotic. I have a, a personal question to follow up on this point about customer councils. And this is a really ticky tacky one, Jason, but do you give discounts to the customers that are on your customer advisory council? Do you incent them to do this?

• 49:25Jason Calacanis?

  You don't have to. It turns out the people who actually really need the product enjoy having access to the founders and the access and being able to have a say in the direction of the company is what is truly valuable to them. Getting your newsletter for free. Actually, if you were to do it for cautiousoptimism.substack.com, it would actually not work because.

• 49:53Jason Calacanis?

  Then you'd have freeloaders giving you advice. Taking advice from people who aren't paying for your product is the worst idea ever. Now, you're saying a discount, but even still, users are called users for a reason. They use you. Customers are sacred. They've given you their credit card. You're in a deep, meaningful relationship with you. You're making a transaction and they, the beauty of subscriptions is will cancel if you're not providing value. Yeah. So people over index on advice from venture capitalists, users, social media. But they should be indexing on a smaller number of people who are customers and who use the product. Cause there's really two types of customers you could have.

• 50:38Jason Calacanis?

  Engaged customers and customers. You want to find the most engaged customers and, you know, really index off of their feedback. The person who's bought their third or fourth Tesla, that's a very important customer for Elon to listen to and for the team over there to listen to. My feedback as somebody who has, you know, is on their fourth Tesla and is getting their fifth, super important for them. Why am I going to buy the Model Y, not the Cybertruck? I've been going back and forth. Why would my wife want the Model X, not the Model S or the Model Y? That's a really interesting piece of information for people to have. That's why being able to segment customers into buckets.

• 51:20Jason Calacanis?

  So loyal customers who you've had already, who have been on your newsletter for over a year and to open it up all the time, they're going to have one piece of advice for you. The, the people who are in month one might have a different piece of advice. So this is where segmenting cohorts, so you'll hear cohorts come up. Very important. The people who leased their Teslas. And who have the Model 3 and buy the most basic model and use it for driving Uber or their commuters or the college kids. That's that's one piece of advice. The people who buy the Model X and spend 100 dimes on it, that's a super user. And that is critically important.

• 52:02Jason Calacanis?

  And you know what? This is a hit. This segment's a hit. I'm hearing people say this is super useful and commenting on it.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  Why don't we grab another question from the audience? How big of a role do you think humanoid robots will play in the next 10 years? Do you really think it's worth all the hype?

• 52:19Jason Calacanis?

  In the next five years, I don't think you're going to own one if you're listening to my voice right now, in all likelihood. I think five of us out of 100 will own one. I will be one. And that would just be like the same person who buys like the Newton Personal Digital Assistant. It's going to be that sort of level or people who bought PCs in the 80s. In other words, there's a bell curve, the technology adoption bell curve. And there's the masses, they're the middle of the bell curve. And then you have the laggards that are the last to use a technology. And then there are the people who like to sample new technology, the avant garde. And people call them different things, but you see the innovators, early adopters,

• 53:02Jason Calacanis?

  early majority, late majority, and laggards. And this is the adoption curve. And if you haven't seen this before, it's super important for you to know where you are. If we were talking about electric vehicles right now, we are in the early majority. And we're going into the late majority. I was an innovator. I bought the Roadster. Early adopters bought the Model S. The early majority bought the Model 3 NY. The late majority is going to buy, you know, whatever comes after that. And the laggards are the ones who get dragged along. If you had Uber on your phone in year one or two, you know, you were part of that, you know, Vanguard at the front. And the Vanguard, they'll buy stuff, not use it, they'll try it.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:48Jason Calacanis?

  You know, they're Odd people, they're coveted people, but it's me, you, Robert Scoble, and people who can't shut up about it, who buy the Vision Pro and wear it and annoy people and bring it to Thanksgiving. It's that guy. It's that guy at Thanksgiving.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Are you spying on my marriage? Because that sounds a lot like me.

• 54:08Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if you brought a VR headset to Thanksgiving in the last 10 years, you're that guy.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, you are.

• 54:15Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, when you look at that chart, we're not even anywhere near the early or late majority. We're nowhere near that for VR. Some things get stuck. They're sticky.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  In the early adopters era, yeah.

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's important to know where you are because early adopters will buy anything. They'll tell you it's incredible. They'll try it. They'll buy it. They'll try it. They'll throw it in a drawer. You know, you really need to get to that majority and it takes time to get there. If the product is a startup, startups should not be going after markets where laggards are using the product.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:52Jason Calacanis?

  Because that means there's competitors.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  There are tons. And there's more competitors there are, the lower the margins are, perfect competition, economics 101, et cetera.

• 55:01Jason Calacanis?

  Very hard to acquire customers for, you know, an Uber or an Airbnb competitor or a DoorDash competitor at this point because they got that locked up. Why would you switch? And to get people to switch requires a technological innovation, or it requires being 10 times better, which most often comes from a technological innovation. So the example we gave of Taxi Magic, the iPhone with GPS and Maps was 10 times better. And for some reason Taxi Magic couldn't make that jump and Saicar, Lyft and Uber did.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  Oh, I can tell you why Taxi Magic didn't make that jump is because it was only 15% better. And you were still talking to a taxi company who didn't control their taxi drivers and you couldn't rate both ways. And people were bad and they didn't take credit cards and they blah, blah, blah. It didn't solve the pain point. It just made it slightly easier if you're still at dinner to order a taxi.

• 55:52Jason Calacanis?

  And this, what you pointed out was somebody who sat there and said, what sucks about getting a taxi? That was Garrett, that was Ryan, and that was Travis. They sat there and they obsessed over every step. And one framing is what sucks? Can we take that pain out? The other is what's delightful? Can we add that in? And another framing that people will often use in the startup world is friction. Friction is just what's slowing you down? Another way to describe pain. And one of the things that always slows people down in these systems is payments and tipping. And I had major debates with Travis about tipping. I wanted to add tips early on. He did not. He was absolutely against it.

• 56:35Jason Calacanis?

  He said, well, just going to make it fast for you to get in and out. If you have to make a decision, the decision should be to get an Uber. The decision should be to rate the driver if you want to, because that helps the network effects. Let's not add any other decisions. No more decisions. And there were just two decisions, ordering the Uber, you know, putting in your destination, which is the decision to use it or not, which really isn't a decision. So what are the decisions to do after you've decided? Rate the driver. I mean, I think that's the only decision to this day in Uber. Rate the driver.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  You can pick a black X.

• 57:12Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. You do have to do that. Right.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  What's that? Isn't there a middle option like?

• 57:16Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there's XL, there's teen, there's woman driver, there's dog driver. I mean, actually, because they're all below the fold, the newspaper term, below the fold of the newspaper, less important information. Because they're below the fold, you don't even see them.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So this is a fair point. And adding that friction, there's a good reason to do it. Because if you have a lot of luggage, you need an XL. And if you're an executive and a CEO, you might want the black. And if you're on a budget and you're a kid, you might want the Uber X.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  You know how people joke that all technology is bundling and unbundling and just kind of going back and forth?

• 57:52Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  OpenAI, when announcing that they were going to, in the future, merge their reasoning and non-reasoning models together after GPT 4.5, they said, we also hate the model dropdown selector because it's kind of anti-consumer. You just want the best, fastest one. You don't want to pick between 4O dash mini or 03 dash mini flash.

• 58:12Jason Calacanis?

  And you used to have to pick Dolly to make an image versus ChatGPT to ask a text question. Now, I don't think Dolly's in the menu anymore. So you should ask a question and it should determine if that question requires which model. In pro mode, you can expose those. And that's what it really should be. If you want to hit the dropdown, you hit it. Logging in is throttling. So ChatGPT, their monthly active users went bonkers when they took out logging in. Now, they had to have logging in because they had paid customers and they had an SLA, service level agreement that, you know, they wanted to do. So there it is.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  So why don't we talk about your favorite Founder University pitches?

• 58:54Jason Calacanis?

  The reason we started Founder.University was about half the applications for funding we get at Launch Fund, that's the name of our fund. The applications come to launch.co slash apply. About half of them were people who were thinking about starting a company. They had a couple of co-founders, but they weren't, they didn't have finished products. They hadn't even incorporated. And so they couldn't come to our accelerator. And the way I designed the accelerator was to take seven companies. This last time, we did 11. We did 11 because we had too many great companies coming out of Founder University, to be honest. It's a 12-week course. You do it online. It's twice a week, Monday and Thursday nights. If you come for all 12 Monday nights, you submit your progress every week.

• 59:38Jason Calacanis?

  And then we offer a 25K check as your first check at a million-dollar valuation if you want it. Rich people don't take it. That's about 20% of the people starting companies. The other 80% ask for it every week. And then we also offer the standard Silicon Valley Y Combinator tech stars launch accelerator deal of 125K. When the companies get towards graduation, the best ones who make the most progress pitch myself and Mike Savino, another general partner at our firm, my partner. And, um, you know, we ranked them and we picked them. And we like to invest out of the 250 teams who come to each cohort. We just finished cohort nine. Uh, we like to invest in the top 10%, about 25 of them. So of the 100 investments we do a year, probably 50, 60 of them are Founder University 25K

• 1:00:23Jason Calacanis?

  or 125K checks. And the other 40 come from the launch accelerator or our follow-on investments from the top 5% of our portfolio. That's the portfolio strategy. That's what we're doing here. So these are very raw, year zero startups, but I just thought I would share some of them to give them some shine. Tell you why we're considering investing in them, or we have invested in them, or why they were our top folks. And, um, you know, when folks do get an investment from us and they go through the accelerator, I eventually have them come on the podcast if they make progress. But this is like, I just thought as a new thing, we just run through their website, show their websites. You tell me the name, I give you my feedback.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's pull up the first one then, and it is poker GPT, which is a combination of AI and poker Jason, two of our favorite things. Talk me through why this one is your jam.

• 1:01:10Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, uh, there is a very interesting business out there of training people to play poker. These websites typically are subscriptions. They cost fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month. Some of them cost thousands a month. And, um, what this product does is you give it your hand, and then the hand gets, uh, analyzed by chat GPT. What they're trying to do here is just make you a better poker player. So this business could reasonably get, I would say, hundreds of thousands of subscribers for twenty bucks a month. So it's a small community, but what I've noticed

• 1:01:50Jason Calacanis?

  is there is a hundred million dollar revenue opportunity out there for a company like chess.com. So I don't believe anybody's made the definitive poker coach. Search chat GPT, you see what's happening with poker. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that there's enough of an audience, maybe not as big as chess, to get to low millions of revenue here, perhaps even eight figures. I don't need, as a year one investor or a year zero investor, to figure out, Alex, if it can get to a hundred million, if it can get to low millions. I think as a team, we can figure out what's the next card to tone over, turn over. Pull up tone base as an example for a second. Yeah, so to speak.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  You're not gonna, you're not gonna take your, uh, your victory lap there? All right, so here we go.

• 1:02:38Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just gonna drop them. So here's tone base. Tone base went through our accelerator, they're doing phenomenal. They started with, I think, guitar, classical guitar. And then they added violin. Yeah, hit the dropdown for violin right there. Thank you. Guitar, piano, cello, flute, trumpet, voice, clarinet, double bass, viola. They're now up to their eighth or ninth category.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  It's Jason, it's viola.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  Viola, thank you.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Sorry, I've been in too many symphonies to have you defame.

• 1:03:06Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. It's not my jam.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  The middle, the middle stepchild of the stringed instrument.

• 1:03:10Jason Calacanis?

  This is masterclass for these instruments. Now, you would think when they came to us with but guitar or violin, that it wouldn't have been a big enough opportunity. And you would be right, it wouldn't be big enough for venture. My job as the world's greatest angel investor is to squint and say, yeah, let's get that ideal customer profile to our point before. And then that wedge is in there. Open the wedge. Let's open the wedge. Get in there. How did Uber start? Lincoln Town Car. Then Uber app. Uber Eats. Uber Pool. Uber XL. You can rent cars on Uber now. You can take trains in Europe.

• 1:03:53Jason Calacanis?

  You know, it just never ends. And so that's what I think is going to happen in the poker space. There's other poker games. And if they figure out how to coach poker, I'm a poker player who also plays chess. There are people who are poker players who also play Magic the Gathering. So I love the idea. I love poker coaching. I think there's something here. I want to see what happens on the flop or the turn. What's our next company?

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  I played with it. Super cool. And it's got me excited because I'm going to New Orleans for a week, which means I'm going to be playing a lot of poker.

• 1:04:24Jason Calacanis?

  I love it.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  All right. Next up is JS Mon. I think this is, this is super cool because JavaScript, if you don't know, is pretty much the most important language out there for programming. So.

• 1:04:35Jason Calacanis?

  We're seeing a ton of security startups and there's companies like Palo Alto Networks that acquire great companies, put the CEOs in charge so there's a clear path to an exit here. And these security experts created JS Mon to help people who want to protect websites and run reports on them in security. People are constantly running attacks, what they call it, white hat attacks, and they do security audits. So automating security audits, if you have the ability to do so, is going to be a huge business. AI is going to play a part in it. So it is what it says it is. And. You know, enterprise 500 a month, you know, security bro 50 bucks a month, you get the idea.

• 1:05:20Jason Calacanis?

  I would get rid of the free and the starter and just go right to the enterprise or security pro. And that's always the thing, you know, our number one piece of advice to founders who have products in market is almost always, how did you come up with the pricing and double it?

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was about to say double it.

• 1:05:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, double it.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:05:38Jason Calacanis?

  Double it.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  All right. Another one, Jason, this one surprised me a little bit that it was your jam. I'm going to do my best, explain to people what Wide Worlds is. So its tagline is make memes, build culture, drive growth. And this is really interesting. Essentially, there's a meme inside of the crypto world that community is everything. And that's predicated on a fundamental truth that humans like to work in groups and we are all kind of community oriented folks. Okay. So what they do is this company, Wide Worlds, will help you define your brand language, use AI to help you generate a lot more assets for around that brand image, and then use agents to help send those assets around to energize your community.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  And I think it's a cool idea, but I'm, I'm curious what about it grabbed your eye? Cause to me, there's a lot of moving parts. I'm a little curious, but I'm a little skeptical.

• 1:06:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So this is a weird idea. And when I see weird ones, I get interested, especially weird ideas with traction. There is a unique opportunity to create a character using generative AI. I think we can all understand that. And you see characters all the time. Mascots is one way to say it for different products, right? So if you look at any cereal brand, Fruit Loop, she got the Toucan Sam, Aunt Jemima with the pancakes. Although they've changed that now, I think there's a politically correct, they actually use the, if you look that up for a second, this is interesting. My daughter was educating me because she's, she's very up on these social issues.

• 1:07:14Jason Calacanis?

  They actually changed the name of Aunt Jemima pancakes to the literal name of the woman who inspired it because it's using an archetype, I think, for Aunt Jemima. I know we're getting down like a little political correctness here. But Aunt Jemima is considered a mammy, quote unquote, offensive trope racist kind of thing. So they came up with the actual name of the woman who was the inspiration. And Pearl, and it's now Pearl Milling Company?

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Yes, formerly Aunt Jemima.

• 1:07:49Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I don't know if anybody knew this, but now it's Pearl Milling and they have the woman who's, do they still have the woman's photo or no, they got rid of that too?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  I don't think there's, no, it's just their brand image now, but I'm seeing eggnog pancakes, which means that I'm hungry.

• 1:08:04Jason Calacanis?

  I had, I had waffles today, man. I got this great waffle maker. Anyway, I don't know how I feel about this. Pepe the Frog was a funny meme that got co-opted by the Nazi kind of white supremacist. Anyway, there's a whole range of characters here, putting aside racist.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  Tony the Tiger from Frosty Flakes.

• 1:08:23Jason Calacanis?

  Forgetting me back on track. So in order to make one of these and to make memes, you need to have a tool. And I thought, well, this is interesting. If we made a twist character that went with this for our brand, we could then have the twist tiger. I don't know, it's just an idea.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  No, no, I love it.

• 1:08:45Jason Calacanis?

  And that, that we could make memes all day with them. Seems silly, but characters and IP are what drive the mouse house. Disney. It's what everybody's aspiring to in advertising. So maybe there is a business here. Again, odd with traction. This is an interesting factor. Something strange you don't understand with traction. Get curious. I'm curious.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  This reminds me of the fact that most scientific discoveries don't kind of commence with eureka, but instead, huh, that's weird. Yeah, I'm thinking about the twist mascot. We want to have alliteration. So we want T T. Animals that begin with T include the taper, the tarantula, Tasmanian devil, termite, tern, tetra, tiger, tiger, shark, toad, tortoise, et cetera. If you have a idea for us, Alex W. Lunch, let me know what you think we should do.

• 1:09:39Jason Calacanis?

  Tiger is pretty dope. I mean, it kind of rolls off the tongue. Twist tiger, twist tiger shark. It's interesting, too.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Twist turtle. I'm kidding. Okay, we have one more to do, which is, oh, okay, this one I struggle with, but you liked it. So we're going to talk about it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lumix advertising.

• 1:09:56Jason Calacanis?

  Lumix advertising. Here, what they've done is on a Vespa, you know, when you're delivering food, there's a box on the back.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Jason Calacanis?

  And in this box, which they created, it's got three sides of it have an LED display. And I thought to myself, low margin, outdoor advertising business, probably not venture scale. When I see an idea that's working, I get curious. So it's working. They've got prototypes out there. They're doing it in South Beach. And I thought, you know, Uber and DoorDash have a wonderful ad base business, right? And so does Instacart, Amazon, right? You're at the shopping cart. So I started thinking about that. And I started thinking about food delivery. And I just thought, hmm, what else is there here? Again, open up the aperture, keep your eyes there. The advice I gave to the founder was to look at the leasing

• 1:10:49Jason Calacanis?

  business. Uber had a leasing business. I forgot the name of it. You can look it up, Alex. It doesn't have the name Uber in it. But there was a leasing business associated with Uber at some point. I think Lyft had it too. They might have spun it out. And there are finance companies. Like, if you look at car companies today, with the exception of Tesla, you know, Ford's leasing business or whatever. So here it is. Introducing exchange leasing, lease options built for Uber driver partners. So One of the things people don't know is you, if you want to be an Uber driver, you may not have a car or you may have one car for your household that you can use for four hours. But you know, mom or dad have to go pick up the kids or they need it this weekend. And then whoever's driving in the household for Uber needs a car. So you can actually go rent a car. That's how taxis and medallions work in New York.

• 1:11:32Jason Calacanis?

  You rent a car and the medallion for 130 bucks. The taxi driver drives like a lunatic until they hit 130 bucks, which on a Sunday might take them five or six hours. You understand why they're under some pressure because they got a 12 hour shift. They get to hour six. Now you know why they're peeing in a cup is because they're like, oh my God, I might lose money or I might make $200 today and I spent 135. So I just thought to myself, you know, I wonder if they provided and rented the scooter and the advertising box on the back, what would happen? Then I thought to myself, man, if I was Uber or DoorDash, or I was like a local restaurant in partnership with them. I don't know if you know, like, I think DoorDash and Uber,

• 1:12:13Jason Calacanis?

  they might've had exclusives with McDonald's or Starbucks at different times.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Jason Calacanis?

  I might very much want to buy that fleet out for the year and not have Dunkin have it versus.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Oh, this is just like in search when you have to, if you search for Jason Calacanis and you're a brand, you have to buy your first ads.

• 1:12:33Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you. Thank you. Now everybody's buying calacanis.com. Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. If you do that, that'd be a, that'd be a great troll.

• 1:12:39Jason Calacanis?

  If you buy calacanis.com right now, I'm going to send an army of people. I'm going to find one of these Manila Army, uh, black hats, gray hats to click your ad 10,000 times from US IP addresses and cost you a lot of money. Don't do it.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Who, oh, oh, no, you own calacanis.com.

• 1:12:55Jason Calacanis?

  I own calacanis.com. I'm just saying if you bought the ads on there. So anyway, I usually don't like these hardware things, but I do think I encourage the founders since they have traction to keep pulling the string and see what's happening here because maybe, you know, we had invested in this one other company that I felt like I got screwed on, um, pretty badly. And they had some traction and, but it was constantly having problems. I do think maybe another entrepreneur, another team.

• 1:13:23Jason Calacanis?

  Specifically taking a swing at this part of the puzzle without having to wrap a car could be interesting.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  So I agree with all of that. And I think actually, if you think about bringing this technology to, I don't know, markets in Asia that have high density and high scooter usage, for example, could be great. My only beef with this is that it's just very visually loud. And, you know, I still see Ubers go by with the, the, the light bar on top that has ads. I'm always like, ah, okay. I guess everything ends up kind of being what it was before. Kind of like how, you know, YouTube TV was cheap and awesome and now it's getting more and more like cable.

• 1:13:56Jason Calacanis?

  I'll take one more question from the audience. There was somebody here, actually, you know, I hate to delve into, um, politics too much, but somebody asked something about like, why don't I ever call out Trump or Elon? And I wanted to address that, actually. If you look at my Twitter feed, I've literally talked about process journalism today and how an investigative journalism and how I felt like, I believe the next step for Doge, uh, is to hire a team of investigative journalists to take the stuff that's spilling out of Doge, right? And I think the Doge philosophy is radical transparency, just put stuff out there. That was called process journalism. In fact, your alma mater, TechCrunch, believed in process journalism. I did not.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:14:39Jason Calacanis?

  The reason I didn't like process journalism is because that's what Gawker did to a more extreme level. They would release something that came into the tip line. And then they would use that as a cudgel, as a leverage to kind of get the story and get more information. The problem is, you know, you could spread something that's false.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:57Jason Calacanis?

  And that's why process journalism, sometimes it's good to slow down. Now, it's the people's money. The mandate is let the information out there. But as we've seen, the information come out, hey, Reuters is got this much money. Politico got this much money. And then we find out, okay, that wasn't Reuters, the journalist, that was Reuters, the data service, or that was Politico. The reason it seems like a lot of money is, but anyway, my advice to them is, yeah, sure. You want to dump everything, do a data dump. That's totally fine. That's what WikiLeaks did. As a journalist, former journalist, I like a little more thoroughness, but I understand many people believe that they should be able to see the CIA documents for WikiLeaks or this, or

• 1:15:42Jason Calacanis?

  the JFK files. I like a little vetting, but I understand people disagree with me. Why not have five investigative journalists in a room? Every day talking about these contracts. Yes, the condoms in Gaza might be a different Gaza, whatever. Okay, how much are we spending on condoms? How much are other countries spending on condoms in other countries? Why are we doing that? Is that to prevent disease, to change birth rates? What's the CIA's goal here? You know, the USAID stuff was driven by foreign influence. A lot of times that's like a CIA thing or hearts and minds. Let's have an investigative journalist call people on the ground and say, hey, did this money actually buy 50 million condoms?

• 1:16:25Jason Calacanis?

  Or did we get charged $100 per condom? Like, that's the work of investigative journalists. The problem is investigative journalism is expensive.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  And slow.

• 1:16:33Jason Calacanis?

  And slow. So, to your point, do I ever agree with, do I disagree with Trump? I told everybody, I gave him a B and I, the meme coin I don't like. I don't like the lawfare, whatever's going on with the mayor of New York.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  New York is a-

• 1:16:48Jason Calacanis?

  And doing that like leverage, I don't like that either. I didn't like the lawfare when they did it against Trump, when they up those charges. I said that very publicly. I thought the upscale of the charges was ridiculous. Like, just give him the speeding ticket, whatever. So, it's gonna be chaotic. I can't even keep up with all this stuff. My job is to talk about startups.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:07Jason Calacanis?

  That's what we're gonna do here. When it overlaps with technology, yes, I'm gonna talk about it. But I cannot be responsible for everything David Sacks, Elon, and everybody else is doing in the world. I have countless friends in and around the administration. I'm gonna stick to my lane largely startups and technology.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  No vicarious guilt.

• 1:17:28Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I'm questioning things all day long. Are people not paying attention?

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  They're not.

• 1:17:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So-

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  So, I mean, just to give you the example of this, we touched on Palantir the other day. And honestly, we talked about how Palantir is a great company with a visionary founder and products that are resonating in the market. And then we said, you know what, though? Maybe this valuation is not entirely moored to fundamentals. And I saw- A lot of responses to threads talking about our conversation. And people were just claiming that we're like on the take, shorting the stock. Like, one, who would pay us to ramble about?

• 1:18:06Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want to use the R word on the program, but that is Ray.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  We are not stupid, y'all. So anyways, it's people need to relax. The thing that I'll say is, and I know we're going to get this on Monday, but just my little point is right now, there's a lot of people who are posting pro-dosh things to engender favor with the people on X that are the most influential. This is not just Elon. This is the venture capital community and so forth. And I think that what they're doing is often getting ahead of their facts and their ability to understand the data. And so we're having wasted news cycles of BS that could have been precluded with traditional reporting standards. I love citizen journalism. I love having more voices. I've been on Twitter since 2007. But if you're going to make an explosive claim about criminality.

• 1:18:53Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, you know, somewhere between a data dump and, you know, biased journalism on the margin, whether it's MSNBC, NPR, the Daily Wire, you know, opinion journalism. There's investigative journalism. There's thoughtful center, middle of the road journalists just pursuing truth. It's not that many anymore. Everybody seems to have picked a side in journalism. There's a lot of sensationalism. I just wish they were like more centered journalistic organizations. I'm really dismayed that that model doesn't work anymore.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  So what we should do, and I know we're, we're going to say this mostly for Monday, but what if we founded the, um, the Center for Boring Journalism?

• 1:19:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, unprofitable journalism.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  We are going to talk to you about these things and you are going to be slightly bored, but they are what matters.

• 1:19:45Jason Calacanis?

  The Center for Boring and Unprofitable Journalism.

• 1:19:50Jason Calacanis?

  As opposed to tribal journalism. That would be pretty great. All right, everybody. It's a lot of show. Next week is President's Day, so we'll be back on Tuesday, I think.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:19:58Jason Calacanis?

  We'll see you all next time. He's X.com slash Alex. I'm X.com slash Jason. We'll have Lon come on, on the news on Tuesday and we'll see you all then.