Lovable's Anton Osika on Revolutionizing Software Development and OpenAI Drops Deep Research | E2080

OpenAI dropped Deep Research—hilariously, the exact same name as Google's existing tool. Jason and Alex dive into the AI arms race, break down Lovable.dev's insane growth to $10M ARR in weeks, and test whether AI can really replace software engineers. Plus, they analyze Trump's latest tariff chaos and what it means for startups, global trade, and the economy. * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show. (1:09) Jason's talk and case study at Stanford (2:38) Managing the chaotic news cycle (5:22) NBA trade insights: Luka Doncic and Anthony Davis (7:15) Lovable startup's rapid growth (9:44) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (11:02) Lovable's AI demo and European startup landscape (15:20) Lovable's target market and pricing strategy (19:48) PrizePicks. Run your game. Download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST (21:39) Custom software development's future with AI (23:17) Launching and designing AI-powered apps (27:07) US sovereign wealth funds and crypto regulation (28:56) LinkedIn Ads. Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (33:42) Creative tax and debt reduction strategies (41:34) Defense spending and OpenAI's new product (46:51) OpenAI's market impact and ethical considerations (53:02) AI's role in content creation and job market (58:13) Venture capital trends and startup ecosystem (1:01:19) DeepSeek's popularity and security concerns (1:03:28) Tariffs, economic impact, and supply chain importance * 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 * Check out: Standford Case Study on Jason: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/jason-calacanis-case-study-creating-resources OpenAI's Deep Research: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ * Follow Anton X: https://x.com/antonosika LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/antonosika/ * Follow Lovable: X: https://x.com/lovable_dev Website: www.lovable.dev * 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: (0:00) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (0:00) PrizePicks. Run your game. Download the app today and use code TWIST to get $50 instantly after you play your first $5 lineup! Go to: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/TWIST (0:00) LinkedIn Ads. Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  All right. So a couple of weeks ago, we had the guy behind Deep Research from Google on the show. Great interview, great time. You were a big fan of the product. Sure. I'm a big fan of the product. Then over the weekend, OpenAI, everyone's favorite closed AI shop, dropped their own product. And Jason, did you know that they also called it Deep Research?

• 0:19Jason Calacanis?

  It's fascinating that they, I'm shocked that in any way we would have OpenAI do something like steal somebody else's IP.

• 0:31Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's kind of laughable, right? They just called it the same exact thing. Okay, sure.

• 0:36Speaker 02

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• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calcanese, Alex Wilhelm, and we do this three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, typically around 12 Texas time. But sometimes I have a speaking gig at Stanford, like I did today, where I was speaking at Jeffrey Pfeiffer's Power class. So we had to push it back a little bit because I do this class every semester because they wrote a case study on me in the class, which is a very weird experience. But there is a case study, literally, on how I accumulated power early in my career that was written maybe 10 years ago. So that is a very surreal thing to have these students at. Man, one of the students came at me during the class. It was, it was spicy.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Okay, I have, I have a similar story, not about me, but I was taking some classes at Booth Business School as an undergraduate. And we were doing, you know, looking at case studies, going through, debating them as a class. And no one knew who this guy was at the back of the classroom, just sitting there. And then it turns out he was the principal in the case study we had been going through. And we'd all been ragging on the decisions he made. And then he's like, well, that was interesting. And we were all like, ah, okay. But that's the power of, you know, tier one. Schools is that you get the actual principals to come in and do their thing. And that's why I love it.

• 2:15Jason Calacanis?

  There it is.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Here it is. Yes, and a study in creating resources. Yeah, man, good job. I will read that.

• 2:21Jason Calacanis?

  But yeah, no, it's been a crazy two weeks, I guess. Today is Monday, two weeks after the inauguration. So here we are on February 3rd. We're two weeks into it and my Lord, the news cycle is fast and furious, huh?

• 2:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, we were joking about this a little bit before the show, but it feels like one of those times in which enough things are happening in so many different places and in different directions that you need to be online essentially chronically to stay even fractionally up to date. Like there's just chaos is maybe the right word, but kinetic might be the right word as well.

• 2:55Jason Calacanis?

  Sure, there's a lot going on. I think people forgot, you know, my nickname for Trump in his first term was Captain Chaos, because he would say things and he would say things in such a colorful way. And then people would take him seriously or not take him seriously. And all of a sudden you would have protests at airports. You would have the stock market doing backflips. As somebody I heard say recently, he's the, he's the stick in the drain that stirs it. So, you know, if something's happening in the stock market, like he's probably stirring the drain. And today the stock market absolutely tanked because there was all this talk over the weekend about tariffs. But as you pointed out on X, this is like the third or fourth time he's brought up tariffs and done the saber rattling. And it's the same thing over and over.

• 3:40Jason Calacanis?

  We're doing tariffs. The person on the other side of the table acquiesces and sends troops to the borders or promises to fix something he doesn't like, and then the tariffs are off. So I actually recommend maybe once a day, if you're a founder, consuming news, put it into a nice, tight 30 minute, 60 minute band, get all your news. You know, you'll get some of it here on the pod when you're on the treadmill or going for a hike. But man, if you try to keep up with this, it's going to rattle your brain over the next. 206 weeks that are left of this.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Don't, don't say that out loud. I don't think I'm going to survive. Um, but Jason, you pointed out over on, uh, on social media that there's actually quite a lot more than just this going on. There's also been the NBA trade chaos that has been heard around the world. I'm still trying to sort out what the hell is going on there. I do think you make a good point that a little self-care, a little investment in ourselves. It's going to be a, it's definitely going to be a marathon. So I think we should all breathe.

• 4:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  And try to maintain a little calm.

• 4:38Jason Calacanis?

  Download the Calm app and, uh, I literally did a hike. I always do a hike on the ranch every day with the daughters and, uh, then, uh, I was going to do my meditation and, uh, two of my three daughters did the meditation with me on Calm. And we had like a very nice 14 minutes together. Diet, exercise, sleep, meditation. Focus on those four things in chaotic times, in any times, and you'll build a nice, solid foundation. Luckily you can use Eight Sleep, one of our investments. You can use Fitbot, another one of our investments for working out. Eight Sleep for sleep, Calm for meditation and for diet, you can use Nutrisense. So I have a, I have a startup in each of these categories. Go ahead and take care of those four things, however you choose. Um.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  Call him Mr. Power Outlet because he's always got a plug.

• 5:21Jason Calacanis?

  I got a plug. Yes. I will absolutely, uh, have a plug for all the stuff, but you know, we, uh, we like to have founders on the show. Oh, and then on the Dallas trade, just for people who are wondering, since Alex and I are big NBA fans.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Yes, sir.

• 5:33Jason Calacanis?

  WTF?

• 5:34Speaker 00

  Okay. So for folks who don't know, Luka Doncic is one of the, is generational talent. I think is the way to put it in terms of his disability to play, play the game and was the only player on the Mavericks that I could, you know, name, because I'm not a Mavs guy, I'm a Warriors guy.

• 5:47Jason Calacanis?

  Player in the league. Well said. 25 years old, went to the finals last year.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:53Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe shows up out of shape, overweight. People say it's like 280 pounds or whatever. So there, I guess there are some concerns about his, uh, fitness, but lo and behold, on Saturday night or Sunday night, Saturday night, I think, he got traded to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, who's 32 years old. It would be like the equivalent of trading Michael Jordan or Steph Curry. Like he's that level in his prime. So it makes no sense. And they got a very little take for him. And people in Dallas, it's like literally good at the franchise, but I like the conspiracy theory that the family that bought the Dallas Mavericks from Cuban.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:28Jason Calacanis?

  Care deeply about, uh, they made their money in, uh, gambling and wagering. And that's maybe going to happen in Texas, maybe not. They want to build a casino with the Mavericks as the anchor, but maybe they are trying to sink the franchise in order to move it to Vegas, uh, which is an interesting concept.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Well, there's a WNBA team, the Aces play in Vegas already and there's a, they have the hockey team there and they moved the, the, help me out Jason, the Oakland A's, I believe are now.

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, yeah, I think so. Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  So I can see like a growing nexus of, of sports in, in Vegas, but I still really, even with that, I questioned the trade just as a sports fan. I, I struggle. AD's a player. Shout out, you know? Good. But I mean, you don't give away.

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  Player, maybe?

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it feels, it feels like a downgrade. Anyways, we love having founders on the show. And Jason, there's been a startup that I've been tracking over on X that has been consistently growing, I think faster than basically any startup that I can recall in history. It's called Lovable and they announced back in December, they had reached four million ARR. And then they announced just a couple of days ago, they've hit 10 million ARR. So I wanted to get the co-founder on the show. So let's bring Anton Osika up. He is the co-founder of lovable.dev. Anton, how you doing?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Super excited to be here. I'm a fan of the pod, Jason and Alex.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yes. So, uh, tell us, what is your startup do?

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Lovable is very simple. Instead of hiring a software engineer, which is costly and slow, you ask an AI system in plain English what you want. Then you get an app or a website out of that. And, uh, yeah, we just hit, as you're saying, Alex, 20,000 paying users. And I'm excited to be here and spread some of my excitement about, about what we're doing.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  I'm going to show what I built using Lovable in a second, but just to be clear, are you actually adding something like a million dollars in ARR a week right now?

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's going very predictably going one million per week since we launched in late November.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Okay. And then Jason, because you see a lot more pitch decks than I do, how often do you see a startup that's less than a few years old growing by a million ARR a week?

• 8:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, that would be some viral moment. It would depend on the price of the product, right? If the product was a billion dollars to install and that would be crazy because you would have to have this crazy pipeline of SaaS companies and seven figure deals are, are rare and they take six months to 12 months typically to close. If you, uh, had a product that was a thousand dollars, getting a thousand people to spend a thousand dollars a month, uh, or a thousand dollars a year is a little bit easier, but still hard. So yeah, hyper growth is hyper growth. It's rare.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  To show this off, Jason, I'm going to show you what I built because you know my coding skills are absolutely, you know, top of the, top of the pinnacle. Here is a game that I made this morning using lovable.dev and I'm going to show off my awesome snake game. If you're on the audio version, I made snake with obstacles. That's my major innovation in the gaming space. And as you can see, it works, Jason, it's live on the browser and you can crash and die and do pretty well. But Anton, there's a, there's a flaw in this that we wanted to talk about.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you have a leaderboard on the right side, but from what I understood, Alex, this is not something you have connected to the backend with a database where the leaderboard is stored globally. Maybe it works just on your computer, but you asked me like, okay, can we change this? And I said, sure, we can do it live on the, on the stream.

• 9:45Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:29Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:01Speaker 00

  So we're gonna try to do this live, Jason. The point is, my leaderboard doesn't work because I don't know what I'm doing. So here is the lovable interface. Again, if you're on the audio version, there is a canvas on the right side where the AI builds stuff for you. And then on the left, I have a chat with lovable's AI, talking through what's going on. So my leaderboard doesn't work for my snake game. And I have signed up for Superbase, Anton, and now I need to know what I should do to make this work as a non-developer.

• 11:28Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so just, and stepping back for a second, Anton, you basically put in a text prompt and it writes code.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's what you can see on the left. If you zoom in, Alex, you can see like what Alex has been asking the AI to do. And then it's been iteratively changing the entire application that's shown on the right hand side.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  It's slick, Jason. Like, I actually knew how to, I mean, we use a lot of AI here at Twist, but I mean, like, this was something that I could pull together as a non-developer quickly, and it was fun, so.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  So we go big Superbase, that's the standard, I think, half of Y companies, they use Superbase. So here you select your project that you created with Superbase. And then you don't need to touch Superbase more after that. If you want to like have low level granular access to the data yourself, you can go into that interface. But now the AI is going to handle the setup of the backend system, which you, like, you, Alex, you own all the data that's stored in that backend system. And then every time that you ask something, of course, the AI has to think for a while.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Okay, so, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop sharing and we'll come back to this, but I want to talk about how you managed to get to where you are, because the company launched three times, Anton. And it seems the third time was the magic moment. So can you just talk us through a little bit about how you went from a couple of launches that didn't have a major impact to the one that came later last year that ended up growing to 10 million AR?

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So before I started the company around this, I actually launched the fourth time or the first time, which was showing off an open source project that was called the GPT engineer. So this isn't at all the same product, but it was the first open source project that really captured the mind space of people outside of tech, I think, in that large. Language models, they can start writing code. So that was back in twenty twenty two. But now we launched three times last year with with a version kind of prompt to application. And and it's still it had a completely different name. And each time we launched the first, the first and second time, it was behind the waitlist. And with the product, it was like good, people liked it.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  But we we wanted to only do a full, full on launch when we knew it was really good. We had solved some of the big roadblocks from the second launch, which is that AI gets stuck and so on.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  And then and then we launched in twenty first of November, and since then it's going been going straight up.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  So then I want to talk about doing this inside of Europe. Because one thing we've talked about a lot, I mean, here on the show, frankly, is that Europe does seem to be a little bit behind in the realm of AI, uh, leading to tweets like this showing, you know, the US has OpenAI and XAI and China has DeepSeek, and then Europe only has these impossible to open bottles. You said that you're committed to proving this wrong. So I I'm just curious, what's it like building an AI startup in Europe today with the regulatory load? And does the company's quick growth show that it's more possible than some people thought?

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I sure hope so. I think it's definitely a bit of hard mode to do it from do AI startups from Europe. Because you get, it's much harder to break through the noise. People are generally less ambitious, like the ambition density is is usually lower. And so you need, but you, but the talent, like the raw talent is there. So you need to find the raw talent and light the fire and increase the ambition level. And I I definitely think there's going to be a lot more acceleration coming coming out of Europe. And, um, yeah, on your point about the regulatory problems. I think they, from where we are at now, mostly affect consumers in Europe.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  So like, there might be a point in time where we only release something outside of Europe, which would be very sad, right? But it's not affecting our our revenue in the same way, frankly.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  So explain to me the product a little bit more. The, who is this product aimed at? And then how much are you charging for it?

• 15:19Speaker 03

  So this product is used by tons of different groups. Entrepreneurs that want to build a company or build even a SaaS startup. They don't have to find a great developer, which is super hard. They can just start building the product all the way to the first version with our tool. And then if they can onboard engineers to the code base with their tool of choice. So anyone who's an entrepreneur and hustler love this tool. We also see designers and product managers who've been using Figma. Instead of going straight to building the real thing by just prompting and then getting a beautiful user interface. And finally, agencies and freelancers that usually took days to deliver projects or weeks. They can ship things in less than a day.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  And that's, those are like all the different big user groups that.

• 16:09Jason Calacanis?

  And how much does it cost?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  So it starts at $20 per month and then it goes up based on the AI consumption, which is like extremely expensive from our side. I think you just shared a screenshot on that, Alex, to $900 per month.

• 16:21Jason Calacanis?

  And so the concept is somebody who wants to prototype or build an app. They want to build a fitness app, a sleeping app, a small game. Instead of hiring a developer team, they can go in there, build it themselves. And then maybe hand it off to a developer team if they want to finalize it. I guess that's the piece that I'm always wondering because in a native language model, whether using Gemini or ChatGPT or even a code like Replit, you know, these features have existed. You can have it build prototypes. But then when does it move from being a toy where you can build like, you know, interesting little projects and be like, wow, it made it? To, hey, this is production quality and it can go there.

• 17:04Jason Calacanis?

  Has that sort of final piece been crossed yet? And or does it still require you to have a developer and a dev team in your mind?

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Also, there's like 100,000 K dollar projects that are shipped with our tool completely. And I could share my screen just to showcase a few of those. Commercial applications that people have built. So here's just an example from our Christmas hackathon. Here, I'm showing a screen sharing.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  An application that is a hackathon website built with Lovable, of course, where hundreds of people build pretty interesting things. And just bringing out a few of those. Someone built a fully commercial venture fundraiser CRM here with Lovable. Sending letters online where you just describe the postal address and then you get it shipped by connecting to existing APIs was built. And like learning languages and social media tone of voice guideline generations with AI. So these are some examples of commercial products that have been built all the way with Lovable.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Listen, I couldn't have told you that some of those were actually made with an AI prompt versus a designer. And that makes me kind of fret for my friends who currently make their money designing websites.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  I must add that in some cases, you need a lot of devotion. If you're not a technical to go through all the hurdles and maybe read up on how to get around the problem and some types of problems that AI runs into. But with sufficient patience, you're going to get through it.

• 18:34Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, if you think about startups writ large, you know, 20 years ago, getting a team of developers, making wireframes and building some basic functionality was, you know, the first three to six months of the journey. And then connecting with some consumers. And of course, here now with AI, you can compress that to three or four hours. And then maybe even let some people play with it and get some feedback. But you still have to do all the other pieces to the puzzle, marketing the product, customer support, selling it and I guess supporting it. So this is the beginning of the end of, you know, what I'll call commodity software.

• 19:17Jason Calacanis?

  And we knew that was coming, you know, if you want to create an app or a timer, you can go find a timer online. But here you could just make a timer. And that's kind of interesting because in the early days of the internet, if you think about it, Alex, you could go make a landing page on MySpace or GeoCities, one of these hosted ones.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:36Jason Calacanis?

  And then all of a sudden Squarespace gave you the ability to have your own domain name, pop it up and have a gorgeous looking website that previously would have cost a couple of million dollars. So why wouldn't the applications get built this quickly? Makes total sense to me.

• 19:50Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:38Speaker 00

  Anton, do you think that in the future, people are gonna just roll their own software for everything? Like you showed the venture fundraising CRM. I mean, am I gonna eventually just have a suite of applications that are just Alex's tools that are all kind of built by myself, hosted by myself, and hold all my own data? I can't decide if that's an exciting feature or one that sounds like a lot of work.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean- I I I let me get get to that. I just want to echo what you said, Jason, with software and SaaS is just going to be absolutely disrupted. The the amount of software, great software, much better software is going to explode, but the prices are going to absolutely collapse. I think there is a case for people customizing, kind of building almost their own software. But one of the pieces, even though the engineering time is kind of almost reduced to zero, thanks to AI, there's a cost of building good software, which is to test it with a with a human, us humans. We are kind of the bottleneck for the for software, and that's typically what the product manager does. And now now I think it's more like an AI builder that is really good at understanding and testing with users. So that's going to remain.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  And we're like a lovable, we're very bullish on finding who are the best people building with our tools. So tomorrow we're launching something where we can easier, where we can launch your lovable apps and get feedback from users. And then I I think what you're going to see is the single people companies are with the great, where the founder has great product taste. We'll be like single person SaaS companies and be able to launch and market them just thanks to and the wisdom of the crowds figuring out where the best best high value SaaS products are.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  And that's launching tomorrow.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's launching tomorrow.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Oh, well, break your little news here on the show, Jason.

• 23:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a it's a really interesting concept to be able to use text prompts to build code bases and then deploy them to the wild and things like, you know, replit and supbase or sup superbase and all these things are just abstracting it. And it's apparent that, or at least to me, it's apparent that the future programming language is going to be English.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:39Jason Calacanis?

  And you're going to be able to just describe what you want and get it. Um, now, of course, you will have features and refinement that humans will do in the last stages, but just like people used to be able to create mockups and hand them to developers or, you know, designs and hand them to developers to be built. This is um going to speed that whole process up. And instead of needing a 12 person team to build a modern app company, which is kind of what you need, about 12 people, you're going to need two.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:08Jason Calacanis?

  That's going to unlock what we talked. About last week, Alex, which is all those little nooks and crannies, the long tail, the skiing app, the cross-country skiing app, the cross-country skiing app for this specific mountain in France, you know, for this group of people and retirees at this retirement community, they're going to have their own dedicated app for them. And it will just be this long tail of apps and products and services like you're saying, that could be bespoke, or that could be for, you know, just pickleball, just in Austin, or just in Northern Austin, etc. So, very cool stuff and a great job to the team.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Thanks, Jason. Yeah, can I just ask, is there any app that you want built now that's so cheap and easy to do, Jason?

• 24:50Jason Calacanis?

  An app for me to be built, um, I am, I don't have one off the top of my head, no. I just did a landing page for Found University and I looked at it and I was like, huh, that landing page would be, you know, last year or two years ago, if I asked some average member of our team to make a landing page, what they would have built. So I do think, you know, the refinement of design is the piece I'm kind of interested in. And I also did a quick one where I said, make me a fasting app. And it used Xero as its inspiration, but it didn't have great design. And so the design piece, I think, will be really interesting, whether it happens in Adobe or Canva or inside of Lovable, you know, or some combination.

• 25:34Jason Calacanis?

  The ability to make world-class design is the other big unlock, as opposed to, you know, let's call it, you know, six, seven out of 10 level design. And that takes taste, right? And we'll see if the machine can have taste eventually.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  And just before we let you go, two things. One, that worked and now my leaderboard functions, so thank you. And two, there's been a lot of conversation about the potential for churn amongst fast-growing AI startups. And you guys are one of the fastest growing out there. So just before you go, what's churn like amongst your customer base today? And is it changing, getting better, getting worse as time goes on?

• 26:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we're seeing this smiling retention curves, not that much smiling, but they're flattened.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  There's a lot of people that come in and they're like, oh, there's a new AI tool. I want to try it. But for us, which is uncommon, there's a 45% of the users, they, that's where their attention line completely flattens out. So that's, that's how it looks right now. And the reason for people, the 60 or the 55% leaving is currently that there are places where as a non-technical person, it's very hard to kind of build out your entire dream. But this is absolutely changing super fast. So in a few weeks or so, like more and more non-technical people are going to be able to build out full, full SaaS companies.

• 26:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's gonna be awesome. Congratulations on the early success and we'll look forward to following your progress. Well done.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Thanks, Anton. All right, Jason, you, my friend, wanted to talk about sovereign wealth funds and I am all here for it. So for folks who need to catch up. Today at the Oval Office, the President announced the creation of a sovereign wealth fund here in the US. Jason, you had ideas on how to fund this thing, natural resources, crypto.

• 27:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  You seem bullish.

• 27:27Jason Calacanis?

  First, we should start with what is a sovereign wealth fund and what's the purpose of it? So if your country isn't in 36, 37, 38 trillion dollars in debt and you have some natural resource, let's say Norway with their oil reserves or Australia with their mining reserves, they have rare earth minerals there. It's a pretty big landmass. Those are owned by the country. So what do we have in America? Well, I think our oil is mostly privately owned, but we do have land that we owned. We, a large percentage of the land in the United States is owned. Or you could take some amount of taxpayer dollars and put that into a sovereign wealth fund.

• 28:08Jason Calacanis?

  So what is the point of a sovereign wealth fund? Typically, you have a sovereign wealth fund because you have excess capital and you need to do something with it. We do not have excess capital. We have massive debt. So this is very strange to be bringing up right now because what are we going to do? Go into debt, create a sovereign wealth fund? Saudi has a massive sovereign wealth fund because They're sitting on top of oil, same with the UAE, same with Qatar, Qatar. Those places then want to deploy with their sovereign wealth fund intelligently, the people's share of that in order to get a return or to achieve strategic interest. So the reason you have it is because you have excess capital.

• 28:49Jason Calacanis?

  And the reason you deploy it is to grow it for your people to end or create some sustainable future. Hey founders, I want to share with you an experience that I love. And that's when I get ads that are relevant to me, not some nonsense that is not targeted. The other day, I got an ad for a fund management platform. And it was a new one that I hadn't heard of, and I manage a fund. So I was able to schedule a call with them. That's amazing. It's not rocket science. It's just targeting. And how did that happen? It happened on LinkedIn. If your business is marketing to other businesses doing B2B advertising, LinkedIn ads is amazing because it guarantees that you reach the right audience. I don't need an ad for HR tools, as an example, right?

• 29:34Jason Calacanis?

  There are other people who work in HR. I work in venture. So you want the HR people to get the HR ads. You want the venture capitalists to get the fund management software and services ads. Makes total sense. And LinkedIn's advertising tools will connect you to decision makers based on their firm graphics. You may not have heard that term before. That's your job title, your industry, your company size, and more. LinkedIn has two things that you need to grow this year. First, reach. LinkedIn has over a billion members, 130 million of them are decision makers, and of course, 10 million are C-level executives. And number two, LinkedIn has impact. B2B marketers report two to five times higher return on ad spend compared to other social platforms. So you don't waste your money.

• 30:19Jason Calacanis?

  Plus, 79% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the best platform for paid media. LinkedIn allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers. So start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today. We'll even give you a Hyundai, a hundred dollar credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com/thisweekinstartups. Terms and conditions do apply.

• 30:48Jason Calacanis?

  And Alaska has this, right? So Alaska gives a dividend, I think, to, you can look it up, what it is, but there is a universal basic payment in Alaska because of, I guess, some of the mineral rights that are there that are owned by the state. And the state of Texas actually owned some land with oil in it, and they put it into a trust for University of Texas. So there are local state-level sovereign wealth funds, essentially, trusts, I guess, might be how they're described. But this makes no sense for the United States right now because we have debt. If we had excess money, like, let's say, we own a bunch of prime real estate in major cities for the government, and we don't need that office space because we've downsized the government, and some number of people are working from home.

• 31:32Jason Calacanis?

  If we sell that, well, we should take that cash, not invest it in venture capital funds, like the one I run, or private equity funds, or real estate funds. We should just pay down the debt so we have less interest payments. That makes more sense. So this seems like a bit of a boondoggle. However, here's why it's coming up. TikTok. Ah, good, yes. The president says, "We'll give you a license for TikTok. We get half of TikTok shares when it goes public." So it goes public, it's worth, he says, a trillion dollars. People privately say a hundred billion. Let's pick 200 billion as a number. United States has a $100 billion sovereign wealth fund now,

• 32:14Jason Calacanis?

  and we give $1 billion to each of 100 venture capitalists, private equity, real estate investors to invest it with the hopes that the interest on that is greater than the interest we're paying on our loans for our debt. If not, we should just take the shares of TikTok, sell them on the open market, take the 100 billion and pay down our debt, so we pay less. So this has terrible ramifications and downstream effects that we should also consider. Why would we have the government doing the job that we, as a nation, have? Any elite practice in private, right? We want smaller government and private companies

• 32:59Jason Calacanis?

  doing this. So it's not like there's a lack of venture capitalist, private equity folks that our sovereign wealth fund needs to exist. It doesn't need to exist. And so it makes no sense.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Well, one, agreed. I don't think this is what we should be doing with our time and money right now. But if you are the president and you do want to have more influence on the market, more leverage to enact change and to kind of push things around the way you want to, having your a personal piggy bank, which is sovereign wealth fund, you know, writ large, I can kind of see it. But I really struggle to see how we're going to find the money to finance this thing. My question that I'm struggling with a little bit is, does this play into the whole idea of a national, you know, Bitcoin or crypto trust? Could those be melded together? Should we pursue that? It to me, it seems a little risky for the national bank, but.

• 33:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, we, we own a certain number of Bitcoins because of like Silk Road and other seizures. So there's an argument, if you think it's going to appreciate and it's strategic to own it, that we take that strategic reserve and put it into this and then have somebody who's super intelligent manage it. So you would hire somebody from the private sector or a couple of people from the private sector to make an investment committee, like the one that exists for CalPERS, California's retirement fund, or one that exists, uh, Mubadala for the UAE and Abu Dhabi and their sovereign wealth fund. So you hire really smart capital allocators to make the right decision of when to sell an asset or when to hold an

• 34:29Jason Calacanis?

  asset. Sure, that's possible. Or you could come up with new ways to generate revenue. One example would be if we want to have a clear, uh, framework for crypto, I think two things would make it very palatable. One, have an investment test where in order to trade crypto, you got to take a basic test. If you go in Robin Hood and you want to trade options, which are complicated, you have to walk through some tools that explain to you how options work. Now, they're not required to do that. They choose to do that because they want to have people have a good experience with their product and not lose their money. So we should have. Accredited an accreditation test. Then the second piece might be, well, if you want to trade crypto, there needs to be some rails.

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  Therefore, any crypto being sold or bought has ten basis points.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 35:18Jason Calacanis?

  Five basis points, one basis point, one one hundredth of a percentage. So all these billions of dollars that are going back and forth. What if, if you traded, you know, XRP or Ethereum or Bitcoin, that little bit went into our reserve? Over time, you know, it might build up as a little mini tax. And then that tax will also go to fund the operation of the SEC or other folks who do enforcement. Which, if you were in crypto and you were a good actor, you would want to fund enforcement against bad actors so that the industry grows and is trusted, which kind of growing, kind of stalled. And it's not trusted. And so I think that there could be ways to look at generating new revenue here.

• 36:01Jason Calacanis?

  What if every time somebody wants to IPO or be on the United States market, they have to give ten basis points of their IPO, whatever they offer, to go into the sovereign wealth fund? So if Alibaba or Uber or, you know, pick another country that has a publicly traded company, you know, Mercedes was going public theoretically and they want it to be traded on the US stock market, we'd say, yeah, there's a ten BIP, you know, onboarding fee that goes into our sovereign wealth fund to help us grow our economy. But it feels also like then this is going to be highly politicized, which I think you're pointing out. You know, if MBS wants to build cities or build NEOM, a new city, or buy, you know, live golf and do a golf thing,

• 36:45Jason Calacanis?

  he can do those things because he is the prince. He's the king. I guess he's the prince, right? So in the United States, we don't have princes. We have every four to eight years it turns over. So now we would get into, okay, Obama did X, Y, and Z. Trump did A, B, and C. Kamala and Biden did X, Y, and Z. And now we're going back and forth. And then the leadership of this has to get ripped out, plugged back in maybe. And then whose priorities? Is it and why? It just feels like. We want less government, let's go with less government.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Well, you could have, you know, five or 10 year terms or lifetime terms and you could have it be set out. But I think we've seen recently that not all norms about length of employment in the government persist. So I struggle with that, but I was laughing actually because one of our live viewers dropped a funny comment. They said, I don't like the sovereign wealth fund, but I'm okay with taking 0.1% of tech shares at IPO. To what end in that case? Just stealing them?

• 37:43Jason Calacanis?

  Taxes are good if they can pay down the debt and make the US solvent. And we have a solvency issue. So I think being creative with taxes is a good idea.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:53Jason Calacanis?

  And I would put anything on the table in that regard. If it is earmarked to pay down the debt, like immediately, like do not pass go, do not put it in a slush fund. Just pay down debt, pay down debt, balance the budget. That's, that's all that matters right now. We're on the brink of insolvency.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Looking through the list of sovereign wealth funds, because I was just going through the, you know, the top 10 prepping for the show today. It's basically all oil money. And so I wonder if there is a way we could create something involving if you're leasing public lands, if you're using public resources, take a slightly larger cut, put that money into a sovereign wealth fund. I, I can make it work, but I do agree fundamentally that it's a bit of a boondoggle, to use your term, until we've made actual progress on reducing not only our aggregate debt, but our yearly deficits.

• 38:38Jason Calacanis?

  The deficit has to get, yeah, first thing is to stop the bleeding. So getting the deficit under control is a good idea, right? If your revenue exceeds your spend, you know, or you're at break even, you've, you've accomplished something. Here's another idea, immigration hot button issue. Hey, if you're an immigrant here and you want a 10 year golden visa, you have to pay a million dollars in taxes over the next 10 years, or whenever you hit a million dollars in taxes, that's when you get your citizenship. Boom. Like we could come up with creative things. Now that wouldn't be the only type of immigration we'd have, obviously.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:10Jason Calacanis?

  That could be the golden visa, which other countries have. You make an investment, it goes into the sovereign wealth fund and then you get a visa. And if you're a good citizen for some period of time, you can get to become an actual citizen of the country. So there, there are all kinds. Ways if if our biggest resource is people want to be here.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 39:29Jason Calacanis?

  Well, why wouldn't we try to monetize that to pay down our debt? Anything to pay down the debt and balance the budget is my best opinion.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Would you be in favor, just about buying of adding a couple hundred basis points to the corporate tax rate? To help.

• 39:43Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  That issue.

• 39:45Jason Calacanis?

  I think everything should be on the table in terms of taxes and I would always start with the most affluent. So you don't want to mute economic activity. But you do want to pay down the debt. So if corporations had to pay, you know, increasingly high minimums on their cash hoards. Uh, you know, if they had to pay based a minimum tax on certain amounts of revenue. Um, if individuals who had, you know, I'm not in favor of wealth taxes because people can leave. So you have to be judicious in this, but if people have over some very large number of equities. Maybe they get charged a very small amount.

• 40:25Jason Calacanis?

  Again, when I say like 10 basis points, if you told me I had to pay 10 basis points every year on my. You know, uh, economic holdings over X millions of dollars. I'd be like, don't like it, but not going to kill me. And if it balances the budget short, as long as the waste, fraud, abuse is also getting taken care of at the same time. No rich person, no affluent person, no affluent company is going to feel bad about paying a little more in taxes. If they know it's not being wasted and they know that it actually goes towards balancing the budget. Which, you know, if you're running a startup, you know this, like you, because you run out of money. We have this magical gift that could only exist for a short period of time, but we get to print imaginary money.

• 41:09Jason Calacanis?

  And people still want to buy it and that may not last forever. So.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  Well, not unless stable coins become the next big thing and they put all their money into T bills. I mean, that helps a little bit, but it's around the edges. I'm curious to see when we get to defense spending and, uh, and waste fraud and abuse there. Because the Pentagon, as people famously point out, hasn't passed an audit in some time. And I'm curious what, okay, here's a fun game, Jason. What fraction of DOD spending do you think is wasted? I'm going to go with.

• 41:37Jason Calacanis?

  Double digits.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Uh, 25% probably. I mean, that's.

• 41:42Jason Calacanis?

  If you don't have to pass an audit, if you don't have to be efficient and everybody just says, hey, you know, it's defense, it's defense, we can't touch it, you know, then you're never going to have efficiency or competition. And so, you know, the competition's here. Venture capitalists are investing in military technology now and plus plus is going away. So we have to attack everything. And so that's, I think, one of the things we're seeing now with Doge and USAID and all these controversial things that are occurring and causing a bit of chaos and making people wring their hands. My best advice is give it 100 days. Better it's happening, even if you don't like it, better it's getting under control

• 42:25Jason Calacanis?

  and give it 100 days and then see what happens. That's my best advice. We're five days into it, maybe 10. Give it 100 days.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. People don't, people forget, but two weeks ago I had hair. I had a full head of hair and now it's all fallen. No, that's not true. All right. So a couple of weeks ago, we had the guy behind Deep Research from Google on the show. Great interview, great time. You were a big fan of the product.

• 42:48Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 42:48Speaker 00

  I'm a big fan of the product. Then over the weekend, OpenAI, everyone's favorite closed AI shop, dropped their own product. And Jason, did you know that they also called it Deep Research?

• 42:59Jason Calacanis?

  It's fascinating that they, I'm shocked that in any way we would have OpenAI do something like steal somebody else's IP.

• 43:12Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's kind of laughable, right? They just called it the same exact thing. Okay, sure.

• 43:16Speaker 00

  All right, sure. Anyways, I've pulled this argument from the announcement video and I think it's a pertinent example, something that you really care about, but I also have, I have a quick demo to show. So here is what OpenAI announced recently, in case you have been living under the proverbial rock.

• 43:31Jason Calacanis?

  We are introducing a capability called Deep Research. What is Deep Research? Deep Research is a model that does multi-step research on the internet. And what it does is it discovers content, it synthesizes content, and it reasons about this, this content, adapting its plan as it uncovers more and more information.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  So this is a finance problem. So I'm an investment analyst in a Silicon Valley VC firm. I want to analyze the market for civilian supersonic air travel and prepare a thorough investment memo and then many other specifications. And so the model clarifies and we provided some additional requirements for the memo. And then the model kicked off the task. And as you can see, it went and researched for seven minutes, used 12 different sources, and then came back to us with quite a comprehensive report of the field. And you can imagine if you were doing this for your job, this would be quite helpful to bootstrap your research as you're doing your initial investigation.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. How much did they pay the original researchers for the report they built on top of their research? I guess if they're giving citations, they're going to claim it's for use. These deep research projects are really impressive because they are, as they read the internet and scrape the internet, they figure out what questions to ask next. So if you were, and we did this, remember we did it with the model when we were doing our model of what would it take for self-driving cars? Yes. Oh, you know, for all of US rides. Well, when you ask it, hey, what are, it might ask, what are US rides? And it's like, well, there's car rides. And it'd be like, okay, are there any other rides? And it'd be like, well, there's subway rides and public transportation. Would you like to include those? Yeah, those count as rides. Oh, okay. Are there other

• 45:05Jason Calacanis?

  rides? Oh, yeah, there are school buses. Oh, you know, there's carpooling, whatever it is, it might find things that you didn't anticipate asking a basic question. And that reasoning and logic really does take things to the next level, as we just saw at the beginning of the program with lovable. So when you're using lovable.dev, I wonder if it was, when it did mine, it said, I'm looking, I'm using Zero Fasting as inspiration. And I was like, oh, okay. Well, that's interesting. It basically did a search in its reasoning, are there other fasting apps out there? What can we learn from them? What are their

• 45:45Jason Calacanis?

  features? And then it probably did a scrape of somebody at ZDnet or CNET doing a review of Zero Fasting and what features they highlighted there and then said, oh, well, let's create those features here. So it's using some journalist or maybe reviews from the App Store to then go figure out what other questions to ask and then build software. So this kind of reasoning is taking it from being not just, let's say, a business process outsourcing worker in Manila in India. That's like, okay, let's fill in, you know, these variables into the database. Let's do this type of OCR, character recognition, whatever. And then saying, oh, what would a college person do? Oh, what would a PhD person do? What would a management consultant do?

• 46:30Jason Calacanis?

  And I think they're kind of like already as good as management consultants.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Oh, I absolutely think so. So, uh, two things. One, Jason, I, I do have a demo to show you. I did a deep research example, but I also, while we were talking, did ask deep research from OpenAI, the robotaxi question. So it's currently working on that for us. So we'll take a look. But just to show what I came up with, um, for folks out there on the video, I'll talk about, do a bit of playcasting here, but I asked deep research from OpenAI to do some work for me on the economics of being a small video game publisher, uh, one of my pet industries. Took seven minutes, 30 sources and came up with, and I'm not going to read this clearly because it's thousands of words. A pretty interesting rundown of funding sources and then economic viability between major releases. Essentially, how do you handle episodic revenue, Jason?

• 47:17Speaker 00

  And I was very familiar with this question already. And so I asked it because I wanted to just know how good of a job could it do and could it teach me something new? And the answer to the second part of that was in this case, no, but I thought it was incredibly comprehensive if you didn't know anything. And so I, I think that these are more like, if you don't have the information or knowledge, they'll get you up to a solid B plus. But they're not going to take you from a B plus to an A plus if you were already there. And that is almost slightly disappointing to me, but also based on what you said, this is taking stuff that already exists. If you've already read the source materials, what more can it add?

• 47:55Jason Calacanis?

  There is a limited corpus of information in the world. So if you were like, hey, how do I raise a venture capital firm today? How do I raise my first venture capital firm today? It can go and Tell you the entire history of how venture capital firms were made and micro funds and all this stuff and give you the architecture. But that doesn't give you the wisdom of asking somebody who just did it in the past two or three years, or somebody who's an LP who said no to the last 10 that have come into their firm. And say, you know, strategically, here's what I think's gonna happen in the marketplace. In other words, predicting the future. So perhaps deep research is where we're at now. And then future predictions is where we will get to.

• 48:39Jason Calacanis?

  Or current strategy, or how to apply this knowledge. So if it was, you know, the history was index the world's information, find the world's information, and then AI guessing the next word or answering your simple question, then evolving onto research and being able to organize, you know, the entire corpus of information. Well, the next piece is then either an agent executing on it.

• 49:04Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 49:05Jason Calacanis?

  Or an agent or an LLM giving you advice and predictions of the future. So there's not much left here. All that's left for the AI to do is to build the venture fund and go raise the money or advise you on how to do it. Right? And in your case, build the game studio or build the game.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 49:25Jason Calacanis?

  And so feels like we're on the cusp of the end game.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  It does feel like we're on the cusp of the end game. I'm increasingly impressed and I'm starting to think without forcing myself to, oh, I should use this more often. This will actually help me as opposed to this is a toy I'm experimenting with much more that I should build this into my day to day workflow. And I've been doing the same thing for a long time, a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, a lot of typing stuff down. And so I'm probably overly set in my pattern. So if it's good enough now to actually jostle me from those ruts, that says something to me that's, that's pretty material. I think this is better than what I've seen from Google thus far, but I bet you that Google has something that's baking and in two months it'll be out and then openly I will come back. The pace here, Jason, remains very quick.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  And I think we're going to see the stuff get out pretty broadly. Currently, you have to pay the $200 a month.

• 50:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Open AI subscription, but they are going to bring. It down to the lower priced tiers quickly. And you know, we've talked about AI scaling laws and costs they're off. So I presume in 12 months, this will be done in one

• 50:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think the reason they're limiting it to the $200 one isn't just to make money. I think it's because when you fire these things off, I think it's firing off concurrently many queries.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 50:41Jason Calacanis?

  And I think that their servers would shut down because people, ah, if every query was deep research, you know, oh, analyze the Luca trade, analyze all the trades in history, like it could be launching 10, 20, 50, 500. I mean, the AI would go crazy. So there must be some cap. And I would love to hear from somebody, what are the caps on these? Like, does it fire off the first 50 and then stop? And then require you to then say, hey, give me some more knowledge here and ask follow up questions. Because these things could run indefinitely. You could tell the AI, just give me scenarios of trades and analyze trades, potential trades, future trades, and make an agent that does this, and it would just burn through cycles and compute.

• 51:24Jason Calacanis?

  So that I think that's where we're at right now is people are maybe concerned rightfully of how much compute is available, inference is available to do all this and put it all together. Then there's storage and electricity. I mean, this could get very, very, very expensive over time.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  But that's awesome, because if it's expensive, it's going to get people to work on making it cheaper. And that's going to be awesome. That's more capacity, more bandwidth, more storage, more compute, et cetera. That's actually awesome. I had a very different take on the potential risks here or issues. I was thinking about the poor internet out there. Like if you're Bob and you have Bob's website and OpenAI comes to your website and just pounds it all the time with deep research queries. Couldn't this actually increase the total overall stress load on the internet, let alone the OpenAI server base?

• 52:06Jason Calacanis?

  And you make no money from it. The truth is they've probably ingested and are lying and have it in their index. They've probably scraped all this data and they're keeping it on their own hard drives over time, where the most common stuff in cache, which, you know, they could claim it's in a cache and they don't know what's in the cache. But what if the cache becomes like the size of? The English-speaking internet, which if you were to look at Google cache, almost every webpage, when you click Google cache, used to come up. I don't know today what the status of that product is, but it used to be every single Engadget page was cached. Every single TechCrunch page was cached. So they could claim it's in a cache,

• 52:49Jason Calacanis?

  but it's really, for all intents and purposes, ingested, and they don't need to go read your webpage. So this does actually put us back to the point of, are you licensing this data? Do you have permission to do this? Should you need permission to do this? Should you be paying for it? And then if somebody does pay for it, I think that would be the power move. Whichever one of these companies is getting towards hundreds of billions of dollars in value, why not just start buying content sites?

• 53:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:18Jason Calacanis?

  How much is CNET worth now? How much is TechCrunch worth to Yahoo? How much is Engadget worth?

• 53:24Speaker 00

  30, 20.

• 53:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so why not just buy them? And why not subsidize them and pay the journalists to keep producing content? And then have it as exclusive to your platform?

• 53:34Speaker 00

  So that's brilliant, and I love that idea. But also, I was thinking, you know, you were talking earlier about how, you know, the LLM is never going to have the wisdom of the person who did the thing most recently. I wonder if in the end, we're going to have a lot of AI model companies literally buying people's time and sitting down and asking them questions? And just feeding that directly in?

• 53:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that exists as a concept. There are third-party startups that will have developers, accountants, lawyers, answer questions or look at questions being asked and verify them. Think about Mechanical Turk from Amazon.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:09Jason Calacanis?

  But for white-collar folks. So if you said to the AI, "Make me a logo in an Art Deco design," and it got it wrong, there are some designers somewhere who are answering questions on behalf of language models and these AI companies to refine it. Just like in the early days, Google and Amazon had people saying, "Describe this image. Oh, that's two women baking a cake, and, you know, they're in a country kitchen." Boom. Uh. So yeah, there, there, that's actually happening and that could be a job in the future, which would be a human in the loop, working for an AI company. Yeah, that could be the future of this.

• 54:50Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, you can create all the tools in the world, but if people don't have the motivation to use them and create something of value for their fellow humans, it's for moot. So we saw this with the introduction of the VHS and the digital camcorder. Everybody said, wow, there's going to be like so many more movies and documentaries. And you know, it did get cheaper to make them. And yes, there is more content because it is cheaper to make.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:14Jason Calacanis?

  But it wasn't, uh, I guess what they would call a Cambrian explosion. You know, that everybody made a documentary film or that there were a thousand times as many documentary films, unless you count like maybe YouTube existing as a concept. So I do wonder like if people are actually going to use this to be productive.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  I think they will because they're, because they're, they're voting with their wallet. So the information had some reporting out in the last couple of days. Uh, the information writes that paid subscribers to chat GPT nearly tripled to 15.5 million last year from 5.8. And that would put it on by their estimate about a $4 billion run rate. And then their API business, they write, um, grew to what they think is about a $3.2 billion run rate. So if that is correct, and we're working with estimates and third party data and doing our best. But that would put open AI on a $7 billion run rate just from those two products. So I, I think people are voting with their dollars. I mean, I had to upgrade my open AI account to the expensive one to get this today to play with it for the show because

• 56:15Speaker 00

  I didn't want to talk about it without having used it. And I bet you I'm not alone, man.

• 56:19Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, there's going to be a lot of sampling of these tools, as you pointed out with lovable, um, you know, people will sample them, they'll try them. Uh, they might try five of them at once, forget to cancel two, cancel three, then eventually cancel the other two. So that, that's happened before. It happened in the app economy and then after people go crazy sampling, they actually know what they need. Things are free, the winners become apparent and yeah, chat GPT is going to have a hundred million people paying for chat GPT at 20 bucks a month. No doubt in my mind, that would be 14 billion a year.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  I mean, 20, 24?

• 56:57Jason Calacanis?

  24 billion a year. Sorry. So if they had a, yeah, because it's 20 bucks a month. But eventually I think that price comes down to $10.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:04Jason Calacanis?

  A hundred dollars a year for your LLM, a hundred dollars a year. I mean, you it's conceivable you could have 250 million people paying for a product or service like that in the Western world, which would be 2.5 billion a month, which would be 30 billion a year. So there's a $30 billion TAM, just like Netflix is on average probably 10 bucks for 250 million people.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Actually, Netflix has gotten surprisingly expensive. I know you and I don't track every dollar that changes in our monthly expenses, but like, it's like 20 bucks a month now? I think it's like doubled since.

• 57:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but then you also have places like India, China, other places that are $2 a month, $3.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  You mean on average? Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

• 57:44Jason Calacanis?

  Anytime you do, yeah, these averages, you got to take into account what people in India and China and other developing countries or, you know, places that don't have as strong of a dollar. But it's a super impressive and I think the building of verticalized app and starting companies is going to be changed forever. Two people are going to be able to create products and services that make $10 million a year. That is going to change venture capital and the economy forever.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  So the question there that I have, Jason, is, is it going to be, uh, let's imagine there's $100 million in revenue for, for an idea or a project or a company. And let's say in today's world, one startup will go out there, dominate the market and get all $100 million in revenue. Do you foresee in the future five or 10 two-person teams doing 10 million in revenue apiece and they're all kind of existing at the same time? Or do we still see kind of a consolidation effect that we traditionally see in software and technology companies rolling those up?

• 58:39Jason Calacanis?

  There'll be certainly, uh, rollups in M and A, um, that occur. It also requires that somebody want to go pursue that opportunity. So many times you'll see somebody who has a really interesting medium-sized business, they're like running a store in a local community where they have six of these stores in a local community and it's making $50 million a year. And it's like they dominate the Northeast for tires, but nobody else wants to go build that company that does flat tires because it's arduous and painful. So you also need to have somebody want to go and make a better version of, I'll keep bringing up the skiing app, I use slopes.

• 59:22Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 59:22Jason Calacanis?

  Does somebody have the motivation to take, if that person's making 10 million a year, does somebody want to go take the time to charge half as much and? Steal the customer base and make a million or steal a portion of the customer base who's price sensitive. So you know, that that's the reality of businesses. Somebody has to want to go displace a company that requires motivation. One of the things that might happen is in society, you'll have so much abundance that you won't be motivated or more people will be motivated to stay home and consume than create. And that's kind of where we are now.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  I'm trying to figure out that'll be net bullish or net bearish for venture capital because consumption on one hand drives GDP, especially here in the US. So that's good. But on the other hand, I think people still talk about venture capital being essentially founder constraint versus market constraint. Like there's not enough people who can break through walls and shoe glass and so forth to actually found more generational companies. So I hope.

• 1:00:18Jason Calacanis?

  Motivation. Yeah.

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. But I mean, here's my thought about the $10 million point in slopes. $10 million is $10 million worth of motivation by definition. That's a lot. I don't know, man. Would you like to have another 10 million? Sure.

• 1:00:30Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. I mean, if you want to go pursue it and then it's a competition. So even though we could both create slopes today and make that competitive product. Well, if that person is on the edge, keep coming up with new features, keep looking at the latest APIs and they just iterate and they keep the product getting better and better than people, if the amount they're charging is less than the value people are getting, what's the reason to leave? And that's what happened with Netflix. Netflix has actually a pricing power that or Disney Plus. Like, am I quitting Disney Plus with three daughters? No, just keep putting the Marvel and

• 1:01:09Jason Calacanis?

  Disney and Star Wars stuff in there and I'm good. I'll be subscribed until I die. The end, right? Yeah. They have it, folks.

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Elsewhere in the world, just really briefly before we jump, DeepSeek is catching a lot of bans. And Jason, I wasn't going to bring this up on the show, but did you know DeepSeek is still the number one like ranked app in many national iOS app stores today? Like, I didn't think it was going to have to kind of stay in power, but something to keep an eye on. I'm shocked by consumer demand.

• 1:01:37Jason Calacanis?

  And just so people also know, the ranking in iOS is determined also by recency of A new app. So it's not just how many raw downloads. It has to do with how many new people are putting it on their phone for the first time. So you can look up the the App Store algorithms. They will give, you know, if a million people downloaded Spotify today, but 100,000 downloaded some new music app that competes with it. That new music app might actually outrank Spotify because it's 100,000 new lit new downloads as opposed to upgrades.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Caveats, caveats. I mean, so here's the US App Store rankings, DeepSeek. You go to the United Kingdom, DeepSeek, you go to Canada, DeepSeek number one. Like that's

• 1:02:23Jason Calacanis?

  Check back in three months, six months. Yeah. I mean, it's, and it also can be gamed. So I wouldn't put it above the Chinese for gaming it like, why is it going? Number one, I wonder like, is it because it's free?

• 1:02:34Speaker 00

  I think it's because it's free and OpenAI, like we just discussed, wants you to pay for things. But in Texas, the governor has banned DeepSeek and Red Note on government devices. In Taiwan, it's banned on government devices. The Navy and NASA are limiting usage. Congress wants to ban staff from using it. So there is a slow rolling institutional response to this.

• 1:02:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, because the hosted version would then send everything directly to the CCP. Yeah, of course you want to do that. And then the non-hosted version, if you put it on your laptop or you were to run your own instance on your favorite cloud provider would be fine, I guess.

• 1:03:11Speaker 00

  Uh, I think that's, I don't see a security issue there, but I'm not a cybersecurity guy. So, you know, check with your local.

• 1:03:17Jason Calacanis?

  It's open source, so you'd have to find some backdoor. It'll be sending the data back to the mothership somehow. But the hosted version, certainly, I would never allow on any government property. No way, no how.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Huge loophole. All right. Um, Jason, just before we go, do you want to talk about tariffs at all?

• 1:03:32Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, give everybody the overview. It seems to me like these are you know, based on what I'm seeing, they're a negotiating tactic that Trump loves to use because it makes world leaders call him and bend the knee. Okay, great. I guess that works. And then the other piece I've seen is there's a, a couple of people on the fringe in the let's say economic fringe, who believe there is a way for a desirable market like ours to enact tariffs and get rid of income tax. And that is some crazy obscure.

• 1:04:12Jason Calacanis?

  Thought of how the US could change over time. Where do you want to go with it?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  Well, I was just surprised to watch how fast people's perspectives have changed inside of technology. We had Anthony Pompliano on the show a couple of months back. What I like about Pomp is that whatever he does, it's 110%. And so when Trump announced that there was going to be 25% tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and 10% more on China, Pomp wrote a letter explaining why tariffs are good, why they're not going to cause inflation. And then Trump got on the call with the Mexican president for like 20 minutes and they sorted out something and then that was taken down. But can you imagine how tough it must be to like go forth and defend tariff policy only to have it be taken apart at the last minute? Like, it's been, it's been kinetic. It's been very, very busy over the last 48 hours. And I was raised

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  in the Chicago School of Economics, if you will. And so I'm not a tariff guy. I'm a free trade guy. I don't like them as, I especially don't like tariffing our allies for no reason. Like, I mean, Canada is a perfectly fine hat for the nation. Respect for our Canadian friends. They're mad. Like, we've actually managed to really anger an ally that we tend to not even think about. And I think that's just a mistake. And it's not good economics.

• 1:05:28Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, if we charge them an extra amount to get their attention to close the border, and then we relent, I think that's probably what's happening here, because I don't think we don't want to be able to send our stuff to Canada. And then it just, where does it end? Like, you charge 25%, they charge 30, you go 35. Like, it just kind of eventually unravels. And it's better for the world if the labor to build products and services goes to the cheapest place possible. So more people have access to that product or service, with the obvious caveat of you don't want to have an interdependency, right? You don't want to have the not be able to get drugs to your country, or, I don't know, surgical

• 1:06:12Jason Calacanis?

  equipment, whatever it is, gasoline. You do need to have some redundancy in the supply chain. So things being made all in one place is dangerous. But I think this is all posturing, and it'll, it's just noise. And again,

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  Uh, focus on your startup. Read the news once a day. Read the news both. No, don't read the news once a day. Just tune into Twist three times a week. We do this Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays. You can get all the news you need in 60 to 90 minutes. Jason and I will be here taking you through all of it. We have an awesome founder interview coming on Friday with another space company, Jason, that I'm so excited about. And things are cooking along, so we'll see everyone back here on Wednesday. All right. Cheers, everybody.