Tech's Super Bowl, Huge Earnings Week, Lon Returns and more! | E2083

Today on This Week in Startups: Lon Harris is back, and we're diving into all things Super Bowl—especially the tech takeover in this year's commercials. We break down the biggest ad moments, from Squarespace to Uber Eats, Instacart, and even Harrison Ford's Jeep spot. Plus, we dig into Google Trends after the ChatGPT ad, the unexpected appeal ofThe Banshees of Inisherin, and Matthew McConaughey's latest move with Salesforce. That's not all—France is making bold AI moves, OpenAI is getting into chip development, and we've got aFounder Fridays competition coming up! * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason, Alex and Lon "kick off" the show!(5:09) Breakout Super Bowl commercials(9:23) Rocket's Super Bowl ad and its impact (10:21)Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time athttps://Lemon.io/twist(13:00) High-risk hobbies of the rich and famous(15:23) We all loved the new Squarespace ad and its effectiveness(19:07) The appeal of "The Banshees of Inisherin" and ChatGPT Super Bowl ad(20:17) OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months athttps://www.openphone.com/twist (21:34) Google Trends analysis of ChatGPT ad impact(22:19) A look at Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowll half-time show and his popularity(24:15) Rating the ChatGPT Super Bowl ad(31:01) Coda. Empower your startup with Coda's Team plan for free—get 6 months athttps://www. Coda.io/twist(32:42) Uber Eats and Instacart Super Bowl ads & Harrison Ford's Jeep commercial(39:49) Matthew McConaughey's role with Salesforce and A-list actors in 2025(44:14) France's AI investment and strategy(47:10) AI in customer service and SaaS pricing(52:34) IT unemployment and AI's impact on tech support(56:45) Upcoming earnings reports from key tech companies(1:02:12) OpenAI's custom chip development with TSMC(1:02:35) Founder Fridays: A new initiative for founders and competition format* 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 Join Founder Fridays here:https://www.founderfridays.tech/ * Follow Alex: X:https://x.com/alex LinkedIn:⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Lon: X:https://x.com/Lons LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharris/ * Follow Jason: X:https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (10:21)Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time athttps://Lemon.io/twist(20:17) OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first six months athttps://www.openphone.com/twist(30:31)Coda. Empower your startup with Coda's Team plan for free—get 6 months athttps://www. Coda.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?

  Lon is back, Lon Harris is back, and we got to talk about all these Super Bowl commercials because so many of them are tech related and there's a lot to say.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  First of all, I was shocked at the number of technology ads because we put together a list for the show today and it was like 10 or 12 or 13. That's like a hundred million dollars in tech spend.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is not something you should do when you have a small amount of money, but if you're a billion dollar company, you got over a billion dollars in your bank account, why not do it? And here's what you should do. If you have under a hundred million, you want to participate in this, I might do this next year. You should do a spec Super Bowl commercial, let it out and say, if we could afford a Super Bowl commercial, this would be our Super Bowl commercial. So you can hijack the Super Bowl commercial by releasing your not Super Bowl commercial. Or we can't afford a Super Bowl commercial, but we made one anyway. You should punk rock this.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by 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. OpenPhone, create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com/twist. And Coda, Coda empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize, plan, and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.io/twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan.

• 1:25Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. With me, Alex Wilhelm, I'm Jason Calacanis. We got a full docket today. Some of you who are old school Twist fans, right? Might remember Lon Harris, who was like the original news reader here. He would read the news, I would comment on it, my friend Tyler Crowley would also comment it. That was the old school crew. Well, guess what? Lon Harris is back in the fold and he's helping with editorial across a number of projects, including this one. And today I thought we'd bring him on, Alex, because he's a pop culture wizard. Lon is back, Lon Harris is back. That's right, back in the fold. And we got to talk about all these Super Bowl commercials because so many of them are tech related and there's a lot to say. And he's a good, good media guy.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Lon, first of all, I was shocked at the Number of technology ads because we put together a list for the show today and it was like 10 or 12 or 13. That's like a hundred million dollars in tech spend. So help me out here. Is that a normal amount of technology ads for Super Bowl or is this a much more tech heavy, you know, rundown?

• 2:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've seen the mix go a lot more tech over the last, I mean, five, seven years, something like that. A lot of tech projects have had huge hits and really like sort of come out of nowhere and like found a huge audience. So there's precedent to be, which we're going to talk about. Their 2023 Super Bowl ads are widely credited with like, here's to be, start watching to be. And of course now they dominate the free ad supported streaming space. So I think that's what a lot of these other companies, that kind of precedent is what a lot of these companies are looking at. And we're going to talk about, I think booking.com is another one where it's sort of like this relatively little known service that did a bunch of big game ads and now they're like one of the major players in their space.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  And I think a lot of other companies are trying to sort of get in on that. And at the same time, we've seen less interest from the kinds of brands that we once would have thought of dominating. Fast food, beer, trucks. They're starting to spend more of their ad money on, you know, digital platforms, other kinds of alternative media. So both of those things happening at the same time, we've sort of reversed the trend.

• 3:33Jason Calacanis?

  Fascinating. What makes in your estimation, Lon, as we get ready to watch these ads? What makes a breakout Super Bowl commercial? Cause that's a new, that's a different genre than just a normal commercial, which hits you with repetitiveness. There's something that's gotta be tent pole or big about this, you know, when it comes to my mind. Obviously the 1984 commercial from Apple.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:58Jason Calacanis?

  The Cindy Crawford Pepsi commercial from 1985. I think, cause I think I was like 15 years old when I saw that one and that one is burned in my memory, a pretty simple one, but I think it's. I don't know if we make those anymore. What makes to my original question, a great Super Bowl ad in your estimation? And you can get in on that too, Alex, if you have.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, to me, it's just, it's cutting through the noise. This day is like the busiest advertising day of the year. And so if you're going to do something big that day, it's gotta be like. I've got to really do something extreme and crazy that captures people's attention. You have to avoid, I think, being too cheesy. I think like, if you remember the Mr. Peanut funeral thing from a few years ago, they built it up so much, they did get everybody's attention, but in a way that was lame and then they had nothing to do with it. Once they got your attention, it was like, all right, Mr. Peanut's dead and now he's like a baby or it doesn't really even make

• 4:58Speaker 01

  It never made sense. You had to pay too much attention. And also, I don't think about Mr. Peanut that much. Like, no offense to our friends that grow legumes, but you know, it's not really my, my jam, Lon.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  Exactly. So I think it's a two-part thing. You've got to cut through the noise, but then after you do that, you've got to have some kind of memorable hook or some kind of message or some kind of idea that resonates a little bit and people relate to and are interested in.

• 5:23Jason Calacanis?

  What's your thesis, Alex? Do you have a thesis as to what makes a great commercial for you or just generally?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  I have a me test, Jason, which is the I love to see a brand take a shot on the Super Bowl. I love to see people that don't have the money, go for this prize and try to win. And so my favorite example of this was Oatly. They had that annoying ad of the CEO like playing piano and everyone was like, that's the worst ad ever. I thought it was fantastic because it got everyone talking about Oatly. I mean, as an oat milk guy, that worked for me. Sadly, as I'm about to show you, I don't think it actually worked out for the company as much because as you can see from this chart, they're now only worth about $24, but I still liked the fact that they went for it and tried something that was actually a little bit on the edge. Not in terms of like amount of skin per se, but just like our CEO playing piano. Come on now. I love that.

• 6:11Jason Calacanis?

  I think when we look at these, there seems to be some genres or formats, Lon, that are kind of clicking with people. One is the entourage, the ensemble. I'm going to throw a lot of pop culture at you at once. Dunkin' Donuts, you know, we're going to send three, four, five celebrities at it. Uber Eats, we're going to put 10 celebrities at it. So that seems like one genre, but we're going to just cameo the hell out of this. Another genre Seems to be, we're gonna touch on your heartstrings with a country music song, or a slow thoughtful monologue, maybe like Harrison Ford did this year, or other people have done before.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  Or a narrative about family, generations, parenting.

• 6:59Jason Calacanis?

  American flags.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Relatable emotional content that resonates.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Shall we play the booking.com ad that we're all kind of talking around here? I feel like.

• 7:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, let's get to it. These are generally 15, 30 seconds, but let's take a look at bookings.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Booking.com has something for everyone.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Oh, permit.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Wee wee wee, right this way.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I love the Muppets.

• 7:22Speaker 05

  What about something more family friendly?

• 7:25Speaker 04

  One Vegas hotel for the pride to be. What if we hate everything? We have free cancellation.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Stafford.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Donza.

• 7:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, listen, I am a Muppets super fan. As you can see, I know each of these characters and I want to laugh and I want to have it connected in some way. And nothing connected. None of the jokes mattered. They just threw the five most popular Muppets in there. But there was nothing in the storytelling here. So I give this like a wasted opportunity. It's a like a, it's a D for me as in dumb. It just wasn't done well.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Now compare that to what Rocket put together, which was a almost homage to America, back to the flags comment and having children and building a family. Watch this one.

• 8:13Jason Calacanis?

  I did see this one.

• 8:18Jason Calacanis?

  Man, it's a great song. Miss Virginia.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  Well, this, this has a tie into the game. They, they.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  It does.

• 8:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:27Jason Calacanis?

  To a river.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  This is exactly what I'm talking about in terms of like unique clever ways to grab people's attention.

• 8:35Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, we all know it's like really special to have kids and. Going home. Oh, here we go.

• 8:42Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  And everybody knows all the words to this song, which is very like, there's not that many songs that cross every cultural barrier that an entire football stadium can sing along to.

• 8:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, this is universal.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  But everybody knows this song.

• 9:00Jason Calacanis?

  Take me home. And it's got the soldiers coming home, which that always those reuniting videos get me every time.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:07Jason Calacanis?

  On the dream.

• 9:10Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so rocket.com.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  But they actually got the stadium to like sing along during the game. So this had a live

• 9:19Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, they did?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  During the game. Yes, stunt component.

• 9:25Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so after the purse, wait, hold on. After the commercial, they got the stadium to sing it.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:32Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, smart.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Because everybody knows Country Road Take Me Home. It's one of those songs. You can get a whole stadium to sing together.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  But the NFL originally said no. So there was going to be a pre taped sing along, but then at the last minute, they got permission from the Super Bowl to essentially extend their ad by 15 seconds afterwards by in inciting the audience to sing. So 75 seconds for the price of 60. Well done.

• 9:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Or they paid a little extra, but either way, I think that this is an upsell, but a smart one because yes, I have never seen anybody tie the commercial into the actual live arena. I guess you get points for that. I did see online lawn. People were saying this was a pro life ad. And I was like, okay, it's pro life because there's babies in it or something, but I think it got co opted like this is the pro life ad.

• 10:22Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:33Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they, they tend to claim a lot of media content that is just about parenting, family, and that is not the exclusive domain of the anti-abortion movement. Some people who support abortion choice also have families. It is, it is true.

• 11:57Jason Calacanis?

  It is true. Alex, you, uh, yes, you have a family and you are pro-choice. Okay.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  So that has residence for him and yet he is not, uh, on the pro-life side. So I don't, I don't know if that's entirely fair.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  I can see though, how everything is viewed to the prism of culture wars today, Jason. So I think that people are looking for like, is this for me or against me? Is it for me or against me? That is the most generic pro-family yee-haw America thing of all time. It's for everybody.

• 12:23Jason Calacanis?

  I like it.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  And also even that, even that song, it's about West Virginia. It's about like rural, the real Americans, Americana. But, you know, there's nothing in it that's offensive to people who live in big cities. John Denver was for everybody, so.

• 12:37Jason Calacanis?

  John Denver was for everybody. And, um, as I always warn my friends who want to become pilots, if you've got a great life and you're rich and you're famous, or any combination of those things, love, you've got a family, you don't need to be an experimental pilot. It's like right in the name, like test pilot. You don't need to do that. If you're rich, you're powerful, you're famous, you could have a test pilot. You could let other people be the test pilots. Uh, I'm of course referring to the fact that

• 13:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:05Jason Calacanis?

  People don't know John Denver died young, flying like some experimental plane.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Listen, some guys just have a need for speed, Jason.

• 13:13Jason Calacanis?

  It's no, I gotta tell you, it's so dumb.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Cave diving, experimental flying and motorcycle racing.

• 13:20Jason Calacanis?

  None of that.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Don't do them. Also, experimental subs, please. Let James Cameron do the submarine tech. He's, he's the expert.

• 13:28Jason Calacanis?

  That's another one. A billionaire and his son decide they're gonna go on an experimental submarine. If it has experimental or test in the word.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  If, if it's being operated with a PlayStation controller, you don't need to be on that.

• 13:41Jason Calacanis?

  Do not do it. Okay. So I'm gonna give D to the bookings one because they didn't use the IP properly.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  I agree. I agree.

• 13:50Jason Calacanis?

  They hooked me in and I didn't get, uh, for example, when they had them coming down the slide, I was like, oh, I wonder who's gonna be in the water. Muppets in the water, that might have hooked me in. Or like, it could have been a crossover with maybe Oscar the Grouch being in there, right? And get a little Sesame Street.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think Disney, I think that, that contractually, I think Sesame Workshop co-owns those characters. I don't know if Disney can use Sesame Street characters in an ad.

• 14:18Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  Disney fully owns the Muppets. They can do whatever they want with them. So I think, I feel like it might've come down to that.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  We're debating IP rights inside of corporate communications during a major sports event on television. God, this is America.

• 14:32Jason Calacanis?

  What's the other, who did the, um, oh, the Rocket one? I give that a B plus. I liked it a lot. Made me feel stuff. Give it a B, B plus. What do you give it?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Uh, I would give it an 85. So kind of a straight B, I think. I think it was good quality, but I'm not gonna think about it a week from now.

• 14:46Jason Calacanis?

  And bookings? You got anything for bookings? What do you give that?

• 14:49Speaker 01

  23 out of 100, F minus, minus.

• 14:51Jason Calacanis?

  F minus. What do you give it?

• 14:52Speaker 03

  What you said about it was the jokes didn't land. It didn't feel like the Muppets because it's not funny like the Muppets. If you had one or two Muppet show level gags, I think it would have been like, oh my God, the Muppets. Did a bookings.com ad, but as it is, it just feels like, yeah, they're in it. But it doesn't matter that they're in.

• 15:10Jason Calacanis?

  And there is another opportunity here where you're going to use the Muppets. The Muppets interacting with famous people, that always lands. So you have a Miley Cyrus in there with one of the Muppets. That could have worked. You get like a LeBron James or you know, a Luka Doncic. Some basketball player interacting with them at the hotels. Now you've got something good. Can we just go to the number one ad? I want to go to the one that was my favorite. This I thought was the best one. This is A plus for me. I'm giving my score ahead of time.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  Ah, come here to me like ten of the old tale of old Squarespace.

• 15:45Jason Calacanis?

  No idea what he just said.

• 15:48Jason Calacanis?

  But I love this guy.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  He's going to tell you the tale of old Squarespace.

• 15:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  Oh, Squarespace, oh, Squarespace from, from many yonks ago. For talk could be. Squarespace for yourself. And so. Do you know any one?

• 16:05Jason Calacanis?

  So I saw a movie, Lon, you probably saw it as well. Uh, the Banshees.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Of Ina Sherrin, yeah.

• 16:12Jason Calacanis?

  Of Ina Sherrin.

• 16:13Speaker 03

  He's parroting that right now.

• 16:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 16:17Jason Calacanis?

  I love that film.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  It was really good.

• 16:21Jason Calacanis?

  And I like this because everybody could have a Squarespace. The local bar in the town, the musician singing musical lessons. Everybody needs a Squarespace. And I like this actor a lot because he's weird.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Barry Keegan. I also think it hits on the idea that Squarespace has been around forever, like by internet standards. They really are the oldest, most reliable, most infamous and iconic. So the idea of taking that and going back to like early 20th century, you know, like I think that's, there's, there's something interesting there too, that they're getting at. It's, it's, it's interesting branding for them.

• 16:58Jason Calacanis?

  I like the whole look and feel of it. To me, it was my favorite. Uh, what, what, what did you think, Alex? Uh, you want to give it a letter grade? It's A plus for me.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  I liked it a lot, so I give it an A, A minus, maybe. I'm a big fan of, of certain Irish comedians and so forth. So all that landed really well for me and I've always liked Squarespace. But. I will say that it does provide a really fun contrast between like we having fun online and rural Irish countryside in the mud. And so I that contrast to me really sold the idea like the internet's better than the way things used to be. So it felt like progress to me while being very polite and that resonated quite well with me. I liked it.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's great. It's funny. That's what I was saying. Like, it's funny in a way that like the other ads are like cute. Like you'd be like, oh, they got the Muppets. This actually has jokes like him throwing laptops and them crashing into the mud in front of these like peasants. Like, that's funny.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  And I think just even that imagery lands better than most of the other ads we've been looking at.

• 17:54Jason Calacanis?

  I feel like they took a chance too, right? Like somebody at an agency was like, you know, it'd be great. Did anybody see Banshees of Inisherin? And like, two people raised their hand out of 20 people in the room.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  Right. Like an Oscar nominated, a prominent movie, but not a movie everyone has seen.

• 18:11Jason Calacanis?

  Why do I like this film so much? It was an odd film, but I found it captivating. Why is Banshees of Inisherin captivating, Lon?

• 18:19Speaker 03

  One of the things I think is so interesting about it is it was sort of conceived as like this kind of parable. It's sort of about the Irish national character. It's about the Irish Civil War, which sort of takes place literally in the background of the movie. I think it also resonates just on a personal level, the the idea that you can have a friendship that suddenly falls apart. And and and that that feels like a relationship or like a breakup in in in a powerful sort of way. And and you know, the idea that that male friendship is so mysterious and we don't really understand the nature of it and why it starts and why it ends. And and what what keeps people in one another's orbit and not, and I think that that that is very resonant for people.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  It's something we sort of don't think about all the time, but is there.

• 19:07Jason Calacanis?

  That's such a great recap. Okay, we gotta go OpenAI, right, Alex? Like, OpenAI has tons of money laying around. So Super Bowl ads are what, five million now?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Eight.

• 19:18Jason Calacanis?

  Eight million for a Super Bowl. My god, inflation. What are these poor companies?

• 19:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:23Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So they're doing something pixel. They're using the dot.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So fire to wheel to to horses. This is all about progress. We're watching things evolve.

• 19:35Jason Calacanis?

  Agriculture. Okay.

• 19:38Jason Calacanis?

  And the dot is what you see when you use it. Now we're getting into ships, going to the new world. We're going to colonize other countries. Now the railroad is polluting everything.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  It's like pixelated in a way, but it also has that kind of pointillist, like that, that artwork sort of style where it's all made of little dots. It looks cool.

• 20:01Jason Calacanis?

  Dial up.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  I like the animation on it.

• 20:07Jason Calacanis?

  All progress as a starting point.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  And then I love what it is. It does not say OpenAI. It says ChatGPT.

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• 22:03Speaker 01

  So here's the thing that I was curious about, Jason. Before you give me your rating, I want you to vet the performance of this ad. So here is a Google Trends chart of ChatGPT.

• 22:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. The term, the word.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yes. So, so this is 7:30. I think the ad was around here and it didn't actually have that much of an impact compared to what I expected. And for reference, here's the same search with Kendrick Lamar over Superimposed. So.

• 22:28Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So people were like, what is Kendrick Lamar? Who is Kendrick Lamar? Why am I watching him? Because he is a niche kind of, that's a deep pull in the rap space. I mean, compared to Jay-Z or Beyonce.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  No, no, no, he's bigger. Kendrick is huge, man. Kendrick had a huge 2024. That song was everywhere.

• 22:48Jason Calacanis?

  I thought he was like the rapper's favorite rapper.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  He was, but as, as he said, how'd you let a conscious rapper go commercial? Kendrick has 86 million monthlies on Spotify. And then you said Jay-Z, Jay-Z has, we all love Jay-Z. Jay-Z's 34 million.

• 23:05Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. All right. So that's all because of that song probably got really popular.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  He already had, like, you know, that he did the Black Panther song with SZA at the Super Bowl. That was a huge song. Humble was a really big song. DNA, DNA was a big song.

• 23:19Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, I like him, but I, I, what I heard yesterday on the socials and from folks was, who is Kendrick Lamar?

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you're following the wrong people.

• 23:27Jason Calacanis?

  Function of white, rich people not knowing who Kendrick Lamar is. I think that's more of a function.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  You're following right wing commentators and they do that. Did you see, I don't know if you saw it, there was a collection of tweets. Literally, this happens every single year. Right wing guys are like, they should get a marching band. They should get a country music band. Well, who are these people? Why are they doing these offensive songs? It's every, it doesn't matter when it was the weekend. It doesn't matter who they booked.

• 23:51Jason Calacanis?

  That was terrible, the weekend.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital on the Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl performance. He says, replying to Godzad, who said that this was a new low for the halftime show. Beg to differ, says Josh. Lyrical genius, double entendres and pure creative, genre-breaking poetry. My kids know every word. So I think that, you know, even amongst the rich old white people, it played.

• 24:15Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Uh, I think it's generational for sure that a lot of people.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  That I would agree with. And it might also be, it might also be regional. Like I'm from Los Angeles where Kendrick is also from.

• 24:26Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  He is enormous here. I mean, he's, he's the biggest rapper in the world right now in Los Angeles.

• 24:33Jason Calacanis?

  For me, it's still Prince. I think Prince had the best.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Oh, I love that. The Prince halftime show is, is, is a classic. It's a legend. It's legendary. No, nobody's arguing that.

• 24:44Jason Calacanis?

  Let's rate the, uh, the chat GPT one. The chat GPT one for me, I think aesthetically was pleasing. Like I think it was an interesting graphic design. I don't think it hooked me in in any way of like, this is why this is important or something. I'm a little bit cynical, maybe. I feel like this is a missed opportunity. They had that beautiful, engaging video. And it should have delivered with a message at the end in the way the 1984 commercial did. So that was evocative, you know, it told a story. And then at the end, they had this like iconic line, you know, find out why 1984 won't be like 1984, you know?

• 25:27Jason Calacanis?

  It had like a little punk rockness to here. At the end of this, they were like, what, what did they say? Like, uh, had to do a term paper or something like that? They like threw in a couple of searches like that.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, you hear audio of people asking chat GPT kind of basic questions. But I think the weirdest thing of all is that they, progress always has a starting point. Like that's their, you know what that feels like to me is when like Enron used to take out those ads where it was just like a crop, uh, growing and a plant and like a grandmother hugging. And then it's like, we're building the future, Enron, like where it's so. General, it's like, what do you do?

• 26:05Jason Calacanis?

  Smith and company.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. What is this for? Like, ChatGPT is a product. You can like, show me what it does and how to use it.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  All right. All right. So let me, let me tell you why I love it.

• 26:14Jason Calacanis?

  I give it a C. I give it a C.

• 26:15Speaker 03

  I go, yeah, I go, I mean, I like the ad as a piece of animation. It looks cool. I go, yeah, C plus, B minus, something like that.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Oh, what do you got? This is my favorite ad of the Super Bowl.

• 26:26Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Why? Because I love the way it started with the pre-technology era, the first sparks of what we considered to be human innovation, fire the wheel. And then it took you through this really kind of fast-paced, re-watchable, I would say, progression through the modern era. And to me, it's a very optimistic message that we are still making progress of the scale of first flight, microchips, et cetera. And this is the future. And then it sells it at the end with a very easy, and you can go play with it for free. How cool is that?

• 26:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. It's, I mean, it's, okay, I would have done, if I was gonna punch it up.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:02Jason Calacanis?

  I would have directly connected what AI could possibly do in the way the AT&T commercial did you will. And if you pull up the AT&T commercial, what they predicted you will do, they predicted EZ Pass, they predicted like Netflix, they predicted a lot of interesting things. I would have used this to then take fire the wheel, you know, dial up and then shown you a self-driving car. I would have showed you a robot like feeding chickens and getting the eggs from the coop. I would have shown you how insane this is going to get. I would have shown robots on the surface of Mars. I would have really gone for like,

• 27:45Jason Calacanis?

  a, you know, a surgeon robot using AI.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  So this is that ad.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Right. This is an interesting comparison though, because I feel like on some level, we're in a much more cynical age than we were. And if you tell people. Here's what's coming. Here's the future and show them moonshot ideas. I think we have a lot more built in cynicism for that in 2025. People have been hearing that stuff for years, you know, like we're in a post where's my flying car era.

• 28:18Jason Calacanis?

  That you will commercial. What year was that? Because man, you look at that. They showed a PDA, a personal digital device is long before the iPhone with a stylist on a beach. So that was saying like, you're going to send a fax from the beach. I mean, they kind of missed it by like 10 feet. But they were, they were in the general facility, which is you could take a video of your kids and then post it to the internet for the world to see or something, or you could do a live stream. And then they showed GPS never getting lost. And they show going through a toll. What were the other things in there? It went by so fast.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I'm gonna scrub through it, but it was 1993, I believe.

• 28:54Jason Calacanis?

  Was that 1993?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  So also wireless internet because he was on the tablet from the ocean. I thought that was pretty important. And they also showed the, the book on the screen.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Right. That's what I was gonna say. Some sort of research tool or in early internet, you know, you'll be able to read any book instantly, you know, right on a screen.

• 29:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  But it's better than they show because they're in a library in that, in that, in that video. But really, you're just at home now. You don't have to go anywhere.

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  This was 1993. So this is before the web browser. Just to give people an idea, this is during the AT&T dial up era. They showed a video phone booth, a remote medical consultation.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  But think about how much more optimistic people were about consumer technology in 1993. We were right on the verge of all of these innovations that were real and existed, but just were like, just about, you know, like the internet, we all knew was real. It was just very slow and you had to get like AOL to use it. I just feel like today, there's been so many more promises that we then haven't quite lived up to. I don't know if you can sell people on the future is now in the same way.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Osprey says that Nike was the winner. I did like the Nike had non-technology. It was kind of a women's sports homage. I watched a lot of women's sports.

• 30:09Jason Calacanis?

  That was good. I like that one too.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was like, oh, it's A. Wilson. Oh, it's Caitlin Clark. You know, that was fun.

• 30:13Jason Calacanis?

  I think there was an Uber each one again.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, with Matthew, Matthew McConaughey playing key figures from NFL history.

• 30:20Jason Calacanis?

  I like this one, not just because of my history with Uber. What I liked about it is when you drop historical references and you can follow along with this kind of.

• 30:32Jason Calacanis?

  Rapid drops of things like they do the refrigerator Perry. They do the Buffalo Bills. And they call it a pigskin like. Ice cream Saturdays, ice cream Sundays. There you go. Okay.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  Also Sean Evans from Hot Ones right there. Another.

• 30:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, is that Sean Evans from Hot Ones?

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, another fun little cameo.

• 30:54Jason Calacanis?

  Smart. I love Hot Ones.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Me too. A big, big Hot Ones.

• 31:02Jason Calacanis?

  Founders like me, you've got a lot on your plate. Running a startup means you gotta manage an endless to do list, tons of tasks, right? You gotta do your chores as a founder and you gotta juggle dynamic priorities. One day it's sales, the next day it's development, then it's product, then it's raising money. And that's why I rely on Coda, C O D A, to keep everything in our organization under control. Coda is the all in one platform that brings together the best of documents, spreadsheets and apps all into a single scalable workspace. And you know, it's so much more than when I say a to do list. I'm using that as like somewhere I start. Okay. I rattle off a couple of things that need to be done, but then my team builds databases

• 31:44Jason Calacanis?

  and workflows into Coda so that repetitive tasks become automated and information is shared. And there's a single source of truth, our training documents, our meetings with founders, everybody who we co invest with, LP relations, we do it all on Coda. And it gives us the flexibility to adapt to shifting priorities. We set our OKRs and we balance all that ambition we have with practicality. There are templates that you can use to start you on second or third base. Projects like Twist 500 where we're trying to catalog the top 500 private companies. That's being done inside of Coda. When you go to twist500.com, it's a Coda based website, public facing, but a database

• 32:27Jason Calacanis?

  and a system for us to track those companies on the backend. It's a all in one hub for startups. It's literally a Swiss army knife that we can use in any situation without having to go research another SaaS product and another template and another login. And another debate and negotiation with a SaaS vendor for yet another $5,000 or $10,000 a year. And hey, it's my money. I would rather use Coda and have everything in one place, one login, and then hook it all together. It's intuitive. It's powerful. It makes our workflow seamless. Coda empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track goals effectively. Take advantage of this limited time offer just for startups. Go to coda.io/twist today and get six months free of the team plan. Very generous. Thank you to the Coda team.

• 33:11Jason Calacanis?

  That's C O D A dot I O slash twist to get started for free. Well done, Coda. I give this one a B+. I liked it. I love anything where there's like pop culture references seeded through it. Yeah. So I give it a B+ because I liked when they this part where they got the refrigerator Perry. I always remember the bears.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's playing Ditka right there.

• 33:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, playing Ditka. It's pretty fun. Yeah.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  It's fun. Yeah. I also liked the Instacart. I thought was kind of similar where it was all the different ad mascots together. Like it was, it was doing like an Avengers Endgame, but for at, you know, characters from other ads like that Monkey Baby from the Mountain Dew ad, there's Chester Cheetah.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  How do you know all those names?

• 33:53Jason Calacanis?

  I told you he's pop culture.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  There's the weener. Monkey Baby. There's the Doughboy. There's the Jolly Green Giant.

• 33:59Jason Calacanis?

  Jesus, how do you do it? I'm like literally trying to keep up. There's the Jolly Green Giant. You're right.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's more. There's Mr. Clean.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  It's Kool-Aid Man.

• 34:08Jason Calacanis?

  Kool-Aid Man. There's the Cheeto Guy.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  I don't remember what the, the dogs in weener suits. There's the Energizer Bunny. So yeah, it's another like point at the, do the DiCaprio meme. Point at the screen when you recognize a character going by.

• 34:22Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Ah, right. The DiCaprio meme.

• 34:24Speaker 03

  So they get, it's a really strong from a, see there, yeah, there's the Old Spice guy.

• 34:28Jason Calacanis?

  Old Spice guy, yeah.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  It's just, it's hitting so many memes and ideas and familiar characters that it keeps people's attention.

• 34:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, much like the Uber one. So that's a theme when you have the density of the plot with characters, etc. And you can point to it. And it's um, it's like that South Park episode where they had member berries. Remember?

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Exactly. No, you're exactly right. Yeah, it's it's any any chance to you. People love Easter eggs. They love references like it's like a it's like Deadpool three, but for a commercial.

• 35:00Jason Calacanis?

  Fan service.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  Fan service. Fan service, exactly. But for commercials, which is

• 35:04Jason Calacanis?

  sad in a way.

• 35:05Speaker 03

  A sad commentary in a way that you can have commercial fan service, but you can.

• 35:09Jason Calacanis?

  In the Instacart ad, do we think that Instacart split the cost of the ad which eat with everybody who got a mention? In other words, they pooled their money? Or do you think they said, hey, if you give us your IP, you give us Mr. Kool-Aid, Mr. Clean, we'll just put him in there free of charge. But you got to give us the rights to use it.

• 35:29Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't I don't know. That's an interesting like, obviously, if you are Pillsbury, why wouldn't you want the doughboy in there? It's like, okay, he's one of the prominent mascots. We want him included, you know?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I'm with Lon on this, but I'll also throw in that Fiji, the CEO of Instacart is on OpenAI's board. So in my personal 5D chess board that I have in my head, I'm thinking that everyone wants to be on Fiji's good side because she's so close to OpenAI. Ergo, everyone said you can have the Kool-Aid man for free in your advertisement. And so they didn't have to pay anything. But I don't think they contribute.

• 35:59Jason Calacanis?

  So I give a B plus to this one. So we have we have some genres here. You got the dense fan service one. We got that as one. And then we have the heartstrings, country roads one. And another heartstring one that I loved was my guy, Harrison Ford, who's a Tesla guy, by the way, I know that. You know, I talked to him at a Tesla event one time. But he's a he's a big Tesla guy. But he did a Jeep commercial. Which was kinda like a crossing the aisle kinda commercial and hey, you might like to plug it in, or you might like gas. I think that was kinda the point of it. Let's play a little bit of that one if we have the Jeep one. But you saw this one, right Lon? What do you think of this one?

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Yes, I liked it. I mean, I feel like Harrison Ford, the last few years, he's really sort of taken ownership of his role as like America's granddad. And I think we all, we all have such strong emotional connection feelings for him, more than, you know, like you could put Walton Goggins in an ad and he's a good actor. I'm a big righteous gemstones guy, but it's not the sort of person who evokes the same feelings as Harrison Ford. And so I think there's just a gravitas, a cultural significance that he has that only a handful of other guys have. Tom Hanks, you know, how many, how many American actors are really in that, in that world? Maybe Samuel L. Jackson, who also made a notable appearance, but not that many. If

• 37:26Speaker 03

  you put him in something, everybody's paying attention because he's, he's America's granddad. I mean, it's Indy, it's Indiana Jones.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Matthew McConaughey to me has become the Salesforce guy who also does some acting.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  A little bit. He's in a lot of ads. He was in two ads this year.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  That's too much. That's saturation. That's brand dilution. Matthew's just sit down.

• 37:46Jason Calacanis?

  So they're doing like a lot of Americana. He's at a barn. He's in his J Ranch era. He's in his ranch era here as well. And there's a part of this where it shows the plugin and it shows like people going in different directions.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  If Kevin Costner hadn't bailed on Yellowstone to do his Horizon films, he could have done this. Like it's

• 38:04Jason Calacanis?

  And there's the plugin. See, look, there's the Rubicon plugin, hybrid.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  It's like that, like, you know, he, every, everybody, it doesn't matter if you're a big city liberal, if you live in a red state, if you're a farmer, a rancher, everybody loves Harrison Ford. He's universal.

• 38:21Jason Calacanis?

  And I like the joke at the end where he's like, am I last name? And I love Jeeps. So I, I thought this was cheeky. I thought it was heartstring pulling. And I'll tell you how effective this was. I've always wanted to own a Jeep Wrangler. My wife has always wanted to own a Jeep Wrangler.

• 38:38Jason Calacanis?

  And we just never got around to it. You know what I did after watching the set?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  What?

• 38:42Speaker 03

  You bought a Jeep?

• 38:43Jason Calacanis?

  I didn't buy a Jeep, but I went and I looked at the Jeep inventory around me here in Texas. I was like, I should get a Jeep for the ranch.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  I just assume if you're, yeah, I just assume that's, that's on a level you could just impulse. That's it. That's a J impulse purchase.

• 38:57Jason Calacanis?

  It could be a J impulse purchase, but I didn't.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  I'd have to build up a little while. I have to think about it, do some research. For you, just, just go online by it.

• 39:05Jason Calacanis?

  Well, the only reason you have to do a ton of research on this, by the way, now is I was on Car and Driver. Like Jeep has so many options. You can go hybrid. You can go regular. You can go two door. You can go four door. You can go hard top. You can go soft top. You go Rubicon. You could go six speed. You could go manual. You can go automatic. I mean, it's so many options. It's fatigue with the Jeep.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  I feel like that's part of the bit though, isn't it? It's like an all customizable, like your need, whatever your specific needs are, there's a Jeep for that, you know?

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Uh, but they do have a Jeep hybrid now. Uh, there's a Jeep Wrangler plug in hybrid. I didn't know that. Yeah. I was looking at the Jeep Wrangler hybrid. I was like, well, that's kind of cool. I wonder how many miles it gets or whatever.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  They're getting their ROI on that, on that Ford commercial already.

• 39:54Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it made me want to know what's up and I don't think they have, do they have an all electric one yet? I don't think they have an all electric Jeep yet.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, but I do know that every time I see a Jeep Gladiator with the top and the doors off, I'm like, that is the tank top of trucks and I always really want one, but my, my driveway is not long enough to have that. Plus my wife's car in it. So it's just, I, I can't buy one. So I don't have room.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  For the ranch, yes, it's not a very practical big city vehicle, but for the ranch, I could see it totally making sense.

• 40:23Jason Calacanis?

  What's the story Alex with Matthew McConaughey, uh, securing the bag from Benioff because Benioff is constantly running around with celebs. Uh, he's got the guy from Japan who was his like best friend. I forgot that guy's like either an artist or a musician that he's always hanging out with. And he's got Matthew McConaughey on the payroll.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 40:46Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and then there's another celebrity he had on the payroll for a while. Well, I, I, this idea that like Matthew McConaughey is like the strategy officer of, what is his official role and how much money is he getting paid to do this?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  So I, I went and looked this up and according to reporting from 2023, Matthew McConaughey is getting paid, quote, more than $10 million a year to serve as a creative advisor and TV pitchman, and that's according to the Wall Street Journal. So how much money is $10 million a year? It's about $27,400 per day. And I gotta tell you what, Mark, I'll do it for half.

• 41:24Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's a big number, 10 million bucks, but I guess if you've got like a hundred billion dollar company, I guess you can give somebody 10 million, but that's a lot of chatter.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:33Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what people get paid. Lon, would he be considered A-list like Tom, like Harrison Ford is A-list and George Clooney's A-list?

• 41:41Speaker 03

  We're in a very strange time in the movie industry. Conventionally, yes, he would have been like, he would have been who you'd normally think would be, you know, Oscar, when like was in all those rom-coms, had a, had a, had a, has a big career.

• 41:55Jason Calacanis?

  He's a legit guy.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  But in 2025, there's really only a handful of people who like, we know can definitely open a movie. Even guys like Will Smith are no longer like sure things. And Will Smith is more prominent.

• 42:08Jason Calacanis?

  Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  I mean, Cruise, even Cruise had a stumble with that last Mission Impossible. Like who is still an A-lister? Uh, it's hard to say.

• 42:18Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, great job. We'll see you on another episode soon. We'll drop you off and we got a couple of business stories to get through today. That are critically important. Well, that was fun. And what, what I like about that is we, we really got to talk about all the great internet companies spending money on this. This is not something you should do when you have a small amount of money, but if you're a billion dollar company, you got over a billion dollars in your bank account, why not do it? And here's what you should do. If you have under a hundred million, you want to participate in this, I might do this next year. You should do a spec Super Bowl commercial, let it out and say, this is.

• 42:52Jason Calacanis?

  What if we could afford a Super Bowl commercial? This would be our Super Bowl commercial. So you can hijack the Super Bowl commercial by releasing your not Super Bowl commercial. Or we can't afford a Super Bowl commercial, but we made one anyway. You should punk rock this. I'm going to advise a bunch of my startups. If you have 10 million in revenue and you want to go spend 100K making a not Super Bowl commercial, I'll retweet it for you. I think it's like a really good idea to punk rock and guerrilla market into the Super Bowl and release it with a press release.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  And then also say, or if you wanted to take it up one, one notch higher, say, this is our banned Super Bowl ad. They wouldn't let us play this. It's too X or too Y. And then people will talk about that as a controversial free speech point. And then you get even more play.

• 43:37Jason Calacanis?

  By the way, I think, um, you know, the meditation app did an election night commercial. I don't know if you saw that. This is 2024. They did it. Okay. So it was a couple of months ago. I remember getting a lot of feedback on this. They just did a silent ad. We brought this ad space to give you 30 seconds of silence. Yep.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  It's pretty effective because I'm already talking quieter.

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  I'm already on NPR voice. Yep, just silence. You're welcome. I mean, it's so powerful when you think about it like it's election night. Everything is going chaotic and comms like boom. And I know this because calm was the number one app of the year, according to Apple. They gave it the app of the year, not just health, but overall when Trump became president as a like, kind of sub tweet for all of Trump. Like, listen, I know it's going to be chaotic. Captain chaos is in, you know, get calm. So when Trump won, I was like, this is going to be great. We're going to sell a lot of eight sleeps and a lot of calm meditation apps. People are going to be all high strung and bent out of shape. Okay. What else do we got in the news? There's a bunch of news going on. This is rapid fire. Go through it.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  All right. So AI news to kick things off. There's an enormous event going on in France. We talked about this just for a hot second at the end of last week. J D Vance is going. I think Modi is going. But the whole point is that France has unveiled a lot more spending than we expected. They're putting together a over $100 billion private investment pool, Jason, to build

• 45:04Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  data centers, investing companies. There's a new pan EU, kind of like AI corporate consortium being put together that General Catalyst is a part of.

• 45:13Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  And I think it's a pretty big deal, frankly.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  So they put a pool of capital together. Vive la France. They're going to try to compete in data centers and AI. As we talked about, they got tons of nukes. They got tons of energy. This gives them a pole position. So what a forward thinking country in that they decided, you know what? We're not going to shut our nukes down. We're going to lean into nukes because we know we don't want to. We don't have oil in France. That I know of. So if we don't have that, let's go clean. Let's build extra nuclear. They were 80, 90% nuclear at one point. Now they're probably 60, 70% nuclear and 20% renewables. But if you have extra capacity for nuclear

• 45:55Jason Calacanis?

  and people need data centers, absolutely. Why wouldn't you put data centers in France and get some Pancho Chacalot and? Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I hear croissants in France cost a lot less than croissants in the US. So I'm aboard. It's 109 billion euros and it's called the EU AI Champions Initiative. Oh, that's the general catalyst thing. There's a bunch of AI stuff coming out of France right now. And I know people have given Europe a lot of stick for its regulatory posture. They do seem to be shifting, Jason, and I think that it would be great to have two hubs of AI development in the free world to counterpoint China. And then finally, one last thing here, Mistral, the French foundation AI model company and Helsing, the European defense company are going to work together on AI defense tech for Europe. And I thought that sounds very American. So we have a big investment. We have less regulation and we have guns. Europe is going American on AI.

• 46:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yep. Hey, pay your fair share. I love it. And then, uh, yeah, we had talked last week that UAE was going to invest uh, in data centers there. And so this is great news. And if you want to play a part in the AI future, there's a couple of ways to go about it. Obviously, you could have great PhDs coming out of your universities who know how to write code, etc. You could have energy, uh, you could have data centers. There's a lot of ways to go about it and you can lower regulations so things can move faster. Good on them. I also saw, you know, and I, and I, uh, reply to you, uh, Sam Lessin, who worked, um, he's a, I think he's Slow Ventures is his venture capital firm. And he had worked, uh, at Facebook for a long time. And obviously his wife is the

• 47:35Jason Calacanis?

  Jessica Lessin from the information, which we sometimes quote here. Oh, yeah. He did a really interesting tweet. You can pull it up. He says, simple slash obvious AI company to build, replace, do not reply at email addresses with please reply at. And, you know, you could read his like little pitch on it, but my Lord, I always hated do not reply emails because I'm like, if you could get a reply from a customer, like, why wouldn't you want that? Like, that makes total sense. But, you know, with AI, you could have people reply and then send them a thoughtful AI-based reply first. And then if they need a human, they could ask for a human at any point in time, just kind of like you do on the phone where you say, I need an agent. And, um, yes, somebody should build, please reply at as a company.

• 48:19Jason Calacanis?

  Just take his advice here. This is a great idea to just build an AI email gateway that does this and this only where it's human in the loop. You make a web interface. I mean, this could change everything for small businesses. What a great, obvious idea. And, you know, uh, you just have to be willing to iterate on it, but I just wanted to give him a shout out. Uh, because that is a great idea.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  I think it's a great idea and it actually makes me pretty encouraged about how much space there still is in the market to take modern AI technology and apply it at legacy systems to improve the overall consumer and customer experience, to use kind of a buzzwordy term. This isn't even that hard off-the-shelf technology, Jason. You could make it with pretty much, I think, any major LLM API. But here's the question that I have. Build it or buy it. If you're a company, would you want to pay a SaaS fee for this? Or would you want to just have your own crew spin up your own version of it?

• 49:14Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. I mean, in all cases, you have this. It's a feature. It can be done internally, yada, yada. I would say if you make it and it's $99 a month for up to 10,000 emails and it's $1,200 a year, why would anybody build it? Because

• 49:30Speaker 01

  It's cheap.

• 49:30Jason Calacanis?

  A developer's gonna cost you $100,000 in a year of work to do it. And like Squarespace, you know, I always tell people about like using Squarespace, they constantly add features to it. So it wasn't like a Shopify competitor. It was like more for like a beautifully designed website and Shopify was for e-commerce, but they added the e-commerce features. Then they, you know, it wasn't for selling content like maybe Patreon or some of those other platforms are for, you know, we can sell content or email newsletters or videos. And then they added that. So what you could do with this is you make it for email, then you add it to WhatsApp, you add it to text, whatever. But it's a really great wedge. And what I would do is I would make it free for under 1,000 emails.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:12Jason Calacanis?

  And just see what happens. So if somebody wants to do this idea, you know, find a friend or two, email me, [email protected], go to launch.co/apply and build a prototype. If your prototype's good, I'll give you 25K or 125K to go to Founder University or, you know, to the Launch Accelerator. It's just such an obvious idea. I'm happy to give people their first check to give it a shot if they're actually developers and they make a prototype. So somebody can clip this and put it on, you know, our request for startups. Shout out to Sam Lessin. Great idea. I think you could build it for 25 to 125K, no problem.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  So in baseball

• 50:50Jason Calacanis?

  On your weekends, yeah.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  The Mendoza line is kind of like the threshold at which someone becomes like ineffective at batting. I think it's like a .2 batting average. I wonder if there'll be a SaaS line? Like if you charge less than 1/10th of the cost of a developer for your SaaS product, no one's gonna build it because it's so much cheaper to buy it. And I wonder if there's a way we can use that to like frame what software product might be at risk.

• 51:14Jason Calacanis?

  Three developers. If you have to put three, if the cost of building something and maintaining it in your company is three developers, you're probably not going to do it because you got other things you'd want to put the three developers on. But under three developers, you probably just want to buy it, right? So for us internally, we built all of our systems for tracking companies using Coda and Notion and Zapier and some other tools. That was under three developers of work. Like you could have, I think we probably have in total three, four people on the team spending 20% of their time each, like less than one full-time person. And they're not even developers. They're just savvy business people who know how to use these kind of scripting tools.

• 51:56Jason Calacanis?

  So yeah, it might be like a two developer rule. If it's over two developers or more, just, you know, we'll do it in, you know, or if it's under, takes under two developers, just buy the software that's out there. There's something there where you don't want to waste too many developers on a project. So.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  Also, you don't have too many projects. I mean, we talk a lot about how focus is so important for startups. And then we also talk about rolling your own software. Well, those do kind of contrast a little bit.

• 52:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, now you've got a management team that instead of doing their job is managing the building of the infrastructure for the company. So you've got to really think, is this worth doing? And I can tell you, at the core of running an accelerator or an incubator is processing a large number of applications efficiently, tracking a large number of companies and their progress. So when you're an at-scale investor, it does make sense to build custom software. If you're a firm that does six investments a year and you process 2,000 applications, yeah, you could use off-the-shelf software. We have 20,000 applications. We do 100 investments. We're tracking, I don't know, a thousand companies that we've either invested in or that are in our programs like Founding University. So yeah, we need custom software.

• 53:05Jason Calacanis?

  You know, there was another story that you had put on the docket about IT unemployment on the rise. I thought that was a very interesting story.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  So on Friday, we showed a chart showing that there's been a pretty sharp decline in how many new. People were being hired into tech roles in the US. And I found some more data on that. So according to Department of Labor data that the Wall Street Journal published, the number of unemployed IT workers here in the States rose from about 100,000 to about 150,000 last month. And that pushed IT unemployment from 3.9%, kind of below the national average, just a little bit, to 5.7%. Now, some of this is end of year cleaning house, companies letting people go and so forth. But I, I wouldn't have thought in today's moment, when there's so much opportunity in technology, that we would have a higher unemployment rate for IT folks

• 53:54Speaker 01

  than the average American worker. And the question is, is this AI showing up in the numbers, Jason?

• 54:01Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's two things. One, there's, um, the software in IT is getting better and better, and it's being offshored. So that combination of offshoring and let's call it self-serve. So you are in a remote company, you have a problem with the Mac Mini or whatever I sent you or the camera. If the microphone, the camera and the Mac Mini are, you know, well constructed and the software like Restream is well constructed. Are you going to ask for tech support from Producer Court or Chris? Or are you just going to try to solve it yourself? You're probably going to just try to solve it yourself to not bother them.

• 54:42Jason Calacanis?

  And you'll be a little self-reliant and the answers are there. So I don't think it's AI replacing the person. I think it's the person replacing the IT person. I think what it is, is the customer, you know, the executive going to chat GPT and saying, how do I underline in Word? That's what's happening here.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Okay. So essentially people are more empowered by improved software and improved ability to go out and find their own answers. So in an IT context, going back to your early IT experience, we just need fewer bodies. Okay, I'll take that.

• 55:16Jason Calacanis?

  You're not going to call the support desk if you can call an AI. So instead of calling the support desk, go to chat GPT, go to YouTube, go to Gemini, ask the same question.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:26Jason Calacanis?

  Go to Grok and you're probably half the time going to solve your issue. So the number of calls coming into the help desk go down.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 55:32Jason Calacanis?

  Because of AI. So this is a very weird one. It's not that AI is like exactly replacing the person. It's that people are going to AI to solve their problems. And I suspect this will happen with lawyers and accountants as well and doctors. All of those professions, before we call our attorneys, we upload a document to ChatGPT and we ask it, is this a standard safe? Has anything been changed? Here's the standard safe.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Smart.

• 55:57Jason Calacanis?

  So before you call your attorneys and spend $800, $1,200, shout out to expensive attorneys everywhere.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Shout out, yes.

• 56:03Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out. You should, as a founder, take the document and just ask ChatGPT to analyze and say, how is this term sheet I got from a venture capitalist different than the standard term sheet? Then when you go talk to your attorney, you could also upload, as an employee, here's my non-compete, non-disclosure, whatever you signed, when you, you know, my assignment of IP. You could ask ChatGPT to analyze it, summarize it, and then you can go to your employer or your employment attorney and say, hey, who owns my IP in this case if I use my own laptop on the weekends? All of this is to say, the first third or the first half of questions for professional service people are going to be answered not by Google but by ChatGPT.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Oh, we're done. This goes back to, we talked about Glean the other day on the show, which is essentially AI for internal corporate answers. And Yahoo was a customer, so I actually got to use it for a second before I quit, and they just hit 100 million ARR. So there's another example of just this playing out in the market. I will say though, I think for biggest, the biggest companies, you're going to need IT staff because their internal systems are so complex, it's a little bit harder to ChatGPT your way out of them. But for anything under 1,000 people, I think you're dead on.

• 57:14Jason Calacanis?

  All right. So we're going to have a big week this week with earnings. I'm just going to pick my top three that I want to go over. You can pick your top three and we'll meet in the middle. I really want to understand what's going on at Robinhood, Reddit, and hmm, my third choice, let's see, Zillow, Shopify, Freshworks, SimilarWeb, Lyft, and SolarWinds are going to come out on Tuesday. So I guess I got to go Lyft is my choice there because, you know, I want to see how they're responding to the situation with self-driving. I got to go Robinhood and Reddit because I think those two are crushing it and super important to Robinhood. I never sold a share of Robinhood. We distributed from our first fund, our Robinhood investment.

• 57:56Jason Calacanis?

  At like, I don't know if it was eighteen or twenty dollars a share. I think it's at fifty bucks a share right now and growing.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  Six thirty-four share.

• 58:03Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Up zero point eight six percent. Look, but look at that tear from the beginning of two thousand twenty-four, when it was thirteen, fourteen bucks a share. It has been ripping all through last year.

• 58:13Jason Calacanis?

  But give it the lifetime one, because what happened, this, this is a really important lesson for everybody.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Lifetime. This is, uh, from, this is, yes.

• 58:21Jason Calacanis?

  So this is the lifetime chart. That peak is when Kathy Wood and when it went public and I was locked up for the first six months. So if you look at that chart, I think it peaked early at fifty or sixty dollars a share. What was the peak?

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Uh, this was the peak was seventy.

• 58:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so this is really important. It went to seventy dollars a share and did it go public in twenty-two or twenty-three?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  I think it was very early twenty-two. It's August twenty-one. I'm sorry.

• 58:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, wow, August twenty-one. So I couldn't sell. August twenty-one was still zerpy, kinda zerpy in the air. And so people went nuts for Robinhood and then it came crashing down. Everybody's like, oh my God, this is a terrible company. I was like, this company's great. People love this product. I'm not selling. I'm gonna hold Robinhood forever. Little did I know that Robinhood would continue to crush it and if you just watch it, it comes back.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  It does.

• 59:14Jason Calacanis?

  And now here we are, fifty-six dollars a share. You know what? And it's peaking right now. I'm not selling it. I think, I told everybody, I think that this is going to be a trillion dollar company. What's the market cap of Robinhood right now?

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Fifty billion, exactly. So I, I changed the chart if you're watching the YouTube version and I threw on, Jason, this is just the, the federal funds overnight target rate, the Fed rate, as we call it.

• 59:32Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 59:33Speaker 01

  And what happened was, you can see, this was very much in the zerp era, the early trading period. And then rates went up and there's a bit of a lag and then Robinhood rises. But one thing I think people forget about Robinhood's resurgence was frankly, it made tons of money off of holding a lot of cash from its customers. And so when the price of money went up, a lot of fintech companies saw a pretty substantial boost to their, their revenues. So the Fed giveth and the Fed taketh away. But Robin's one of my favorite examples of how the Fed can really be on both sides of a trade. Now, you wanted Reddit, let me pull it up for you.

• 1:00:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Wednesday, I think we we have Robinhood and Reddit. I don't know if they announced beginning of the day, end of the day, but we could probably grab like Zillow is an interesting one on Tuesday coming out as well because that would give us some insight into the changes that occurred with that settlement in the real estate market. So maybe Tuesday we grab Zillow lift. Wednesday, we grab Robinhood Reddit. Thursday, I guess we gotta do Coinbase with all the changes in crypto. And then maybe Airbnb because that's like an interesting bellwether. So there I got six that I'm interested in. You could pick a couple as well. And that gives us like what we'll cover this week. Because there's so many startup lessons from from that cohort of six, right? And it's a marketplace, marketplace, marketplace,

• 1:00:46Jason Calacanis?

  content, marketplace, marketplace. It's five marketplaces, one content company.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  I want to the one only one I want to add, Jason, is what I have pulled up right now, which is Monday.com. They're up 28% today because they reported this morning. And I have, it's rare to see a SaaS company jump that much in the current moment. And just so people know, what does it take to crush as a public SaaS company? Revenue growth of 32% year over year, faster than expected, better adjusted EPS than expected. And they've they guided to about 1.21 billion for this year, which was above estimates. And they're generating tons and tons of cash. So all you have to do is be at the pinnacle of public market growth, have expanding profitability, insane free cash flow generation, and be analyst expectations. And you too can have a greater than 10x multiple.

• 1:01:35Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, they got a billion in yearly revenue. That's great. They're making money. They're profitable. They're growing at over 30% year over year. All of this is great. So maybe this is the beginning of the return of SaaS. And I bet you that their employee count is half of what it was at the peak. I bet you that's the trend is that they probably had like a thousand employees and now they have 500. Because in order to get the earnings to go up like this, you gotta have some discipline, right? There has to be some discipline. And look at all that free cash flow. Wow. They can start buying their shares back. I mean, and this is one of the things about if SaaS is going to be perennially undervalued by the public markets, then these SaaS companies can go private like Zendesk did, I believe,

• 1:02:19Jason Calacanis?

  or they could start buying back their shares. So they really have two options of how to take advantage of valuations being low. Start buying back shares, which Uber is doing because they perceived their shares were low, or you could

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  Take the company private.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  No, no, no more of that. No more take privates. Only Publix. All right. I, I, I just, I really want more IPOs this year. Elsewhere in the world, OpenAI is taping out its chip with TSMC, which means that they're moving forwards on having their own hardware. Keep in mind that, uh, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, everyone's doing this. We also have a bunch of chip companies in the TWIST 500, including Etched, which we're trying to get onto the show. They are making transformers specific.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody wants Etched on the show. So if somebody knows somebody at Etched, let's try to get that locked up. Founder Fridays announcement, uh, FounderFridays.tech is where founders host other founders in groups of ideally six to eight or enough to go around a roundtable and talk about what was your big win for the last month? What are your big challenges? That's the format. That's all it is. But imagine if you're a founder, you're home alone, you're in Miami, you're in Austin, you're in San Antonio, wherever you are, and you got to sit with five others, six others, seven other folks and answer that question. What's working? What's not working? And then give each other advice. It's the simplest format I ever came up with. It's the most effective format I've ever come up with. We decided we're going to do a Founder Friday city competition.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:03:48Jason Calacanis?

  We used to do this in the old days with meetups. We're doing a Founder Friday competition. Each city is going to have the ability to have a little startup competition amongst their six, seven, eight founders. You know, each give their best pitch. Then whoever they want to represent them in the nationals will get to go. We're going to make a bracket. We'll have eight international cities, eight US cities. You know, they'll all battle each other. And then we will wind up with like four quarter, you know, whatever, four people in the finals. And then we'll rank them and we'll have a show.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Jason Calacanis?

  Where each of these, uh, folks get to pitch for two minutes, take a question from Alex and I, and then we'll pick the winner in each of the brackets. So there'll be an additional great reason to join a Founder Fridays group or run one in your city.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  I love this.

• 1:04:39Jason Calacanis?

  For founders.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it. I love it. I love, I love demos. I love founders. I love vetting things. I love asking. Questions, I'm 100%

• 1:04:46Jason Calacanis?

  There it is. So share it there. He's Alex, X.com slash Alex. I'm X.com slash Jason. He's got a newsletter. It's called Cautious Optimism. I have one. Just type in Jason Calacanis Stubstack. You'll find it. Sign up for it. I'm going to start writing some email newsletters, I decided.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:05:02Jason Calacanis?

  Now that we got Lon here to help me with ideas and we'll see you all next time. This week in startups.com slash docket to see Wednesday's docket ahead of time. You can ask questions in the docket. Thank you to Notion for hosting the docket. Bye bye.