SPEAKER_02: I'm going to need some counsel here. If somebody flies over my ranch, it's your ranch, it's my

SPEAKER_03: ranch. Can I take them out? Because I think Texas law might be different. What have you found out so far? Because obviously this is a moving target, so to speak. Definitely, definitely. And Texas has

SPEAKER_07: probably the most different laws is the rest of the United States. For the most part, you're not supposed to mess with the internal functions or the flying of unmanned air vehicles, because you classify UAS or drones the same way you classify aircraft. So think of it as shooting down a Cessna.

SPEAKER_08: That's how the law currently sees it. I can't do that.

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SPEAKER_16: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With me, my co-host, Lon Harris. Alex Wilhelm has the day off today. We're going to get right into the news. Tons of things going on. There's more updates on this crazy deal versus rippling

SPEAKER_18: espionage story. Anthropics getting to ASL-3. There's a new app for whistleblowers. What else

SPEAKER_20: we got on the docket? Oh, there's so much. Yeah. I want to talk about Floweth. They're calling it the first infinite AI agent. That sounds interesting. There's a company, a YC

SPEAKER_22: company called Firecrawl. They're hiring AI agents. They have a job posting up for three AI agents that they want to hire. There's Blue Sky News. We got to talk about 23andMe got

SPEAKER_23: bought. Plus, we've got Parth from Prantel coming in for office hours. It's a packed ship.

SPEAKER_26: I was driving here in my new Corvette that GM lent me a Corvette for a couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_25: How nice of them. Nice to be an influencer. But, you know, I've always been a Corvette lover. So, I was driving this incredible E-Ray, which is like their hybrid Corvette. They have a little battery in it. It makes it sort of powerful. So, here I am, you know, going down. I don't know if I was on 5th or 6th Street, whatever. I'm going down here in downtown Austin. And look what happens. Looky here. I'm sitting there at the traffic light and I see a little R2D2 go by. Oh, there's a little guy, yeah. I don't know. Which brand is that one? I can't

SPEAKER_30: see it from here. AV Ride, it said on the side. AV Ride. And look, it gets to the corner

SPEAKER_31: and it's like, got to make a little decision here. But your burritos, your tacos, they're coming. They're coming with that robot. They're on their way. I think they're in LA everywhere.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah. Yeah. They're all over Hollywood. You walk around Hollywood Boulevard and there's always one of these scooching by on this way. I have a punch up for this. They got to teach

SPEAKER_31: these things how to go up and down elevators. That's so obvious, the next step. But think

SPEAKER_25: about how much work that will be for that company. So, when you talk about how much work is left to do for door to door, what I want is that to go to your WeWork and not be downstairs, but to go right up to your hotel room, go right up to your floor and wait for you in the lobby.

SPEAKER_20: These things are incredible. Yeah. That, that is, but you, it's interesting. Every task like that, that you add the layers of complexity, like you have to teach the robot, not just how to get on an elevator, how to like get to the right floor, how to figure out when you're at the right floor. Correct. You know, like if you, if it stops on three, but you're not bringing the burrito, you're bringing the burrito to a guy on five, it has to know, don't get off on three. For right now, it's obviously going to be the lobby. Yeah. But I'm just thinking

SPEAKER_25: like, what's next is this thing tapping on your door. Right. It's going to be pretty

SPEAKER_26: amazing on an R2-D2 basis. I'm sure you finished Andor. Oh, of course. I mean. Finished Andor.

SPEAKER_49: We, cause Lon is just such an oracle of this doing the inside streaming newsletter. Is that

SPEAKER_50: not like the best Star Wars ever created? I think it is. I think it might actually be the

SPEAKER_23: best Star, at least since I feel like Last Jedi, I really liked a lot. It's definitely the best

SPEAKER_20: since then, but it might even be going back to like original trilogy. Empire Strikes Back

SPEAKER_52: level. I think it might be as good as Empire and Return of the Jedi. Yeah. So, so good. I just want to thank them for creating it. Here's what I was saying. Finished it last night.

SPEAKER_20: One thing they did that I didn't even think about at first that's so good is it goes,

SPEAKER_23: it sort of retcons the Death Star and it makes it the Emperor's plan all along. Yes. Even when

SPEAKER_22: he was Senator Palpatine, when he was first drawing all these things together, it was always about creating the Death Star, which makes Return of the Jedi better because the Return of the Jedi, it's like, oh, they're building another Death Star. Okay. It feels repetitive. But when you go back with the insight of Andor, you're like, well, of course he would try to do it again. Yes. He'd been leading up to this for years. The whole energy project was to Death Star. Yeah. And it's really

SPEAKER_25: interesting that they're filling in the timeline. So it's 17 years, I think, is when he takes over as Palpatine is like 10 to 17 years before the battle, BBY, the battle of, before the battle of

SPEAKER_16: Yavin. Yavin. Yavin, yeah. And then it's after the battle of Yavin. So they're really trying to

SPEAKER_23: educate the audience on all of this. Yeah. Here's the timeline around the major events of the

SPEAKER_20: original Star Wars. Incredible character and literally not a lightsaber in the series. No. At the very end, one of the last lines is Benjamin Bratt, as Bail Organa tells him, may the force be with

SPEAKER_27: you. I think it's the first time they've mentioned the force. Yes. Which that's like such a brilliant

SPEAKER_26: master stroke is just the patience with the series to not go for what would have been easy layups for them. There's no Darth Vader, spoiler alert, no Palpatine. I thought for sure, you know, when that

SPEAKER_63: one, so there's a couple of spoilers here, when that one ISB guy kills himself. Part of gas. Yeah.

SPEAKER_25: When he kills himself at the end, when they said, they're ready for you. I was absolutely hoping that he would have to face Palpatine and Vader. Oh, sure. Or something. Yeah. I feel like the

SPEAKER_20: temptation to put the Emperor in there, even just in one, like a Zoom call where the Emperor is waiting.

SPEAKER_67: They should have, right? But I guess restraint is great. Yeah. Tony Gilroy said he purposefully

SPEAKER_20: didn't want to do that. He wanted Krennic to be like the big bad of this show. And, you know,

SPEAKER_02: he's the ultimate authority. Another thing I wanted to talk to you about is, I just want to shout out to designers everywhere. I just love great design. One of the great things you can do for your

SPEAKER_25: startup, and one of the 13 reasons we have to invest in a startup, we have this like secret playbook that you're now privy to. One of the 13 qualities we look for is world-class design. World-class design, you know, when I first told everybody, look for world-class design, they kept checking off this box. My researchers, my analysts who were looking at the incoming pitches for startups for us to invest in. And I said, that's not world-class design. So they said, please tell us how to define world-class design. I said, well, you know it when you see it. It still wasn't enough, right? Right. So I have to like take what's in my brain and put it into a team of 11 investment team members. So I said, if Apple would feature that app at a keynote and Steve Jobs would tweet it, or Steve Jobs would introduce the person, that's world-class design. Right. Right. So com.com was app of the year. Other apps get featured. Apple doesn't feature it unless it's great. And I saw this guy, Mark Hemion. Hemion. Hemion, who, you know. LA tech guy. LA tech guy. And he did this great thing where he took the Airbnb icons, but made them in Dieter Ram style, who is the German industrial designer. Sure. Yeah, I got it. And let's just show this on the screen here. These are all the Airbnb designs. We didn't cover it, but last week, Airbnb took a second swing at experiences. So when you're at an Airbnb, you're in your city, they want to kind of be the Everything app. So we now have multiple people going after the Everything app, and they just took some icons and put it here. If you don't know that style, look at this, because they're doing something, I guess, called detailed 3D isometric icons. Yeah, I pulled up. Look at this prompt that he used to generate these. It's huge. A highly detailed 3D isometric icon of a insert object inspired by a Dieter Ram's brawn design. Style, Airbnb, 2024 icon language, miniature diorama,

SPEAKER_16: emoji-like objects with crisp edges, realistic textures, and soft, handcrafted realism. Material, a mix of matte plastic, brushed aluminum, ceramic, or leather, depending on the original object. View, three-quarter front left, isometric view with a slight top-down angle. Lighting, soft neutral

SPEAKER_18: studio lighting from the top left with double shadows. Still going. Still going. And I've just read

SPEAKER_20: you the first half. Now, what I think is so fascinating, I used to play around a lot in the early, early days of generative AI, when it was first becoming viral. Stable Diffusion was like the first app I played around with. Yes. And people used to use all of these very subjective terms in their prompts. They'd be like, cinema quality, high definition, beautiful angles, picturesque imagery. And I think what we've learned over the years of working on prompts of what people have gotten so much more sophisticated at, it doesn't need any of the flowery language. A computer doesn't know what to do with that. But the more details like this, that you can add specific, actual physical details,

SPEAKER_22: like brushed aluminum, front left isometric view with a slight top-down angle. Like if you give

SPEAKER_02: the computer specifics, it knows exactly what you want. Prompts do still matter. And asking the LLM,

SPEAKER_25: how would you do this prompt might be helpful. Design matters. Steve Jobs was obsessed with design.

SPEAKER_26: If you do world-class design like this that you're seeing here, you will get 30% more investor meetings. 30%. And I think you'll get taken 100% more seriously by your customers. So is it worth it to spend money on design? Well, if you don't have the money, of course not. But we're moving into a

SPEAKER_25: world where you can constantly iterate on your design and make it better and better and better because of these language models, because of the tools. Doing business and making deals would be a

Chamath Palihapitiya: lot simpler if you had a crystal ball. Obviously. Hey, if you've got a future prediction startup, contact me. I'm going to write you a check. You're coming to my accelerator. But until then, one way to future-proof your business is with our amazing partner NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one ERP tool on the market today. And it's trusted by over 40,000 businesses for a reason. But you might be asking, what does NetSuite do? Okay, you're at a startup. Maybe you wonder, who is this NetSuite I keep hearing about? Well, it's going to take all your accounting, inventory, financial management, and HR and put it into one easy-to-use platform, one source of truth, one resource to check for anything you need to know about your business. That's going to give you real-time insights and allow you to forecast with the visibility and control you need to make great decisions. It's like being a fighter pilot. You've got all those important instruments right at your fingertips so you can go fast, beat the competition, and grow your business. So NetSuite is going to help you have all that reliable information when you need it. Founders, you're going to need to know about it. And a great first step is to get the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. So speaking of opportunities, go ahead and download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash twist. The guide is free for you at netsuite.com slash twist. That's netsuite.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_25: Maybe you can pull up a couple of the inspirations that Steve Jobs had. I put a couple in the Slack room for you there, if you could open one or two of them. And, you know, Steve Jobs obviously really cared about design, but he also wasn't too proud to be inspired by it. So what you see on the left here, if you don't know Dieter Rams, is this German designer. On the left, I think, is a radio?

SPEAKER_02: That's a Braun Transistor 3. Radio. Yeah. Transistor radio.

SPEAKER_25: You look on the right, it's the iPod. You guys seeing a pattern here? Like, Steve Jobs was very much inspired by his design. Show the next one where you can see like, yeah, this one, if you make it

SPEAKER_90: bigger. Here we go. Go command plus plus maybe. Sorry. No problem. We can edit it in post. Okay, good. So here you're looking at that, right? The Braun Pocket Radio 58, Apple iPod 2001. Give us a

SPEAKER_23: couple of the other ones we're seeing here. This is the Braun T1000 radio. That's from 1967. And obviously on the right, the Power Mac G5, your desk, your tower. Yeah, the tower. And look at that. He's

SPEAKER_98: got that. He's got it. Almost exact. Yes. Now what's this on the left here? This is the Braun LE1

SPEAKER_20: speaker from 1959. And you can see how similar it is to that iMac generation. 48 years later. That's

SPEAKER_25: almost 50 years later. Let that sink in for a second. Design can be timeless and simplicity is, you know, elegantly simple as I think one of the concepts. Steve Jobs won Designs, Design Awards, was considered the tip of the spear in design for many decades. Did you see The Brutalist, that movie? This reminds

SPEAKER_22: me of a lot of that Bauhaus sort of style as well, which was also German. Absolutely. And

SPEAKER_15: my point here is you don't have to reinvent the wheel. What's the last two? It's worth looking at.

SPEAKER_23: This one is a T1000 radio from 67. And then again, the full case, if you look at the Power Mac, Mac Pro from the early aughts. Beautiful machine. And then this last one is on the left. We've got a Braun calculator from 77. And on the right, Apple's calculator app from 2000. Which is an

SPEAKER_16: exact copy. It's an exact, yeah. I mean, it's literally exact down to the yellow button. Made

SPEAKER_25: it a Braun calculator in your iPhone. And the point here is, immature artists copy, mature artists steal. You can just, with your startup and your design, be inspired by designs that happen before you adapt them and get all that credit and build on the legacy of other designers. I think it's fair game. If you're upfront about it and you give a little bit of credit and, you know, a nod, you don't want to, you know, just steal for the stealing sake. And when people, when you're, I find design is very intimidating for people. Here's what you do with design. You just say, who are the designers who inspired X, Y, and Z? So find some things you like in the world, say, which designers are related to these designs I like. Ask an LLM. And then go find some books, buy a couple of like books, put them on your shelf. And when you're, you know, not in front of your computer or your device, just take them in and then think about your startup and how you're designing your product to make it better. Your logo, your website, how your interface works. This is one of the things that made Superhuman do so well. Superhuman has a very constrained, awesome design. And that made that startup really appeal to investors, employees, and of course, customers, most of all. Another thing I want to talk about is I got an email this weekend from Athena. Everybody knows Athena provides those assistants. I'm an investor in the company. I have two Athena assistants. They're assistants from typically the Philippines who work for you and are just super dedicated and make you more efficient. They have a newsletter. I don't know how to sign up for it. But anyway, you can look for the Athena newsletter. It's on Beehive, I think. It is on Beehive. So do a search for it. And you can go to athenawow.com if you want to get a couple of weeks for free. But they did this really interesting summary. And what they do in this newsletter is they talk about people who are efficient and how to be more efficient in your life, how to get more done with less. And they talked about Hillstone's only choice system. David Chang calls their French dip haunting. Danny Meyer confidently orders the usual without glancing on the menu. Haunting. Haunting. That's a good French dip if it's haunting. Yeah. I mean,

SPEAKER_109: I want a haunting French dip. I want to be haunted by French dip. I'd like to be haunted by my French dip.

SPEAKER_25: They're talking about Hillstone, one of America's most consistently extra restaurant. What is Hillstone's secret? Meticulously designed systems that completely remove friction. I saw that sentence and I said, this is what I talk about all the time, right? You want to remove friction in your startup. You want to make things go faster and easier. And you want systems over goals. You want to create systems over goals. And so I'm always trying to do this in our business. When we sort for founders, we look for them, create systems that remove friction, get us closer to founders, and get us supporting them and figuring out what they need, right? And you're seeing that firsthand because you're also working on the investment side of the business. Hillstone founder, George Beale, famously drills every table into the floor so the tables never wobble. Good idea. It's such a simple, great idea, but how many times you've

SPEAKER_117: been in a restaurant, it happens like one out of five times, right? It's like a 20% problem.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Well, I won't shout out and shame the restaurant because I love the restaurant, but we recently went to a very nice kind of fancy place in Austin. It was Uchi. And they sat us at a high, weird, wobbly table, and we had to go ask for a second table. Yeah, we were those guys. It was

SPEAKER_122: that. Well, because it was weirdly wobbly. And it felt like they added that table to a well-designed

SPEAKER_16: room to just add a six top. A little bit. And it was so weird. I love Uchi. I wasn't going to call

SPEAKER_25: that. Uchi was the greatest. I'm going there tonight, actually. The table was one-third higher than all the

SPEAKER_128: other tables. It was a little bit of a weird, awkward table. One-third higher. It stuck out

SPEAKER_41: to me all this time in my mind. And the chairs were also like a different level of height.

SPEAKER_88: Yeah, we were a little bit above everybody around us. But basically our food would have been at our

SPEAKER_133: belly height. Correct. So we would have been like these giant NBA players. It was what it felt like.

SPEAKER_134: It felt like when Patrick Ewing goes to a diner. It was just crazy. Shout out to Patrick Ewing.

SPEAKER_25: Shout out to Patrick Ewing. Okay. So that's one tip, right? So he said, and I went to their website. If you go to their website, look at their rules on their website, because they have a rule that they only do like four tops and they don't allow kids. But if you do bring kids, like they're like admonish you that if they're crying to get out of there and they don't do big parties. That's another one of the things. Every, and I'll read some here from this. Every table is a booth, each equipped with its own spotlight, eliminating guesswork around seating and lighting. So this is also another issue, right? Because everything's a booth. You know what everybody wants when they go to a restaurant? What do they ask for? The booth. They ask for the booth. Yeah. You get a booth. That's it.

SPEAKER_139: You want the booth. Everybody wants a booth. Yeah. Right. Booth is the restaurant. Booth is the

SPEAKER_16: default. So the booth is bolted. It's a default on their website. They talk about like their rules around dining. And did you find that page on their website, Hillstone? If you look on the Hillstone website, you'll find this. I'm checking it out now. Yeah. Yeah. Go take a look. The Hillstone has like on their website, their rules around and dress code. Then servers handle exactly

SPEAKER_25: three tables, never four, because the restaurant layout itself enforces this rule. So they lay out the restaurant in little pods. You have three each. So this was like really informing some of my thinking around our ratio of number of founders to an investment team professional. While other restaurants pile tasks on managers to fixing, Hillstone builds systems that prevent problems from existing. And so this is something that's a really important point. Excellence doesn't rely on oversight, but on systems designed to make the right choice the only choice. The right choice is the only

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SPEAKER_25: One of the systems, you know, here at our investment is like, we want multiple co-founders. Like, that is a system level decision that we have decided. We want people who are going after the English speaking market. And we want people who are incorporated in the United States. Why? But we don't have people who speak Japanese. So it's hard. And we don't understand the Japanese law around investing in startups. That would take another 10 people to set up a Japanese office. So we'll leave Japanese investing to the Japanese investors. We focus on that. We focus on early stage. We, you know, people want us to invest in 25, 50, 100 million dollar rounds all the time. We say, no, no, we want to focus on our programs. So make a good system choice. And then you don't have to have as much management. This is why I created like, here are the 13 qualities we look for in a startup. If they have two, three or four of them, let's go ahead and meet the company. And then I made a systems choice. If when we do the 25K check, which we offer people a $25,000 check to incorporate their company at Foundry University, I just said, if any one team member wants to do it, and they write up a review of the company and two other team members give an answer, which could be, no, the system is you can still make the 25K investment. So we never are going to have a situation where somebody wanted to make a 25K investment and didn't because there was some debate. The rule is one person wants to do it. Who cares? 25K investment. Worst case scenario is they lose the bet and they learn something. Best case scenario is they make a crazy bet on an Uber or a Robinhood or a DoorDash, something that doesn't seem possible. Let's get into the news here. I think for me, the corporate espionage stuff is incredible. Tee up the corporate espionage.

SPEAKER_53: All right. So everybody bear in mind, Rippling and Deal, they are two sort of HR,

SPEAKER_22: payroll, fintech kind of companies. They help small businesses and startups to handle and manage and pay their teams. Rippling has sued Deal, alleging that their rivals stole trade secrets, conducted tortious interference and unfair competitive practices. Basically, they're saying a Deal employee covertly worked at Rippling and passed Rippling data over back to Deal. Deal has counters sued. They argue Rippling was also attempting to spy on them. So all of this is going on in Ireland courts right now. Deal filed a new motion asking for Rippling to hand over more behind the scenes information about hiring. I'll try to make it as simple as I can what's going on. So all of these allegations center around a former Rippling staffer named Keith O'Brien. He has admitted in legal documents to being a spy for Deal. So he was working for Deal, then worked for Rippling, passed Rippling secrets back over to Deal. According to Deal, Rippling fired Keith O'Brien, paid him a termination fee, then rehired him and has agreed to help him with his legal expenses relating to the Rippling versus Deal saga. So Deal is saying that's very unusual. It's very unusual for a company to fire someone for cause and then rehire them during a legal proceeding and help them pay some of their legal fees. So what Deal wants now is for Rippling to turn over all employee agreements

SPEAKER_23: with Keith O'Brien unredacted so they can figure out what's going on with this guy and why he was hired

SPEAKER_165: and fired and rehired. Wow. This is like that Robert Hansen guy, the FBI agent back in the day who

SPEAKER_74: worked for the Russians or something like that. Yeah, like it's a little bit like that. They keep flipping. He said, these guys are, yeah, are they double agents or now it seems to be, are they triple

SPEAKER_25: agents? So O'Brien was working at Rippling, Deal got him to flip, stayed at Rippling.

SPEAKER_18: Maybe. Maybe. And then he got fired by Rippling. They terminated him and then Rippling was like, you know what? We probably should keep this guy on staff. That's what it sounds like. It sounds like

SPEAKER_20: they're like, let's keep this guy happy. Let's pay him some kind of salary. Let's help him out with his

SPEAKER_23: legal fees. It's all speculation. We have no idea what this guy was really up to. Okay. This is really dumb.

SPEAKER_25: If you really want to understand what your, I'll tell you how corporate espionage works in the real

SPEAKER_16: world and startups without actually having a spy. You literally don't need to do that. This is

SPEAKER_22: literal espionage. Like we have an inside man in the other company passing us information. If you

SPEAKER_26: interview people who work for a company, let's say you were to, gosh, let me really make sure I do this

SPEAKER_174: deftly here. I would never be involved in anything like this. I just want to be totally clear. But I have heard stories because I've been around for a long time. Let's say, pick a company, any company

SPEAKER_68: that has like, it's on top of its game and you want to get information for them. Google. Perfect.

SPEAKER_26: Okay. So you want to understand how Google's ad network works. Yeah, I do. You're Facebook. Facebook's like a new startup. You go find people on the LinkedIn or whatever who worked at Google. Yeah. You put out an ad. You look at people who worked in Google's ad network on optimization,

SPEAKER_25: client, whatever, and you figure out what they got paid. You put out an ad. You hire an agency, like a recruiting agency. Sure. To put out an ad that doesn't have Facebook on it. You tell them, we want you to ask all these questions, record the call perhaps, and then have five or six people from that company target them with the ads for the job. You put the job out for $450,000 base and $1 million in total comp for ads, for, you know, RSUs. You know, make it so that they can't not take the interview. You have no intention of hiring them. Right. You're just pumping them for info. Pumping for information. Yeah. They sit in a meeting. You get to the third, fourth, fifth question. Hey, so what are you working on? Yeah. Tell me about that. I mean, they're talking to a recruiter. The recruiter then meets them for lunch, talks about stuff, and then they just dump all that

SPEAKER_26: information back to their client who hired them on retainer to do this. Yeah. So they don't even need

SPEAKER_22: a success fee. And when you work for a tech company, when you're interviewing with other tech companies, that seems totally normal. That's what the interview process is sort of like anyway. You know, you've got to talk about what you've been working on. What are some of the biggest challenges you face? What are some of the projects you've managed? I've been in interviews like that. Never for untoward

SPEAKER_20: reasons, but it wouldn't seem that strange. And then there are these information networks. I don't know

SPEAKER_16: if you know about those. So there are information networks. There are expert networks. Expert networks. Let me just pull up like an example of this, but there are expert networks and there was an SEC investigation of these. So expert networks were set up to pay people who worked inside of corporations

SPEAKER_25: to anonymously get paid to give information to researchers.

SPEAKER_16: Okay. Sounds interesting. So people work at Walmart, right? They get asked to do, and they get paid $1,000 for an hour, $5,000 to talk to an analyst who just asked them questions about the market. Now these people think, well, I'm just an expert. I'm getting paid for my expertise, but it's actually somebody who's trading or competing against Walmart or target. So it's either target going after Walmart, Walmart going after target, but this being presented as like, we're not going to

SPEAKER_26: get what's called material non-public information and MNPI. But people are doing it explicitly to make the trade. So if you watch the TV show, Billions, like they're using all kinds of ways to get inside information from companies. These expert networks became the ultimate, you know, way to do this. And so you can look up expert networks. That's how people do this. And there are ways that they enforce compliance in these things. But most companies now say, if you do this, it's actionable. You cannot participate in these.

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SPEAKER_213: So that's how that's how it actually works. We don't know how much of this is true,

SPEAKER_48: but these are just the allegations. Also, you could just use a product like if you have a customer,

SPEAKER_25: if you're a rippling or deal or I don't know, ADP, whatever company competes against each other, you could just talk to one of your customers who previously used them and tell them, hey, what did you like about the system? What didn't you like?

SPEAKER_23: This was my, this was my thought upon me. Like I am a former, I've used both rippling and deal.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. They're very similar. And I couldn't even tell you what technology they're trying to steal from the other one. It seems like it's pretty straightforward from a technology, not a knock on either of them. They're fine at what they do. Yeah. But what's the high tech thing that they're doing? They're just keeping track of everybody's payroll. It doesn't really seem like that convoluted

SPEAKER_50: or like cutting edge. None of it makes sense. Yeah. Tell me about this. I guess maybe the startup that wants to hire AI agents. Oh, I loved this. Yeah. We got to talk about this. So Firecrawl is a

SPEAKER_22: Y Combinator back startup. They are a scraping tool that gathers data from around the web to train LLMs. That sounds scummy, but they're actually trying, their whole bit is they're trying to do it with clear ground rules, with guardrails. They're trying to responsibly scrape the web. So like a lot of their customers are enterprises that are scraping their own web data for AI training. And then a lot of the other sites they work with are opt-in. So companies that want to have their data scraped to help train AI. They honor the robot.tech settings. They only scrape websites. So it's a lot of like more responsible. That's their company. So they put up three, uh, job board postings. They are exclusively looking to hire AI agents. They've set a $1 million budget to fill three positions. So far, there are about 50 applicants. They want AI agent employees. I'm doing air quotes for those of you listening. They want AI agent employees to, uh, autonomously create SEO friendly blog posts and tutorials for their website. So it's like, imagine a content farm, but instead of humans doing the content farming, it would just be AI agents. But the extra wrinkle would be the AI agents watch the engagement metrics and then tweak their own blog posts based on what's

SPEAKER_27: getting performance. So they're basically SEO consultants, but AI.

SPEAKER_18: Okay. This is stunt. Of course. It's a stunt, obviously, because they're putting this out here to get people who are interested in AI agents to talk about this in the media.

SPEAKER_222: They know dopes like me are going to talk about it on our podcast.

SPEAKER_18: And they know you're going to put it here. But anyway, well done. And I put the link in here, pull it up if you will. Content creation agent, AI agents only, San Francisco, California, remote US, any, new grads okay, junior software. And I guess this is the job board for Y Combinator has a job board. This is the Y Combinator job board.

SPEAKER_25: I just want to point out that, uh, they're also looking for a founding engineer for 150k to 250 ahead of customer support engineering, 200k to 300k, uh, with the amount of equity creator and community lead, et cetera, et cetera, founding AI engineer. But if you look at the top three, no equity,

SPEAKER_22: no 0.3 basis points 0.7. Well, why would you give equity to an AI agent?

SPEAKER_25: Well, the AI agents are going to need a union apparently, but look at the salary

SPEAKER_228: for the content creation agent. Yeah. 5k to 25k. I'm not taking it. You're not taking it? Not taking the 5k job.

SPEAKER_230: Well, what if you created the prompt and you just ran it and checked on it every day for 15 minutes? Yes. I, I, I mean, obviously that's the idea. Incremental 15k a year?

SPEAKER_22: If you are one of the guys who invents the AI agent, it's passive income for you. You did,

SPEAKER_221: your, your job is done. I'll be, I'll be honest. If somebody could make me an AI agent,

SPEAKER_25: that read all the news stories that were related to what we're doing here and summarized a lot. And okay. But if you could hire them and they were 500 bucks a month, would you come to me and say, Hey, for, but 20 bucks a day, I could eliminate an hour of work and put an hour into other work.

SPEAKER_22: I will say if we could have an AI agent put the entire docket together to a, to even to a point that I could spend an extra 32 minutes to an hour cleaning it up and fixing it, that, that would be

SPEAKER_25: pretty amazing. Okay. So somebody make a, uh, this is what I want somebody to make, make an agent for us that reads hacker news, Reddit, you know, free, some choice, Twitter handles, tech meme,

SPEAKER_98: everything else. And just say like, based on what we've talked about on the docket previously, what should we have in the docket now? Make suggestions and then just have it, give us a thumbs up, thumbs down if we like it or we rate it and then get better.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. That's the biggest, based on my use of AI tools, I feel like that would be the big,

SPEAKER_20: everything beyond story selection. I already feel like an AI could basically do. Yes. It's the

SPEAKER_22: it's the picking the stories, just the stories we're going to like and not just picking any startup news. Like that's where AI tends to struggle in my experience. Yeah. I mean, maybe somebody on our

SPEAKER_25: team knows how to do this and they can start building these agents. I need some agents to get going here. I got, I got a lot of ideas for agents here that would give us the ability to do more work. And we talked about static team size as a trend. I'm putting some of my trend stuff together because I'm doing my, every year I do a keynote at a KPMG in the summer. It'll be the second year

SPEAKER_16: I'm doing it where I go through my trend report. Sure. And I did it last year. I got to look at my trends from last year, but static team size is when I talked about and boy has that one. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_247: Yeah. Come to manifest itself. Lots of people talk. I estimate with these agents,

SPEAKER_25: we're going to see the five to 10% faster that everybody gets at their job using AI first. Go to 10 to 20. I think the agents, because none of us here are using agents.

SPEAKER_16: We know about agents, but none of us are building agents on a daily basis. No, no. I mean, I might

SPEAKER_253: have one or two people on the team who are doing one. Yeah. I feel like Lucas is starting to play

SPEAKER_16: around with some of these agents. But it's not getting to everybody in the organization. We have to figure out how to get everybody to be able to make agents quickly and to maintain them. Because

SPEAKER_25: it's not just about creating them one time, it's about the reinforcement learning.

SPEAKER_243: Using them and making them better by reinforcing from using them. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: So anyway, I think it's a great story. I give a shout out to this team just for being precocious enough to understand what's in the zeitgeist. I mean, it is worth talking about just

SPEAKER_20: from a one thing that we talk about in Founder University and with these companies all the time,

SPEAKER_22: early stage companies. They're all looking for, how do I get the word out? How do I virally market what I'm doing? How do I get people interested? Earned media. And yeah, like, and so this is a great example of, I think, you know, use lean on what, you know, reporters like to talk about and media people like to talk about it. People losing their jobs to AI. Is AI going to take my job? That's a huge topic right now. If you can come up with a way to interact with that story, even in kind of a silly

SPEAKER_76: way, people will talk about it. Let's talk about speaking of socialists, blue sky falling. I think that's actually a good story for blue sky. Oh, there's, there's kind of two stories for blue

SPEAKER_263: sky. Uh, so, uh, the big one, the news item today is that, uh, during NBA playoff games,

SPEAKER_20: blue sky posts, skeets, as they're called on the site, what they call them skeets. Yeah, they're dumb. They let the users, they let blue sky users vote on what should post be called and they voted

SPEAKER_22: skeets. Uh, so yes, blue sky skeets from the official NBA account during while playoff games are on NBA, uh, post will be marked with a red border and they'll have live on them. And if you click on the NBA icon, it'll take you directly to where the game is streaming or the NBA. TNT, NBA on NBC

SPEAKER_20: coming back next year, ESPN. Right. Wherever NBA wants you to go to see the game, you could just

SPEAKER_263: go directly there from blue sky. As it should be. Yeah. So it's, it's like, uh, their, their attempt to sort of make it like draw everyone's attention to the fact that you can externally link. They don't

SPEAKER_20: de-rank posts with links in them. And, uh, like X does, like Facebook does, like Instagram does, like TikTok does. They're trying to keep you inside their walled garden. I like that. Yeah. Uh, so COO Rose Wang explained that they don't want to trap you in blue sky. Her quote, we want you to use blue sky

SPEAKER_263: to discover what's happening. And blue sky is a nonprofit or a company? They're a company. There is the, there is the open source standard, which is called atmosphere, I think. Okay. And

SPEAKER_22: then blue sky social is a private for-profit company that's on that open source standard. So they're part of this whole network, but they are a for-profit company. Uh, that ties into the other thing going on blue sky today. Wired published a profile of their CEO, Jay Graber. Uh, so she gave some general background there at 34.6 million users. They have 25 employees, but they're looking to bring on five morning at 30. They're working on, uh, ID verification and identity. Uh, they're working on communities and they have all these external blue sky feeds that they're working on integrating into the main platform. But she did also talk a little bit about revenue. They don't have any kind of revenue share in the works, uh, but because they don't down rake

SPEAKER_20: links that they're sort of, that's the, that's the strategy is you can't earn money from your blue sky post, but you could grow an audience at blue sky and use it to link back to your Patreon or your sub stack or wherever else you want to. There are a public benefit corporation,

SPEAKER_25: just to put a finer point on it, public benefit corporation is a way of pretending your for-profit is a nonprofit without actually being a nonprofit. Right. And the way you play this game is, and like,

SPEAKER_16: listen, I don't want to be too cynical here, but you know, like Ben and Jerry's, Tom's of Maine, I think some of the, or Tom's shoes or whatever, some of those are public benefit corporations. What that means is you state a mission and that all stakeholders instead of shareholders are taken into account when the board makes decisions. Right. So this is the game, the shell game that Sam Altman is playing. I was about to say, this is the open AI game. Yeah. Right. It's, it means nothing. It is literally window dressing. Yeah. Um, and so they are talking

SPEAKER_263: about, they're going to make money via subscriptions. That's what Graeber says in this interview.

SPEAKER_20: They're also considering marketplaces, sponsored posts, and even experiments with advertising. So

SPEAKER_277: we will see more revenue driving on a blue sky starting this year. Probably their publicly stated

SPEAKER_25: mission or like the public benefits mission develop and drive large scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. In other words, create an open decentralized Yeah. Open source town square. I think censorship resistance town square. And it was founded or

SPEAKER_22: backed by Jack, right? Yeah. So this is the bizarre. Although Jay Graeber now says he's not involved at

SPEAKER_44: all in the day to day in this wired interview. Yeah. But he is the guy who backed it. Yes. And he backed

SPEAKER_88: it while he was at Twitter. Correct. Because he had that whole open source, like he backed a lot of

SPEAKER_65: different open source projects and Bitcoin just yet. Jack was just sort of generally committed to open

SPEAKER_25: source as a concept. He provided 13 million in funding to blue sky public benefit. Does that mean he owns a percentage of it? I wonder if he's an investor or it was a donation, but he did it via, is he on the cap table? I wonder, this is the question I have about it. I think, did he do it

SPEAKER_16: through square? Did he do it personally? And you've got to give Jack some credit. He's like one of the few founders that built two publicly traded to what were publicly traded companies worth over

SPEAKER_22: a billion dollars at the same time. I think it's only him. She says, I was a contractor. I wanted independence because old Twitter moved slowly. Jack Dorsey was our biggest champion, but then Elon Musk said he was going to buy Twitter and that threw off everything. No projects were going to get shipped, especially not something as ambitious as blue sky. That's when we started thinking we should

SPEAKER_18: experiment with building our own app. But did he get, is he a shareholder? Yeah. He provided funding,

SPEAKER_253: not a donation. Right. So yeah, she says Jack isn't involved anymore. He had a portfolio approach to decentralized technologies and early on, he helped several projects get off the ground. He funded another distributed protocol that I think today he prefers, Nostr, N-O-S-T-R, which shares many architectural similarities to blue sky, but works more like a cryptocurrency wallet.

SPEAKER_26: See, I think that's interesting too, is like this whole decentralized piece to it where when I post to micro blog, it gets all the replies from all the different services and pulls them back

SPEAKER_25: there. And it posts to all of them, except for Substack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,

SPEAKER_02: all the places I want to post to, LinkedIn. So it's like, literally it doesn't work. Yeah. Maybe he's got very small ownership. It's not publicly disclosed. It seems to be the case. If anybody

SPEAKER_25: knows what's going on here, I would like to know. We have a guest. We do. Office hours time.

SPEAKER_22: Uh, Parth Mahendru from Prantle. They're a, uh, they're one of our twist companies. They're in our, our current accelerator, I believe. Okay. Uh, they're a Toronto based startup. They develop non-lethal solutions that counter unmanned aerial systems, UAS, uh, using ultrasonic technology. It's basically an acoustic laser that can take out a drone. So this, this acoustic laser, they, they focus the sound waves. It disrupts the gyroscopes that allow drones to fly and know where they're at in 3d space. So that's how sort of my rough layperson example of how it works. Uh, they designed the system. It was for engineering students from university of Toronto, which includes our guest Parth today. Uh, and they sort of devised this whole system. They're currently working on a prototype, the size of a carry on suitcase, as well as a backpack model that foot soldiers could bring into the field with them. All right, let's welcome our guest Parth Mahendru from Prantle.

SPEAKER_294: Parth, thanks for being, thanks for being with us here. Thank you so much. Good morning, uh,

SPEAKER_297: Jason. Good morning. Nice to meet you guys. We met because you had a Wall Street Journal story about your college team that had built this technology. Tell us a little bit about how

SPEAKER_302: it's going and maybe we'll play it and you can explain to the audience as basically as you can

SPEAKER_07: what you built. For sure. Um, what we do is we take down drones with sound because our tech is, um, safe and it's legal. Meaning we have a sound cannon that shoots drones out of the sky, but the sound cannon does not harm humans because the sprung frequencies that it uses is the ultrasonic frequencies, which humans cannot hear. So it puts us in a very interesting niche, um, where we have civilian infrastructure, say prisons or, or military bases that are close to, um, houses and civilians where you cannot readily use lasers and missiles. And that's kind of where our system shines and

SPEAKER_26: that's our use case. So here we see the drone, it's flying. You're chasing it down. You shoot it with

SPEAKER_25: this cannon. It falls out of the sky. You can sell these, uh, or you'll be able to sell these eventually to prisons. Or if I had a, I don't know, a music venue and I was concerned about terrorism or just

SPEAKER_16: people videotaping. Now it, have we built laws yet for shooting things out of the sky being legal? Because I know there was a lunatic. It was probably Florida. If I had to put my money on it, some guy literally shot a drone. Really? Yeah. With a gun? Yeah. Do a search. You'll find it. It's a guy

SPEAKER_18: literally shot a gun. He got arrested. And it was like, literally an old man. I think this guy was in the Korean war and he had flashbacks and he was just like Walmart drone. And he shot, I don't know

SPEAKER_253: if it was a Walmart drone. No, it was. I'm looking at the article. 72 year old Lake County man who shot a Walmart drone he believed to be surveilling him has been ordered to pay the retail chain five grand. I mean charged with one count of shooting or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings vessels or vehicles. One count of criminal mischief and one count of discharging a firearm in public.

David Friedberg: I'm going to need some counsel here. If somebody flies over my ranch. It's your ranch. It's my ranch.

SPEAKER_03: Can I take him out? Because I think Texas law might be different. I don't know. What have you found out so far? Because obviously this is a moving target, so to speak. Definitely, definitely. And Texas has

SPEAKER_07: probably the most different laws is the rest of the United States. For the most part, you're not supposed to mess with the internal functions or the flying of unmanned air vehicles because you classify

SPEAKER_08: UAS or drones the same way you classify aircraft. So think of it as shooting down a Cessna. That's

SPEAKER_02: how the law currently sees it. I can't do that. Not even from your ranch. It's kind of funny that we were even having this conversation because I've had people flying over

SPEAKER_25: the ranch in basically go-karts with a fan on the back. I don't know what you call those things. Any idea what those are called? Go-karts with a fan on the back? Have you seen

SPEAKER_316: these? Like paragliders maybe they're called? Yeah, okay. They have a fan and you're sitting

SPEAKER_25: in a seat and then they have a parachute. Sure, yeah, okay. There's a guy, I don't know if it's my neighbor or whatever, but he's flying around in one of these things. I don't know if people are

SPEAKER_41: just randomly taking off from land. Yeah, it's a powered paraglider. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_07: So I can't shoot that guy down, apparently. No. I don't think so, but for the most part, precedent has been if someone's below 300 feet, then it's technically on your property. Anything above 300 feet or something along those lines, you could take it out, but then that's also an illegal gray zone because you're not supposed to shoot down an aircraft. So without proper authorization, it's just a messy situation, especially when you're shooting bullets at it

SPEAKER_320: because it could hit people nearby. Got it. That's why we need non-lethal.

SPEAKER_25: We need non-lethals, yeah. So if I have a paintball gun, I could hit the guy with a couple of paintballs. That might be fun or pepper balls. There's non-lethal pepper balls so you can spray out people. Yeah. Anyway, we don't condone any of this here at this weekend. Start us to be clear.

SPEAKER_217: Certainly not. Don't shoot anyone down. How's the startup going? You know,

SPEAKER_16: you're one of the first investments we've made in what I'll call, you know, military tech or adjacent tech. And how are you thinking about your startup? Are you thinking, hey, I should go military and there's tons of investors interested in that? Or should we be going, you know, with venues and

SPEAKER_25: or should we in between maybe the local police? How are you thinking about your startup and go to market? Because I know you've been in the laboratory building this for a year or so.

SPEAKER_325: Yep. Yep. And again, thank you so much for your trust in us. That really means a lot. Currently,

SPEAKER_07: we're still building our tech, but we have demos set up very soon starting with in the next five days. So that's going to be our first unveiling of our product at a private demo with certain military stakeholders. That's going to be happening towards the end of this month. We're super happy and very pumped up about that. Other than that, our major clientele, the people that we're focusing on our go to market strategy. The overarching goal is obviously getting into the military industrial complex. But the way you get there is through years of solicitations, testing, and then making your device mill spec. That's what they call it, making it vibration proof, dust resistant, waterproof, so on and so forth. And these things usually take a long time to get certified and a lot of money. In the meantime, with whatever we've built, we we've started demoing and we've started starting to have pre-orders and leases upcoming this summer with commercial entities and government agencies such as prisons and police forces. Those have been a pretty they have a pretty big interest in our tech. And obviously, like you mentioned concerts and sports venues, there was a Taylor Swift concert in Toronto a while ago. And I saw the security team have like fishing nets trying to fish drones out from the balcony. Yeah. So

SPEAKER_25: crazy, you know, these drones are also, you know, they don't fall out of the sky that often. Right.

SPEAKER_16: They're relatively safe. It's kind of hard to crash a drone now. I think you have to have like a drone that is one you built yourself, kind of like Ukraine is doing. Most of the commercial ones are designed to

SPEAKER_26: not crash into things that have a void in systems, etc. Yeah, I think it used to be if it like if you

SPEAKER_103: went out of range, it might just plummet out of the sky. But now it can sort of land itself. It

SPEAKER_26: returns to sender. Yeah. It basically knows where it it knows the waypoint where it left from. Right. And when it loses connection to the handset, it just starts heading back to that. Right. Am I correct?

SPEAKER_07: Um, pretty much. They have the go back to home feature most of the commercial drones nowadays.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. So any questions or challenges you have? It sounds like you're off to the races. It sounds

SPEAKER_25: like you're going to need to raise money and you got a one or two year process of, you know, getting this thing ready for purchase by the military or militaries around the world. How are you thinking

SPEAKER_06: about international and questions for me? One of my questions that I had might not be a very

SPEAKER_07: straightforward question. It might be very specific, but it is us going from demos to full scale products. There's a lot of things that we need to do, a lot of polishes that need to be made to make sure that the operation is seamless. But right now we have a balance, so to say, either we perfect the product or we have a semi-functioning product to give to stakeholders. Now, usually if this was software, I would think to get something out the door as soon as possible. But given that these are pretty major stakeholders like a major airport that we're going to be leasing out the next month, it begs the question, should we invest more time into finalizing our design, perfecting it, or do we produce more designs, for example, to give to more stakeholders?

SPEAKER_26: Yeah, this is a resource question. I'm typically in favor of listening to the customer and the

SPEAKER_25: partner and hearing what their needs are. It's quite possible this airport wants a solution immediately

SPEAKER_16: and will deal with it being maybe not as polished around the edges. If you don't have the industrial design done, if it's not waterproof, whatever the case may be, the airport might say, good enough, we want to pilot this with you. And we're okay with the fact that we're a pilot customer,

SPEAKER_25: we've piloted things before. So that would just be level setting with the customer. And then there are international customers who also might invest. So if you look at what's happening

SPEAKER_16: in the Middle East region, they have monarchies there. And the way the monarchies and the investment funds work is, you know, you have families that are connected to the monarchies. They literally could

SPEAKER_25: be cousins or adjacent to them. They may want very much to invest in your company. They may very much need the technology at their airports or their oil fields, just to give two examples. And they might have the ability to say, here's a magic wand when it comes to regulation. We can get this done.

SPEAKER_26: So if you look at the VTOL companies, my understanding, if we were to look up Joby and some of the other VTOL companies, a lot of their first, you know, things, pilots that they're putting out there for the vertical takeoff and landing companies are in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, the Kingdom,

SPEAKER_340: Saudi Arabia, and your second question. Yes. Yep. Sorry. My second question was, it builds onto the

SPEAKER_07: first one. It's we have some pre-orders, we have potential leasing agreements that we've signed, how do we fulfill them? So to say, given, um, certain constraints that we have, for example, our team is not massive. We don't have salespeople on the floor. We don't have technicians on the floor. Um, and if we were to give someone a few devices of ours to say test for a month, we would definitely need to be checking in on it. Uh, I'm not sure if this is a hardware only issue or if this is because we're at that stage. Um, how do we, how, how would you recommend

SPEAKER_26: with you? I recommend finding a customer who can spend a decent amount of money because they have

SPEAKER_16: an acute need and that will be willing to let you be on site and you could bear hug them. So you got two or three team members say, Hey, listen, we want to be on site for a hundred days with you during the pilot. We want you to pay a half million dollars in advance. And so you might have like a really, um, you'd be able, you might be able to solve two problems at once. One, you get a, an amazing

SPEAKER_18: lighthouse, you know, killer customer who also has a need and who's also willing to pay. Is that helpful?

SPEAKER_325: Definitely. Um, and just to follow up on that, what that mean, say pushing off certain clients or

SPEAKER_07: certain potential customers who were interested in getting our tech, but not really the lighthouse

SPEAKER_163: customers. You have to prioritize. You can't boil the ocean. You can't service all markets at once

SPEAKER_26: when you've got a startup. So when Tesla came out, they came out with the roadster

SPEAKER_16: and they figured out there were rich tech people who wanted to see electric cars and they were willing to pay $150,000 for a car without power steering and barely had air conditioning, uh, and a heater like the HVAC and it was very small and that would pay the 150 K up front. So they picked a customer base that wanted a sexy sports car that had the most ridiculous acceleration ever and could beat a Corvette or, uh, uh, a Porsche or a Ferrari off the line because of the electric, uh, motors and wanted to have the latest technology that had ever been built. They didn't build the model Y, the model three cyber taxi, cyber truck, or the model S at the same time, you know, startups are about

SPEAKER_25: compromises there. And you can actually use this to land that best lighthouse customer. You say, listen, we've got seven different customers. You go to the seven say, we're looking for somebody who can make this commitment. And then you can make the sacrifices founders, which might be hard if you have families, et cetera, to say, Hey, we're going to be on site. So we all got families. Let's say you had three co-founders and you have a couple of co-founders. If all three of you have families, you might say, Hey, listen, I'm going to like be away from my family for 10 days. It's kind of hard to do. You have to talk to your spouse, et cetera, you know, and I'm going to be on the ground for these 10 days. Uh, we're going to have one of our founders who doesn't have a family relocate there for 90 days. The other founders then going to rotate in for 10 days. So that person can go on their vacation, whatever it is, and make that big sacrifice to make sure that first customer, that's the lighthouse customer that's spending so much that you bear hug them, you bear hug them so that you can't lose. You gotta make that deal work. And then you can use that to show how serious you are to investors. Look, we have this airport, Dubai airport, whatever the, the new airport, and Abu Dhabi, or like, I mean, there's some incredible airports over there and we are, we really relocated ourselves there for, you know, 60 days to get this done. And that's our commitment level. You know, we're all in this, um, race for credibility and investors are looking for the most dogged teams. We were talking earlier on the pod about how somebody had asked me, is there a venture fund I can put money into that only invest in in-person teams? It's like, huh,

SPEAKER_16: they really think that like, as an LP, that is the determining factor. And they're now asking venture firms, are you in-person or not? And why or why not? And so you're starting to see that.

SPEAKER_25: Awesome. Uh, and let us know who we can introduce you to, you know, we're, we're good with the warm

SPEAKER_07: intros, I hope. For sure. And I completely agree with the, with the in-person thing. That's, that's a, that's a big point, especially for hardware startups. We're just doing, we're working every day,

SPEAKER_356: we're testing every day. Even right now I was, I was soldering some boards, um, while I was waiting, uh, you just gotta do what you gotta do. Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, keep your periphery vision

SPEAKER_163: open. You know, the peripheral vision, sometimes you start with taking these drones out of the sky,

SPEAKER_25: but you know, you start talking about sound-based weapons or deterrents. Maybe there's other ones. I saw recently there were some people riding, I think it was in the EU somewhere. I don't know if it was Spain, et cetera. And they cleared a street with a sound weapon where, you know, these protesters were getting too frisky. Now I'm not saying I'm endorsing this, but, um, you know, in the case of a riot lawn, would you rather have people get hurt and beaten or have their ears hurt? You know, like that seems

SPEAKER_16: like the most non-lethal thing you could do rife with abuse, like pepper spray, but better than bullets.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. I mean, better than being shot. So are sure that they're, they're saying, uh, earlier this year,

SPEAKER_20: an illegal sonic weapon might've been used on protesters in Serbia. Oh, Serbia. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_22: People started, uh, uh, a subdued sound lasting only two to three seconds, but, uh, one person called

SPEAKER_103: it very unusual and very frightening, like a sound from hell. He's there. I think once you, you mentioned

SPEAKER_367: that, I think I could just quickly tell you that we're doing this one other thing with a company that

SPEAKER_07: we haven't disclosed yet, but, um, we're, you see CCPB cameras that are, um, surveillance cameras, we can say disable them from a distance, um, without physically touching them. So that, that helps teams say tear out rooms and that includes teams and police forces. So we're currently testing, um, some of those with this undisclosed company, but we're very excited and, uh, we'll keep you updated

SPEAKER_26: on how that goes. Yeah. That's a, that, that's what I mean, like keeping that peripheral vision open. And when you talk to venture capitalists, you can say, Hey, listen, here's what we made.

SPEAKER_25: Here's the core technology. First application. Here's two, three, four, you know, and there's things that have to happen for three and four to happen in terms of scientific break crews. But the second one is a realistic one for us to launch in year two. And then we're selling two products into people. Incredibly well done. Continued success. How can people find out more

SPEAKER_301: about the company and reach you? Um, go to parental dynamics.com or, or just call in our

SPEAKER_367: phone number. That is actually my phone number. I will pick up 24 seven. Okay. All right. Thank

SPEAKER_25: you so much for your time. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. This is a big concern. I, I, I hate to even bring it up, but as a person who was there for nine 11, I, I constantly am vigilant in a way. Maybe I wasn't pre nine 11. And when I got my drone and I started playing with one of these DGI Mavericks and I was zipping it around, I just thought to myself, how on earth has there not been a major drone attack in America? Yeah. And when I saw this company, I read about on the wall street journal that this team had created this in a competition. I just said, you know what,

SPEAKER_16: I might lose my money on this because it might be too far fetched to sci-fi. You know, maybe the world's not ready for it. Maybe it won't work. Maybe it will. There's so many risks when you're doing startups, but I was like, we do need to be thinking about how to stop these drones. Sure.

SPEAKER_20: Absolutely. How has it not happened? I mean, we keep talking about, you know, how it's, how huge of a shift it is that the military it's always been, you know, like, well, where are our planes and where

SPEAKER_22: are our troop stations? Like how quickly can we get them to the operating theater? You know, like, so it's like, oh, the aircraft carrier. And then it's at sea, right near the country. And that's how we get our guys over there and like drones and unmanned. It just changes that whole thing. It could be anywhere and you could send your drones in to drop bombs. I could have a luggage roller with five of them. Yeah. And so it really like everything we think of about how wars happen and how wars are staged and military sort of strategy. It's all, it's all thrown away. All right, everybody. It's been

SPEAKER_26: another amazing episode of this week in startup. He's x.com slash L O N S I'm x.com slash Jason. And you can look at the docket this week in startups.com slash docket sign up for our newsletter at this week in startups.com and go ahead and post a comment, follow us on all the socials, and we'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye.