SPEAKER_00: let's go to the gray area sure um your uh and i think there's an uh allegation around lebron james here not that lebron james did anything but lebron james was going to be out of a game where he was potentially injured and these injury reports come out early in the day and they get updated as you go and people take them into account when they're betting on games obviously the handicappers and the people who do it professionally so what happened in one of these cases allegedly is somebody told their friends oh i don't think lebron's gonna play tonight he tweaked his ankle they tell their friends they put action on the games having that information an hour before the lines change now if they say hey lebron's not playing tonight and he's lebron in his prime the odds in the game would change dramatically but if you get your bet in you've got your bet locked in at that other bet so is that illegal well in this case the injury status jason was sold by

SPEAKER_04: allegedly um his friend and former la lakers coach damon jones uh jones was also an ex cleveland calves

SPEAKER_06: player and uh yeah he essentially sold the information ahead of time that's that's just so

SPEAKER_00: if he did in fact sell it now what if you were just talking to your boys and you're like yeah you know uh don't bother coming to the game lebron's not playing right and then your friend does

SPEAKER_11: something stupid just like i might say to somebody you know oh hey yeah i was uh you know i was at a party and somebody told me this company is going to buy this company and uh but you know and then they told their friends and then that friend traded on it or that friend's friend traded on it so this gets people pinched all the time in insider trading so there's a lot of gray area here now that people have to get used to which is you know if you are the trainer or you're a security guard at one of these arenas and the security guard finds out and they you know are at a poker game and yeah i know lebron's not going to play tonight and then somebody gets their fantasy sports out and puts a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars on it's probably not going to get picked up so brave new world um there's a chance that none of this is cataclysmic so yeah anyway um it's a brave new world but i think all of this being regulated and being on the up and up is going to actually take fraud that was going on that we were unaware of and make it above board so i'm actually confident that the referees aren't doing any of the shenanigans like tim donahy was doing back in the day um where he was giving the injury reports to the mob allegedly i think he got convicted of that so i don't know if you use the word allegedly anymore but anyway very interesting story uh lots of technology opportunities there so if you're a startup and you see these kind of problems you can build a company and then sell it to those people to solve that problem the nba is going to need one of these as well which is educating their players and trainers and everybody around it as to how easy it is and so there's so many startup opportunities here um i'm glad that these things are all getting regulated and yes that they're above board now so i actually take the opposite approach to i think things are fixed i think things are being fixed this week in startups is brought to you by

SPEAKER_16: every running a startup is hard enough every takes care of incorporation banking payroll benefits accounting taxes and more so that you focus on building not back office admin visit every.io nexus stop shadow ai in its tracks with the unified platform for secure ai adoption and productivity try it with a free 14-day trial at nexus.ai twist and linkedin ads start converting your b2b audience into high quality leads today launch your first campaign and get 250 free when you spend at least 250 go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit all right everybody welcome back to this

SPEAKER_11: week in startups i'm your host jason calacanis x.com slash jason instagram.com slash jason he's alex wilhelm you know i'm from tech crunch a bunch of other stuff ah he's x.com slash alex and cautious optimism is his newsletter yes search hey joe hey joe i'm saying hello you know people don't know we're doing live now we get thousands of people tuning in live and it really does make the show great if you want to join us on the live team x.com slash jason follow me and you'll get the live youtube look for this week

SPEAKER_00: in startups or actually even better go to this week in startups.com slash youtube and when you go to that url boom it automatically subscribes you if you're not but then you got to hit the bell we have so much to go over it has been an absolutely crazy week there's a lot of law and disorder going

SPEAKER_04: on did you notice that have you noticed this trend i have noticed this trend there seems to be an uptick in fraudulent activity that we're now hearing about jason especially involving one of your favorite

SPEAKER_24: things in the entire world which is poker yes uh there's the pot calling the kettle black you also

SPEAKER_11: love to play some cards well let's get started you're talking of course about uh cash patel came out after an amazing season opener for the knicks and for the spars wemby had that crazy performance i don't did you see the highlights of wemby and san antonio i have i have not i even i have not even

SPEAKER_09: caught up with my warriors yet so that's how far behind i am wemby is like this seven foot five he's

SPEAKER_00: in his third year you know to call him a unicorn like porzingis or kevin durant would be an understatement he's kind of like an alicorn um pegasus and unicorn and he's doing things in the nba nobody could imagine and uh then of course we get this drop of a crazy yeah there's wemby that's wemby and

SPEAKER_11: the highlights from this are just bonkers if you just look up wemby highlights game one he had a performance that literally had bill simmons and stephen a smith and some of my nba friends uh in my group chat like i we've never seen this before seven foot five guy doing crazy things on the court putting all that aside after this incredible launch of the nba season cash patel came out and dropped the hammer some people saying this was political um you know stephen a smith took the position this was political trump trying to get back at blm or the nba and it was a race issue i don't know anything about that everything is so political these days but um i do know about poker and i do know

SPEAKER_00: about sports betting so maybe you could tee up for the audience alex what exactly got dropped on thursday morning we're taping here on friday you'll get a friday night yeah so on the poker side of

SPEAKER_04: things there were a series of games that were set up in a fraudulent manner jason and they involved what were called face cards which in this case were high profile people from the nba that's the sports connection for folks who were curious and this included uh chauncey billups who i believe is the coach for the portland trailblazers along with some other names these games were essentially marketed by using whales and jason for folks who don't know a whale is a player with a lot of money and perhaps maybe more money than skill so if someone invites you to a game and says hey we're gonna have a couple of billionaires and they're going to be drunk you want to go because the whales will be splashing around with their money now these games cheated a variety of ways jason manipulated shuffling machines an x-ray table they had poker chip trays that were scanning cards they had cell phones set up and they were moving data all around which was a whole lot of work to make seven million dollars over a long period of time the last thing i'll say about this is the uh four of the five families

SPEAKER_25: uh famous for crime in the new york city area were involved as enforcement allegedly allegedly 17 times

SPEAKER_04: all this is alleged 100 i have no inside knowledge i was not invited as a whale or a sharp and uh this is all from from the fbi and mr kasha patel but i i will say jason it seems like a hell of a lot of work and a lot of illegality to make seven million dollars when in the technology world seven million dollars is absolute pocket change uh in the ai game so it's just it almost feels like

SPEAKER_35: small potatoes um yeah there is a small potatoes aspect to this if you've got a 20 or 30 million

SPEAKER_00: dollar nba contract but uh these rigged games have been around forever if you read any of the poker law lore i should say um there were people who were going i heard about this one they would go to games in texas you know and on the way to the games they would have decks these are marked decks so if you look at the back of a deck of cards somebody can pull up a marked deck image from just google images and we'll show it what they would do is they would have on the back of the cards this fancy intricate um patterns now what you would do is you would either cut the deck with an imperfection or you would put some sort of hidden thing on the card so if i was across from you i would know you have an ace or a king and you don't really need to know all the cards if you just knew who has aces who has kings this is a tremendous advantage of when to fold and when to go in this is the most simple version of it and so what they did was there was a tradition of like picking up a deck of cards at a gas station on the way to a game that was wrapped and sealed this is really crazy poker law at these games and so here you go if you're looking uh you're watching the screen here what you'll see is in the top left

SPEAKER_42: corner you have these crazy patterns but they would just be slightly different unless you put them

SPEAKER_04: yeah curly cues that are missing but just small things that would tell you if you looked at them this is an ace this is not an ace this is a club this is a heart giving you a huge edge jason frankly

David Friedberg: correct and so these slight imperfections another way to do this is people with their now could

SPEAKER_00: indent or bend a card in a game yes and then when the bent card comes around and this is why when you're playing a game if you ever see a bent card or a card with an indentation you stop the game you say there's a bent card you hand it to the dealer founders listen if you've got a b2b company

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SPEAKER_19: stop that hand immediately and they will put a what they call a new setup a new setup rich guys in big poker games can say i want a new setup just because they're running bad superstition or for this reason when they do that they take the deck they put it away they crack open a fresh deck i heard these stories that they would go to the gas stations the two or three gas stations from the airport to the big game they would pay off the guy at the gas station to put in a series of decks that were marked but were sealed in plastic the whale comes they buy three decks of cards they go to the game they hand hey i got three new decks the guy the confederate from the guest station would say yeah dopey picked up the decks here they're marked so even if you thought you were bringing your own deck it would be marked uh so let's put that aside for a second there are new high-tech ways to do this one of them is eyeglasses or contact lenses and then uh some dyes that you can only see if you're wearing those another way to do this is what's called being a mechanic you saw this famously in uh the movie rounders that's where people who shuffle the deck can put the aces on the bottom two slots let's say so they see the aces as they're shuffling and as they shuffle they just put them on the bottom then when they uh throw the cards they're throwing from the top of the deck to everybody then they get to alex and the dealer who's a confederate would send a card from the bottom of the deck now i've been in games where i think i've seen this oh really yeah yeah i've been and i've been games that i think were dirty like just a small number of times like two three times and i never go to those

SPEAKER_11: games if you're going to a game where there's celebrities like i got invited to molly's game over and over and over again molly would text me and call me when i lived in los angeles 20 years ago and say hey leo or you know toby or this celebrity that celebrity is going to be at the game they want to see you and i always have the same joke to her which is they want to see me lose 50 grand right

SPEAKER_19: and at that time the games a big game would be 10k buy-in 25k buy-in now these games have gotten

SPEAKER_11: significantly higher there are people backing people staking people eventually molly's game allegedly you know uh got taken over by i don't know if it was the russian mob or the armenia mob

SPEAKER_00: some mob group so what happens in these games is uh they can use also what's called the deckmate two there are different card shufflers a card shuffler means um it just automatically shuffles the cards it fits into the thing i actually own a card shuffler i've had it for over 15 years technically people were not allowed to have these there's like two brands but i had one of the ones that like are used in casinos these are like really on the up and up but the more recent ones from china the deckmate two specifically they know the value of each card so if you were to take a card out of the deck and put a card from another deck in there and you had say five aces it would it always checks the cards are correct and then it tells you hey there's something wrong here you have 51 cards in the stack instead of 52. oh you left in uh the jokers we're not playing with jokers so this is the deckmate two i have the deckmate one these things were never available to individuals

SPEAKER_11: they were like an off-market purchase you know falling off trucks kind of situation ah got it let's leave it at that um so there's all kinds of ways to cheat people you could also have three people playing from the same chip stack so me you and lon have you know fifty thousand dollars were all bought in and then you know well one and well two you know they get aces but they're playing against three other players putting this all aside uh if you're in a game with celebrities and they're taking a rake which is illegal in most states if you're playing a home game in most states it's legal if you're not taking a rake in other words making a profit because then you're in uh competition with the uh casinos and they don't like them they do not you can do a bunch of searches online where things

SPEAKER_00: are illegal where they're illegal and what the lines are it's different in new york like even running i think games in new york is technically not legal even if you're not taking a rake but they kind of let people do it i think dc has rules it was always very famous uh rumors of obama or clinton having a poker game friendly one um anyway when it becomes high stakes when you don't know the players in the game you shouldn't be in the game if you're in the game and you're with high profile business people who have a lot to lose and the amount of money they're playing let's say me playing for 25 or some famous ceo playing for 100k and they're worth x amount of money they're not going to cheat because their reputation is more than the cost of that put that aside so chauncey billups who's currently the coach

SPEAKER_04: of an nba team i believe he's the coach i'm gonna double check that now but i believe it's the portland triple blazers my my theoretical home nba team so you know if you look at this like and and

SPEAKER_00: this is something that's been going on for five or six years allegedly there's also all these sports guys play badugi and other games when they're in the plains because they have a lot of downtime and it's a nice bonding thing but if you remember the gilbert arenas uh bringing guns to the locker room that whole case when he got suspended for a year was over poker debt so poker debts can get spicy dicey etc there's a million ways to cheat now there were you know a half million ways to cheat before technology let's put that aside there's a second thing going on here i don't these two cases are not related anyway but fantasy sports has made it very easy to do what's called a prop bet not betting on the score of the game very hard to influence that right without it being very obvious now in this other case you could let people know um hey my over under the over under is i get seven rebounds so on average i get seven they think versus this team which has an incredible rebounder i'm against dennis rodman i'm gonna get you know only six sure well if the person you know halfway through the game uh says oh i sprained my ankle and they come out of the game with four rebounds you know the under is pretty good right you could bet under a certain number of rebounds and these idiots these incredibly stupid people allegedly if any of this is true it would be the

SPEAKER_11: height of stupidity to do this kind of stuff but there are some gray areas here and some of this is

SPEAKER_04: new some of it is as old as time yeah just i would say the startup angle here is as we talk a lot more about prediction markets and we talk more about options trading and we talk about crypto and ico's and um token treasury companies jason and spax are back just know what you're getting into wage your money

SPEAKER_25: you can afford to lose and uh try not to get caught up with the gambino family collecting your debts

SPEAKER_70: because that's not going to be a now on the over unders very specifically um because all of this is

SPEAKER_11: legal and not run through bookies anymore you know your local bookie at the bar there are software companies somebody can look it up um there's a software company that looks across all of the

SPEAKER_19: uh prediction markets or really the fantasies the the the you know the prize picks the draft kings

SPEAKER_00: so there is a literal uh company that looks at the action being placed now when this uh i'll call you know when an incredibly stupid person i won't say these people are because they're it's all alleged and this you know you never know this may not be as bad as it looks but if a stupid person were to say i'm going to do this thing where i get under a certain number of rebounds and their friends put two hundred thousand dollars on them and they're the fifth player or sixth player on the team they're not lebron james they're not steph curry where all the action tends to be uh and they normally have twenty thousand dollars in action on them across all of the different um you know sites this company

SPEAKER_11: um which i don't know the name of but if you find one lawn you can just check that it's exactly that um and pull up the website and just verify that for us please um they will alert the different places

SPEAKER_19: hey there's odd action right going across these sites and then they kill that prop bet and they

SPEAKER_04: send it to the feds so we found one jason's called polyrouter.io this is specifically for the prediction markets i'll just pull it up here yeah this just shows essentially how to get all of that in one place now on the on the thin betting volume spiking didn't some players specifically in a different case get busted for making really large prop bets on their relatively small normal trading amount and it was in fact the volume differential that got them busted because i remember seeing headlines

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SPEAKER_79: that's n-e-x-o-s.ai twist if you make these stupid bets um and yeah it looks like there's a lot of them i

SPEAKER_11: just asked producer claude and it looks like cion offers ai driven fraud protection tools for gaming platforms geo comply widely used across u.s sport books to verify player location and print vpn fraud sports trader focus on protecting sports integrity by detecting max fix fixing and irregular betting behavior that's the one it must be sports trader and uh somewhere in these documents about uh all of this that was one of the companies i think that alerted them so they just turned the bet off and then they give it to the feds and these people get busted let's go to the gray area sure um

SPEAKER_00: your uh and i think there's an uh allegation around lebron james here not that lebron james did anything but lebron james was going to be out of a game or he was potentially injured and these injury reports come out early in the day and they get updated as you go and people take them into account when they're betting on games obviously the handicappers and the people who do it professionally so what happened in one of these cases allegedly is somebody told their friends oh i don't think lebron's gonna play tonight he's tweaked his ankle they tell their friends they put action on the games having that information an hour before the lines change now if they say hey lebron's not playing tonight and he's lebron in his prime the odds in the game would change dramatically but if you get that in you've got your bet locked in at that other bet so is that illegal well in this case the injury status jason was

SPEAKER_04: sold by uh allegedly um his friend and former la lakers coach damon jones uh jones was also an ex

SPEAKER_06: cleveland calves player and uh yeah he essentially sold the information ahead of time that's that's

SPEAKER_00: just so if he did in fact sell it now what if you were just talking to your boys and you're like yeah you know uh don't bother coming to the game lebron's not playing right and then your friend does

SPEAKER_11: something stupid just like i might say to somebody you know oh hey yeah i was uh you know i was at a party and somebody told me this company is going to buy this company and uh but you know and then they told their friends and then that friend traded on it or that friend's friend traded on it so this gets people pinched all the time in insider trading so there's a lot of gray area here now that people have to get used to which is you know if you are the trainer or you're a security guard at one of these arenas and the security guard finds out and they you know are at a poker game and yeah i know lebron's not going to play tonight and then somebody gets their fantasy sports out and puts a hundred dollars or a thousand dollars on it's probably not going to get picked up so brave new world um there's a chance that none of this is cataclysmic so yeah anyway um it's a brave new world but i think all of this being regulated and being on the up and up is going to actually take fraud that was going on that we were unaware of and make it above board so i'm actually confident that the referees aren't doing any of the shenanigans like tim donahy was doing back in the day um where he was giving the injury reports to the mob allegedly i think he got convicted of that so i don't know if you use the word allegedly anymore but anyway very interesting story lots of technology opportunities there so if you're a startup and you see these kind of problems you can build a company and then sell it to those people to solve that problem the nba is going to need one of these as well which is educating their players and trainers and everybody around it as to how easy it is and so there's so many startup opportunities here um i'm glad that these things are all getting regulated and yes that they're above board now so i actually take the opposite approach to i think things are fixed i think things are being fixed which is much better because using

SPEAKER_04: that in a ironic way all right jason first up on the docket today uh everyone's talking about 996 this is the famous model from china in which workers work from 9 a.m to 9 p.m six days a week for a total of 72 hours at a minimum okay um interestingly enough you know we've talked about this since 2019 uh but currently in the american ai era we are seeing headlines from the journal fast company washington post everyone's talking about the insane pace of work required today by leading startups and i actually i pulled a tweet from you from back in 2019 this is a man named uh jason calacanis saying founders were up against jack ma enforcing a 72-hour work week nine nine six six days a week nine to nine p.m the exact same work ethic that built america you

SPEAKER_06: can get on your twitter pedestal and attack jack ma or you can make a plan to win now that was

SPEAKER_00: six seven years ago jason so quite quite a while yeah i mean i just had heard about this when venture capitalists used to invest in startups their big trick was to come on a saturday to visit the startup and see how many cars were in the parking lot or they would come at night then we got into this

SPEAKER_90: life work balance nonsense um unions uh people you know wanting to see their families all this craziness um and uh you know when you get in a dogfight on a business level and you've got to ship product

SPEAKER_11: like there's a huge prize here um you know we talked about the tam of this market is going to be huge yes then people can opt into we're going to work 72 hours a week we're going to work six days a week which by the way the entire world did for thousands of years worked six days a week it was only ford and the model t and the concept of getting americans uh the ability to take a weekend road trip that created the five day work week the 40-hour work week in order to sell more cars you can look all that stuff up um so it's it's not super controversial to bring this back and if you're being compensated wildly you know hundreds of thousands of dollars a year yes uh you know stock options that could be worth millions to tens of millions of dollars it's not unreasonable uh for this to happen and it's in fact not illegal if you're a salaried employee and making beyond the minimum wage and what minimum wage plus overtime would pay uh my understanding is this is legal in the united states people can make that decision and trade off so um the legality points very interesting though jason because after

SPEAKER_25: well basically go back in time 2019 uh michael moritz formerly of sequoia now kind of a venture marriages for the world wrote an article for the financial times discussing how much chinese companies were working and also how frugal they were and it was a bit of a shake the cage moment for american startups at that time remember that that was the financial times right yeah yeah yeah but then some things happened so over in china um pin um i'm gonna ruin this everybody i'm sorry but

SPEAKER_04: pen duoduo uh had an employee die on her way in from work another one jumped off a bridge and another set themselves on fire and that led to a conversation inside of china in which there was a mini revolt amongst tech workers kind of complaining about the insane pace of work that was required of them and that led to china in 2021 saying that 996 was actually illegal now they haven't stamped it out coverage since then has made it clear that it's still in effect but even inside of china where this model kind of came from there was pushback against it i i just wonder if people are doing good

SPEAKER_06: work or how much of this is performative versus versus actually being effective jason can you tell

SPEAKER_00: me more yeah i mean there are moments in time where you can burn out and it works against you uh but putting in a 10-hour day 12-hour day you can still be productive um and it's uh it's a it's a personal

SPEAKER_90: choice if you want to do it it's not a big deal and then a lot of times law of big numbers if you've

SPEAKER_00: got a hundred million people in china who are working 996 let's say because they want to become rich and they want to take their family out of you know poverty to the middle class or middle class to upper middle class and they make that decision you know a certain number of people tragically uh

SPEAKER_11: commit suicide it's one in a hundred thousand or one in 250 000 depending on the society the age group etc so would that person have committed suicide anyway is what you have to ask now this comes across as incredibly cold and callous but in business and in life they call this the law of big

SPEAKER_00: numbers uh so at burning man there's a hundred thousand 75 000 people there and so if one person

SPEAKER_11: were to commit suicide at burning man by you know every 10 years by running into the burning man fire right does it mean burning man you know uh killed this person it means this person was going to kill

SPEAKER_03: themselves in all likelihood anyway yeah so i think i think i'm pretty much on board with your take on it's fine if you're compensated fairly for it i'm a big enough deal now that i can afford to hire my own

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SPEAKER_04: and i think that equity upside is the critical thing there because if you own what you're working on you're less of a salaried worker more of a owner in the company so what's the minimum equity expectation you think is reasonable for an employee to have to sign on for let's say a decade of 996 at a company

SPEAKER_24: yeah i mean again it would be up to the person if the person is you know from an immigrant family

SPEAKER_11: and they grew up with five people in a one bedroom and 150 000 or a hundred thousand dollars to them you know pays down this debt you know buys a house whatever okay that's the personal choice for some people if they're already a millionaire they might be like i'm not doing this unless i'm getting

SPEAKER_00: 10 million in stock options so there's no one answer um there is just the reality that you're in a competitive space if you're in the nba lebron james is or steph curry or michael jordan is prime or kobe bryant certainly we're definitely doing more than 72 hours of basketball per week they were working more than 72 hours a week navy seals olympic olympians they're all doing they'd be like 72 hours of work in a week to be an olympian or kobe bryant they'd be like oh that's like a vacation week for me so it is what it is folks you don't need to be precious about it it's not causing people to die it's it's light work when compared to what humanity was doing you know a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago where people literally worked in fields seven days a week and maybe they took sunday off for

SPEAKER_03: like the lord's day but much worse than that i mean go look at the history of mining yes thank you but

SPEAKER_04: here's the thing though i i people are gonna say but guys aren't we trying to get away from that isn't technology supposed to free us up and i'll just say because right now we are at a hinge point in technology there's a new paradigm that everyone wants to apply and there's the geopolitical element this is going to be the way it goes when the markets are competitive so um last thing jason before we

SPEAKER_25: scoot on here i went and i did some searching around the web and i found some companies that have job postings that explicitly note higher hourly requirements so corgi says that new hires and people pursuing the account executive route are required to be in the office six days a week merkor who we've had on the show six days a week with monday through friday in person so one remote day latch bios says six days a week monday through sat etc etc etc so you can see companies being up front and i think up front expectations reasonable equity splits go for it if you don't have those things

SPEAKER_11: you're kind of being a jerk yeah and europe is you know even europe is having this discussion and in china i i think uh there was a podcast 996 i think either sequoia or google ventures had like

SPEAKER_03: literally named their podcast 996. so and chinese developers name their protest site 996.icu because working 996 sends developers to the intensive care unit if you think you can compete in a company

SPEAKER_00: working 40 hours a week and hiring you know whatever it is you know twice as many if you think you can compete with 72 hour a week work weeks where people are getting massive compensation by working 35 hours a week go do it spend twice as much money have twice as many people and see if you compete you might

SPEAKER_11: actually be able to maybe you'll attract more people maybe you're maybe better people will come work for you you know we might be sitting here in 10 years and have um a standard in the united states uh for a lot of different workers let's say lawyers and accountants of four days a week or teachers or nurses we may go down to like a four day 35 hour a week you know nine hour a day 10 hour a day work week and in fact there were some companies that were pitching this during the peak woke era of silicon valley and this stuff ebbs and flows like during that peak woke dei you know kind of life work balance nonsense um there were literally companies that were saying come work for us you can have unlimited vacation and work four days a week and that was their sales pitch and those companies i can't even

SPEAKER_42: remember their names because they lost to the companies working 996. and speaking of getting fit look how she felt i am i was on the i was on the scale the last week 169 to 172 i'm really in my perfect zone i'm trying to get down to 166 for ski season and increase the muscle mass on my body how

SPEAKER_00: did i do it i spent the last four years testing different glp ones you know i'm talking about ozempic wagovi mangiorno and um changed my life i don't want to get emotional but i lost 40 pounds i feel great i don't look at myself in the mirror and go why can't i lose this weight i had uh whatever my genetics working against me my lifestyle working against me the food supply working against me i'm not going to beat myself up about it i used a tool glp ones having a better diet exercising rocking fasting i i tried everything and it worked for me it might work for you and it might if you want to

SPEAKER_11: try i suggest ro.co ro.co i'm an official spokesperson me charles barkley and serena williams three incredible notable athletes in their field or i should say two notable people and me those are the three spokespersons for ro.co two incredibly famous people and me so go to road.co and hopefully it works for you i got the food noise out of my head i believe the phrase is podcaster waistlines matter

SPEAKER_04: too you know absolutely let's keep going all right next up in the docket um let's talk about presh presh is a former uh launcher we all love presh fantastic guy we lost him because he went off to go build his own company back in some unbelievable presh how dare you but he made a very interesting video clip jason that he shared on twitter back in september that you asked him about in which he was doing some uh storyboarding if you will for a promo clip for his company tempo and you asked him

SPEAKER_25: to do a demo for us and we also have the final version of that so i thought i would show the uh the 19 second clip that got you interested and then show you the final version and we talk about it okay

SPEAKER_90: great yeah presh is building um a company called tempo to extend your health span and he made a

SPEAKER_133: great promo video and he shared it so here we're seeing it and i once was great voice over thank you

SPEAKER_135: and an old man sitting on a bench you made writing in his journal for stepping into the morning sun

SPEAKER_136: getting sunlight felt easier to stay inside

SPEAKER_00: so here's the simple workflow so yeah i asked presh to do a how-to because people are making these incredible videos uh and some people are spending 50 or 150 or 250 000 doing them other

SPEAKER_42: people are doing them with ai and i think presh is in that group so let's hear from presh how he did it

SPEAKER_25: all right with it here is our dear friend explaining the nuts and bolts of how to do this yourself if you

SPEAKER_141: want to it's a simple workflow started with the concept we narrowed down to this a letter to my younger self concept which is basically 100 year old grandpa writes a letter to his younger self as his pen touches the notebook there's a bunch of shots of me doing a number of healthy activities the reason i

SPEAKER_150: chose my grandpa was i just recently hired him welcome to the team pardon welcome to the team

SPEAKER_141: congratulations so he became the first chief centenarian officer i wanted to find a fun way to include him in this waitlist video then i wanted to script it out in storyboard this is where i use chat gpt i basically prompted it with this and got a whole structure out of it so now we have the concept we have the script now we want to create a storyboard the storyboard now comes after creating the script so we basically have this script and structure so we're going to pop that into gpt ask it to start creating stills you can refine this further but that ends up looking like is something like this while i make the storyboards there stills sketches and so what he's showing is the prompt he

SPEAKER_00: wrote so he comes up with the concept 100 year old writing a letter to himself says let's make this into

SPEAKER_11: a script gets basically a scene by scene of what should be in this adverti this um this ad this promo video and then it generated sketches in storyboards for him then he took the storyboards and then he made them reality and uh this is just wild when you think about it keep going drawn by hand for the scene for

SPEAKER_141: example a sketch of a grandpa sitting outside on a bench and again i'm just doing like a rough draft here just because i want to see how the story lays out before we make the actual thing you could use vo sora if you wanted like actual videos and now i have about 20 stills that create the whole story so we got the concept we got the script and storyboard so for the voiceover we use 11 labs we're going to go to text to speech and put the script that i want create and for voice i'm either going to search their library or create a voice if you go to the voices section and create our clone of voice and so i use a combination of different voices to create this old man speak anyways you get the idea i'll go here and i'll just download that into an mp3 voiceover is done now we want to go to music what i did was i basically took that into chat and said give me a prompt that being his description of the advertisement and i went over to this other tool called sora using chat i outputted this prompt as well he means sooner to give to sora to then create make sure it's an instrumental track and it'll create different versions in sora so i can go through pick a track that makes sense that i like now we have the concept we have the script we have the storyboard we have the music we have the voice over and now we just need to edit it together and simple editing tool i'm going to bring in cap cut and so i took all the stills and just placed them out here so we have almost just over 20 stills here i'm going to drop the audio track from 11 labs i'm going to drop the audio track from suno and then it turns out to sound and look like this to the younger man i once was so the idea here again we're not even going to ship this really it's just for our own like creative process seeing if we like the

SPEAKER_151: concept enough to make it real and that's it that's the process of how to make a quick concept video

SPEAKER_26: i i thought it was fantastic i love the fact that he went through every single tool in order show them how to do it because i could do that now jason in in a couple hours i love it yeah i mean eventually

SPEAKER_00: you'll be able to do this in one llm or in a browser with agents that'll do the entire process for you right now you have to use the best of breed tools to make make each piece and then stitch them together and the interesting thing is he could have just released it as the sketches and i think it would be really effective i think they went and took this concept and you refine the concept you refine the concept the other person who did this quite famously i believe and our executive director lon air director lon will correct me if i'm wrong but um perhaps my favorite director of all time ridley scott uh definitely my top two three um ridley scott was known for doing storyboards constantly um and i think he learned to do them himself and he would storyboard all these ideas and sets and everything whether it was aliens or gladiator and um he could just do them himself what that does is it lets you kind of get a feel for the story before you do something expensive like higher actors and uh you can kind of see if the um tone works and if everything works so this is genius we have a

SPEAKER_11: company saga which does this that we incubated in our accelerator and we'll pull up saga in a moment um yeah and here's the picture thank you producer lon of ridley scott doing the alien pull this up this is incredible check this out it's in the uh twist taping room yep yep yep yep

SPEAKER_03: here is the image jason which shows a number of different screens would these be individual

SPEAKER_00: scenes that i'm looking at here yeah so i guess what we're looking at and let me pull it up on mine um yeah these are each individual scene and then i guess there's a title and then notes underneath it but he would draw these himself and if you look on the top right you're seeing the side view of a human with the face hugger on it the iconic face hugger and what's great about that and then you can see the engineer and the second one on the right is i think the engineer and its ship or you

SPEAKER_11: know somebody going ready to be in a cryovac etc uh acid dripping uh you know as uh when you kill these aliens their acid drips on the left and it's just some blood drops all of this is to say

SPEAKER_00: he doesn't have to uh tell people what he wants he can show what he wants and then here if you pull up the napoleon ones so here you see napoleon and uh i think those are the scene numbers on the left 53

SPEAKER_42: 61 and he was just great at drawing these um in real time just think about how much time this saves when you're trying to explain something to somebody and this is really indicative of how ai is going to make

SPEAKER_00: everybody you know uh ridley scott level presch is not ridley scott he has not made 10 films but he's

SPEAKER_42: doing what ridley scott did so the gap between the or tour and the amateur is closing yeah you know so

SPEAKER_180: from amateur to autor i think the distance between those things was a lifetime it was decades now the

SPEAKER_11: distance is going to be you know instead of 10 000 or 20 000 hours i think it goes down to 100 or a thousand hours if pressure were to do that process every day a different storyboard a different 30 second scene and he did it for 100 days so he put in 110 hour days or 12 hour days and speaking of uh 996 so he did imagine if you did 112 hour days you know now you're 1200 hours into your career what would the hundredth day look like versus his first day of doing that this should be inspiring to young people who can't get jobs all these young people who can't get jobs we've talked about static team size we talk about ai displacing jobs here's the opposite of it you could become ridley scott level i believe in a hundred days you could do things that ridley scott does you might not do them with as much panache you might not have the instincts he has but you would get damn close lon if somebody did

SPEAKER_49: this a hundred days in a row with these tools how good would they be at making visual scenes in your

SPEAKER_184: mind i think an amazing thing yeah like filmmakers a lot of them really do just spend obsessive amounts of time thinking about how things would look how they would block them out i once uh not to toot my own horn but i once chatted with john wu i interviewed him for mission impossible 2 and he could still years later tell you every setup for the killer well we put the camera here we were behind this corner we had to move it around here he just committed all that to memory the whole scene was in his head so that on this on the day when he was directing people he just like you you need to be right here the light needs to be here he just had the movie already playing out in his head before he ever set

SPEAKER_118: foot on on the set incredible so um everybody go follow preshi pooh my preshi pooh he came to work for

SPEAKER_00: me quit school came to work for me at 18. we backed his startup he's doing great um and what's his twitter

SPEAKER_25: x.com slash presh d kumar and if you want to check out tempo the company he's working on join tempo dot app we love this guy thank you pressure for making us that video and we'll put

SPEAKER_00: the links in the docket if you want to read the docket you go to this week in startups.com slash docket and then we'll put it in the show notes as well we'll put the links to all this great stuff so if you listen to this week in startups and we give you some tips here and tactical stuff from the founders in our portfolio we're going to link to it all the time you can go to this week in startups.com docket and see previous episodes dockets get in there and get all those

SPEAKER_11: links so if you watch this week in startups three days a week monday wednesday and friday sometimes we throw in a tuesday show because we're sold out of ads and yeah they they talk me into adding a show um you're going to just become a better founder and that's why we do this show we're passionate about founders and technology and inspiring people to start companies and here you are you're you're listening to the show and you are going to get better and better at starting companies and learning these tactical techniques if you're hanging out with us the big news this week on

SPEAKER_04: the anthropic front jason is that the company has tapped google for an enormous compute purchase they're going to get up to 1 million of google's tpus in a deal worth up to tens of billions of dollars and it's going to bring on more than a gigawatt of capacity to the company in 2026 now reading this news i know a lot of folks out there might not know what a tpu is so i went ahead and did a little prep work and asked producer claude what is that well it's an asic or an application specific integrated circuit that is essentially designed just for these machine working sorry machine learning workloads basically they're designed to do a lot of mathematical operations very very quickly and that's what powers the neural nets that we all love and know and just for a little background here uh they've been working on the tpus since i think 2013 something around there so they've been in the

SPEAKER_25: game for a long time if you want to use claude like we do you can go to claude.ai slash twist it started we have a 50 discount for three months but jason essentially google tpus are better they're more efficient they have lower costs and they're tailored for this kind of work but more to the point i'm shocked that anthropic is kind of putting aside it's a long-term deal with amazon it's a preferred partner for both training and inference to go rack up with google i was curious what you

SPEAKER_42: thought about why they made this choice i think any um any any compute advantage these large language models can get they're going to take what's fascinating about this one is that gemini google uh the gemini large language model anthropic and claude they're direct competitors so this is perplexing uh interesting confounding strange bedfellows yeah if you're anthropic and you're giving money and doing this partnership with google and you're both competing for customers users uh users businesses uh developers and apis it's kind of interesting and as we say in our industry no conflict no interest what this signals to me is the anthropic team and the google team

SPEAKER_49: are collaborating they're they're in like with each other they might not be in love but they're in like with each other who else is in like with each other satya nadal and open ai were in like we're in love

SPEAKER_11: with each other i think they've dropped down to in like with each other and i noticed satya nadella and elon are in like with each other so and nvidia is in love with everybody jensen loves everybody equally but this is um the place we are the other thing i think is super interesting is amongst the llm companies

SPEAKER_90: some have money printing machines so if you were to look at the foundation models you've got grok open ai anthropic mistral yeah mistral mistral i guess i'm including them and then you have uh gemini and you have uh llama what zuck is working on i think that's probably your big six i'm missing anybody

SPEAKER_06: there i mean we could bring up the amazon and microsoft models but given that you and i always

SPEAKER_42: forget the names of those families of models yeah i don't i don't see them coming up yet so if we

SPEAKER_22: just take those six look at those six of those six which ones have money printing machines which ones have money printing machines profitable machines earnings machines well gemini google correct and meta

SPEAKER_11: okay this puts them at a significant long-term advantage meta and google can build infrastructure

SPEAKER_19: at a pace that the other four um have to go raise money for yes so let's pause on this for a second

SPEAKER_11: now one would argue gemini uh is probably in third or fourth place typically and i think llama is typically in sixth place or fifth or sixth place yeah so the companies at the top are obviously open ai um and then i would say claude and grok that's probably your one two and three and then

SPEAKER_90: your four or five and six mistral might probably llama's six mistral's five and yeah so you can start

SPEAKER_00: to look at this and i wonder if google and meta have a huge advantage in that they could start deploying hardware at a scale that the others cannot now the others are the bells of the ball right now because they have the best product and people want to be on their cap table and then this makes me wonder why is

SPEAKER_90: apple with their war chest and microsoft with their war chest not participating in this lunacy of

SPEAKER_49: building out huge data centers huge infrastructure i guess google is i wonder if microsoft too but it's

SPEAKER_04: less speculative for them chasing because they talked about in earnings and they've said we just have the inference demand and we're just building against kind of like proven bookings so with them i'm not that concerned but i think that the the economy between the money printers and the money needers is very important because when you think about xai and open ai they are spending tens of billions of dollars on infra anthropic isn't they're raising money from the major cloud companies amazon i think eight billion google about three billion and they're getting access to compute so i kind of wonder and i you know i don't want to sound too nice to anyone here but like is anthropic kind of nailing this because they're not taking on the infra side quest yeah partnerships i think are a way to win here

SPEAKER_42: if you want to go far you go together if you want to go fast you go alone so going alone uh i think will give you a massive speed advantage in the short term and i think building up partnerships could make you go further of course you might be inspiring the value to be ag uh accreting to your

SPEAKER_00: partner not you and this is the open ai microsoft relationship yes personified who's getting the value open ai has the branch at gpt that has the largest number of users but their percentage of market share

SPEAKER_11: has been going down consistently now they're still growing because the pie is getting bigger but if you look at they were 98 of the market three years ago i don't know where they are now um but i think they're probably 80 of the market now in terms of consumers and developers using this stuff they're going to keep going down on a percentage basis just like amazon web services had the game to themselves before azure and yeah literally and before azure and um google oracle came on strong so now you have four people competing for that three major and oracle coming on strong oracle's really not going to take this lying down they see uh cloud computing as a big uh a big accelerant of their business obviously so

SPEAKER_00: really interesting i do think these kind of partnerships mean more stability um and you know you know if they you're like you're saying if inference is taken off the table for them and it's styled by somebody else that's sort of like when dropbox this is a history lesson for folks

SPEAKER_90: dropbox launched at the conference i created uh with tech crunch tech crunch 40 tech crunch 50 you remember back in the day i created this conference uh with an old friend of mine we're

SPEAKER_11: no longer friends but an old friend of mine begged me to do this conference with him and i did it

SPEAKER_00: with him uh and dropbox launched there i remember meeting the guys that dropbox didn't work they were they were running it out of sequoia's offices and uh they were just having a heck of a time

SPEAKER_11: getting the software to work i remember their pitch uh which i think was at the first tech crunch 40 we can look up tech crunch 40 uh pitch for this and i think actually i own the tech crunch 40 youtube site i gotta go find it um but they did a great job they also went back and forth do they have their own infrastructure is that cheaper do they use aws when that was the only game in town would they be giving it all over and this uh going back and forth as to is it an advantage to have your own infrastructure or is it a disadvantage was just personified um by 37 signals and one of our crack researchers will pull up this video that was just shared on twitter uh now x.com of um david hanmeyer hansen dhh uh which is his twitter handle as well x.com slash dhh really smart cat friend of the pod we got to have him back on soon dhh just did um an analysis and he open sourced it and told everybody of how much money they're saving by getting off of other clouds i don't know if they're azure aws but play this video and show the chart when we have it this is extraordinary i

SPEAKER_49: think this is like main character energy some of my producers i think we we missed this main character

SPEAKER_04: energy but dhh i think i had the right clip right here jason let me get this set up for us yes by

SPEAKER_00: the way great six hour conversation between lex friedman and david uh back in the day oh this is

SPEAKER_06: the clip that i have is him standing up talking do you know that's the one i'm talking about i was just also giving a promo to my friend lex friedman all right here is dhh talking about aws spend we were

SPEAKER_214: paying aws 3.4 million dollars we've taken that money invested it into our own gear and we own it

SPEAKER_218: ourselves and we're not down today it was not a major crisis when aws was uh was down and now we can nuke it so let's do it ready let's push delete they literally are deleting their aws instance that is

SPEAKER_00: such good tv he shared the table of how much he spent year after year on cloud computing and he estimated that they are probably saving like i said a million or two million a year who knows let's just say if they're saving a million dollars a year over 10 years 10 million dollars to the bottom line it does add complexity so um there is a back and forth that all founders go through should we stand up infrastructure should we use other people's infrastructure you can go faster when you use other people's infrastructure because you don't have to take on that responsibility and build out the team when you do have unlimited resources and uh you know the the great example of this would be elon with

SPEAKER_42: x ai and elon knows more about factories and physical production of items than anybody on the planet with

SPEAKER_00: the possible exception or you know co-leader of flexport maybe right or not flexport um is it yeah flexport produces ryan ryan peterson no no that's flexport uh flextronics are they the ones who the iphone goes they they subcontract to anyway there's china an american multinational manufacturing

SPEAKER_25: company that does end-to-end advanced manufacturing but yes flextronics so flextronics are the people who

SPEAKER_42: build the iphones they're based in singapore like some companies like tick tock are based in singapore but they're chinese companies you know but if you look at this chart um they have their aws and google bill and the total and you know at their peak they're spending 3.4 million in 2019 the total they spent between aws and google from 2017 to 2025 21 million dollars and so there you have it folks uh you could

SPEAKER_00: potentially uh save a lot of money doing this but you will be slowed down so you got to be thoughtful about it that extra million dollars they spent a year let's say probably well worth it if you're building you know and i think they probably have 30 40 50 million dollars in revenue uh 37 signals so if they got 50 million in revenue you don't sweat the million dollars in expense if you're trying to go fast and you got competitors however at some point you may want to look at it and optimize this is why oracle is being so aggressive oracle's going to people saying give us your cloud bill whatever your

SPEAKER_11: cloud bill is we're going to cut it in half um and so i just i know some of the people at oracle and they are aggressively like google cloud and azure were very aggressive last couple years trying to increase their growth rate yes compared to aws all of them are growing they're all incredible businesses

SPEAKER_02: well because that's because the cloud is just doing insanely awesome things i mean dear god can you

SPEAKER_172: imagine and what happened when aws region went down the entire world ground to a halt that's how much we

SPEAKER_24: depend on these guys and that's when you can be multi-cloud you know you can just go multi-cloud

SPEAKER_11: at some point um and uh distributed cloud and you can move from one to the other you can use your own internal infrastructure for some things that are cheaper and you can have hybrid cloud right so there's a lot of options here very important for founders i think to not take this on early i don't think it's an advantage in the first three or four years at all i think it's a huge advantage to use

SPEAKER_49: cloud providers obviously another amazing episode of this week in startups is in the can we'll see you all on monday bye bye