SPEAKER_00: you know i want to get into immigration thank you for like bringing up this topic and following my twitter stream because it is you know big on my mind and i know people like to know what i'm thinking and i like to share what i'm thinking why do i like to share what i'm thinking alex people email me jason at calacanis.com is my email for life where they dm me and tell me that i'm a horrible person and uh you know you've got to stop accepting dude you've got to lock down

SPEAKER_07: your dm i love it i'm not liking my dms i love the savage dms i get it's incredible okay you don't like them i don't know i tweet them i'm just like i can only take so much i think

SPEAKER_10: i have a slightly uh lower bar for negativity day-to-day than you do i just like after the

SPEAKER_12: third or fourth time someone calls me something nasty i'm just like all right all right that's

SPEAKER_16: enough it's strictly uh it's strictly a reflection on how they're feeling about themselves at that

SPEAKER_18: moment yeah that's true yes and usually it's a troubled person or a 12 year old or a russian

SPEAKER_20: chinese bot trying to cause trouble or just somebody doing engagement farming in order to

SPEAKER_24: make money you know yeah this week in startups is brought to you by paddle self-serve software is global by default but selling to every country is complicated paddles merchant of record manages payments sales tax chargebacks and refunds so you don't have to wherever you want to take your business go there with paddle go to paddle.com twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee free period fitbod tired of doing the same workouts at the gym struggling to plan your own workouts fit bod will build you personalized workouts that help you progress with every set get 25 off your subscription or try out the app for free when you sign up now at fitbod.me twist and linkedin ads start converting your b2b audience with high quality leads today we'll even give you a 100 credit on your next campaign go to linkedin.com this week in startups to claim your credit terms and conditions

SPEAKER_26: apply hey everybody welcome back to this week in startups it is january 3rd 2025 we are here in the

SPEAKER_28: new year i'm still in tahoe uh getting in some skiing i did 16 full days i took my first day off

SPEAKER_18: i'm trying to beat my record of 40 days which i did i think three years ago all right my second best year was 36 so i'm currently ahead of my two best years i track it with an incredible app called slopes so i want to shout out slopes if you don't have slopes and open snow and you're a skier please go buy those two i'm not an investor either but yeah i'm just having a wonderful time had a restful great time with my daughter skiing a ton and i got to ski with chamath and freeberg we're all on uh you know this sort of vacation to tahoe not in the same house but you know in the same area

SPEAKER_29: and so a wonderful wonderful restful holiday how was yours alex how was your rest holiday was it

SPEAKER_12: restful it was full of food but because we had a three and a half month old dear most of it no not super restful but i think that's just par for the course when you have really little kids so not a complaint i got to see my brother who uh actually he's uh he's living in austin for another six months uh on assignment oh i'd love to meet him yeah i'll see what i can do he's a major in the army and he just completed his phd in applied physics and is going back to west point

SPEAKER_35: to teach wow respect when we have our next event we'll invite him i do like some ceo dinners and

SPEAKER_18: vc dinners on thursday nights in austin every thursday i invite five people to come have dinner with me i got some regulars and then i always invite like a new person to have like wide ranging discussions because i love people yes you do doing this show let's say hi to some of our folks who have tuned in early mark beatles our first nodi coming in today campbell uh nodi squad uh bernie hep happy new year all he was our third michael dan moison soan um he is also part of the nodi gang squad whatever i i think nodi gang is good uh maddie newman our producer and researcher in austin she's here you don't get to be in the well you can be in the nodi gang sure uh and uh oh oozy obi is here uh yes i'm alive thank you a little dark gregory kennedy homestead creative uh and a bunch of other people are here we always like to shout out the nodi gang what's the nodi gang there's some people who put on notifications on youtube go to youtube have been this week in startups monday wednesday friday we will be going live at about 10 a.m pacific yes noon j cal j ranch time in texas and

SPEAKER_37: 1 p.m alex time on the east coast actually jason before we jump into our first chart and our first

SPEAKER_39: story because you brought up the time we do the show would you like to tell people how the next

Chamath Palihapitiya: couple of weeks are going to be slightly different oh yes i am going to be traveling internationally

David Friedberg: for 10 days so we might start earlier or later earlier i think it's 8 a.m eastern time next week

SPEAKER_18: we'll confirm that put it in no 8 a.m eastern time okay which means 5 a.m pacific time i mean so if you get up from the nodi gang you're going to have my absolute uh salute to you so yeah when i'm on the road i still want to do live hell yeah and it's my that's my big resolution for this year is to try to you know i got my sleep dialed in i got my weight loss i got my exercise i'm adding meditation but i just want to take those four fundamentals and increase them as part of my new year's resolution maybe lose the at last like maybe 10 pounds get to 165 and the weight training going really dial in the sleep get that 80 90 sleep score every night not just four or five nights a week so try to get that to six nights a week maybe yeah and then the diet i'm really doing well with that but i got to take out a little of the sugar um so anyway those are my resolutions you got any short uh

SPEAKER_00: any any any uh quick hits on your new year resolutions new year's resolutions so abs for

SPEAKER_12: sure i'm i'm putting in a lot of push-ups jason i'm not gonna lie a lot of planking a lot of crunches trying to work on that i avoided new dad weight round two thankfully because i didn't i gained like 15 the first time and it's brutal um abs finish a novel don't drink for a year and i think i'm going to add a non-professional really personal one i want to be a really great husband and father this year i want to be patient i want to be kind i want to be engaged and and available and i want to be a little bit less in my head so a little bit more stoic a little more zen a little bit less frenetic a

SPEAKER_35: little bit less all the time so i think you know you have an active mind is my perception and when you have an active mind you're highly intelligent which you are both of those things um you can

SPEAKER_18: have a hard time turning it off there's a very simple way to do this just get the calm app i'm talking my own book here but i'm invested in that company for for a reason and they have one minute three minute five minute ten minute just do it ten days in a row yeah one three four five whatever number of minutes a breathing exercise some music that they have at a specific hertz that helps you go to sleep just do that then go interact with your kids that's my secret and there are other like stoic tests you can do yes to help you frame uh and shout out to the guy uh is it ryan holiday ryan holiday yeah yeah shout out to ryan holiday who i have to catch up with because you know we we've

SPEAKER_00: crossed paths a couple times and he's also in uh bastrop which is east of austin and i would love to have dinner with him maybe one of these thursday nights or go out to see him

SPEAKER_18: anyway you know doing that stoic exercise where you think about losing something or loss or not having it another framing is if you were 70 years old your kids are 30 years old cats in the cradle you know they're gone they don't call you all that often they're busy with their lives

SPEAKER_00: if you could go back to this moment in time i make it a little emotional here but if you go back to this moment in time what would you pay for that what would the value of that be when you're 75

SPEAKER_18: years old to go back to the moment when they're three and a half years old they're screaming they're

SPEAKER_28: inconsolable you've got a diaper while you're changing the diaper yes another thing happens they puke on you you're covered in puke you're cleaning a diaper it's 2 a.m you got an insufferable

SPEAKER_43: boss who's like where's the twist 500 right where were you at my house last night because we had one

SPEAKER_18: of those nuts and yeah it's trying it is trying right and so that's what i do and when i was on this vacation um i was saying to myself i don't get this back i don't get this moment with the with the whole family i got the whole family out one day five at the same time going down the same ski run i saw your picture of that it looks really cute and i just have to tell you like i just looked at that and i said i'm making memories yes making memories uh for them for myself for all eternity and so use those techniques and i think you'll you know with a little meditation a little equanimity and a little stoicism you can get through what is the chaotic days i always loved warren zivon

SPEAKER_00: werewolves of london lawyers guns and money ton of great songs he was on david letterman he had found out he was dying of lung cancer oh okay he had never been to a doctor for 25 years and david letterman said to him hey what can we learn from you that you've got this diagnosis and you've got a very short period of time now he said well the first thing is go to the doctor more than once every 30 years and they laugh and then he said well what else can you know in all seriousness you know know aside from visiting a doctor uh and he was a smoker a lung cancer the whole thing he said uh what what can you tell us he said well you know enjoy every sandwich enjoy every sandwich and if i ever

SPEAKER_18: got a tattoo it would be of one or two things enjoy every sandwich and a picture of a sandwich or a bulldog and in my weird 54 year old you know i don't know three-quarter life prices if i ever have one i might do that i might get a sandwich on my arm or something with just those e enjoy every sandwich ees yeah every sandwich uh because it is such a powerful concept the simplicity of a sandwich and just enjoying every bite that is my message for all of you in hope for a great 2025.

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SPEAKER_12: period yeah and thank you everyone for being here to kick it off with us a twist jason is still in front of a tree he has his fire going i still have my uh accoutrement up to indicate my own holiday enjoyment uh but jason why don't we give the people what they want and i believe that is spelled c-h-a-r-t in uh twist terminology so let's grab one love a good chart and let's start with this so this is actually a chart that you tweeted and i wanted to start here because i thought it was a fascinating chart but i'm curious why is this quote something that you think a lot about and why did you share

SPEAKER_78: it to start the year well you know when i started in venture capital there were very few players very

SPEAKER_18: few 20 30 years ago there were 20 30 years ago very few players you had your sequoia you had your cliner you know some other weird firms it was a very bespoke weird unique tiny business yeah and

SPEAKER_51: then uh you know google happened and you had this sort of big company that nobody had ever seen before and obviously apple when steve jobs came back and the iphone happened those two things created an industry that was larger than people could ever imagine and in the early days people used to go public with 25 million 50 million dollars in revenue so a lot of the growth that happened was after the ipo people would hand them off and what this chart is showing is instacart's delivery instacart's major investors and the price of each funding around you see here uh cosla cannon partners and y combinator paid 24 cents i'm assuming that's the share price yeah and then sequoia paid 24 cents so what happened there is even though that was a year apart the seed in the series a the seed round was

SPEAKER_18: on a convertible note that converted i guess without a discount to that series a round um which is weird that they didn't have a discount on it but okay so those two people did the earliest investments and they paid 24 cents a share and drees and horowitz came in for the series b a year later uh and paid three bucks a share and then you had kleiner uh and some other folks come in for the series c at 2015 and you see this nice like every year sequoia y combinator come in eighteen dollars now they had paid 24 cents now they're paying eighteen dollars right almost like a hundred x what they paid originally maybe 75 x or something like that um five years later in other words they had inside information this was a great company so they both made a second bet that's when y combinator had their um fund which was their um growth fund continuity right they came up with the term continuity for it weird terrible name actually um because it gives the impression that it's not as cutthroat as it is and that everybody gets one which i think is why gary probably got rid of it yes and then you start to see other folks come in like tiger global d1 capital dst which is yuri milner's famous firm general catalyst one of the mega ones and then eventually this last round where fidelity t rose indrescent and sequoia paid 125 bucks a share in 2021 peak zero and somebody took these and they circled you know the series d

SPEAKER_28: and called it venture capital and then they called the series e and above not venture capital you and i had talked about this last week i think and i just want to point out to people that when we talk about

SPEAKER_18: venture there's i think trad vc and then i think there's new vc yes and for founders it's really

SPEAKER_51: important to understand where you are in this journey trad vc traditional venture capital we're placing bets we're helping you grow the product find product market fit and then whatever this new

SPEAKER_18: vc is this late stage new vc um what i'll just call i don't know the growth stage sure pre-ipo uh mez i'm gonna just call it mez financing screw it i'm going old school trad vc and mez because we used to call

SPEAKER_35: this mezzanine financing like this little round between when you were venture and private and going

SPEAKER_18: public so i'm gonna say this is mez growth yeah trad vc is like the bespoke art punk rock gut feeling roll up your sleeves and everything else is just a spreadsheet it's just people with a spreadsheet and i'm not diminishing them but the decisions made there are made largely on some economic bet and that bet did not pay off because the public markets did not reward the private market investors after a certain round and that's what the chart shows so we throw up that chart one more time at what point and what is the stock price today uh if we look at instacart you know at what point were you under water with your investment because here i think it's somewhere you know uh it ipo'd at 27 which means you know the that series e the first non-venture capital the mez financing is still under

SPEAKER_12: water by a third almost so the share price today because i thought this would be go with this was about 44 bucks when i checked it a little bit earlier so actually i think d1 capital with the tinder offer in 2020 is probably only now underwater by just a little bit but that they're at break even yeah but that means everything after which was the bulk of the capital probably invested in the firm because late stage rounds are larger than early stage rounds didn't do well and i think this just goes to show that venture capital the model the 2 and 20 model the partner model the everything we know about venture capital doesn't always scale perfectly through the mez tranches but the reason why i like mez jason mezzanine uh as an idea here is it was always supposed to be temporary and short and

David Friedberg: constrained a mezzanine is not the entire venue right no it's just this little uh you know balcony

SPEAKER_51: right this little mezzanine the balcony there so you know the point here is those people put their money in they sat around for four or five years and had no return in that same time if they had just bought the s p etc you know they were 10 to 25 returns each of those years in other words they would have tripled their money double tripled their money if they just put it in an index fund so the industry has changed

SPEAKER_18: radically and the industry in some ways has been broken part of it is too much capital and trying

SPEAKER_28: to make it bigger than it is and that's why just making the announcement here today i am committing our

SPEAKER_18: firm to going even earlier i have decided you know as over the break here i want our firm launch which

SPEAKER_51: does founder university a pre-accelerator where half the companies aren't even incorporated yet and the

SPEAKER_18: accelerator which is appear to tech stars and uh y combinator where we you know have companies that have modest traction or they're you know mvps just going into the market yeah we're going to really focus 95 of our effort there and we were spending about a third a third and a third third in directs

SPEAKER_51: third in accelerator third and pre-accelerator i'm just looking at it saying you know what we can do our most work the most work the best use of our time yeah is in founder university accelerator so i'm

SPEAKER_35: kind of reorganizing our firm uh around this concept and so uh i'm announcing that our founder university 10th cohort is going to be in person in austin so if you're interested in hanging out with me every

SPEAKER_00: thursday every tuesday uh because thursdays i tape all in monday wednesday friday i do the swing startups tuesday is going to be my founding university day i'm going to make tuesday my day for just hanging out with the founding university accelerator companies and we're going

SPEAKER_51: to do it in person i don't know how exactly that will come together i may get a co-working space i may do it with my friends at capital factory but i've been looking at that chart thinking about it a whole

SPEAKER_18: bunch and thinking about where i want to spend the remaining years i have to be productive

SPEAKER_73: all right founders let's talk about your fitness yes you can't build the next google you're not going

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SPEAKER_73: gym fitbot helps you level up your fitness how does it work it's pretty simple they use machine learning they use exercise science and they build you a custom workout plan that's just for you and it's based on things like the muscle fatigue of your past workouts and your recovery so listen you don't wind up like doing too many quads and not enough abs and too much back it monitors all that for you it tracks things like muscle fatigue and recovery so you avoid overworking or underworking any muscle group and if you don't have a gym that's not a problem fitbot works anywhere and it keeps your workouts fresh and effective so for example when i'm on the road i might go to one of those hotels that has like a tiny little claustrophobic gym and all they have is like dumbbells and a treadmill no problem easy peasy you tell fitbot what is available it makes your workout now i might be at a full gym where they have a circuit where they got kettlebells which i love and then it will give me a workout based on the kettlebells and the circuit machines and what's really interesting is i use the watch app and i can just sit there and log my sets in the workout app i can change them there's a little key where like you still want to get biceps but there's three or four different ways to get biceps worked out you can pick the one you want to do they have over 1400 videos to guide you through every move in fitbod and you can kick off 2025 nice and strong take all the guesswork out by getting 25 off your fitbod subscription or you can just try it for free fitbod.me twist that's fitbod.me twist

SPEAKER_105: fitbod personalized fitness that grows with you well let's talk about the idea of going earlier because

SPEAKER_12: one thing that people have been talking about lately is how venture capital fundraising on the venture side has become very concentrated amongst a couple of firms so just to give people some background around why you might be going early here is a chart that shows just the number of venture capital firms that are active just as a little bit of background for folks this by the way jason is via the financial times and pitchbook data and it just goes to show that as you can see over time more firms and then fewer firms and why that matters is we have seen the amount of venture capital raised go down but also become more concentrated so if you look at this chart here from pitchbook this is from december so it's slightly out of date but it's mostly correct we can see that a handful of firms have raised the bulk of the capital and if we're going to think about the example of instacart that we started with i presume that they're going to deploy a lot of that capital into later stage rounds because you cannot deploy billions of dollars each year into a pre-accelerator jason i mean what are the checks for

SPEAKER_00: founder university yeah i'll get right to that but looking at this strip chart here 49 billion raised by the top 30 firms indrescent seven billion general catalyst six billion thrive capital uh josh kushner's shout out to josh 5.5 billion these people are doing mezzanine financing when you're putting a billion or two billion dollars into you know taking twitter private or you know chat gpt at 150 billion

SPEAKER_51: like should chat gpt not be a public company if they're making six billion a year like what are we talking about here why are these companies private now i know they have a special situation because they're trying to do this fugazi fugazi non-profit into a for-profit thing um but then you look you know the other experienced managers and emerging managers are a small portion of that i think lps need to start thinking about well where do they want to concentrate their dollars and what is the best use of their capital in time yes if they want to have average returns i think these late stage funds

SPEAKER_18: are a great way to get exposure and it's i think what's happening in their minds i'm going to do a little um mind reading here is i think they're going to look eventually at this mezz financing cohort you know what josh is doing at thrive and again this is not a criticism as public market

David Friedberg: investing they're public market investing so then jason just to be clear that means they're going to be

SPEAKER_18: shooting for essentially the s p they're going to be seven they beat seven percent twelve percent they're better than the s p on average as you know as a lover of low fee index funds it's true and then the rest of us are trying to hit double or triple that yes 15 or 21 let's say so that we say hey you know these things are private um anyway i think for founders who are looking at this just

SPEAKER_51: understand you know if you're going to a firm that has you know five ten twenty billion under management they just are not going to give the attention to you yeah as a tiny founder trying to figure it out so i think just as founders be thoughtful and put your expectation you know listen if you're going to talk to josh kushner or indresen horowitz the late stage group there they're putting a billion or five billion or two billion into some of these deals if they're putting 250k into your deal it's not going to move the needle for them it's not going to get their attention that doesn't mean they're bad people

SPEAKER_18: it's just the nature of it just like i can't help you when you're raising at you know a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars even when you need 30 million or 40 million i can refer you to my friends but that's almost the entire size of my fund we do a 45 million dollar fund the good news

SPEAKER_28: for me is i don't need a lot of capital i want to do 200 of these 25k checks for founder university to your original question we give people their first 25k check to start their company and then

SPEAKER_18: we give them 125k check just like uh the same terms as y commenter and tech stars when they're

SPEAKER_28: in that second stage so i think ideally i would like to do 200 of the 25k checks you know that's

SPEAKER_18: about 5 million and then do another 5 million in the 125k checks which is about i guess 40 of those right so you know that would be 240 companies a year which would be two and a half times what we're doing now we're about at 100 a year now that means i only really need 10 million a year to deploy 15 million a year and i can have enough service area that if we hit a unicorn every 200 we could have a really amazing fund uh you know just doing the math on paper so i've been thinking a lot about this the market keeps changing my original thought was i would keep half our money in reserves to bet on the biggest winners but what i'm realizing is gosh a lot of these seed funds are a lot of these seed

SPEAKER_51: rounds when these big funds dip into them they're demanding 10 ownership which means they want to put in 10 million dollars which means they they ratchet a seed round up to 100 million and the company's got 100 million dollar valuation they have 1 million in revenue so they give them 100x and that's just gonna like distort reality as we've seen instacart's reality got distorted there and these distortion effects can be profound and problematic we're going to talk about in the back half of the show because bench and level two promising firms just busted out we'll get into

SPEAKER_00: that in detail you know i want to get into immigration thank you for like bringing up this topic and and following my twitter stream because it is you know big on my mind i know people like to know what i'm thinking and i like to share what i'm thinking why do i like to share what i'm thinking alex people email me jason at calacanis.com is my email for life where they dm me and tell me that

SPEAKER_03: i'm a horrible person and uh you know you've got to stop excepting dude you've got to lock down

SPEAKER_07: your dm i love it i'm not liking my dms i love the savage dms i get it's incredible okay you don't

SPEAKER_10: like them i don't know i tweet them i tweet them out in collections i'm just like i can only take so much i think i have a slightly uh lower bar for negativity day-to-day than you do i just like after

SPEAKER_12: the third or fourth time someone calls me something nasty i'm just like all right all right that's

SPEAKER_16: enough it's strictly uh it's strictly a reflection on how they're feeling about themselves at that

SPEAKER_18: moment yeah that's true yes and usually it's a trouble person or a 12 year old or a russian chinese bot trying to cause trouble or just somebody doing engagement farming in order to

SPEAKER_12: make money you know jason you asked us to put together a couple of stats to help frame the debate that we've had uh nationally i want to say about high school immigration and we have a guest in just a second that's an expert but i want to show this little infographic because i think it provides some good foundational information for everyone who's watching today so this is a couple of data points one how many new h-1b visas were granted and the latest full year data we have is from 2023 everybody will have 2024 data very soon but we wanted to be consistent so the number was 118 948 and that's a little bit above the cap number everyone talks about and that's because there are some exempt categories uh the total number of illegal immigrants in the u.s in 2023 we went through a bunch of different data points the best number we could find was about 11.7 million total and then the unemployment rate for the u.s back in 2023 3.6 percent and as of right now open tech jobs the best number we could find that was inclusive was about 530 000 tech jobs so jason that's what you

SPEAKER_123: wanted to know and i hope that that is accurate to current data well we will put these in the notes

SPEAKER_35: we'll cite our sources uh always and you know the illegal immigration number is hard to pin down

SPEAKER_51: because it's an estimate and they have this thing like encounters at the border and i don't know if that 11.7 million is the cumulative during the biden kamala harris administration or it's in the single

David Friedberg: year i think that's like no that's that's that's um expected total uh illegal immigrants living in the

SPEAKER_12: u.s oh living in the u.s okay down to 10 uh and has now picked back up and we're approaching 12 million again but we're still under the all-time national peak which was 2008. okay everybody 2025 is here

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SPEAKER_51: here i am trying to i'm because i have a lot of friends who are involved in the administration i don't have to say who they are you can just google look at my you can do google them look at my twitter

SPEAKER_18: stream and people are weaponizing what i say against my friends like i don't know if you've seen this but a lot of like the like fringe elements of maga and some other things are just

SPEAKER_51: taking whatever i say and then slamming it into my friends feeds and saying hey your bestie your best friend your good friend your colleague your business partner they don't even know the nature of my relationships they're saying this with people who maybe i don't even have a relationship with or have a

SPEAKER_18: very cursory relationship i am going to be very muted for the next couple of weeks about these issues on my social and here because i don't like to get my friends dragged from my comments okay so if people think i'm being a little subdued i am self-censoring myself by by choice i don't have to nobody's asked me to but i'm going to self-censor myself a bit over the coming weeks just so i don't get weaponized but the h1b visa discussion you wanted to talk about on the show you're the co-host we had a guest booked i want to talk about it here from maybe less of a political basis but

SPEAKER_12: more of an educational basis just to level set facts this is lisa wedden uh founder ceo of plymouth street jason she worked for bloomberg beta back in the day she's a sequoia scout as well so she's been on the venture side and the founder side and i booked her because i had the same thought h1b visas and then as i was learning so much more about the u.s immigration system this week it turns out that sure her firm mostly works with o1 visas which are different than h1b visas so one lisa

SPEAKER_139: thank you for being here how are you thanks for having me i'm great happy new year yeah happy new

SPEAKER_12: year so i want to start at a kind of a high level here and talk about the impact of immigrants on the technology scene uh the american immigration council says that 44.8 percent of the fortune 500 companies back in 2003 were founded by immigrants or their children i know this is a uh a near and dear issue to your heart so i'm curious when you think about high school immigration what is your compelling argument you tell people who are skeptical as to why it matters to our national growth

SPEAKER_142: so i think the stats are really compelling here 55 of technology unicorns are founded by immigrants some of the most iconic companies of our generation spacex repler um stripe have all been founded by immigrants um and when you think about you know the early discussion capital is not necessarily the constraint for innovation human talent is uh plymouth's mission when we set up was to accelerate us innovation by enabling the highest skill talent to build in america and immigrants have consistently proven time and time again to be some of the most innovative risk-taking entrepreneurial individuals absolutely that's the the core focus here is how do we unlock a new era of u.s innovation so my

SPEAKER_31: question then is why is your firm so focused on o-1 visas as opposed to the much more i would say uh

SPEAKER_12: newsy recently h1b program that i think people are much more familiar with than the o-1 program

SPEAKER_142: totally so the h1b program was designed in the 1990s and it was set up with a 65 000 cap limit uh today over 780 000 individuals apply for the h1b and the reality is is that we could be losing out and i think we are losing out on the world's best talent because these individuals are put into a lottery ticket system and so you could imagine a leader in ai a leader in quantum a leader in nuclear energy puts their name in a lottery ticket system and they don't get it and i think the reality is is that we want to recruit and retain this world-class talent and in comparison to the h1b the o-1 is not a lottery ticket system you have to put together a real research report about an individual you know these applications are between 400 to 600 pages long to document someone's extraordinary ability and so you have to be really elite to to get this visa pathway okay i i just want to recap here alex

SPEAKER_18: o-1 visas yes this is uh i think the quote is i'm reading here extraordinary ability or achievement in the science arts education business or athletics they must demonstrate sustained national international acclaim and recognition in their field this can be proven through awards publications high salary etc that is one character care uh one type of visa to come to the united states and this is extremely

SPEAKER_71: rigorous and there is no abuse here or almost no abuse in your mind lisa it's too hard to game the o-1

SPEAKER_142: you know less than 5 000 stem individuals come into the us on an o-1 visa and you have to document substantial evidence to prove the o-1 visa um so it's not easy no it's not an easy pathway to game

SPEAKER_51: how many get awarded each year and how many applications just ballpark if you know that number

SPEAKER_142: just under 30 000 get awarded each year and the majority of those visas actually go for o-1b's which is in the entertainment and the uh artistic professions so if there is less abuse of o-1

SPEAKER_105: visas compared to the h-1b program which i think everyone agrees has a place could use some fixes do

SPEAKER_12: you expect that technology companies writ large are going to move away from h-1b visas and toward the o-1 process simply because it's not a lottery and therefore is worth the extra effort to go through because

SPEAKER_142: you know it's not random it's merit-based i think uh companies use every tool in their toolkit to retain their best talent and different visa pathways offer uh this opportunity you know there's the tn category for canadians and mexicans there are um visa pathways for australians you know the visa landscape is not a one-size-fits-all i think also when you talk about early-stage startups and later-stage companies they have different talent needs i think that o-1 is an amazing visa pathway for the very best talent both at the earliest stages for founders who want to build in america and the later stages and i think the best companies that we work with like mid-journey replit pico ai they take their talent extremely seriously because they know that the constraint for growth is finding the

SPEAKER_105: very best talent i'm just curious about the the the viability of o-1 visas to hopefully expand to

SPEAKER_12: allow for more high school immigration because i think personally just my own view not even speaking for jason or the show that if we could 10x the number of very brilliant people that work in technology that can come here and stay every year it would be worth you know at least one percent gdp growth per annum which is the cheapest thing you could possibly buy i'm just curious does the o-1 program have the capacity to to help with that or do we have to fix h1bs to get that level of high

SPEAKER_168: school immigration flowing so i think there's reform across the system but the o-1 is an uncapped

SPEAKER_142: user pathway and we should be utilizing it and this administration should utilize it insofar as it achieves our our goal of american competitiveness i think the message for the world should be america is open for business for the world's best skilled innovators and we want you to come and build here and innovate in this economy and i think this is a golden opportunity to share that message and utilize every tool in our toolkit to do that and visas are a component of that all right and then i just want to

SPEAKER_12: get your take on this because i know you're a bigger fan of the o-1 visa than the h-1b but the h-1b has been criticized just a lot lately um it's lost some of its i'd say public luster how fair do you think the criticisms are of h-1b visas that they underpay or they entrap workers uh into contracts they can't get out of because then they get deported how reasonable are the criticisms of h-1bs

SPEAKER_173: in your view i think there were you know most practitioners would say that these are known

SPEAKER_142: issues that we need to identify and reform i think there's been a ton of really interesting discussion online around increasing the compliance fees for companies you know increasing the wage requirements you know this program was designed in the 1990s again we want a system that is adaptable and updates

SPEAKER_175: to um our modern era and so you know i think there is reasonable criticism that most practitioners has

SPEAKER_52: known have known but yeah i can give a little color on that actually alex when i was in the

SPEAKER_18: started my career in the it business i was at sony statute of limitations is over uh or i don't really care i'll just say it uh i was out to lunch um with the people running the it department and um they said hey we don't have to work weekends anymore uh we got these indian guys and they're going to be you know in this office somewhere uh in the middle of america and they're dirt cheap they get paid 50 less than us and they come here with their family if they don't do what we tell them and they

SPEAKER_28: don't work the hours we tell them we can deport them and they have 30 days to find a new job which they can't so therefore they're going to do all the weekend shifts they're going to work 50 60 hours a week there's nothing they can say and i said wow that's really dark and they said yeah it's great and i was just a 21 year old kid and i was like yeah but that makes some kind of like indentured servants it's totally abhorrent um and all the discussions i heard about h1b specifically during that time period uh in the it business specifically not entrepreneurial pursuits was just about saving

SPEAKER_35: money and maybe being able to grind these employees down is there a fair criticism to that and what i

SPEAKER_173: experienced 30 years ago you know i can't speak on behalf of all h1b holders but i can speak to the

SPEAKER_142: people that i talk to every day a large number on h1bs and they want more flexibility to be able to work at different companies start their own companies you know there's these incredible h1b employees who are working at large tech organizations and they want to move on to another visa pathway because they want to build in america and they are you know struggling with this visa category that they're pursuing because they do have to maintain their status maintain their prevailing wage and so from my kind of own personal perspective like i am hearing stories of individuals who want to move on to the move off the h1b because it is not the right visa category for them um and there are you know

SPEAKER_146: there are companies that abuse the h1b category too we know this like there are how do you solve the

SPEAKER_18: abuse how do you how would you solve the abuse what are i mean i've watched the twitter debates i have my own answers but i'm curious from your perspective if you could wave your magic wand you do this for a living you work on these what three things would you change in order to make it more fair to american workers who want those jobs and to the employees who i believe in some cases might be five percent or ten percent it's obviously not the majority maybe you know it's unfair to them

SPEAKER_142: yeah you know i focus most of my work not on h1b visas like i look to people who are moving off h1b visa um but i think the reality is like there are you know several things that are interesting about reforming the h1b one is that you could look to explore to increase the costs for companies uh for the h1b so increasing the annual uh compliance uh costs for h1b visa that would be uh i think really interesting increasing certain elements of the wage requirements could be really interesting and reforming the number of allocations in the lottery for companies and i think those would be uh frankly kind of like an interesting and necessary requirement for uh ensuring that this visa category

SPEAKER_186: is updated from the 90s awesome if you go back to twist episode 35 we had brad feld on uh and little

SPEAKER_12: baby jason you know 14 years ago uh they were talking about this issue and one thing that they brought up was um was the idea of a like um entrepreneur or an investor visa jason the idea that if you're going to deliberately come here and start a company there should be a separate door just for

SPEAKER_188: you there should be an easy way for a foreign entrepreneur who wants to start a business in the u.s that raises a certain amount of money from u.s investors you're in be able to get a visa and get

SPEAKER_189: going right put that amount of money in a bank account fill out a form you're done that's right

SPEAKER_188: so it turns out as we start talking you know to our i i don't you know the politics is a mystery to me but to my you know the friends of mine that are in in the house in the senate uh and some of the other people that we know what we found out pretty quickly was there's a type of visa called an eb5 visa which is basically the opposite of what we want the eb5 visa which has been around since 1990 gives a visa to a foreigner who invests a million dollars in a u.s company oh genius right so you can base you basically are you know the idea is to drive investment in u.s companies right but the person getting the visa is simply the investor so you know there's a lot of controversy around that particular type of visa or people buying visas etc but the structure was parallel we want the opposite we want the u.s to be the investor and we want the entrepreneur to be somebody talent exactly if you

SPEAKER_193: have yaoming in china you want him to play in the nba exactly so somehow his visa got approved that's

SPEAKER_12: right that's right and lisa just as a lost as a last thought do you think we need instead of trying to fix and shoehorn our needs into the o1 and h1b categories just simply a blank sheet of paper in an entirely new category or new system to avoid just endless rounds of small technocratic fixes to a

SPEAKER_142: program that seems to have larger issues um i think there's huge opportunities to explore like a fast track entrepreneur visa they did actually come out with the international entrepreneurship rule which was a different opportunity but it was very complicated and not super fit for purpose and so yeah to the extent that we can streamline this immigration system and have very clear opportunities for innovators i'm so in favor of it in this moment we do have visa categories that are advantageous for entrepreneurs so we're doubling down on that but again you know let's be innovative and let's think about our ultimate goal which is advancing u.s innovation and to the

SPEAKER_203: extent that we can think through every tool in our toolkit i'd advocate for that all right lisa thank you so

SPEAKER_202: much plymouthstreet.com if you want to look up what her work thank you much what do you charge lisa how

SPEAKER_35: much does it cost if a company hires you per person how do you get paid we get paid for per visa so how

SPEAKER_208: much what does it cost between ten to twelve thousand dollars okay so it's kind of reasonable but it's not

SPEAKER_142: cheap it's your very best talent we really fundamentally believe in investing in your talent and these

SPEAKER_187: applications over 500 pages long so we really focus on ensuring that you can consistently and reliably bring over your best talent fantastic really appreciate you coming on lisa thanks so

SPEAKER_35: much appreciate that you know uh it was great to have her on i think there's a really easy way to

SPEAKER_18: solve this problem hit me number one a minimum salary yes i don't know if it's 50 60 or 70k but that's an easy one to do you put in a minimum salary for this number two you have one year to find a new job so if you're on an h1 bvz have a year to find a job now i know what people are going to say you know like that's unfair or whatever but hear me out because there's the next piece when i'm up when i

SPEAKER_28: am an employer i pay ten percent of your salary ten percent of your salary not just a thousand dollars or whatever these application fees are ten percent of your salary uh up to a certain number so there's like a minimum but it also maxes out so that you have uh a disincentive for trying to use this for like let's say frontline it pc support specialists you know somebody who comes and reformats your hard drive or reinstall software your whatever's not working um and i think a lot of this

SPEAKER_18: stems from the fact that a lot of people on the gi bill or you know uh folks thought hey i can get

SPEAKER_51: a degree from some degree mill they sold me on being an it person they told me the starting

SPEAKER_18: salary in it was 75k so i went 30 40k into debt i figured i could pay that back after the five or ten years you know uh and then i would be making six figures eventually and then all of a sudden you're

SPEAKER_51: like wait a second the the job i was going against there's somebody getting paid 50k instead of 75k well if you charge a minimum of 10k per year and you force people to pay not only the 10k

Chamath Palihapitiya: but the employer has to pay the 10k the second year when you leave oh so if you go away they're

SPEAKER_18: still on the hook for it still on the hook for that year or maybe you're on the hook for six months and the new employer's on the hook for the next one whatever it is there's some sort of fee so that if you were an employer you really have to think about this then you take all that money and i think

SPEAKER_28: aaron levy friend of the pod uh has been on many times from box said hey why don't you put that money towards stem education hey there you go now we're talking or maybe you put that money towards the people who had it degrees from those paper mills we identify them and we have a way for those folks to pay down the debt for it degrees that maybe were overpriced or whatever and i'm not big into that because i like people to make that decision but i'm just thinking creatively here because there is valid criticism here i believe there's significant um abuse on the low end yeah and once you eliminate

SPEAKER_18: that i think people can have a much easier time with this issue i think so too i never i don't think

SPEAKER_12: we're ever going to get the people who want to shut down all immigration for all time in the united states ever on our side here but if there's a way we could grab 65 of the population and open up the economy to allow for more smart people to come here and build and have faster gdp growth and have more of a talent edge on the rest of the world by being an attractive place for brains to drain too well then we'd have a stronger nation more money and happier people jason and i am just so in favor of that i want

SPEAKER_220: big america big strong america i have literally three blog posts i've started i drafted that i'm

SPEAKER_18: holding until after trump's in office and this all dies down because i don't want to poke the tiger here and have people taking my blog post quoting it because i have different feelings on this and you can look at my twitter i've said i think we should be the most prosperous and the most populous country i think both of those things are important and how do you get there you're going to get there through population growth and people having babies and you're going to get there through immigration

SPEAKER_12: but you know what we got plenty of time to talk about this in 2025. we do and we have plenty of time after the administration has all gone through confirmations so now moving on um okay sad news but i want to talk about this so we're winding the clock a little bit bench fell apart at the end of last year at the end of 2024 bench a a company that people had heard of and used for a long time that had last raised money back in 2021 jason and outsourced accounting firm right outsource accounting firm exactly and loved by startups loved by stars and when they died it shocked people because i don't think people knew that they were on the ropes and then to start the year there's another company that's followed it's a fintech hr startup called level it offered benefits so essentially if you were an employer a startup say you could create kind of an innovative benefit program for your employees they did self-insured dental and vision products and you could also do wellness fitness all sorts of things using this level program they have also died and according to jason the ceo of paul aaron in an internal email that the information got he said quote while fundraising we entered an acquisition process that we believed would provide significant value to our clients and members unfortunately the deal fell through at the last minute due to external challenges beyond our control my question to you because i have a lot of thoughts about the business and the timing and so forth but when a ceo says we were fundraising there was an acquisition and it fell apart what does that tell you in your spidey sense it tells me the company was burning

SPEAKER_18: too much capital okay the investors had lost faith in this company um being a great place to deploy capital so they're burning too much money maybe the actual unit economics didn't work so new investors assessing this opportunity might have thought if putting if they're burning some millions of dollars

SPEAKER_51: a month at this company the valuation is very high there's all these covenants and all of this uh preference stack where the latest investors get 2x if i come in and i do a pay to play around or a cram down round where i say all the existing investors their shares are going to get diluted 100 to 1 or 50 to 1 or 25 to 1 or 10 to 1 or 5 to 1 they're going to be common shares and then we're going to start over raise more money they just thought you know that pain and suffering as bill gurley has said over and over again i've heard him say this on many podcasts a lot of investors are just like i don't want to come into a toxic situation and be the toxic person who delivers the medicine to the patient and maybe

SPEAKER_28: acquirers because of the wrath of lena khan looked at it and said i can't acquire this for some reason or they just weren't acquisitive and or the unit economics of doing outsource bookkeeping just looked like this was a bookkeeping firm that didn't really have enough technology there and the mission to use technology to make bookkeeping you know auto categorize expenses and costs maybe that just never got there so maybe it wasn't wasn't great execution or maybe they just couldn't get the margin there and this experiment failed and the board seems to have made two mistakes one they asked the founder yes there's been a big controversy hey trying to out the board now i would be very careful the board might have been doing something fiduciary that was responsible as a fiduciary if that ceo and we don't know was not hitting their numbers was not a great leader couldn't track talent we don't know then they probably were right to try to find a new leader and maybe they found the wrong one or maybe it just like i said was a crack foundation or a failed experiment so we don't have full information you know trying to out the the vcs who ousted the founder i'd be very careful yeah i saw that i would be very careful with that because they might have actually been doing the right thing and the hard thing and doing the hard right thing is hard and it makes you look like a jerk as a vc i've i've actually never ousted a founder i've never because i'm an early stage vc that we never got to that point but i you know know people who have and sometimes it's like this founder was off the rails

SPEAKER_12: they were in founder mode they were off in la la land well that's why to me when a vc does actually pull a founder i almost don't view it as a non-founder friendly move because it's done so infrequently i presume in today only the most extreme associations so to me if that happens i actually judge the founder more than the vc i want to go back to this this bench thing one last question because i i have been not a question more of a thing that i'm curious about we have seen fewer deaths fewer implosions fewer big flame outs in the startup world of companies that raised a huge round at a big valuation in 2021 than i expected but then we just had these two companies land in quick succession bang bang and so i i my the thing i'm curious about for this year is how many will we see in 2025 will this be the year when companies that haven't raised since 21 fail because there's probably

SPEAKER_17: several thousand of them out there that are just waiting to either get bought for a dollar or to die and i maybe this maybe we're finally at that moment jason maybe it's here i think when you raise

SPEAKER_18: a ton of money and you have a lot of runway you can kick the can down the road you can do four riffs you can raise your prices but eventually you know you can you can put lipstick on the pig you can paint the house but it's still got a crack foundation it's still got a bad fundamentals possibly and i think that is the the the challenge that is the challenge well we'll see uh do you want

SPEAKER_12: to wrap up with just a little bit on this lift amazon uh sure yeah i mean i think that this was one

SPEAKER_18: of my big uh the all in prediction show comes out tomorrow i predicted um that i would one of my big business my big business deal of 2025 in the prediction show which you'll get today uh friday uh was the um that there would be consolidation in the on-demand space and the autonomous space in 2025. now that's a bold prediction but i do think we could see amazon uber doordash byd uh uber tesla zuks waymo you're going to see some of these merge if waymo and uber merged they're de facto going to run the table on everybody they become it's going to be it's going to be like a

SPEAKER_28: battle with it's going to be hard for tesla to beat that right no i absolutely agree now we're plus waymo equals win i think i think they win uber plus tesla means they win sure so if you look at

SPEAKER_51: that you have waymo and tesla plus zuks very promising plus another 15 other providers of

SPEAKER_18: autonomy so you take those 18 different autonomy providers there's probably five that are the most

SPEAKER_51: credible you take those five and you pair them with either uber or doordash or amazon and their deliveries you got a pretty robust offering and so in with the end of the the wrath of lena khan we could see something epic occur something like the acquisition of whole foods uh or something like the acquisition maybe even a better one youtube instagram whatsapp like a mega matchup

SPEAKER_12: that has significant impact on the future so i agree with all of that but i'm a recent convert to the amazon uh possibility and i had honestly forgot why why that amazon owns zooks yeah oh you forgot zooks has got great potential it does and so amazon if you forgot like i did amazon bought zooks back for 1.2 1.3 billion in 2020 uh the company had raised uh up to about a billion dollars jason at a valuation there reached as high as 3.2 billion so not the best venture exit but certainly a property at amazon that's done well so lately zooks is has expanded to san francisco larger vegas footprint and foster city and they're going to do their first public riders in vegas this year so zooks officially is going to be a real robo taxi company in the near future so that means that they had the technology side jason sorted out at zooks which is amazon and then there's lift which uh my friend anita ramaswamy over at the information pitched uh this amazon lift deal as a 2025 option which got everyone talking and the thing that i i'm just blown away by is how essentially lift is free lift today is valued at exactly 1x it's trailing uh revenue whereas uber is worth three and a quarter x and tesla's worth the 13 and a

SPEAKER_243: half x is trailing revenue so you can buy a lift for 1x revenue attach it to zooks you'd have to

SPEAKER_18: really you'd have to pay a premium sure to get the shareholders to give it up and that premium would probably be 2x or 50 or 2x so i think if you add a 50 premium to it but i think you're and it is about to you know they are going to be break even profitable i don't know if they've got some funny gap uniqueness to lift i haven't been tracking them but i do that i can answer that for you so they are

SPEAKER_12: roughly break even ish on a gap basis they have 107 million of just even done the last quarter but the thing that i think is most important jason is their trailing operating cash flow was 740 million

David Friedberg: in the last four quarters so it's kicking off cash awesome um so you know it's not i i mean

SPEAKER_18: buying the number you know what will be the number five six seven eighth most important player globally

SPEAKER_51: maybe the 10th most important player globally is not a power move power move is to buy uber grab um door dash like that's the power move um and so amazon tried to do restaurant delivery they failed

SPEAKER_28: at that one i don't know why they failed it's i guess it's a hard problem to solve they weren't focused on enough who knows what the reason was but they they like to take big risks they bought whole foods i think that took them a couple swings at bat but i think that's actually working because i see whole foods uh coming to my house and i know a lot of people are buying from whole foods via the amazon interface now and they seem to have figured that one out too so i think um i don't think this is going to happen i think well i just think you're like buying a brand you're going to disappear anyway and amazon already has the prime members so simply opening this up to amazon prime members and saying every amazon prime comes with essentially what uber one is and uber one apple one amazon prime it's all the same thing a membership fee to get people to use a product more to increase consumption and to do more lock-in uber one's got i think 20 30 million members now

SPEAKER_51: it's incredible i just slowly picked up on it and those people from my understanding from public reports spend a lot more money so oh yeah there's something really interesting about that uber one membership and amazon prime that could be very powerful if you think about those as one thing and you think about what they're both doing at their core amazon and uber both move stuff yes if i was on the board of amazon tesla or google i would have one thing in mind and now people think i'm talking my book here i have exposure to all these names except tesla um and if i wanted to have a bunch of tesla i

SPEAKER_18: could um i think the stocks kind of hit meme territory right now it's like and i have owned tests on the past i the reason i don't own tesla as i said before on the show is like people think i have some inside line because of my friendship with people over there just i have exposure to everything

SPEAKER_28: i'm not talking my book here whoever on those boards buys uber and i i don't think uber is for sale but no i don't think dara is gonna would be no but if i'm if i'm if i was bezos i would get in a room

SPEAKER_18: with dara and say what do we got to do here if i was elon if i was on the tesla board uh i would be

SPEAKER_28: like we're because i think tesla's not worth over a trillion uber's worth 130 billion or 40 billion giving up 10 of your equity or five percent of your equity to own those 25 million members and then just be guaranteed to win and to have a global footprint footprint day one or day zero

SPEAKER_18: because the cyber taxes aren't going to be on the road till next year sometime or maybe the end of this year and they'll go into mass production to have that advantage if waymo gets that advantage if i was larry and sergey i would be going at uber i believe uber merges or is acquired with

SPEAKER_260: one of the four players tesla amazon google waymo and then long shot of long shots

SPEAKER_43: might get blocked but a doordash and uber combination ah that's scary merger even me my

SPEAKER_28: ding ding ding antitrust bells go off at that one but i'll tell you why this is something that the antitrust people should at least maybe consider letting happen okay then you would have a company

SPEAKER_51: add to the mag 8 or uber plus airbnb so expanding the mag 8 makes each member of the mag 8 less powerful yeah we should be trying to take the mag 7 or 8 and make it into a mag 17 or 18. yeah mag 20 yeah make a mag 20 then that's the way because you're not going to stop them they're just too good at what they do they're at the top of their game they have too much cash no administration can stop them you're not going to break them up even if you do break them up they're going to add more businesses and so or if you break up if you force google to spin out youtube or something you you would actually then create a mag 9. so there might be a case to break up one or two along the margins that's my best belief here but i do think we will see that we're going to go from one percent of rides

Chamath Palihapitiya: globally being ride sharing to 20. in that case the tam's going 20x in the next decade or two easily in my mind and if that's the case and car ownership goes away man tesla's flat year over year

SPEAKER_51: i think on car deliveries 1.8 million or something like that which is extraordinary one percent down

SPEAKER_277: year over so even yeah you call it even car ownership is having an issue right now i think

SPEAKER_28: young people don't want to own cars so actually tesla's making the absolute right bet on the cyber taxi so why not ensure the win for 10 of your shares by buying uber for me that would be like a dream

SPEAKER_18: or amazon buying it or doordashing so a couple a couple of data points here just to wrap up uh

SPEAKER_12: this conversation lyft valuation as of right now 6.03 billion doordash 72 and a half billion i think people don't realize how much more valuable doordash is than lyft uber 137 billion and then we get into the big boys tesla 1.27 trillion and then amazon 2.35 trillion and i'll just throw in uh alphabet for good measure here uh that is drumroll please 2.36 trillion dollars so there's a lot of capital here someone buy uber to make jason's month and uh we're back on uh we're doing a late show on sunday

SPEAKER_51: and we're going to record the monday show on sunday we might go live with it we'll see so if you're around sunday night because i'm going to be traveling on monday uh we're going to record the

SPEAKER_18: show sunday back to hey listen no rest we like to we like we love doing the show we do whatever we have to do to get out no rest for the weary all right everybody uh do me a favor founder.university

SPEAKER_51: start a company in 25 number two follow x.com alex x.com twi startups x.com jason and finally i'm trying to get to a million dollars in startup credits for get startup credits.com this is a gift from me and my team to all startups we can't invest in every startup 20 000 people apply for funding from us so what we did was anytime anybody takes a meeting with us we give them the get startup credits.com package which is i think over five hundred thousand dollars in credits i'm going to get it to a million i got oracle in there i got uh google cloud in there i got cruise for accounting like really stable accounting i got vanta in there i got oracle i got zendesk i got linkedin i mean these are the biggest names i got in broker i got northwest i got hubspot uh athena go to athenawow.com get a free month i think uh so what i'm doing is the people who are my friends who provide services

SPEAKER_18: at an elite level i'm allowing them to provide something really great to founders this is my mission to help support founders in year zero zero year one year two the hardest years you go there you fill out the form you say what you need i need accounting i need uh hiring from linkedin i need marketing from hubspot uh i need cloud computing could be you know azure i don't think we have azure in there anymore um oracle or google cloud i need any of those so if you want to be part of

SPEAKER_51: it just email me jason at calacanis.com it's got to be something like legit if you give away one month of your service like the rack rate deal don't bother contacting me it's got to be super generous like two years of the product 100 000 in credits no strings attached and you have to attach an evangelist to it so the way that get startup credits works is when they fill out the form alex the founders contact information if they opt into it goes to that provider so if you say you want cloud it'll go to the evangelist at google it will go to the evangelist at oracle it will not go if you don't click off cloud so you're not going to have your time wasted but then you're put in touch with

SPEAKER_281: people like a real human being yes you're just a slush pile no you're not just going to get added

SPEAKER_18: to a mailing list and get spammed you have to have to have to put an evangelist on it has to be a

SPEAKER_51: good deal anyway it's an experiment we experimented in the fourth quarter with it we had hundreds of people i believe come in and fill out the form in the experiment we had i think a half dozen

SPEAKER_18: partners we're going to go to a dozen partners it's working great and we'll see you on the next episode of this week in service bye bye