SPEAKER_01: What are VCs known for doing in the summer and the winter? SPEAKER_00: Uh, it is not hard work and graft. It is mostly skiing and hot air ballooning. Correct. They're known for doing nothing. SPEAKER_05: Yes. SPEAKER_07: Now, I gave a big speech to, you know, one of our young guns here. I call them the young guns, the ones who come from out of school. Doesn't mean we don't hire older people. SPEAKER_11: We do all the time, but, uh, look, we hired you, Alex. I mean, you're ancient. SPEAKER_13: Uh, I never miss you on this show. Ken, just getting roasted, getting roasted. You're supposed to be supportive. SPEAKER_15: Well, that's just my numbers turned around in a heartbeat. I would give up. SPEAKER_18: I would literally give up every dollar I have to be 35 again. Really? I literally would go back down to zero for 30 to be 35 again. Every single dollar. SPEAKER_23: This week in startups is brought to you by dot tech domains. Don't miss our jam session with J Cal contest to apply and get more details, go to jam with J Cal dot tech brought to you by dot tech domains. Vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get a thousand dollars off for a limited time at Vanta dot com slash twist and open phone create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at open phone.com slash twist. SPEAKER_06: All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm Alex. He's Jason X dot com slash Alex X dot com slash Jason. And, uh, news three days a week. That's our goal this week. I think we have two, we're still doing the interview shows. We're still doing the liquidity pod every other week. I think we'll be the pace for that. And we're still doing AI with sunny. So we're trying to figure it all out. Shout out to our sales team here at launch the venture firm, uh, and this week in start that produces this week in startups because they keep selling the show out. And that gives us the ability to keep investing in it and, uh, make sure you SPEAKER_29: are subscribed on all the podcast apps, YouTube, all that kind of good stuff. SPEAKER_06: We got a great rundown today. Uh, Alex has been working with the team. You know, there's about six, seven people on the team here. So, uh, what's on the docket today, Alex, and then, uh, welcome back. SPEAKER_32: Happy Tuesday. Today's Tuesday. SPEAKER_00: Yeah. July is going too fast. My birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks and I'm not, I'm not excited. I'm turning 35, which is not milestone. Yeah, it's kind of like the, you're actually middle-aged now moment. Um, but that's not what you're hearing or they're on the pod today. SPEAKER_37: We have a venture capital firm that is building its own AI, sorry, GPU cluster. I want to talk about why they're doing that costs and also services, then venture capital trends from the second quarter, including notes on where valuations are today. The data actually shocked me. So I can't wait to talk about that. Then one of J Cal's favorite things, remote work arbitrage. And we're going to segue from there into robots and the twist 500, lots of videos there. So get excited for that. And I recently learned that you can watch this podcast in video on Spotify. SPEAKER_00: If you didn't know, we were part of the video. SPEAKER_38: Yeah, we're part of the video, um, I guess, uh, Daniel, uh, from Spotify invited us to be SPEAKER_06: part of the video, uh, beta like a couple of years ago. So we've been doing it. SPEAKER_40: We used to have to do one RSS feed for pot, like for on iTunes, you can actually get a SPEAKER_06: video version of the show as well. Cause they separate it. Ah, okay. SPEAKER_43: And Spotify kind of came up with their own system to put them together, but it's SPEAKER_06: proprietary. And I told him this, and I don't like this. I told Daniel straight up and I see, see his BDI when they invited us. I was like, I don't like you creating your own standards. Please respect the RSS standards. We have a video one. We have a regular one, just do it from those. And they were like, no, we built our own thing. And I'm like, God damn it, Daniel. If you keep breaking our, if you break the standard, I'm going to call you out on SPEAKER_40: it all the time. So, and he's like, what do I care? SPEAKER_30: And I'm like, oh, fair enough, but please Spotify don't break RSS standards. Don't break the podcasting standards. That's what got us here. SPEAKER_46: Yes. SPEAKER_37: Podcasting works because of RSS. And if you don't know, RSS stands for real simple syndication. It's literally designed to be simple, basic, easy to use and works everywhere. If you create a new system, it's going to be worse, but let's start with what's going on at Andreessen Horowitz. Jason, we have talked over the years about how venture capital firms are expanding into services, hiring, business development, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I never thought I would see a venture capital firm put together 10,000 GPUs as the information is reporting that they then rent back to their startups. I presume at a very low cost. It's a project called oxygen and it's the first I've heard about it. And I'm blown away by this. SPEAKER_49: So first impressions from you. SPEAKER_48: It's a great idea that they stole. SPEAKER_06: This idea was pioneered, uh, by Daniel gross, who founded a really, really. Interesting company called pioneer labs. I think he's a really, really, really smart cat. Um, and what they did at pioneer labs is they kind of gamified startups or really more like product launches. And like, you could kind of score points, move up a leaderboard for releasing products and having product velocity, which has always been product velocity. The key to startup success. How quickly can you iterate on your product? Yeah. That gets you more shots on goal, et cetera. So he kind of gamified that and created a, a competitor to Y Combinator. He since shut it down because he's working at one of the, uh, AI companies. SPEAKER_54: Um, he co-founded, uh, an AI company, I think with Ilya. SPEAKER_57: So we'll get to that in a second. But what they did was they created something called the, uh, uh, Andromeda. SPEAKER_58: Is that how you spell, uh, pronounce Andromeda? SPEAKER_59: If, you know, that's not right. I've been seeing it wrong my entire life, so let's just go with it. Cluster. SPEAKER_61: So this was, uh, Nat Friedman and he, uh, got a bunch of GPUs together, uh, clusters SPEAKER_57: of Nvidia H one hundreds. SPEAKER_06: And they did this back in the day and, um, you know, it got a ton, a ton of press. So here I'll, uh, share it. SPEAKER_29: There you go. So there's a little bit on it. SPEAKER_06: Here is the, um, hacker news. On it Andromeda cluster, 10 exaflops for startups from Nat and Daniel. You know, they launched it in June of 2023. So why is this important? SPEAKER_64: Well, uh, the same reason why getting credits from Azure, AWS, Google cloud, SPEAKER_06: Oracle, and other folks has been so powerful. If you give startups, you know, a hundred thousand in credits, 50,000 in credits, they start, it really does help. Cause they would have to spend that. So you kind of letting them experiment. If they do succeed, they're gonna be very thankful to you. And maybe they'll buy more clusters from you. So this is just a little piece of candy. SPEAKER_57: It's a little added benefit to your, you know, consider this like your Amazon prime of venture, your, your Uber one of venture, you got a couple of extra features. One of the features is you, you, with a 16 C you don't, you haven't built out your cluster yet. SPEAKER_58: You can use theirs. If you're going to be a going concern, you're going to have your own cluster, SPEAKER_57: obviously, or you're going to use AWS, but this is a nice little piece of marketing candy. They stole from Daniel gross and that. Uh, so I was like, do you have credit, but you, you mentioned it there, right? Like people have offered HR services, like recruiting, how Sequoia capital is known for being great recruiters, uh, people did product days. I remember, uh, Sequoia as well. SPEAKER_06: When I was a Sequoia CEO, they had a product day where they would have some major company, Google, IBM, Walmart, whatever, come to Silicon Valley, and they would have 10 of their companies come and pitch them for 20 minutes each. Yeah. I was like, okay. And for Walmart to come to Silicon Valley and meet 20, you know, a bunch of Walmart mid execs to come and meet 20 startups is like, they don't even know these startups exist. They would maybe be able to find three or four of them on their own. So to curate that for them is really magical. So this is, um, really nice of interest and Horowitz to do big win for founders, big win for Andreessen Horowitz, uh, so I think it's a, I give them a plus on this. SPEAKER_70: It's, it's not cheap though. That's what I keep thinking about because their, uh, their cluster, which they're SPEAKER_37: going to scale to 20,000 in time does include Nvidia H one hundreds, which are expensive. Now I get Andreessen being the central purchasing point because they have a lot of money, they have a lot of friends. I'm sure they have connections at Nvidia. They got access, they got allocation. Great. But it's a pretty big capital outlay to buy all those chips and then keep them around and then also let people access them. SPEAKER_71: They've built essentially their own personal, what core weave. It sounds like, so it's not, it's not inexpensive. And so my question is, are they funding this out of fees? Like management fees or where's the capital coming from? SPEAKER_55: Good question. Um, you know, these go for 25,000 in GPU ballpark and eight, one hundred, I think. SPEAKER_06: Yep. So anyway, you start doing back of the envelope math. This is a nine figure investment. They have 20 billion under management, something in that range. I, I remember when they hit 10. I remember when they hit 15. So anyway, if they have $20 billion under management and you get a two and a half percent or two and 22% management fee, uh, you know, it's, it's a lot of money, uh, every year coming in $400 million. Uh, so, and some of those funds are sunset. So they're at maybe half or 1% and they, some of them might be front loaded with two and a half. Who knows? Anyway, they get hundreds of millions of dollars in management fees. This will probably cost them, you know, some amount per year because you would spread the cost over 10 years. Um, and who knows what kind of round tripping craziness they're doing here. We talked about round tripping. Yeah. Maybe this is like, maybe they're clusters on one of their investments, uh, or maybe they're splitting the cost. Maybe they let you use a certain amount and then they'll charge you, you know, costs. So maybe you get like, you know, uh, an allocation. Um, I see this as, you know, like, uh, marketing and PR, uh, more than anything. And so if you're some team and you can get a meeting with them and they're like, Hey, by the way, do you want to play with our clusters? SPEAKER_54: And they're like, sure, I'll play with your clusters. Here we go. Boom. SPEAKER_79: Okay. Founders, the jam sessions with me, J Cal contest is heating up. I've seen a ton of interesting submissions so far. We've picked two winners and we're looking for three more. If you are a founder with less than $2 million in funding and you have one of those awesome dot tech domain names, head to jam with J Cal dot tech and tell us all about what you're building. If you win this contest, you get to come on the pod this week in startups and pitch me what you're working on. And then I'll give you some unfiltered feedback in real time. And you'll get your company mentioned on the number one startup podcast in the world. We're partnering with dot tech domains because super innovative startups already use them. SPEAKER_83: Names like rabbit dot tech, Aurora dot tech, and one X dot tech, heck, even our own founder fridays dot tech use this amazing new domain name. SPEAKER_06: So here's what you do. Very simple call to action. SPEAKER_57: You tell me about your awesome dot tech domain and startup. Apply for the jam session with J Cal contest today at jam with J Cal dot tech. SPEAKER_85: We're picking the last three winners soon, so get in there. SPEAKER_87: All right. I'm going to explain this using Jason style logic. So roll with me. SPEAKER_37: Uh, you're Anderson Horowitz. You have $200 million a year in inflows. Just call it half of the total figure we thought of. That means you have a lot of capital to play with. You spend, I don't know, 25, $30 million a year on this cluster. You get into one or two more hot deals that pay out 15, 20 X in your capital. And this is break-even or profitable with only a couple of winners out of it. So as long as this actually does help your deal flow and getting access to either a lead check or a big check into other companies, the math can bear out. And it turns out and Jason Horowitz unsurprisingly is doing tons of AI deals. Um, just since June, they've done heavier, which was $130 million round Decagon Mistral Valor labs, and of course, XAI now they weren't leading all those, but it does go to show that they have the deal flow. They have the money and they have the cluster. The only thing we don't know is, is the cluster driving the deal flow or not. But I, I, I wonder if anyone's going to compete with this. Like, do you see Sequoia stepping up to do some work playing? SPEAKER_90: I mean, it, you can rent this stuff. SPEAKER_06: So I think this is like a short-term PR win, you know, there I, my belief is that, um, we will be overbuilt with hardware and infrastructure pretty quickly. Now I am in the minority in that belief, but I've seen this movie before with fiber and server builds out and storage build outs. When people see all that profit and they see all that money being spent, a bunch of people rush in to capture that money. And then what happens? The margins get burned away. So while I still think NVIDIA is just a tremendous company, they'll have a lot more competition. SPEAKER_57: Open source software, other software solutions will reduce, uh, the need for more clusters. They will become more efficient. Yeah. I believe I could be wrong. Obviously we're in uncharted territory here. So I leave the possibility that I'm wrong and I am in the minority on this, but I think we might get to an overbuilt situation in the next, you know, call it two to five years. And if we're overbuilt, then I think it's going to be like storage. Like, do you hear startups talking about storage anymore? No. Did we hear people talking about storage in 2005 to 2010? Yes. Dropbox, YouTube, Google photos, iCloud, everything was about how much storage, how fast was it backup speeds. And now it's kind of all been abstracted, hasn't it? So I think we'll be, we'll stop discussing this hardware, uh, shortage and this hardware push probably, you know, towards the end of the decade, it'll be forgotten. SPEAKER_37: Goldman has already said in a, in a recent research report that actually the, the chip shortage, the fact that people couldn't get even H100 that they wanted to buy them is easing already now that it is because NVIDIA has new hardware coming out. That's going to be better, but I I'm curious if that shows that the arc here might be a little bit more compressed than we might otherwise think, but you know, the depreciation on these things has got to be crazy once the next generation comes out. SPEAKER_00: So I wonder if you could even put that out over a 10 year time horizon, or you'd have to do five years at which point it gets a lot more expensive because money is expensive SPEAKER_06: now, so, you know, they're in a lot of these things when people do press releases, you and I, as former journalists doing random acts of journalism here in commentary, you know, SPEAKER_102: we've all been part of this where they, you, you read the, you know, the details of SPEAKER_06: announcements and it's like, oh, up to 20,000 clusters or, you know, eventually 20,000, like it's like, they may have a hundred right now and they may have said like, okay, yeah, if we keep raising more money on the management, if we keep seeing demand, we'll add to it, the price with that. So who knows what they're actually spending on this. Maybe they spent 10 million on it so far. And if they win a couple of incremental deals, then they add the next set of clusters, the next set of clusters. And who knows if they're like standing, did the, did any of the details say they were standing this up themselves, or are they just renting them at AWS or Google or Oracle and they have some relationship with Dell or somebody? SPEAKER_105: I, I think that they're hosting it themselves, but I will double check that and get back to you on it. SPEAKER_37: But here's a question that I have thinking about Andreessen Horowitz and his scale. Cause you just mentioned the AUM there's, there's overall size. And I think they went the RIA registered investment SPEAKER_71: advisor route over time. So it is, is Andreessen too big for the venture game? Is that why they're doing stuff like this to kind of just, they, they feel like they're overfilling like the venture cup, SPEAKER_37: if you will, they're doing so much more. I wonder if we should not really consider them trad VCs anymore. SPEAKER_01: They're not traditional VCs in that they've gone for scale. When you go for scale, you hit the SPEAKER_06: average, right? The good news is the average in venture is better than most averages. So if you can deliver a beta, the average with a chance of alpha, when I went out and raised this last fund, one of my LPs said, you know, you're doing a hundred startups a year. And I said, yeah, you know, I think we'll get to 200, you know, by the next fund. I don't want to rush it. I'm not like trying to trace the 450 investments, but that YC are doing, I want to do me, you know, I make a hundred is the right number. So I keep track of it, two new investments a week, you know, it makes sense on average. But you know, I do want to keep growing. And they said, well, the seed stage does better than the series a stage, right? So we've seen people try to get in earlier. Now doing that means a lot more work. So you've got a front and center view now, because you're on the inside and you came to the off sites and, you know, you're, you're, you're involved in what we're SPEAKER_07: doing under, you know, obviously as an employee of the company under NDA and everything. So what I SPEAKER_40: learned from that LP was, Hey, if you just tell everybody you're going to hit enough surface area SPEAKER_06: to hit the average, the average for returns, you know, call it cash on cash, uh, multiple moik, multiple on invested capital is like three and a half for, uh, you know, early stage. And then when you get to series a, it goes down to two and a half, three, and, you know, it goes down from there. So, Hey, listen, you know, you, if you could actually make a convincing argument that being average and being an index fund of seed stage, which is what Y Combinator is, right? It's, it's, I was just about to say, that's kind of the goal. It's a mutual fund. It's kind of cool. SPEAKER_114: Cause then as an LP, you're like, well, they may not hit this crazy outlier, but they may not SPEAKER_06: also return half my capital back or one X. So kind of good. Cause these LP is like predictability. Uh, that's what they're looking for. And Andreessen Horowitz has created a product for sovereign wealth funds for endowments that feels predictable. So great job to, you know, Ben and the team over there and Mark, cause they created the index. And so if you want to put a billion dollars to work or $500 million to work in venture, you know, going to Sequoia, if you can get in or going to Andreessen, well, you're going to hit the average or with Sequoia, you're going to do better. And with Andreessen, you're going to hit the average Sequoia may not have room for you to put 500 million in, uh, Andreessen takes the 500 million. Right? So let's say Sequoia takes your a hundred million, but they don't take 500 and Andreessen takes the 500. Now you're like, well, I'm going to get a better return on my hundred from Sequoia. Great. I'll do that. And then I'll put the 400 with Andreessen. It's not going to historically, they're not going to hit the same returns as Sequoia, but they're going to hit the industry SPEAKER_03: average or better. Hopefully. And you still think that, that they'll hit the industry average or better given the size of their funds. Kind of hard not to kind of hard not to because SPEAKER_57: they have a great brand. Sure. There are great people like David Ulovich and others working there who have, yeah, David's great. Um, and people respect them. And you know, they, they, they had a really clever idea when they started it. We're only going to hire rich people who are founders, SPEAKER_58: spit take. Okay. And you know what? I, the back channel during the DEI era of, uh, Silicon Valley SPEAKER_121: was, uh, you know, now we're in the MEI era and we had this conversation last week. That was a very SPEAKER_57: productive discussion. Now that like DEI is out of favor, but in the DEI era, people were like, Andreessen Horowitz only hires white men. That was like the vibe for partner. Yeah. And remember he talked about partner washing, like everybody's a partner. Oh yeah. But yeah, if you only hire CEOs who have already been successful, that means they were successful and started their companies 10, 15, 20 years ago, like Ben or market. So when you looked at the SPEAKER_06: composure of their actual partners, not the partner washing that everybody's doing in Silicon Valley, you had, you could see it was, you know, going to tilt a certain way. Cause we had such a dominance of, if you look at the big exits, how many weren't men, you know, historically over the 20 years. Uh, so, but the reason they did that was they didn't want to have to pay them big salaries. Ah, I was going to ask David Yulevich comes there and you know, whatever David's worth, I don't know his personal net worth, but he did fabulously well. David doesn't need a million dollar salary a year. I don't know what they pay everybody, but my understanding was they just told everybody, just take a little bit of cash. You're in it for the carry that we'll take that cash and we'll build the HR department. We'll build this cluster. We'll build marketing. We'll build PR. And you know, he was very, Andreessen was very enamored and influenced by Michael Ovitz. So SPEAKER_131: Michael Ovitz was there for a bit. Read. Have you read the book? Who is Mike Ovitz? I have not read that book actually. Just read it. It's a great read. SPEAKER_132: It's one of my favorite reads long list of business books. It's not a long read either. SPEAKER_58: And it's a great audio book for when you're walking with your weight vest. So put your weight vest on, get that zone to work out. Now that you're a 35 year old old man. SPEAKER_134: Uh, not, not for another 13 days. Okay. Okay. All right. SPEAKER_117: Uh, not counting down at all. You, you put it all together. I think they then move those, SPEAKER_57: the, all those management fees. They don't need them. Like Mark and Teresa is not in for the management fees. Even if they have hundreds of millions of management fees, it's not gonna move the needle for him. He doesn't need money. He's post money. So if you only hire post money, you're in a good place. So there's different strategies. When I'm building my firm, I don't hire post money people. I hire young guns. Uh, not that we do it based on age, but I hire people SPEAKER_06: based on, I hire a lot of people out of school. Why do I like to hire people out of school and give them their first chance to be in venture? Because they haven't been corrupted with the venture capital system. The venture capital system teaches bad lessons. SPEAKER_107: Double click on that because I could, I could unpack that different ways, but I don't know exactly what you want to hone in on when it comes to that. So keep going. SPEAKER_01: What are VCs known for doing in the summer and the winter? SPEAKER_00: Uh, it is not hard work and graft. It is mostly skiing and hot air ballooning. Correct. They're known for doing nothing. SPEAKER_03: Yes. SPEAKER_07: Now I had a, gave a big speech to, you know, one of our young guns here. I call them the young guns. The ones who come from out of school. Doesn't mean we don't hire older people. We do all the time, SPEAKER_11: but, uh, look, we hired you, Alex. I mean, you're ancient. Uh, SPEAKER_13: I've never mentioned this show again, just getting roasted, getting roasted. I'm 53. You're supposed to be supportive. Well, that's just my numbers turned around. SPEAKER_15: In a heartbeat. I would give up. I would literally give up every dollar I have. SPEAKER_18: Yeah. To be 35 again. I literally would go back down to zero for 30 to be 35 again, every single dollar. You could leave me with zero dollars. And if I could be 35 again, I wouldn't swap you all the SPEAKER_37: money in the world to give up 18 years. So the, the reverse of that makes sense. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. No, I hear that. Oh, but going back to venture young guys. SPEAKER_40: So when you have the young guns, you know, I was just telling, uh, one of our up and comers who I just thought has great potential. I said, uh, can I ask you a question? Like how serious are you about SPEAKER_06: this deadly serious? I said, great. You, you want to be really legendary at this? I said, yeah. I said, can I ask you like, did you have like a big weekend? You go to a rave? Did you go away for the weekend? Like things to do? And just, no, I said, if I was you, when I'm having brunch on a Saturday, when I'm having my brunch on a Sunday, pop out your laptop, send, do 90 minutes of work, 90 minutes while you're eating lunch, having your coffee. I said, you do that every Saturday and Sunday, just put in that 90 minutes on a Saturday, 90 minutes on Sunday. I said, you will look to me SPEAKER_57: as the founder of the firm, much different than the other 11 people on the investment team or any firm you're at, because I will see this activity on the weekend. And I'll be like, whoa, you really got an edge on not only your competitors inside our firm, but against other firms. I said, the easiest thing in the world to win adventure work hard because the rest of the VCs are taking off six weeks. They're all in Italy right now. The joke amongst LPs is they they're following their GPs on Instagram and the LPs are in the office because they work at Harvard or CalPERS and they get four weeks vacation a year. And they're like, I just gave this person $10 million LP commit a $50 million LK commit. And I can't keep track of all the places they are. They're in Ibiza. They're in Greece. They're here. They're there. They're Coachella. They're, they're at this thing stagecoach around everything. SPEAKER_37: So this means though, going back to the Andreessen point about hiring people who are effectively post-economic, it means then that you need to find people who are wealthy, going to be good at adventure and are not caught up in the venture capital way of life because I presume Andreessen SPEAKER_70: doesn't run a, uh, a relaxed venture capital firm. They've never struck me as chill. I would say they do run a relaxed venture capital firm actually. David Friedberg: Winkly. Oh yeah. And the reason I would say that is because here's what happens. SPEAKER_06: As you, if you're, if you are truly successful in your career, you have a network, you're great at signaling and you're efficient. So somebody like, we'll go back to David Yulevich SPEAKER_29: since I don't know any of the other partners teams there, but, and David is friend, uh, or we're friendly. SPEAKER_40: So, you know, I guess someone like David, he's got a crazy network and he's built businesses himself. SPEAKER_06: So when he can actually, I don't know, David, I think works hard, but let's just say somebody in his model did take off two months a year or even three months a year when they are effective, they're going to be definitely effective and they're going to have deal flow in their network. SPEAKER_58: That's the most elite. So you can make up for it with those kinds of advantages. Got it. But there's a big trial in between. Yeah. And w what is in that, that valley between the truly elite people who have established networks and are really good at what they do. And I would put myself in there because I do have a pretty big network because of the podcast and just hustling for 30 years. SPEAKER_57: And a young gun is people who are actually young guns who are acting like they're David Yulevich or Ruloff or me or Saks or Chamath or, or pick the person who, or Jim Brayer, you know, you have people who are truly successful at it. They have the networks established. You can't play the role of SPEAKER_61: senior VC without having paid your dues. That's what got venture into trouble. SPEAKER_106: Well, the trough then the way to get across the trough is just endless work. I think it is the, is the summary there. And actually this, I know we need no substitute for hard work is a phrase for a SPEAKER_107: reason. Well, this is correct. We need to get on to Q2 in a minute, but this has actually been SPEAKER_37: something that I've been thinking about personally, because you know, having a second kid and I've been here long enough now that I feel like I have my feet underneath me and I got to know everybody and working on my newsletter. And I, and then it hit me that I right now actually lack big goals for SPEAKER_00: what's next. Cause I've been, I mean, when you have a baby, as you know, your life gets shattered into a thousand pieces and suddenly your focus is, is everywhere, but like advancing your career. SPEAKER_37: Cause you're doing diapers at 3 a.m. But I'm, I'm kind of almost, I think like figured out how SPEAKER_174: to handle kids. And so I, I almost need to set new big goals. So I'm glad we talked about this, but yeah, very simple goals for you, which is, you know, showing up for three podcasts a week, SPEAKER_06: it's going to build your profile. Uh, and you have a great start to that. I would set a goal for doubling your follower count or just doubling your views per tweet, just whatever the views per tweet are, just try and double them because that's exposed. So I double your views per tweet, forget about the follower count. Cause that could be spots and other nonsense and you can game it. Just double the view count per tweet, which means you actually look at them and then decide to decipher what tweets work and what don't. So you're being thoughtful about your tweets as opposed to, you know, how most people do their tweets are just, I just thought of an idea and I tweeted. SPEAKER_29: Um, and then I, I would just set milestones for the number of paid subs, SPEAKER_06: 50, a hundred, two 50, 500, and then put that on a calendar and then divide it by the number of weeks. And so if you said, Hey, I gotta get to a thousand paid subs in five years, SPEAKER_57: and you know, it's gonna, you know, the first 50 are the hardest, the next hundred is easier. SPEAKER_54: The next hundred fifties easier. And the next two fifties easier. You can actually just sort of map that out. That's how I would do it. Cause I put that, I call that brick by brick. SPEAKER_185: Uh, and that's how I built my career. I, I, I, my philosophy is bird by bird and Lamont shout out. If you've ever, have you read a Lamont's book bird by bird? No. Oh, so we read very different SPEAKER_186: books is what I'm discovering. I'm a nonfiction guy. Uh, and I'm mostly a fiction guy. Yeah. SPEAKER_54: So bird by bird by and Lamont, um, is, uh, the subtitle, some instructions on writing and life, uh, published in 1994. And, um, you know, it's basically about doing things one step at a time. And it was because, um, it comes from a story of Lamont's brother who was trying to write a report SPEAKER_57: on birds and the father advised him to tackle it bird by bird, one small step at a time. Um, and then you break down and her general philosophy, break down larger, large projects SPEAKER_06: like we're talking about into smaller ones. It's, it's simple, but profound. Um, and then, you know, it's like a little bit about sort of how perfectionism, I always tell people don't let perfect, um, you know, the enemy of the progress. Yeah. Ah, okay. Perfection is the enemy of progress is the way I've said it. I know there's other ways to say it, but don't don't perfection is the enemy of progress. You get that first and you actually did it with Bianca take cause she's doing the twist newsletter and you just said, you know, the first hitting the publish key, the first time it gets easier each time is what you said. That's a very Lamont thing. The first time you SPEAKER_40: hit the publish key is scary and hard and each time it gets 1% easier. You're in the rhythm, right? So cautious optimism.substack.com is that the, uh, uh, that, that URL would work. Yeah. Go ahead. Go to cautious optimism. And, uh, yeah, I have to pay. Are you accepting payments yet? Cause when I first signed up, you didn't. You can give me money if you want. I gotta decide if I SPEAKER_114: want to be a foundational member or, Oh no, no, no, that's fine. I may actually be a foundation member for two hundy. I'll just, I'll just never offer free. You were about to offer me SPEAKER_134: for free. Don't ever offer free. I will not comp you. Don't comp anyone. No comps. All right. SPEAKER_85: Let's keep going. I did. I did call my mother-in-law. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup, but if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like sock two. What is sock two? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be sock two compliant. If you don't have your sock two tight, your sales team can't close major deals. It's that simple, but thankfully Vanta makes it real easy to get and renew your sock two compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. Without Vanta, it takes three to five months. Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85% on compliance costs. And Vanta does more than just sock two. They also automate up to 90% compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get a thousand dollars off at vanta.com slash twist. That's SPEAKER_200: vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock two. Q2 numbers are coming out. If you don't know, every single quarter, a lot of venture capital tracking firms, your pitch books, your crunch basis, SPEAKER_37: et cetera, compile lots of data. We use this to understand what's going on in the market that we can't see directly. And there's quite a lot going on that I want to dig on. First of all, it turns out in Q2 that venture capital totals were actually up a little bit. So crunch based news SPEAKER_71: says $79 billion invested globally in the second quarter up 16% compared to the first quarter of this SPEAKER_00: year and up 12% from a year ago. Does that match what you saw in the market in the second quarter? SPEAKER_06: Looking at the funding reports from these different places, you know, crunch base, I think your alma mater has pretty good data because it's not unlike some databases that are more closed. It's a little more open. So I tend to think it goes a little bit bigger than the other ones. Am I SPEAKER_71: correct in that? Yeah, it does. It tends to encompass a little bit more. Um, and we have push book data here as well, but just, just the, the, the improvement from Q1 and the improvement from SPEAKER_55: I would say anecdotally I'm seeing a pulse. Okay. So signs of life. I wouldn't say we're up and running SPEAKER_06: and you know, breaking that speed. It used to be coming out of the accelerator. We would have seven companies and five of them would raise money within the six months, you know, during the accelerator SPEAKER_58: and the next six months. Got it. Sometimes we'd have all seven, like in peaks are all seven. And the, the two who didn't raise money, usually one of them was because they chose not to, and one of them couldn't clear a market. Got it. So the hit rate was pretty amazing. It was basically, and the one who didn't raise money was typically, they were strong. So they were making money and they're like, ah, I just don't want to stop and raise money. I want to keep building and grow my valuation. So call it six out of seven. Then during, when the whole market collapsed, I think we had a class where only two out of seven raised during the class. And the other ones were like, I can't even get meetings because VCs were licking their wounds. They were just circling, uh, their portfolio and doing triage. SPEAKER_57: I can say right now, the, my time was 80%, 90% triage, 10% new, 20% new. And I think it's kind of like 50, 50 now. So that's what you really have to look at is the percentage of free time, a founder, a GP, a general partner has to dedicate to new deals. You do have to place bets, but because SPEAKER_06: a fund is supposed to be deployed over four years is kind of the primary investment cycle. That's where you're planting the seeds and then you're reaping the returns over the next six years and helping them grow and then raising the next fund. People were taking that four years and they were deploying in one and a half to that upset LPs because that means they were coming back twice as fast, which means they're not being as thoughtful by definition, right? So I'm trying to tell our team, Hey, let's slow down. If we have this many applications meet with the top X percent, instead of doing 120 new meetings a week, which is where we peak, we're doing, we did 120 meetings, new meetings in one week. That's like a 6,000, that's a 6,000 meeting rate for the year. I said at scale, I want to hit 5,000. So we kind of exceeded my goal. And I said, Hey, for the summer, I want you to go down to like more like 30 meetings a week, you know, like drop it down. And then I want to have the summer of portfolio. So I have everybody right now in the firm meeting with all of our portfolio and then categorizing them into a very simple process one, two, or three. And it's the first time I'm talking about it. I like simplicity and I like challenging the team to, SPEAKER_54: you know, do these kinds of projects. So I told everybody July, I want this done. We started in June. I want to meet with every founder and get a candid assessment of every single portfolio company from fun one to the most recent one. And then I want you to give me a capsule SPEAKER_57: and we'll, we'll talk about the company. One is they're growing like gangbusters or raise, you SPEAKER_61: know, year over year, two, three, four X or more growth. Number three is they've run out of money SPEAKER_57: and they can't clear market. And they're kind of on, you know, sometimes founders call it going into cockroach mode. You know, they got 200,000 in revenue, a million in revenue, the business isn't dying, but they don't, they can't raise capital. They're kind of trapped. Right. And, you know, you get a good number of companies like that. And usually those companies SPEAKER_06: have to be sold. They need to, uh, maybe do some management changes, get reinvigorated or shut down, right? Liquidate. And that's a process for founders because it's emotional. And then there's a big product market fit triangulation going on in group two, which means their revenue spiky. They have, you know, they might have 12 or 24 months of runway. So they're, it's not like they're imminently going to go out of business, but they're not tripling revenue year over year. If you're tripling revenue year over year, you're going to clear market with investors, or are you going to hit, you're going to hit break even. So we really don't have to worry about you. We just have to give you support to grow faster or get to profitability, whatever it is group three, you're kind of sitting like in hospice in some cases and like, Hey, this is going to get wound down. What's our plan to wind down. It's kind of, it's tough. Yeah. And I spend a lot of time on that actually, even though it's most people, most VCs consider that a waste of time. I spend time on that because I like to be there with the founders at the end. If I was there at the beginning and hold their hand and say, Hey, it's going to be okay. And let's take a year off and then, or a month off. And then let's talk about your next company. Cause I do think exactly a second or third time founder, man, SPEAKER_102: hell hath no fury. Like that second or third time founder, cause they're like chip on their shoulder SPEAKER_103: or they're broken forever. They're not going to start another company. It usually goes, uh, SPEAKER_59: Josh would say from Lux, uh, chips on shoulders, but chips in pockets, I think is his, uh, I love it. Endless. He loves to say that. Good on Josh. To your point. Yeah. If you're, SPEAKER_37: if your company just failed and you're pissed off about it, I bet you, your next one's going to do quite well, but then I take it in July that everyone's working with the companies in bucket. SPEAKER_226: Two that could help could use some help with some product market fit or customers, et cetera. SPEAKER_227: Okay. Juggling multiple devices and apps to run your business is a mess. We all know that SPEAKER_229: open phone is here to make that simple. I have an open phone number. I use it to communicate with founders and it really works for me. I have a desktop app. Boom. I can go in there. I can do voice over IP in this beautiful elegant app right on my phone or on my desktop. I use it a lot on my desktop. I'm being totally honest. Cause I have my headset on and sometimes founders want to do a call. They don't want to pop open a video conference. My sales team loves it. Why? Because they get to SPEAKER_227: keep their private phone number for their private phone number. And then they have all of their business stuff track in one location. So if they need to make a phone call to somebody they talked SPEAKER_229: to last week, they can see their call history, click on it, send a text message and start a phone call with that person. And the ops team uses it. When we have people calling, they have questions about their investments, LPs, et cetera. We have a round robin phone number. So it will forward the call to two or three people on our team. Cause we like to have really good customer support. And all this is easy to do with open phone. It's super affordable at just $13 a month, but twist listeners get an extra 20% off of any plan for the first six months at open phone.com slash twist. What if you have an existing phone number with another service? No problem. Easy peasy lemon squeezy open phone is going to port them over at no extra cost. So head over to open phone.com slash twist, start your free trial, get 20% off. You're going to love this product. It is so affordable and it's so SPEAKER_227: elegant just to the product team and open phone. Great job. I look at products all day long and yours is elegant and simple and powerful. Well done. You can help all three groups. It's just different SPEAKER_06: strategies with group one. We can put them into our whisper network and introduce them to top tier VCs and say, this is one of our breakout companies. They're not raising right now. I just want you to know about them. And so that's that whisper network we created inside the firm in group two. Yeah. You want to say, Hey, what are you doing? What experiments are you running? And talk to them about product SPEAKER_57: market fit, maybe get them more focused. A lot of times it's a focus issue. They're working on four different projects. You know, one is their original idea to or like, you know, like projects that you never should have started. And then this other one is the one that's actually going to be the winner in the company. So in Uber's case, that was Uber X. Yeah, not Uber black, it will relax it. Great. But Uber X SPEAKER_54: became this like breakout global product. And so, you know, then in group three, I have a new idea SPEAKER_06: that I've been workshopping, which is I'm going to bring a group of them together. Uh, I'm going to probably, I'm going to start doing some retreats in Austin. So I'm going to do like a retreat in Austin, where I bring together a bunch of those folks who are struggling or can't clear market with investors, but have some revenue, which is a struggle in and of itself, because it's kind of like a trap because you can't shut it down because it's got a million in revenue or 2 million and you can't raise money because it's only growing 10% a year. It's like a real trap and see if we can come up with strategies for that group. And the strategies for that group, I think are going to be helping them find a, a soft landing, M and a sell the assets, shut down, whatever it is. Or my other idea is what we might have for D to C brands and two of the founders are burnt out and we create a D to C holding company with the two founders who are actually inspired and say, Hey, why don't we just have whichever is the strongest company with the best cap table by the other three companies, everybody gets some equity in those and then see if we can clean up things there and create a new SPEAKER_54: opportunity. If they don't want to do what's eventually going to happen, which is an M and a sale, SPEAKER_37: you know? Yeah. I wonder if you should just put together like a special fund just for like the got to a half million, 1 million ARR and aren't going very quickly and like do like micro PE for SPEAKER_249: those, those companies. And it's like, like literally the smallest PE possible. Just put them all SPEAKER_40: together. There, there were people doing that. Like there was, um, uh, I think it was tiny corp was doing like, um, Andrew, uh, Wilkinson's, uh, was, uh, trying to buy a bunch of companies and put them SPEAKER_06: together. And so, yeah, they have gone out and yeah, here's tiny. I don't know if you know tiny, but he's a smart cat. He's built, he's good at building businesses and tiny.com. He actually got, yeah, tiny.com. Um, so they started in 2007. Um, and seems like here they wanted to kind of do the Warren Buffet thing. They have 11 companies. They founded 40 that they majority own 90 to SPEAKER_54: have minority investments in 900 global employees and 19 head office team. So they're kind of like a SPEAKER_37: holding company. Uh, this is, this is a brilliant idea. I I'm going to look more into tiny. Cause this is, I've thought of this several times. Well, you know, laying there in bed, trying to go to sleep. SPEAKER_71: Like, what would I do if X situation happened? Um, but Jason, I do want to bring us back quickly to SPEAKER_37: the Q2 numbers because there is quite a lot to talk about. So, um, we have a chart of global AI SPEAKER_71: funding through the second quarter of this year's charts in there. And as you can see, there is something going on here that is relatively indicative of, um, some interest amongst the venture capital world for AI shares. Now this chart that we're going to look at here is in fact, influenced by the XAI round a $6 billion series B. So that's in that's in there. But I think that this SPEAKER_70: jump in the amount of capital dispersed in the second quarter is nuts. This is just crunch based data into AI startups. And I thought it was a deal is 20 billion. Looks like 23 billion or something. SPEAKER_106: Yeah. The deal number will go up because deals tend to lag a little bit. The biggest deals with the most dollars get announced first, and then the seed deals kind of fill in. So expect that to go up, SPEAKER_49: but oh my gosh, that's an enormous amount of capital for one quarter for one overall sector. SPEAKER_06: It is. It's because of the clusters, like we were talking about before to dovetail with the Andreessen Horowitz one. Yep. There's very few times where building companies requires massive and in venture require massive capital outweighs. We've seen it historically. We saw it in the wars, SPEAKER_29: the competition between Uber and Lyft, DoorDash and other ones. Those consumer subsidy wars, SPEAKER_06: I'll call it the consumer subsidy wars, like the clone wars. That was indicative of like, SPEAKER_57: let's use capital as a weapon. And here again, capital as a weapon, you need massive infrastructure. You're a big company like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and you can't do M&A. So what do SPEAKER_117: you do? You do those two deals we've talked about where you buy teams and you skirt around Lina con adept and inflection AI. Yep. Thank you. And then, or you just build huge clusters and you, SPEAKER_58: you beat people on infrastructure. And so, you know, it's, it's rare that you have to have massive SPEAKER_57: capital outlays and use capital as a weapon. I can only really think of those two instances where capital as a weapon worked. The only third time you could argue with the talent wars of the 2000s. And so when Google started just hiring everybody and letting them hang out Hooli style on the roof and vest, that was capital as a weapon as well. We're just going to hire people for 250 K and you knew many of them, uh, you know, here in the valley. Oh yeah. I, I had friends that were making SPEAKER_37: a lot of Google money when I was in my mid twenties and I was like, you don't seem to be that stressed SPEAKER_71: ever. How is this possible? Because my job was, was very stressful when I was that age in San Francisco. Now, uh, before we move on to the twist 500, cause I'm going to bring back that idea of SPEAKER_37: capital as a weapon in just a second, but we have a table here that shows median us venture capital pre-money valuations by stage. I just want to touch on this Jason, because the numbers once again blew my mind. So what this shows, this is pitch book data, uh, their first look for the second quarter. SPEAKER_70: It shows us that as time has gone by pre-seed, seed, early stage VC and late stage VC median us pre-money valuations are at all time highs this year. And we've heard a million dollars for pre-seed SPEAKER_06: 2014, 1.4 seed 4.6 in 2014, 12 million. Now that tracks for me, the Uber and thumbtack data stacks rounds were all five under five, 5 million or under. Um, so I did all three of those for a $50 million valuation and look like S that would be the equivalent of like the seed round now. Now, of course, you know, the, the tech economy has grown significantly and the exits are larger. SPEAKER_254: So I'm just saying that, that it's like, when I look back in time and I realized like Microsoft SPEAKER_37: went public and they'd raised 1 million in VC and so forth, like things used to be so cheap compared to where they are now. And early stage VC, the median was 12 million back in 2014. Now it's 45. And then late stage went from 30 to 68. But the thing that just shocked me is these are higher than last year and they are higher than we saw in most cases, even in 2021. And if you read Twitter, everyone's complaining about, you know, failing to make market and struggling to raise. And so the thing that I just kind of wanted to ask is in, in your view, is this the impact of AI enthusiasm skewing the SPEAKER_71: market's numbers for all startups, or is it just better out there than I thought, just given what SPEAKER_06: I've heard from founders that I know. Okay. And such. So remember, um, there's the group of cause and correlation, um, and survivorship bias. These are the valuations of the companies that did clear market. So by definition, they're the strongest. And so for the strongest to go from 2019 for 4 million to a 50% increase in 2024 over five years, it's not exactly shocking to me. It's a decent, you know, 50% more. And so what you have to ask yourself is, is the prize that much bigger? I, where I get concerned is early stage and late stage VC, those two moments. I think for those folks, if they don't have product market fit and you invested at 45 million, it's incredibly hard to return your fund. So I make all SPEAKER_58: of our, uh, from the young guns to the managing directors. When we make every investment, I have them SPEAKER_57: do a very simple calculation. I'll do it with you here live on the air. Sure. We're going to invest in a company at the $6 million valuation. Let's say we put in $600,000. Sure. Oh, let's do it. A $5 million valuation, 500,000 in a $50 million fund. Okay. We put 500,000 in it's 1% of the fund. SPEAKER_06: $5 million valuation. Now we own 10% of the company. So if that company becomes a unicorn, we will have returned 10% of that a hundred, that billion dollars, which is a hundred million, we will have doubled the fund. Not so fast. You're going to get diluted because they're going to do multiple SPEAKER_276: rounds of funding. So you just take that seed stage, early stage investment, whatever your ownership is, SPEAKER_06: assume you're diluted by 50%. Okay. It could be as little as 30. It could be as much as 60 or 70, depending on how capital efficient the founders are. Let's pick the number 50%. What that means is in order to return the fund, if we invest 1% of the fund, uh, and we own 10%, we're going to get diluted to five to return the 50 million. We need a unicorn to return the fund. Now let's do the same SPEAKER_281: math for somebody who invested at a $50 million valuation and they put in 5 million, they own 10%. SPEAKER_54: 10% and they get, uh, they have it out of a $500 million fund. Okay. It's a $500 million fund. SPEAKER_57: They own 10% of the startup startup exits for a billion. They own 10% it's a hundred million. SPEAKER_103: They get diluted by half. They get back 50 million. Yeah. They've now returned 10% of their SPEAKER_285: fund for hitting a unicorn. This is why I was asking about Andreessen Horowitz earlier. It's so much harder to return venture style money. It's very hard. Yeah. Once the base gets large. I mean, SPEAKER_57: entry price matters. I tell this to everybody all the time. Entry price matters. So just do that back of the envelope in order for Andreessen or in this fictional case of the $500 million fund, SPEAKER_54: um, which is like a series a fund would be like in that range, 400, 500, 600, like a classic, uh, Fred Wilson fund at, you know, uh, union square. So you look at something like that and yeah, they have to SPEAKER_276: hit a $5 billion company. Uh, no, they have to hit a $10 billion company, a Decacorn, a Decacorn. If they own 5% of a Decacorn, it's 500 million to return the fund. But that, how many Decacorns are there? Not that many. And if you return the firm SPEAKER_71: once over and your cash on cash returns are 1.0 X. You're out of business. You're out of business. SPEAKER_102: You're not going to be able to raise a $500 million fund. You gotta hit two to stay in business. You gotta hit three to grow. There you go. Rule of thumb. And that's why nobody SPEAKER_281: believes in venture right now. We are in the darkest days of venture in my career, SPEAKER_06: uh, since.com era. This is the darkest time. It wasn't as dark during 2008. Everybody saw that as an opportunity. Cause that was like, oh, this real estate idiots did, you know, gave the last, SPEAKER_102: the last 5% of mortgages they gave were to people who should never have bought homes. SPEAKER_142: Right. It was like, we all knew what happened there. SPEAKER_57: It's just, they created a housing crisis. They should have never given those people mortgages. Those people should have been renting or they should have bought smaller homes and they shouldn't have bought three of them. They shouldn't have had people who were like, uh, cabaret dancers in Vegas, buying free homes on fake paperwork. Yeah. I, I, uh, I gotta say that was one of the funnier SPEAKER_46: scenes in, um, the big short. Oh, great. Thank you for getting the reference. I got the reference. SPEAKER_304: Uh, you, you, you twisted it slightly, but I'm going to let it pass. By the way, I just, I like to do SPEAKER_307: cabaret dancers. Oh, elite cabaret dancers. Yes. Special cabaret dancers might say. Yes. Um, I have read the big short. So there you go. Business book that we both read. Now I have the SPEAKER_71: data for you and what you just said. So according to once again, pitch book data, we don't have this SPEAKER_37: pulled up, but I have it right here. Um, us-based VCs have raised 37.4 billion dollars so far this year. Mm-hmm that's down from 81.5 billion last year. So it doesn't sound that bad because we're halfway through the year. It's on a 75, 76 billion dollar run rate down a couple. What people have to keep SPEAKER_00: in mind is in 2022, VCs in the U S raised 191 billion and they raised 177 billion in 2021. So right SPEAKER_70: now you're right. This is a very, very tough time compared to prior norms. It'll be interesting to see who's left standing after this particular round of venture shares stops, because it does look extinction level for a lot of firms that maybe didn't hit that two X that you mentioned and are certainly not going to hit the three X that they would need to expand. It's going to be tough. SPEAKER_314: I mean, we could take the whole number and say what the industry has to return to double. SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's an interesting, so if I do that math and then I look at the exit market and I see no one going public. I don't see a lot of big M and a and the numbers just don't make sense to me, but I've learned that the old quote about the market staying irrational longer than you can stay solvent is so true because I was worried about this back in like 2016. I'm like, where are all these unicorn IPOs and we're right back to it and everyone's still investing. So I must be missing a trick somewhere in, in how this works. SPEAKER_26: I mean, if you say it was 37 billion was raised in one year, SPEAKER_70: 37 billion raised, uh, thus far this year, last year, US based VCs raised 81.5. SPEAKER_26: So that 81, if it got deployed over four years, would be 20 billion deployed a year. But anyway, SPEAKER_281: in that vintage of $80 billion getting deployed, that's got a return. Uh, let's call it two and a half 80 times two is 160. Add another 40 for two and a half. You get 200 billion, 200 billion. Okay. That's just, uh, SPEAKER_06: you know, uh, an Uber and a door dash put together seems reasonable. Au contraire, SPEAKER_57: my frere, you don't own a hundred percent of the company. You do not. You own 30% of the company, maybe 40. Let's be generous and say the VCs own 40% of the company. Sure. They did own 40% of the company and everybody else on 60, 40% of 200 was 80. So you, you, you know, and, and then how many SPEAKER_117: Ubers and door dashes are there? There aren't that many. Right. And so it's venture math is tough. SPEAKER_71: This, this is why when we talk about VCs taking time off, I'm always like, your job sounds hard, not easy. You think this would take like all your time, like you wouldn't have time to be in it. SPEAKER_317: Why do they have a lack of sense of urgency is the question you have to ask. It's the top. Well, SPEAKER_37: my guess is it's the time horizon that it's very hard to get graded. Bingo. Two things, SPEAKER_317: time horizon. And then there's a second one. Hmm. Um, there's actually three I can think of after SPEAKER_58: time horizon. So what makes it, what would lead a person in the pursuit of venture capital to not have a sense of urgency? One is the time horizon. You know, it's like, oh my God, SPEAKER_57: I'm not going to find out if I have winners until you're six, seven or eight. Okay. What's the second thing? What makes it really cushy to have this job? Well, you get paid management fees, whether SPEAKER_54: you're doing well or not. Bingo. That's number two is you get those, uh, those incredible, uh, management fees that, you know, kind of make it. Yeah. Um, and what's the third thing? Well, SPEAKER_309: just because I was thinking ego just straight up. Yeah, there's something around, I was going to say SPEAKER_54: entitlement. Um, but there's a thing where you don't get fired from this job. You just fade away. SPEAKER_254: You get kind of managed out. Okay. You get a window seat. Hmm. We stay on your boards and such. SPEAKER_102: Yeah. Nobody gets fired in this industry. I mean, you might get fired if you like punch somebody or SPEAKER_338: did something horrible. Right. And even then it's like a golden parachute and you're spending more SPEAKER_03: time with your family, whatever the press release says. Right. I'm going to go farm alpacas in New SPEAKER_299: Mexico. Sure. Exactly. Yeah. Uh, to change your career. So like when's the last time you heard, SPEAKER_06: uh, Andreessen Horowitz fired three of their partners for a lack of performance. SPEAKER_05: Uh, never. Tell me the last venture. You've never heard of one. You've worked at SPEAKER_140: Crunchbase and TechCrunch. Yes. I've never heard of a VC. SPEAKER_37: And now you work at the speaking service. Actually, that's not true. I, I have some SPEAKER_71: friends who are investors and occasionally we speak off the record as friends. And I have heard about how people get left off the next fund. Got it. For example. Not invited to continue. Yes. But unless you literally knew what was going on inside that firm, it would be completely opaque to the outside. Cause we're not, I'm not getting the, the key man SPEAKER_37: contracts. You know, I'm not seeing that when it changes, it's hard to see externally. So yeah, SPEAKER_71: it's funny though, because VCs love to tell founders hire fast, fire fast. Doesn't seem to apply. SPEAKER_350: Are you saying VCs are hypocrites? SPEAKER_351: Well, I'm saying humans have, I need to put my pearls on so I can clutch them. Oh my dear. SPEAKER_71: I'm not trying to single them out as hypocrites. We've also discussed politics on this show. So SPEAKER_107: this does come up occasionally, but I mean, I, I, there's something that I've, I enjoyed about that. SPEAKER_58: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's for something that I believe should be a much more intense. SPEAKER_57: I'm trying to create intensity and urgency inside my firm. Uh, and it is counter to how the industry works. Remember I said, I, I, I'm not recruiting from like X VCs. It's for this reason. They think they can just F off. They can frack off for four years, make 20 bets and not be accountable to those bets. I'm now looking at, I gave each person on the SPEAKER_110: investment team. They're the primary contact for a certain number of companies and they are SPEAKER_57: responsible for pulling those companies through. So I found a precursor to exits. The precursor to an SPEAKER_06: exit is a pull through. What's a pull through a pull through is when one of your companies gets funded by another venture firm at a valuation or a cap on a note. That's higher than the one you invested. Right. You invested at five and like our fictional case before, and then somebody else invested at 10 on a convertible note. And then somebody did a series a at 30 or 40. That's something we can actually track in slow, single digit years, two, three, four years. We can actually track that. And I'm looking at the stats for my team. I'm keeping those stats starting this year. Um, and I remember I said before, one of our big names in the, in July is to do like a massive portfolio review. They're giving me the capsules of every one. I'm saying, what's your plan for this company? And how do we get this company to pull through and help the founder get to that next round of funding or help them shut the company down? If they don't think it's, you know, if it's impossible to save and help them with their next company. And so I found something pull through and I am looking SPEAKER_83: at that like a hawk. Yeah. This strikes me as the venture capital firm equivalent of the advice you SPEAKER_37: gave to the venture capital analysts you were discussing earlier about working on Saturdays and Sundays, some, if you do the extra work, you will probably have the extra results. Um, speaking about extra work, you and I have decided that we're doing the twist 500, which means that we now get to add a whole bunch of new companies. Let's do it. If you don't know everybody, the twist 500 is our growing list of up to 500 private market companies that we think are the most interesting, innovative, or just fun to talk about. Mostly we're focused on quality. We'll throw a couple of weird ones in there, but today we're going to talk about robots because Jason, one of your favorite topics is remote work arbitrage. And we recently saw something that is beautiful, which is, and we have the video clip of this, a robot being used via tele-operation to stock shelves. And I'll bring this all together in a second, but John, can we bring up the video of the tele-operation robot, please? Here we have one nerd sitting in a chair with an oculus on and a robot. You can see him moving snap. Jason, you want to talk about this particular SPEAKER_61: seven foot tall shelf stocking robot. It's a nightmare looking robot. It's for some reason, SPEAKER_57: they made it black with a very thin waist and like a really thick chest with like pointed ears. I mean, it looks like something from black mirror and it is putting bottles on a shelf of soda pop and iced tea. In Japan, it looks like, um, with a remote worker. And this is, uh, you know, it trended on SPEAKER_06: x.com and we're just talking about it. It turns out this is an old clip, but I thought this dovetailed with remote work arbitrage, remote work arbitrage RWA. Okay. And this is something you and I have talked about, uh, on and off the show for a while. Remote work arbitrage. Uh, there's that Reddit where people SPEAKER_83: are, I always call it overworked, but it's overemployed over slash overemployed. So everybody's SPEAKER_06: looking at remote work from home or globalization and saying, how do I optimize? So here's overemployed on Reddit. Overemployed tells all kinds of sordid tales. Some of them are true. I'm sure many of them are fake, uh, developers mainly, but sometimes marketers, uh, working from home, having three jobs, and then figuring out when they have to be on a standup call and they're on two at the same time, SPEAKER_58: how to arbitrage that and how to deal with if they get called on, but they have two laptops open and they're working the two jobs. They're on two zooms and they know how to angle them. And if they get called on simultaneously say, I'm having an internet problem. Let me reboot. They reboot one computer. They finished what they're talking about the other one. And they say, my internet went out and boom, SPEAKER_57: they gotta go reset the router. Anyway, they got the whole list of possible excuses. Oh, I spilled my coffee on my keyboard. I'll be right back. And then they have a keyboard. They're stained in coffee. SPEAKER_58: Like they have all kinds of naturally tricks. So that's the employment side. Okay. Now let's SPEAKER_57: go to the employer side. Do you remember? I think you were co-hosting at this time. Uh, there was a chicken shop, uh, making chicken sandwiches or something on the, uh, east side of Manhattan and people went in there and there was a zoom call and they're like, what, why? Oh, somebody left their SPEAKER_123: computer on with the zoom call. And then this woman from the Philippines is like, can I take your order? SPEAKER_37: Yep. We have the video of that here. Here we go chicken shop. And here is the woman and you know, it's zoom because they haven't taken away the little bar at the bottom that shows zoom options. SPEAKER_191: Well, it's a little, it's a little bootleg, you know, it could be, it's kind of blue. It's not SPEAKER_37: refined. It's, it's hacked. They hacked it together. This is hacked together. Uh, this blew my mind. And then there's also another example that we were talking about before the show, which is, uh, remote humans, remote EAs. You love to talk about Athena, but we've seen now seen tele-operation of robots. We've seen people zooming in across the con the world to do face-to-face and then also back of office help. So to me, the overall thing here is that remote unlocks quite a lot. As long as you're not lying to your employer and trying to collect multiple paychecks. Let's call it what it is. SPEAKER_06: Capitalism arbitrage. When I see overworked, overemployed, you know what I see? I see SPEAKER_316: entrepreneurship. These people. I was confused why you're so unhappy with them. I'm like, SPEAKER_375: these are something that great employees to me. I'm not super, I'm not super. I mean, I think it's SPEAKER_58: unethical, right? Okay. Okay. It's obviously unethical. Um, there's a bunch of issues with it SPEAKER_06: where you could get sued and then there's, you know, IP issues. This is a plethora of issues. Um, and it does create a little bit of chaos and mistrust that would ruin remote work for everybody. SPEAKER_58: So there's that we're putting it all aside. If you're a developer and you can do three jobs and people are happy with your output and you're as a manager too stupid to manage people correctly and say, this person's working three hours and the other six hours they're working for two other companies SPEAKER_61: and you're not smart enough to know that. Then, you know, I think it's on the manager, right? SPEAKER_00: I think the problem here is there's a reason why there's, I've, I've never heard of a journalist having two full-time jobs at the same time. I've never heard of a lot of industries. I think the reason why developers pulled this off is they have built a culture in which people will leave them alone to work because they demanded protected time to have deep work focus. And to be clear, SPEAKER_37: that makes a lot of sense. I'm totally here for it, but it also creates the ability for them to be SPEAKER_71: less responsive and have it be totally normal. So I, I, there's a lot of blame to go around here. Um, the thing that I wanted to talk about though, and the reason why I wanted to have all these different examples is to me, it seems that the idea of tele-operation of robots is going to become SPEAKER_37: quickly posse. I still think we're going to have humans zooming into things. I still think we'll have humans doing remote work from the Philippines or from the U S or from wherever, but the tele-operation SPEAKER_71: robots I think is going to get, uh, squeezed out because it turns out there are so many companies today working on humanoid and humanoid style robots that were added to the twist 500. Optimus is one, SPEAKER_64: the human is one. So they're studying what, what, what's your a hundred percent correct. So there's SPEAKER_06: one issue of robotics and then the other issue and, and learning. And then the other issue is just arbitrage. So we got these arbitrage examples, Athena, wow.com. If you want to get like a free month, SPEAKER_29: I think, or a couple of weeks free for my friends over there, I'm an investor in Athena and we have SPEAKER_06: two Athena assistants working. It's 3000 a month, 36,000 a year. You can swap them in and out. They're trained. If you don't like the one you're working with, you swap them out with another one. They're unbelievably good. And you know, what I found is people who are taking those, what I'll call operations jobs. They're not just EAs. They're kind of like operations people. When I hire operators SPEAKER_29: in the U S market, it costs twice as much. So they're going to cost 50, 60, 70, 80,000. If it's SPEAKER_06: in a major city, it might be even more 90, 100, 120 in San Francisco. And most people are not looking to stay in that job. They're looking to use it as a springboard. So now you're paying two or three SPEAKER_58: times as much. And then the reward for finding somebody great is they leave to go to another job. So you have to replace them every 12 months or nine months or 18 months. And then if you ask them to do certain things, it might be above or below their pay grade in their mind. Americans are hard to manage because we are the, one of the most successful driven countries in the world for other countries that are emerging and frontier markets. The idea of getting a job with an American for $36,000 a year is just mind blowing. It's a lot of money. A lot of markets. I mean, the Athena assistance, from what I understand, they don't get the whole 36, but there are the 0.1% of knowledge workers in the Philippines and wherever they're based, SPEAKER_57: putting all that aside. Um, I do think, uh, you know, we're, there's something happening here where, you know, everybody in this global free market, because of how good zoom is, you know, look at us here, co-hosting the show from random states. It used to be, SPEAKER_61: we'd have to be in the same city. Remember those days, if you want to be a podcast, you had to SPEAKER_358: move to LA. I kind of miss those days. Sure. I do miss getting paid at my job to walk places. SPEAKER_37: I used to like walk. That's kind of fun actually. Yeah. Cause I would, I would go outside and I would like walk down the street and then I would sit and order a coffee, talk to somebody. And then I would like go back to work. Now I just like hop between zoom calls and my life's worse, but yeah. SPEAKER_266: Anyways, anyway, you're talking, speaking to the socialization issue, which is very real, SPEAKER_06: uh, and it's, it's having an impact on people. So anyway, uh, this is a trend we're going to keep looking at remote work arbitrage RWA remote work arbitrage. If you have examples of it, email us, you know, give us examples, any remote work arbitrage on either side of the equation. We're kind of interested in it. I, I think I'm S I'm seeing it myself. I was doing, um, I talked about this with sunny on the AI episode this week or last week where I had, um, I was looking to hire people in Austin for a job and I made a, I asked it to give me the high, low and average SPEAKER_57: hourly rate of this position. It was a domestic position. And, uh, I said, put it in a table and SPEAKER_06: give me citations. It did it. Now this would be a knowledge workers job last year and a knowledge SPEAKER_57: worker at 30, 40, $50 an hour. In fact, I might've used my Athena assistant to do that for me. SPEAKER_58: Right. Give me the, and now the Athena assistant can do that as well. So there's some, the, the, the last piece I'll say on the RWA is what I'm seeing at Uber, Airbnb, Google, Facebook and others, SPEAKER_123: which is 30% growth, 20% growth year over year, same number of employees. I want everybody to think SPEAKER_57: about that. Can you get, can you grow a firm 30% year over year, 50% year over year, but keep the number of team members, full-time team members the same. I think you can. And I think it's happened for three years in a row now. Part of that was these organizations were bloated. So you're getting rid of all these VPs and middle managers and product managers who maybe they should have never been hired again to dovetail the other story where he said people were using capital as a weapon at Google to hire talent and keep them from working somewhere else. They literally, the co-founders of Google did that as an explicit strategy. If we hire you, you can't work for a potential search engine SPEAKER_97: competitor or an advertising network competitor until Facebook came along and, and it started, uh, SPEAKER_06: uh, offering even more money. Exactly. Even more money, but Facebook and Google, uh, are gonna have the same number of employees for five years, I predict, and they're gonna have their revenue go up. I think the number of employees at Google and Facebook five years from now will be the same number SPEAKER_37: of employees, but the revenue will have doubled. I, I think the way that I would phrase that bet is revenue will double staff goes up by 30%. Um, just yeah, but I mean, but your point stands, I'm not undercutting the, the, the, just that there is rising efficiency and this, I presume trickles down to startups. People now probably expect higher ARR per FTE at your average SaaS company. SPEAKER_06: I'd say it starts with startups because startups are resource constrained. So they have no choice, but to be efficient. They that's always been their gig. And so we see companies like podcast AI, uh, as but one example, and they just do so much with so few people. And so I think we're entering the age of, it's almost like standup comedians, uh, or a solo guitar acts like Bob Dylan. I've always SPEAKER_54: been enamored by those. Why? Jerry Seinfeld or, um, Kevin Hart. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm friendly with Kevin Hart and I went to see him when I was in Dubai and I was talking to him after the show. And, um, I'd seen him before the show and I'd seen him after the show, hung out with him in the green room. It was very nice. He's such a, just such a really charming guy, uh, and talented. And I just was enamored by how he could go to Dubai, do three shows just him. Now he has friends in our entourage SPEAKER_409: or whatever, if he wants to have people around on stage, it's just him. It only requires him. SPEAKER_57: Yeah. It only requires him. He could literally get off a plane, private jet, commercial jet, go somewhere and entertain literally 10,000 people at $200 a ticket on average, $100 a ticket, whatever it is. Jerry Seinfeld, probably more. I don't know who's, who's, who's the king of the world. SPEAKER_411: Dave Chappelle. Chris Rock. I mean, there's these comedians who can just pack rooms. SPEAKER_412: And then there's, you know, if, you know, a Jack Johnson or, you know, uh, Grimes, a DJ. SPEAKER_06: Now a DJ might need a stage show and there might be a little bit more to it, but even still a DJ could just show up with a thumb drive and a dope set and just crush it. So I think that's kind of what startups are when compared to the big companies, the big companies have infrastructure. They have a campus. They have all this stuff. When they move, they move, you know, they take big steps like a giant prontosaurus, like some giant, uh, dinosaur. They just lumber. But when that, when that foot lands, it shakes the earth, like AWS launching a product. Right. And startups are like the Raptors, you know, little pack, zip, zip, zip, slaughtering what's around them. And so the AI stuff, uh, that's where I learned about Athena. Actually, uh, I was looking at the startup and I SPEAKER_57: just saw startups talking constantly about having an Athena assistant instead of having the proverbial Jack of all trades or Jane of all trades, or they, them of all trades. Thank you. SPEAKER_97: Add to thank you. Yes. I'm trying to be inclusive. Um, and, uh, in the chief of staff role, SPEAKER_06: this essentially replaces that. I mean, well, what do you need that role for? So the age of efficiency is here and there's a lot of remote work arbitrage. And I think this is a trend for SPEAKER_40: everybody to just be aware of, um, I don't know that it results in dramatically less employment. SPEAKER_29: I think what it results in is a global balancing of salaries. So just, SPEAKER_358: Oh yeah. Well, interestingly enough, the, the RTO movement is the biggest movement is the biggest, SPEAKER_37: I think piece against a harmonization of salaries around the world, because then it says that you have to be in San Francisco to make San Francisco money versus making it available more broadly. SPEAKER_55: But that's not what you're hearing or there. That's returned to office for those who SPEAKER_426: have returned to office, returned to office. Yeah. Yes. No, that's what we're here to do is to make SPEAKER_06: sure. I listen deeply to what you're saying and just make, I channel the audience and I heard RTO and I'm like, oh, return to office. I wonder if they know that. So return to office is a thing. SPEAKER_412: We talked about it last week. Yeah. I didn't, but that we're gonna talk about that. Let's wrap. Yeah. SPEAKER_71: Let's do it. So we have 10 companies that have raised a combined $2 billion. And we have a table. SPEAKER_37: I'm going to show you here to run you through the names of these firms. So I've ranked them by capital raised. These are the companies we've added so far in the robotics category. Figure, SPEAKER_71: Brian Machines, Agility, Bear 1X, Collaborative, Sanctuary, Aptronic, Mentee, and Oversonic. And Jason, I'm going to show you a tiny clip of each one and tell you why I think they are fantastic. Shall we go? Let's do it. I love this. All right. Figure. Let's do figure first. SPEAKER_431: This is the figure bought inside of a BMW plant picking up a piece of car. I don't know what SPEAKER_71: that is. Some sort of component and it's showing how it looks like a floorboard to me. Thank you. I'm glad someone here knows what it is. And there's going to be some text coming up here that says it has a less than three centimeter tolerance. That is not great, but I do think that we are still seeing these robots improve very, very quickly. Figure has raised $854 million. And I think it's probably the best known startup doing humanoid robots that are powered by AI. Of course, Tesla has its own and so forth, but not a startup, not in the same way. So yeah, this is figure. Now let's go to Bright Machines. Bright Machines is the second best funded company that we've added in the robots category to the twist 500, $437 million raised. And they are doing robotic micro factories informed by AI. So not humanoid robots, but modular micro factories that are powered by AI. I think this is one of the coolest things I've ever seen, period. And they're doing various different types of manufacturing with them. This is like the thing you see in the three body problem television show, like high end manufacturing and like on site, not off in some different country or somewhere else. This is like in your warehouse. I think this is, SPEAKER_117: These are tethered. They cannot go walk around a factory. They're locked in some portion of the SPEAKER_71: factory on the assembly line. Got it. Yes. And then we have agility robotics. Now this bad boy SPEAKER_174: looks human humanoid. Okay, cute. That's generous. SPEAKER_57: Yeah. I like the big eyes. Big eyes always make you look cute. That's like a classic Disney thing. SPEAKER_71: But watch it, watch how its legs function. So unlike a lot of these robots that are trying to be literally like humans, this is what I would call human ish, uh, might be cheaper designed for warehouse work. A lot of these robots, by the way, are designed for in warehouse activities because we don't need humans probably carrying all those boxes. I think it's adorable. The company has raised 178 million dollars. And, um, as it says there are different effects. It has horse legs. The SPEAKER_57: knees are backwards. So for some reason, horse legs and a, it looks like a minotaur. It's a minotaur, SPEAKER_117: Alex. It, it, it's the bottom half is horse legs and the top half is human. That's, isn't that a minotaur? No, that's a, that's a centaur, a centaur, a minotaur legs. Oh yeah. Well, SPEAKER_207: I said a minotaur is human down and then, uh, bull up. I think maybe, huh? Anyway, SPEAKER_83: it does look like it is some Greek mythological, uh, animal. The cute version. Uh, then we have SPEAKER_71: bear robotics and this is another one that I'm really excited about. So Jason, just, I want you SPEAKER_285: to just watch 10 seconds of this and tell me how adorable these robots are, because this, when I was SPEAKER_118: prepping this, this made my day. Look at them. Okay. Okay. So they're little R2D2s with four, one, SPEAKER_06: two, three, four, three, or four trays. And they're zipping around with food on them. I've seen these, there is a, uh, movie theater chain. Uh, there's one in the Hillsdale mall in, uh, in the peninsula here in the bay area. They're closed at that mall and they put the food into it and it drives the food to each of the individual theaters. And then there's a runner in each theater who takes the food from that there. And so when you're walking to the movie theater, that hallway has these type of robots. Um, these things do seem like for room service at hotels would be epic. Um, and when I was at Disney, uh, I went to like the pizza and pasta place, you know, kids are, and we were by space mountain, SPEAKER_57: um, and star tours, and they had reconfigured the cafeteria that you, because they have a Disney app now that has ordering in it, like toast startup. And we should probably put toast, make a note about toast. Um, and instead of like having people order food, you order in your app, then it tells you to go to a certain stand and your food is being assembled there. So the cloud kitchens movement, the toast movement, because of a lack back to the labor arbitrage that's occurring, they're arbitrage charging. What toast does in terms of labor arbitrage is they take the labor that was the business's responsibility and they put it on the consumer. So let's make a note of that type of labor arbitrage. Um, and so that's, what's happening here. This robotic is part of that labor SPEAKER_446: arbitrage eliminating. There is, there's a version of this called the, the, the Butler, the Butler, SPEAKER_37: B-U-T-L-R that I saw a thousand years ago when I was, I talked to my first stint and it was designed to do room service. Um, but the reason why I like bear robotics is it's raised 176 million dollars. So it clearly has enough of a commercial footprint to raise big boy capital. So I think it's, I think it's going to be in and around the world. All right, next up one X technologies. Um, another humanoid SPEAKER_71: robotics company raised 136 million. These are on wheels and they appear to be a little bit like those, um, wavy guys you see, like a, like a car lot. They just seem oddly stretched. I'm sure this is lovely. They cleaned up some coffee in this video. Um, just another example of a well-funded humanoid robotics startup. Moving on. So here the robot is going to sort individual things onto two SPEAKER_37: different trays. And the whole shtick here, the reason why they have the clock in this shot is that they say can do it about as fast as a human. Now, clearly it's a test. It's a demo, et cetera, but I think it shows dexterity and speed. And that speaks well for the whole industry. SPEAKER_71: Next up apptronic. This is a special shot. Jason, I went through their entire YouTube channel and I found you the one in which it shows them shooting the video of the robot. So this is the behind the scenes version of it. I pick it because apptronic has raised, um, about 30 million and they SPEAKER_00: have built a robot that can walk and can do things. So I wonder if the barrier or the barred entry into this humanoid robotic space is maybe a little bit lower in, uh, dollars raised terms than I expected. SPEAKER_37: And then two more mentee robotics. Here's the mentee walking around someone's office, following directions. She just says, follow me mentee bots. And then the bot follows. And then it takes, uh, I think it scans the office she's walking through to make a map of it for itself. And then finally, we have over sonic robotics. Uh, they've only raised 5 million euro. As far as I can tell, I think they're Italian and it's good to, I think get some other international kind of names on the 200. So that's 10 companies, $2 billion raised mostly working on humanoid robotics. The thing that I took away here is AI plus robots is going to be awesome because they can think more, they can do more. They can just be more varied. And also there's a ton of different ideas about SPEAKER_70: how to build the best robot electric systems or, um, pneumatic systems, how to handle the effectors, SPEAKER_49: their hands. So much cool stuff here. This got me super stoked about like what's going to be coming in the next couple of years. I just can't wait. SPEAKER_06: I think it's a great start. If you have more robotics companies for us, then just, you know, hit us on Twitter x.com slash alexx.com. So Jason, give us your suggestions. We we're starting with 10 gives a really good overview. What I saw in there are just general observations is, um, you know, these things are slow. They're very slow, but they don't need a break. So if they're half the speed of a human and a human works in eight hour shift and humans make mistakes and these things theoretically don't make mistakes, uh, or at scale, they won't make mistakes. They can beat us. If they're half the speed of us, they can beat us just by working 24 hours a day or 23.5 hours a day, like the cafe X machines do. Um, and the cafe X machines are faster and they are perfect. So that's the thing we realized when we did cafe X eight years ago, they told us like 40% of Starbucks orders have SPEAKER_57: a mistake in them. Either they're cold or they got it wrong or whatever. I believe that. And that was like an internal Starbucks number. They quoted us like from some internal report. Like we gotta get our, you know, we gotta, we gotta get orders tighter. Now I'm sure doing app orders again, putting the war arbitrage on the consumer. There it is. Try and make the consumer do the work. Um, SPEAKER_06: you know, is, is a great insight. These things have to be faster. They, um, are going to show up soon and everybody's trying slightly different footprints. You have to wonder, like if two arms are good, why not have four arms? Um, but they, what they're trying to do is make humanoid robots. I think for two main reasons, one, the general applicability goes way up when they have the human form factor, why the world is designed for humans. Yes. Therefore, any job that a human can do, these would have the footprint to do them, whether it's, you know, doing dishes or making a latte or working in a factory. So, okay, mission accomplished there. That's why they're doing it. It's. And I think maybe the second reason is so that they get adopted by the public, SPEAKER_84: but the public accepts them, right? Public acceptance. I think is if these things look SPEAKER_58: like us, they act like us, they are friendlier than us. I think that's a big part of like SPEAKER_57: the, when they steal our jobs and they take our work, we'll be like, oh, we used to do that work, but you do it really nicely. You've got really big eyes as Jason. And you have big eyes. So you SPEAKER_97: kind of look like a Pixar Disney character. So I'm good with it. You can take my job. I'll just sit SPEAKER_37: home and let's just, I'll just stay home and collect my UBI or universal. My UBI is really, SPEAKER_58: I think great collection. I think a great start. Um, and some companies are going, it's a harder task to build a human one. And it's a harder task to use an LLM or general AI. It's going to take longer to do those. But when you do succeed, it can do many things. SPEAKER_37: That's, that's why I'm excited. These are not, this is not a dishwashing robot. It's going to be a humanoid robot for your house that you can ask to do things. And some of these, um, uh, examples that we just saw, do you have the ability to chain different actions together to do a complex, um, I guess the robot equivalent of answering a query, which is doing actions to fulfill the ask. SPEAKER_06: Tell me what there was that famous humane. Uh, it was like, well, give me something to eat. And it looked at a bunch of stuff in front of it. And it took from a bunch of non edible items, the apple and hand it to the person. So it was kind of like, oh yeah, an LLM could do that. Um, or, you know, if you, you could ask it out, you can take a picture of what's in your fridge right now and say, what can I make? And chat GPT four and Claude and all these other ones can do that. You can take a picture of a bunch of food and I'd be like, you could make fettuccine Alfredo. You could make lasagna. You know, it would actually tell you what you can make based on the ingredients, which means robot plus LLM means you could tell the robot, what do we have in stock? What can you SPEAKER_70: make me? And it's like, well, I can make you. If that union happens on the timeframe we expect and at the quality level we anticipate, it's going to lead to an entirely different world for everybody. SPEAKER_37: So I'm hoping that that, that pays off and that's why, by the way, just in those 10 companies, as I said, 2 billion invested, not a huge shock. Um, before we wrap, we are talking also about SPEAKER_381: housing and construction startups for Friday. We're going to be back for more, which was 500. Chamath Palihapitiya: So we'll do the same format, 10, 15 minutes, 10 companies, a little bit of commentary. SPEAKER_37: We get them in there. We've already had 60 submissions, I think 60 or 70. And some of them, I'm already pulling them into spreadsheets. Some of them have multiple votes. I'm, we're going to get extra attention to the ones that get the most community love because that often gives us a great signal for what people like in the market, but lots to say there. So I'm Alex W at launch.co. SPEAKER_49: If you have a construction tech, a housing tech or a robotics tech company, let me know. We'll talk SPEAKER_01: about it on the show. Awesome. All right. It's been an amazing episode. Uh, founder Fridays are coming up SPEAKER_06: and you can go to frown founder, fridays.tech. Uh, are you doing a, um, are you doing like an outro for every episode now, Alex, or is the team doing that? I know you're executive producer now. SPEAKER_70: So I've been doing the bumpers for all the, uh, liquidity summit things, but I can definitely, SPEAKER_381: I can take the outro. Um, we've been trading off essentially the outros, but I can do it. SPEAKER_58: I think we should do like a little package at the end of the show, just of like all the things to SPEAKER_61: remember. So founder, fridays.tech is a good thing to remember twist 500.com is a good thing to remember. TWI startups.stubstack.com. Bianca is doing a multiple time a week newsletter now where she's going to talk about the show and the things we're working on. So you can just stay up to date. Uh, don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and hit the bell, post some comments on YouTube. We're SPEAKER_57: going to start reading those on air best comments on YouTube. We will surface on air. So do you want to do one question? Yeah, let's do a question live. Why not? All right. Now, Jason, SPEAKER_37: we're going to go ahead and do one very standard question, and then we're going to do a silly one just for fun. So really quickly from, uh, Sazaku 85 on YouTube. This is for Jason in your view, SPEAKER_71: what is the most interesting AI company you have backed this year? Putting you on the spot. I love SPEAKER_58: doing this. God. Yeah. You know, I think podcast AI, because I love podcasting, you know, just they SPEAKER_57: have really amazing, uh, product velocity. And so I'm pretty enamored with that company. So I'll go with podcast AI. They're doing really interesting things now. Like, you know, we spend, um, SPEAKER_06: uh, a lot of time on the docket. They're making it so you can just do your docket, uh, with podcast AI. So let's say you were doing a corporate podcast. You could put in all of your inbound, like your blog, social media, whatever keywords. And then it will say, Hey, here's things for you to talk about on your podcast. Pretty neat. So you take the docket process, right? We have the twist 500. You can go to twist 500.com. Imagine taking all that data and just saying, Hey, go find us the latest news on these companies and put it into a docket and then rank it by what's most important. Now AI is going to do like a 40, 50% job, but it'll get 10% better every two or three months. So I think maybe a year or two from now, you could actually do the docket for a popular podcast or 80% of it, you know, or have like a starting point, right? Uh, so I, I love podcast AI. There's another one called Jenny AI, J E N N I dot AI. And, um, this is for academics and, um, you know, a lot of people in, uh, here's the, uh, thing. It just helps you write and do citation. So again, very verticalized AI. So if you were writing your paper college academia, it's just going to really do a great job. Stanford uses a pen uses that Oxford businesses. So just for writing, citing and editing, you and I SPEAKER_29: are word cells. Um, really, really great versus shape rotators. That was a weird week on Twitter. SPEAKER_107: All right. Um, and we're going to grab one more just for fun. Donnie Waller. Hi, Alex and Jason. SPEAKER_71: I'm a solution architect at Twilio segment. I am starting a video called segment recipes. That is the tech cooking show with a colleague is buying an AI laptop, a good idea to run my own video models. SPEAKER_37: Now AI laptops are relatively new Microsoft invention as part of the windows 11 umbrella. And I want to know if they're any good. So Donnie, yes, buy one, use it. And if it's terrible, blog and do video about that. But I mean, if you're a solutions architect at Twilio, um, you can afford the laptop. Don't overthink it. Go out there. Buy good tools. SPEAKER_57: Yeah. I think if you're going to do any type of models, you're going to do it in the cloud for now. Um, and it's not that expensive and people are giving it away for free. So just apply to Andreessen Horowitz and get some of their cluster. They'll give you like, they'll give you $5 million SPEAKER_334: and a free cluster. So all the way back to the third of the show. That's how we do it. SPEAKER_54: It's called the callback shout out Kevin Hart. All right. He's Alex. I'm Jason. We'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye bye.