SPEAKER_00: i did a tweet today i believe optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity including the wheel in this obviously it is going to be the most successful product

SPEAKER_01: in history and people will forget that tesla ever made cars this week in startups is brought to you

SPEAKER_03: buy aws activate aws activate helps startups bring their ideas to life as you build and scale your business activate credits grow with you to support your changing needs apply to aws activate today and receive up to one hundred thousand dollars in credits visit aws.amazon.com startups credits squarespace turn your idea into a beautiful website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and monarch money get control of your overall finances with monarch money visit monarch money.com twist for half off on your first year all right everybody welcome back to this week in

SPEAKER_00: startups it's your boy jason calacanis and my co-host here alex william how are you sir have

SPEAKER_07: a good weekend oh fantastic tons of time with the kids last ice cream stop of the summer and we bought ada a little uh balance bike so it was honestly amazing jason before we get started though i have a request from everyone who's a twist fan twist listener yes even the occasional twist enjoyer if you go to get perspective dot ai slash share slash twist there is a little survey that our dear friend lon

SPEAKER_06: put together and we would love to hear from you about how the show is going what we can do better and we are collecting all this feedback so we can make the best possible podcast for y'all that's get perspective dot ai slash share slash twist okay um another way to do this would be to do

SPEAKER_00: this week in startups.com survey and then have that redirect to it just make it a little easier for us actually there's turns out there's a type form or a survey there our old survey is there so let's clean this up and post um but yeah another good way to do it and we'll put it in the show notes as well surveys do help uh tell us what you love tell us what you want to see more of okay did you see this um see this video that's going viral it's we have violence in the streets autonomy is not going to come without a price we are already having robots attacking people in china and we have people attacking waymos in the united states play the video all right so first up this is a video from

SPEAKER_14: china producer long thinks this is staged but yet it's very very funny it's a unit tree robot accosting the man on a moped and jason you just can't make this stuff up enjoy how do i get one of these unit

SPEAKER_17: trees oh my god you just run them with like a joystick right and this guy's dressed up

SPEAKER_24: yeah so the unit tree has a little backpack on and like a jacket and this guy on his moped looks so confused as the robot comes up and tries oh now it's boxing the bike oh my god it's he put boxing

SPEAKER_00: gloves on it can i get one of these robots how much does it cost can somebody get me one of these i want to bring it to the all-in summit next week and start harassing people with my robot all right now the

SPEAKER_14: when the waymo front jason uh people are having various reactions to robots around the world and i

SPEAKER_07: would say that self-driving cars count as a robot so here we have from austin and the subtitle here is austin tram transplants uh harass clanker downtown so here is the clear yes we'll talk about that in a second but here are a couple of gentlemen accosting a waymo and uh it's kind of sad they're just being kind of mean to it they're standing in front of it they're hitting it they're making faces at it

SPEAKER_26: i think they're using the force to just hold it in place like they're there's a passenger in there

SPEAKER_07: they're holding a human hostage that's terrible i mean this is um this is going to become an issue

SPEAKER_00: folks because as these things become more prevalent people are going to f with these things in new york i guarantee it and waymo just got their permit for new york and um you know watching these guys what

SPEAKER_32: i noticed was there's a there's a rail crossing back there and so not only they uh effing with the waymo they're effing with the passenger they're also creating a serious safety hazard i don't know if that's in the train tracks or not but this could become like an issue here and there's going to need to be a law that if you f with a self-driving car talking about regulations that there's some ramification to impeding a car now they're in the middle of the street i don't know if it'd be jay walking or whatever but if this does become a trend there is another video that went viral in san francisco this past week of a bunch of folks jumping onto a waymo and doing backflips off of

SPEAKER_00: it to the point which a cop had to be called because a bunch of drunk people decided and i don't know what this is like cow this is modern cow tipping which that's our first i think breaking

SPEAKER_14: news story do we have a breaking news story here i mean it's as breaking as you can get on a podcast with a with a set recording time about an hour or two ago anthropic the american foundation ai model

SPEAKER_07: company best known for competing with both xai and open ai for all that ai market share announced that it closed its series f jason now 13 billion dollars was the total raise we had heard five originally then reports throughout that it was going to grow to 10 billion because of outsized interest turns out

SPEAKER_14: the number is 13 170 billion dollar pre-money valuation 183 billion dollar post-money valuation more money higher price than expected very bullish for the company yeah um some of these companies

SPEAKER_40: are crushing it in ai they found revenue streams and their products are extraordinary um you know claude is what i use in my perplexity browser i talked about that before and i bounced between the llms

SPEAKER_39: but man for deep research claude is really undefeated i think when i do deep research man it shines and

SPEAKER_07: these browsers and did we get on the claude browser yet the claude for chrome extension has not approved me yet i'll talk to lon about that because i really want to test it live we need to show it off on the show they they did only give out a thousand uh keys i think it's a little bit right now jason like the rollout of robotaxi with tesla i think they're probably picking and choosing a little bit and no shame to that it's a new technology i'm not annoyed but it's not like a general beta we can opt into um but the things you're outlining are why iconic fidelity and lightspeed you need three lead investors to fill out a 13 billion dollar round uh took the plunge here but also jason i want to point out that a lot of the reporting we've seen about how fast anthropic has grown the company went ahead and confirmed so they did say yes we're at about a billion arr to start the year we crossed 5 billion in august and then here's the other thing that really kind of blew me away claude code now this is their command line interface agentic ai tool uh my brother-in-law who writes a lot of code explained to me why using the cli matters a little bit opaque to me but what's really cool for investors and for the general public is claude code has now reached a 500 million dollar run rate in well it

SPEAKER_06: reached uh general access in may so not that long the company is just firing on all cylinders which combats i think the kind of ai doom and gloom we've seen in the last couple of weeks since gpt5 came out

SPEAKER_14: people have been pretty negative even my neighbors are asking me about this uh so i think this anthropic round kind of pushes back against the sad narrative that's been forming across ai for the

SPEAKER_39: last nine or ten which we should get curious about the sad narrative uh seems to be based upon a massive amount of spending and wondering when that money gets paid back not something you need to worry about uh these are people who could afford to lose the money right like you don't have to worry about like meta adding a bunch of servers or microsoft or google or xai like they can afford it and their investors

SPEAKER_00: can afford it some of them have war chest of cash what else are they going to spend on a stupid dividend that's dumb that's that's not a bet on the future that's betting against yourself that's saying i have no more ideas left i'm just going to give shareholders money uh instead of putting it to work on something else right now buying back your shares is different because that means you think the shares are underpriced and you want to penalize the market and let them know hey i think our shares are underpriced so some combination but the dividends is what i really have a problem with because giving people a buck a share when you got a 500 share or 200 share like okay fine but i who's in it for that who's in it who's in microsoft or google or metaphor or apple for the dividend like some wonks i mean it for the rush of

SPEAKER_48: a new product or service i would have rather seen apple for the love of god release a car or some new product that inspires me but we should get curious about this because the other thing

SPEAKER_00: that people are underestimating is the impact of these robots we did a goofy thing about this robot now i'm gonna go we're gonna circle back on the docket if you don't mind not at all if you could tell me a little bit more about this robot i know you had some other videos of it but i did a tweet today i believe optimus is going to be the greatest product ever created by humanity including the wheel in this obviously it is going to be the most successful product in history and people will forget that tesla ever made cars in another 10 or 20 years people are going to say remember the company sony they used to make um rice cookers and hot blankets heating blankets and uh no that was i

SPEAKER_54: think the first product was a rice cooker and a heating blanket what did you think it was the walkman

SPEAKER_57: uh well i was just thinking back to like the 90s and i was like people but i think yeah i realized

SPEAKER_24: well well bantering that i was off by a couple of decades anyways keep going rice cookers blankets

SPEAKER_00: fantastic this could be like we could be sitting here thinking like all these incredible cars ev

SPEAKER_32: revolution self-driving all a footnote these robots are going to become the best selling products in the history of humanity and they're going to change the world more than the internet when you're busy all day

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SPEAKER_07: and using the offer code twist okay so jason first of all give me um you said 10 years or 15 years what's the timeline for this this change i think we should put a little bit of a barricade around it

SPEAKER_00: here well i think people are going to start realizing this in two years i think right now we see the robot kind of goofing around just like i don't know 10 15 years ago we saw like drones goofing around we saw the darpa self-driving product goofing around we saw the ev1 from i think chevy was the first ev that they leased to people and then destroyed them because the oil industry giant conspiracy whatever like things start as toys and then they become real and this robot you can tell

SPEAKER_48: it's a toy because the applications are doing a prank on the street and scaring somebody or boxing

David Friedberg: demonstrations as i'll show you right now observe look at this not very intimidating but i guess

SPEAKER_14: technically impressive if you're watching the audio listen to the audio version and it's a unitary robot

SPEAKER_07: doing some martial arts are we sure this is real not as well it says jason right there not generated by ai so it has to not be because you can't lie on the internet i mean we're watching this do tai chi

SPEAKER_00: and i think we're both having the same reaction which is why they put the footer there this does not seem real but then you know when somebody like dana white who is one of the great

SPEAKER_72: you know innovators of our time who i would love to interview at some point um i don't want to play blockjack with them i mean i don't know if i can stand those stakes man i watch him play blackjack he

SPEAKER_74: he goes what does he play play a hand per hand it's got to be tens of thousands of dollars and

SPEAKER_39: i see he plays multiple hands at a time and there was a video on the internet that i just saw this weekend where his wife like comes to him it's like caressing his shoulder at the table whisper something to his ear he kind of shakes his head yeah you're right because he went south for a million with like a bad beat on like some splitting tens or whatever the hell happened um but anyway the guy's a billionaire he can he'd afford to do it he likes to get the rush from the blackjack i get it better he'd do that than other bad pursuits but here it is this this went viral last week so again things start as toys people get curious and then the world changes so in this video

SPEAKER_14: we have two of the little robots and this time they're going to box against one another and uh as i said in the pre-show they're not going to knock you out yet but they do seem to be slowly improving

SPEAKER_07: there jason that's just not very intimidating to me you know that's not uh i'm not scared yet

SPEAKER_75: yeah what if we um had a blade pop out of the the keel i'm afraid of being stabbed yes uh i need one

SPEAKER_21: of these immediately can somebody get me one of these i don't what do these things cost like 10 grand

SPEAKER_06: five grand 16 to 21 i think was what uh lawn pulled for us so not that much money i mean like about as much as a really good four-wheeler for your ranch probably yeah because somebody contact

SPEAKER_40: them and ask them if they would let me have one next week to play with at the all in summit i'd like

SPEAKER_00: to show up at all in summit with this and just start walking around with it on stage and having it do crazy stuff things start as toys okay then people get curious and then technologists adapt the technology and the platforms to do things in the real world we saw we had on the show just a week or two ago uh these pincher robots doing folding laundry sincere ai and it was uh i forget the name

SPEAKER_07: of the actual product but it's s-y-n-c-e-r-e is that company jason i want to ask you about optimus itself though because we talked on the show quite a lot about figure and the other companies that are also pursuing this vision lots of capital lots of progress and i think some of them got started before the tesla optimus project you're framing this not just as a humanoid robots are going to become this uh very common very powerful thing but that tesla's optimus in particular so um you have different

SPEAKER_14: friends than i do what are you hearing about the optimus in particular that gives you so much

SPEAKER_40: enthusiasm um well you know when elon says the future of the company is optimus and you see him get into what i'll call warlord mode um he's not doing politics you don't hear him talking about politics anymore but you do saying him like oh he released version four of his master plan he says 80 of

SPEAKER_28: tesla's value will be optimus i think it's going to be 99 i think all the other products will be like merch or like secondary products like all the even self-driving i mean i think i said this before i do

SPEAKER_00: think like a dozen people are going to get there all around the same time and so and then there's a giant world out there but there's something about this product and the factories that elon is able to build there is no human on the planet who knows more about factories and building factories than elon musk now there might be other people who've built more factories but not the most advanced factories i'm talking about a singular individual who i watch over 20 years build his first factory build the next factory build the next factory build the next factory buy the largest like stamping machines if you look at those stamping machines he used to build the cyber truck which wasn't the hit people thought it was going to be but what he learned from using those giant um pressing machines somebody can look it up the giant pressing machines i saw them in person actually he showed them to me um when i visited

SPEAKER_48: these pressing machines and i'm not sure what they're taught what they're called but producer claude will get in under 10 seconds obviously because producer claude's brilliant um yeah the giga press is what they call it it's actually a german company that makes them that he sourced them from and then he challenged them as my understanding to make a bigger one and then to make a bigger one and i think he ordered them or ordered them in advance um well this is public knowledge um those here's a video of the

SPEAKER_07: model s this is going way back in time jason uh this is back to 2012 to see how long they've been doing this but here is an example of some of the pressing machines they used to make yeah uh model s cars so

SPEAKER_00: really part of the game for a while yeah and they've they've kept going they've kept going they've kept going so what i think is going to happen is he's going to make an optimist that understands the real world because of the self-driving experience which is what but one ai experience i see and so that combined with all that knowledge plus the xai knowledge plus the factory knowledge means he's going to be able to make robots to make robots and we could be sitting here in another five years and he's got a factory or maybe even converted the tesla factories some of them adapted some of them to make optimists at scale and then to have optimists understand the real world because all the teslas have mapped out the entire world and understand everything in it and then you just take what he learned there from you know their dojo computer whatever and they have colossus that computer and i think like dojo might have been shut down or it's been deprecated to work on new things but you just think about what he learned standing up colossus which nvidia said was the greatest um like feat they've

SPEAKER_93: ever seen like jensen was like i've never seen anybody do something like this like it was unbelievable how quickly they did it yeah and tesla did disband the dojo team uh that was in mid-august i'm trying to

SPEAKER_07: pull up the um the earnings call i don't quite have time but uh if i recall the tesla earnings call did discuss optimist ramp and they were discussing i think something like it showing up in the earnings late next year which isn't that far away because it's already q3 so we're thinking about four quarters away from actual revenue jason you're thinking in two years eight quarters we'll see it impact our lives

SPEAKER_06: all i'll say is this hell yes faster please i i i'm so tired elon frequently late

SPEAKER_101: but never wrong like that's you know he basically gets it right eventually so everybody's mocking him

SPEAKER_00: or pulling these clips and making these like clips of his claims about robo taxi sure he was too optimistic about that maybe he's too optimistic about optimist whatever it is like he'll figure it

Chamath Palihapitiya: out i think the timeline for robo tax is like one to three years depending on the city of the regulation

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SPEAKER_39: into some like tesla q anti-tesla i'm like guys i own the first model s ever made i'm the 16th tesla ever made they're in my garage you know 20 feet away from me right now where i'm sitting i'm the biggest tesla fan in the world and um it's just you have to be realistic of like it took five or six years

SPEAKER_48: for waymo to get approved in each city and to figure out all the edge cases and he's doing this probabilistic model which means it's it's going to be able to navigate anything anytime anywhere but in the short term it's not going to understand like oh the 290 or the 405 has this exit closed in the way that waymo does with a deterministic model and then they're all like freaking out but they they all make videos incessantly then they're quoting it guys i believe in tesla obviously but i do think every single person who's doing self-driving is going to take one two three years one to three years to get approved in each city and i don't think waymo is going to be able to like snap their fingers and turn on new york either maybe it takes waymo 12 months in new york maybe it takes some six months whatever no shame in the safety driver game we'll get there when we get there folks um and that's not me talking my uber book you know uber is going to be just fine um but i do think optimus is going to shock people when he does figure it out and maybe it's version five maybe he's on version two right now or three but they will figure it out and i i i'm trying to think of an area in the world where this doesn't have a dramatic effect on everything a dramatic effect on everything on the planet i could see optimuses there could be a million optimus robots working at

SPEAKER_00: amazon in a very short period of time uh and alex looks like we have a question from our live audience if you don't know we do the show live you get about 20 extra show and you get to hear us do

SPEAKER_39: technical things and you know uh you know pull up stuff from producer claude um but uh there was a

SPEAKER_24: question i think from the audience yes here it is so could there be a world where you can get in trouble for interrupting autonomous driving and how would that work yeah it would work like anything

SPEAKER_40: else a ticket you would get a ticket so some places like drinking in public is not allowed you get a ticket and if you pay off and you pay a fine um yeah and just like you would probably get a fine for

SPEAKER_00: lifting the gate on a railroad or you know when i first moved to santa monica

SPEAKER_39: uh i was there actually i was in it was before i moved there i was there with a rented car i was late for a lunch i parked on one side of olympic boulevard and the lunch was on the other i parked

SPEAKER_110: i got a spot i jump out of the car i walk across the street whoop whoop oh that's the sound of the police i get pulled over by santa monica good we see a driver's license you're jaywalking

SPEAKER_39: i said i'm jaywalking you get jaywalking i said you give tickets for jaywalking he's absolutely he said you're from new york because i had the accent back then and i literally handed my thing and i said i am so sorry sir i am born and raised in new york it's my first or second it's my second

SPEAKER_00: time in california nobody told me if people told me that jaywalking wasn't a thing here i looked left i looked right i looked left again there were no cars anywhere yeah in new york city we play frogger

SPEAKER_39: guy laughed he uh he gave me the ticket anyway he said well now you're not going to forget here's

SPEAKER_119: your ticket i didn't thanks yeah well no of course not but i i do i say throw around the garbage i'm paying this goodbye bye oh god somebody's looking it up right now i'm gonna get dinged for the fine

SPEAKER_14: but do you think that a fine is going to be enough of a negative incentive to stop kids from doing things

SPEAKER_07: that are disruptive because there are fines for i believe in providence like unmuffled motorcycles and cars and doing donuts in an intersection to make a lot of noise to annoy everybody we have a police force here we pay a huge chunk of the city budget for it and every night at an intersection near my house it is like i'm at nascar and so i think we need bigger fines like i should be allowed to hunt you with a paintball gun and i think we should expand that to people who abuse self-driving

SPEAKER_121: guards it's easier you don't have to take your paintball gun out all you got to do is talk to

SPEAKER_40: your neighbors and set up a camera and then just submit the video to the police uh on a usb drive via certified mail put your complaint in give the driver give the license plates and say this is my

SPEAKER_00: first this is my second and then the police once you've documented it the police take action i know this from past experiences i won't talk about here but having had situations where i documented stuff with the police and sent it by via us certified mail and sent it via fedex and then followed up

SPEAKER_39: with a follow-up i haven't heard from you this is my second follow-up hey this is my third follow-up

SPEAKER_00: would like to hear from you this is my phone number because now they have to see ya because if that car spins out and kills a person or a dog or press property damage and then you have

SPEAKER_48: given it to them i know police because i come from a cop family uh extended family especially you once somebody is documented it i mean you got to cross your t's in your eyes or it's going to be on

SPEAKER_122: you whoever opened that envelope whoever took the report does not want to get dinged all right but

SPEAKER_06: not quite as fun as paintballing but what can you do all right jason next on the docket um clement from

SPEAKER_07: hugging face a company that you and i both know as an online repository of open source ai models um argues that apple is not in fact a complete dud in ai as we have said on this show i think about 14 1500 times but instead is actually doing quite well now the argument here is that because apple's

SPEAKER_06: put out a couple of targeted models usually made for on to my on-device ai inference that they're not falling super far behind a couple of recent examples are fast vlm and mobile clip 2 the second generation of that i have notes about these models for us but i'm just really curious is it enough for a major technology company to build models for a niche use case and to seed the market for general purpose ai or is apple making a strategic error here and i'm a little bit torn so i kind of wanted to get

SPEAKER_07: your perspective on what's the best way for apple to approach this you know um number one

SPEAKER_39: hugging face is a great company i love such a great company yeah it's so great that they're like

SPEAKER_121: you know organizing all this and coleman has found his voice on the x.com platform so i highly recommend following him i'd love to have him on the pod i've invited him he just told me he's very busy

SPEAKER_00: so we need to get that uh not producer claude for this but producer oliver let's get that worked out um open source is a huge advantage if you're behind i believe the stuff apple's working on is open source um i could be wrong but i believe these are all open source models uh that they're doing and if they are in fact open source that makes a lot of sense to me because if you think about what's in

SPEAKER_40: apple's wheelhouse it's creatives that's their biggest strength so photographers video editors

SPEAKER_48: graphic designers that's the wheelhouse right it was originally the creative computer if you were a business person you had microsoft office windows here apple you know creative do that now it's the two platforms do business equally well maybe not video games equally well but they do um you know almost everything equally well but you give the advantage to apple for creatives it is the standard right

SPEAKER_07: i just want to back up what you're saying here jason i knew that the open elm model for them a small

SPEAKER_100: language model was open source but i've just confirmed that both mobile vit and fast vlm are also

SPEAKER_09: open source so yes apple has been using a lot of small targeted open source models but open source

SPEAKER_00: so apple makes money through elegant beautiful hardware devices if those devices um are so uh sought after and they get more features and more functionality then people don't switch off of them and they get

SPEAKER_40: locked into that ecosystem there's a duopoly in the united states in the world of android and ios and ios

SPEAKER_00: i believe ios is up to are they up to 60 market share in the us now it was like a big moment maybe five years ago when they tipped over to become top market share and what this showed was uh price was not the determining factor for a smartphone purchase people did not care about price they cared about features they cared about design they cared about the velocity of it ease of use the family features you know all that kind of stuff and they've just built a better operating

SPEAKER_121: system so what's their market share up to now i'm curious in the eyes now we're all familiar with

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SPEAKER_139: that's right aws.amazon.com startups credits according to a stat counter july 2025 data ios has

SPEAKER_07: 59 percent market share in the us so just under 60 and it it gyrates month to month jason but

SPEAKER_93: call it just under 60 percent well thanks for to producer claude for uh finding us that source and

SPEAKER_07: producer claude is very very fast and thanks to our friends at anthropic for that you know we covered them in the news as well but they also make great stuff just for us on the show fantastic

SPEAKER_121: and uh we'll give you a discount code later uh you can get 50 off all their stuff they gave us a nice discount code to share so this is brilliant on their part if the community of open source and startups

SPEAKER_00: and other folks start working on mobile vit and open elm and those things get an edge like the chinese

SPEAKER_48: ones have um you know this could uh put developer momentum and ideas into that project and then they don't need to make money off of this they don't need it to be proprietary they need to know how to

SPEAKER_00: integrate it perfectly into their ios and um mac os ah okay i disagree i think on on both counts jason

SPEAKER_07: and here's why one i think apple's growth era from hardware is behind it we've all seen us reach peak smartphone i don't think people are going to start buying more laptops i my imac that i've had for a couple years is fantastic don't need to replace it so i do think they're hunting for software-based growth this is why they've been focusing on services so in the future i wouldn't be shocked if apple's subscription consumer offerings had some ai components to them that's useful and then the

SPEAKER_06: other thing is i really do think you're right if we're going to keep smartphones the way they are today then building small models that you can run at the edge to do on-device inference processing are useful i just think that the row of apps era of smartphones is fading and that companies that have

SPEAKER_14: a stronger general ai model they can use to build a more compelling os from the ground up kind of like instead of adding you know ai to salesforce what if you built salesforce with ai from the ground up i think that second class of future smartphones is going to be better and i think apple runs the risk of making essentially a better google search and getting crushed by a perplexity if that makes sense

SPEAKER_109: okay so a bet is emerging here a bat is emerging so based on what you're saying

SPEAKER_00: you believe the app interface is going away don't disagree that people will spend more time in the

SPEAKER_121: chat interface or the voice interface i think we all agree with that apple and alexa and siri and all these things were kind of like the false start or the tip of the spear there that's now being wedged

SPEAKER_00: open sure i think i would have to set odds with you okay so what are the odds that a new entrant takes 10 of the smartphone market away from android and ios in seven years based upon an ai first phone so it's a very specific kind of bet here

SPEAKER_146: so repeating this back to your new entrant so not android takes 10 of the smartphone market away

SPEAKER_07: from the combined ios and android share right and this would be predicated on ai first phone and this is a seven-year wager oh i'm gonna go 100 okay you got 100 okay 100 100 okay i'm gonna take the other

SPEAKER_39: side of it i think it's just really hard to crack this habit in seven years so we'll put that on the docket and put it in the calendar i'll put it under 100 bucks and uh here we go there's another hundy i'm

SPEAKER_24: gonna win from alex man at this rate i'm gonna go broke no oh my wager here is optimistic because

SPEAKER_07: i want this so i'm kind of betting okay for the thing that i i'm trying to manifest thank you jason i i needed that zoomer that zoomer phrase okay um all right i i the one thing i'll say is i i

SPEAKER_39: i agree with you that it's possible that is it apple one that i pay a hundred bucks a month for now twelve hundred dollars a year for my family so between the five of us i guess i'm paying 20 bucks for

SPEAKER_00: you know music and everything i mean pay for everything um yeah if they added like ai photo editing to that and that was part of it sure i do think that the reason they're investing in this stuff is to get people addicted to making images and videos that you cannot make on the current generation

SPEAKER_39: of phones and laptops so i'll take the opposite ah i think what they're trying to do is break

SPEAKER_00: and to antiquate to antiquate to make to purposely make all of our devices obsolete because they cannot

SPEAKER_32: run these ai models efficiently enough to get the value and then the next 20-year cycle of laptops or a 10-year cycle of laptops and phones will be based on having enough power in to run these models

SPEAKER_00: and um that to me sounds like a good bet but there's two ways for them to win

SPEAKER_07: well that's why apple's worth several trillion dollars they're not playing single lines here jason they're running multiple bets but i i just think that apple has been too conservative i mean

SPEAKER_06: even if they made siri fan even if they made siri fantastic even if siri was every bit as good today as open ai's chat gpt voice mode i would still be worried about them because i don't think they're going

SPEAKER_07: to be able to actually rethink their smartphone designs they uh we've been talking about folding phones for years from samsung and apple is rumored to be working on one for the future well blow me over ladies and gentlemen excellent finally my iphone can have a crease in it that's what i've always wanted from i from cupertino well done they're kind of fun i you know i have my pixel 9 fold and i i

SPEAKER_40: find it fun um you know it's 10 to 20 percent of my mobile phone usage i'm lucky enough to have the budget to play with you know to have two phones because i feel like i need to as an investor understand the latest and greatest i always keep an android phone i always keep an ios phone hey

SPEAKER_00: speaking of innovation and new models grok's coding model i saw was breaking out so how do we keep up

SPEAKER_07: with this folks i mean well you listen to this week in startups ladies and gentlemen where we keep you informed all right so uh on friday on the show we were talking about grok code fast one and jason i said look the data's early but it does appear to be a hit people seem to be using it the gist here

SPEAKER_24: folks is that it's very very fast high tokens per second and incredibly low cost a dollar 50 per

SPEAKER_07: million output tokens over the weekend we saw the model absolutely become enormous for a while just it became the number one model on open router and keep in mind that we're talking about over a trillion tokens processed over an open router per week so quite a lot of usage volume here the thing is i wanted to phrase this frame this in a way for folks that it made more sense because if i tell you jason uh 200 billion tokens yesterday that's a little fuzzy like what does that mean so i ran the math on how much revenue that is to put into kind of brass tacks for folks now there's a couple of

SPEAKER_24: assumptions in here i tried to figure out for a coding model what is the average ratio of input to output tokens because that matters for the overall profit mix and basically we're going to run a 75 25 output to input ratio so three to one all right so per every 100 billion processed tokens on a grok

SPEAKER_07: code fast one using that split it works out to 117 500 in revenue so if they did 100 billion tokens

SPEAKER_06: per day that would be about 120k in revenue which is a lot less than i expected i think doing the math and then i ran the math again uh the same usage breakdown same hundred billion tokens for claude

SPEAKER_24: sonnet four works out to 1.12 million dollars because that model costs about 10 times as much now when i ran the math last night claude uh sorry grok code fast one had done just under 400 billion

SPEAKER_07: tokens and so that was about a half million dollars in revenue for xai a breakout model massive usage

SPEAKER_06: but it's so cheaply priced they're kind of undercutting themselves was my takeaway

SPEAKER_110: yeah i think when these new technologies come out one way to get people's attention and i think i said

SPEAKER_48: this on friday is to be disruptive in pricing and you know that was airbnb and uber's model disrupt the pricing and yeah that's clearly what they're doing i guess we have a guest today do we have a guest we

SPEAKER_172: probably have them waiting here listening to the show maybe we should have our guest on

SPEAKER_07: yeah all right so next up we're going to talk to scale social now this is a company jason that you are actually a little bit familiar with because they went through founder university back in cohort 10 and what they do is they put out qr codes at local businesses that people can scan and then they upload a video of them saying they enjoyed the place that they're at then scales social takes that make it into an automatic socially ready clip and then it runs it as a geo targeted social advertisement creating a flywheel to bring in more people to get more testimonials to create more advertisements i love it please welcome to the show it's run bin dong hello from iceland thank you

SPEAKER_40: so much from iceland where there's nothing to do but work on your startup you're inside a 10-day trip

SPEAKER_00: yeah oh no you're on vacation beautiful beautiful here yeah um you know when i heard the idea for what you're building and i'm not sure when i heard it um i was like this is brilliant because doing an advertisement for your product or service um you know that can work but in my own lived experience

SPEAKER_183: you see me using that woke language alex my lived experience okay i do love it when you go full of

SPEAKER_00: woke because i know it's driving your friends nuts in my lived experience uh i get a lot of information about places i want to visit in japan or new york or la in short videos now to the extent uh to such an extent that i have on my instagram and tiktok accounts and i've started to make these public

SPEAKER_32: things to do with kids in austin uh austin bakeries austin steaks and barbecue but when what you're

SPEAKER_48: building is trying to find people who authentically went to the business had a great experience and

SPEAKER_00: start a flywheel going and then use that as advertising this is so complicated and nuanced and takes a lot of work that i don't think the sushi restaurant or the barbecue joint or the laser tag or they're not going to have the time to do this so maybe you could tell us a little bit about how it's worked thus far and then what's in it for the person who writes the reviewer makes this short do they get compensated how do they get compensated walk us through this maybe show us

SPEAKER_187: yeah absolutely um this idea actually came out of my experience delivering dumplings door-to-door

SPEAKER_54: so you were dumpling delivery guy yes shanghai dumplings the crab and pork ones those are ones i

SPEAKER_191: like um made by my mom so okay very good yeah i spent my career in corporate but um had a chance to build a handmade dumpling business with my mom um she was a retired uh restaurateur and we wanted to keep her busy and we eventually sold the business but one thing that just kept coming back is why is it so ridiculously difficult to market your brand authentically uh food influencers were a thing but to your point

SPEAKER_187: they could be paid and uh the magical moment was when our customers were actually text and or you know send us videos of their own dumpling making experience and so we're like why can't we build a solution that

SPEAKER_194: does exactly that at scale and i think it's very nuanced from that perspective um so having the operator

SPEAKER_00: mindset helps a lot and do you wind up paying the reviewer and how do you engage the reviewer that's i think the little nuance i'm curious about how you tested that or started that process because i might find it a little weird you know to get an email from the restaurant or from you hey you wrote a review on yelp or google would you make a video or you find their video how does all that contact with

SPEAKER_191: the individual work yeah so that was actually one of the biggest challenges early on um i think a few things happened covet and toast and how toast tabs and ordering through qr codes became a thing in the restaurant industry and so when we thought of our solution we said okay well can it be qr code based

SPEAKER_187: because people are already very very familiar with it and two can we make it so lean whereby there's no app download so it's essentially a web app and we've designed the entire experience to be just three screens we've had internal battles about making more features and ultimately we just come back to this

SPEAKER_07: okay it works okay so then when i'm in a restaurant i see the little code it's on the table i'm eating my my dumpling my pizza whatever it is and i go this is fantastic and then i scan it and then do i record a video inside the restaurant i'm just trying to think through the actual consumer process here

SPEAKER_191: that's exactly it so you scan the qr code and we'll prompt you to share your experience

SPEAKER_187: you will literally take photos and or short-form videos inside the restaurant and immediately we evaluate your content live using ai and we'll be able to prompt you on whether it's a great quality content maybe you can try again but ultimately they will get a perk right away from the restaurant

SPEAKER_32: it's instant gratification instant gratification you you studied bf skinner genius so what is the reward a cocktail uh an extra dessert what is it so it could be anything that the restaurant owner wants

SPEAKER_176: to give out for that location it would be a free side a free drink turns out giving away alcohol is

SPEAKER_210: illegal in certain states okay um two for one might work but okay got it so that's their compensation

SPEAKER_211: and you tell them hey can we use your video in our promotions for our restaurant and scale social

SPEAKER_191: owns that copyright um they effectively give us the data and one thing that we are super interested in

SPEAKER_212: is analyzing all of that contextual data and giving additional insights back to the operator there's

SPEAKER_54: just so much data how much do you charge and how do you charge the restaurant what's the sales pitch there i'm always interested in we got the consumer side but now you got the business side you're

SPEAKER_00: creating basically like a marketplace for testimonials so brilliant so much work how do you charge the

SPEAKER_39: restaurant we know how you paid off the user they got a free you know dessert whatever fantastic worth it for them to do a little testimonial they probably enjoy being on video what is the restaurant do they just pay a sas fee or something or they pay per video how do they pay it's a sas fee so for quick

SPEAKER_187: service restaurants it's a thousand dollars per location per month and for full service restaurants so a proper dining experience is two thousand dollars per month per location you know what i love about

SPEAKER_216: this alex is that this is a founder who knows their worth okay two out of three people are going

SPEAKER_32: to say that's too expensive but the one out of three are going to say okay sounds great let's go 12 000 a year 24 000 a year yeah we make three million dollars here if you can get us 10 more you're an idiot for giving us this tool okay so let's beg the question then if you're gonna charge

SPEAKER_06: premium you got to show them the goods how do you handle analytics and showing roi to these small

SPEAKER_24: business owners because i know if you run a small business you pinch a penny very very tight absolutely

SPEAKER_191: so our ideal customers are franchisor brands in quick service and full service so there are proper

SPEAKER_176: marketing teams in place and one of the historical challenges for this segment is imagine you're a

SPEAKER_187: subway owner as a franchisee you're contributing about three percent of your top line revenue to the franchisor brand that goes into a marketing fund every single year and you constantly are wondering what are you doing for my location you could run tv ads for all you want but how does that translate to my specific business in pittsburgh pennsylvania we helped them bridge that gap because we could take that video and literally land it in that three five mile radius of that location love it so you use

SPEAKER_01: tick tock or you use instagram stories what's the most effective for restaurants so we're all channels

SPEAKER_187: across facebook instagram google search display and we also have a fairly proprietary relationship with one of the largest ad exchange networks in the world so they serve up billions of ads that gets us into the long tail of advertising thousands of super local websites can you show us can you show us some

SPEAKER_229: stuff just give us a little tour of uh or maybe show us a couple videos that performed well absolutely

SPEAKER_230: so we have tons of super personalized videos on our website um this is due for a huge upgrade upgrade

SPEAKER_187: as well but what you'll notice is this is very tick tock like there's not a lot of filters being applied to it and it showcases a lot of people and this is where our algorithms are actually teaching us something new when we first started the business we're like oh we should show burgers and pizzas turns out people don't care they don't care about burgers and pizzas they care about seeing other people the magical moment that comes back is when one of our clients literally texted me on whatsapp it's like hey guess what like i had a customer who came in the door saying that they

SPEAKER_239: saw their neighbor in one of your reels wow that's so that's powerful what i also noticed here is i'm

SPEAKER_39: looking at mizuki on the top right it's an asian restaurant good food great people an epic hibachi

SPEAKER_32: and then there's a like people are having fun they're smiling they're writing stuff on fire my kids would love to come to this and when i see that i'm gonna get interested i'm gonna get curious and um

SPEAKER_00: you are doing all of the classic like putting a logo and doing good cuts so there's post-production

SPEAKER_245: being done here either by ai or you know maybe tweaked manually but you have that source material to

SPEAKER_176: work from yeah that's right and we collect um on average about 100 pieces of content every month

SPEAKER_07: so how long does that take to get to that pace because i presume runbin that not every restaurant sees such quick uptake from the qr code it's like what's the qr code hits the tables to you have enough

SPEAKER_176: to do an ad for them what's that lag like yeah so we actually baked in a 14 day free onboarding period

SPEAKER_187: right so again understanding the operator's mindset they don't want to pay for something until it's up and

SPEAKER_191: running during those 14 days this is where we designed the qr code we literally shift these

SPEAKER_187: cards to their front door we handle everything and so all they have to do is to put it up so here

SPEAKER_01: i see campaign performance july 2025 this is like a dashboard and you can see the person got 345 000

SPEAKER_00: in reach uh they got 1100 clicks their click-through rate was 0.32

SPEAKER_48: and wow they got 17 orders you do close the loop as alex was saying and restaurants must be over the moon

SPEAKER_176: huh they are in fact this is a unique client um we started working with them in july so we're two months in um their general manager just got a company-wide shout out because her store performance is up 104

SPEAKER_187: percent year over year compared to the same period last year amazing and it's unique because they don't do any online orders even though you know we still got 17 we absolutely optimize for people to visit their physical location so this is uh right outside of a college campus and also inside food court in a mall which is historically very difficult as a business and look at this amazing pitch from

SPEAKER_39: gamma.app one of our partners a beautiful beautiful deck gamma app is amazing so tell us a little bit

SPEAKER_54: about the program which one did you go to i think you went to founder university yes absolutely how did you find out about founding university which cohort did you go to f 10 11 9 it was the past the previous

SPEAKER_191: cohort just summarized yep so you went to f10 tell everybody how you found us and what the program was

SPEAKER_176: like and why you chose to do it yeah so my co-founder kid is based in seattle um ex amazon and uh she had met lucas at one of a local event and so we got the word from the event and we applied right away um great

SPEAKER_187: experience overall we just learned a ton through the programming and it also gave us enough space to just keep building and getting traction from a revenue perspective so it was a really nice healthy balance whereby the programming isn't overwhelming it's sort of like hey here are the guard rails here's what you should really listen to and dial into and by the way we're not going to take up your time in really building your business and traction right and so that balance was actually critical because

SPEAKER_01: we literally accelerate our revenue through that this is important note alex when we built the program as a former founder myself and i'm a founder now right building this venture firm with this early pre-accelerator found university and accelerated launch accelerator which was like you know yc or tech stars

SPEAKER_00: what we learned was we don't want to burden the founders we want to be wildly efficient founders most pre founders most precious resource is their time and after that it's their money um and so we you know we try to do something on monday night you learn some content we'll have a partner a speaker etc and then on thursday we have you get together with a pod and we you know have

SPEAKER_39: like a round table discussion with 25 other founders and we kind of go like deep into the granularness of the of the business and you get to hear other founders and what they're struggling with

SPEAKER_00: and also how they're succeeding this makes it not lonely being a founder is lonely and going and finding 25 other founders to spend your time with that would be a full-time job in itself so we basically pop up a little what they would call these mastermind groups and we do it all for the very low price of 500 and if you come all 12 weeks and don't burn the seat you can request to get your 500

SPEAKER_39: bucks back you know we encourage people if they don't want to take it they can just give it to us and that helps us run the program but we have 300 people come to this program uh 300 teams and we pick the

SPEAKER_00: teams with great track records product velocity we like builder founders so you had two founders uh runeban yeah in your company three three three i have a technical founder as well so you have a

SPEAKER_187: technical co-founder how'd you meet them so paul my technical co-founder were um he was introduced

SPEAKER_39: through a vc friend oh amazing so you networked into finding them and then what's your skill set other than

SPEAKER_176: being awesome and visionary oh this is actually the crazy story i built my career in product and health

SPEAKER_187: care so i've worked on telemedicine platforms genetic testing startups um and this is sort of a i can't get rid of this idea kind of passion whereby you know the dumpling was just inception of it all see this

SPEAKER_238: is one of the keys alex and um for my editor my editorial director air director lon we're rewriting

SPEAKER_48: making like a 3.0 of the curriculum charlie cutty jackie kelly we have so many people who've contributed to this giant curriculum and i'm i'm gonna actually teach the next one myself personally um and we're breaking it down into like the 12 most important components and why do people start startups is one of

SPEAKER_00: the initial things i'm going to talk about and you have the um personal experience and vision uh itch you

SPEAKER_48: need to scratch this is one of the key things sometimes the founder just is so obsessed a founder

SPEAKER_00: obsession with something like dumplings and then they want to honor somebody like their mom this is so powerful as a concept now you would look at this and be like oh it's a sas tool for small businesses who cares you know what ruined being cares and that's all that matters the fact that you care means when you come to work every day you don't need the motivation i love doing this show because i like hanging out one like hanging with alex i tolerate producer oliver he's he's getting his act together he's i mean it's tolerable he's he's working his work in progress yeah more work to do um okay now to my team you met lucas he got you into the program fantastic it's competitive to get in like 10 of people get in then another 10 we invest in so from application to funding it's one percent every week we ask people to send in what they accomplished that week remember elon saying alex

SPEAKER_40: what did you get done last week five things baby five things right now the government's not doing it anymore rip doge i guess um this concept of what did you get done last week was something elon and i

SPEAKER_00: talked about just when we were kids when we were both 30 years old in the early 2000s of just startup cadence like can you can you get something done in a week for the love of god just get something done

SPEAKER_48: and you had to send in those reports you send them in and then the fact is we read them and the fact that there's somebody else reading it and giving you some feedback even if it's just a attaboy at a girl how do they them whatever it is whatever you're into it's fine with me um i'm really proud of the

SPEAKER_00: work you've done get social scale.com is the url and uh remember anything i can be helpful with as we

SPEAKER_172: wrap up here any any uh any question you might have or or blocker you have that we could share with the

SPEAKER_187: audience to help everybody learn together yeah i do actually um been thinking about that so as we fast forward this concept um say three years from now um in effect what we're doing is we're digitizing a word of mouth marketing right and so we are building the core infrastructure for that to happen and the way i like to think in analogies it's almost as though we're building the stripe

SPEAKER_176: for authentic marketing we're having to really educate our clients because we're trying to create

SPEAKER_187: an entirely new category do you have any advice for companies like ours that's really trying to control the narrative and creating that narrative and category in the in the meantime as we build a

SPEAKER_121: company absolutely fantastic question some people manifest the market to exist that didn't exist

SPEAKER_00: before airbnb would be one of them the idea of couch surfing like unless you were a weirdo on craigslist you didn't know what that was getting in another person's car taking a ride share from sidecar lyft or

SPEAKER_39: uber was alex as you know that's a big jump for people to make there's a bell curve of people adopting technology which alex will pull up in a second and there's a group of people who are called early

SPEAKER_00: adopters some people will refer to them as the vanguard tip of the spear now these people they

SPEAKER_48: love new technology because they see it as an advantage because in the past they've used new technology and they've experimented with it to solve a problem and had a good experience then there's

SPEAKER_00: a group of people you know who are laggards they're not innovators they're the other side and then there's the late majority you know in some cases that might be your sibling who buys a tesla 10 years after yours did they hear you talking about it it could be the early majority

SPEAKER_48: of the late majority but the innovators that 2.5 percent those are the ones that will um just try your product because they're so enthusiastic and not only will they try it they'll give you 50 good ideas they'll pay for it i buy everything i buy the pixel fold if i use it and i like it great if i don't it goes in a draw i sell it i gift it whatever i don't care i consider it a cost of doing business the laggards in the late majority they are going to hand ring forever and so you have to teach your team to sort these people and the way you've done that is by having a bar pricing um and hey um you've

SPEAKER_00: also studied your customers and realized they're savvy they don't want to pay for it while they're learning

SPEAKER_48: so you gave them that 14 day trial very savvy don't waste your time on people who don't want your product or don't understand it yet focus on and identify where your most innovative people are and what they've used in the past the people who will love your product are people who've used toast what a great thing i heard you say earlier if they use toast that means they knew what a qr code was

SPEAKER_32: you don't have to explain it they know the value of it because now they don't have to have any as many

SPEAKER_01: waiters which are hard to find you just need runners runners don't need to speak english runners

SPEAKER_32: don't need to be charismatic they need to run the goddamn mozzarella sticks before they get hard

SPEAKER_00: to the table that's why they're called runners and that revol toast revolutionized restaurants where you could have three runners and then one manager come over and say oh how is everything oh yeah great um and you know you also got rid of this trying to flag down a reader the people using toast understand efficiency they understand customers they're customer obsessed so is there another equivalent to toast it might be the person who puts a cold brew tap in their restaurants right some people might put a cold brew tap in their restaurants or a kombucha one which means they're part of the vanguard they're the innovators they want to try new things and delight customers so it's really that simple uh canva is the perfect example of a market that manifested itself they manifested photoshop for people who don't want to learn photoshop and spend a thousand dollars on you know uh adobe you know no offense to adobe's suite of products but they're complicated and they're for professionals so they said what about the other 95 of human beings uh let's manifest that so what i do think you need to think about is the next group after you perfect this group you don't want to get the team distracted but you as the founder should be thinking what's another big ticket item that a

SPEAKER_48: personalized recommendation from somebody in your town would get people to buy well if you did it for a car company there's new car companies out there one of them is called scout another one's called the

SPEAKER_00: grenada if you had the people who own these cars making videos and you convert somebody this thing's got a ten thousand twenty thousand dollar these costs a hundred k man if you get them to do this you could ask them for 24k a year plus you could say we'll do a hundred k uh consulting for you to help you get this going you could give us your client list we can email the client list the clients could get a special backpack or a piece of merch for doing it and we would like you to give us a thousand dollars in affiliate fee three thousand dollars in affiliate fee every time one of these go what if you sell 10 a month now you got a 500 000 client so just start thinking big ticket what about colleges people want to know about colleges oh i chose to go to ut i chose to go to this college and i made some videos about what it's like those high paid colleges they might pay for something like this and they might give you like they give a spiff to people who get full fair chinese students or singaporean students they will give them like five or 10k these brokers every time they land something so i just want you

SPEAKER_280: start thinking about that you just telegraphed a deal that we're working on it's rv campers

SPEAKER_40: oh smart smart smart smart smart well here's the thing i've been at this for a while and if i seem like i'm really smart you don't need to be smart you just need to do a lot of meetings and listen and

SPEAKER_00: get curious to go full circle from the beginning of this you don't need to have 160 iq you just need to talk to people with 160 iqs or people with 100 iqs who are gritty doesn't need to be pretty

SPEAKER_40: but it does need to be gritty runbin i'm so proud of you i'm so excited to be on the cap table sky's the limit here get back to work okay thank you you got it i salute you sir it's been another amazing episode of this week in startups uh today's tuesday we had the day off but we got the wednesday show

SPEAKER_286: coming we got a friday show coming incredible stuff coming god i love my job

SPEAKER_06: i i love i love doing this because it's never ever boring to talk to founders before the show

SPEAKER_07: you weren't even here yet runbin and i were just talking about league of legends in china like i mean it's just founders are such dynamic interesting people they never fail to be an

SPEAKER_00: espresso shot to the brain absolutely and they uh you know the biggest uh thing for me was you know when he when he went through that diligence thing just this weekend i was writing to my team about the purpose of the diligence to keep it in mind to make sure we communicate it to founders and then what a great testimonial i'm joining your syndicate so i could put 5k into startups because that's like the minimum i think we do is like you put like as little as 5k in which you'll never get on the cap table of a startup unless you can write a 50k 100k check they just won't take your check but with the syndicate.com we'll have 20 people put in 5k or a hundred we'll have you know 200 people put in 4k whatever it is and we'll put 800k into a promising startup again 80 fail 90 fail so only bet and invest

SPEAKER_48: money you can afford to lose but he was like hey if you diligence us this much and you've helped us this much hey the inventory uh at the syndicate.com um you know it's probably pretty good if you are an accredited investor the syndicate.com you can go sign up kelly and maddie are running that and they do a great job and uh we now have a 50 person investment committee we call it the deal committee alex i haven't uh disclosed this publicly yet but 50 of the most engaged members of the 11 000 person syndicate of which i think 4 000 have made an investment now meet every week they sort through three or four companies a week i think two or three four depends on the week and then they um will do pre-commits and then we decide whichever one gets the most pre-commits we'll send to the rest of the syndicate and then i ask them to give candid feedback we put that together and then we give it an aggregate to the founders if they don't make it through uh the deal committee and so they get some good feedback

SPEAKER_14: and they know when to come back right i i love that also i've dropped by a couple of the um syndicate hangouts and done some talks with them super nice people jason just the nicest

SPEAKER_54: producer oliver just um found my internal message and i don't think i have any spelling errors here

SPEAKER_00: because sometimes i write these when i'm like running around the ranch smoking a cigar and shooting my gun or uh cutting the grass but uh here pull it up on a monday on labor day when you're supposed to work that's why they call it labor day folks hey who was here at nine o'clock

SPEAKER_24: last night preparing the docket that's my it was me because i'm having a third child and i feel poor anyways here's the intern sorry that was not supposed to be a a stopper uh jason explain to what's on the

SPEAKER_32: screen here okay this is our slack there's me uh from uh probably 15 years ago with my hands up like

SPEAKER_00: it's a very iconic picture of me taken at um i think gnome decks remember chris perillo back in the

SPEAKER_54: day uh huge nerd uh a nerd ball as we say is the technical term and he you know like does star wars

SPEAKER_40: characters but he used to do this like nerd conference i know it was geek con or something and he asked me to speak and i spoke at it up in seattle and that's me going like what the

SPEAKER_00: so i use that as my uh internal flag which is me so in wtf and it says at here our dd process due diligence at seed is twofold one educational for pink and red flags insurance accounting contracts we are educating folks on what will happen in series a rounds the punk rock successful founders choose speed over being accounting nerd sorry mike sovino who is my internal accounting nerd my first boss uh he's a general partner at the firm to identify major red flags for discussion i am missing found with 35 invested engine major lawsuit so we can advise them how to fix them that's it that's why we do the due diligence process not to slow things down or back out of a deal we don't want to back out of deals when we have conviction i saw this thing it's a great clip of um not charlie munger um warren

SPEAKER_110: buffett warren buffett and he said you can talk yourself out of deals if you know it's a simple business they're pulling oil from the ground you get a 35 coupon you know you got your thing and he's like you don't have to be like a genius you know they're like they're like statler and uh lon

SPEAKER_48: help me out here statler and from the muppets maldorf they're like statler and waldorf and you know they kind of sit up there and they answer questions once a year and it's kind of a little bit of a

SPEAKER_110: a stick i like it and he says listen i don't need to be a genius to know that if you got this shell thing and it's a layer after layer of free money and you drill down and you take it and this is like smart people and the person's an engineer running the company and they give you a 35 coupon there's not some diligence i don't want to block the deal you just make the investment and the diligence is

SPEAKER_48: the diligence what it is and i just saw this week and i was like i gotta remind my team and i just ran to my slack and just put this in here because like the job of leadership at the end of the day alex is to

SPEAKER_00: repeat yourself over and over again so people really understand why you're doing things we

SPEAKER_40: do this thing here this week in startups three days a week so that we can help founders uh and find founders and geek out um and change the world we'll see you tomorrow we'll change it a little more this week in startups he's x.com alex cautious optimism.news throw him a hundy please folks he's who's got a third kid on the way we'll see you next time bye bye