SPEAKER_00: let's face it our industry's general hospital is open ai at this point it is the soap opera of our

SPEAKER_03: industry yes but like all good sitcoms we started somewhere things happened and we ended up exactly

SPEAKER_05: where we started off to begin with so there we go ladies and gentlemen open ai part 495 i think

SPEAKER_06: next week tomorrow on general open ai hospital we need some dramatic shots

SPEAKER_12: when in doubt talk about open ai because there's always something going on this week in startups

SPEAKER_15: is brought to you by 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.com twist linkedin ads to redeem a 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com this week in startups and equinix the equinix startup program offers a hybrid infrastructure solution for startups including up to 100k in credits and personalized consultations and guidance from the equinix team go to equinix

SPEAKER_21: startups.com to apply today hey everybody hey everybody welcome to a very special edition of

SPEAKER_24: this week in startups i am so excited that alex wilhelm is joining us today not as a guest but as our new co-host and we've got a ton to talk about you know alex has been on the program god at least a dozen times doing these round tables at least and um i've spent the last four or five years trying to get him

SPEAKER_27: quit tech crunch and crunch base and join me here and finally you decided uh it's time so welcome

SPEAKER_29: as co-host not just guest no i'm incredibly excited to be here i freaking love podcasting i love business i love startups i love talking about it honestly jason and i've been kicking it for a long time and so now

SPEAKER_31: we're gonna do it quite often news round tables interviews we have a whole slate of things planned

SPEAKER_33: for the show it's gonna be absolutely awesome and it's great because you and i have uh a great back and

SPEAKER_35: forth a rapport uh on these subjects you're a challenging person to do this with because your knowledge level is so high usually in these discussions i'm up against you know somebody who maybe is deferring to me hey you have more experience you you have tons of experience in this you've been covering this at tech crunch crunch base and everything in between so it's just really great to have you here and uh i'm i'm really excited for a great summer twice a week minimum

SPEAKER_37: news yes and we'll do it live sometimes and so if you have questions join us in youtube linkedin or

SPEAKER_38: twitter he's at alex i'm at jason think about that i mean we both have our first names on x which is

SPEAKER_40: just evidence of our uh intense nerdery and the fact that we've been doing this for a very long time

SPEAKER_29: i will try to live up to your kind words um but the good news is there is so much going on already

SPEAKER_43: even for this early in the week yeah so why don't you tell everybody what's on the docket today and

SPEAKER_03: then we'll go right to our first story yeah okay so first thing we're going to talk about today is

SPEAKER_05: open ai equity clawbacks and essentially when you can talk smack about your former employer and how to do damage control live then ai revenue we have some data on the consumer side we'll talk about what's going on on the enterprise side of things i'm a little bit surprised to see how well consumer is doing compared to business we'll talk about that then there is a big deal in cyber security showing that there's a lot of consolidation going on not a lot of ipos but we are seeing some movements in sass that i want to talk about then uh jason wanted this in the show today how much are founders paying themselves and what is reasonable i think he'll have a couple of things he wants to say about that and then venture interest in crypto and then we're going to do a very quick tease and a reminder to everybody that this is nvidia earnings week everyone's going

SPEAKER_02: to be tuned into that jason but i think we have to wait until wednesday yeah and i think we should

SPEAKER_33: probably go live right after that that might be a fun thing for us to do because you and i love to geek out on the 10 q's and kind of read the tea leaves in these product announcements and financial quarterly announcements uh there's just so much information buried in those docs and it's a lot of fun because you have the scoreboard of the stock price you know as a backdrop as opposed to private companies where you know the valuations don't change all that often let's get into this open ai equity issue because this brouhaha this uh donny brook has been going all over twitter and social media and tech meme everybody's got something to say about this because i think there's a wider issue here and let's face it our industry's general hospital has is open ai at this point it is the

SPEAKER_12: soap opera of our industry yes when in doubt talk about open ai because there's always something going

SPEAKER_05: on so there's there's two things going on here jason one there have been a couple of exits from open ai including on their post super alignment team people thinking about privacy and safety we'll get to that in a second but when one of the people exited vox wrote a piece describing essentially an agreement inside their exit deals with their former employees that if there was any disparagement ever they could get their vested equity clawed back and why does that matter and also vested versus unvested how common is this set up amongst other companies that you've seen yeah so

SPEAKER_33: this is common and it tends to be reciprocal so it's not as one-sided or as bad as it sounds first of all when you leave a company and it's on good terms bad terms whatever it is a company can

SPEAKER_35: decide that and you can decide it's double opt-in here in america and we're talking about the american

SPEAKER_33: market okay it doesn't work out whatever the reason the company might say hey you know what we'll give you six months of severance and we'll vest you know your remaining two years of equity all

SPEAKER_37: we ask is that you don't trash us publicly when we give you this pile of money uh or potential future lottery tickets and the other person might say you know what screw you i'm gonna write a tell-all book which they probably signed an nda on the way in that they can't do that but this is kind of like a confirmation at the end hey you signed an nda at the beginning to not trash us

SPEAKER_24: we're not gonna trash you it's reciprocal so therefore everybody tends to be okay with it what's the reason why this one i think caught people's attention is twofold one the never-ending drama that is open ai sam being fired rehired did they discover you know uh general intelligence all this kind of stuff and that they could claw back and take back that money yes that is the part that's got people a little bit tweaked what would be the reciprocal effect alex if the company trashed you so the company trashed you do you get more money do you get something in this case no so this is like

SPEAKER_21: a little bit overbearing if it's your equity and you earned it they shouldn't be able to claw it back but there does need to be some sort of something has to occur there has to be a a cost to trashing

SPEAKER_60: the company or form a boss if you agree not to right and the company so my question is there's things

SPEAKER_03: that exist in in legal terms and paperwork that we all sign and most of us don't read and then there's

SPEAKER_05: what's actually applied in the market so if this sort of setup is relatively common in terms of

SPEAKER_03: people writing it down and signing it how common is this actually to see put into practice because sam altman of open ai said one i didn't know this was happening two we've never clawed back equity vested equity is just that vested so to me is this like a thing that was buried deep in the docs that

SPEAKER_05: no one even knew existed and therefore wasn't used and therefore it's a pr issue or do some companies actually claw back vested equity which to me doesn't seem right or fair i have never heard

SPEAKER_33: about vested equity being clawed back the only exception would be fraud so let's say you stole something you misrepresented your revenue numbers you i don't know physically attacked another employee i

SPEAKER_37: mean like really crazy criminal stuff you you know like dark stuff i could see them trying to wipe out your equity even if you did that in the let's say somebody went crazy and literally beat up somebody at work i mean this that's never happened right but let's say that happened somebody loses their mind if you tried to claw back their equity and got into a legal battle over it i don't think you'd win even in the case of a criminal assault charge i don't think you'd be able to claw back their equity

SPEAKER_64: so this is like more embarrassing and bad optics than it is reality to answer your question

SPEAKER_29: i think also it was a bigger story because one of the people who left was on the safety

SPEAKER_03: and security side of things and so people thought maybe they were being muzzled by this and they're you know it's the kind of sam altman emperor palpatine meme type thing that he's behind the scenes pulling all the strings in reality i think there is some tension at open ai about how to approach safety i know you have a perspective on that but i do think that this equity issue is going to get sorted and hopefully goes away because i think we should have robust healthy debate and not kind of

SPEAKER_05: uh people worried about losing their meal ticket essentially because i don't know if you've heard this jason but open ai is worth a couple of dollars so yeah people have been selling their equity in

SPEAKER_33: this non-profit for-profit hybrid we can get into that a bit uh at an 80 90 billion dollar evaluation i think thrive capital did a secondary and let people sell it so this non-profit or a theoretical

SPEAKER_35: non-profit is you know uh people have a lot at stake if 20 percent of it's owned by the employees let's say 30 percent i mean it's 25 million dollars 25 billion dollars sitting out there um split up amongst

SPEAKER_71: i think they have 500 or a thousand employees it's not that many employees for the amount of value created

SPEAKER_05: especially given how fast they're growing and we'll talk about that in a little bit but yeah i'm just

SPEAKER_29: glad that this is being sorted out and we can put this particular episode of general hospital behind

SPEAKER_03: us but like all good sitcoms we started somewhere things happened and we ended up exactly where we

SPEAKER_05: started off to begin with so there we go ladies and gentlemen open ai part 495 i think next week

SPEAKER_06: tomorrow on general open ai hospital we need some dramatic shots

SPEAKER_29: i get that mixed up with house and house is the one with the doctor who like did too much drugs but yeah discovered cool things in general the other one's more like this relationship-y soap opera one

SPEAKER_77: right i just remember in the 80s my grandmother would watch these things it was just like a fascinating thing to me that some people stayed home during the day and there was like some sort

SPEAKER_24: of television broadcast television targeted to addict people who were staying home with their kids and i think that's what soap operas were well that explains a lot about generation x and how they

SPEAKER_03: were raised and what they consumed now yes you know we'll see a little bit later what happened to the

SPEAKER_67: tech talk generation but i guess gen x was the general hospital kids if you will listen a strong

SPEAKER_82: 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 sock2 what is sock2 well any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be sock2 compliant if you don't have your sock too 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 sock2 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 percent on compliance costs and vanta does more than just sock2 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 twist that's vanta.com twist for

SPEAKER_33: one thousand dollars off your sock 2. i mean it's my favorite trend on tick tock right now is they've

David Friedberg: summoned gen x and like gen x is now coming out and being like we're the f somebody said i there was like all started on this woman with pink hair said like i think we could all agree gen x is the worst

SPEAKER_87: generation ever and then every gen xer was like we're latchkey kids we were free range kids we were kicked out of our house yeah you know we bled on the streets yada yada yada we don't care about and like then the millennials got in between the millennials or whatever and they're like no no

SPEAKER_90: no no don't stop in gen x yeah leave gen x alone they're crazy they are very independent and they

SPEAKER_03: have a lot of perspectives and they actually had some pretty good music to back it up yeah leave them alone that's my take i i the generation thing i think is useful as a fun like i don't know rubric or heuristic or whatever but don't get in between them because it is a lose lose lose lose battle yes yeah what is not a lose lose lose battle though is what's going on with open ai and their revenue

SPEAKER_05: in the wake of last week's announcement uh jason i know you talked about this on i think it was on

SPEAKER_02: all in and also on this show i have played with uh gpt for oh have you had a chance to actually dig into

SPEAKER_33: it yeah i've been playing with omni uh and yeah it's pretty cool i i haven't been able to get the omni companion where it's running on your desktop and you can show it your desktop working yet because i have a corporate account and i guess it's not released to the corporate accounts yet

SPEAKER_35: which seems counterintuitive to me okay um but the product seems like it's getting better and

SPEAKER_24: better and they are working more on the user interface and i think that's like the most interesting part of this is we are now in the phase where building the language model

SPEAKER_37: and indexing the world's content and consuming all this content and being able to regurgitate it and give you some interesting sometimes delusional results okay interesting fun to play with but when you start getting into you know being able to turn it on talk to it and have it understand what's going

SPEAKER_24: on around you this gets really interesting and i think consumers are starting to see the use case and as you build that use case with consumers then they're willing to pay for it if you

SPEAKER_21: pay 240 a year for this as a business person and you get but one good idea let's say you and i as

SPEAKER_24: writers we summarize a podcast we ask it for background on you know nvidia's history and it gives us like reasonably good content or we give it a an old you know nvidia video and say summarize this and time stamp it like that kind of stuff is worth twenty four hundred dollars you look you were given a research assistant who gets paid 30 bucks an hour yep you know that work and so you and i being in editorial and journalism know like researchers get paid 30 bucks fact checkers maybe 40 bucks

SPEAKER_33: and it if it does that man that's pretty significant and you will not churn and that's really the issue is will you cancel your subscription because you're not getting a lot out of it i subscribe to

SPEAKER_35: everything claude poe this and now i'm starting to look at it and saying well which ones do i actually need right and and that's i think the phase we're going into right now is do i need this is it essential or can i use the free version because now it's free when you do a google search it summarizes stuff

SPEAKER_103: at the top and i think 3.5 is free without login so yeah but i mean maybe it's just the the inner nerd

SPEAKER_03: in my soul but like if there's gonna new ai model i must have it like i'm not gonna sit back here and be like well you know it'll come out in six months okay like dune 2 came out i have a small child i have to wait to see dune 2 until i chose up on my tv and now i'm gonna watch this weekend

SPEAKER_05: very excited but with things that i can control i am going to buy them immediately so i have a personal um open ai account that i pay for and my dad loves it actually um so i got to tinker with

SPEAKER_03: this the the spoken word element of um gpt for omni fantastic like it's unbelievable yeah if you brought that four or five years ago and showed it to someone they would think it's fake it's

SPEAKER_33: impossible there's no way it is fantastic i explain why this is better in your mind as a consumer than

SPEAKER_03: siri i don't mean to be a a mean and unkind person but siri is hot garbage and it has not gotten better

SPEAKER_05: in okay here's how how long siri has not been good i was living in chicago while i was going to university and one of the co-founders of siri came to chicago where he was from and gave a talk about selling the company to steve jobs right since that point i do not think siri has gotten materially better whereas

SPEAKER_03: llms have been improving at a simply almost organic exponential pace yeah and so to me the ability to

SPEAKER_05: talk to something that can understand what i'm saying and converse with me means that i am one step closer to being able to talk to my computer and do things very quickly that can accelerate my overall process and that's why i didn't put it in today's show but microsoft's new copilot plus pcs are once again drifting in that direction i can see a world where gpt for omni plus voice plus some stuff built into windows and suddenly your pc that you use can do a lot more and hopefully our iphones too but that's why i'm excited about it because it's better and it's getting better faster yeah and if you i talked to

SPEAKER_35: sam about this on all in i think um the cb problem is the big problem with siri and alexa you know you're like hey siri give me driving instructions to get to this place i just activated my siri or alexa do this

SPEAKER_37: or okay google do that yeah and then you know you have to be like over and then it does this thing and then your kid says oh do this don't play this song or like you get interrupted and it just never works and you're waiting 60 seconds for it to come back to you if you have to wait more than three or four seconds you could have typed it and you could have gotten the search result already so that's what i benchmark it against is this more suffering and pain than typing the address into ways you know or my

SPEAKER_38: tesla's you know google maps and it turns out most of the time siri is slower than me just typing it in

SPEAKER_05: also sometimes you'll be like siri give me directions to my spouse's work and it'll say okay playing kenny g now on apple music and you're like okay great i don't think that's quite what i had in mind no uh but a couple data points on this so tech wrench had some news up about um how big of an impact this new model is having on open ai and the thing that really got me kind of going here was that they have seen net revenue on the mobile side so chat gpt mobile um rise from about 491 000 a day to about nine hundred thousand dollars a day now we all know that open ai is a big company now it's doing billions of dollars in run rate but here is a dramatic increase in the amount of money consumers are paying from their own non-corporate accounts to use this stuff and to me that shows that what we are talking about is not technology that will work in five years it's technology that people are willing to pay for now and that to me is the market something that really does have as we say in the startup

SPEAKER_71: world pmf it just it just does it's strong product market fit and it's actually what we call deep in

SPEAKER_38: the industry market pull so andy rackliff uh co-founder of benchmark and wealthfront who's been

SPEAKER_27: on this program a bunch of times he talks about market pull that's when the market wants something and they're calling you saying i'll take six right you're you open up your bakery and then somebody

SPEAKER_24: shows up is like yeah i need a hundred baguettes you're like what for it's like i have a restaurant down the block boom you got market pull these baguettes are great it reminds me of the iphone

SPEAKER_131: i skipped iphone 14 i went from 13 to 15. before that i would buy iphone 3 iphone 3s iphone 4 iphone 4s

SPEAKER_24: iphone 5 iphone 5 i mean i bought every single update so i think this technology is so compelling and moving at such a fast pace i agree with you you must keep buying it and playing with it i have set

SPEAKER_37: my action button on the iphone 15 which is that like button above your volume that takes you directly

SPEAKER_33: into an app when i press that what it does is it takes me directly to chat chippie ah look at that

SPEAKER_60: and the reason i did that was i really want to have this experience like her in the movie where i just

SPEAKER_35: talk and talk to it and when i'm driving with my kids again like oh they'll ask me a question about like

SPEAKER_136: a bag yes okay it's gonna be okay chappie you just told me they're experiencing heavy load

SPEAKER_29: speaking of product pull right there i mean if they're saying sorry guys we have too many people

SPEAKER_138: that want our stuff right now there's no more baguettes for you navigating the b2b maze can feel really tough huh you're trying to hit the mark with all those top tier executives you want them to pay

SPEAKER_140: attention to your enterprise product but where can you find all those big fish the whales the ones who call the shots make buying decisions for corporations for startups and everybody in between well here's where linkedin ads is going to solve that problem for you and i've used this it is one of my secret weapons linkedin means business business equals linkedin in people's minds when you're on linkedin you're in the business mindset so you're going to really be thinking about business products and services you're open to those opportunities and linkedin recently passed a billion users 180 million of those billion are senior executives 18 but hey we all know about the one percent 10 million c-suite executives that's your cfo cto cio these are the people who are always looking for a new product or service to make their organization run better but they are on linkedin that's why linkedin's ad platform delivers two to five times greater return on investment compared to other social media platforms so easy to understand why this is because this is where all the business people are and they're in that business mindset super easy call to action make your b2b marketing everything it can be and get a hundred dollar credit on your next campaign go to linkedin.com this week in startups to claim your credit that's linkedin.com this week in startups no spaces no dashes terms and conditions

SPEAKER_60: apply because they're giving you a hundy it's been great when i'm in the car with my kids we're driving to

SPEAKER_35: tahoe or something about a bunch of time they'll ask me a question about something and i'll be like oh yeah tell me the history of ireland or tell me about this and it's pretty fun you know to have that

SPEAKER_38: assistant there and so yeah i mean kudos to them i think it's a million dollars a day it looks like app figures are saying their revenue is getting to and that doesn't even count the enterprise side which we have enterprise chat gpt at launch yeah so we pay for everybody so now that you're paying for your personal you're going to have a launch address and you'll also have it from the company i'm

SPEAKER_29: trying to actually make those two play nicely part of my day today was getting all my stuff turned on

SPEAKER_03: and set up and so forth but i mean again i i'll happily pay for just because my dad uses my account my personal and just can't get enough and he is not a tech guy so that to me is another element of this works for folks who just want to do stuff and get things done but here's my question that i don't have as good a visibility into as you which is how well is the enterprise side of ai doing because when you think about every company in the last 18 months has been talking about adding ai or we've been

SPEAKER_05: doing ai for 10 years etc etc etc to me i can easily see it in my life that consumers cannot get enough

SPEAKER_145: of this stuff and some companies like launch sure but how well is the enterprise side of like this new ai technology that's being imbued into every piece of software how is that performing i don't know yeah i think

SPEAKER_146: it's a mixed bag some people you know are just not going to use it like i remember when i started in it in the late 80s early 90s some people at that time boomers basically had an assistant like what

SPEAKER_37: we would call a secretary with a pc and they had an office with no pc can you imagine going to work with

SPEAKER_35: no computer in your office it's like what did you do all day i think you just wrote things down on paper apparently things on paper you took phone calls and you took meetings like that's what an attorney did

SPEAKER_37: and then typing was something that a secretary or the typing pool literally there was a floor with just people who typed and that was a career typing yeah and proofing was a career a lot of the things

SPEAKER_24: that we like look at now are like wait i have grammarly and that makes my i mean it's incredible what ground we does and you and i are writers i don't know if you've ever had grammarly give you a suggestion you're like yeah it's pretty good actually nicely done today for the first time i use

SPEAKER_05: grammarly for the first time in five years because again setting up my computer for this show and stuff and i was like oh actually all right fair enough it's pretty good although it does not appreciate if you're speaking in like shorthand in a note stock for a podcast sometimes it likes to say things like that's terrible grammar and i say uh no but still it's a bullet point you know it's i'm trying to be terse here grammarly yes um but i will say going back to the consumer side of things did you see the news that they have pulled one of the uh voice voices of the new uh gp i did not see that oh yeah they pulled sky uh which is one of the women and they said this is not scarlett johansson's

SPEAKER_03: voice that we have instead it is a actress that we have used to create this voice imprint and they but they had to say it's not scar joe and so i presume that there was a um a call from someone's

SPEAKER_05: legal team saying hey we think you have stolen our voice uh but they're working on that but i i gotta

SPEAKER_31: say i went through each of the different voice options and they're all pretty good yeah uh

SPEAKER_33: speechify is a cool product i use that will follow you around the web and read web pages to you so if you know i sometimes you know how it is we're in front of computers all day i just like to have

SPEAKER_35: something read to me or i'll send it a pdf and it will read it to me when i'm on the treadmill going for a walk or driving and it's had this for a while a voice that's presidential they call it clearly barack obama and then they have one that's gwyneth paltrow and i was like holy cow and i asked gwyneth like did you approve this yeah i did it with them like four years ago so you can have gwyneth paltrow read you the wall street journal or a barack obama-ish impersonator um but yeah this will i think on the enterprise side it's a no-brainer when you're doing research like if you were to ask

SPEAKER_38: it i don't know make me a marketing plan right for a new podcast or write a press release about

SPEAKER_33: alex joining this week in startups if you've never done those tasks as an employee it's going to start

SPEAKER_37: you on third base basically i'm not saying it's like the finished product but if it's starting you on second and third base hey how do i plan an event for a hundred people what should i think about and it's like location ambiance theme av and you're like oh i didn't think about ambiance and theme or gift bag i hadn't thought about that so it's kind of making everybody by bionic right now and what i want to be able to do is have multiplayer mode and we don't have that yet but imagine you and i sharing a space right where we're talking to the ai together and i think that's what sax is doing with glue ai is it's kind of like slack but the ai's in the room with you so if you and i were

SPEAKER_24: working on show notes and let's say we're doing something like um the history of blackberry we decide we're going to do a retrospective on that we could be talking to and say hey when was blackberry formed and tell me about the funding and what were their initial products and how were they received and it

SPEAKER_38: goes out to the web and gives us bullet points and you and i are in a thread with the ai now you start to think about how valuable that is when the ai is on the zoom call the ai is in the slack room or in glue ai that's where i think this is all headed which is the ai's are co-workers right and they're

SPEAKER_24: going to seem like like not very sophisticated co-workers at first um like maybe c-3po to luke skywalker and han solo and then all of a sudden they're going to seem like transcendent

SPEAKER_21: where they're like telling us what to do right and i think we're on that journey i think it's going

SPEAKER_03: to be incremental but but quick and so i think it's going to feel like we're going to look back in five years we'll have gone by and we'll have these amazing tools but i bet you it's going to be kind of like a step function each time but that's still really fast because we are doing really quick things here and so i'm just i know there's worries about ai in a number of different ways deepfakes

SPEAKER_05: and developing economies around elections and so forth lots of things to think about but fundamentally technology has found a new path to go faster now and after we've all gotten a little bored of mobile a little bored of new iphones i think it's great that there's something out there that is pushing the boundaries making people a little scared and also hopefully giving us the next thing like that can help us do a lot more faster because we don't have enough people so more productivity is

SPEAKER_60: going to help a lot yeah i mean doing more with less is going to be the theme i think if you look at

SPEAKER_33: to make this brass tacks you know uber hasn't added employees like i think their net new employees is flat for three years so you know people leave people get hired but just net net i think it's three years flat i think airbnb is very similar but those companies are growing at 20 or 30 percent revenue so if your revenue is going up 20 30 percent year over year and your headcount stays the same how is that efficiency

SPEAKER_35: happening well software businesses should be efficient but i think a big part of it is ai and globalization and that means these companies are going to be able to do more with less which means what happens to everybody else you got to go start more companies you got to go solve more problems in the world and god knows there's a ton of problems in the world to be solved

SPEAKER_172: okay cloud computing has revolutionized startups over the past decade you know that but the reality is hey a fully cloud-based solution is not right for every startup sometimes a hybrid solution is your answer like if you're working with sensitive data that can't be trusted to cloud or if you need to connect to multiple cloud providers at once or maybe you just want a much more cost-effective solution in that case you need to check out equinix equinix metal will give you direct access to physical servers but you still get all the benefits of the cloud so no need to rack and stack your own servers no equinix provides on-demand infrastructure in over 25 major cities and here's the best part they have an amazing startup program for you the equinix startup program offers personalized consultations and guidance from the equinix team and of course you'll get up to a hundred thousand dollars in startup credits so here's what i want you to do head to equinix startups.com to apply and when you apply james from equinix is going to reach out to you directly that's equinix startups.com to apply eq u-i-n-i-x

SPEAKER_03: startups.com i could come up with quite a list right now things that are keeping me up at night but the good news is is that people are working on them and they are paying themselves as they do this

SPEAKER_05: and this means i get to bring up my favorite topic which is how much your founders pay themselves jason we've never never answered this question once in the history of people talking about startups so let's talk about some data from pilot who collected a bunch of different bits of data from founders in different geographies and different fundraising tiers you might say debugging companies so we can see a little bit better and i i pulled a bunch of the data for us here i'm curious which of the numbers that we have in front of us sticks out to you the most as the most either insane or the most kind

SPEAKER_46: of like that feels right to you got it yeah so pilot's a great accounting uh partner for a lot of

SPEAKER_33: our startups and so they actually have data so this is in this sort of zone where like carta or angel

SPEAKER_35: list release information in aggregate uh and it generally is pretty accurate it's not the whole picture it's a subset but i this does trend this does look to me to be accurate because when founders asked

SPEAKER_33: me this after we raise their they raise their seed round what we say to them is you should take the least amount of money possible to live without fear you know comfortably so that as much money goes into the startup and the product and everything as possible right if you want max revenue with the least downside you go work for corporate america and they pay you you know as much as possible and

SPEAKER_35: you leave and you're a free agent but when you're an owner it's like owning the nba team versus

SPEAKER_60: playing for the nba team one you're trying to optimize for salary one you're trying to optimize for the value of the enterprise so if you are optimizing for the value of enterprise and you

SPEAKER_35: raise a million dollars well you don't want to pay yourself 500k you want to pay yourself you know a 5 or 10k a month draw that's what i typically see at startups in the first couple years they pay

SPEAKER_37: themselves 5 10k a month which equals 60 to 120k looking at this data it turns out i'm exactly right um startups 100k to a million 90k max 600k that 600k is like some weird abomination like nobody should be

SPEAKER_03: yeah it's a fat finger and someone when they're filling in the survey information made a mistake that's that's my take of that number because yeah if you raised 100k and you're paying yourself a

SPEAKER_186: 600 000 per your salary you're gonna have money for like 20 minutes i think yeah yeah it doesn't

SPEAKER_37: pencil out so and then you look at the next one one million to 2.9 million raised median

SPEAKER_24: founder salary buck 25 and that seems right to me in your startup you should probably be like i don't know the 10th most expensive person as the founder the sales executives you're also our developers yep you're like savant product designer ux wizard like they should all be getting paid 200k or 150k or 250k um you know if you're a five million dollar startup but you're the thing that this doesn't take into account is also globalization and like hiring people offshore um or work from home people remote people which i think is the bigger story here founders um generally are don't are founders in

SPEAKER_21: silicon valley at least generally um half of them don't have kids yet and they're not married and they don't have mortgages so their burn rate is low yes now once you have two kids private school a mortgage

SPEAKER_24: you know maybe you got a spouse or not you know now your nut might be 30k a month 20k a month and so an exception is generally made in those cases when somebody goes to raise money if that person isn't

SPEAKER_33: well to do and they've already made their money you know vcs might be like okay we know going into this that this person needs to get paid 400k a year just to cover their nut and it seems crazy but those founders tend to be more seasoned they raise more money they have an easier time getting to

SPEAKER_35: profitability the sweet spot for founders actually is like 35 to 55 years old everybody thinks it's young people it turns out like success rates are much higher in that group and much lower in the other group we just remember the zuckerbergs and the gates it makes for better movies if you have

SPEAKER_05: someone who drops out of stanford or pick another one of the schools but what's interesting to me about this data is that it doesn't actually go up for a long time so for startups that raise one to 2.9 125k median 3 to 5 million 124k median and then for startups that raise 5 to 10 150 so really it stays flat for a long time although once you raise over 10 it does go up to 194 according to pilot but really it plateaus and stays it's less elastic than i expected it to be and this becomes a board decision

SPEAKER_33: when you get to those levels once you've raised over three four or five million you start to have a board the board then manages compensation when you're in year four five six seven what you want to do as a board and this is a question that wasn't asked or isn't taken into account here is what should you do after the founders are fully vested it's year five companies making five ten million dollars in

SPEAKER_35: revenue yeah what you want to do is tie their revenue to the performance of the company so everybody's aligned which is what elon did with his pay package famously and then had it taken away and now they're trying to restate it which is hey if the stock price goes up you hit this milestone dara from uh uber has a similar thing like when it broke 100 billion he got some great you know slug of equity it's kind of hard to fake that it's hard to fake your public market uh valuation because the people who are buying that are the sharpest pencils in the class right they understand like the reality of this business so what you really want to do is um as a board make sure that

SPEAKER_24: you understand what the person's personal financial situation is and then have it make it so they're not distracted i'm always in you know when we get asked for money hey can i get a raise you know the the conversation or can i sell secondary the number one goal is to keep the founder focused and the stress of running a business is enough they don't need to have mortgage stress or private equity private education stress or other stressors in their lives take that out so that they can just

SPEAKER_38: you know and then if you're starting a company you're a young person lower your burn rate like

SPEAKER_24: literally if you've got a bmw payment and you got like a three bedroom get a studio you know go public transport or you know get a used prius for 10k lower your burn so that you don't have to worry and be a

SPEAKER_201: slave to this uh nut that you're chasing every month also the thing people forget is that once

SPEAKER_03: you have a lower burn rate and you have more money saved you have a bigger middle finger to give to anybody you don't want to work for work with listen to like i mean it is the it is the hack around the annoying bits of capitalism so yeah keeping your burn rate low is fantastic although if you say private school one more time i'm going to start having nightmares on the show because i recently learned

SPEAKER_203: how much money you can spend on kindergarten in first grade and it's about as much as i paid to go to

SPEAKER_204: university it's kind of crazy yes this uh i'm a product of the public school system and then i

SPEAKER_33: went to boy scout high school for like 2k a year in the 80s and they gave a discount of like 500 less for each one student so i think my older brother was 2000 i was 1500 and my little brother was like 500 or

SPEAKER_60: 750. they really worked with you the the catholic school system uh but yeah it gets quite expensive if you go that route and if you have multiple kids it can no man yeah it can get crazy i i think of it

SPEAKER_67: this way i already pay property tax therefore i should get uh just they should go public school down

SPEAKER_60: the street it's free well it's free and then this is why i think not to make this a political show but you and i have political things so we we don't want to not talk about them i think the voucher system and

SPEAKER_33: creating competition for education is just a great idea if you're paying taxes into this pool

SPEAKER_35: and the public school in your district isn't very good and you can get 14k because i think the average is like 14 000 is what we spend in the united states 15 000 i mean it some cities might be 20 and then some places in the south that might be 10 like lower lower cost of buildings and salaries but why not give that to parents and they're like oh because then it's going to crush the public system it's like maybe they need some competition if they're not doing so well as long as there's

SPEAKER_05: similar accreditation standards across um uh charter schools and normal traditional public schools i'm sympathetic to that but to me it comes down to what the implementation of it because as i think you and i both know when it comes to large expensive government programs if you don't get the details right you can create a bigger mess um but i i do think that i think the providence schools are so bad the

SPEAKER_72: state took over so a little competition wouldn't hurt i don't think i'm here for it i'm here for it too all right let's get moving all right so i grabbed a cyber security deal uh jason do you know cyber arc or

SPEAKER_05: venafi just offhand i do not tell me good because i had to like look these companies up the reason why

SPEAKER_03: i put this into the show notes uh one it's a 1.5 billion dollar deal um essentially cyber arc is buying venafi from tama bravo so private equity but the thing is i was going through all the the

SPEAKER_05: releases the company's doing about 150 million arr which means that this is a 10x arr deal and that means it's a double digit arr multiple and founders used to get those for breathing back in 2021 now as we've seen it's much harder to get and secure this especially at scale yeah and so i was curious why is this company uh exiting for this dollar amount and i did some parsing so here's my hypothesis one nearly a hundred percent recurring revenue so this is a serious software business this is not

SPEAKER_92: services this is not crap they're kind of pretending as ar it's real quality revenue quality revenue

SPEAKER_03: and then also a business that isn't too expensive because they said that it's going to be margin

SPEAKER_05: accretive on a non-gap basis kind of from the get-go so it's not a trash fire of red ink and then also it adds 10 billion or 20 to the new parent companies tam in their view so future growth yeah in these

SPEAKER_35: situations um the acquirer has a thesis they have a plan and we don't know what their plan is but let's say uh when cyber arc buys this what they may have done is look at uh vanafi's uh client list they look

SPEAKER_33: at their client list the overlaps 20 it's an 80 that they already have their you know sales team going out to lunch with and taken to playoff games and whatever and when you introduce this new product

SPEAKER_35: they've penciled out oh well we can triple the revenue therefore we can quote unquote overpay for

SPEAKER_218: this so when youtube was bought by google they penciled it out and they're like we already have

SPEAKER_37: servers like we're going to save all this money on server infrastructure we got global so we can run youtube to every country we've already done that we've got servers and teams in korea and japan and australia and all over the place when you buy a company if you have a way to monetize it at a higher

SPEAKER_24: scale quicker than the original company you can pay 10x 20x it doesn't matter it's funny money because you'll just boom instantly put them through your distribution system and distribution really matters we've seen this when like slack got bought by salesforce now there's like they took the two lists of here's people who buy salesforce here's people who buy slack there are a bunch of people who didn't overlap those are potential customers and the integration with salesforce and slack theoretically could get really tight i don't think it did um but anyway that's typically what happens here is the acquirer has some thesis like facebook buying instagram okay you cross post your posts

SPEAKER_38: from facebook from instagram to facebook all these old people on facebook we don't know what instagram

SPEAKER_92: is now go open an instagram okay but i want to go back because you described 10x as part of the funny

SPEAKER_05: money bracket i mean jason 10x arr was conservative like 18 24 months ago but now you're describing that as pretty expensive am i reading your comments there correctly that 10x is almost like an aspirational

SPEAKER_29: like ar exit multiple for technology companies of scale because that's what it sounds like to me um

SPEAKER_33: i think we're going to see the multiples in sas go back up um as yeah i think we'll see that um i think we bottomed out and you know because there was a great sas consolidation that occurred yeah where you know during the down market of 2022 into 2023 when the market collapsed um two things happen one head count went down remember all those layoffs well if you lay off 30 of your team or like you know uh

SPEAKER_35: there's 30 000 less people or 40 000 less people working at microsoft facebook uber airbnb those people don't need grammarly those people don't need salesforce they don't they're not in slack anymore so you have this incredible headwind that all of the sas companies felt at the same

SPEAKER_24: time then some cfo says you know what boss wants to save some money we've got 400 sas products it's going to be 200 yep and then they just go to everybody can you do this feature in this product and so something like coda or notion you know if you were using let's say asana nothing wrong with asana great product you can kind of do that in notion or coda so then the boss says can we do that encoder or notion project management or to-do list or whatever great we don't need the full strength version of asana we'll just go with that or vice versa asana does something that you know some other product does and so that's where you're seeing a lot of these sas products add adjacencies yep and

SPEAKER_05: they want to be the last sas standing i think that's dead on and actually when you go back and read this particular acquisition this vanafi deal they said that it's going to help them create a unified platform for machine identity security at enterprise scale but exactly that and also bessemer a venture firm that i'm sure everyone listening to this is familiar with uh in the cyber security space which is what we're talking about in this deal said that the growing trend is major players are increasingly turning to product only acquisitions to build platforms and so everyone's trying to get a little bit broader a little bit deeper and so that we don't get bumped off as a point solution when the cfo says hey we are going from 400 to 200 and so it's almost like sas musical chairs leading to consolidation that's great i'm sad that we're not seeing more startups go from zero to ipo because that's what i really want to see but at least we're getting some deals out of it we're learning from it and so that's kind of why i wanted to talk about this i think cyber security is especially

SPEAKER_03: ripe for consolidation so i bet you i don't know lunch that we're going to have two before more of these

SPEAKER_33: in the next couple totally yeah i think palo alto network says a lot of acquisitions a lot of these like what i'll call single and doubles you might call them tucking acquisitions under a billion in revenue way under lena khan's radar she's got bigger fish to fry you know and and frankly you know like it's kind of boring and you're not going to get any headlines going after this israeli cyber company that's trying to make people safe and it's a little billion dollar acquisition 500 million

SPEAKER_35: dollars who cares we got microsoft google we got scary people who are impacting the world in their

SPEAKER_37: mind that need to be controlled and reined in breaking news coming in about the scarlett johansson

SPEAKER_27: her voice maybe you could read this for us alex breaking news we have a breaking news story here this is a first for alex's co-hosting here it's in the slack room uh you can pull it up

SPEAKER_05: breaking news from scarjo breaking news from scarjo so quote last september i received an offer from sam altman who wanted to hire me to voice the current gpt 4.0 system he told me that he felt that by my voicing the system i could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and ai he said he felt that my voice would be comforting to people after much consideration and for personal reasons i declined the offer which means the scarjo has plenty of money because i'm sure open ai was showing up with the dump truck money nine months later she goes on my friends family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named sky sounded like me when i heard the release demo i was shocked angered and in disbelief that mr allman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference mr allman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional tweeting a single word quote her a reference to the film in which i voiced a chat system samantha who forms an intimate relationship with a human briefly two days before the 4.0 demo was released mr allman contacted my agent asking me to reconsider before we could connect the system was out there

SPEAKER_03: then she says hired legal counsel letters written to altman and then they've taken down the sky voice

SPEAKER_67: as we mentioned earlier okay jason i have views about this um yeah uh you can be a scamp you can be a rogue you can skirt the rules when you are small not famous and not rich as hell as open ai is what were they

SPEAKER_37: thinking this of course they were going to get in trouble for this i mean it's we keep having these instances occur and you remember the rumors of why sam was fired the first time were and we talked about

SPEAKER_35: the scandal on all in were like hey this deal making right like this he's a consummate deal

SPEAKER_37: maker i've known sam for 20 years he is a great deal maker he talked elon into put co-founding open ai and putting like 50 million dollars in right like um and then he was in the middle east not raising seven trillion that was like a mistake by the press they probably were looking at them

SPEAKER_24: tam the total addressable market of chips whatever the future projections of how many we sold and they thought he was raising seven trillion but it's still a lot of money he wasn't going there for

SPEAKER_201: yeah he's probably raising a billion or two right to make chips or whatever fovs and and and whatever

SPEAKER_24: putting all that aside you know if you're a great deal maker sometimes you can maybe um what's the word uh scarface would say get a little high on your own supply kind of situation and this feels

SPEAKER_37: like that which is like okay she doesn't want to say yes she doesn't want what i would think is 25

SPEAKER_35: million dollars i'm guessing they offered her whatever she got for black widow times two i remember scarjo had to sue disney to get her black widow's money uh because they didn't release it during pandemic

SPEAKER_03: i think they went direct that that window of release and the royalties if you ever want to figure out more about that just look up hollywood accounting which i believe is a fancy word for fraud um but

SPEAKER_128: they like to play with the numbers that way they don't have to pay out a lot of stuff but anyways yeah he got a little high on his own supply here i mean it why why do this is what i would be thinking

SPEAKER_35: if she doesn't want her likeness and she made that or she wanted a higher price and you weren't willing to pay for it why would you poke the bear she is a high profile person yeah and this is just a bad look to be leveraging a person's celebrity making them an offer calling them two days before

SPEAKER_37: trying to get the offer done and then being like yolo you didn't do it we'll have ai make a fake voice that's similar to her i say not cool not cool sam you should just respect people's um there's a term

SPEAKER_24: there's a legal term for this which is a person's like right to their personality

SPEAKER_38: and a lot of us in podcasting who have become a little higher profile have to deal with this which is somebody will take a clip of me saying something this happened two or three times and then they go

SPEAKER_37: run an ad so i say something nice about a startup and then they will take it and then do a youtube ad on it and i'm like hey you can't do that without my permission and they're like but you said it publicly

SPEAKER_24: i'm like i said in the context of my show you're using me for this other reason that's not allowed and um the way she phrased this was very specific the confusion of the public is a test for this specific

SPEAKER_37: issue when the public is confused then you have a case the reason she said my family and friends all told me congratulations on this deal is she's setting up the lawsuit she's going to want now a settlement

SPEAKER_05: and a settlement they will pay her um i am certain well i mean all they have to do is call 1-800 satya nadella and make sure that the check clears but i mean just an unnecessary mistake and this goes back to your earlier i mean joke about them being general hospital this never-ending soap opera i mean here is a second rate in the face for a company that didn't need to step on any breaks they already have money and technology and momentum and they're they're kicking alphabets butt right now for as far as i

SPEAKER_03: can tell and they can't stop stepping on rakes and it's beginning to make it seem like i'm trying to find a way to phrase this jason without blowing up the internet but like maybe the board had a couple of reasonable points when they were a little peevish with mr altman earlier i'm not saying he should

SPEAKER_05: have been fired from the company entirely but i mean this is not a great look for someone who should know better because sam's not 21. he's been around the block he's run things absolutely and the fact that he called her two days before i think goes to show that there was some guilty conscience pricklings going on and that should have been enough to pull the plug on just one of the voice models they didn't

SPEAKER_72: even need this they had like five others yeah it's called the right of publicity um and you saw this

SPEAKER_35: come up with um i i brought it up with ads and stuff like that um but this happened with george uh carlin's estate suing because somebody made a a comedy special with george carlin you can't just do this stuff right uh and the people making deep fakes i don't want to even bring up taylor swift deep fakes because they're really disgusting and you know like it's uh they're sexual in nature and so it's super abhorrent uh there's like two levels there but the right of publicity is basically i i'm

SPEAKER_37: allowed to be jason calacanis or taylor swift or alex wilhelm you could be who you are and not be used by other people in commerce and part of the test is again is the public confused and here i think

SPEAKER_262: the public is confused but it's just it's a waste but i mean like like think about it we were talking uh 10 15 minutes ago about how cool technology is how fast it's moving how we're excited about it

SPEAKER_05: where is it going to go next what software is going to be baked into how is it going to change our life how are we going to work on it together and then we have to talk about scarlett johansson and and her likeness and royalties and that i mean i just i don't want to but we have to because it matters but it just it just he needs like the same may need like a new best friend to sit him down every like 10 days and be like that's stupid don't do that everyone needs that person in their life i

SPEAKER_33: have it i presume you do i and i admit for a number of friends where they just say hey am i crazy and i'm

SPEAKER_35: like yes yeah this time don't don't don't do that yeah go to your group chat hey um should i do this and he's like no i one wonders if this is an explicit strategy like trump to stay in the media and then sell subscriptions so maybe like creating all this drama and chaos keeps you as part of the cycle i don't know you know what they said in their um presentation the other week open ai

SPEAKER_05: that 100 million people use chat gpt they are the conversation already i don't think they need any help it's like if metallica put out like a new like water brand they don't need that to sell out a stadium just show up play guitar have some fun and go away in this case make an ai model sell it to me huzzah don't get scarlett johansson don't turn the public sentiment against you for no reason when

SPEAKER_31: consumers are paying part of your bills maybe is the best way to put it i was just talking to

SPEAKER_35: huberman about this uh because he has people um using him talking about different nutrients or whatever in their ads so he'll talk about hey you know you should this you know compound whatever is

SPEAKER_37: good for this reason help you sleep help you build muscle mass whatever they make an ad they put him in it and he's constantly having to sue these people who are making you know different vitamins and pharmaceuticals of like you can't use me in your ad just because i talked about vitamin d doesn't mean i'm a spokesperson for everybody and you know what he wins and he's winning every time

SPEAKER_274: so of course he's winning every time i just hope it's enough money to matter young people don't do

SPEAKER_27: this like i think some people don't understand the law you're not allowed to use other people to make money without their permission full stop whether it's authors whether it's disney are you taylor swift

SPEAKER_67: trying to get us into the open ai ai training data fair use because i feel like you're you're you're bringing us slowly slowly over to that part of the conversation i just think there's a general

SPEAKER_38: lack of respect in our industry for content and you know sam when he was on all in talked about how music they didn't want to do any music i don't know if you heard that conversation but he was very

SPEAKER_24: delicate around music and didn't feel it was fair i can tell you what that is in our industry it's known

SPEAKER_37: don't poke the music there they will come down on you remember peloton was using their music like oh they will try to get an injunction against you to stop your product from being sold in the market

SPEAKER_21: they're hardcore they're not like content sites or newspapers which have traditionally been like oh i don't know if we should do a lawsuit whether the new york times is doing it they finally stood up umg

SPEAKER_71: and sony will come and kick your door down and take your money and absolutely and i've seen it up close

SPEAKER_21: and personal with startups we have where like somebody uses music you know youtube did it other people you know they'll have music in their system and they're like oh yeah you're using music um

SPEAKER_24: here's your lawsuit and here's your settlement and you're like i think i'll do the lawsuit they're like great go look up the napster lawsuit we'll be here for seven years speaking of metallica i

SPEAKER_05: didn't think napster and metallic were to come up on the show today but hey here here we are um speaking about things that are a blast from the past though i want to talk just for a second about what's going on with crypto venture capital because i i it's coming back and it's not super crazy yeah so the data from pitch book indicates that uh 2.4 billion was invested into crypto companies in the first quarter of this year and that's up from a crunch based data point of 1.2 billion q4 of last year so a pretty quick ascent and coinbase is doing good regulatory clarity is coming around are we due for another crypto bull cycle i don't know but i never write them off jason because yeah

SPEAKER_92: i've been around long enough to not make that mistake i feel like there's bitcoin and everything

SPEAKER_35: else so if we just talk there's like bitcoin in the exchanges and there's everything else bitcoin

SPEAKER_33: store of value it's a unique one-of-one technology in the world that nobody owns and that has you know survived the test of time so if we put bitcoin in its own little bucket obviously if you're living in venezuela or you're trying to get money out of china or russia or you're doing some illegal activity

SPEAKER_37: or gray market activity it's a wonderful thing to be able to store it transfer it put it on a thumb drive it's magical then there's like every other use case and the exchanges help you trade bitcoin great etfs yada yada there's a business there everything else you know i i'm struggling to find

SPEAKER_35: the use case where big we're having something on a blockchain or nfts or whatever actually provide enough value that it's worth the technical hurdles right so everybody keeps coming up with um i guess this farcaster is like the twitter decentralized twitter that they're trying to build jack is working

SPEAKER_24: on no that was blue sky and then he resigned from blue sky but there's another star something yeah and then there's farcaster i forgot the guy's name but um he does a podcast and he's he's pretty smart

SPEAKER_38: cat um and like farcaster i should have him on the program at some point yeah it's trying to make like

SPEAKER_24: the distributed version of twitter that nobody can ever you know take down right and is you know

SPEAKER_37: sensor resistant whatever i don't know that that's enough of a use case for people to do all these technical hard things to sign on and for it to hit scale like in other words the value

SPEAKER_24: of decentralization for money if you're a money launderer or you're trying to you know fight against um your currency being devalued whatever it happens to be like that's a that's a really

SPEAKER_38: great use case and it's worth the squeeze call it uber or book an airbnb like everybody told me airbnb and uber were going to be just uh intermediated by crypto huh yeah i was going to

SPEAKER_283: tokenize my house turns out i haven't yeah well i mean tokenizing your house is an interesting one

SPEAKER_24: um there there is like um this ability to take a home okay and then um sell the shares in the home right uh and have it be a way for people to play the real estate market and i think that's a thing

SPEAKER_301: real estate investment trust aka a reed yes aka i think we've already invented well yes and that

SPEAKER_33: requires a bunch of paperwork just like a venture fund requires a bunch of paperwork etc you know

SPEAKER_35: in venture at some point it will be legal to create a venture fund that's tokenized and i will do it when it's legal and it's buttoned up imagine i raised a hundred million dollars sure from a hundred thousand people a thousand dollars each whatever it is ten thousand people ten thousand each do your back of the envelope math and then let's say that hundred million doubled in value and you said well you know i put

SPEAKER_37: 10k into that and i double my money i have 20k right now i'm going to sell my 10k to somebody else who appreciates the assets in that fund and then i covered my basis and i'm free rolling on the other 10k that would be amazing do you know how hard that is to do in venture it's impossible like people

SPEAKER_27: selling secondary in a fund oh it's so hard and i don't have you been following this uh dxyz i just had

SPEAKER_308: the founder um uh dxyz fund stock this is the destiny oh yes this is the thing that owns stakes

SPEAKER_72: that it's not supposed to have in private companies that weren't approved to be sold as secondaries

SPEAKER_37: yeah in some cases and i talked to him about that issue and um it's cool to be clear yeah yeah but i mean this just shows how much the public wants to participate in the private market so yes i do think like an idea like this that was on a blockchain would be fine with me um if it's regulated and people aren't going to get scammed the problem of course 99 of these things are scams grifts or incompetence

SPEAKER_05: or some combination of those yes and sometimes they're fun like no one has more fun than the crypto kids they invent a new meme token like there's bonk now which is like a shiba inu offshoot on solana okay they're having more fun than i'm having i i pay property tax i don't know but i will say though when you talk about tokenizing the venture capital fund i can totally see a use case for that but it's still an inherently financial use case of the blockchain and that to me is is the limit around my interest in it because whenever i pull up um a crypto focused game for example it's always about nfts and trading and no offense to the crypto folks out there but that's not what i want that said though you and i are perspectives vcs are showing up and putting more money into this stuff again and so i'm curious to see what comes out of this next wave because we haven't seen a new innovation like um nfc's a couple cycles ago ico's a couple cycles before that so i'm curious what will be the thing that makes the souffle rise yet again and frankly i mean bitcoin

SPEAKER_35: is over 70 000 as we speak it's up six percent today so what the script does that and bitcoin's been

SPEAKER_37: around for 15 years and hasn't been hacked hasn't it's like it's really one of the most resilient things humanity's built like it feels like the great wall of china to me like are we all gonna die in a pandemic and then like bitcoin is still running and like some alien species comes here a thousand years from now and they're like yeah they're all gone but hey their bitcoin servers are still running and

SPEAKER_87: we have some archaeological uh evidence that humans were smart they created this token okay so uh uh

SPEAKER_03: do you use um fidelity vanguard or any of those kind of equivalent online brokerage services sure sure i know that all of my money which is in those services is is at risk to one emp right like if you take out the computers all my money goes away is the one thing that gold bugs do have right but i think at the

SPEAKER_05: same time if you take out all the technology to the surfers and stuff bitcoin also grinds to a halt and so to me it is i think as you said a store of value i think it has shown the test of time because we're still talking about it but it does have the same risks that i think other modern forms of money

SPEAKER_03: and value have to it and it hasn't solved that because if you show up in the you know future you know wild west 2.0 when there's no water left with a usb stick with some bitcoin on it you're not going to

SPEAKER_72: get a drink i don't think going back to politics i think if you want to win the presidential election

SPEAKER_35: okay if you come out and say as part of becoming president i am going to solve the regulatory framework presidential order straight down to the sec and we're going to fix this mess and americans will be able to trade in crypto and we're going to be the leaders of crypto in the world you would get you know low single digit percentage of these lunatics uh young people who love draft kings and sports betting stonks robin hood and crypto and you say listen it's your money you want to bet it on the knicks you want to bet it on bitcoin or an ico or you want to you know bet it on gamestop it's your

SPEAKER_37: money you're free to do it and here's like a sophisticated test you know take this test learn about diversification and scams protect yourself and then have at it i think that wins you a couple of points in the election and i think trump's going to do that by the way the election right

SPEAKER_03: because in the you know in the us it's always 48 52. so this week uh the house is going to take

SPEAKER_05: up the financial innovation and technology of the 21st century act or what they're calling fit 21 bipartisan endorsed by the blockchain association generally a well-received thing and one thing that it does according to a house summary is participants will have a clear process to determine which digital asset transactions are subject to the sec's jurisdiction and so forth and so essentially they're trying to solve what you're saying and i think the democrats are coming around a little bit on this if you if you i've been watching the tea leaves in the last 10 14 days i think this is turning around and what i think that means is is that the crypto long-term believers your brian armstrong etc are going to get most of what they want which means that the us is going to stay pretty much i think the global epicenter for crypto talent and so forth apart from

SPEAKER_38: tax havens and so forth out there but i mean singapore and other places were really you know trying in the in dubai other you know the zerg whatever that was and switzerland was trying to oh yes remember that like they were going to be the place i think montana or wyoming were doing dows and i thought the dow i don't know did you follow the dow thing uh decentralized autonomous organizations

SPEAKER_05: jason i was in boy scouts and i have been a patrol leader i've been a senior patrol leader

SPEAKER_29: i have heard of the cats and uh that's why i was a little skeptical of the house yeah i love the idea

SPEAKER_05: i love pure democracy i love people working together i love federating out power to the folks

SPEAKER_03: but a discord group does not a democracy make and so to me like the technology was never there to

SPEAKER_05: actually underpin the aspirations yeah and so it just it struck me as like modern day utopia utopias utopia yeah sure utopian sure utope that english i speak it utopian thinking yeah uh that was great and it never really took off and i don't think we've seen a dow apart from maybe maker dow that has

SPEAKER_03: actually stayed around long enough to have this sort of impact people hoped that they were going to have

SPEAKER_218: so cool but you know not exactly it turns into lord of the flies awfully quick doesn't it i think is your point boy scouts and laura flies are like either end of the spectrum right you got like the navy

SPEAKER_38: seals boy scouts and then lord of the flies i was a scout as well lord of the flies and boy scouts are

SPEAKER_343: much closer together thinking it's feral children exactly uh it gets a little crazy out there i know

SPEAKER_05: we have to go but like i'll just say this pay attention to the um the crypto regulatory scene this week everybody there could be some important votes that could determine where venture capital flows where founders flow and where projects are built so if you care about that it's a big week

SPEAKER_38: and then for market pull we talked about um you know two really great examples of market pull in our industry historically for founders who just want to study that and one of the things alex i'm really

SPEAKER_24: glad you're here is you can as a journalist and an editor-in-chief of all these publications over time that are at large all these titles you had you can start uh looking at the advice for founders and startups and maybe helping me tease out some of those topics for the audience like market pull comes up all the time how do you know you have it like stripe uh and twitter were like two of the uh it's canonical i guess the word for that like examples of market pull that we've ever seen in history those things really drove uh you know people who were like i need i need some way to process

SPEAKER_249: payments that's cheap and fast and better and it was like oh have you not tried stripe and i was like wait what is that and they just boom people sign up and start using it you don't you don't have to have

SPEAKER_21: a sales person get on a call and then with twitter it was like do you want to talk to the world in

SPEAKER_201: real time from the sporting event or from your you know whatever you know and uh yeah here's your

SPEAKER_03: publishing how good of examples those are actually i would go back free stripe and talk about square

SPEAKER_05: back when it was called square yeah i recall when they put out the very first little reader you could plug into the bottom of your iphone yep 3g i think back in the day yeah i got one of those i had no use for it whatsoever i just wanted one because i knew that that was a it unlocked a thing which was commerce essentially yeah and i also will never forget the first time i figured out what twitter was for i used a client called twirl back in the day like 2009 2008 and i'm like wait a minute i can

SPEAKER_67: just say as much as i want and other people have to listen to me instant just full-on addict haven't

SPEAKER_354: stopped since will never i will be on twitter when the universe ends or x or whatever well and you're

SPEAKER_35: also uh again back to the you know your political framing you're you're a free speech absolutists yes you're based on my watching you on social media over the years so a free speech in terms of

SPEAKER_05: government control absolutely a free speech absolutist i i think we should be allowed to say fuck on television i i'm a big i do not want the government saying what i can and cannot say at the same time i do think the market will respond to certain speech and i think people can flake to the two but when it comes to regulation i'm about as close to a free speech absolutely as you can get

SPEAKER_38: yeah yeah yeah it's so weird like our generation because i think you're kind of on the tail end of

SPEAKER_71: gen x you consider yourself a tail end of gen x or like don't don't shoot me but i'm square in the

SPEAKER_280: middle of millennials okay because you kind of just you present as a gen xer um so it's it's the hair

SPEAKER_37: i think you did you have gen x mentorship when you were growing up like were you around gen xers so i think that's the thing with some of the millennials is they kind of hung out with us because we were the older kids like in high school whatever so if you had a gen x influence on you you're like you know what if a bunch of idiots want to prove to us they're racist by you know putting on bedsheets and pretending they're part of the clue flux and march down main street great now we know who these idiots are and they've proven it to the world i'm fine with like kanye west going on twitter saying crazy stuff and then getting suspended because you know what now we know that this person has mental illness is an anti-semite and worships hitler like the guy is obsessed with hitler

SPEAKER_370: apparently and like he's mentally ill yeah okay what more do you need to know he's told you who he is

SPEAKER_128: but importantly you just said kanye i should be allowed to go out and say whatever he wants agreed

SPEAKER_05: and that private companies can then choose to platform or not platform that speech okay that is literally how it's supposed to work that is that is the government going away and the marketplace functioning speech totally what you don't want to do is let bob or jane yeah tell you what you can and cannot say or hear or whatever or how to run your business that that's what i'm afraid of and i

SPEAKER_03: think that people want to be loving and caring towards each other and we end up trying to solve speech by limiting it and what we end up with is a mess consistently because yes no matter how much

SPEAKER_336: good faith you have in your government someone else is going to win an election down the road and they are not going to agree with you and you're going to give them a big old stick yeah exactly be careful

SPEAKER_37: uh because if you start tipping the scales and then you lose power guess what you just gave that

SPEAKER_35: weapon to the next administration the next one and the next one and who knows how they swing that

SPEAKER_374: kettlebell it's gonna swing away your head is what they're gonna do yeah all right listen this has

SPEAKER_35: been a great first episode we'll see you all on the next this week in startups everybody go follow at alex and welcome him as co-host of the show thank you just give us your notes uh let's get him some follows here and i'm at jason this week in startups.com is powered by podcast ai you can search the entire archive of god getting close to 2000 episodes and we will be doing two news programs a week subscribe to the youtube channel this is critical and turn on the bell so that when we go live hey uh

SPEAKER_140: you can know and get this breaking news and you don't have to wait for the show to be edited and come

SPEAKER_160: out the next day two ways to win all right great job alex what a great first show i enjoyed this thank you yeah absolute blast total blast i'm so glad you're here ah fun times