SPEAKER_00: people are voting with their dollars to install solar that is not even subsidized. Why? It's cheaper to install solar than it is to install clean coal. So the idea that we're going to burn more coal rather than put in solar, rather than invest in nuclear, just seems illogical. And so all due respect to the secretary, I believe there's a little bit of politics in this and that Elon and the Chinese have it right.

SPEAKER_02: This week in startups is brought to you by Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers and

SPEAKER_05: get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon.io slash twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in

SPEAKER_00: startups. He is Alex Wilhelm. I am Jason Calacanis. This is the show where we talk about startups, the broader tech ecosystem, finance, and of course, everything having to do with starting a company and

SPEAKER_08: being a founder. I do basically two things in this world. I invest in startups and I appear on podcasts

SPEAKER_00: three days a week here on this week in startups, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Thursdays. I tape all in and it comes out on Friday. And then we run two, three programs for investment. Founder University, which we're kicking off today here in Austin. I got a hundred people outside the studio listening to amazing talks. And that's our pre-accelerator. Then we have the launch accelerator on its 35th cohort. That's where we put like tech stars, Y Combinator, Antler, et cetera, 125K into startups that are already formed and have a product in market typically. And then finally, we have the syndicate.com where we do later stage companies and we syndicate those deals to over 10,000 angel investors. So that's what I do for a living. And here we are at this week in startups. Alex, we got a lot to get to. Maybe we just start off with the companies we accepted in the accelerator and rapid fire. You can tell us about them and I'll give my feedback. So,

SPEAKER_10: all right, well, I'm going to pull up a screenshot of everyone's logo here. So we can take a quick look at this. Here's the launch accelerator website. And Jason, I want to tell you each of these companies in order. So first up is era. This is an application that helps women reduce anxiety by transforming wearable data and self reflections into custom meditations. I love women's health. I love this idea.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So we've had great success with our com.com investment with a tone base, teaching people music. And of course, I've enjoyed everything from my Fitbit scale to my whoop, to my aura ring, which I don't use anymore because I lost it. And my eight sleep, which we're investors in, people really will pay any amount of money to be healthier or, you know, significant amounts of money to be healthier, to optimize. And if you look at women's health, it is different. There are, please don't cancel me, Alex. There are gender differences that are real in, on planet earth. And, you know, when you make something for half the population, you get a benefit because you are targeting it to a specific group of people and you can tailor it to their specific needs. Now you lose half the audience, but that's okay because you over-service those and stress. You might have experienced this with moms or people trying to have it all. It can be stressful, right? And so any way to cope with stress, which is in some ways the obesity or cancer of our time, as we, my thesis is as we get rid of obesity because of GLP-1s, we'll see a decrease in things like cancer, heart disease, which are downstream of obesity. And we have an obesity crisis in the world and specifically in America. So what will be left? Well, stress and anxiety, mental health, these are very, very acute issues in the world. I like to take some, I don't want to call it a hell Mary, but I do like to make some aggressive bets on things that are going to happen in the next year or two or three. In other words, skating to where the puck's going. So I'm very happy about this one. And if you click on the link, Alex, it'd be great to show their homepage because it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_10: Absolutely. Coming right up. Here is the homepage for our dear friends over at ERA Smarter Stress Management 4.8 stars over on the App Store over 1000 ratings already off to a very strong start, Jason. But let's keep moving on. Got a lot of companies to talk about. Next up is Loops. Loops wants to build AI agents that help automate customer experience. Now the tagline here, Jason, is pretty simple. AI customer experience that pays for itself. All founders love a good deal

SPEAKER_00: and they also have love having less busy work. So I dig this one too. Customer support is a repetitive task based on knowledge. It's a finite knowledge set for your product or service. When you think about the issues you have when you're flying on an airline, those issues will be, I need to change my flight. I need to book a flight. There was a problem with my flight. You know, it's a small cohort of issues. My flight was canceled. My flight was delayed. Yada, yada. Or I need to change, you know, X, Y, and Z in my reservation. So if you can help people build agents to address these things and empower people to delight customers, you can have two things occur, Alex. You can lower your prices at your, you can, you can lower your expenses, which means you can lower your prices or you can be more profitable and you can delight customers. And delighting customers is what it's all about.

SPEAKER_12: Really excited about loopsmartai.com. I'll shout out their domain name. Let's go to the next one.

SPEAKER_22: All right. Next up is Lumix Ads. Now, Jason, I'm curious, is this the company we had on a while back

SPEAKER_10: because this method of attaching essentially billboards, digital billboards to ride sharing or

SPEAKER_13: delivery vehicles seems really familiar to me. Do we have them on? I think that they came to our

SPEAKER_00: founder university, um, and they're getting great results. So here you see, if you look at the web page, um, I, I'm assuming those are LEDs, but they could also be printouts in color. I think they're printouts actually. Um, okay. I have to check that. No, I, no, I think they're LEDs. So they made these boxes to put on the back of Vespas. Yeah, they're, they're LEDs. Sorry. Um, and what they found were, was that people riding around Miami and other cities, uh, these were highly, highly effective and advertisers love them. People love outdoor advertising. We've had a couple of companies fail in this space that we've invested in. Um, but I still believe in outdoor advertising. And I do think we're going to see more and more mobility in the world. I recently saw a Waymo had been wrapped in, um, Sabrina Carpenter's new album. So imagine there are a thousand robo taxis, a thousand, you know, Vespas, a thousand, a thousand, a thousand drones, et cetera. These things could all have some amount of advertising on them. It has to be normalized. It has to be proven to be effective, but it's going to be a great market. And so I'm really excited about this company as well.

SPEAKER_10: Sabrina Carpenter's latest album, man's best friend. If you're not up to your Gen Z pop, now, you know, all right, next up Monsha. This is all about bringing AI into the world of education. Jason, um, I do a lot of startups. I love this idea. My thought here is that lesson planning is probably a little bit repetitious. So giving teachers more AI tooling, help them do more with

SPEAKER_13: less and probably have more time with the students. But I'm curious what you think.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Monsha.ai, M-O-N-S-H-A.ai. Um, everybody wants to think education is going to be disrupted by AI. Yes, that is true. But how will that happen? Do we think teachers are going to go away? Do we think teachers are unnecessary? Of course not, but their role will change. And if you can make a teacher create better lesson plans, um, that means more engaging classes, more reason to come to class. And so this is a great wedge. They found a problem. Teachers want to make better lesson plans. They spend a lot of time on it. Students want to be informed, educated, entertained, perhaps engaged, fascinated by what their teachers are teaching. So why not give them some tools to build their, you know, essentially presentations, right? And make better courses. And so if you can make a teacher, but 10%, 20% faster or better, you know, making their lesson plans, that's going to have a dramatic impact on outcomes. And maybe teachers can teach more courses. So if you were, let's say this makes teachers twice as fast creating coursework, well, that would free up time for them to spend more time with students, or it would give them the ability to teach another course and make another, uh, lesson plan. And of course, outcomes will ultimately be the other part of it. So you're starting to see a theme here in how my team and I will look at startups. Does it save money? Does it make the product better? Does it save time? Does it do all of those things? Great products and services in the world tend to entertain you, save you time, save you money, or make you better at something in the world, right? And so here we are faster, better, smaller. Great. Let's go. One thing I always pay attention to when meeting with a new founder is how quickly do they get back to me? Response time. Do they have a sense of urgency or not? Leaving people hanging, not getting them the information they need during due diligence or during an investment process, response times matter. And if you're running a service business, it's extremely acute. If I don't hear back from you, I'm moving on to the next provider. With open phone, your entire team can share one number and one inbox, turning incoming calls and messaging into a collaborative project where nothing falls through the cracks. Your customers and clients hate having to constantly re-explain their situation to you. So open phones, warm transfers completely fix this issue. Plus when it comes to voicemail, open phones, AI agents will not just answer your calls after hours, but they'll ask important questions and capture your leads or customer support needs while you're sleeping. See why over 60,000 businesses already trust open phone. And one of those businesses is mine and they're going to give you 20% off your first six months. If you go to open phone.com slash twist, it's very important. You go to that. I know you don't need to save the 20% if you're listening to this pod, but it lets you know that we sent them. If you've got an existing phone number with another service, open phone, we'll port that over at no extra charge.

SPEAKER_10: Open phone.com slash twist. Well, sticking to most of those themes, the next company is next visit, which is an AI medical scribe that unsurprisingly transcribes medical appointments. Jason, if you've ever gone to the doctor and I presume everyone listening here has, you've seen the laptop out and their amplifier typing. What if they didn't have to do that? What if they could just talk to you back to the idea of saving time, saving money and getting better? I love this. We're seeing this happen, uh,

SPEAKER_00: you know, on our desktops already with, you know, zoom creating meeting notes and the long tail of meeting note companies from notion, adding it, obviously granola, many different products or services are doing this now. Um, and so it's going to be verticalized so that when you're talking about specific, uh, codes that, you know, go into reimbursement with insurance companies, it knows what an F299 is point B right. And it, and it will double check that. So all kinds of coding medications, you have to get these things right. And so it's great that people are going to be working on these

SPEAKER_12: very narrow verticals. Reminds me of tax GPT, another huge success we had at the accelerator.

SPEAKER_31: All right. Next up is a company called path. Now this one's a little bit interesting, Jason,

SPEAKER_10: what they want to do is help people build applications. But the trick here is when you go to their website and you look around, it's not just for external apps, it's for internal apps as well. And while I love companies like lovable to let people take a prompt and turn it into a semi app, if you will, I think the idea of applying that to what companies need to run themselves is

SPEAKER_00: quite interesting. The, um, the major innovation we'll see with AI, um, will be inside of enterprises where people who know exactly what software they need, but are unable to build it, will be able to build it in the future. So many times there's some operations person, there's some sales person who says, I need software to do X, Y, and Z. And then somebody finds, you know, that requirement or they stumble upon it and they make a startup. Well, it would be much better for somebody to build that prototype inside their company if they were so inclined, because it might be too niche. If I had a company, you know, I don't know, that was a bakery selling $7 croissants and, uh, you know, I needed to have some app for managing the production of said croissants across different regions, et cetera, and delivery to bakeries and, you know, other, uh, third parties who resold ours. You know, that whole process, there might not be an app out there to manage the resell of a central bakery to 50 other restaurants and cafes who want said croissants. Well, now somebody could make this croissant AI

SPEAKER_12: app for that bakery and maybe it helps them scale faster. So there you go, folks. Great job. Path.dev.

SPEAKER_02: Well, you just gave, uh, Mistral and the entire European sovereign AI, uh, movement to push by saying,

SPEAKER_10: Hey guys, croissant AI coming up next. Yes. All right. Uh, the next startup is Pitch Perfect. Now, Jason, you know, I love startups. You know, I love you. A little torn on this one because this is all about having more effective SMS drip campaigns for marketing. Yep. And I want to hear why I should

SPEAKER_00: love this. So you and I, uh, come from an era of people who cared about the privacy of their phones, right? We, we, we were very open to getting emails because that didn't feel super intrusive. Right. Um, and you could kind of sort them, or maybe you'd make a shopping email or you'd put a little tag or you'd have the, you know, email software, use Gmail superhuman, put them into a marketing tab. But there's another generation that doesn't like email. They much prefer to live in their SMS. That's their inbox. You and I look at our, uh, you know, SMS, like that's for my spouse, my kids, you know, my parents, it's emergencies, right? It's high, high, high signal. We are not the average consumer anymore. We are the old paradigm, the new paradigm. They, you ever see these people who have 327 unread iMessages and you're like, how could you ever have that? I, I have every single one of my iMessages is read all the time and I will unsubscribe or block, you know, if I start getting

SPEAKER_35: pitches from Gavin Newsom or JD Vance on my phone, how many do you have? 513 unread. What, are you on group chats or something or what, what is all that messiness in there? You,

SPEAKER_00: I don't know. I've got toddlers. Okay. Call me. Uh, and so, you know, each generation, um, looks at these different inboxes differently. And so other people look at phone calls as intrusive. I like getting SMS from my favorite brands. So when I get them from, you know, ski brands or specific, you know, um, other brands where like clothing brands, where I'm really into them, Tom Ford, I don't mind being on those, but I do want them to be high signal. This will allow you to be high

SPEAKER_10: signal at a fraction of a penny per SMS. I mean, the thing that shocked me here when I was prepping for this is that 0.007 dollars per SMS, which is seven tenths of a cent. That's about as cheap as I think it gets. So, all right, moving on next up, we have ready, which is an application. It's not too hard to explain. Jason, if you have folks who work for you across the sea, you may want to provide retirement benefits for them as you do to your domestic employees. That's not always as easy

SPEAKER_00: as you'd hope. So ready wants to make that easy. Yeah. Paying people overseas is hard. Getting them benefits is hard. Uh, onboarding them is hard and there's a whole swath of companies and this one has great traction and we're seeing increasingly, and it's a thesis we have, that work will go to knowledge workers in a region that are most motivated to do it at the best price and you're going to want to retain those folks. So if you're in a competition to do data labeling, if you're in a competition for SDRs, for developers, for designers, well, if you can say to this group in Paraguay or Uruguay or India, et cetera, Hey, we are aware that there is a 401k system in your country. It's not called 401k. It's not a 529. It's not an IRA, a Roth, whatever, but, um, you know, ready R E D I I.co is going to just abstract that all. And we're going to give you a hundred bucks a month towards it. Well, that could be the difference between having 20% turnover and 2%. And that could be the difference between having, you know, a highly profitable, great company and one that is constantly chasing its tail, trying to retain talent. And it is becoming a talent war in those countries.

SPEAKER_10: Absolutely. And if you're going to hire overseas, you're going to need to keep an eye on compliance, Jason. And that's where Sourcely comes in. Sourcely is compliance on autopilot. Automate your SOC 2,

SPEAKER_13: automate your other reports that you need. Yeah, absolutely. And, um, you know,

SPEAKER_00: they're, uh, integrating with all of people's, uh, different environments, whether it's HubSpot or Intercom or Slack. And so, um, you know, it's, uh, end to end and it's going to help people with

SPEAKER_12: their cyber security needs. So lots of competition in this space. And, uh, we're really excited to see

SPEAKER_22: how they do. I'm going to make a small correction here. I'm being, um, lit up in the, uh, the back

SPEAKER_31: channel here. It's so curely, not sorcerly. That makes a lot more sense. And, uh, I sincerely apologize to the team.

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SPEAKER_19: Spatial Gen, which you can see here, all about building spatial video for different contexts. What's the thesis here?

SPEAKER_00: So, um, people will want immersive content eventually. And so imagine exploring, you know, uh, sports is, uh, probably the one where people get a lot of, um, it's easy to imagine wanting to watch sports in an immersive way and being able to stream that is highly technical. So imagine you're watching a UFC fight. How do you make that environment and stream it at a high fidelity? You're going to need backend tools and that's what they're building. So, uh, you know,

SPEAKER_11: this is how I'm going to get courtside in the NBA without having to pay $15,000 a ticket is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_00: Absolutely. And so again, skating to where the puck is going. We haven't heard a lot about the Apple vision pro, but we will, you know, Apple didn't just invest $10 billion into that project for no reason. They believe that AR VR is going to be a platform that works obviously XR, which is a combination of these things. And I believe this new iPhone air, which is a weird product, right? It's all battery. And then the top is a little tiny computer. When you X-ray it, it's literally 90% battery. And at the top where the camera is, is the entirety of the computer and the chips. And they got rid of the SIM slot, which saved a bunch of space. That is their prototype, not for a thin phone, which I don't think people care about particularly, even though it's interesting to look at the Apple air as a phone. I don't think actually anybody wants this. Honestly, I don't really, I don't think it matters to anybody, whether it's half the thickness of your current phone or 50% less, because you still have that big chunky camera and everybody likes to have the big chunky camera capable of great photos. What I think they're doing there is a proof of concept. Imagine you lop off. If you show that again, if you lop off the top 15% of that phone, that's where all the innards are. Now take that and put it into the side of a thick pair of Ray bands, like, you know, Bob Dylan would have. That's what we're looking at here. And in fact, you know, basically where the phone bezel, where the camera bezel is, is the entirety of the compute. And people are already mocking up glasses for Apple. I saw them like trending on socials where people are like, Hey, you know, this could be the next glasses. And so if you think about glasses, there it is. So that. That's amazing. Yeah. You think about that. And by the way, the Mac mini is part of this process. So making things smaller, faster, and cheaper means they will be putting what we just saw into TV monitors, Apple TVs, watches, and eventually glasses. So this whole process of manufacturing tiny components that do everything and that have good battery life is all leading up to a pair of Apple glasses. And we believe Spatial Gen will then be able to help people send videos to those glasses. And if you had those glasses and you were watching the Netflix fight, remember Netflix had a hard time with streaming. Now imagine you're streaming this incredible 16K immersive video. That's a lot of bandwidth. That's a lot, uh, to contend with.

SPEAKER_31: And so, yeah, that's what that's a huge bull case for your star links and project Kuiper's that want to build enormous cloud, sorry, satellite, um, data transference systems.

SPEAKER_10: Cause if we're going to have that level of bandwidth, Jason, we're going to need it everywhere. So, uh, one last thing before we move on, here is one of the mock-ups of what some people think the Apple specs will look like. Imagine if you took that bit of the phone, Jason, just slopped it onto the earpiece. Absolutely. Voila. Uh, I'd buy one day one. Okay. Last company in this cohort is a company called Treasure. They call themselves the all-in-one platform for your conventions. And I love this one because they directly call out the fact they're building a tool that's going to help people host card shows and hobby events. Sound's niche is an absolutely enormous part of the economy.

SPEAKER_05: People love trading cards. They love card games. And also Jason, I love anything that encourages people to get out of the house and go see some like-minded folks.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. Trade shows are something I've done and imagine an all-in-one trade show platform for, you know, your particular passion, uh, your trading cards, magic, the gathering, comic books, video games. Well, a blocker for a lot of people is the organization of these events and all the vendors at them. So, uh, if you can build a platform where people can sign up to buy a booth, people can find that booth on the, you know, in the app, on the website, engage with it. Those people can see their sales, ticketing, all that great stuff. Um, we feel like the people who've used this product gave it rave reviews. So we look for teams that are builders. And then if we talk to a couple of customers during our diligence process and they're over the moon with the product, we think to ourselves, we've got a team that's exceptional at building product who has already delighted a user. It doesn't matter if it seems niche to us at the time because Lincoln town cars, four VCs and CEOs coming from the airport or going from dinner to the after party in San Francisco seemed niche at the time. It became Uber and Airbnb and sleeping on somebody's couch and, you know, renting your spare bedroom. That also seemed niche at the time. Coinbase and Robinhood seemed like niche products at the time. Those are some of the biggest hits of the last 15 years. So if it's a great product person like Vlad or TK and it's niche, okay, we'll, we'll take those opportunities and then watch them build that beachhead market into a wedge, like those wedges you might put into a log that if you hit it three or four times right at the direct spot, could crack open a giant market. That's what we think we'll see out of treasure, which is ontreasure.com, ontreasure.com.

SPEAKER_31: And if you want to understand the market better, just check out the trading card database and then search for a big state and look at all the events that are going on. Not a small market today. People

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SPEAKER_15: hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io slash twist. All right, Jason, let's move on. I want to bring

SPEAKER_10: up a clip from the all in summit. We talked about this a little bit on Friday, but there's one more the team wants us to discuss. Sure. This comes from your conversation with the secretary of energy,

SPEAKER_19: I believe, Mr. Chris Wright. And round two. Round two. Yeah. This went viral on social media. Yeah. Yeah. And I pulled some data to help us understand the argument. But here, let's hear from both you and the secretary. Okay, here we go.

David Friedberg: The solar supply chain. And think about this. Is that why you guys are down on it that we would have to buy the solar panels from them? Because it seems like you're looking backwards and China's looking forward. That's where the disconnect is coming for me. But there's no there there.

SPEAKER_62: There's no there in solar and battery. So Elon Musk has it completely wrong. He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And I'd love if we could

SPEAKER_61: make a bet 50 years out, I'll make a bet solar never gets to 10 percent of global energy. Solar has a future. And so after 30 years of subsidies, maybe it should fly on its own as an energy source. It has roles. There's remote power that in the United Arab Emirates, they're building a firmed one gigawatt solar, eight gigawatts of panels and a ton of batteries. They've got great sun resources. They have low cost labor, they can build things there. Solar has a role. But we've had this inflated role that somehow the world is going to run on solar panels. There's no math that shows that'll ever happen. And China doesn't believe it for a moment. But think of why are they installing three times as

David Friedberg: many as us per capita then? And why are they so effective at installing nuclear power plants? I don't know if you're gaslighting us, no pun intended. And this is just like a Trump MAGA thing where we have to dis natural sources. But do you really want to dig coal out and burn it and pollute the environment that we're giving to our kids?

SPEAKER_61: I want energy to better human lives. And the cost and reliability of electricity and energy sources. The other thing we should say, electricity delivers 20% of global energy. Wrap the panel and wrap the whole planet in a solar panel. You got 20% of energy delivered. Where's the other 80% going to come from? It's process heat. It's transportation fuels to run jets, to run ships. That's not going to come

SPEAKER_11: from solar. So Jason, what's going on in there? Here's what your first reactions are to it.

SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was trying to make a point about just the approach this administration is taking and trying to parse out what is their actual beliefs versus what is political posturing. One of the things I've learned through being pulled into the political arena against my will is that politicians will sometimes say things that don't match their actual reality, whether it's a Republican or Democrat or anybody in between. And I felt like when speaking to Chris the two times I have, there was this over indexing on clean, beautiful coal, clean, beautiful coal, clean, beautiful coal. And in fact, President Trump made a joke that sometimes people were saying it too much and not enough emphasis and an actual dissing of solar and batteries. And when you look at the Chinese and what they're doing, or you look at what's happening here in Texas, the great state of Texas, people are voting with their dollars to install solar that is not even subsidized. Why? It's cheaper to install solar than it is to install clean coal. So the idea that we're going to burn more coal rather than put in solar rather than invest in nuclear just seems illogical. And so all due respect to the secretary, I believe there's a little bit of politics in this and that Elon and the Chinese have it right. So if that's the case, you'd have to wonder why typically when people, when there's a little bit of this cognitive dissonance, my take on it is special interests are at work or are being appeased. And so perhaps we were appeasing, you know, solar and renewables, wind, geothermal, and all of that in the Biden administration. And we were subsidizing it too much and we were all going to be up to our ankles in water. And like, obviously those predictions of global warming never came true. Uh, we're in terms of like crazy weather patterns, but secretary, right? Does agree that global warming is a real trend, just not a cataclysmic one. So far we haven't had cataclysmic flooding of the places people claimed would be underwater. So I, I don't think we need to be precious about, um, which energy sources we go with in the short to midterm, but I do think we need to be honest about the longterm and the longterm is nuclear solar and batteries. That is the winning combination. Anything other than that is a short term solution. And I would rather see us have leadership in Washington that can say that. And I feel like they don't say it consistently enough. So I just wanted to just tackle it head on and, uh, you know, we'll continue the

SPEAKER_31: debate. Well, that's very polite, Jason. That was a very, very, I thought you were going to come out a little bit more swinging because no, I think maybe I'm more, more extreme than you here, like

SPEAKER_10: nuclear for base load. Good. And then solar plus batteries for variable. I mean, my God, why can't we just do that and not have extraneous CO2 emissions that are causing problems? I'm a little bit more worried about climate change than the secretary, but I'm also, you know, as you said in your thing, worried about what we're leaving to our kids and building more coal-fired power plants

SPEAKER_00: is not a good thing to do if you care about that. Pollution is, I think, the easiest way for people to understand why we shouldn't be using these things. If you lived in a major city where you had a lot of carbon emissions, you have years taken off your life, whether it's Shanghai or Los Angeles in the 80s, 70s, 80s, and 90s in that smog cloud. And so the fact is this stuff is dirty. And if it's dirty and it takes years off your life and you have a haze cloud above your city, you know, that's a good enough reason to go with these other solutions. You can also see evidence in what poor people are doing around the world and what rigorous, independent people are doing here in the United States. People who are rigorous and independent, resilient individuals on ranches, on farms, you know, at their homes, people who have a couple of acres of land, they're all putting in solar. Why? Yes. They want to be independent of the grid, which will be increasingly unreliable as demands increase and the government's incompetent. And it's just nice to be independent because you also get the benefit of lower costs. In India, people are buying cheap solar panels and cheap batteries off of, you know, like Amazon and installing them in their homes. So if poor people and then rugged individualists in Texas are embracing this technology, not because of subsidies, they're just buying it on Amazon without a subsidy. That tells you something. And so I will be proven correct here. Solar is the future and we will eventually realize that build solar factories here and somebody with vision like Elon will build a solar factory in Nevada and they'll buy a bunch of land around Nevada or Arizona. And what they will do is the solar panels will come back, come out of the back of a factory, Alex, I predict, and somebody will walk them out

SPEAKER_72: and put them in the ground or a robot like Optimus will go, put four screws in and then go back to the factory, grab another one and walk it five feet further and go. And that'll be happening 24 hours a

SPEAKER_00: day with an Optimus robot and cheap solar panels. And they'll be digging the minerals and everything they need on that same site and making them and deploying them. Cool for me. And then running cables to the rest of the country to get that energy out there. And so I don't mind us using short-term fossil fuels to bridge to this new future, but I do think as a country, I don't mind subsidizing sustainable, clean energy. I would like there to be no incentive to install coal, oil, and natural gas. And I would like to see incentives, moderate, modest to accelerate the deployment of renewables, not to a level that it's absurd, but just enough to make people lean a little faster towards it. This administration thinks different. That's something we could bring to the voting boots in the future.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah. Well, we're not going to get into the one big, beautiful bill and its impacts on renewable energy versus coal, but I'll just say this. There is a company called TeraBase, T-E-R-A-B-A-S-E,

SPEAKER_10: on the Twist 500, that is working on building solar technology for what they call the terawatt era. And just a couple of data points before we move on. Jason, in 2015, global solar, photovoltaic, was about 1% of total electricity generation. By 2024, it was about 7%. And if you convert that to total global energy usage, it's about 1% to 2% last year. So I can see that getting to about 10% in 50 years, no matter how we draw the numbers. So I would say the secretary here is talking someone else's book,

SPEAKER_19: which is a little bit disappointing, but we can move on.

SPEAKER_00: It is what it is. And we probably over subsidized in the past and gave the renewable energy a too big of an advantage. And now it's swinging the other way. Hopefully, we get there to a place where just the economics are undeniable. The economics are kind of undeniable. It would be great to show a chart here. If somebody could pull it up, maybe producer Claude can help me out because they are so fast at this. The declining price of solar panels. And if you look at the cost of solar panels from, let's just say the nineties to now, and producer Claude will have this information in just a moment. We can even pull up the producer Claude screen and just show how amazing Anthropik is

SPEAKER_12: at doing these kinds of things. I really respect that company, by the way. They've just been doing

SPEAKER_10: a great job. All right, Jason, here's what our producing team sent over to us. I think this is actually from our world in data. Claude would have taken an extra second and we're on a short show today, but here we are. Solar panel costs have fallen by about a fifth for every doubling of cumulative global capacity. So as we build more, prices go down. And as you can see from this chart, it used to cost over a hundred dollars to get a single watt of power from solar. Now that's about

SPEAKER_00: a penny. Yeah. So this will keep declining to a point of, my gosh, it's almost going to be like we're giving these solar panels away. We're going to be giving these things away soon. They will be like, you know, coolers. When you go to the store, they would give you a styrofoam cooler for free when

SPEAKER_78: you bought a 12 pack. Oh yeah. It's going to be kind of like that. Like they're just going to be like,

SPEAKER_72: Hey, would you like some solar panels? And if you go on Amazon, people are buying these things for,

SPEAKER_00: you know, solar plus battery from anchor for a couple of thousand dollars. It's unbelievable

SPEAKER_10: how quickly this is all happening. All right, Jason, here is the Claude chart that you requested. And it also came with a bunch of other data points that are quite interesting. So if you look here,

SPEAKER_19: Claude writes that there's been a 99.8% total price reduction in solar panel prices on a per watt basis

SPEAKER_13: since 1975. Hell yes. Technology is what I have to say to that. Absolutely. All right. Let's keep

SPEAKER_10: going. Just incredible data. All right. Next up, Jason, Alphabet reached $3 trillion in market cap

SPEAKER_19: becoming, I believe the fourth, fourth company ever to do so coming in just behind Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple ahead of Amazon, Meta, Broadcom, Aramco and so forth. I remember writing a post like maybe five,

SPEAKER_10: seven years ago about the first group of the kind of mag seven back then. It's called the big five, reaching $3 trillion total in market cap as a combined unit. Kind of nuts to me today that we're

SPEAKER_19: seeing so much value here. So why? Well, Alphabet shares are up 21% in the last month, in the last half year, 48%. In the last year, 57%. Google's going nuts, Jason. I presume you're sitting pretty

SPEAKER_00: on a couple of shares. Yeah, I'm pulling up my Robinhood right now. Gosh, I'm getting a ton of dividends on this stock. I bought, let's see, March 18th, 2023. I bought 1,000 shares at 100. And on December 6th, 2023, so this is two years ago, I bought another 1,000 shares at 130. That $230,000 in Google shares I day traded are now worth in two years. Drum roll. God, I mean, they're now worth $268,000.

SPEAKER_72: I'm up 115% in two years. How did I make this trade? It's very simple. It was a very simple trade.

SPEAKER_00: They have deep mind. They created a lot of the Marden LLMs. The idea that they wouldn't be able to make the transition through search moving to answers, I thought was farcical. Why? Because in conversations I had with Sergey and Larry, 10 and 20 years ago, they said, at some point, when you do a search, we'll just give you the answer. And I watched over 20 years as they went from the 10 blue links to when you typed in Uber stock price, it would just give you the stock price. Just give you the answer. Just give me the answer. And they know what they're doing. However, a lot of people didn't believe this. I think sometimes the pie gets bigger. In other words, if you put more ride hailing cars on the road and the prices go down, consumption goes up. Consumption is not fixed. Consumption can increase. The number of people who were using the web when it was dial up was de minimis. It was low hundreds of millions. Now it's billions. And it was because it became broadband. Not only did we see 10 times as many people go online, or maybe 20 times as many people go online between those two eras, they started doing a hundred times the activity. Why? Because it was faster. It was better. It was cheaper. Faster, better, cheaper. Faster, better, cheaper. I think Google is firing on all cylinders. And I don't know if you saw it over the weekend, Gemini became the number one downloaded app in the world. I don't love the name Gemini, but I do love the product. And I do love Notebook LM. I make my decisions on the management teams and the products they're releasing. When I see a management team releasing products as good as Gemini and Notebook LM, a sleeper inside that company, and I see their focus level, and I see Sergey going back to the office when, you know, let's face it, Sergey's got an incredible life and he likes to, you know, go wakeboarding or whatever else, but he loves coming to the office because this is so exciting. It was obvious to me they would figure out this transition. Doesn't mean they're out of the woods yet. It just does mean they were undervalued. And, you know, people like Nate Silver, you know, I'll just, sorry, Nate, but here is a Nate Silver tweet. I was unable to replicate this. They need to shut Gemini down. It is several months away from being ready for prime time. It's astounding that Google released it in this state.

SPEAKER_31: I don't know the date of this. Was that February, 2024? And the, the reason why I grabbed this particular tweet, Jason, is because he had prompted Gemini, who negatively impacted society more, Elon tweeting memes or Hitler. And Gemini, which was clearly programmed in this case to not take a position on anything, said it's not really possible to say precisely who was worse. And he's like,

SPEAKER_88: this is terrible. You take it down. But that was a year and a half ago. Yes. Right. That was not that long. Shortly after I made my trade, I might point out.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. But also there were other detractors as well. Here's a fortune headline from someone that everyone's heard of, former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. He says that Google's

SPEAKER_10: struggling on AI because they decided that work-life balance was more important than winning. Put your pitchforks down, everybody. He doesn't work there anymore. But that was the sentiment in the market that Google had missed the trick. They had dropped the ball. They were behind the curve.

SPEAKER_19: We'll pick your analogy. But it was brutal. I mean, opening, I was running circles around them. And I think, Jason, what really peeved people was the original attention is all unique paper came from most of Googlers. So why did they miss? And now here they are.

SPEAKER_00: And, you know, they took steps to change their culture. If you're up against a bunch of lunatic startups going 996, and you've got a bunch of people working from home four hours a day, Eric Schmidt was right. Sergey got back in the office. People started taking, you know, working at Google more like working at a startup. So I give them a lot of credit for having a sense of urgency. And at a big company, there's a very simple way to do this. I hate to sound like a cutthroat capitalist, but you start firing 10,000 people and saying, come back to the office and, you know, starting lighting a fire under people, you will see a dramatic shift. And that's what all these big companies did. Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon decided that the cultures they had created and enabled were ones of entitlement, massive compensation without massive effort. If you want to work at these companies now, you can't lollygag. And you know what? Sometimes I'm sorry if it sounds, you know, a little bit cutthroat, but sometimes the leaders of companies need to put their foot down and say, we're going for this. If you don't want to work this amount, if you don't want to be compensated phenomenally, this is not the company for you. Andy Jassy, Sundar, Satya, everybody has realized in-person work beats a team working from home, period, full stop, the end. And so that's the change that's occurred. I give Eric Schmidt, and I challenged him on this at the All In Summit, was my first question to him. His first question on stage was that video that Stanford took down. He saw it clearly because he was at Novell. He was at Google. He understands hard work and in-person

SPEAKER_81: work and that kind of culture will beat a work from home culture every day of the week.

SPEAKER_97: All right, next up. Alex is like, does that mean I have to come to the office? No, Alex.

SPEAKER_13: I have volunteered to fly to Austin a dozen times. That's because you love barbecue.

SPEAKER_31: I know. No, actually to the contrary. It's because I want to go play a lot of poker in Texas.

SPEAKER_101: That's what I want to do. Let's do it. We'll go over to see my friend Doug Polk at the lodge.

SPEAKER_31: That's literally where I want to go because Brad's a shareholder there and I love Brad.

SPEAKER_10: Okay, next up. Robinhood's newly publicly traded venture capital fund. So this is a little bit of a strange one, Jason. I think we can unpack this for people. So Robinhood announced a thing called Robinhood ventures fund one. It's going to be a publicly traded closed end fund that is designed to give ordinary investors. You don't have to be accredited access to private market companies. The thing that I'm a little bit uncertain about is what companies are they going to put into this fund? Because if you go to the Robinhood explainer page, it says, do you want to join the fund? Are you a company? Send us an email. So I'm trying to sort out exactly what Robinhood's going to do. I don't think it's fully clear. The idea it's concentrated positions in

SPEAKER_19: leading startups, but at least they're trying to do this. Your thoughts, Jason.

SPEAKER_00: Um, Cathie Wood did one of these closed end funds. I have been pitched on it. I did take a look at it. I haven't done it yet, but there's the arc innovation ETF. So you create these funds, you can buy into them. The fund then goes and acquires shares either secondary or primary from previous investors and employees, et cetera. And you get access to these in a basket. It's a great idea. Um, the reason I never sold a share of Robinhood is because Vlad is a product genius and he listens to his users. I just did the closing fireside chat with Vlad at the Robinhood summit. We had, it was supposed to be like me interviewing him and then him maybe asking me a couple of questions, but he used the time to just ask me a bunch of questions and it kind of flipped, which was fine and charming. Um, but they keep, um, figuring out new ways to engage their customers. They added crypto, they added prediction markets, they added, um, you know, these closed, this closed end fund. Innovation beats, uh, stagnation any day of the week. The reason why, when I, again, purchased Robinhood as a private investor, the reason I invested was the leadership and their product velocity. And that's how, when we went through the launch, uh, accelerator class at the top of the show, that's how I picked these companies, product velocity, builders running the company and delighted customers and that product velocity, which of course delights customers, they've only gotten faster. Robinhood's gotten faster at producing great products. They're leaving everyone in the dust.

SPEAKER_31: I mean, that's actually something that I very much agree with because they announced tokenized private

SPEAKER_10: shares a couple of months back and then little controversy about how they were getting their open nice stock, you know, SPVs and so forth. It's always going to be a little bit complicated, but at least they were really trying new things. And then it feels like the drop of a hat later. Here we are with this entirely new offering. Um, two things to keep in mind. One, there are some publicly traded venture capital funds. So, uh, Molten Ventures over in the UK, for example, is a publicly listed venture capital fund with a permanent capital base, which is an interesting model. Hasn't really taken off around the world, but there are some examples of that. And then Jason, speaking about making wagers on things involving companies, did you hear what poly market is building? They are building prediction markets for earnings. Yes. What? Yes. My friend, this just came out. How did I not know about this? I think this dropped today. We were very busy news cycle for a Monday, but this is the, uh, if you're on the audio version, I'm showing the poly market earnings calendar, which shows, uh, what people think is going to happen on a percentage basis. So we click into, let's say, I think this is FedEx right here. What do we got? They have a 60% chance that they are going to beat its quarterly EPS

SPEAKER_19: estimate. Yes. Jason, I knew you'd love this. Look at that. I mean, what would be great about this for

SPEAKER_00: me is, you know, I can now hedge my Uber shares, my new bank shares, et cetera. So I could say, Hey, listen, I'm sitting on all this Robin hood. I'm sitting on this, these Google shares. I'm concerned they're not going to hit earnings. So I can essentially hedge against my holdings. Or I could say, you know what? I have a feeling based on my tracking of these companies, they're going to crush it. I believe in management. I believe in these new products. So if I were to look at Robin hood and Robin hood, if right, if they came up here, uh, on poly market, I might say, you know what, I'm going to put $10,000 that they beat their earnings. Right. Cause I believe in the company and maybe I can make an extra, you know, if whatever 5k, I love prediction markets. I am all in poly market will be available to American traders very soon. And I have been on the side playing around with this on Saturday night. I, um, bet on the underdog Crawford, I think was his name in that fight on Netflix. I bought the Canelo Crawford fight. Yes. I put 32 cents on it. And then I got to watch during the fight each round. I watched them. I watched it change from him being the underdog at 32 hit 38 cents, 50 cents, 60 cents, 70 cents. And I could close out at any time my position. Which is really interesting when you think about that, Alex, I could have just locked it in and said, you know, in case Canelo hits a knockout punch, I'm willing to take my 40 cents as opposed to my full 70 cents. Then I was talking to editorial director, Lon Harris, and he told me, we were just talking about the Emmys and he's been saying the pit, the pit, the pit's going to win, uh, over, um, severance. And so I was like, okay, I'll put a thousand dollars on the pit at 38 cents. Boom. I make my quick 600 bucks. Lon also now becoming a degenerate, uh, gambler. He puts, he put a hundy on it. What have you done to poor Lon? No, he, this is Lon's wheelhouse. He understands this better than anybody. He's got an edge. He's my sharp. I'm going to bet on every single bet he gives me because he's my sharp, you know, in that movie where he says, meet my quant. He doesn't speak English. Oh, I know what you're talking about. That's, that's my Lon. He's my quant when it comes to entertainment. I'm my own quant when it comes to, uh, some other things like, uh, technology and earnings. Uh, you might be my earnings quant, actually. We've got to have a little conversation next time these things come up. And then I also put, and or was trading at two cents. So what I basically did was I faded, I faded severance. Now, listen, I love my guy, Ben Stiller. I love severance, but I thought they're going to sweep so many other categories. They're over indexing a bit here. The pit's a bit of a phenomenon. People can't shut up about it. Lon gave me his inside take on it, that the people who were inside, who vote on these things, really did love that show. And severance was a hit amongst other elites, but he thought that that was

SPEAKER_35: underpriced. And I think this is going to get everybody to start thinking in bets, like Annie

SPEAKER_00: Duke says in her book. And if you can start thinking of everything in the world as bets, you can have a better life because if you're not willing to wager on it, you're really not paying attention enough. The reason I love investing in the public markets and on startups is it makes me

SPEAKER_100: sharper. It makes me think more rigorously because I have money at stake. Yeah. Also,

SPEAKER_120: a great way to save the award shows, which I've seen declining viewership in the last 10 years, if everyone's betting on them, they're going to turn into spectator sports. So

SPEAKER_31: honestly, I can see a lot of stuff looking more like that.

SPEAKER_00: Well, and the reason I used to like listening to the Oscars was I would be in a betting pool. They would do these like at offices. And I think we did them sometimes at Mahalo, et cetera, where everybody would put in 50 bucks or a hundred bucks and you would do these things. It just does make it more entertaining. And I got to tell you, I watched that fight on Saturday night until the end. Why? Because I had a vested interest in it and it just makes it more engaging. So I like this new addition. I also like the fact that it gives you something to do over the weekend. You trade stocks during the week, the stock market closes.

SPEAKER_22: And then you got something to do on Friday. Didn't we just talk about how everyone should go outside a little bit more? I don't think we need to be preparing our, our Monday earnings, but maybe we do. Maybe we do. I mean, I'm trying to go outside more. That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. I mean, listen, I was outdoors. I was on the ranch, making these wagers on my phone. So you can still be out and about. And there's, you can make very small wagers. You can make a $10 wager or a $20 wager. You can make a wager that's less than your monthly Netflix, but let's say you make one that's, you know, you have real conviction and you have an edge. You could pay for your whole Netflix. I think it makes everybody think sharper and it gets people more engaged, gets people reading more, doing more analysis and just being a better predictor of the future. I love it. I

SPEAKER_13: love it. Yeah. I think I agree with like 90% of that. The 10% you don't. The 10% you don't is what?

SPEAKER_00: Just my concern about addictive gambling. I mean, do you think addicting, addictive gambling is what? 5% or 10% of the population kind of fall down that where they get too into it?

SPEAKER_31: Something like that. I mean, so the analogy here is sports. I think Jason, I have a lot of friends that love to play small sports bets. Your five, $10 wagers on X, Y, and Z for their favorite teams. They watch the games anyways. They have a lot of fun with it. I've also, I think I may have told the story once, but I was at a gas station nearby to where I live and I was watching some of the people who work there. They were showing me their sports bets and they were betting. I mean, gosh, it must've been most of their income. And they seemed all pretty dejected and sad. They were young men, kind of as you'd expect. And I think just watching that made me a little bit

SPEAKER_19: leery. So I'm 90% in. I'm a libertarian in this way, but I mean, I'm always going to be a little bit concerned about individual welfare. Yeah. It's great that you think that way.

SPEAKER_00: My take on it is those folks are so into it that they're going to go do it anyway. I think those are the folks who, you know, are doing scratch off tickets, the lottery, football sheets, you know, they're going to play in their local poker game and go overboard. I think the other 90% of people or 95 are probably not doing it and can do it in a control fashion. I look at it in some ways,

SPEAKER_145: like I might look at cannabis or look at alcohol. Alcohol. Yeah. You know, like there's a certain

SPEAKER_00: group of people who will overdo it and GLP ones are starting to show that addictive behavior and this is orally. So, you know, we'll, we'll see where it winds up, but that a GLP one also dampens that

SPEAKER_31: trade in individuals. Yes. I just thought of an idea. If you're a startup founder and you're building the company that's going to use GLP ones in addiction treatment, I don't have Jason money,

SPEAKER_00: but I'm in for your first 10K. Okay. Here we go. All right. This has been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. He's Alex, cautious, optimism, .news. .news. Good job. Oh, by the way, I watched your episode with Leo Laporte, not this week, the previous week. Great job on This Week in Tech, the OG This Week in Podcast, This Week in Tech. Go check it out and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.