SPEAKER_01: People in our secret group chat have questions for me.

SPEAKER_00: Some might be spicy. What do you think founders should be doing to try to sort of give themselves a little bit of moat against open AI?

SPEAKER_03: There's always going to be a feature set that the interface of the large language model is not going to add.

SPEAKER_04: Out of all the people in Silicon Valley, who's the one person you really don't like the most and why?

SPEAKER_05: Some people have damaged the reputation of the industry and the user base.

SPEAKER_07: And then some people have just maybe screwed over friends of mine. I've been a consistent critic of every time he had a chance to do the right thing for humanity. He picked his own self-interest.

SPEAKER_10: It's a level of selfishness in decision making that and cutthroatness that I understand, but I wouldn't do. And I think has damaged the reputation of the tech industry. The two people I'm talking about are two of the most successful people ever in the history

SPEAKER_11: of business. All right. Lon Harris is here. I'm Jason Calacanis.

SPEAKER_01: People in our secret group chat on X, formerly known as Twitter.

SPEAKER_07: Have questions for me. I'm going to answer them. Lon is going to give me these questions. He's vetted. Some might be spicy. It could be political. It could be technical. It could be startup related. It could be life. It could be health. It could be dating. It could be anything. I'll answer any question for our community. If they have it, if you want to join our community, x.com slash TWI startups. That's our handle. If you DM that handle, we know that you listen to the pod and we will add you to that group. The group's got 400 people in it or so, and it's quite a nice little group talking about the topics of this week in startups of TWIST. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_00: I would add, if you're very active in the group and participating and sharing great stuff, there's even a higher level insiders group. Maybe you can add that one. That's very rarefied. We don't just let anybody into that one.

SPEAKER_18: It's a funnel.

SPEAKER_07: We have everybody following the account, that we have 400 or 500 people in this crazy group chat, and then I think we have 10 people who are the best people in the group chat who we know are good actors that we're filtering into just a small group.

SPEAKER_10: I don't know exactly how to build community this day and age, but I'm going to start doing more dinners and live shows since people want to get together in person. A lot of people, Lon, are sad and lonely and staying at their ranch, smoking cigars, sitting

SPEAKER_24: on a bench, and want to see more humans. Get out in the world, yeah.

SPEAKER_26: That's what I want to do.

SPEAKER_27: I need to get out in the world more. So yeah, more dinners, more hanging out, more live shows. So first question comes from Richard Corral of Quanto.

SPEAKER_29: It is an accounting firm in the age of AI. Here, I'll share their website. They're basically, he describes it as an AI-powered wealth management platform.

SPEAKER_04: And so here is his question. We have a $10 trillion AUM lead interested in us as clients and investors. They gave never seen something like this before level feedback, but then ultimately told the company they're too early for now, but they want to stay updated. So Richard wants to know your advice on how to combat the challenges facing startups with that early stage status, even when their tech is advanced and innovative and looking forward.

SPEAKER_32: Sure. Each investor has a different area of speciality.

SPEAKER_11: And you should look at what stage of a startup they invested most. And whatever they tell you is not as important as what they do, right? So if you were looking at a person and trying to judge them, the best way to judge a person is to look at their previous behavior or to watch them doing the job you're asking them to do. This is first principles thinking.

SPEAKER_10: If you go to a family office and you are in year zero of your startup, you are not incorporated yet, you have a, you know, a demo, a product, they're not going to invest unless they have

SPEAKER_11: a history of investing in entrepreneurs who are not yet incorporated and who don't have a product in market yet.

SPEAKER_07: Now, you have to divorce what people say in social settings, especially investors, from their behavior. If you look at my firm, Founder University is designed as a product occurring in three different geographies, three different continents around the world, twice a year each, six cohorts a year, Riyadh, Tokyo, and in the US. And we explicitly ask people to come who have two or three founders and you don't need to be incorporated. You don't need to have customers yet. We want to meet you in year zero and then the accelerator, we would want to invest and we want you to be incorporated at that point.

SPEAKER_10: Now, if you go to a family office and they've invested in seven things in the last five years and all of those things are private equity deals that their friends brought them and they put $30 million into each deal, how on earth are they going to put $125K or $250K or what you're looking for in your seed? They're not. But you got introduced to them. They took the meeting. They're going to say nice things.

SPEAKER_07: You have to divorce the nice things they're saying from the reality of what they do. That's all. You have now somebody who likes you. Okay, great. But they say that to everybody. What you want to look at is, do they actually invest in your stage of startup? The answer is probably no. Therefore, who does invest? Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, A16Z, Pear, has a great summer program. Sequoia has ARC. I have Founder University, Launch Accelerator. Go to those programs first.

SPEAKER_05: Get your $125K, your $25K check, your $250K check. Get your first five customers and then you can go back to them and they might be a greater later stage.

SPEAKER_07: And in terms of numbers, in order to get a seed round today, you need to contact 150 seed

SPEAKER_05: funds, get 50 meetings with seed funds, to get 20 second meetings, to get two to give you a term sheet. That's the funnel today. If you're not doing that, you're just not playing the game on the field. You may hear of people who get funded, they take a meeting and they instantly get funded

SPEAKER_07: and they weren't even looking for funding. Those are memorable stories because they are not the norm. They're notable because it's not the norm. That's why you're hearing those stories. The norm that we see on the field is emailing and trying to get in touch with 150 different

SPEAKER_10: investors, getting on the radar and getting a quick Zoom call with 50, getting 10 or 20 of those. In other words, 10% of your initial target list to take a second meeting. 150 targets, 15 second meetings. That would be a reasonable goal. If people are not willing to take a second meeting, you're not really, you should really only judge second meetings. People are not obligated to take a second meeting.

SPEAKER_46: Therefore, a second meeting is notable. Okay. I hope that helps.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I think that's, it's interesting. It's how, how many different sort of fields and kinds of work that's applicable to like people think to become a content creator, you just create like two or three videos and

SPEAKER_29: then one goes viral and now you're Mr. Beast. And it's like, no, it's hitting it every single day. It's doing it hundreds of times until you find your voice and refine everything. And then you start actually growing. And I think it's kind of the same across just about any discipline. All right.

SPEAKER_04: Speaking of Founder University at On Protons, On X had a pitch for you for what they call Founder Community College. So their question is, why is there no Founder Community College to go alongside Founder University? It would help with the coming wave of 500K to $5 million AI driven single person owner

SPEAKER_29: operated companies. So you're not worried about fundraising. You're not worried about board seats. You're not worried about cap tables. It's just focused on tools and building great products. What do you think is there?

SPEAKER_04: Can you see a level between, you know, Founder University that's for, you know, people who are even earlier?

SPEAKER_05: So funny, they mentioned this. I literally this weekend was asking about the accreditation laws and how I could give a degree. I was asking this because we have an associate in training program for the venture side of

SPEAKER_07: our business. We're hiring six people in June to be part of that. They start as researchers. They become analysts. Then they become associates. It's a basically a three year program to go through each of those titles. 60, 70, 80, 90K is like sort of the career path in terms of salary. So instead of paying for a degree in venture capital, we pay you is the way I tell people to look at it. And we hire twice as many people, really three times as many people as we need, because we think one or two of them are going to opt out. It will be like not the career for them. One or two of them we will not continue on with. In other words, we don't think they have what it takes. And then one third, we're going to keep and they're going to become all stars in our firm. And we want to replenish that. But I had so many people say to me, I would like to send my child to that. Can you charge me 60K a year for two years? And I'll pay you 120K to teach them how to be a venture capitalist because there is no course in that. There's like, can you have education? It turns out I'm not legally allowed to give a degree in being a founder or a degree in being a venture capitalist. I could give a certificate. Right.

SPEAKER_53: But not a degree. When you're a founder and you're moving fast and you want to close a big deal, a traditional bank can kill your momentum. Long approval processes, clunky, outdated systems, not intuitive. I mean, some of these systems look like they were made in the 1970s and have never been updated. Not all banks are designed to work for startups. We all know that. And that's exactly why Grasshopper Bank was created. Grasshopper is a real federally charted bank, but with the kind of financial tech stack that you'd build for yourself. They're going to open your new account in just minutes, not days. That's a key pain point. An integration friendly platform with real time transfers and AI tools that are going to save you even more time. All without training your budget on a bunch of unnecessary fees. That's where they get you. And because you're a valued Twist listener, Grasshopper will drop a $500 cash bonus into your account when you use the promo code TWIST. And so that's what I think a lot of people do with these continuing ed certificates, et

SPEAKER_07: cetera. So I would have to partner with a local university in the U.S. to do this.

SPEAKER_10: And there are some that do this.

SPEAKER_07: But you can give certificates or a diploma, but you cannot give a degree. That's the word that I think gets you in trouble.

SPEAKER_10: Now, outside the U.S., there are some universities in the U.K. that will let you use their programs to do a U.K.-accredited degree.

SPEAKER_07: Okay. And then there are islands. Like, there were some islands people would go get degrees in medical practices. Sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_49: I mean, I know that's a big, like, Central American thing. People go down there to get their degrees.

SPEAKER_59: Right. And, like, dentistry and other things. And it does somehow work in the United States.

SPEAKER_07: I don't know about those. It seems fugazi, fugazi.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: But I have been thinking about this because I do think college is broken. So next year, I told my team, I want the associate and training program that we start in the summers to be so good this time. And you and I were talking with Jackie about it. We're going to have, like, a Monday morning session and a Friday end of the week session where we do professional training. And then in between, they work at one of the business units inside the company.

SPEAKER_05: The goal, I think, is for that training program, those two two-hour sessions that bookmark the

SPEAKER_07: week to be so good that next summer, when we do it, we could literally charge for it and literally say, for $50,000, you can come work here for nine months out of the year, take your summers off, or 10 months, and for two years, and then take on Kauffman Fellows. There's a program called Kauffman Fellows. You can pull it up on the screen. Kauffman Fellows charges, I believe, $80,000 or $90,000 for two years. Somebody look up the price. It was extraordinary. And then they were like, oh, well, that's for people who are already in it.

SPEAKER_46: So Kauffman Fellows is this program that people do. And you can see it's incredibly diverse.

SPEAKER_07: They have, like, scholarships and stuff like that because our industry, the venture industry, was known for being, maybe 10 years ago, a little too, dare I say, male and white and Ivy League. Sure. But they've had 1,000 fellows. Some of them you might know. There's Jenny Fielding. I know her. And I don't know which one of these people are paying for it. There's Monique Woodward. I'm an LP and her fund. So I don't think there's anything wrong with this program necessarily. There's Mamoon. But I do think it's a bit of an elitist group. And it's, I think, $90,000 a year.

SPEAKER_63: I don't know if someone has looked it up. Yeah, no, Jacob looked it up.

SPEAKER_29: Producer Jacob looked it up for us. The Kauffman Fellows two-year program tuition is $80,000. Application fee of $100 if submitted by the early deadline.

SPEAKER_00: If you missed that, it's a $300 application before the actual end-of-time deadline.

SPEAKER_03: So I think I could have 10 people in this program charge them $50K each. That would be $500K. Then I could hire two full-time people to work on it and create a program.

SPEAKER_07: And I think it would be better than Kauffman. I know it would be better than Kauffman, fellas, because you get to come with me to Saudi, come with me to Tokyo, see those programs and interview companies. And I think they're not even in office for that much. I don't think that this, I think this program is all virtual. I think they maybe spend a couple of weeks together.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah, Zoom meetings probably, mostly. But I wonder like what the actual curriculum is. If somebody could send me the curriculum or send me like the agenda and what it is,

SPEAKER_71: I would love to study what Kauffman has done. I don't know if it's public.

SPEAKER_07: But anyways, I'm not dissing them for having an incredibly overpriced elitist program. Yeah. Well, I am thinking on a competitive basis, like maybe I could create a better program.

SPEAKER_03: And then for Founder University, I would be fine with partnering with a university that wanted to give a Founder University degree and make it a two-year program.

SPEAKER_07: And it just teaches you how to be a founder and embed you in companies.

SPEAKER_75: I mean, sure, why not?

SPEAKER_00: There's probably some young people that would be interested, that are interested in entrepreneurship but wouldn't even know where to get started. I feel like that's what Founder University is good for. Like, here are the 10 terms you don't know. Here are the concepts everybody's talking about that you're not familiar with. Like, that's where I think we can really help young people.

SPEAKER_07: Or maybe you put the two together and it's just company building and you have two tracks, the Founder University track and the associate, the venture university track. You have the two tracks and you major in one minor in the other, but you learn both sides of the table.

SPEAKER_00: And I mean, we're also, I bet you, Kauffman Fellows is not doing media training. You'd also come out of this knowing how to make a newsletter, knowing how to do social media, knowing how to make a podcast, you know, like all those communication skills that you wouldn't get that are so important in this field. I mean, we talk about it all the time because we're constantly booking investors and venture capitalists and founders as guests, but there are a lot of brilliant founders with great companies or brilliant investors with great portfolios, but they are dead air on a podcast.

SPEAKER_49: You can't book them on things. Yeah, for sure. And so like, we, we also help with those skills that are important as well.

SPEAKER_82: Yeah.

SPEAKER_83: Now, unfortunately, because some idiot started a podcast about startups 16 years ago, and now every venture capitalist has to have a podcast.

SPEAKER_85: Yeah. Geez. Those four billionaires got together to future shift during COVID and now we're all done.

SPEAKER_86: Especially since one of them is not a billionaire.

SPEAKER_85: I actually think three of them are not billionaires technically. That's breaking news. Huge if true.

SPEAKER_90: Yeah. I don't think Freeberg's a billionaire. Maybe on paper with a hollow stock. I mean, people refer to you.

SPEAKER_29: I don't think Chamath's a billionaire. I don't know. People just refer to you all as billionaires. I just assumed. I've just been guys. Charles might be a billionaire. I don't know. I feel like, yeah. Sax and Chamath may be pretty close. Maybe. Chamath after that grog deal. Come on.

SPEAKER_95: I think he probably owned 10, 20% of that.

SPEAKER_63: I feel like he's probably. Yeah. I mean, that's always the thing. And then who cares?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah.

SPEAKER_83: Like, honestly, the more I look at wealth, wealth creation, once you get past like this

SPEAKER_46: basic $10 million mark, you have the FU money. You have the FUM. Right.

SPEAKER_07: And once you have FUM, it doesn't matter. You could ski. You could podcast. You could do whatever you want. And it's exactly $10 million. I think that's, yeah. That's exactly the FUM number. FUM starts at $10 million. $10 million.

SPEAKER_83: Once you have that, you make 5% on your money, which is a half million dollars a year, which means, you know, after taxes, $400,000 or $500,000 a year, you can just exist. Yeah.

SPEAKER_98: I'd be back in Florence right now. You'd be back in Florence. How was your trip, by the way? I didn't ask you.

SPEAKER_99: Amazing trip. I had a great time. Yeah. Rome, Rome. How many days did I give you off?

SPEAKER_100: It was, you kept saying 22. It was technically 19 days off. And a lot of those were weekends. So it was like, I think it was like 14 work days off total.

SPEAKER_103: It felt like you were gone for two months. My God. You would definitely have job security. I was like, I'm CCing lawn. And I'm like, Jesus, when is this guy going to be back?

SPEAKER_100: All right. Give me another question. All right. Let's go into number three. This is from Surge Dog, also on X.

SPEAKER_04: Love Surge. If you compare early stage startups today to 10 years ago, what has changed the most in how you evaluate them? And in particular, he's interested in what do investors overvalue, do you think, from the like old school conventional wisdom playbook? What traditional must-haves have become optional? And what expectations are now table stakes?

SPEAKER_29: How has the landscape shifted for you as an investor in early stage?

SPEAKER_111: Yeah. I mean, the number one thing is the amount of capital it takes to get a product to market and to the amount of time it takes to get product market fit.

SPEAKER_03: That is dramatically decreased.

SPEAKER_07: So over time, with Vibe coding or the no-code revolution, we had these moments where it seemed like really no-code was one, the cloud era was another, where the cost of running a startup went down 10x. It used to be 3 million, then it went to 300.

SPEAKER_05: And when that happened, because of WeWork, outsourced accounting and legal, and not having

SPEAKER_10: to stand up your own data center, it used to take 20, 30 people and $3 to $5 million to get your product to market.

SPEAKER_07: That was in the Web 1.0 era, the 90s. Seed round would be 3 million. It would take 12 months to get your product ready to go to market.

SPEAKER_10: And you had all of these expenses, which were considered non-negotiable, and you had to do them. You had to have a PR firm, 10K a month for 18 months, 180K. You had to get an office for 25K a month. You had to put a 250K letter of credit down. So that was another 300,000 a year for two years, 600,000, 250K letter of credit. It was basically a million dollars to set up your office. You had to put a half million into service. Now you had 1.5 million. You had to spend 100K on legal, 1.6 million. You had to hire an HR person, an accountant, and a lawyer, another 250K. Now you're at 1.8, 1.9 million.

SPEAKER_113: You get the idea. Then you hired a couple of product people, developers. You're at $3 million. You finally get the product launch, and you figure out if you're going to win or not.

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SPEAKER_10: Then, the Y Combinator era, the cloud computing era, meant you work at home, three people, you eat ramen.

SPEAKER_39: For $300,000, you could stand up a startup in under six months.

SPEAKER_10: Now, then it went to like $30,000, just paying for some servers, but maybe you got free credits, and you and your partners never met in person, and you just shipped, and you vibe-coded stuff, and you got your first customer.

SPEAKER_113: Then, you applied to Y Combinator, or Techstars, or Antler, or one of these incredible programs, Launch Accelerator. Now, it's kind of like, I built a, I vibe-coded a product, I got to $100,000 in revenue, and then I applied to Y Combinator. Then, I applied to Launch Accelerator. So, that's what we're seeing.

SPEAKER_10: And so, the time from idea to first customer, and first customer is light product market fit. You can convince people to pay for anything, but let's just say some level of product market fit. That's down to weeks. It's down to a weekend. Yeah, I was going to say, it's out of days.

SPEAKER_00: We've seen companies on the last few months of the show that are literally like, oh, I built this 14 days ago, and we're talking to them on the show about all of their hundreds of customers.

SPEAKER_122: Our bounties program is a perfect example of that. We have two bounties out this week in startups.com slash bounties or bounty.

SPEAKER_07: And the one for the fact checker, real-time fact checker, we got 15 people, and I think three of them are really good. Yeah. That was like in under 30 days. And then we're doing another one, another $5,000 bounty for annotated.

SPEAKER_111: And what I'd like to do with one of those companies is actually make it a startup.

SPEAKER_71: So I'll give them the prize, but then I want to hire them and incubate the startup. So that's my hope is that the real-time fact checker becomes an actual startup company or annotated becomes a real startup. So I'm hoping to find a founder or two I can hire and put into like a startup or a company I incubate.

SPEAKER_00: And by the time this airs on VOD, we'll have already picked a winner for our sidecast live production company. Or multiple winners. You never know. We've seen some amazing submissions. There are really some great submissions. All right. Next question.

SPEAKER_29: From founder, university vet, Mahika Golani of a company called Treya. She wants to know, how should startups think about differentiating when Frontier Labs release products in the same vertical that they're building in?

SPEAKER_00: Of course, this is a huge story. People are always worried about, are they going to get death by clawed in? Is Anthropic going to just take over their business? Of course. What do you think founders should be doing to try to sort of early differentiate, give themselves a little bit of moat against OpenAI, Anthropic, and others?

SPEAKER_03: Absolutely. So there's always going to be a feature set that the interface of the large language model is not going to add because of clutter and confusion.

SPEAKER_05: So let's take travel.

SPEAKER_07: We had a great startup, Rome, and they, I think, were built on like the preview, like the 2.5 of, and you can look up Rome, and we probably have it in our database here. I think they wound up giving the money back to investors because in ChatGPT 2.5, that was like an API, and then they were letting you put in. I want a three-day trip, I want to go to Italy, I have three weeks, my boss gave me 19 days to be out of the office. Yeah, it was great. What should I do over my 19 days because my boss is so goddamn accommodating? And Rome was like one of the best previews I've ever seen. It's in our database. It's not public because it's shut down. But let's take that one as a travel example. You can ask all these travel questions inside of ChatGPT, and people do. But if you were to build an interface around it and features around it, and you're constantly adding features and then building a community around it, the community, the support, these extra features, they're not what ChatGPT is going to work on. They're just going to, ChatGPT, X, they're going to just give you your basic output. But what if you want, when you get the basic output, you want to play multiplayer mode. So you and I and Amanda and William and Bianca are doing our next trip to Tokyo, and we're like, hey, let's do this as a group. Let's all research where we want to go for three days on a bullet train. Let's all research where we want to go for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and shopping.

SPEAKER_10: And then we all do our research, but we're watching each other do the research. And then we click and we vote and we add it to an agenda, and then we finalize the agenda. All that stuff, Rome Around was the company. That's not going to be done by ChatGPT. So you can build all that around it. And then you could build the concept of a virtual travel agency, somebody who uses AI and does all this itinerary with them, and you pay them per hour to do it. Or you pay them for ground support. When you're on the ground in Tokyo, they match you with a local guide.

SPEAKER_07: Those things will not be done by ChatGPT, if that makes sense, right? So that's, I think, the differentiator you can do. TaxGPT, another example of it.

SPEAKER_29: I was just going to say, having just planned a trip, you do look things up on AI. It's natural. I use it in place of a search engine at this point. But then there's also Viador and TripAdvisor and all these other platforms.

SPEAKER_00: And it's using both. It's not one or the other like I think a lot of people think. It's sort of, you know, you layer these different tools on top of one another to get the best result.

SPEAKER_49: So I think there's truth in that.

SPEAKER_07: I think community multiplayer mode support services around those things, they're just not going to do that. They're not going to create a marketplace with local guides. One of the things I want to do when I go to Japan next time is there are now food guides who have come out. And, you know, one of the things is because of social media, everybody goes and, you know, does a video of the memorable stuff. Right. And then all the influencers go there. But it turns out, like, unless you speak Japanese and you know the surrounding area, those places are targeting American tourists. But there's 20 other places with pancakes that are just as good or better that don't have a line. And you can hire. There's one guy who's a bit robust.

SPEAKER_46: And his thing is like he's I don't know if he uses the term fat or, you know, whatever. He's your jolly fat guy who takes you on tour. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_143: And I guess there was a movie.

SPEAKER_46: Yeah, there was a movie about like Brendan Fraser was in about like rental family.

SPEAKER_144: Yes.

SPEAKER_29: And the concept is he's an American actor and he's hired to pretend to be like a surrogate father in this family that doesn't have a dad around. And apparently this is I mean, the story behind the movie is that this is a real service in Japan that you can like rent a fake family member for occasions

SPEAKER_00: or for times where you are particularly missing having like a dad around. And then he becomes, of course, bonded with the family.

SPEAKER_63: And it becomes a sweet story like that.

SPEAKER_20: You could also do rent an old guy for fun.

SPEAKER_148: Yes. So that is a thing.

SPEAKER_29: And there's a rent a boyfriend, rent a girlfriend services. Those get talked about a lot. And it's not a sex worker thing. It's just like I want somebody to go to this ball game with, you know, like it's that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_151: Yeah.

Chamath Palihapitiya: But the the renting a food thing is like that's even better.

SPEAKER_07: So let's say you have this idea for an A.I. planner, but then the A.I. planner has to result in something like you're on the ground. OK, so you get the basic chat GPT features for free, but we could also connect with somebody who books this or gets in line for you, brings you, translates, it sits with you, gives you the backstory, takes you and arranges for you to go in the back and make the ramen, you know, between, you know, lunch and dinner service.

SPEAKER_29: For sure. Yeah. In Rome, we booked a one of those golf cart tours where the guys drive you around in the golf course. And we got to go into a bunch of crypts and stuff under the churches because he like would give he would give the nuns like five euro. He knew where to go and like who to talk to. So we got to see like genius, the tomb of St.

SPEAKER_00: Cecilia and all this sort of aqueduct under the Trevi Fountain stuff that most tourists don't get into, which is cool. So, yeah, I think that's it.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, there's there's a there's a service there if you can find your sort of spot in the stack. Yeah, for sure. So from Triperidot on X, they are a dating app for serious daters. I'll bring it up here on the screen. They compare it to being like it's like being set up by a friend as opposed to just a sounding on an app by women for women.

SPEAKER_04: A new take on the dating app. That is their business, their question. And I quote, founders are often told to find the right investor. But most advice reduces to stage, sector or warm intros. When you evaluate founders, what tells you there is real alignment beyond the obvious category fit? And then the founder adds they're asking because fundraising feels to them like a marketplace with weak signals and poor coordination. They feel like the best founder investor matches are not just about who invests in their space, but who sees their problem the same way that they do. Your thoughts.

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SPEAKER_167: Okay, so there are investors who, investors have all different sets of signal and processes in which they invest.

SPEAKER_169: I have a friend who's an investor at True Ventures. He only invests on things that come through his network. He's an older guy. He's probably 60 now.

SPEAKER_07: And he basically looked at his career of 40 years and said, or 30 years and said, you know what, all the great investments came when one of my friends told me about a company. Therefore, I'm not taking any emails. People can email you all they want. The only way I'm taking a meeting is if another venture capitalist or a portfolio founder tells me I should meet with it. And he just uses that as his filter. And I think it works for him. Then there are people like Y Combinator or us. You come to launch.co slash apply. We meet with 10% of the companies that apply every week. So some weeks we get 200 people applying, sometimes 500. We meet with 25 people a week now. We were meeting with 140. That was too much.

SPEAKER_03: It's crazy. So we meet with those 25. At the end of the year, you know, all said and done, we've done 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 meetings.

SPEAKER_07: And we've invested in 100 companies, called down from 10,000 to 20,000 applications. You get the idea. But we don't invest in biotech or military tech right now. We're looking at military. We actually started with military tech, but we didn't do biotech. We didn't previously do bio, you know, and everybody's got a different preference.

SPEAKER_03: So figuring that out is hard and it's work. And I think the best thing to do is to study what people have already done. You get a Crunchbase account or any of those things. You start following on social media the different firms and figure out 150 different firms that invest at your stage and have invested in similar companies.

SPEAKER_07: So if you're a marketplace and they did Uber or Thumbtack, like I did, or they're doing FinTech, like I did Wealthfront and Robinhood, you can know that when you come to me, we share that. So if you're doing a FinTech marketplace, you're like, hey, J.Gal, you did Thumbtack and you also did Robinhood.

SPEAKER_46: We're doing a marketplace for financial advisors and you pay financial advisors by the hour instead of 1% of your net worth or your portfolio size. And I'd be like, oh, yeah, that's a really good idea. I would love to hear that pitch. Yes. So that's your job. And you have realized now as an investor that this is not a clean, easy to navigate

SPEAKER_10: marketplace. It's a bit bespoke and underground. We have a product called Whisper Network for our founders where they get to go in and search through and put in their materials, ask us for an introduction. And even with that tool, it's still hard. You're hunting, you're packing, you're doing research.

SPEAKER_11: I think AI will make it a little bit better, but it's your job. It's tedious. It's a full-time job treated as such.

SPEAKER_10: That's why if you have three, three, three co-founders in a company, one of them can focus on the product. One can focus on sales and one can focus on corporate development.

SPEAKER_01: Corporate development is another fancy way of saying raising money. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: And that's what you need to do. You have to look at fundraising as a full-time job. You have to collect investors and build deep, meaningful relationships with them over time.

SPEAKER_00: Sort of the same answer is number one. Like it's just, it's about legwork and putting in the hours and, you know, shoes on the pavement, or as they say, you know, it's like about just hitting the streets and hearing the pictures.

SPEAKER_11: It's a sales funnel. You have to qualify each sale. Are you qualifying each investor? Do they invest? Have they invested in your stage? Are they actively investing?

SPEAKER_01: Or is their fund in maintenance mode and their in-between funds? What check size do they do? Do they lead a deal or do they follow a deal?

SPEAKER_10: Are they like my friend and they only take intros from existing founders? Okay. Then you have to do the work to meet one of their founders then in order to meet them. Okay. Are you willing to do that work? So if you have 10 great VCs you want to meet with, maybe your best strategy is reaching out to five of their founders, meeting two of them, and then using those two founders to get one of them to introduce you to a partner over there. Now, you're talking about sending 50 emails to founders to get 20 meetings to maybe get

SPEAKER_32: on the radar of those 10 venture firms, maybe get on the radar of three or four of them. So again, that's the sales funnel.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. It's like when you're applying for your summer jobs as a teen. And, you know, like at first you're like, I filled out three applications. I went to the ice cream store and the bookstore and, and it's like, no, no, you got to fill

SPEAKER_00: out a hundred applications to get that one interview and to get that job. It's the same kind of story.

SPEAKER_181: Oh, and you know, you can be creative about it.

SPEAKER_111: Like, uh, there was somebody I saw who went to San Francisco and put the pitch.

SPEAKER_03: You can, somebody can look it up here in the producing team. They put the pitch for their startup on the back of their laptop and they just sat there

SPEAKER_111: in a cafe in South Park, I believe, which is not South Park, the TV show, but a little park in San Francisco where there's a couple of cafes and there's VCs tend to be around that park or there's some number of VCs. And they just said, I'm going to sit here and run into some people. The, and there was a Paul Graham quote or a video clip that went viral recently.

SPEAKER_07: It turns out San Francisco and the Bay area are very unique in that the startup culture there is to help people without an expectation of short-term rewards.

SPEAKER_39: And everybody helps everybody. This podcast was my way to give back. And that's why I've done 2000 episodes of it. People tell me all the time, oh my God, you really helped me. I'm like, okay, I've never met you. They're like, oh no, I listened to your podcast and inspired me to start a company. And then I started my second.

SPEAKER_07: Then I met somebody who was on your podcast because I emailed them and told them it was a podcast. So that helping people without expectations of return is a unique part of the tech industry and Bay area culture. You can only experience that by going to the Bay area and meeting people.

SPEAKER_00: We found this post, the guy who put a sign on his laptop. I'm going to, I'm going to share it right now. Thanks to producer Jacob who have dug that up. Uh, yeah. A guy put a sign on his laptop, AI, B2B startup, raising pre-seed product is live. Come say hi. A few investors came up to him. No cold emails, no pitch deck, no intro, just visibility in the right place. So there, your laptop as a billboard would sort of be the concept there. There you go. Yeah. All right.

SPEAKER_16: People see you coding.

SPEAKER_00: We got a, we got a, what do you want to do one or two more? Are you, you're, you're, you're okay. Keep going.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, we got a, we got a, my energy is good. Good question in from one of the live viewers right here on this very live stream. We're doing right now from at Yadon 9884. What's the best path for a bootstrap hardware founder? Once the prototype is real and nearing profitability, would you stay lean and grind revenue or start bringing in strategic people before you scale up?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Yeah. I think you should get investors.

SPEAKER_07: If you're at that point and investors have totally 180, their position on hardware. It used to be hardware is hard. I don't want any part of it. Now it's hardware is the only, one of the only moats left. I love hardware. Plod is doing a great job with that. We just had on the program, somebody made a bookmark that goes into your book and then you can scan it.

SPEAKER_124: And Alex was like over the moon with this product. And I was like, why do I need that different strokes for different folks, but hardware is

SPEAKER_07: now a way to get lock in whoop as a hardware product, you know, has some amount of lock in my eight sleep.

SPEAKER_03: All of this now has become a moat and a way to increase the fidelity and the usefulness of a product. So yeah, hardware is no longer a blocker with investors, which is really fascinating to

SPEAKER_111: me. I invested in many hardware companies, Terra Cafe, Cafe X.

SPEAKER_07: We had a Butterfly, which was a drop cam, you know, camera ring competitor. It didn't work out. We had a smoke detector back in the day before other people came out with smoke detectors. You know, most of these things fail and eight sleep succeeds.

SPEAKER_77: It's just Terra Cafe is succeeding really well. Cafe X is still going and actually doing really well. But hardware is hard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_111: And it just takes a little more capital. So you're going to have to find people who are comfortable with investing the capital. And there are now a large number of hardware companies. You can work backwards to them. Kickstarter is still like a very viable option doing viral ads to get your first thousand

SPEAKER_46: customers to give you a thousand dollars and, you know, charging them three or four times what the retail product would be to go first. You get, you know, dummies like me who are like, yeah, I don't care about the price. I just want to be the first to have it. Yeah. Great. Whether it's like the Tesla Roadster that I paid 150K for or countless Kickstarters I've paid for and, you know, the boxes are in my closet unopened or I used it once. It was like, oh, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_19: I learned something and now I move on.

SPEAKER_00: I wonder if robotics is going to really supercharge this whole thing. Like you're already, you could drop a few grand and get a Chinese humanoid robot at this point. Like soon that's going to be like its own hardware categories. People buying like weird little new robot designs for their house.

SPEAKER_199: I think figuring out what to do with commoditized robots is going to be a very interesting business. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

SPEAKER_27: And I think they ultimately will be a dollar or two dollars an hour is my guess.

SPEAKER_00: So if you think about, you know, you don't shell out all the money for the hardware, but you pay less. And then every month you've got to pay your $12.99.

SPEAKER_07: If I was making Optimus or Figure, I would go to Amazon and say, what do you pay somebody to sort packages? They'd say it's $27 an hour and then fully baked.

SPEAKER_111: It's $35 an hour. People sue us for workman's comp, insurance, all this other stuff. Right.

SPEAKER_205: And I'd say, okay, we'll give you a figure robot.

SPEAKER_07: You're currently paying $30 an hour fully baked, you know, $20 to the person, $10 plus 50% for everything else. We'll give it to you for $4 an hour. And we'll have somebody on site who's maintaining them for you. And you have 100 robots here sorting packages for $4 an hour. How does that sound?

SPEAKER_03: And they say, great, $4 an hour times 8,000 hours a year, four times eight, boom, it's going to cost 20, 30, $40,000 a year to have these maintained and ready to go.

SPEAKER_07: But then when it goes to consumers, you can really abstract it like a lease, you know, so you'll just pay a $299 a month lease and that gives you 500 hours of your robot's time. If you go over, it's a dollar extra.

SPEAKER_39: Like you lease a car and you go over a certain mileage, you pay 50 cents a mile.

SPEAKER_199: That will be a really good model for these eventually.

SPEAKER_21: And then there are going to be all kinds of applications.

SPEAKER_208: Great acronym too, ASS, automatons as a service. It's going to be great. Automatons as a service. They'll be your acronym, yeah.

SPEAKER_181: They'll cover your ass, yeah.

SPEAKER_111: I think they're going to be great. I mean, we had a security one, Nightscope, that had been at like TechCrunch 50 or one of the early launch festivals, one of the early ones.

SPEAKER_46: That was that weird looking robot that just drove around. Now there's many of those security robots.

SPEAKER_10: And I think they were taking the same approach, which is security guards, $20 an hour for them to pay, play, candy crush and fall asleep. This thing never falls asleep. It works 24 hours and it's $10 an hour. And even if it was the same price, it does a better job because it never stops walking around.

SPEAKER_213: It's got 360 degree cameras recording everything, which a human's not capable of.

SPEAKER_100: It's not going to accidentally shoot as many people probably, hopefully, as the human security guard would.

SPEAKER_110: But good luck with your hardware startup. It's good timing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: All right. We got a question from Jacob. We got a very spicy question that you're free to punt or we can react to some videos. What's your pleasure?

SPEAKER_216: Give me the spicy and then we'll do a video reaction.

SPEAKER_04: From Sean Sully, a.k.a. Arugle on X, out of all the people in Silicon Valley, who's the one person you really don't like the most and why?

SPEAKER_219: Who don't I like in one way?

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the one person you don't like. I think you could pick your reason. You disagree with them on things. It's a personality conflict, whichever. Yeah. You take your pick. I have some I have some guesses, but I'd like to hear your pick.

SPEAKER_05: Well, listen, I I would say, you know, we all operate in the same ecosystem of users and some people, I think, have damaged the reputation of the industry and the user base.

SPEAKER_07: And then some people have just maybe screwed over friends of mine. So, like, Zuckerberg, I've been a consistent critic of my number one personal one guess. It's not personal. It's that every time he had a chance to do the right thing for humanity, he picked his own self interest over that of humanity, whether it's teenage girls and like or people's privacy or how he worked with partners in his partner program and treated founders.

SPEAKER_10: Every single time, he seemed to make a decision that was not in the best interest of humans. That's it. And so I don't like the way he's behaved. It's not personal.

SPEAKER_111: Like, I don't I haven't seen Zuckerberg in person in a decade. I mean, I might have been at a dinner and been in the same room as him, I'm sure, a couple of times. But having sat down and had a conversation with him, I'd be happy to do that and be happy to interview him for a project or a product.

SPEAKER_10: But I think he is so obsessed with the growth of his companies, which has made him tremendously successful, that copying other people's ideas blatantly, screwing partners over in the partner program he had, not being thoughtful about teenagers using his product, not being thoughtful, not being thoughtful about, you know, all the reports that he had internally about teenagers and specifically teenage girls and how damaging Instagram was for them in terms of eating disorders and anxiety and then optimizing all these platforms to keep you online. And it's just it's a level of selfishness in decision making that and cutthroatness that I understand, but that, you know, I wouldn't do and I think has damaged the reputation of the tech industry. I think he actually has made people look at the tech industry and be like, you know, well, I mean, we've Sam Altman, I don't like because he screwed Elon and Elon's my friend and I watched it happen. But I kind of liked Sam or I did like Sam interpersonally. We always had some like interesting things, but he, you know, he kind of shivved my friend and I'm team Elon, not cool to what he did to him. And listen, I'm not the only person who thinks like, hey, maybe Sam should not behave this way on a business level. But again, it doesn't matter in business. You can be incredible. The two people I'm talking about are two of the most successful people ever in the history of business. Yeah, they're doing all right. So in some ways, being able to make self-interested decisions and not worry about what people think about you and not worry about losing and burning relationships is a quick path to extraordinary success.

SPEAKER_00: Yes, I think being a being a like high level tech CEO definitely self-selects for some of those qualities that we would associate with, you know, like someone you might consider like a jerk or a not not very nice person in your life.

SPEAKER_07: I mean, the number of people who in that piece in the New Yorker, which, you know, listen, these press pieces, like it's probably, you know, 60 percent true, 40 percent true, 80 percent true. Who knows? And then people have agendas. So you have to sort that out. And the press doesn't care about sorting out the agendas. They care about like, hey, is this piece going to rip or not? Right. So I don't the New Yorker piece on Sam was brutal and a number of people called his behavior sociopathic. I didn't call his behavior sociopath. That's what, you know, Ronan Farrow and his collaborator. I didn't participate in that piece. They asked me to. I was like, you know, I don't really have any business interest with Sam.

SPEAKER_71: So, like, I'm not qualified. And then, number two, I don't talk to the press. So I'm good. Thanks. But they were like, we had specific questions to ask you about Sam Waltman and about the Sequoia Scouts program. I was like, yeah, feel free to put them in writing and I'll consider. And they're like, we don't do that.

SPEAKER_111: And I was like, I just didn't respond. Right. Well, I don't care. You know, I just was interested in what the questions were.

SPEAKER_198: I probably wasn't going to answer them anyway, but I was curious, like, what the question even was. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_236: I mean, when you're writing a piece. So anyway, that's the answer. There you go. Fair enough.

David Friedberg: I think. And it's not personal. Like, so, you know, everybody wants to make a personal. Like, I'll bring up maybe the guy with the wrong. The guy in military tech. You know, like when I made. When I popped off on my answer about him.

SPEAKER_188: Yeah. It's not that I dislike him. I just thought what he did was brain dead.

SPEAKER_07: Like, stupid. Like, to do covert stuff. Now, is the press story correct or not? I don't know if that press story was correct. And I did kind of pop off. And I apologize to him. Because, like, yeah, I look back on it. I was like, yeah. You know, maybe I was a little bit too hardcore on my answer. But if that story was true, I do think he did the wrong thing.

SPEAKER_242: But I didn't have to say it as brutally as I said it. And I did kick him when he was down. He got fired. I was kicking him. So I kind of looked at it.

SPEAKER_05: And I was like, yeah, maybe that was not a classy or kind or Christian thing for me to do. So I was like, yeah, okay. I take ownership of that. Sure. I kicked the guy when he was down. When you podcast every day. Probably shouldn't have done that.

SPEAKER_00: When you podcast every single day, you're just reacting. You're doing hot takes. You get caught up in the moment, I think.

SPEAKER_07: Well, but you see how I do it. Like, we were doing a recording before this. And people were asking me about a case. And, you know, oh, Y Combinator and General Catalyst supporting a founder who allegedly did things that were unethical and copied another startup. And I framed it like, if this is true, and we don't know if it's true, this would be maybe unethical but not illegal behavior. And maybe, you know, General Catalyst didn't know what this founder was doing, if it's even true, and maybe they're trying to clean it up right now. So I really think through, like, before I pop off, and I just don't trust the media or any report now. And when you hear me on All In, you know, sometimes people just run with a Kane Coe of the great story or, like, some viral clip. And I'm like, just so we know, that viral clip could be AI. It could be an old clip. Nobody knows. So this is alleged. And I kind of make a joke about it. Allegedly, perhaps, not confirmed. I put all those disclaimers on it because I'm old enough now to know, like, some non-zero, like, low double-digit percentages of time I'm reporting on a news story. It's not exactly accurate.

SPEAKER_00: I think that's a good lesson for even if you're not hosting a podcast, even just a in your everyday life. In 2026, you've got to take that beat. It might be very satisfying to be like, oh, this idea of the story lines up with my personal biases. I can't wait to share it and prove how right I've been. You always have to take that extra beat, like, is this AI? Is this true? Is there a community note? Is there some additional information? Is this being framed in a certain way designed to provoke a reaction? Because everything is-

SPEAKER_248: Lon, this was your first trip to Italy?

SPEAKER_29: This was my first time ever in Italy. Yes, that's true.

SPEAKER_250: Okay. So- And Greece. I went to Greece.

SPEAKER_29: Oh, you didn't went to Greece as well? I went to Santorini and Mykonos. I visited Santorini and Mykonos. Amazing. It was amazing.

SPEAKER_167: So give me your general impression of Greece and Italy. What were your favorite parts of it?

SPEAKER_07: What was extraordinary? And then what was underwhelming and didn't hit the notes as we go off-duty here?

SPEAKER_253: Yeah. So I went- It was Lon off-duty in Italy. I went, I did a week in Rome.

SPEAKER_00: Me and a friend, we stayed in an Airbnb right by the Castel, St. Angelo. Right, right. It's sort of the middle of the city, right? You know, not far from Tristevere. Staying in the Airbnb was amazing. We're walking distance from the Vatican. It's a building from the 1600s where the Pope's staff used to live in, like, the Renaissance era. So it was an unbelievable place. The best thing we did was that crypt tour. We did a golf cart crypt tour. And a guy took us to all sorts of, like, out-of-the-way, you know, sort of, like, churches that had, you know, bone temples in the basement and all of this crazy art.

SPEAKER_29: That was amazing to see. We took a bullet train one day to Florence and to the Ephesi Gallery.

SPEAKER_00: We went to this amazing pasta restaurant called Osteria Pastella that was—

SPEAKER_255: I think I went to both of those.

SPEAKER_00: That's great.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, they're one of the places they take a huge wheel of cheese and they pour brandy in it and then they light it on fire and then they mix your pasta in the cheese bowl and then they topped it with white truffles.

SPEAKER_00: It was incredible. And the Ephesi, you know, lots of great art. I will say a down thing. It's very, very crowded right now in Italy. Lots and lots of tourists want to see Rome in Florence. I was not alone.

SPEAKER_04: And one thing that really bugged me in all the art museums that we went to is people are standing in front of the paintings of the sculptures and they're just snapping photos on their phone. And, I mean, this is, like, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Caravaggio's Medusa. Just go on Google Images. There's a hundred beautiful, up-close, high-resolution photos of every—you could get the Birth of Venus on, like, a mouse pad.

SPEAKER_03: Like, you don't need your own photo. I think this is a gripe. This is a gripe that's worth noting. Yeah. And just be in the moment, folks. Just be in the moment. And I'll tell you the thing that makes me crazy in these places. The selfie stick.

SPEAKER_188: That, yes. Or the i360 guy. Yes, yeah. You know the i360 guy with the stick? Of course. They're all— And it goes up? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: And he's got to walk around and he's got to have a 360 view that he's never going to look at. But the 360 guy is worse than the selfie guy. Yeah. The selfie guy's got his iPhone on the stick, whatever. These guys are walking through Vegas casinos. And I'm like, what are you documenting? Your life is incredibly boring. You're the least important person within a hundred miles of this place. This place has been documented, as you correctly point out, to the point of absurdity. And now everybody's got to be on your i360, and you're smacking people in the head.

SPEAKER_07: Nobody cares. You're never looking at these things. If you want to take a quick photo of yourself in front of your favorite piece, totally fine.

SPEAKER_217: Right. And that's—I did. I posted a few of them to Twitter. I would take a picture of myself.

SPEAKER_04: Like, here I am. I'm in the UPC. I want to remember this moment. I'm not saying don't be a tourist. Don't take a photo. Don't take a selfie. But it's that—just taking it. And, like, we went to a Rothko exhibit as well in Florida. It's like a modern museum. And it's like those paintings, it's being in the room with it. That's the point. It's overwhelming when you're standing in front of it. You're not going to appreciate it on your phone. What are you doing? So that—

SPEAKER_27: Here's my idea.

SPEAKER_111: Here's my idea for these museums. 24 hours and increase the price to go a little bit.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Or maybe, like, on the off hours, you pay a premium. Oh, sure. I would like—because these all close at 6 o'clock, right?

SPEAKER_04: They're done. Yeah, it's like—Ufizi, I think, is—yeah, it's like 10 a.m. to, like, 4.30. But you have to get a time. They send you through in shifts. So when you buy your tickets, they give you a time to show up, and then you get in the line. And there's, like, a VIP line.

SPEAKER_20: You pay an extra couple of euros. So what did you pay?

SPEAKER_218: 10 euros or something? It's not expensive. No, it was—I think it was, like, 30 euros apiece. But we also made those plans a little last minute.

SPEAKER_29: I bet if we got in earlier, we probably could have gotten a cheaper Ufizi pack.

SPEAKER_03: Here's my idea. The place closes, like, the last entrance is 4.30, which means they're kicking you out at 6. Right.

SPEAKER_05: 6 to 8, 8 to 10, 10 to 12, 12 to 2, 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. I know maybe people don't want to work those.

SPEAKER_69: Have a 100-euro experience.

SPEAKER_07: Now, a 100-euro, a $100 experience per person sounds insane. But, by the way, if you're an Uber driver or you're a housekeeper in New York, you're making 30, 40, 50 bucks an hour already. Yeah.

SPEAKER_59: And that person might want to have an experience with 10% as many people there or 20% as many people there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: It would be a totally different experience to go and really, like, soak it in on your own and have the time. Yes. Instead of being pushed around and everybody's trying to push. Wow.

SPEAKER_278: I would have loved, loved to go to dinner.

SPEAKER_112: And then I like to do my after-dinner walk because I'm old and I'm, you know, controlling my weight, row.co slash twist. I would love to do my two-hour walk in the Louvre from, you know, 8 to 10 p.m. or even 10 to midnight. How great would it be for us to be in the Louvre at 11 p.m. and see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo with but a half-dozen people there.

SPEAKER_279: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Because also, yeah, like, in the British Museum, too, in London, I had the same experience where it's, like, it's amazing to see that stuff. But you're constantly in, like, this huge crowd and everybody wants to take their photos and it's really –

SPEAKER_284: Did you go to the Florence gelato place that I told you about?

SPEAKER_29: You know, I did. I went to a gelato place in Florence, but we were only there for 24 hours. I ran at a time. I did not get to it.

SPEAKER_00: I missed that. I missed that one. But I did – we did go – we got some incredible food the whole time. I roamed, too. We went to some really amazing restaurants. And then – so that was week one.

SPEAKER_29: And then week two, we joined my dad and my uncle and his girlfriend, Karen, for a cruise. And that went to Santorini, Greece, Mykonos, Greece, and also a town named Kushidashi in Turkey where there's the ancient Greek ruins of Ephesus are there.

SPEAKER_00: And so we did a little quick tour of that.

SPEAKER_288: Santorini, beautiful, right? Oh, my gosh.

SPEAKER_32: Hillside with the – did you get to go on the donkey ride? No. Up and down the Santorini?

SPEAKER_04: I felt bad for the donkey.

SPEAKER_00: I didn't – I don't want to subject a donkey to my 200 pounds. I felt like I'm not going to do that to that poor –

SPEAKER_169: Well, this is why road.co slash twist will get you down to 180 and you'll be fighting what you're going to – no, I thought the donkey thing was a little bit extreme, too. But they have, like, this very steep hill. Yes.

SPEAKER_296: And you take a donkey ride up it.

SPEAKER_04: Oya, the sort of – it's the city when you think of Santorini and you see the Instagram posts with the white houses and the blue dome churches.

SPEAKER_29: That's Oya. And so we got to go check out the town. We took a bus to get there. And then we went to Fira as well, another town.

SPEAKER_00: And then they took us to one of those black sand beaches. So we got to do a little beach ride in Santorini. It was incredible. That was incredible.

SPEAKER_298: I'm glad you got to take some time off.

SPEAKER_111: Me too. And this is where I don't have a problem with the metaglasses, actually. I'm okay. Sure. I have an exception for metaglasses.

SPEAKER_07: If you take them to dinner, you're not invited to dinner. Right. However, if you're in a museum and you want to put those on and record – Go for it. Go for it.

SPEAKER_04: It's better than the selfie stick everywhere. I still don't think you're really going to get a lot out of that after the fact. Part of being in the museum is you're in the museum. It's real. Like, you can look up art on the internet all the time. I do it all the time.

SPEAKER_306: Take 10 pictures. Okay? Take 10 pictures.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Yourself at the front. Yourself in front of your favorite piece of art that you saw. Okay.

SPEAKER_307: At the cafe, having a coffee and whatever.

SPEAKER_04: I'm not anti-selfie. I took a ton. But, like, when you're standing in front of a Rothko, you don't need to have your camera. It's just – What are we doing, folks? It's just lines on a canvas on a photo.

SPEAKER_29: You have to stand there and soak it in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_310: All right, everybody. There's been another great twist is in the can. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.