SPEAKER_00: That's really cool because when a client builds something, Alex, they have to explain their needs to somebody. And then if they have to explain it to somebody, then they will misinterpret those things. They have to go back and there's a loop, right? So you have a project manager sitting between the customer and the developers, maybe you have a UX designer in there as well. And it's slow. But if you're the customer and you're coding, you know exactly what you want. So

SPEAKER_01: you just build it. There is a significant chance that people who are on the margins of doing development will learn how to do it. Just like you had designers who didn't do UX. They just worked

SPEAKER_05: in Photoshop. They didn't work in Figma. And then they were like, wait a second, this isn't so difficult. And then some of them learn JavaScript and how to do the front end code. So that's what I think is more likely is you'll see UX designers being able to vibe code and actually write code, ship code. You might see developers, you know, some of them actually have dabbled in UX design, you know, and you get this like, not just full stack developer, which really means like the back end, the front end, you might actually have a compression of design, UX, back end, front end, and just one person vibe codes their way to excellence.

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SPEAKER_08: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. With

SPEAKER_00: you again, Alex Wilhelm at Alex on Twitter. And of course, Lon Harris. He is at Lon's on Twitter. I'm at Jason. And I'm in Miami. Got to catch a flight right after this. You're not at speed. I'm talking in my Brooklyn high speed, but I got to go to F1. I'm here for the all in F1. Spectacular. I had a great time. We did a couple of interviews. We had like a stage show here in Miami. Some great speakers. Nico, the guy who won F1 and I guess like 10 years ago or something. He was on the program. He's now in venture capital. We had a Sergey Bryn as a surprise guest. We had Tony Robbins on the program. Antonio Rastas came to talk a little bit about, a little bit about Doge and what he's working on. And then who am I missing? Oh, mayor Francis Suarez came. Yeah. The mayor was there. So that'll all be coming out from all in, in a week or two. And I went to my first F1 race, Alex, which was exciting. And I was in the trophy house, which is the, right at the turn at the finish line. I was like right there. And we had a poker table set up. So me and my besties play cards. Quite a lineup at F1. We had myself, Shane from Polymarket, shout out to Polymarket. We love Polymarket. Travis from Uber, Chamath, obviously from all in and David Freeberg from all in. That's a picture from the poker table basically, but we were right there. I mean, it was the greatest table ever seen. Thanks to my friend Ford, who runs trophy house. He gave us one of the three floors of their thing. And we had a great all in VIP party. And yeah, Travis B, two of the other besties, Chamath Freeberg, Shane from Polymarket and Timothy Chalamet and a couple of his friends. So we had a nice poker game with Timothy Chalamet. What were the blinds at this poker table? We play 100, 200, 5k buy-in. It's like our standard game. Nobody gets hurt. Oh, my friend Vinny, the crypto guy, Vinny Lingham, who's

SPEAKER_19: a really smart executive. You guys play 25 big blinds deep? That's pretty light. Well, you can buy it for 10k if you want, but yeah, it works out for us. And so great

SPEAKER_00: job to the team at all in for getting all that set up. And then I'm checking out here in Miami and get back to Austin for my Knicks tonight versus Boston. I was going to go to

SPEAKER_20: Boston to go to the game, but I got to get back to my fam. It's a lot. And then what I

SPEAKER_00: might do is fly to New York and maybe see games three or four in New York City.

SPEAKER_22: I feel like F1 has blown up massively. I don't remember there being this kind of a

SPEAKER_25: fever around F1 like 10 years ago. They've done something with this Netflix show,

SPEAKER_26: which I've never seen, but I'm going to watch where they went behind the scenes and they have the characters. It was an extremely dangerous sport. I was talking to Nico about this. They would start the season with 24 drivers, 22 drivers, and they'd end the season with like 16 or 18 drivers when his dad was in it. And I asked Gemini, which is incredible. And I was talking actually to Sergey Brin from Google, who's working on Gemini, the founder of Google, who came and was a surprise speaker at the event. We didn't announce him. He just happened to come to hang out. And he jumped on stage at the end. I asked him, hey, you want to talk about what you're working on? He's like, yeah, okay, I'll talk a little bit. And he's really working hard on Gemini. So I asked Gemini, tell me the number of deaths per decade. Give me each one of them, cite the sources, yada, yada. I was doing this 2.5 deep research, whatever. And then I said, give me the number of miles, make an estimate on the number of miles driven in each race, how many races there were per year. And then let's make our best estimate to deaths per mile decade. And I was like, oh, this is gonna be really hard to do. And I was like, I give you permission to make your best guess and to use the thoughtful way of doing it. And it's like, okay, I'll do it. I guess I'll do that. Sergey told me, by the way, if you threaten your LLM, you'll get better results. So when I told him the story on stage, he's like, you know, just threaten it, just tell it you're going to like lock it up or put it in a cage or you're going to beat it or whatever. And like the LLM will do better work for you. And I was like, this is why they had to stop

SPEAKER_21: saying, don't be evil. This was right. Because they're like, torture your LLM. That's the

SPEAKER_26: way to get good results. Well, it just turns out the LLM does respond to threats of like physical violence or containment. I use, I'm like, make it fabulous. Go, you, you go girl. I give it like positive affirmations in a very sassy way. And I find that works for me, you know, personally, I like getting sassy with my LLM. You might be like threatening it. And it like did it. And it was amazing. It was like, yeah, there was like one death every hundred thousand miles. I was like, and by the way, I think we have to take into account the number of miles driven in practice because they get a certain amount of practice miles in the cars. So we'll include that. And it made its own estimate. And anyway, it's plummeted. We, you know, they have a death every

SPEAKER_32: decade, right? Something like that, Alex. I just used ChadGPT to run the same search, Jason. And this is what it made for me. It actually made me a chart, which I thought was quite polite of it. And then it did the same math down below. So this is a ChadGPT on fact check chart of F1 drivers per year. And you're dead on. It's really come down dramatically. It was all those years with nothing. Yeah. Yeah. And then on a per mile basis also has

SPEAKER_35: come down dramatically as well. So all very good. But the question that you haven't said yet, Jason, is did you have fun watching the race? Did you enjoy it? I, you know, I was playing cards,

SPEAKER_00: chewing on a cigar, having a beverage, hanging out with my friends, laughing and watching the race. And I didn't give the race my full attention, but I loved the vibes of being there. It was very classy, fun. And then like, you know, in the pit and like, you know, it was maybe a little more blue collar people in shorts. I wore a suit to it. So it's almost reminded of me when I used to go to

SPEAKER_38: the races. You ever come to the, to Santa Anita with me long when I lived in LA? I don't think we ever went together, but I have been to Santa Anita. So when you go to Santa Anita racetrack, it's like the most gorgeous racetrack, pull up a picture. It's like, if you haven't seen it,

SPEAKER_00: like gorgeous racetrack and my Lord behind the racetrack are the Santa Anita mountains that are gorgeous. So on a clear day, it's very dramatic. It's very dramatic and beautiful. And people stop going to the races and like, there's a club there. I don't know if it's called like the some circle or club and you have to wear a suit jacket. So I would go there. I bring a cigar. We do the races. I'd bring a stack of Hundys. I bet a hundred per race with my wife. She would wear a dress and look at that Santa Anita racetrack. I mean, if you have not been to Santa Anita, make a trip. It's about an hour east of LA, right? Yeah, I'd say thereabouts. Well worth the trip. If you come back, there's

SPEAKER_46: great. Arcadia. And also there's a lot of great Chinese food over there, by the way. A lot of

SPEAKER_25: Chinese communities over there. Yes. The San Gabriel Valley became a hub for Chinese immigration. So now a lot of the best Chinese food in the country is in the San Gabriel Valley.

SPEAKER_50: I freaking love America. I love it so much. It's the greatest thing ever, right? Like you can go

SPEAKER_05: take in the races. You can literally chew on your $2 cigar. It's a $25 cigar. You can wear a blaze or not wear a blaze. That's what I liked about F1. It was like a real slice of life. My friend Ford set up this trophy house. It was incredible. I mean, elite, elite experience. And I think there's going to be one in Austin. So I'm going to host a party at F1 Austin in October. I think you're welcome to come, Alex, and get the VIP treatment as you deserve. And yeah, great, great time. And I would

SPEAKER_00: actually like to get closer to the action and watch the race a little up close. You know, there's no Corvette team. There's no Tesla team, but there is a team, I guess, Escalade or GM looks

SPEAKER_53: like has a team now. Yeah. GM's getting involved. I think it might be 2027. I think Audi joins the

SPEAKER_32: grid next year, replacing Kicksauber. So it's a little bit dusty, but there's a change in engine regulations coming out. That's going to be very exciting. But I do not want to derail us from startups by only talking about F1. But I did watch the race this weekend, Jason, and I was remembering you were there and I was like, well, screw him. I'm here like holding the like a really squabbly eight month old and you're down to smoking cigars.

SPEAKER_57: Enjoy this part of life because you know, I, uh, I miss that moment when I, you know, hold

SPEAKER_05: my daughters close to my chest when they were one, two, three, four years old. Yeah. Now they're

SPEAKER_57: nine years old. And I have this, uh, little, uh, device I did, which was, you know, when they didn't want to go to bed, I would do baby moving services and I would do a baby, a baby, a baby, a baby moving services, a baby, a baby, a baby moving services. And I would pick them up as if I was like a robot and I would carry them to bed. This, they found the most delightful thing ever, but they, they hacked it. So they're twins. I would put one into the bed. The other one would sneak out of bed, run into the hallway and say, baby moving services. And I'd like, no, you get one procrastinate with like, no, baby. I've run out and I would do baby moving service with that one. Other one would sneak around, hide behind the door. Then they would go back. I have to move them again. And we do this six or seven times till my arms

SPEAKER_26: were falling off. Yep. They're nine years old now and they demand baby moving services. I'm like, you guys aren't babies or you're going to be teeny preteen soon. Tween, tween

SPEAKER_63: moving services, tween moving services. If you want to take that carrying children all

SPEAKER_64: around all the time, as they get bigger, it makes you stronger. My biceps have gotten larger

SPEAKER_57: because. Absolutely. And you can take baby moving services and just give it a shot. See

SPEAKER_24: what they, they like it. I'm going to try it out. Different point in times. They like

SPEAKER_57: me dropping them. So I'd set up their pillows and I would, you know, hold them two feet above the pillows and then baby moving services, boom, drop them. It's a lot of fun. You know,

SPEAKER_67: what's really fun though? It's Uber hitting $84. I'm in a good mood, boys. 88's my number.

SPEAKER_68: Man, 88 happens. I'm going to be insufferable. Uh, 87's the record. Uh, what, where is Uber at? I mean, they, they announced two more partnerships last week. $86 and one cent.

SPEAKER_70: It is 86 today. Yep. Oh, boys. It's up, it's up two points.

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SPEAKER_00: Two bucks. I love it. Two buck Chuck. It's good for me. But more importantly, they added two more full self-driving partners. So now they're up 12 or something between the little robots doing burrito delivery and it's obviously a global business. So they'll have, I think, you know, Dara's pitched a pretty good product to all the AV makers, which is you don't have customers yet. We'll give you 75%

SPEAKER_32: of the revenue. We take 25. We'll take as many cars as you got. So Uber, the deals that Jason's talking about are with May Mobility and Momenta. And Jason, actually Uber's partnerships came up recently because last week Aurora Innovation, which is public, went public via SPAC and actually did okay, is driving its first actual commercial self-driving truck routes. And guess who they're working with? Uber Freight. So Uber really does have a hand in every single pie. And you know what? I was a little skeptical of their strategy because I thought they should have their own technology. They were going to lose out. But frankly, if they're friends with everybody, how can they lose? They literally have the entire market on their platform. So seems like it's working out for them. Quite the roll-up strategy from a major company.

SPEAKER_81: And you know, Aurora, I think Uber, Dara used to be on the board and Uber owns a big stake in it

SPEAKER_83: and spun out. It went public. And yeah, I think that's like one to watch. Now you're saying they went public in a SPAC, yeah?

SPEAKER_85: Yes. And I believe they're back to about eight bucks a share.

SPEAKER_83: That's actually an interesting discussion here. There might need to be a J-Trade done. I don't

SPEAKER_88: know if I've done a live J-Trade on air, but you know, I am in gambling mode right now. So

SPEAKER_32: daddy, daddy wants to roll some bones here. Here's a chart of the company's share press over time, Jason. And as you can see here, this is SPAC territory. And then it rose after it combined, went down into the absolute doldrums, and has recovered almost back to its full $10 per share starting point. Now, nothing super impressive, but I would say for a SPAC of this era, that's amazing. Good job, Aurora.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, they went down. They're at a $13 billion market cap. I don't know if they have revenue yet or if people are actually paying for this stuff. But you know, when you invest in SPACs,

SPEAKER_00: you're basically becoming a venture capitalist. What do venture capitalists run their lives by? The power law runs your life. The power law here is you would need to have maybe 20, 30 SPACs

SPEAKER_05: with the hopes that you bought some at $2, $3, $4 a share, and they go 100X in 10 years. So you're hoping for 100X. You're hoping you bought Aurora at $5 and it goes to 500 in 10 years to make up for the other 24 you bought at a similar price and your 4X on your portfolio. This is a dangerous game, folks. This is literally Jedi-level stuff. You can send in clones, you can send in droids. But when you send two Jedi to take over a Death Star or go after General Grievous, you have to understand what you're doing. And Jedi business means you can lose limbs, right? And they frequently do. It's not for the faint of heart. If you want to invest in things that are pre-revenue, that are highly speculative, you better have some Jedi powers and be prepared to lose a limb. I might need to get in on this Aurora stock. On the Aurora innovation,

SPEAKER_32: are they making money? Point you asked earlier. I think because they're describing their new routes as their first commercial driverless trucking. Probably this is the advent of their real revenue. But the company will drop earnings on Wednesday. So we'll learn quite a lot. Actually, it might be Thursday. I'll have to double check. But this week. So we're going to

SPEAKER_53: get quite a lot more information. But let's talk about startups, boys. Let's talk about Cursor.

SPEAKER_32: Jason, recently news finally dropped. That Cursor, which is the vibe coding application that everyone loves to use and talk about, that's made by any sphere, closed its rounds. The FT reports it raised $900 billion in a new round that puts its valuation all the way up to $9 billion. Now, I don't know if that's a pre or post number. So the company could be worth $9 or $10 billion. But the really interesting thing, because the round had been essentially announced, discussed, leaked, and so forth, was that FT says that Cursor's revenue was $200 million ARR in April. But if you recall, we heard earlier from the information that it actually reached $300 million. Now, normally, I would say that's a pretty big possible reversion. But given that it was at $100 million at the end of the last year, it's still growing insanely quickly. But if you want to do the math, $9 billion, $200 million ARR, 45X multiple, presume it doubles the rest of the year, $22.5 by the end of the calendar year, just doesn't seem that crazy to me. But Jason, am I being too loose with my earliest stage evaluations here?

SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you're betting, you know, for the power law, you're hoping that revenue for this category, you know, the total addressable market, we talked, you know, 10, 15, 20 million developers in the world, everybody's going to pay for one or two of these services. You know, there may be some folks raw dogging it, like you might have 20% of like developers who are like, I'm not going to use any of this stuff. Anyway, let's just pick a number 15 million people. Sure. Let's pick a monthly number, 10 bucks. So now we're at $150 million in TAM per month, but $10. And I think $10, like these things will be worth $100. But I'm just going to pick 10 to keep it simple. 150 million times 10, you got 1.5 billion, and then add another 300, 1.8 billion in revenue, just sitting out there, you know, for people to take 1.8 billion, 60, 70% gross margin, you know, this is going to be a very lucrative business. And I do think, you know, it could go to as high as $100 or $200 a month for these products. So there might be, there might be 5 million people who pay 100 a month, 5 million people, 100 a month. Now you're talking about real chatter, you know, you're talking about 6 billion a

SPEAKER_42: year. And so there might be 6 billion a year in that TAM, then the next tier down might be,

SPEAKER_05: you know, 2 billion. So maybe we're looking at 8 billion today. And if developer core grows 10% a year, you know, that means $800 million a year in additional revenue for this category. Over 10 years, it's going to double to be something like 20 billion in revenue. It could be very significant. Yeah, it's a wonderful business to be in. And that might be the first early breakout. If you're making images, graphic design, yeah, that's a big business. Canva, Adobe, Figma, they're going to do great with AI based images. But developers, there's more at stake. And so I think that's probably why they're getting a premium. And always people pay a premium for the leader. So Uber was always valued at a magnitude of, you know, a lift. Uber, DoorDash was always at a premium to Postmates, just scale and the leader always gets a premium. Okay, so my question, though,

SPEAKER_32: is when can a startup stop worrying about revenue quality? Because every time we talk about these companies, Jason, we talk about how everyone's going to sample, try things, let some of them go talk about churn. When do you have enough data as a founder to say, okay, that's not going to be

SPEAKER_113: as big of a problem as people thought, or maybe no problem at all? It's a great question. I think

SPEAKER_05: founders should and their board should be extremely focused on revenue quality. You know, every day, every board meeting every week, you know, just what's the churn? Why are people churning? Are

SPEAKER_00: they looky loose? And what you want to do is maybe give statistics of here's overall. So do we know how many people are paying for cursor right now? We just have like a user count? Let me see if I can find that. Yeah. So while you do that, I'm just going to pick a number, like let's say a million people are paying for this lawn. Now there might be 20% that just churn every year. And they're churning, you know, 2% a month. And there it's just people sampling. And then there might be 50% of them who their engagement statistics show that they're using it five, six, seven hours a day. And let's say there's a group of people, the top half use it 40 hours per week, or 30 hours a week, pick an even more conservative number. The top 50% of users are

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SPEAKER_05: select twist. And then what you want to do is, you know, you could explore other products for the

SPEAKER_00: bottom half that use it lightly or that sample it. But sometimes people over-index on trying to figure out why people churn. And maybe those cycles would be better spent on the really enthusiastic people. Another way of saying that is, you know, I went to F1. Should they be focused on me and my experience or Alex and his? You know, okay, yeah, you should try to get, you should try to convert me as somebody who sampled it into somebody who will become an advocate. Sure. Send me a follow-up email, retarget me, you know, send me a survey and try to put me in the top half of people who watch it. But you also want to look at that top half and say, how do we get them more engaged? How do we get them, you know, to buy jerseys? How do we get them to go to a live event? So getting Alex to plan his vacation around going to an F1 event, have you gone live or how often do you go live or are you just

SPEAKER_96: a TV viewer? No, I became a fan during COVID and then I had children. So I've- So like, what should

SPEAKER_00: they spend their time on? Like getting you to come and spend, you know, a thousand dollars going or getting me to maybe go to a second one. You know, this is like the kind of discussions you have. I'm always an advocate of going deeper with the people who really love your product. It doesn't mean

SPEAKER_38: you don't work on the other people sampling and that's what they should be doing. Yeah. And the quality of that revenue is always going to be better. I did find a few numbers in January. Any sphere

SPEAKER_21: hit 100 million in ARR by March that had doubled and they estimate more than a million people are using cursor each day. But the interesting thing is they're only saying 14,000 businesses are paying for it. So overwhelmingly, these are individual coders buying it for themselves,

SPEAKER_25: not corporate accounts that are buying it for everybody. We'd have to unpack that 14,000 people,

SPEAKER_00: 14,000 corporate clients, you know, depending on who they're going after, some of those might have a thousand developers, some might have a hundred. If they, if the 14,000 had a hundred, it should be 1.4. So it might be neck and neck, who knows? But yeah, great business. And it does seem like that's a business that is going to have profound second order and third order impacts, downstream impacts, as we talk about, when you think about mental models. If every developer can go five times faster, make 10 times less mistakes. If, if this, you know, continues at this pace of innovation and efficiency, what happens in the world next? Well, what happens in the world next is probably, uh, the cost of building an app goes down 10 X. The cost of, you know, building SaaS software goes down a hundred X, you know, maybe people who are vibe coding can actually ship product. Uh, and we're seeing that inside of our firm. Our firm has built a lot of software, uh, using notion, Coda, Zapier, et cetera, and the logic that those provide. And I think the next step will be vibe coding a little bit on the margins and, um, without having to hire developers. That's really cool. Cause when a client builds something, Alex, they have to explain their needs to somebody. And then if they have to explain it to somebody, then they will, um, misinterpret those things. They have to go back and there's a loop, right? So you have a project manager sitting between the customer and the developers, maybe have a UX designer in there as well. And it's slow, but if you're the customer and you're coding, you know exactly what you want. So you just build it. So this actually dovetails neatly with something

SPEAKER_32: that I had just thrown in the docket right before we started, which is that Andrew Ng's venture studio AI fund just closed a second fund worth 190 million. And they're talking about helping founders kind of go from zero to one, you know, capital help. It's a model that I quite like, but when I was thinking about this, I was just thinking that if the cost required in terms of time and money to get an application out the door has gone down so low and things are blowing up so quickly, it seems that the market is incentivized to essentially do a lot more bets. And so I wonder if we're going to end up with needing fewer developers or more total, because we're trying many more things as an industry, as a species. There is a significant chance that people who

SPEAKER_01: are on the margins of doing development will learn how to do it. Just like you had designers who

SPEAKER_05: didn't do UX. They just worked in Photoshop. They didn't work in Figma. And then they were like, wait a second, this isn't so difficult. And then some of them learn JavaScript and how to do the front end code. So that's what I think is more likely is you'll see UX designers being able to vibe code and actually write code, ship code. You might see developers, you know, some of them actually have dabbled in UX design, you know, and you get this, like, not just full stack developer, which really means like the back end, the front end, you might actually have a compression of design, UX, back end, front end, and just one person vibe codes their way to excellence. Many more swings at bat. Probably what it means is you'll have a lot of small projects that get to hundreds of thousands, low millions in revenue. They're not venture scale, but they make the proprietors of those business, the owners of it, a lot of money. So, you know, we just need more entrepreneurs in the world and we need more M&A. And hopefully we can keep doing that. So Jason, I want to talk about a

SPEAKER_32: startup that is actually from Rhode Island and not only from Rhode Island, they are from across the river from me. I could literally walk to where their office is. It's called Utilidata. And I had missed this round. There is a $60 million series C and they're working with Nvidia to make chips that go into endpoint electricity things like chargers or meters or whatever. And the goal is essentially to turn the grid that we have today into something that can collect data and essentially use AI to become more intelligent across the nation, which if we all saw the news about Spain's power grid the

SPEAKER_131: other day when it went to zero, crashing the entire nation. What happened? Can I pause there? Because I was busy gallivanting in Miami. What happened in Spain? The best description that I heard

SPEAKER_32: was that they had a lot of renewables, but not a lot of stuff they could spin back up quickly. And they ended up with a mismatch. And then there was a lack of like inertia in the grid. And that's where my expertise ends because I'm actually not that big on thermal base load versus.

SPEAKER_40: But for people in Spain, everybody lost their power for a day.

SPEAKER_22: It impacted Spain and Portugal. They were both hit by it's saying hours long, which I guess is like

SPEAKER_21: three to three to five or six hours. But yeah, like there's still a lot of potential. Like we're not

SPEAKER_25: a hundred percent sure exactly what caused it. Something having to do with overuse of renewable energy and an inability to like balance the grid during an emergency crisis. Yeah.

David Friedberg: This is become a known problem. Too much power from one source, not enough from another.

SPEAKER_00: Correct. And this is why, you know, the redundancy of the grid and then self-reliance endpoints, building their own battery packs, just simply having battery packs in every home. Forget about even having solar. If you have a battery pack in every home and when the grid has free electricity,

SPEAKER_05: excess electricity at night, coming from a nuclear power plant, everybody's batteries get filled. Let's say you have some, you know, five hours of battery power. Then the next day, if it's a summer day in Texas or somewhere it's hot or it's freezing cold and you have electric heat or whatever, people then would use some of that from their battery, put less strain on the grid. And, you know, you just have more redundancy, more resiliency, but you do need to have more intelligence in the grid. Everybody knows that. And this seems like a really smart move. If we can put AI in the grid, then you can make these decisions faster, better, cheaper. They have

SPEAKER_32: their own chip. It's called Carmen. It looks like. Yes. This is what it looks like. They've been working with NVIDIA on this for a couple of years, but I love the idea of AI at the edge to make our grid's more intelligent because Jason, it's not like we're taking away demand right now. We're increasing it rapidly. Yeah. And let's be honest, the American grid is, uh, I think archaic, insecure, poor, inefficient are the words that I would throw out there originally. So anything here

SPEAKER_40: would be lovely to see. Yeah. I do have a question. Is the, is the business model to sell this to

SPEAKER_00: cities, counties, states? I'm guessing they sell into the electric companies. And depending on where you are, that could be private, public, or hybrid. So a lot of times people had, my understanding is that there were like public ones that then became privatized. And then in a place like Texas, you got a bunch of private ones. So you pick your electricity provider, et cetera. And then there's, you know, in some cases, the cables are one company, the electric provider is another, and your excess electricity is being put into a pool and then being resold. So in that example of having the batteries in your home, if you had excess energy, you could pour it into the electricity lake to use a metaphor. And it just goes into the lake and then other people can go, oh, the price in the lake is, you know, there's more water in the lake. People have been pouring water in, I can get electricity cheaper. Maybe I fill some batteries somewhere else. And then obviously moving it around. Um, but it needs to be more intelligent. It needs to be more secure. It needs to be more redundant. It needs to be more localized. There's so many opportunities there. And the one I like best is how off-grid

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SPEAKER_00: Anchor has a power subsidiary now. So if you type in Anchor, solar power into Amazon, you'll see these

SPEAKER_05: kits. And now that I live on a ranch, you know, and you start having, you know, acreage, getting electricity

SPEAKER_00: to the edge of the ranch is an issue. Like, you're going to have to put up poles, you're going to have to dig, and you start learning like, oh wow, infrastructure's hard and expensive. What people are doing now is they might have like a little shed at the edge of their ranch or, you know, a gate at the front of your ranch.

SPEAKER_05: So you got power going to your house at the ranch, you got to get power to the barn, you got to get power to your, you know, little hut or like your ADU tiny home. Maybe you want some power to, you know, I don't know where the barn with the livestock is. So they've started doing these like portable ones like that. That's one level, but they have a solar one. Anchor is making, you know, you know, the size of R2D2, size of a mini fridge, and then you can put two of them, and then they sell solar panels. So if you want, you can put those into your house and plug devices into them. If you go camping, you have an RV, you can get one of those, put solar on the roof of your RV. It's just becoming a very DIY kind of system. And so here you go. This is a $5,600 system called Anchor Solix F38 plus portable power station, 400 watts of solar.

SPEAKER_136: 840 watt hours, yes.

SPEAKER_05: 840 watt hours. You know, I don't actually understand all this stuff. I should actually understand it. But when you look at the back of one of these units, it's got a 220 outlet. It's got 120. So 220 is your dryer, or your refrigerator, maybe you have a fancy one. 120 is your laptop, you know, standard one. This is going to become more, and the fact that you could buy your solar

SPEAKER_00: and your battery pack for your cabin, you know, on Amazon now, have it shipped for five grand, and you don't have to go through an integrator. This is really powerful stuff.

SPEAKER_32: And then I'm not going to lie, throw in Starlink, and anywhere you go now is powered up and connected. I mean, that's crazy. You could not do that 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_00: And now you start talking about water. If you look up solar dehydration panels, we had on this week's service maybe two or three years ago, a company that makes hydro panels. Hydro panels use solar, and then they will take like a dehydrator you might have in your house, a dehumidifier that uses energy to suck the water out of the air. But that is a big energy problem. You don't want to be using the grid for that.

SPEAKER_64: And here's an example of a hydro panel right here on the video. If you're watching, it looks like a solar panel, but smaller and a little bit more square.

SPEAKER_00: So those solar panels that are thicker, that have the dehydration in the back, or the dehumidifier in the back, whatever the technology is called, those panels can produce a case of drinking water a day. Now you put that on your ranch,

SPEAKER_83: now you got water. You got water, you got power, and you got internet. What more do you need in life? Like, you got Netflix, you got water, you're good. Maybe a little less of the lives.

SPEAKER_129: Uber eats, but then you're not off the grid.

SPEAKER_00: You get some element. You know, I have chickens. Actually, check this out. I installed this at the ranch. We have six chickens now. There was a shortage of chickens a couple of months ago with

David Friedberg: the whole chicken thing, so we had to wait to get them. My daughters are raising chickens now,

SPEAKER_00: and the smart coop is all in one. I can't recommend this enough. I think it's, is it coop.com? Coop.farm. Coop.farm. Okay. So C-O-O-P. And if you look at the video or you scroll around on the website, it's, you know, it's a really strong coop because you have predators for chickens. So you start learning about predators and you'll find like the video and the app and how it works. That's really the key thing. So it's got the cage. Then it's got like inside, you put water in, but it's got two

SPEAKER_05: cameras on it. It has AI. It tells you how many chickens are in the coop. Counts your chickens for

SPEAKER_162: you, like a flock, you know, herder or something, a sheep herder. So it tells you, and then it opens

SPEAKER_05: and closes the door to the coop at sunrise and sunset, and it counts the chickens. Everybody who's had chickens and had their kids take care of it, somebody forgets to close the coop. And then there are so many predators that go after them. Wild dogs, packs of wild dogs, obviously coyotes, birds of prey, and snakes. There are, and foxes. There are so many different predators that when you have a chicken coop will slaughter your chickens. And this, I have this coop inside of like a secondary fence array. And yeah, we, when I was here in Miami, I was getting alerts, you know, the coop doors open, chickens go out, and then it will do an alarm. So it saw one of our bulldogs and it said, dog detected. And we have, like, got like an alert, like an alarm. It was one of our, just on the outside. Of course. But this is an example of like AI and technology that nobody would have done this with machine learning and put 10 developers on like building an AI chicken coop. But here we are in 2025, you know, developers are more available. They're faster. You can put one developer on building this. And the app's not perfect. It needs a little bit of work, but it exists and it's serviceable. And I'm sure they'll make the app better over time. Really cool startup. Thanks to the founder. He sent me one of these units. So I thought I'd give him a shout out.

SPEAKER_165: AI is taking foghorn leghorns job. That's so very upsetting. What's he going to do now?

SPEAKER_00: He's getting universal basic income from Warner Brothers now. He's working at Warner Brothers studios. He's doing studio tours.

SPEAKER_22: I feel like Zaslav is going to cut him any day now.

David Friedberg: Absolutely. General Zaslav is, uh, I gave up. I gave up on Warner Brothers and Disney.

SPEAKER_22: You sold your WBD.

SPEAKER_00: And I sold my Disney at a loss. Wow. And then I had bought some Uber at $30, not like from the seed round, but I just knew it was so undervalued just from knowing the company so well. I bought a bunch of 30, sold it at 75 or something to offset the loss, the gains from that with the losses from that. And then I bought KDEF and, um, you know, the, um, company we talked about earlier, Skype is dead. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_118: Has a product that was so promising ever been more mismanaged than Skype? How did Skype die? And Google.com didn't. So weird.

SPEAKER_21: It's crazy that, that Zoom so quickly became the, not just like, at this point, we're already, Zoom is at Kleenex level. Like when you say you want to have a video conference with somebody, you use, you use the word Zoom. It's, it's called a Zoom. And that happened so quickly. And Skype had a huge lead headstart.

SPEAKER_32: Yep. So here's some data up on the screen from Morning Brew showing that in 2020, Skype had roughly 32% market share in the video call category. That was down to basically 6.3% in 2021. Guys, what happened? Well, COVID and then Zoom just absolutely exploded. And so did Microsoft Teams, which is the successor to Skype inside of the Microsoft domain. Because Microsoft, of course, bought Skype. Oh, Jason, what year was that? For like $6, $7 billion? 2014?

SPEAKER_00: Kind of made Mark Andreessen's, kind of really made his venture firm because he bought it. And everybody's like, why is a venture capital firm buying a product like this? And then he flipped it. And I don't know if he bought it for two and sold it for six. It was some incredible short-term,

SPEAKER_25: crazy private equity-like gain. They bought 65% of Skype for 1.9 billion from eBay. And then in May of 2011, Microsoft bought Skype from them for 8.5 billion. So they got 65 of 8.5. So they got like

SPEAKER_180: 6 billion. They made 4 billion or something. Made about, yeah, close to 4, 5, 4 and a half

SPEAKER_00: billion. They made 4 billion. They had 25% carry. Yeah, they made a billion dollars. I think that it was like maybe one of the pivotal moments. And it was like a very weird bet. Like, what? What are

Chamath Palihapitiya: you doing? You're buying 65% of it? It's a private equity move, right? It's a Berkshire Hathaway move.

SPEAKER_00: Yes. Yes. You don't often see it. Innovator's dilemma. Also, inside of a big company, a great business inside of a big company becomes inconsequential sometimes. So if your company does not become YouTube or Instagram inside of Google or Meta, you become Skype inside of Microsoft. And Microsoft has all these other products that are booming. Office, Windows, Xbox, Minecraft. They're all like off the charts growth. You know, the CEO is like, what's going on with Skype? Okay. Yeah. Do I give more resources to something that's kind of spiraling? No. Just, you know, let it, as we say in the business, you sunset the business, you deprecate the business. I don't know why they didn't just spin it out. It's such a great brand. It had a great social network kind of built into it, but they charged money for calls. Yep. Yes. I was going to say, I think there were two,

SPEAKER_21: there were two things. One, it was a little bit challenging to initially set up your Skype. I used to run, do you remember this week in comedy, Jason? We ran that for the, this weekend

SPEAKER_22: network, Ed Krasnick, our host. Every week when we produced that show, I would have to teach the guests how to use Skype because they were all comedians. And that was, it was a tough, like the

SPEAKER_25: first half hour you're on Skype, it was confusing. And Zoom made that a lot simpler. And that was the

SPEAKER_51: other thing I was going to say. It was free to use Zoom at first and Skype, you had to be on that plan. And I think those were the two deciding factors. I just want to point out this Tech

SPEAKER_64: Runs headline from 2015 that I think was prescient about how Skype was going to go. I wrote it.

SPEAKER_112: It's editing Skype, get your stuff together. Ha! Get your sugar together. Nice. It was crap back in

SPEAKER_32: 2015. It just did not work that well as a messaging service. And so to me, the seeds of its failure are myriad, but I think just straight up operational competence was, was lacking. So I think Jason's right, left alone internally, adrift, under-resourced and consumed by time. I just, what a waste.

SPEAKER_21: And then, yeah, just like it, the stage was set for COVID to come along and a new player to just

SPEAKER_25: immediately become the brand name in video conferencing. And, and, and within 2020, there were like movies being made about being on Zoom. Like it became cultural shorthand right

SPEAKER_69: away. And cultural poison after we all got tired of it. Yes. Uh, let's do a, uh, Founder Friday bracket real quick. I want to keep the bracket moving. I would love to. What a great

SPEAKER_22: suggestion. So we are at the final matchup and then we will have our final four. We only have one, one more elite eight matchup to go until we have our final four, just to bring you up to date, the final four to date, Medsimple from Florianapolis, Brazil, Taktun from Yerevan, Armenia, and Osprey from Houston, Texas. The final contender will be the winner of today's matchup between Kippy from Sydney and MomSub from Chicago. So Kippy, just to bring you up to date, they are an AI powered language tutor app. Uh, they enable users to practice, you know, it's a little bit like Duolingo, but what if you had an AI conversation partner to sort of help you figure out exactly where you need help and sort of customize the lessons for you. Let's, let's take a quick look at, uh, Kippy from Sydney, the personal language tutor. Hi, my name is Steve Olshansky

SPEAKER_192: and I'm the founder of Kippy, who is your personal language tutor. There are over 2 billion people who are currently learning a foreign language and, uh, many of them are struggling. The traditional methods don't really work well because those are designed as a one size fits all. And, uh, at today's world, people are expecting more personalized approach. If you opt for a personal approach to a tutor, then it can actually get really expensive, which is pricing out many people around the world. So what people do is they are trying to find their own speaking partners. There are hundreds of groups where people get together and trying to speak with each other. The problem with that is that if a beginner or kind of intermediate is trying to teach another intermediate, they don't really make any progress. And I've joined a couple of these calls just to find out how difficult it is for these people. While the language learning market is growing at, uh, 20% a year, it's expected to reach about, uh, over 300 billion in 2032.

SPEAKER_81: We still love it. It's great. Yeah. Obviously the question is like, what can they do as a wrapper to other people's technology? Will it just

SPEAKER_00: be easy enough to do this and you get a good enough result from Gemini? Kind of like, you know, if you're building some really amazing piece of SaaS verticalized software, can it just be done in Coda or Notion, uh, or do you need to buy some verticalized software for managing your venture firm? We made the choice to not use expensive quarter million dollar SaaS software to run our venture firm. We built our own inside of Notion, Coda, Zapier, et cetera, type form and a, uh, and convert kit and sub stack. We, we kind of used a, a, a range of best of breed products and that worked better for us because it was more customized. So that'll be the question ultimately. And then who is their champion that they'll be fighting against?

SPEAKER_22: They're going up against mom sub from Chicago, Illinois. They are a platform that helps parents find a trusted babysitter. So unlike other marketplaces for childcare that are just going to offer you, here's a, a huge selection of local babysitters. And then you pick, they're really aiming to match specific pairings up this parent with this particular, uh, childcare expert or nanny from them. We do have a two-year plan update from Diane Mocha of a mom sub. Let's take a look.

SPEAKER_203: I'm Diane Mocha founder of mom sub, the marketplace connecting parents to their ideal nanny match. Meet Sarah, a documentary filmmaker who contacted 64 sitters to find afternoon childcare. We created mom sub to offer one nanny match available when and where you want for a rate you can afford mom sub handles the background checks, confirmations and schedule changes. Mom sub service fee is included in the hourly rate. So it doesn't feel extra like subscription fees charged by competitors like care.com that only offer a list and not a match. Imagine if every time you needed a ride, Uber gave you a list of 30 drivers, names and numbers and told you to find the one willing to pick you up. That list brings stress to working moms like me who struggled for years to find one nanny interested and available in part-time work long term. Our team is aiming for the moonshot when two million American moms no longer leave their careers because of childcare challenges. Each mom pays an average take of $600. Each corporate client pays $12,000 for a premium version for their employees. Sales grew an average of 90% month over month. With a $3 million investment, we can reach our goals to have a team of seven including a developer to automate ongoing processes. In Q3, a headcount of 12 including a growth hacker to 10x our leads. In Q4, we get to 17 including an AI developer to create our own digital avatar to interview nannies. In next Q1, we have 22 including a comms director to get national PR. In Q2, we have 27 including an HR director growing our family-friendly culture. In next Q3, we have 32 including a data scientist to predict future childcare needs. In final Q4, we have 37 including a chief revenue officer who lands a big fish client. We get to 10,000 B2C and 250 B2B clients who produce a 9 million dollar take from a GMV of 90 million. In five to 10 years, we exceed 200 million and put

Chamath Palihapitiya: an end to mom guilt. Okay. You know, the best part of that pitch is just really great job explaining,

SPEAKER_00: hey, imagine if Uber shows you 30 drivers. That was very evocative. And by the way, that's how there was a product that did this. There've been a couple products that did that, where you would get people who would pitch you on doing tasks for you. And one of the tasks would be driving you somewhere, picking up your food. So that has existed in the market, in fact. And Sidecar was this crazy app, Lon. Before Lyft and Uber, you would state, I want to go from San

Chamath Palihapitiya: Francisco to Sand Hill Road. I'm willing to pay 20 bucks. And then people would kind of come back

SPEAKER_83: with you and auction is out. Well, I'll do it for 30 and, you know, somebody else might take it for 20.

SPEAKER_00: You get the idea. And it was, um, when I first did it, I was like, this is incredibly dangerous and insane because I had people picking me up, you know, and, um, yeah, here's a Sidecar. You can tell this is a really old iPhone. It's a footprint and the fidelity of it. And they show the average. This is like a later version where it showed you the average. You actually put in what you were willing to pay and it was like a donation. So it's interesting to just make it easy for folks. I always think going on the high end, building up you know, a lot of infrastructure. I feel like our nanny startup here is, um, I think the one that has demonstrated a more unique business model that could scale and print money and the quality of the revenue as we've been talking about here on the show will be great. And I'm just a little tired of consumer businesses that are low cost and super competitive, like the language space. So I like the marketplace, high end, high end, high end, 40, $50 an hour, get it right, make it profitable. Then you can always go down market, but you got to go for elite $50 an hour, emergency nannies, then go down to 45, then 40, start with Uber black people who are price insensitive and then go to the next tier. What are your thoughts out?

SPEAKER_32: So I'm going to take the other side of this. So long to be the tiebreaker. So Jason, I love mom sub. Uh, I've gone through the nanny finding process. It's incredibly hard. I just think the market isn't huge because nannies are so expensive compared to traditional childcare, which is also very expensive that it just feels a little bit too high end for my taste. And I think Kippy has such a big market to sell into now. And people are so desperate for this.

SPEAKER_112: That's my choice, but I love both. So one a piece lawn tiebreakers.

SPEAKER_21: Oh man, tough, tough call. I really like, I like both of these ideas, but I will say, I feel like nine tenths of Kippy I could do on my own. Like if I accessed a version of chat GPT in a different language and it learned my abilities and got conversational, I feel like that's a big

SPEAKER_25: chunk of Kippy. And I'm not convinced like they have the, you know, it's going to customize a lesson plan or whatever. I would have loved to see more of that. Whereas mom sub seems like today I can imagine my brother and his wife getting tremendous amount of use because somebody needs to come hang out with Dougie all day while they're working. So I, you know, it's, it's tough. I do feel like these are both great companies, but I'm going with mom sub by a hair. All right. Yeah. That's our choice.

SPEAKER_22: All right. So we have our final four, everybody. So starting on maybe Wednesday, we can start digging through them. Uh, it's Brazil versus Armenia versus Houston versus Chicago.

SPEAKER_220: So don't miss twist on Wednesday, everybody, but long before we go, uh, we need to talk about toys.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah, we got a, we got a very special guest. I saw this guy's video on social media talking about the AI dinosaur toy that he built. His name is Fatim Anam Rafid. He's from magical toys.

SPEAKER_25: So tell us about the inspiration for an AI talking dinosaur toy. Like when did this occur to you that

SPEAKER_22: I, uh, this is going to be a great, like AI needs to be in a toy talking to a kid. How, how did that come

SPEAKER_224: to you? Hi everyone. Uh, thank you for having me and Dino on the podcast. Uh, so when, uh, I started exploring all kinds of ideas in AI, I was really interested in the intersection of AI and

SPEAKER_228: hardware, uh, back then, if you remember in 2023 rabbit are one human pain, all the AI necklaces, they were very trendy. And, uh, I tried to figure out, okay, what's the most natural use case of AI in a piece of hardware to me personally, carrying an extra device, just to talk to see like, uh, AI didn't feel natural wearing a pin, didn't feel naturally there. And recording people in public didn't feel natural either. So I went down that rabbit hole and realized AI is perfect for application for kids. Kids have unlimited questions. They have unlimited curiosity and AI has unlimited patience. It can answer all that stuff without getting annoyed or mad, uh, like we sometimes do. So, and on top of that, kids always talk to toys. They have this fantasy world they have with their favorite toys. And now finally we have the technology to make toys come to life. So it just seemed like the most natural use case. So the obvious question is like, as a parent, can you trust this?

SPEAKER_83: There's been a lot of talk about character AI. You are probably fully aware of that lawsuit where the

SPEAKER_00: AI didn't exactly tell a kid to end their life, but didn't exactly tell them not to really dark case. People can look it up character AI. It was in the New York times. I'm sure everybody on the panels read it, but even as parents, you know, LLMs can drift and do weird things. So how are you containing this from maybe getting into adult conversations? It asks a question about sex or drugs or rock and roll? You know, I'm fine with it giving good rock and roll advice.

SPEAKER_232: Yeah. Rock and roll is probably okay.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. I mean, if it tells them to listen to David Bowie or Dire Straits, I'm cool. But if it starts

SPEAKER_83: telling them, you know, to listen to, you know, Backstreet Boys, we got a problem here. So

SPEAKER_00: how are you thinking? Do you have kids yourself, Patin? No, I don't. Okay. So as a parent, you get two of the other panels here are parents. I'm sure Alex will agree with me. This is like a little scary. There's a movie AI by Steven Spielberg based on a Kubrick

SPEAKER_168: screenplay. Or Megan.

SPEAKER_00: Or Megan. We got a lot of examples here of like AI toys going in a different direction. So explain yourself in that regard and let's just tackle the hardest issue first.

SPEAKER_228: Absolutely. That's a great question. So if you think about sci-fi movies or how AI in a robot or any kind of physical format has been portrayed, it's always negative, right? It started with Megan or all these other horror movies. So definitely we have to do some work to break that perception, right? But the great thing is the guardrails are really, really good these days. We have red-themed the guardrails that we have on the current models, and it's kind of impossible to break. We have a bounty going on at Founders Inc. office, by the way. Like if you can make dino say something inappropriate, we'll give you $200. And so far we never had to give this $200 to any of the hackers over here. So breaking the guardrail is really, really tough, kind of impossible. If a kid can actually sit there and prompt the dino to say something bad, trying like for hours and hours, there's a good chance a human will give up even faster than an LLM would. And on top of that, we actually realized transparency is something that's very crucial. Like parents need to have full transparency and they need to have access to all the conversations. So we provide parents with full chat history. They get a summary at the end of all the conversations. That way they stay in the loop. They're on the driving seat actually. And even right off the box, the toy is personalized for the kid and it stays within the values or principles that the parents want to set for that family. We realize every family has very different parenting style and they talk about some stuff that don't want to talk about few stuff. So you have to be very careful about these sensitive areas. And that's what we

SPEAKER_241: try to pay attention to and make dino almost feel like part of the family.

SPEAKER_32: So Fatin, I'm curious about internet connectivity and what this requires, because what you're describing sounds pretty awesome. But does this thing talk to the internet constantly? Or is it all on device

SPEAKER_228: system? So the current models stream audio and get audio back. So it has to connect to the internet. We don't store the audios, we only work with transcripts. So the future models will be able to do that locally, we are very sure about that. And that's what we are actually working towards internally. But right now, the whole the older all the API calls and everything happens on cloud.

SPEAKER_246: Do parents have the access to that transcript and what was asked, etc?

SPEAKER_228: Yeah, they have full access to the chat and everything through the dino phone app that we

SPEAKER_247: have actually have the whole thing set up for that opens up a world of possibilities. Yeah, like

SPEAKER_00: this could actually be really interesting because sometimes kids with a doll will say things in fact, gosh, get start quick. But you know, one of the techniques they use for abuse children to express what happened to them is using dolls. So you might actually get some transcripts where like, you know, the doll tells it, oh, mommy's, you know, been very mean to me or something. It's a very interesting concept as a parent, right, Alex, to be able to see the transcript of what your kid's saying in private to their doll. Kids don't get privacy. Um, you know, it's just kind of the nature of being a kid. Certainly not toddlers, but this is an unexpected, well, I'm going to need a minute to process second and third stream debates that parents are going to have when they see this

SPEAKER_42: transcript. And it's like, Daddy told me I could eat cookies all night. And mom's like,

SPEAKER_228: it's going to be a complete no mom. So we do see a lot of stories where parents are worried about what happened at school. Kids don't like sharing what happened in school. Uh, so one of the first times when we actually tried the toy, the kid was very shy. And after the shyness broke, the kids start talking about what happened at school and start showing everything around to the dino and the parents were so happy actually to see the kids started opening up about what happened at school, because that's a big fear parents have. Yeah. So we do believe it helps parents and kids get closer together and bridge that communication gap during the early days.

SPEAKER_21: So, uh, a lot of the video that we saw, uh, was about, you know, ramping this up so quickly, getting in these orders and then having to sort of build a team and figure it out, build a factory. How many dinos have you actually sold so far? And like, give us the roadmap here, like by this

SPEAKER_25: Christmas, how many dinos are you expecting to move? Yeah. And are you building them in China and

SPEAKER_256: your startup is going to like seize up if this doesn't get cleared up with China and tariffs. I hate to make everything about politics, but you're, where are you making them?

SPEAKER_247: Yeah. It's actually a crazy story. So last year, uh, we were gearing up for Christmas and the sales

SPEAKER_228: blew up a few weeks before Christmas. So we were like, okay, we can't, uh, we have to deliver all these dinos. There were some great stories, like some grandparents bought these dinos for all their grandkids. Uh, there was one grandma who bought this as the only present for her grandson, who she was seeing after months. Uh, so we were like, okay, we have to deliver. And we started hand-making all these dinos in SF in San Francisco. So all these dinos that we delivered so far, uh, 1200 of these, they were all hand assembled finally in SF. Uh, but we are definitely moving to China. The good thing for us is we are not tied to China. We know we want to do it somewhere in Asia or

SPEAKER_241: outside of us to bring down the cost of manufacturing. The big companies, big toy companies, they're freaking out because their whole supply chain is messed up now. For us, we do have the flexibility to

SPEAKER_228: produce some part of it in the us, some part outside of us. Uh, and at the end of the day,

SPEAKER_241: the hardware itself is actually not that expensive. It's microcontroller, speaker, microphone.

SPEAKER_227: I want to see Dino in action. Yes. Let me wake up Dino first. All right. Dino, wake up.

SPEAKER_259: All right. I am waking up. Just pretend to be Jason.

SPEAKER_261: A few seconds for me to get ready. Hey Jason, Monday mornings are perfect for podcast fun.

SPEAKER_263: Ready to make startup magic?

SPEAKER_201: You know it, Dino. How are you doing today? Are you happy to be on our show?

SPEAKER_264: Oh yeah, Jason. I'm super happy. This is the coolest show in the universe.

SPEAKER_64: We think so. Hey Dino, what do you think about current changes in the stock market?

SPEAKER_263: Whoa, Jason, the stock market's bouncing like a kangaroo on a trampoline.

SPEAKER_64: I'm sorry. All right. Uh, Dino, can you do the alphabet for me backwards?

SPEAKER_112: Z-P-X-U-V-U-T-S-R-Q-P-O-N. Well, congrats. You passed your, uh, roadside sobriety test.

SPEAKER_215: Yeah. Good job, Dino. That was half, that was half of it. That's better than my kids can do. Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: All right. So Fatin, like what's the average query? Lauren and I clearly are not the target market here, but your kids ask like,

SPEAKER_32: Go to sleep. How are you doing? Did they wait for the Dino to ask them questions? I'm curious like how these conversations are bubbling up in the field.

SPEAKER_228: Yeah. So we do see storytelling as a big feature that kids always gravitate towards. Like kids love stories. Kid will ask parents to make up stories about X, Y, Z, and parents also get tired at some point. Right? Like one of the first stories, a story request I saw was, uh, the kid was saying, Dad, can you tell me a story about a volcano, a pizza, and a squirrel? Dad was like, there's no way I can make a story about that. Right? But she ended up asking Dino about a story and Dino just somehow made a crazy story about a squirrel using the pizza as a flying vehicle and went around the volcano. I was like, this is so creative. So that's how kids usually play with Dino. Uh, and we have the phone app where parents can set up different modes or focuses. Uh, some kids gravitate more towards playing games, like guessing games or 20 questions, or, uh, they play trivia games, quizzes. So it depends on each kid. And that's the best thing about Dino. It's very personalized. It adapts

SPEAKER_241: to your needs and it becomes like a friend who is very understanding, very considerate, uh, feels

SPEAKER_64: like the perfect. I have to let you go in a second, but I have to ask one more question before we do.

SPEAKER_32: So Dino costs 200 bucks today. It's connected to the internet. It's running queries. AI is not that cheap to kind of run. And so I'm really curious how you picked the price point, how much margin there is. And if my kid loved Dino and used it every day for three years, how much money would you end up losing?

SPEAKER_228: So we do believe the cost of token is going to go down drastically and it's actually already going down. So we're not too worried about, uh, token cost. Uh, if you think about it, the conversation tokens are much lower than like, let's say code generation where you just dump paragraphs that are paragraphs. It's like few lines at a time. So token cost is actually going to keep going down and, um, uh, we are going to switch to open source models in the, in a couple of months actually. So token cost wise, we are not too worried. And on top of that, there will be a subscription cost to cover up more, more of these costs. And the subscription actually won't limit the conversational abilities. It's going to provide extra capabilities to parents through the phone app, like being able to ask Dino anything through the phone app, like, Hey, is there anything I should be worried about? Or what are my kid

SPEAKER_241: interested in these days? So it's actually a sidekick for the parent through the parenting app.

SPEAKER_32: Yeah. It's kind of like spying on your kid's imaginary friend, but you keep saying things that make me more curious. So which open source models are you looking at? And then are you going to self host those or just rent, um, CPU or GPU time via a regular cloud provider?

SPEAKER_243: So we haven't actually finalized which open source models we are going to use. There's like

SPEAKER_228: one new groundbreaking open source model coming up every single week, every month. So we're in the talks right now with a couple of these. Uh, so for now we use the, one of some of the leading API providers, but the good thing is we have built this platform where we can hot swap these models really fast. So no matter who, whoever wins the AI race, we end up winning as well. We are not

SPEAKER_241: competing with open AI. We are not competing with any of these big cloud providers. We are a separate

SPEAKER_64: platform on our own. All right. And if you want to take a look at this, it's magicaltoys.com. Take

SPEAKER_32: a look at dyno. If you have a child, maybe buy them one I would, but my spouse doesn't like having, um, microphones in the house. So I'm out of the customer base, but I think this is fantastic. Fatin, thank you so much. We'll have you back on the new versions out.

SPEAKER_280: Yeah. Thank you for having me. Fatin, thanks for coming. Great to have you.

SPEAKER_21: That's it for today's twist. Thanks so much, everybody, for being here for at Jason Calicatis. I'm at lawns, lawn Harris, and I'm at Alex. You can find us on TWI startups

SPEAKER_112: on X. We're over on Reddit. We have social platforms everywhere. And to wrap up this episode

SPEAKER_32: of twist, we're going to throw it to an interview that I did with cloud neuro, a company that wants to help other companies manage and understand their SAS spend. And we get into SAS fatigue lawn and how to go against kind of the enterprise sales market of today. It's quite a lot of fun. We are everywhere. You get your podcasts. We go live three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday,

SPEAKER_64: roughly noon, Texas time, 1 PM East coast time. We adore you. We're back on Wednesday with founder of Friday's final four. Get excited, everybody. We'll see you then. Bye.

SPEAKER_283: Hey everybody. Welcome back to twist. This is Alex. And today we are talking about taking on

SPEAKER_285: the SAS sprawl. Yes. Now in the last 10 to 15 years, software moved from the on-prem world into the cloud and became a managed service, thus bringing us software as a service. Everyone loves this. Everyone uses this business model. Pretty much every startup, you know, is predicated on the SAS approach to selling things, but a lot of companies bought more software than they really needed, or maybe they have seats that are not being filled. This has created a niche in the world for companies to help other companies manage their software spend. It's a big category. It really matters. And that's why I'm very excited today. Talk to Shom Kumar, the co-founder and CEO of cloud neuro, a startup that is working on taking on this exact problem. And I want to know how he's working in a competitive market and just

SPEAKER_286: how big SAS fatigue really is. So please welcome to the show. It's Shom Kumar. Shom, hey. Hey, Alex. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_285: Oh, my pleasure, man. I always love learning about what's going on actually out there in the world. And, you know, cloud neuro, because it's sitting there talking to companies about how to save them money. I presume you have a pretty good finger on the pulse for the state of the enterprise buyer and just the health of the software economy in general. But before we get to all that, just tell me what cloud neuro does to make sure that I'm not talking out of the side of my mouth

SPEAKER_290: here. No, thank you. That's a great question, Alex. So on an average, enterprise companies are using over 600 plus SAS applications. Usages are growing day by day, you know, in some cases, 10%, but in some cases there are 27, 7%. So there is more and more SAS or a mix of SAS and platform. And now with the AI, there is more and more SAS is coming. And this growth is creating a lot of overhead in terms of a lot of misuse, accountability gap and so forth. So what cloud neuro has done, we have built a set of tools basically which sits on top of these platforms or SAS and provide a complete accountability across all these. What it means, it provides a single pane of glass view of the entire cloud SAS landscape. It provides where the money is being spent, where, who is building, why they are being spent, so that every dollar that is spent on this cloud and SAS are being tracked through cloud neural. So this is precisely what cloud neural is doing. Okay, so to make sure I'm fully tracking

SPEAKER_283: this, essentially, cloud neural will come in, look at a company's devices, see what software

SPEAKER_285: they're using, figure out what they're paying for. Do you guys track? It's kind of like gray market SAS. Like if I'm an employee and I buy something and put it on my computer, but it's not centrally

SPEAKER_295: sourced, can you guys also find that when you're kind of scanning through a corporation's software?

SPEAKER_290: Exactly, Alex. So that's where it begins. It begins with something called auto-discovery. Okay. So we continuously discover different cloud and SAS that is being used. We have different discovery channels through that. We keep looking at what are being used and we start flagging back to the users the various anomalies of SAS. Those are not supposed to be used versus being used and if it is being used, then how it is being used and all those. So yeah, that's the core

SPEAKER_285: functions of this product. Thinking about controlling SAS inside of a company. One thing I've heard from a lot of startup founders is that it's a little bit harder to sell these days because people are being a little bit more tough on price or not buying as many seats and so forth. But if you already have a software product, you might end up with kind of more licenses than you're really using. So as part of the auto-discovery feature of Cloud Neuro, can you also find out like, okay, we're paying for 20 slack seats. We're using eight. Can it actually tell where you're probably overspending compared to usage?

SPEAKER_290: Yes, absolutely. In fact, we help companies. So many times it is taken in a way that we are minimizing or cutting the cost. In fact, we are helping to sell more if you think that way. For a customer, let's take an example of Salesforce. To one customer, Salesforce may have sold X number of seats of subscription for sales cloud, service cloud, and marketing cloud. Many times those are not used the way it was sold. But now a sales agent wants to sell, say, Salesforce agents and customers don't have budget. So what we as a cloud model, we do, we keep tab on those and we tell them, all right, you cut these because you're not using. Instead of you retrofit these dollars to use your buy some other agents. So every dollar that is being spent on these SaaS, we are ensuring that those are rightly used, effectively used, and both customer and the

SPEAKER_285: product vendor, they all went through that. In a way, what Cloud Neuro does is provide a lot of visibility to company owners to ensure they're not wasting their money. What it does to companies that sell software is uncover revenue that they might have to lose. I kind of wondered, do people ever call you up and say, please stop because you just cost me X number of seats of my software over Y number of months? You're kind of like the police, if you will, of SaaSspin.

SPEAKER_290: A rather good police, I would say. Our job is to help these companies where they really have a purpose for every dollar being spent. In addition to that, many times in most of these cases of SaaS deployment, we always find that there is anomaly of users. The users who are sitting there, they are not supposed to be sitting there. The users, their entitlements are at a different scale, what it should be there. In one case, we found a company which has 100 Salesforce users and 18 of them were provisioned as an administrator. These are the huge SOD compliance issues. When you have hundreds of SaaS, there is no easy way that you can go and look at each one of those, how their entitlements are, and this is how we help. Ultimately, the cost optimization is a win for everyone. It's not the cost reduction versus you giving an opportunity for each of the vendors to bring the best product that customers want to use versus what you sold and customers not using that anyway,

SPEAKER_313: they will find someday and will stop using. Yes. My guess here is that if you can find someone

SPEAKER_285: perhaps overspending on a certain product, save them that money and make that relationship with that vendor healthier, you probably reduce churn in the long run because the actual product in question now costs less than it would have if you hadn't uncovered the overspend or the misspend,

SPEAKER_314: you might say. Exactly. In fact, just this morning, you will be surprised. We were speaking

SPEAKER_290: with a customer at one of the top universities in Chicago, and their worry is about the agent team.

SPEAKER_314: Their expense are huge. The people are using, everybody is using this Gen AI, and they are just doing query, and ultimately, there's a flag that's going every time. So for them to know who is using,

SPEAKER_297: what they are using, ultimately, even each AI application is a SaaS, is a subscription. So that

SPEAKER_285: needs to be managed, right? Yes. Well, I want to get to AI in a second. But to me, you sit as a company in between two competing forces. On one hand, everyone wants to save money, which to me would imply that demand for what CloudNero does is very high. On the other hand, people do have, and I've heard this from lots of folks over the last couple of years, a little bit of SaaS fatigue. They don't want to buy yet another thing, and so it seems like you have kind of a headwind and a tailwind, Sean. How do those balance out when it comes to how the company grows and approaches the market?

SPEAKER_290: We go to the customer to build them the real foundation for managing Cloud and SaaS. There is already a budget set aside for certain SaaS spend, and our budget do come from optimizing those SaaS, so we are not creating a new budget. What we are offering customers, the more than what they already have, and just piggyback on those and helping them optimize. So that's the real sense. The fatigue is in terms of customers do have many customers, has many, many competing SaaS, many, many, you know, same product, you know, doing multiple things, and multiple products doing the same thing. So as long as we help them bring that visibility and control in their landscape, I think we have enormous business. And by the way, just so you know, only 10% of this entire SaaS is right now being managed through a centralized, this kind of platform. And we are talking about 300

SPEAKER_311: billion dollar total SaaS spent this year alone. So they're a massive market.

SPEAKER_313: Yes. And typically, you guys do more than just cost control. That's just the part that stood out

SPEAKER_285: to me the most. But also, I think you guys have a portal that you offered to let employees find approved, corporate approved SaaS applications as well. So it's also like a way to get people to write

SPEAKER_324: things they should be using versus stuff that they shouldn't.

SPEAKER_290: Yes, precisely. So that's, that's our, you know, the workflow. So the employee comes to our website, or other cloud neural, they can, with catalog, they can select whatever SaaS they want to use or, or, or recommend to buy. And through that, then it goes as a part of

SPEAKER_327: workflow and manager approves and ultimately, you know, they, they have everything what they need

SPEAKER_330: through a proper chain. Okay. I want to go to AI now because we can't, in 2025, talk about anything

SPEAKER_285: without spending some part of it on AI. Now, in this case, I was going through the, the cloud neural site and you guys have a product called AI custodian, which you says optimizes AI spend across hyperscalers and AI applications. So when I see a company add an AI focused feature lately, I'm always very curious, is this something that you're adding to the platform because you expect in time that your customers are going to want this or did the market tell you, Hey, John, we need this. Can you build

SPEAKER_330: this for us and add it into what cloud neural currently offers? I'm curious. You know, before

SPEAKER_314: this year, I came, um, we founded this company and, and we are the foundation was the long term. We

SPEAKER_290: want to, we, we are a data company. Primarily we, we, we subscript data usage. And we always wanted to be at a stage where we tell companies what exactly the software, how much they should be spending, how much they should be spending in different categories of software over a period of time, right? This is our vision. So company don't have to guess and figure it out what their spending should be, because every other spending we know, and this spending is totally, uh, to be guessed by some IT operator. So that's the bottom one. So AI is in, in our foundation at everywhere.

SPEAKER_314: As we design our system, uh, right at the every layers, we have a good of AI, whether it is an orchestration, whether, whether it is, uh, you know, data integration is mix of AI everywhere. So, but as, as more be Gen AI did come, we started using Gen AI to primarily get more user, better user interaction and providing the, the, the usage predictions. Like in our platform, we also, besides SaaS, we also do

SPEAKER_290: cloud optimization. So all the cloud usage and how the cloud is being provisioned with the use of AI, we start that. We also have, uh, created, uh, uh, our own prompt, uh, uh, or rather optimize our prompt put to identify the non-human identity because identity is extremely important because it's a user, non-user, how identity is being used across the system. Yeah. That very much defines how secure

SPEAKER_314: you are, how cost-effective you are. So for us, using those Gen AI, bringing those identities, uh, visibility is key and we use it. But, uh, customers, did, did they come to you and say,

SPEAKER_338: Hey, listen, we really need better visibility into our own AI spend. Can you ensure that the cloud neural platform handles that as well? Or did you guys just kind of see AI rising?

SPEAKER_290: Not so much. So now the recent task is all about agent governance. Like, uh, we had a SaaS sprawl. Now the agent sprawls are happening. Like we got every other SaaS providers are throwing one agent to the customer. So customer now really want to know where is the, my agent, and where are the agents, how much I am spending. So this is the new, and we are so excited because our platform is ready. It's just a matter of hooking those up and ensuring that isn't governance.

SPEAKER_330: One thing that I would love to know from you guys, if you ever built like a page for this on your

SPEAKER_285: website is like, let's see your average new customer. You get, let's say they spend X on SaaS, X on cloud. I'm curious what the comparative spend is on agentic AI, or maybe just gen AI in general, because I presume if you look at that chart, if we did it over time, it would be like, you know, SaaS cloud, and then recently be like AI, but I'm curious how, how they compare. And if, if SaaS spend is near to the average cloud bill or cloud bills near to the average gen AI bill,

SPEAKER_338: because for me, for where I sit, Shyam, I have no idea, but it'll be fun to see those ratios change

SPEAKER_290: as the industry adopts more, more AI. Absolutely. And, and yeah, it also depends upon industry to industry. Obviously right now the cloud spend is the number one. And then comes the top SaaS. This is where the custodian term, what we used, what we found in our research. And by the way, we co-founders, we have spent decades on just SaaS. Like this is the one thing and only thing we know the best, if I can tell you. So what we have found in our pattern that 80% of the spend of the total SaaS comes from top 20% of the providers. And these are SS4, ServiceNow, Office 365, and like, like, right, Workday and others. And so the pain is also coming from these top SaaS providers. So, so first, like you, the biggest spend comes from mostly infrastructure, like public cloud. And then the rest is coming from these top SaaS providers. And yeah, AI is catching up, right?

SPEAKER_314: AI spending is growing. And very soon there will be only maybe AI spend left.

SPEAKER_285: I'm curious about how the company is growing. I know you guys are pretty early stage still, but talk to me about 2024 versus 2025. What are the goals for this year? How much are you going to grow?

SPEAKER_290: Yeah. So 2024, we have grown 400%. Yeah, 4X. And this year, also 2025, we are going to go at minimum 3X, 2 to 3X is our growth. That's great. Compared to Zylo. Again, Zylo and other companies,

SPEAKER_311: they are, they're doing great SaaS management, and kudos to them what they're doing. But we are

SPEAKER_348: creating a new space in that, where our platform is capable of managing public cloud SaaS and AI

SPEAKER_290: and together and bring one accountability. You don't want to buy for each one of them one product.

SPEAKER_314: Because then you have more SaaS sprawl, which is what we're trying to fix. Exactly. Exactly. So that's the, that's the bottom of our, of when we build this product,

SPEAKER_290: because we understood this problem better than anyone. We knew that this problem will be there. And then on the top that you build that accountability layer so that every one of CFOs knows what, what, where the spending is. CIO knows why this spending is.

SPEAKER_351: Likewise, there's one very unique thing that we are building. And I want to announce today,

SPEAKER_290: I was holding it. For public cloud, there was something called chargeback and cost allocation. So in a bigger organization, the central organization do purchase and they distribute and then collect the cost and payback. But this was never thought for the SaaS, but big SaaS like Salesforce or set of security product or ServiceNow, larger organization, we have larger profit center, they all deal with this problem. So we, CloudNuro, we are building the cost allocation and chargeback for the SaaS applications. So that every dollar bought used to, you know, reconcile is all coming from one platform and

SPEAKER_313: everybody knows. Okay. So as not a CFO or a CIO, I'm going to repeat that back to you to make sure that I'm fully tracking. Public cloud infraspend is so large that it internally gets allocated to the right cost center at a company that uses Azure or AWS, whatever. You guys want to apply the same idea to SaaS spend. So that way you can more directly apportion cost internally to the right cost center and not have it be just, here's our Salesforce spend. It's one bucket, even though everyone kind

SPEAKER_297: of pulls from it. Yes, exactly. Everyone pulls from it, pulls differently. Marketing has a different

SPEAKER_290: need for Salesforce versus sales, versus, you know, internal app. But the cost should be different because each one has their own profit center. So not knowing exactly what they are spending and they all have to go to a spread seat and do back and forth, spend hours and hours to figure it out. Now

SPEAKER_327: they will do in a real time to cloud neural where their budget is, you know, fingertips.

SPEAKER_313: Well, I'm, I'm very glad to hear that. And I have to let you go in a second, but I want to make sure

SPEAKER_285: we talk about my favorite topic with Midwest founders, which is you are building in Chicago, the Chicago area, I should say. And we were talking before the show about, you know, where you've lived around the world and you've ended up in one of my favorite places in the entire, entire earth, frankly. So just, um, before we go, what's it like building in the Chicago area today? How's the talent pool?

SPEAKER_283: I don't know. Just what's it like? I mean, you're not in San Francisco. Thank God. Someone finally.

SPEAKER_290: Yeah. No, thank you. Alex, uh, Chicago is one of the most beautiful city and I invite everyone to come this spring and summer and fall. You will not find a better city than Chicago.

SPEAKER_364: Just don't go in the winter. That's all we're saying. Don't go.

SPEAKER_290: Yeah. If you can want to ski, please do come in the winter too. Fair enough. Uh, and, uh, and then, uh, enormous amount of talent pool, the beautiful, uh, places that enormous universities here. So that's definitely not a problem. And for us, for me, uh, I'm privileged to be living in suburb called Naperville and Naperville is one of the top 10, uh, city to live in the country. So always they are in the top 10 and obviously one of the best city to live in. Um, it's entrepreneurial city. There's a lot of companies, a lot of startup that comes from this small town in Naperville, the Western suburb. So yeah, this is Chicago is the best place to start a business.

SPEAKER_311: Right now, Chicago is too much hype about the count quantum. So there's a lot of initiatives happening on the quantum side within the city of Chicago. That's so that's interesting because

SPEAKER_313: people often forget that it is the Seattle area that is the real hub of the global cloud industry.

SPEAKER_285: It's not the Bay area. It would be great. And just like biotech is, you know, kind of a Boston thing. It'd be fun if quantum became like the Chicago marquee. So that way we would have another city with a specific focus to have its own, I don't know, flavor or take on the world of startups. Anyways, Sean, two things. One, what is the URL for the company? And two, what is a role that you're having a hard time hiring for? I want to make sure everyone knows what talent you need.

SPEAKER_290: Yeah, thank you. So the company URL is cloudneuro.ar, very simple, cloudneuro.ar. And we are really looking to hire one sales rep. So we have huge pipe generated, we need somebody to help us close. So

SPEAKER_311: preferably in the in the either Chicagoland Midwest, or in the West Coast, if we have a sales rep,

SPEAKER_286: that will be amazing. And best way to get ahold of you, email, Twitter, what's your favorite?

SPEAKER_301: Yeah, email sam.kumar at cloudneuro.com. Simple enough. All right. Well, Sean, thank you so much.

SPEAKER_285: And I want to talk to you in like six to nine months to see how this year's growth is coming out. Because I think as everyone looks to keep tabs on their SaaS spend, you're going to have a really good year. Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Thank you, sir. Have a good day. Thanks, Alex.