SPEAKER_00: And in fairness to Jessica, the job of the editor-in-chief is to always have the back of their writers. So she's saying, like, we got it right. What did we technically get wrong? And it reminds me of the story we talked about the other day where, you know, they put the MAGA hats on Felicia and Ben Horowitz. And I said, you know, that could have been more clear, but somebody, you know, like the editor-in-chief is probably like, hey, listen, it's obvious because there's two blue Smurfs on there. You know, people, that's an illustration. And we put in the, you know, tiny little minus one font size that this is an illustration. So, you know, people defend themselves. The truth here is the company feels like it's a little shady.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, oh, Jason, going with the British understatement there. A little shady.

SPEAKER_08: Dude, this guy is, this firm is essentially underneath a canopy of trees. There is so much required shade to discuss it.

SPEAKER_10: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Lemon.io. Hire pre-bedded remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon.io slash twist. Dot Tech Domains. Don't miss our Jam with JCal contest. To apply and get more details, go to jamwithjcal.tech. Brought to you by Dot Tech Domains. And Command Bar. Seamlessly integrate an AI-powered guide into your software, making navigation intuitive and interactive. Visit commandbar.com slash twist to get a custom live demo.

SPEAKER_00: All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. He's Alex Wilhelm. I'm Jason Calacanis. We are going to talk about a lot of news today. This Week in Startups. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and YouTube and TikTok and all those other places for clips. But what do we, what do we got on the docket today?

SPEAKER_18: What are we going to talk about?

SPEAKER_19: So we're going to start with the current kind of cause of the day. The, the thing that people are talking about, which is the information, a scoop on Bolt, what's real, what's not, and some criticism of them.

SPEAKER_21: It's kind of what's trending on Twitter today or X, if you will. Then Waymo and their rapid growth. And also a couple notes on open source self-driving, which is a whole new category that I dug into today for us. Then we're going to talk about layoffs. And then from there, we have some notes on a major deal that happened called Tabular.

SPEAKER_22: Databricks bought it, some notes on that. But first things first, Jason, people are beefing.

SPEAKER_26: Okay, so this brouhaha, I saw Sheil, I think Monat is how you pronounce his last name. I'm not sure. I've met him once, nice guy. He has been getting into it with everybody. Explain what's going on here.

SPEAKER_29: All right. So the information is a technology news website. I have a bunch of friends that work there.

SPEAKER_21: I'm sure everyone's heard of it. It's behind a paywall. They have a kind of a hard paywall model, a bit like the Financial Times, if you will. And they have a focus on scoops. And when they broke some news yesterday that Bolt was seemingly raising $450 million at a $14 billion valuation, it sent enormous waves around the world of technology. Because one, everyone thought Bolt was doomed. The CEO, Ryan Breslau, originally a co-founder who left, got sued, was supposed to be coming back. And then also the dollar amount didn't make any sense. Who's going to give this company $450 million? And then also the valuation didn't make any sense. Because why would it be worth $3 billion more than it was when it was a much seemingly healthier company back in the day? So, Jason, my thought reading this was, huh? What the hell?

SPEAKER_22: And I didn't want to like, I hadn't done any reporting on it. So I didn't want to say to my friends, well, what's this? But I was, I was very perplexed when I saw the headline.

SPEAKER_31: Certainly perplexing.

SPEAKER_00: Let's start with, what does Bolt do? Uh, this is a fintech startup was founded in 2014. The guy who started is Ryan Breslau. He is a unique, uh, snowflake in all the world. He's the guy who said that, um, Y Combinator, Paul Graham, and everybody were part of some bully stack. They were like the mafia in tech, and they were trying to kill Bolt.

SPEAKER_32: There was another startup called fast and what these, I guess, uh, startups did was when you get to a checkout, the idea is to help, help you check out faster. And, um, I see this all the time because I guess Shopify, when I buy a shirt like this one from Rhone or cuts or some of these brands. And I go to log in, it already has me cookied and I'm logged in already, and then it sends me an SMS on the checkout page and says, Hey, just type in this SMS code to your phone number and we'll verify it's you through two-factor and you're off to the races. That makes it really brisk to check out that reduces friction and merchants like that, because if you have to put in your credit card log in every time, it's a pain in the neck.

SPEAKER_36: So there was fast. I think that company went under it.

SPEAKER_32: There was bolt and there's Amazon checkout and Shopify checkout. So there's big players in this.

SPEAKER_39: And then there were these upstart players. I thought these companies had gone out of business. I'm being honest.

SPEAKER_21: Well, there wasn't a lot of revenue behind them, but there was a lot of, I think, enthusiasm at the time for making e-commerce faster, easier, cheaper, better, because keep in mind that we're talking about the 2021 era, which was very close to COVID supply chain disruptions. People ordering more, a lot of future e-commerce growth got pulled forward in the market. And so everyone was like, oh man, we gotta, we gotta get on this. I think if memory serves the, the thing that made these companies look very attractive was they told people, Hey, we are building out this enormous, uh, user base as we do one click checkout a network. But I think what they were doing was they were creating profiles for people for them when they checked out using the bolt or fast or whatever. So it wasn't like Jason was going to a website and signing up for bolt. He was just trying to buy something somewhere else. And then they were counting him as now a bolt user. And so to me, there was always a little bit of BS in this, but also fundamentally adjacent point solution, incumbent competition. And I would say to some degree replicable by a functional development team. So the companies got big, raised money, and then I'm a fell apart.

SPEAKER_42: And so when they said they're back, it just not a single ounce of it seemed to mesh with my understanding of where the market is today. And where e-commerce is today.

SPEAKER_07: And just to give people back to the business model, you as a merchant, let's say you were 1% of the user base.

SPEAKER_00: Like you were a large merchant and you had a, I don't know, a million customers and bolt aspired or fast aspired to have a hundred million customers. And you were contributing your million customers to, you know, their checkout. Um, you would then also be paying fast or bolt, uh, in this case, bolt, I think, uh, transaction fee.

SPEAKER_32: I think it was 2% or something. So now you're paying two or 3% for your credit card, 2% to bolt.

SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're paying some amount of, uh, shipping and everything like that. So that 2%, depending on the business could be material. And I guess that's why people got excited about this. Hey, what if a certain number of transactions go through this and every time you get a new user, if you were doing Acme company, I was doing Delta company.

SPEAKER_32: Let's say we had no overlap, you know, you were selling sneakers and I was selling coffee mugs, you know, thermoses, and we had zero overlap. You would be saving me time and I would be saving you time if our users went to each other's websites. So that's kind of cool, I guess, but I never thought the value prop was that good. I'll be totally honest. Um, I don't know that this was like an actual acute problem in the world.

SPEAKER_06: I don't think it was, I think everyone just wanted Amazon's one click checkout solution.

SPEAKER_21: They wanted to bring it to their website. And I think, you know, when we were watching Amazon at that time, post those insane growth numbers, everyone wanted to buy to the apple, you know? Um, and maybe people were being pressured to have exposure to the burgeoning e-commerce startup sectors. They wanted to pick one company to back whatever, but in the end, a lot of capital got effectively incinerated. And in the case of Bolt, when they raised that really, really large series E, some of their investors said, Hey, we think that you were not entirely upfront and clear about your company's performance to date. And therefore we bought in at too high of a price. And then there was also Jason, the, there was a loan from the company to the founder. So here's a question for you. If one of your founders that you've invested in came to you and said, Hey, Hey, Jason, we just raised a bunch of money. I want to loan myself $30 million from the company. What would be your response?

SPEAKER_52: Yeah, that's dangerous. Um, because you now have a CEO with $30 million in their pocket.

SPEAKER_56: Um, and they have to pay interest on that loan and they're distracted, right? So there's the distraction of $30 million in somebody's pocket.

SPEAKER_00: Also, somebody didn't buy the shares. It's a loan. So now if the CEO goes and blows that money and can't pay it back, what do you do? The CEO comes to you and says, Hey, listen, by the way, I blew through the 30, uh, I need another 30. I can't service the 30. Like I need you to extend the loan and then you have board members who are massively conflicted because they have to manage the CEO.

SPEAKER_32: And let's say the CEO is not doing a good job and you want to fire them, but they have a $30 million loan. You call the loan when you fire them. Let's say the CEO is doing a great job. And he says, I want another, now I want a hundred million dollar loan. It is ridiculously bad hygiene. That's why other parties, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, whatever might give somebody. And you saw this in the, we work, uh, TV show, some third party bank who says, Hey, both shares are worth this. We work shares are worth that. I'll give you a hundred million dollar line of credit against your private company stock. They'll do that with the venture capitalists. I've had people come to me and say, Hey, this is what your holdings, your future potential on the first four venture funds are. You know, do you want to have a loan that you can go start spending some money and pay us? You know, when it was two or 3%, no big deal, but now six, seven, 8%, a little bit of a bigger deal, bigger VIG. So your company has to be growing faster than that VIG a little bit harder to do in a higher rate environment, but it's just horrific, terrible. Disasterous conflicts on a board of a private company, as we say in the business, no conflict, no interest.

SPEAKER_00: So what happens is board members sometimes will pay off bribe, uh, otherwise influence the founder by giving them these kinds of loans or buying their shares.

SPEAKER_61: And it's really problematic. I'll leave it at that.

SPEAKER_62: The way that this was described to me back in the day was secondary is a bad idea. It disaligns incentives, full stop.

SPEAKER_21: The exception being if you want to de-risk a founder with 500 K a million dollars, something small so they can school a house, something very basic, enough money to give them more focus on the business and less distractions in their personal life. That was the only exception made to me.

SPEAKER_00: 10% of your holdings, 10 million bucks, no problem in my mind. So if your holdings were worth a billion and you sold 10, 20, 30 million, no problem. If you sold a hundred million, now you're like, well, this person's buying jets.

SPEAKER_68: They're distracted and maybe they don't care about the outcome as much. So that that's the balance, um, that people find right now.

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SPEAKER_25: Visit lemon.io slash twist. Also, just a note about this.

SPEAKER_19: People borrow money against their public equity holdings all the time. And that makes way more sense.

SPEAKER_21: If you're thinking about this, they're liquid and you can tell what they're worth minute by minute. Private shares are illiquid, harder to value. And as Jason said, much more conflicted anyways, the company is probably not raising the 450. The investors don't appear to be entirely, uh, they're not your sequoias, Jason.

SPEAKER_49: These are not, these are not firms that we expect to have this kind of capital. And this was all in a letter to shareholders, right?

SPEAKER_00: The preferred shareholders got a letter and it said, and I'm looking at this, uh, newcomer, Eric newcomer story.

SPEAKER_74: We are finalizing a $450 million series F funding round from UAE and UK based investment firms.

SPEAKER_00: Okay. That's weird. Because they're just describing geographies, not the actual firms, which will elevate elevate our total valuation to over 14 billion, a considerable leap from our $11 billion valuation during series E1 round in 2022. That's a little bit weird language, by the way, considerable leap.

SPEAKER_32: Who wrote this? In addition to the investment from these investment firms, two investments in five words, not good. We would just say, in addition to the investment from these firms, Bolt may receive additional amounts from existing both investors who may participate in series F funding around.

SPEAKER_80: Yes. And this is where we get to the pay to play bit. So keep going.

SPEAKER_56: Information around with a credulous headline this morning, Bolt near deal to raise 450 million at 14 billion.

SPEAKER_26: They have since updated the story. So I guess this is where maybe they felt that headline was not accurate or they didn't do enough work. What do you think next is important here?

SPEAKER_84: So then she'll, uh, an investor that, you know, and that I know, and I'll just, I don't want to be in the game of, of, of, of, you know, pumping up VCs.

SPEAKER_19: But she'll, it is, in my experience, very nice and patient and it's giving me time when he doesn't need to.

SPEAKER_87: And so I bring that up just because when he goes critical on Twitter, it's a, it's not a normal thing for him.

SPEAKER_21: He's not a guy who's out there flinging mud. Usually anyways, um, she'll said that, uh, the information kind of rushed out the story. Here's his tweet that we're, uh, talking about right now and that he says that it wasn't true. The money and investors aren't real. Eric got the story, right? And then he says, look, I would have been completely fine with it. If they acknowledge they got it wrong and issued a projection. Instead, he says, Jessica lesson who runs the information, um, was smug in his words and incorrect saying that the details were correct. And then he's like, Hey, yeah, but they edited it afterwards. Then we get to a, a response here, Jason, Jessica responds. And, and then he goes, look, one, when accused of smugness don't start with as said yesterday, I'm referring to the piece, not the headline.

SPEAKER_84: And then two, he says, you know, we all make mistakes. People in your newsroom disagree with you on this. And so the, the, the, the bump bump sound you just heard was she'll throw his friends under the bus, because that bus is going to back right back up to the newsroom with Jessica interesting at a trail meeting tomorrow morning.

SPEAKER_29: Glad I'm not going to be in that one. Um, I, I do really do agree. And I wanted to read all that because I think she'll is, is, is dead on. If you make a mistake, people actually, I think have a pretty big band for saying, oh, okay, cool.

SPEAKER_21: If you go like, watch this, I made a mistake, my bad, we're going to fix it. But, but there is this era in the current moment that we're in, and this goes way beyond Jessica, to be clear, uh, people, um, we're in the age of bluster and BS and no shame. And I do think this is partially driven by our recent political climate, but I think people just have this, like, you know, show no weakness, never admit a weakness or a mistake, always punch back twice as hard.

SPEAKER_06: And it just, I don't think always leads to the results that people would like.

SPEAKER_96: And I think this is one of those cases.

SPEAKER_18: It's, you are referring to the Trump look of never apologize. They hit you hit twice as hard.

SPEAKER_00: You know, he's a, he's a, he's a counter punch or whatever they say about him. And so, yeah, I think, and in fairness to Jessica, the job of the editor and chief is to always have the back of their writers. So she's saying like, we got it right. What did we technically get wrong? Um, it reminds me of the story we talked about the other day where, you know, they put the MAGA hats on Felicia and Ben Horowitz. And I said, you know, that could have been more clear, but somebody, you know, like the editor in chief is probably like, Hey, listen, it's obvious. Cause there's two blue Smurfs on there. You know, people that's an illustration. And we put in the, you know, tiny little minus one font size that this is an illustration. So, you know, people, uh, defend themselves. The truth here is the company feels like it's a little shady.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, oh, Jason going with the British understatement. They're a little shady dude.

SPEAKER_08: This guy is, this firm is essentially underneath a canopy of trees. There's so much required shade to discuss it. I mean, okay.

SPEAKER_19: Ryan also went out and founded another company called love that he raised money for. I, I just, I, I wonder what it would be like to wake up with the sheer level of confidence that some people have in, in their own infallibility.

SPEAKER_22: Because ask Adam Newman, I I've never met Adam.

SPEAKER_101: Um, well, no, I mean, these, these are the same type of entrepreneurs. Which it's like, I threw a hail Mary past one time.

SPEAKER_32: Right? So the hail Mary in this case might be that series E F you know, two or whatever in, you know, in P deserve when they hit $11 billion.

SPEAKER_101: And then they think, well, I can hit half court shots. I'm Steph Curry. I should shoot from the logo. Steph Curry doesn't shoot from the logo.

SPEAKER_32: He shoots as close to the three point line as he can get an open shot from. He's not saying like, I'm just because I can, and I have hit a full court shot, a half court shot. That's not my default. I'm going to try to, you know, be a consistent discipline player. And so, yeah, this guy's a little bit, um, effervescent and the firm seems a bit on its surface shady.

SPEAKER_36: Um, when I read the language there, you know, you and I are writers. We pay attention.

SPEAKER_00: The person who wrote that was not a good writer. Just from that little thing where, you know, they say these investment firms, investment investment firms, those are little details that tell me this is not well written or edited. And then to say a UAE firm, that's like saying a Canadian firm. What does that even tell you as a preferred investors? Like we, I mean, they could have said middle Eastern investors. They could have MENA investors, European investors. I mean, it just, the whole thing screams and then that pumping it up. Like, what did he say?

SPEAKER_111: It's an extreme increase in valuation.

SPEAKER_00: Like when I hear that kind of nonsense, I think it's a leap, a leap, you know, like that's not how normal people talk about fundraising. When you talk about fundraising, you just say we're raising X amount. You don't have to say it's a considerable leap. That's almost like, um, trying to get somebody to invest.

SPEAKER_56: And you have to be very careful about that because if you're trying to influence people in making their investment decision, then the way the state law starts to work is maybe, um, you'll get held to a higher standard because you're giving investment advice. I just got a secondary offering from a venture firm.

SPEAKER_00: I'm in very high profile venture firm, very high profile deal. And they were saying, we are considering selling some of our shares in this company. You are in this fund.

SPEAKER_32: Um, you have the ability to request, to sell a certain percentage of your shares. Please, this is not investment advice. Please consult with your lawyer, accountant, financial advisors to make the best decision for you and your circumstances. We cannot give you investment advice. Like it is written by a lawyer and it is not saying a considerable leap. They're not steering the witness. This is why when I do J trading on the program, I'm going to bring J trading back next year. I was very happy with my performance.

SPEAKER_36: Uh, I beat Nancy Pelosi and think that's big since, you know, I don't have any insider information. Um, J trading.com, but J trading.com is going to start in January again. And I'm going to get some of your advice here of what I should be J trading. But, um, yeah, when I was doing the J trading, I just told people like, here's what I'm thinking, but don't copy my trades. Unless you're doing it with money. You can afford to lose because I've never publicly actively traded. I've always been a private market investor and index funds for everything else. So anyway, that's what, thanks for coming to my tattoo.

SPEAKER_120: No, I, I, I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_62: The last thing I want to say about this is the, the, the technology watching media world just seems so much smaller than it used to be. Because here we have like the information, right? And we have Eric and his newsletter newcomer, which is very good.

SPEAKER_21: And, uh, no, I guess tech crunch could have weighed in venture beats still there kind of somewhere. But I mean, like, it's not, I remember the blog days, man, when there was like, you remember like the giga own network and like, there was just so many more properties and more voices and, and more like discussion. And it just felt more alive than it does now. And I wonder if I'm just looking at like what's left of media and just, I'm totally disappointed that there's just so few names out there. Like I'm glad the information is doing well. They hired some of my friends. They hired two of my last co-hosts on my last show jerks.

SPEAKER_06: Um, I, I cannot speak highly enough about the staff over there, but I mean, it's not that huge information. We can't have more than like, what, I don't know, 50, 60 people. And it just made me kind of sad.

SPEAKER_31: Let me make you less sad.

SPEAKER_00: Um, I have been through this three or four times. I had my Silicon Valley reporter print magazine, I had in gadgets, sold it to AOL. I helped Mike with tech crunch in the early days. We did the conference together, yada, yada this week in startups for 12 years and all in, and now the twist 500, I have, you know, been in the mix in this and watched it over the years.

SPEAKER_03: And what I'll tell you is there is a, um, the media business.

SPEAKER_32: Got rocked because advertising works better, much better. Advertising works much better on Tik TOK, Amazon, Uber, meta.

SPEAKER_03: And of course, Google, then it does on tech crunch or business insider, or, you know, pick your publication venture. But what that did was it took a business that had a lot of independence and an enormous amount of people throwing money at them.

SPEAKER_101: For advertising and to the point at which, you know, tech crunch writers started making six figures. Some of the top ones were, you know, there was a competition to see who could fund them versus who could land them as you know, um, writers. When the advertising went away, the whole thing blew up and now it's creative destruction. And what you'll see is there's still a need for news.

SPEAKER_128: There's still a need to understand the world. So we're doing that here. We have the twist 500 and we're going to hire a writer full time to just work on the twist 500 and to cover each of those companies.

SPEAKER_56: Maybe do one company a day, interview them, and then add that to the database.

SPEAKER_32: So we're taking a database approach and the podcast approach, new model, Jessica, with the information, she worked with the wall street journal. She hired lots of people. She's like, you know what, if you can't afford $300 a year, we're not for you full stop.

SPEAKER_36: So she has less audience, but she's gotta have how many, how many subscribed is 10,000?

SPEAKER_41: Oh, a good number. I don't actually know that metric. I haven't pumped that out of my friends yet, but you know, there are two ways you can go.

SPEAKER_62: One today is ads, one is subscriptions. And I spend, you know, years at tech range actually is my, the thing I did there when I went back building a subscription business into the seven figures. It's tough. It's hard. It's, it's a grind. Uh, we got there.

SPEAKER_31: Tech when she eventually chose to go a different certain path, particularly hard though, if you're doing both at the same time. Yeah. That is a tension that I could never resolve.

SPEAKER_56: Well, then you're sitting there and the tension is, does this story go behind the paywall or on the free site?

SPEAKER_00: The advertising sales seems like put it on the free site and get more pages and the sales and the subscription teams. Like, no, it's a scoop, put it back here. And then the author is like, well, I want the maximum number of people to read it. Yeah. And then somebody, everybody rips it off, rehashes it and the, it gets aggregated. And everybody's like, well, I only need the first three sentences here. She'll is doing a better, is doing such a good job summarizing. You don't need to subscribe to the information. If anything's important in the information, it's going to get summarized in business insider or on Twitter, and you don't need to have it the end.

SPEAKER_22: That is a good breakdown of the incentives, uh, conflicts and issues thereof.

SPEAKER_21: But I do think though, to have a successful business, you have to pick a lane and just do it because the tension about, uh, being in front of her behind the paywall. I was the guy for years who went to people and was like, may I please put a paywall on your story? No. Okay. Like, I mean, that, that was, you know, you go home with your hat in hand quite a lot. Now I had a team that was just behind the paywall, but we needed more total stuff, you know? So anyways, it's, it's difficult. And I, I hope that everyone can, can learn from this and we can all do better down the road.

SPEAKER_42: And I really do hope that there is not $450 million in very dumb money that people would put into Bolt, because I can think of a lot of things I could do better with that.

SPEAKER_32: I want to know the revenue from this company. And I just want to point out shield did another follow-up, um, and I, you know, who knows what's true here or not. I'm not saying shield would ever lie or anything like that, but I'm wondering what exactly is going on here.

SPEAKER_36: Here is, if we could pull this up, his update.

SPEAKER_39: And this update came out August 20th yesterday at 7 PM. So it was last night.

SPEAKER_128: The actual deal proposed is even wilder shareholders had less than two days to approve a pay to play deal.

SPEAKER_56: We've talked about those here before. They need to invest more money into the company or bolt buys their shares for next to nothing.

SPEAKER_32: What this means is the existing shareholders, if they don't put more money in those shares get wiped out, right?

SPEAKER_00: And so that's pay to play. Bresla would get a $2 million bonus for returning a CEO. What doesn't he own a lot of the company plus an additional 1 million of back pay. What isn't he already rich?

SPEAKER_56: Why would they be giving him $3 million, $750 K of back reimbursements and an ADK monthly travel security budget. This can't be right.

SPEAKER_146: This cannot be right. Is this security?

SPEAKER_00: Who does he think he is? Taylor. Okay. This must be, he must be like, this must be comedy, right? This is a joke. Shields making a joke here.

SPEAKER_149: Yeah. It's gotta be a joke.

SPEAKER_74: Equal friendly marketplace at terms are amazing, both to invest 15 billion in love at a 1 trillion. Okay.

SPEAKER_49: So he's joking here, I guess, um, seems pretty reasonable. Like, you know, lost a hundred million dollars. I can see that, um, 250 million on the thing.

SPEAKER_74: The article claims that Brad Pam Nani, who refers to as representing Abu Dhabi PE funds, but who's LinkedIn says he's with silver bear and investment bank plans to invest 200 million.

SPEAKER_00: London fund would give 250 and marketing related services.

SPEAKER_158: Okay. So this is all BS.

SPEAKER_84: I mean, Joe Lonsdale replies to that tweet goes, can't tell if this is satire. Yeah. Joe, we feel you.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, we're literally saying is a satire. Um, and when I said shady before, and you were like, you know, it's almost like they're in the Amazon and those trees go up like a hundred and there's a canopy.

SPEAKER_32: And then all the leaves, like when you're really on the bottom, they're like pretty, pretty darn shady, cloudy day, shady in the Amazon.

SPEAKER_22: I wouldn't put $5 into bolt at a 1.4, let alone a 14.

SPEAKER_41: So like, I mean, you're just sitting here scratching your head, but it does again, remind me of, uh, how much fun we had in 2021 as a broader ecosystem, because my gosh, was it a good times.

SPEAKER_128: Okay. Founders. I had Ramsey from up trends AI on the pod last week for a jam session. What's a jam session. It's where the founder pitches me their company and I asked him questions and we tried to move the ball forward. We try to help them solve their problems. I was fascinated by what he's building because it's helpful for trading stocks, right? And even better, it uses one of those gorgeous stock tech domains. So if you want to come on and tell me about what you're building, have your startup featured here on this week in startups, uh, join me, join the jam. Jam with J Cal contest, jam with J Cal dot tech.

SPEAKER_32: We need a couple more people. You have to have under 2 million in funding and you got to grab one of those great dot tech domains, head to jam with J Cal dot tech and tell me what you're building.

SPEAKER_14: And then we'll have you come on the podcast like Ramsey did. Okay. And then you pitch the world and it's great.

SPEAKER_128: Don't forget to get a great dot tech domain name. Apply for the jam with J Cal session at jam with J Cal dot tech.

SPEAKER_21: All right, let's talk about some good news, talk about some good news. So, uh, I'm an enormous fan, Jason, of self-driving cars. Can't wait for them to be everywhere just to take the teenagers out of the SUVs. We don't need kids in tanks. Let's do this. Now, back in May, Waymo said that they had 50,000 paid rides each week. Then June comes around, Waymo says, if you're in SF, it's now open, come on board, hop into your Waymo. Let's go. Then in August, they said they have now surpassed 100,000 paid trips per week. So a doubling from May to August with the addition of more space in San Francisco. But to me, that smells like product market fit, massive consumer demand. And, uh, I would say, given that there haven't been more headlines about Waymo's running into children or dogs, that the tech is working at that level of capacity.

SPEAKER_167: Very exciting.

SPEAKER_168: Yeah, it's really great, um, to see all this autonomous stuff working, which is awesome.

SPEAKER_149: Uh, and if you hitting a hundred thousand rides a week across three cities, I believe it's across three cities, right?

SPEAKER_32: LA, San Francisco, and then Phoenix, Arizona. Now, uh, you have to put all of this in context and we did this on a previous show Uber is doing, uh, quarter million rides per week, quarter million rides per week. Okay. So 1% of 250 million is 2.5. Okay. And 0.1% would be 250. So Waymo is doing point 10 basis points, right? One 10th of 1%. I think of what Uber is doing right now, Uber is doing less than 1% of all rides. Uh, in the United States, like globally. So ride sharing, as opposed to driving your own car is like literally 1% of the overall market of rides. So, you know, people are asking like, how does this affect your Uber investment? You're still long Uber. Of course I'm still on Uber. They're still growing 30, 40% a year in terms of rides. I think what's happening is this next generation or two will not have driver's licenses. And they certainly won't own cars and autonomous will be part of the mix. I drive, uh, Tesla full self-driving every day. I can tell you it is absurdly impressive. It's got, I would say nine out of 10 miles dialed in. It does not have that last mile. Uh, and those are going to be really the hard one. So I don't think the test of full self-driving can be as meaningful as Waymo is. I think Waymo has a lot more experience right now, but I do think in China and some other places, uh, there'll be others.

SPEAKER_00: And I think BYD is going to be the big player here. Uh, Uber has ordered a hundred thousand of those electric vehicles with them that have autonomy. There's six or seven players in China doing autonomy. So I think China will be the, the big market, uh, for this. And I think we will go from 1% of rides being done by Lyft, Uber, Waymo, et cetera, to 10%. And then the question is, you know, what percentage does Uber get of that next 9%? My guess is they get three or four of the next 9%, which would put them at half the market share because there are seven or eight people, I think, who are going to reasonably get to the promised land of those seven or eight people. I would say, let's just say it's eight people get there in the next 36 months. They're not going to be able to build enough cars for the entire market. I think of those eight, five of them will just put their cars into the Uber and Lyft marketplaces. They'll just go to Uber and Lyft and say, how many do you want? And depending on jurisdiction, they'll get employed there.

SPEAKER_149: Um, and you know, then there's the cost. The, then there's the cost of these cars, um, is the other main issue, uh, way, most are like over a hundred thousand dollars all in, and they have to be cleaned.

SPEAKER_32: They have to be maintained. And in the Uber or in the ride sharing model, those are the existing cars that people own.

SPEAKER_00: They're being used when they're sitting there typically unused for some portion of time, but

SPEAKER_36: the maintenance, the storage of the car, the cleaning of the car, that's all maintained by the Uber driver and the Lyft driver, door dasher, et cetera.

SPEAKER_00: So I think this will grow to 10% of the market, which means Uber will be five times bigger. Is my basic premise in the next 10 years. Uber is five to 10 times bigger and has five to 10% of all markets. And then I think Tesla could be number two or even number one, but I think the big winner

SPEAKER_36: is Uber, um, and BYD. I think people are underestimating BYD.

SPEAKER_19: Where do you, so in, in this stack rank of, of major companies that we know, Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and BYD. And then also by do it's, it's Apollo go, um, taxis, which are in Wuhan and actually

SPEAKER_21: think there's 500 of them live there. Now, where does Waymo fit into this ranking? Cause you didn't put them into your top two there, which surprised me.

SPEAKER_62: Is it, are they third or fourth?

SPEAKER_124: Oh no, I think, I think there'll be tough three. Yeah. I think it's Uber.

SPEAKER_00: Waymo Tesla will be the three and BYD. Those are your top four right there. Cruz seems to be asleep at the wheel, so to speak. Um, and, um, you know, I think there'll be a long tail of other players. I actually think this could all become commodified. If somebody starts an open source project that actually works in the way Android does. So then you might have like a high end version of this, like the iPhone version, which would be Tesla and Waymo. And then you might have this incredible global Android of vacation of the industry where BYD or somebody decides, you know what? We're going to open source this whole thing. And, uh, you know, that's, that suddenly then all at once concept in technology.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. And so we looked into open source self-driving and there are a couple of names that are

SPEAKER_19: worth looking at. One is called comma AI. Yep. This might be coolest company that I hadn't heard of in my, in my life.

SPEAKER_21: So if you haven't heard of them, what they do is they have an open source bit of software. They raised about 18 million, actually, ironically enough, they raised one point, sorry. Uh, 3.1 from Andreessen back in 2016 to go way back in time, but they've open source software. And then they'll sell you a kit, which we have up on the screen right now called the comma three X. And you just stick in the front and back of your car and you can have a car that has automated lane centering adaptive cruise control and lane change assist, not level four self-driving to be clear. Yeah. But yeah, but it's going to keep getting better.

SPEAKER_62: They do climb down over a hundred million miles driven. So I wonder if you're right. The core substance here does get commodified a bit like how LLMs are now all pretty good.

SPEAKER_21: And then the question then becomes how do you defend it? How do you make it better? But to me, like, once you solve this, is there really a, a better way to do it? Like navigation, I'm sure that being maps and Google maps are roughly as good at getting me directions to Boston from my house.

SPEAKER_22: Right.

SPEAKER_00: And open maps is going to be, there's an open mapping project. So the open mapping project, comma AI, and we had George Hots, H O T Z on the podcast eight

SPEAKER_32: years ago, eight years ago with comma AI. And he actually almost went to work for Tesla. I think there was a little dance publicly there.

SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, I do think these open source projects, the commodification in China, Tesla has a massive fleet already out there waiting to be woken up.

SPEAKER_32: That's their secret sauce. And you know, the thing about Tesla is when they do figure this out. They have, I think $30 billion in cash. They could just say, you know what, if you want to buy Tesla's, feel free and Hey, but

SPEAKER_36: we're going to just produce a million cars a year and put them into the robo fleet. And then next year we'll put 2 million into robo feet. Next year we'll put 3 billion and Waymo can't do that.

SPEAKER_32: So you have Waymo with a headstart in terms of the number of rides, but they have to buy. Are they on Volvo's Audi's? I forgot what they're using. And then I guess they're going to make their own eventually in partnership with people.

SPEAKER_36: But you understand like they're, you'll have to make these things, put them into service.

SPEAKER_101: And then a large portion of the time they're unused and then there's peak times. And so, you know, it's, it's going to be, it's almost like thinking about e-commerce, right?

SPEAKER_00: If you were looking at target, Walmart, and Amazon, you know, and we were sitting here in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2003, four. Would you want to own those stocks? And the answer is yeah, those three figured it out. And right now, man, do those three companies crush it on e-commerce, right? People are constantly going to those three websites and shipping stuff to their house. So, um, you know, now you probably would want Amazon as your number one, but you would also want to own those other two stocks.

SPEAKER_41: Yeah. I'm just, I did a fact check on your Tesla cash thing.

SPEAKER_22: Uh, I regret you informing me, Jason, that you greatly underestimated. It's not 30 billion in cash. It's 30.7 billion. Come on, man.

SPEAKER_31: You gotta do better than that. I mean, it's just so weird. I have this like really weird thing where I remember certain numbers.

SPEAKER_19: No, no, you are, you were very close and $30 billion to your point is six X what alphabet is committed to, uh, Waymo cause they dropped in another $5 billion as a commit, um, during their last earnings call, which was a lot of money to be there. $5 billion is $5 billion, but Tesla has a lot of money.

SPEAKER_21: So I'm excited about this. One last note, auto ware is another open source project, um, founded back in 2015 by Shinpei Kato at a Nagoya university, and they are building something that I couldn't actually get my mitts around as much. Cause it isn't like a hardware product. It's an open source driving thing.

SPEAKER_22: Anyways, the point there is lots of folks are working on this. And so hopefully we do have a, uh, slowly then suddenly thing coming up because my God save a lot of lives too.

SPEAKER_149: That's the, I mean, that's the best part of all this.

SPEAKER_36: So, um, you know, I mean, listen, I, I believe I I've been telling people, I think Uber hits $88 and 88 cents in the next year. Um, and because I liked the number 88, this is good luck. So when I buy in and I play poker, I buy $8,800 typically, uh, cause it's good luck.

SPEAKER_105: So eight, eight, eight, eight, I think is it. And then I think 10 years from now, we might be looking at it, you know, an Uber sock. That's $888. Why? I just like the number eight.

SPEAKER_210: I just like the number eight.

SPEAKER_211: Mind. So numerology has come to twist. We are now just, I like the number four. So I'm going to go with, well, I mean, look, anyway, but you're a gambler.

SPEAKER_136: I'm a gambler, I get it, I get it, I get it.

SPEAKER_214: Okay, founders. We all know that building software is really hard.

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SPEAKER_06: Oh, so I have brought to you a round that you will not like, but I want to talk about it anyways.

SPEAKER_21: So we're going back to the world of Web3, and we're talking about a company called Story that just raised $80 million. Now, the background for this is that OpenAI is now doing customer tuning for their 4.0 model. OpenAI just landed a deal with Condé Nast, and Anthropica is getting sued.

SPEAKER_19: So I'm thinking a lot about AI models and data for training still, and that brings us to Story.

SPEAKER_21: So Andreessen Horowitz's crypto team puts $80 million into Story, $2.25 billion valuation. And Jason, I'm going to walk you through what it does, and then I want you to tell me.

SPEAKER_100: I'm sorry, did you say $2.2 billion valuation?

SPEAKER_221: No, I said $2.25 billion valuation.

SPEAKER_222: So in the real world where that was a stock trading in the market, you would have to have one-fifth of that in revenue.

SPEAKER_03: So it would be $400 million in revenue, $500 million in revenue roughly.

SPEAKER_228: Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_165: Yeah, and you'd have to have, just to have that, you have to have SaaS gross margins.

SPEAKER_21: So in your high 70s to low 80s, and you would need to have probably positive free cash flow and at least 15% growth and, you know, retention of 100. The points, it's a lot of money, you know?

SPEAKER_19: A lot of money. So what are they building? They're building a blockchain framework that will tokenize, don't laugh, I'm being serious. They will tokenize IP to get it on the blockchain.

SPEAKER_233: No, I'm not. Is this like you're punking me? No, I swear to you. It's just an ICO.

SPEAKER_235: Okay, keep going, sorry.

SPEAKER_237: With the Brezlo story and this story, I feel like we're just like going back to an era where I was banging my head against the desk in confusion. But sure, keep going.

SPEAKER_21: Then they're going to monetize the IP that is on the blockchain by quote, giving creators the ability to set the economic terms for how AI can use their IP. And then all of this is programmable so you can call it if you need to and then and then access it. And really slick website.

SPEAKER_84: I had court pulled this up because I think they put a lot of clearly budget into graphics. And the reason why that, and Jason has done this, Chris Dixon and Carol Wu from their team said that, you know, these AI systems today are likely trained on original human created content, but often don't credit or cite their sources.

SPEAKER_21: If there's no attribution or compensation, what incentive will there be to publish original creations on the open internet? Okay. So I agree with that. I like a venture capital round, not a big crypto guy, but hey, you know, I'm flexible. Uh, knowing all that, Jason, how much money would you put into this deal at the terms that Andreessen Horowitz just accepted?

SPEAKER_36: Oh, on these terms, $0.0, um, Ian, I would say this is foolish.

SPEAKER_00: Um, and I, Chris Dixon is a smart guy, but I think they have a giant vent. I think they have a giant fund of LP money sitting there and they need to put it to work and they need to make big bets here.

SPEAKER_36: But if they put 80 million in at a 2 billion plus valuation, they own 3% of the company 3%. Okay. Nothing.

SPEAKER_252: It's nothing. It's less than a seed investors target for a seed round.

SPEAKER_101: It exactly, I mean, Y Combinator owns 7% of a company per 125.

SPEAKER_32: So if you just think about where you're putting capital, this is dumb. Um, now listen, we haven't, I don't know the founders. They could be the biggest geniuses in the world. This could be Sergey Brin and Larry page, and maybe it's worth overpaying, but I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00: Um, and I do think that although this idea makes some logical sense, um, I think, and I do think it should exist, um, and I am an investor in a company that is doing a clearing house model like this. And I think there will be many clearing houses. One for books, one for music, just like the music industry has clearing houses. So the clearing house concept will exist. Large brands, New York times and county Ness will cut direct deals, read it because they can Twitter, et cetera. And those people will go direct and then there'll be the meat, the fat medium, the medium part of the tail, and then the long tail will need services like this. I think it's going to be a grinded out business. I don't think it's going to ever make. The amount of money necessary to get a, what needs to be like at least a 10 X, a 10 X here means this

SPEAKER_36: becomes a $25 billion company. A $25 billion company would need to have five to 10 billion in revenue.

SPEAKER_142: It's not going to have that.

SPEAKER_56: There's not enough money here, but we could be missing something. The other weird thing.

SPEAKER_36: I don't know if you saw the sec was looking into some VC firms in the crypto space. I'm not saying that there it's injuries in Horowitz, but I, you know, the idea I have here is. I think the sec is very interested in, uh, venture firms putting money into crypto projects, having tokens and selling those tokens to retail or to anybody.

SPEAKER_32: And I've talked about it more here. So I, I don't do crypto deals at all. People send me crypto deals. I'm like, I'm out. Why? Because they're overpriced.

SPEAKER_00: Like this one, two, they are incredibly speculative and none of them, literally none of them, with the exception of coin base, maybe some NFTs companies that are now close to worthless or extremely low value. The only thing that's worked is the, uh, crypto exchanges.

SPEAKER_31: In other words, the marketplace where they sell the tulips works. I think there's one other thing that does work, which is stable coins.

SPEAKER_06: I think stable coins.

SPEAKER_259: Oh, sorry. I forgot stable coins. Yes.

SPEAKER_19: Circle is a company that's gonna go public. I mean, we're actually, we're gonna have spoiler. We're gonna have circle back on the show in the not just in future. Yeah. You're getting that locked in extra by now.

SPEAKER_06: And so circle coin base. And then the list gets pretty short, frankly. I mean, I, I know a lot of people, okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_21: Um, but again, that falls into your exchange. That that's an OG business model that's, that has one foot in Fiat and one foot in crypto doing quite well. And so to me, that's, that's like a hybrid versus a full crypto business. Um, by the way, on the sec thing, where are you referring to the point in which the, uh, the sec was looking at VCs to see if they were acting as unregistered securities

SPEAKER_22: dealers? There's that piece.

SPEAKER_267: Uh, and there's the Uniswap news that came out a couple of days ago.

SPEAKER_269: Yeah, uh, so lock tower reported this.

SPEAKER_32: There was a, um, a podcast where somebody talked about it and what I believe is happening. And I, I did listen to the podcast where this person talked about it, uh, speaking on the

SPEAKER_56: Unchained podcast on Wednesday, Ari Paul, the chief investment officer of block tower. Capital said the sec has launched a quote, bunch of investigations into VCs were acting as

SPEAKER_00: unregistered securities dealers, as you're saying, the discounted token deals that some VCs ink with crypto project puts them in violation of the regular tour regulators, strict securities laws, Paul says. And so what's happening here is if you were to buy, you invest in one of these companies and then they have a token, where does the equity value set? Alex is the equity value in the corporation that you invested in.

SPEAKER_32: Let's I'm going to make up a company now. This company is Uber coin. And it's going to make a decentralized ride sharing network. You put your car up there, you have users, it matches them. It puts it on the blockchain and you don't, you just disintermediate Uber. There doesn't need to be any central location. You just add your card to the blockchain and it knows the location, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Silly idea, but whatever. Okay. I invest $80 million in there and I own 3% of the company like this deal we just saw.

SPEAKER_101: And then they launched a token and the token has, you know, they, they launched 10 billion at 10 cents each.

SPEAKER_32: So there's a billion dollars now in value in the token. And I, as the VC get 10, get my 3% of those tokens.

SPEAKER_00: So I have, I gave you 80 million to invest in the company, but because I own 3% of the company, they said, I'll give you 3% of the tokens as well. There's a billion dollars that's $30 million in tokens.

David Friedberg: And, uh, the token spikes goes 10 X. Now I have 300 million.

SPEAKER_00: So I sell half my tokens to make 150 million. I send it to Harvard and Yale and, you know, Mubadala, whoever the LPs in my fund were. And they get that money from the public consumers, randos bought the token and the token collapses and becomes worth, you know, one 10th of one cent. Yep.

SPEAKER_22: And you know, that is, that's an engine that takes money from people who don't have a lot of money, but are chasing the gen bed for, you know, philosophy of chasing a big win. Good call.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. It takes that money from gen bed funnels and through a fee structure involving VCs and founders. And then it takes most of the profit from those poor people and gives it to foundations that have tens of billions of dollars.

SPEAKER_22: It's not exactly economically accretive for the way you lay it out. I'm not, I'm not stoked by this model that you were describing.

SPEAKER_18: If that had occurred, would Gary Gensler, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, you know, in that contingent of

SPEAKER_00: people who let's say are, what do they call themselves? Democratic socialists.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I, I, I, I don't think Gary Gensler would, would account himself. No, Gary Gensler wouldn't. He considers himself a capitalist, whatever.

SPEAKER_00: But I mean, those people who kind of support this legislation, who represent constituents. Yeah. They're gonna look at that and be like, wait a second. We'll transfer. And they're looking for the wealth transfer to go the other way. They wanna see a more balanced society. What you described.

SPEAKER_18: Sounds like stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.

SPEAKER_289: It does sound a lot like that.

SPEAKER_18: What they wanna do is steal from the rich and give to the poor. So this is going to cause if this is true and this and any venture capital fund did this, the optics.

SPEAKER_32: Would be so crazy that if this, and that's why I think the sec started double clicking and asking questions and yeah, I, I've had the sec come to me, um, you know, and other folks, um, and when they think they see fraud and this is a case where I think I had met with a founder, but I didn't invest, but they knew I had met with the founder.

SPEAKER_36: Sure. How did they know I met with the founder? Well, obviously they got records that I was on their calendar and high profile name.

SPEAKER_32: You know, sec calls you. Uh, and then I'm paying a $2,000 attorney and I'm submitting information and saying, yeah,

SPEAKER_03: this is my notes from the call. And here we are. And then you never hear from them again.

SPEAKER_291: So you just send it in and they ignore you afterwards.

SPEAKER_25: Precisely.

SPEAKER_291: Wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like, I don't want to say they're on a fishing expedition because I don't think that they have some nefarious, uh, purpose, but that's how it feels to you. Because you naturally as a curious person are like, why are you asking? And they're like, yeah, we're asking. And you're like, great. Am I involved in this? Is somebody in my organization involved in this? Well, we didn't invest. Why would you want our information? Like, yeah.

SPEAKER_36: Information. And you're like, okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_06: It's like, if you see a cop car parked outside your house and you're like, did I break the law? Did I do anything wrong? I was just eating donuts.

SPEAKER_21: Anybody, but your blood pressure goes up several gradations and your doctor

SPEAKER_41: begins to get mad. So I, I have to ask you, are you talking about Solana in this analogy that we're.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, no, actually it wasn't, you know? And, uh, I think that one has come up because some of my besties were involved in, they had invested in, uh, a fund that then were investors in Solana. And so far, everything I know about Solana has been on the up and up. But, you know, all it takes is like, cause I had said on the all in podcast and it became like a clip, um, where I was like, I don't understand the valuation.

SPEAKER_36: Like, are you guys wrong this thing or you're selling it?

SPEAKER_32: And we kind of joked like, ah, because if something doesn't make sense in terms of valuation, you sell your shares.

SPEAKER_91: Going back to the Ryan Breslow thing and 14 billion dollars. Interesting.

SPEAKER_36: If you were a shareholder and it was worth 14 billion and somebody offers you a secondary, you'd be like, okay, that's how we're valued. How much do you want? Exactly. And you know, I had that happen once or twice, you know, during peak Zerp,

SPEAKER_149: some people offered to buy us, you know, buy some of our shares.

SPEAKER_00: We took advantage of that secondary. Uh, and then I, you know, I had people who were LPs or people who were in syndicates. Hey, why are we selling 10 or 20%? Cause you, as the fund manager are trusted to make these decisions for better or worse. And so, you know, you sell just a little bit of your calm or a little bit of another company or a little bit of your Uber, you have to then justify it. And what I would just say to people is we don't know what's going to happen in the future, but we do know that this offer came in and these offers don't come in too often. Therefore we thought it was prudent to sell 10 to 20% of our position. And if the offer comes again at a higher valuation or the same, we might sell another 10 or 20%.

SPEAKER_32: So that's always been my philosophy, which is, you know, on the way up, you can pair your position a little bit. Do you feel like an idiot? If it goes 10 X after you do maybe, but it depends on where you put that money. If you took that 10% you sold at a peak valuation and put it into Nvidia. And then that went 50 X, you would feel pretty smart, right? So you always have to ask yourself, well, what did you do with the capital after you got it back? And then some industries, you just have to return capital at some point, or you're not in business. If you're a private equity firm or a venture firm,

SPEAKER_36: if you do not get DPI, as we discussed the other day, you're out of business, right?

SPEAKER_49: So you just. Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_21: I think shaving off 10% to de-risk and return cash to make everyone happy makes perfect sense. It's the old farming point. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. And so I think a slight de-risking is okay, but that's also my personal philosophy towards risk, which is I like to have a roof.

SPEAKER_19: I like to have a job, you know, I'm not, I'm not willing to, to have the variance go so high that it all goes away to any point.

SPEAKER_21: I bring up slaughter not to accidentally subtweet, um, your friends. That was a mistake, but, um, no, no, no, no. I mean, it wasn't the intent. I mean, the reason why I bring it up is I think there was like a big venture investment. I think Andreessen was involved. There was a token presale for Solana and it was called a DC coin for a long time in the crypto community. Now it's street cred seems to be pretty good, but I was always kind of curious if you bought it and then you sold some, and then it turns out that it was a security. How much liability might you have retrospectively? And I don't think that's been fully teased out by the legal system yet. Uh, one last note for me on story. We've, we've talked about told that we've talked about human native. These are companies that are building trad web platforms to let people take their content and put it into the bucket and then get some payment for it. We are now going to get to see a natural experiment between a, a database that is private and a database that is public. And we will see who comes out on top. Um, we did have told that on the show a couple of weeks back, lovely people.

SPEAKER_00: And, um, we'll see how they're gonna do, you know, the other thing about these pre-sales is when you do a public offering, you have a lockup period.

SPEAKER_26: You have audited financials. You have like a, a road show.

SPEAKER_00: You have filings with a lot of these, um, uh, pre-sales. There was a massive discount. There were not lockups or the lockups were negotiated one off. In other words, you're the founder. I'm the VC.

SPEAKER_32: You got five VCs, you got three angels. You cut two, three different style of deals with us. I say, I'm going to buy, you know, 10 million of the tokens, but I don't want to lock up period. The other people say, I just want to buy a hundred thousand tokens. Okay, but you've got to be locked up for two years. And you're like, okay, well, I guess that's all I can get. Can I get 18 months? Like, okay. Now the person who wasn't locked up, they start selling on some schedule. And then the other people who are locked up don't then collapses.

SPEAKER_36: You get the idea of what can happen, right? When Robin had went public, it was like 50, $60 before we distributed at, I think, I don't know, it was 18 or 22 or something in that range. Well, I mean, but that valuation was never real. You know, Kathy Wood was buying a 50, 60, a share, if I remember correctly. And then it came back down.

SPEAKER_320: It was, it was like a one day spike. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: And so again, we have to then go to LPs and they're like, did it hit 60? I was like, yeah, there was like an AMC weird thing that occurred that we didn't get to participate in because we distribute in six months, the end.

SPEAKER_21: Well, that's good to have a pattern. I mean, companies, I forget if it was Sequoia or someone else said that they were now going to hold equities in their companies that invested in after they go public. And then because they did that, they got their face ripped off and the market turned. As long as you're consistent, I think it's fine. As long as you have like, we do this, we do this, we've all agreed to this. But I think if you try to start timing the market after an IPO, if you're a private market investor, you're just asking to make a mistake. Cause that's not your game. That's not. And some people are good at the game.

SPEAKER_149: You know, you look at a Sequoia, they have heritage. They had a family office offering and they were very good at it.

SPEAKER_00: And they knew holding Google and other things post going public was a good idea. So, you know, hopefully, you know,

SPEAKER_36: and those investors, I think, get to choose if they want to be in that public thing or not.

SPEAKER_19: Well, I mean, again, back to about clarity, optionality, and, you know, just, just being above board and basically everything that's not going on in the bulk deal leads to very good business results.

SPEAKER_21: Normally speaking, just do whatever Ryan doesn't. And maybe that'll work out for you.

SPEAKER_327: And, uh, we have one final story, I think.

SPEAKER_21: Oh yeah. We're just something really quick about layoffs. Just because I wanted to touch on this. Because I have a, we've been talking a lot about static team size. You're on the show. Basically companies not hiring more as they grow, you get more leverage out of each employee, greater profitability. And Jason likes to say about how AI is going to help people do more faster. So each person is more productive. You can essentially have leverage. And then Jason, I'm watching some companies in the tech world that are big names, Cisco and Intel, just, just take out the knife. Like they're trying to cut off an arm, absolutely brutal. And so, um, Cisco is cutting 7% after it cut roles in February. Intel is cutting 15,000 people and they're trying to save $10 billion next year.

SPEAKER_29: Here's my, here's my question. I get static team size because often adding people is just, it leads to less productivity

SPEAKER_19: and more complexity and so forth. But if you're looking at a company like Intel, that is clearly behind the innovation curve and you're slashing that many people, we have a chart here of the biggest tech layoffs of the year. You can see that Intel and Cisco are both rather high on that list. Yeah.

SPEAKER_25: Are you, this is by raw numbers, right? You have 26,000 people at Dell, which is 20%. Yeah.

SPEAKER_105: So there's percentage and there's a raw number. These are big percentages and big raw numbers to your point about the cleaver.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. Just, I mean, the blood's flying here.

SPEAKER_21: And so when you see these, these, these massive layoffs, is it the company saying that we made a mistake and we over hired and we're just trimming the fat, or are they saying we can't afford to do what we need to do with these people or 15,000 people from Intel and 7,000 from, or sorry, 7% from Cisco. It's just an enormous production. Okay. Talk to me about this.

SPEAKER_338: Permission to speak freely.

SPEAKER_36: No, go for it. Okay. I'm going to say something. I'm going to say some things that are going to hurt some feelings. Okay. There's a war right now. There is a war between management and shareholders and employees in America. Okay. It's a war.

SPEAKER_07: And it's a multifaceted war, but people, because this is their paper, it's their jobs. It's a very sensitive topic, right?

SPEAKER_03: And it, this is a multivariable war. There's work from home and return to office. Um, and then there is efficiency. There's age discrimination, and then there's top heavy organizations, and then there's natural efficiency. You know, there are people like Jack Welch, Russ and peace at GE who felt 5% should get cut every year.

SPEAKER_36: There are people like Netflix, uh, Patty McCord and, you know, the team over there. They felt you had to, everybody on the team had to get rehired every January. You had to state your case if you wanted to keep going at the company.

SPEAKER_32: So what we're seeing in the market right now is, um, you never waste a crisis.

SPEAKER_00: And because of the over hiring in tech, the legacy companies are looking and they lag, but they don't lag forever. They saw what Twitter, Zuckerberg, Microsoft, and Google did in terms of right sizing. They saw the productivity gains and they said, you know what? We want a little bit of that. We want a little bit of that because management knows that in a company like a Cisco, right? When you brought up Cisco, we're in town.

SPEAKER_03: There are people who've been there for multi decades. And I, I have great sympathy for these people because there are generation, they're boomers, they're gen Xers, and then even millennials.

SPEAKER_26: And like I told you, we took you in the gen X draft because you're cool AF, um, and smart, but the millennials can claim you as well.

SPEAKER_00: The point is boomers massively overpaid at the end of the career, less energy,

SPEAKER_32: less desire to crush it. Generally speaking, I'm painting with a broad brush here. Then you go to gen Xers. Maybe they're slightly overpaid, you know, and you've been at a company and then they're looking at this next generation or. You know, the AI native generation that people talk about Sunday mantra was talking about that on the AI program recently.

SPEAKER_00: Just this, you know, AI native generation is more efficient. And so I saw this in the PC era where, you know, legacy people didn't have computers on their desk and gen Xers who didn't know how to use computers were 10 times. They're just not wasting the crises. They're using this as a way to get rid of the over in their mind, the overpaid old people. Okay. I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but there are.

SPEAKER_26: People who, you know, were at Intel or Cisco for 2030, maybe even more years. They got five, six, 7% raises every year. They doubled their salary every seven, eight years. They got stock options.

SPEAKER_36: And now the company's like, you know, we just don't need this many people because your job is now being done by AI.

SPEAKER_00: And so they're just trying to get rid of all of that, what they consider fat, dead weight, overpaid,

SPEAKER_03: old people, and just cut them that it's really brutal. And then I watched these people because they're on TikTok crying. I have a great sympathy for them. And, you know, it's almost like it's hitting my age group too. I know people who are in their fifties, you're in your forties, you know, like people in their fifties are starting to feel this.

SPEAKER_36: I have contemporaries who are like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to get another job. I don't know if I'm going to get a job at the same salary. What am I going to do? Because I still want to work 10, 20 years. And so, and then forget about like international and globalization, where you could hire people in Portugal, Manila, South America, and Canada at a 25 to 75% discount to do that same work.

SPEAKER_142: And, you know, AI doing some amount of, so the work continues. And, um, oh, okay.

SPEAKER_355: I have a couple, a couple of thoughts about that.

SPEAKER_358: I did. So capitalism is, do you think it's true? What I said?

SPEAKER_06: I mean, the thing, the thing that I, that I quibble with is the amount of people, because Cisco couldn't have had enough people that have been there for 20, 30 years to fill

SPEAKER_19: the, the, the scale, the cuts we're talking about. Intel didn't have 15,000 of them.

SPEAKER_21: So I think they're probably also cutting down some other places. And if they are making these cuts as absolutely painful, one or two time things to clear up

SPEAKER_19: cashflow, to put it into the right part of the business to grow. Okay. Painful. I get it. But if the company was so poorly run that up until 20 minutes ago, they thought they needed all these

SPEAKER_21: people because they hired them, they stopped them, they insured them, et cetera. I, I doubt their ability to actually chart the right path forward. And then the third thing that I've, I've seen at companies that go through layoffs, having been at companies that have had layoffs is once you begin to do that,

SPEAKER_87: all the people who can leave go, oh, it's that now. Okay. And then they bounce and you end up cutting what you think is the dead web, but then you lose the top of the pyramid.

SPEAKER_00: And you could lose some great performers who feel like there's a chunk. Yeah. And you go, I think anything under 10% in this kind of market is probably pruning. And, you know, when you're in that five to 10%, it's kind of in the Jack Welch pruning, not a big deal, efficient. When you get over 10%, something more is going on. Also people were hired.

SPEAKER_32: Gotta remember, we went through a very competitive decade where people were rightfully so, you know, and it's a pendulum, but talent was scarce and there was massive competition. And what did that lead to? It led to people correctly getting the best deal they could in the market and maybe leaving jobs to get, you know, 30, 40% raises. And they do that twice in a decade. And all of a sudden, you know, somebody who was making X is now making X times three. And then people wake up and go, wait a second.

SPEAKER_128: How did this person wind up getting the salary? Wait a second. That's a big number.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, you just, you just explain something to me. This is why everyone gets a 1% raise. Because that way you can never end up doubling your, like, I, I, I had my last job, which was

SPEAKER_29: owned by Yahoo, which is owned by Apollo. Um, like the end of the year will come around and they'd say, we really appreciate your contributions. You get 2.25%, which is more than most people. They got 2%. And you look at them and you're like, bro, inflation's five. Like what? You're gonna pay me less.

SPEAKER_364: I mean, it's like cost of living adjustment. It's like half of the cost of living adjustment.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. And so I think that's why I've been instituted to avoid the situation that you're describing in which if I got a 7% raise every year, I mean, I would retire making oodles of money.

SPEAKER_25: You know, that would be fantastic, but not super viable. That's why people always say you have to, if you want to get a big jump in pay and you're

SPEAKER_00: an elite performer in the top 10%, you have to basically go out and test your worth in the market.

SPEAKER_18: And you know, that's a fine thing for people to do.

SPEAKER_62: And it's struck me as inefficient from the corporation side, because you know how much

SPEAKER_21: it costs to staff up, to have an HR department, to source candidates, to bring them in. And then they leave because you won't give them more than a 2% raise. The incentives there are strange, but Jason, you asked for a question.

SPEAKER_84: We have one from, uh, our, our dear friend, uh, Mr. Or Mrs.

SPEAKER_21: Um, Patushi, let's say, um, Hey Jason, what do you think of future uses of blockchains that deal with storage, would it replace today's clouds and does it seem cool to store yourself on a blockchain, but not sure to invest in it? Essentially. Uh, do you think that file coin is the future?

SPEAKER_319: You know, sorry. I just read.

SPEAKER_26: Storage keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and more reliable. And so anything to do with blockchain and storage, you know, and making it theoretically cheaper. Uh, is, um, just not gonna work because, uh, every time I go to put a hard drive into a new computer or into a rack or a server I have, I'm just like, what have you seen how cheap

SPEAKER_41: hard drives are? Oh, it's, it's absolutely insane.

SPEAKER_31: Like, uh, Jason, give me the price of a two terabyte, uh, driver. I know what would that cost us? A two terabyte drive. I don't even know if they make two terabyte, but I'm going to think it's 50 bucks.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. 10 terabyte drives. I think, uh, most popular hard drive.

SPEAKER_36: So now you need a probably eight.

SPEAKER_49: I think eight is, oh, you're talking about portable. That means it's gotta have a power supply.

SPEAKER_19: And I'm saying that I found a two terabyte one. It is portable and it costs $80. So the point is that the yours is going to be 35.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah. So, you know, um, if you were to look at the cost of, you know, I don't know, like I think eight terabyte or the standard enterprise ones. Now an eight terabyte might be a hundred to 200 bucks, four terabyte, a hundred bucks. So, you know, we're down to guess.

SPEAKER_03: That's like 10 bucks a terrible 20 bucks a terabyte. Yeah. It's 20 bucks a terabyte right now. I mean, it's bonkers. Uh, so blockchain this, and this is the thing. Blockchain is a very inefficient database style. It's because you're replicating it across many servers. It's immutable. It can't be changed or it can't easily be changed. You might be able to change it with like all the servers agreeing to take something down if you, if you are protected that way. But almost nobody wants that database format. The only people who want an immutable public blockchain is people who, you know, want to know the custodian ship of like, I don't know, an NFT. And it really matters that you can see who it changed hands with. And it seems like it's obscure. Like nobody wants it. And so that's, that's always my thing. Bitcoin is now a almost two decades story. And we don't have crypto writ large is a two decade story.

SPEAKER_151: We don't have anything outside of stable coins and exchanges to show for it.

SPEAKER_385: All right.

SPEAKER_21: I have a spite, I have a spicier question for you. So Keith Chris Ellis asks, do you think the net job destroying companies or automation, things like AI and robotics should be taxed differently than job creating companies. Now, this is, this actually fits into my unified theory of, uh, economics, human progress and robotics that I haven't written down yet. But I'm curious, what do you think here, Jason?

SPEAKER_26: Uh, yeah. I mean, it could come to that.

SPEAKER_00: I think that's, you know, why Sam Altman did the UBI thing. I think there are some delusions of grandeur here where it's like, we're so amazing at what we build that we're going to get rid of so many jobs that therefore we have to be the God Kings and Queens and float down and sprinkle all of, you know, a small percentage of the money.

SPEAKER_26: We make on you peons to let you live at home and suckle, uh, you know, the teeth of AI, you know, it's a, it's a little deranged if I'm being honest.

SPEAKER_03: Um, but that is an interesting idea of, you know, putting a tariff on a robot that kills jobs and then redistributing that. Well, it's not insane to think that the, you know, there's an analogy here, Alex, you could

SPEAKER_36: take the toll road and say, we're going to charge for this toll road and put that money or some percentage of it toward public transportation.

SPEAKER_03: So you're paying to go in the fast lane, five bucks a day. We're going to take $2 of that and make it for the subway system. And people have thought of that kind of scenario.

SPEAKER_36: And I kind of like those. I like the idea that the congestion tax in a city like London or Manhattan would go towards improving

SPEAKER_105: public transit.

SPEAKER_00: So you have this thing where like the billionaires, you know, Mike Bloomberg is zipping down Broadway in his, you know, Maybach. I don't know what he drives or whatever. He gets driven in, you know, his suburban and he doesn't hit as much traffic, but he's got to pay 20 bucks to go in that zone. Right. And these D bag bankers in London go in the finance center.

SPEAKER_36: They, I think they pay 50 bucks as a concession fee or something crazy like that. Like a day to drive their Ferraris there.

SPEAKER_346: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let me, let me ask you before. What is the cost of the congestion pricing in.

SPEAKER_31: By the way, Jason called the lawyers D bags, not your friendly, friendly Alex over here. I'm, oh, it's actually not that bad.

SPEAKER_36: Let's see. The lending congestion costs are as follows standard charge, 15 per day, auto pay 14 per day and late payment after the day of travel, 1750.

SPEAKER_03: So it's 15 pounds a day, which is a little bit more than dollars. So it's 18, it's 20 bucks.

SPEAKER_00: But if that 20 bucks goes towards making the tube better, kind of like it.

SPEAKER_22: The tube's great. My first time on the tube happening, spent a lot of time, both on Amtrak and the, uh, New York subway and countering and Bart. I was like, wait a minute. You can have a really nice subway. This place is spick and span. It was warm. It was lovely. There was no, didn't smell like pee.

SPEAKER_00: You know, like I was in Manhattan for two or three weeks with my daughters and you know, I'm team Uber obviously, but you know, it's like in Manhattan and there are times when taking the subway five stops is a lot faster. And even going to Brooklyn to see my family, um, I took the subway. I would say three out of four times now. It's literally taking a hundred or $200 Uber black, which is what I take. I take the Uber black most of the time. It's not, it's, it's not cheap, but it doesn't make any impact on me, but I prefer the subway. Cause I want to get there faster. And I like the subway. I like seeing other humans. I like being part of the mix. I don't know. I don't want violence or a crazy person attacking me and my daughters, but I kind of like it.

SPEAKER_36: I like the vibes. I like being on the subway. My daughters prefer it as well.

SPEAKER_41: So yeah, I remember in San Francisco, uh, during kind of the peak at the last, the pre-COVID

SPEAKER_19: tech era when I was there, you know, if it was less than a mile and it was across anything in Soma, it was always dramatically faster to walk because traffic was so locked up because

SPEAKER_21: not only was the slow once you got into your Uber, but they would have to start seven blocks away on the wrong part of market street and then noodle their way over to you. And then I, I actually, I think I lost a bunch of weeks.

SPEAKER_41: I was just hiking everywhere across the city.

SPEAKER_56: So, you know, that's what works out. Hey, and I just asked chat GPT 4.0 and when I open a new window, it goes there.

SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I asked it, where does the congestion charge money go? How does the government spend it? And according to chat GPT 4.0 public transportation improvements, walking and cycling initiatives, environmental programs, ultra low emissions zones of electrified buses, uh, road maintenance

SPEAKER_25: and traffic management technologies. So all that, um, hippie communist stuff we don't do in Texas, you know, uh, London's congestion charge generates approximately 230 million pounds annually.

SPEAKER_03: Wow. Pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_411: That is pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_03: Um, and then they net 155 million of it after operational costs to invest in public transportation

SPEAKER_00: and cycling. So I kind of like it. So if in the, to the original question, if you have, if you make robots, if you've got the

SPEAKER_101: optimist or the humane and it takes a factory job, maybe that goes towards, um, re-education

SPEAKER_356: or food stamps. I don't know.

SPEAKER_21: Like, I mean, would a 10% tariff on it just to slap, figure out what the replacement cost is tax 10% of it. They get a 90% savings. The robot company makes a sale. Everyone wins tough, tough to do. Um, all right, everybody.

SPEAKER_101: Thanks for tuning in. Yeah. Twist 500, twist 500, twist 500.com. We've picked over 80 of the companies.

SPEAKER_32: We're looking for a full-time journalist to join us here.

SPEAKER_36: Um, we'll probably work for Alex and, uh, do one interview a day. If that sounds interesting to you, email alex at launch.co, or you have you at launch.co. Um, if you're interested and we're looking for somebody full-time to do this. Okay. Maybe it's listed.

SPEAKER_89: All right, everybody. That is our show. We are back with more interviews, more news and the twist 500.

SPEAKER_21: Before you know it, stick close to us. We are on YouTube, every podcast app and social media. We'll see you there. Jason. Bye. Bye.