SPEAKER_00: remember there is an attack vector for these llms they record everything you do and when the police SPEAKER_01: come or a civil case comes whatever it is they dump your information they use your information they're looking at your information sam altman said this um now what if brave took their same privacy approach to browsing where they remove ads they remove cookies they they make your searches private all that good stuff and that's their commitment i think they even have a vpn built in or you can pay like 10 bucks a year it's de minimis i think they should just do 100 vpn so they don't Chamath Palihapitiya: even know where you're coming from unless you want to disclose you know your city maybe um and then make all your ai absolutely anonymous and this is where i think apple should buy brave and duck duck SPEAKER_04: go maybe perplexity this week in startups is brought to you by public you take investing seriously public does too build a multi-asset portfolio and earn an industry-leading 4.1 apy on your cash with no fees or minimums learn more at public.com twist cla innovation takes balance our cpas consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up get started now at claconnect.com tech and century your team should be focused on shipping features not chasing down bugs new users get three months free of the business plan which covers 150 000 errors go to century.io twist and use the code twist all right everybody welcome back to this week in SPEAKER_01: startups i'm your host jason calacanis with me air editorial director lon harris give me a salute there it is yes sir sir yes sir immediately of course yes chef alex wilhelm how you doing boys SPEAKER_17: all right i'm really good i have a new light set up and i didn't have a producer help me and i think i'm gonna go blind by the end of the show but i hope i hope my lights look good now jason i hope SPEAKER_19: you're happy because i did it for you i saw your tick tock and uh it was literally like you were in an interrogation where were you on the fifth alex wilhelm it turns out i was standing contacts SPEAKER_27: within the party sadly no uh we need to see your papers all right listen enough with the nonsense i got 16 different things i got literally notions ai taker i got the zoom ai taker and now i got granola SPEAKER_30: ai taker it's just three that's two too many i'm gonna retire one i think well i mean what if they reply with very different notes i mean you want you want one of them to be fact-checking the other SPEAKER_34: what what am i the king of uh france over here i need multiple people taking notes it's just all uh mishugana am i am i getting it right mishugana you got that that was correct you were you're used to SPEAKER_30: get mishugana and mishigas mixed up but i think we've mishigas is the person mishugana is the behavior SPEAKER_37: mishugana is the person mishigas is like it's a chaotic situation that's out of control David Friedberg: the mishigas on this program's out of control there you go because actually just just to be SPEAKER_17: clear and mishuga is the progressive heavy metal band that's famous for its instrumental and SPEAKER_44: progressive music so there we go well there you go uh this week in heavy metal we're expanding the SPEAKER_07: network everybody nice you know lon we had this debate on uh the zombie k-pop what is it zombie SPEAKER_19: apocalypse demon hunters they're sure whatever demon hunters okay right i'm uh okay boomer um Chamath Palihapitiya: what was interesting about this story to all of us and my daughters were thrilled that we discussed SPEAKER_01: it by the way of course they've watched it 17 times i'm sure but sony had this incredible ip correct they left it on the doorstep of netflix netflix is a beautiful baby yeah sony pictures had SPEAKER_37: this deal with netflix during the pandemic if netflix refunds the production budget for the movie plus a 20 million dollar sweetener netflix gets the movie outright and so this was one of the movies that was produced under that deal so naturally people are like well this this this is the biggest movie phenomenon of the summer they released the sing-along version in theaters it was a smash hit the soundtrack is a smash hit they're making a sequel already this could have been a huge new sony franchise and they're a company that's desperate for new franchises uh and they left that on the table well now their ceo sody picture ce kind of defending their decision in variety today which i SPEAKER_00: thought was interesting really what defense does this dipshit have for giving away harry potter because this is why when people email me hey i want you to invest in my film i immediately reply back thanks so much for thinking of me i like money so i don't invest in movies because these people are sharks when when they would offer me to invest in these sundance movies i was like oh maybe i'll get in on this you know drop uh 50 dimes 100 times 250 dimes maybe i'll put my name up there in lights they're like yeah you can get back up to a hundred percent of your investment and i'm like so i put in 250 the most i can make is 500 why don't i invest in five startups give them 50k each and have SPEAKER_37: unlimited upside they literally put caps on this yeah there's no it's not people do not get into producing films because they want to make a ton of money it's like maybe something that has happened to people but no no it's because exactly what you said it's they want to be in the movie business all right so what is that guys what's this guy's excuse so ravi ahuja uh he says that the deal with netflix made sense and that the the big issue is there's no guarantee that this movie would have been a hit in theaters just because it was a hit on netflix here's the quote it started out on netflix and then word of mouth made it grow in theatrical that's a lot harder to do it's hard to sustain momentum theatrically so i think it was in the right home i would say our mission is to make great content and find the right home and i think k-pop demon hunters right home was netflix but it's an interesting question he's leaving open it's it's theoretical we can't really know but his suggestion SPEAKER_56: is being on netflix is what made this a hit and that it would have maybe gotten lost in the shuffle SPEAKER_17: if you'd released it to movie theaters i don't i don't agree with that at all but i do like the idea that streaming platforms could be a good way to give a show a longer chance at finding this audience because the theatrical window lawn's pretty short whereas on streaming it's i mean effectively infinite but in reality it's until the next major release well what we're seeing now is SPEAKER_37: that's even condensing more it used to be a movie would have maybe two three weeks and then that first weekend became all important now some movies we're seeing the drop off on week two is massive like this was the big issue with fantastic four this summer had a huge opening weekend but week two it had major drop off and so what that means is all the you know the marvel fandom has shrunk those guys are crazy they'll go out first weekend for everything but the rest of america the world not as into it anymore and the drop off is pretty severe so yeah you really get one big shot at it in theaters that if you don't capture everybody's imagination right away it's hard all right he's Chamath Palihapitiya: just doing cya he's he's getting the screws turned to him there's somebody in tokyo right now who's like hey boss what's going on you know they're they're hardcore investors there uh and they bought columbia and all this stuff tristar tristar they got they had a lot of assets there and to give away SPEAKER_01: upside just for 20 million dollars 20 million dollars don't move the needle for anybody they're SPEAKER_37: making a really stupid decision 20 million is so small that it's very simple even a even one big SPEAKER_72: weekend you would have covered more than 20 million let alone like if this had played for a month or two Chamath Palihapitiya: we'll give it to you cost plus 25 percent 50 50 partners yes or no we're going to hulu next we're going SPEAKER_00: to disney next we're going to amazon next let us know yes or no he could have done that deal he would have got that deal right they would have given him instead of 40 million they would have given the 20 million in production costs and then he gets another five million for you know whatever uh SPEAKER_73: the a little uh profit a little a little margin and then we own 50 50 we'll be partners together SPEAKER_37: on exploiting this it does seem like not asking for well if this breaks records if this is a hundred million view kind of thing like you gotta you gotta have some sort of structure to that deal just giving it to them for 20 million no matter how many people watch it even if it's the biggest movie of SPEAKER_75: the year like that's crazy you only do that if you think you have crap content that's not going to SPEAKER_37: make money right and sony pictures animation has had a string of hits they do the across the spider verse movies they did the machines which is a big hit on netflix like they've had some so they did that teenage mutant ninja turtles movie that they've had some big hits gotta read this book something like SPEAKER_79: an autobiography by akira kurosawa used copy of the original version from uh from a library the library SPEAKER_81: thank you to st louis community college that's where i got my original copy uh here's the thing SPEAKER_85: toho studios they owned everything they hired the actors they hired the writers they had the sets they SPEAKER_00: had a full stack just like elon's got a full stack so the lesson here for entrepreneurs is entrepreneurship and business in general is never limit your upside control your destiny go full stack own as much as you can of the process barry diller must have read this biography or just studied it because when he did movie of the week he said you know what he had all these deals from movie studios lon hey we'll make the movies for you we take it you give us money and you can put it on abc and then we get it afterwards and he was like nope we're gonna do it all ourselves like well you can't be involved in it you're just a studio you don't you're just like a tv network you don't get to do this we do this the creatives do it and he was like nope i'm gonna do it which is really what netflix has done they own all their ip for all time and that's what makes it brilliant someday i'll be a studio head if i get to live another 50 years or 100 years i'll carve out 10 years to be a studio head that's what i was meant to do and among other things man i would have loved that job all right thanks so much SPEAKER_01: for the update lon very important update there from holly from from hollywood from the hollywood part of austin texas yes absolutely wow there's also they're building a lot of studios here they're building some studios yeah it's moving here rodriguez has got his whole operation out of SPEAKER_88: austin sure this is it comedy technology music and film it's all happening folks and central texas central SPEAKER_92: texas uh all right it's a little drop of uh blue making a purple uh little city we got here called SPEAKER_96: austin all right thanks lonnie donnie when your website or your app goes down you don't want to hear a bunch of excuses and you don't want to waste your time you just want the problem fixed fast and SPEAKER_01: that's where century comes in they're handling all the real-time error monitoring and tracing so the moment something breaks you know exactly what happened and why they've also got seer s-e-e-r an ai-powered debugging agent that could sniff out the root causes of your problems 94 of the time and growing and like all great startups century is constantly shipping new features bells and whistles and updates they just added ai agent monitoring to the platform when your llm agent starts hallucinating century traces the entire timeline to find out what went wrong and take the guesswork out of it plus it's built into the same system that your team is already using and relying on so try it out for SPEAKER_99: yourself go to century.io twist and actually start making sense of what your agents are doing that's Chamath Palihapitiya: century.io twist you know i saw that lena khan was on the bulwark my guy tim miller had her on and he SPEAKER_85: confronted her about my sort of statements about the wrath of khan and how she iced the industry and she didn't exactly put up a great defense for it um and you know one of my core premises was SPEAKER_01: work on the stuff like right to repair or dark patterns where you can never unsubscribe to stuff all that stuff bundling that's like the classic law we have here in the united states you don't need to SPEAKER_00: make up you can predict the future as some 30 something you know yell i don't know what ivy league school she went to has no job experience uh or and it was obviously political she was very clear in the tim bulwark on tim's podcast the bulwark um you know that she was a democrat and they didn't like you know large businesses i'll leave it at that and google was the obvious case because we all sat here and we're like you know google's got a lot of challenges they may have a search monopoly you know for the past 20 years okay nobody's going to deny that but they don't have a browser monopoly they don't have a google docs monopoly they don't have an android monopoly monopoly we talked in the last episode that they're down to 40 something percent to apple's almost 60 market share here in SPEAKER_01: the united states so the market fixes these things we don't need some 30 something elitist predicting the future because i can't predict the future and i do it for a living and i do it goddamn well i mean i hit some grand slams here folks grand slams robin hood you know uber i hit the grand wealth front i've had a lot of grand slams and i can't tell you which one's going to be the grand slam SPEAKER_17: i think it's a really interesting point because i've been wrestling with this jason uh and the context folks is that this week the judge laid out the remedies in the google search monopoly case and it did not go as far jason as many people thought and honestly the reason behind that kind of limited reach at the end was the rise of generative ai and ai search as a concept and frankly a rising market category so i agree with you that we are seeing the fruits of competition and the results of private market investment and things are going well i use uh gpt5 50 times as much as google now so it's worked for me here's the question though that i don't know the answer to this what do we do for the 20 years in which google did have a monopoly and did get to operate with impunity because i don't think really divesting chrome right now would solve anything but i do also think that if you act in a monopoly fashion a monopolist fashion for that amount of time in contravention of the general rules of the american marketplace there should be some punishment for it and i don't know if the remedies element of this case was the right place to do it but it does feel like they got called out from the monopolist for a long time and then they just got their earlobe flicked and it just feels SPEAKER_07: like an encouragement for other companies you know lena khan makes this point hey uh poor people SPEAKER_01: and you know the the rank and file when they do a speeding ticket or they commit a crime you know they they get taken to the shed right yeah uh and they get raked over the coal so big companies should also pay a price so there is something to that and the answer to that would be if you were on your game and you were actually watching what they were doing it was very clear that they were doing really hardcore SPEAKER_00: exclusive deals with mozilla and firefox and safari and uh search on iphones and you know uh their browser over at apple those things would be technically um you know or they could be anti-competitive therefore you would just go right after that and you'd give them the speeding ticket for that hey you did this you can no longer do it here's the fine but there was like a vindictiveness to this and a we have to like take down this kingdom we have to break them up you don't have to break them up man what you have to do is say these are the rules you break the rules you get a penalty what happens in you know football if you grab somebody's face mask you'll lose 15 yards right and you lose it down i think i don't watch football anymore but face masks are still very very sharp punishments SPEAKER_107: because of the potential for neck and head injuries so yeah yeah so you you know in this probably maybe SPEAKER_00: this is face masking or maybe it's off sides i don't know it would come to a decision as a society but you give the penalty and then you get the hell off the court and you let the people play the game and the winner wins you don't need to get this up in you know you're not a player on the field and i think that's the problem is when the referees think they're the show and you see this happen in any number of sports where there's a referee who's like there was one who kept getting giving rasheed wallace technicals like crazy and he gave a technical to rasheed wallace for staring at him i don't know if you remember that moment and he's like everybody's like what and it's i don't i think that might have been for me to like a playoff game and he was like he was intimidating me it's like okay well grow up you know this is the nba for folks who are outside yes and and this one you know uh referee thought he was the show i think that was the problem so based on the remedies the judge said hey SPEAKER_01: um no more this is the quote google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of google search chrome assistant or gemini great love it good for the industry now that means when you're apple you can say to google hey we'd love to give you an exclusive deal but we'll give you 50 percent of the searches coming in or it's an auction you know if yahoo uh or bang from microsoft or duck duck go if they want to get a certain number of searches this month they raise some money they can insert themselves into there imagine how the world would be different if duck duck go said hey to a bunch of venture capitalists you know we got a better mousetrap here uh where can we get 10 billion dollars to buy half of the search deal from apple and i think we can make it back great great what else uh you know wound up happening here SPEAKER_17: so google will not have to divest chrome which i thought was a pretty important point and we're going to get to how that's impacting the news already jason in just a moment um they're also not barred from making payments as you mentioned they're going to share some data with competitors essentially the argument was that because google would buy market share they would therefore get more search volume and therefore they would get more data and then they can make a better product and there was a flywheel of essential unfairness so they're trying to break that to some degree now people are a bit split on how effective that will be we'll have to see and then finally they won't have to do a uh ballot screen essentially on android to let you pick a search provider so really it's not much other than a forced end of exclusives and we could end up in a world in which gemini wins jason and we kind of maintain google's um monopoly status for a longer time in the gen ai search era but i don't think that's going to be the case i think opening the eye is big enough now to really be a real competitor i just think we need a better faster mechanism to punish companies that are being anti-competitive in the moment and uh i don't SPEAKER_113: think we know what that would be so um so i did see speaking of browsers that the browser company sold SPEAKER_01: to atlassian one of my favorite companies uh shout out to scott one of the co-founders of along with mike of atlassian from down under you know they make jira and a bunch of other cool products they're SPEAKER_17: buying it yep 610 million dollars in cash off the balance sheet less of course whatever cash the company had on hand deal is expected to close in the second quarter of atlassian's fiscal 26 and if you want to know what that means it means q4 of calendar this year so basically by the end of 2025 and the whole team's going to move over and they're going to be treated as a separate entities now jason you and i both know that acquisitions are often pitched to companies that are purchased as don't worry come over be a startup uh and this is one of those cases we'll see how long they stay independent over at atlassian a 44 or 45 billion dollar company it's huge uh but i thought this was a kind of bold move by atlassian a surprise one but i think if you want to consider the future of work in a agentic ai SPEAKER_43: perspective or you know era this is a really smart move because dia their browser is relatively ai forward so cool i'm here for it well you know i talked a little bit about the comet browser having Chamath Palihapitiya: a pretty good experience there and then of course uh claude is coming out with their own browser yeah SPEAKER_118: over an anthropic so they made a chrome extension open ai is theoretically making their own browser i Chamath Palihapitiya: think is the split so you know this idea of like the browsers where work gets done it's the portal to SPEAKER_01: you know on the desktop to the extent that you know when google wanted to um take some market share they Chamath Palihapitiya: created the chrome book they named it after the browser and essentially their thesis was if we just make a really fast lightweight operating system that works on any computer even one with very meager specs every you can use everything through a browser now you can use slack through a browser you could use notion through a browser so you don't have to download the apps you don't have to make a unique app we'll just do it that way that's been a relatively good success for them especially in education SPEAKER_121: one of the themes we talk about over and over again on this week in startups is making sure you do your SPEAKER_122: chores i'm no expert on these things i have some experience steven estes from cla is an expert let's talk about being cash efficient tell us about efficiency and what you see in the in the top tier SPEAKER_124: startups in your practice we're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past you really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need you've got to do the forecast and you've got to do the modeling and you've got it dialed in and get it right otherwise you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back have an extender to the round or you're going to give up too much of the company because SPEAKER_125: you just didn't recognize how much money you actually needed yeah very important to get this stuff right SPEAKER_121: folks and that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button-up way always have a great SPEAKER_126: partner a good partner to have on this adventure while things change my friend steven over at cla SPEAKER_09: visit claconnect.com tech and don't forget to mention that your boy jay cal sent you that's Chamath Palihapitiya: claconnect.com tech start today so this makes a lot of sense to me um the price they have cash companies worth 45 billion dollars or so so this is like one and one point x percent of the market cap SPEAKER_01: yeah it's not much it's very much and uh if man if they figure something out this could be yum yum i think this is a great acquisition and this is the type back to our first story of mid-market acquisition SPEAKER_00: you got a 44 billion dollar company buying a 600 million dollar company let's go let's see these you know kinds of acquisitions happen all the time if you're over a trillion dollar market cap if you're over a billion users yeah maybe we create a second set of rules for those companies that are at scale which is how it works in a lot of other geographies if you're if you have a specific amount of market share in korea you can't gain any more so you have to like essentially do other things with your SPEAKER_73: company so this makes a lot of sense to me i want to ask you a question though yeah so the company's SPEAKER_17: lost valuation march 2024 550 million post money now i raised capital a couple of times and sure the early investors did fine my question though is when you think about around jason at like a half unicorn valuation in 2024 do you think the last money in to the browser company had protections so that way they're not essentially just getting their money back one to one but they're probably making more than that i'm just curious about the economics from the venture side of this so if this was if that deal Chamath Palihapitiya: was done in 2018 19 20 20 21 peak zirp the founder could have said listen you're lucky to invest SPEAKER_01: there's going to be no protective provisions you're just going to convert to common on a sale like anybody else so if you bought 10 of the business you're gonna get 10 back and if that 10 is worth 25 million 50 million or 100 million that's just the way it is but since this was done in 2024 you could see Chamath Palihapitiya: um a savvy investor saying okay we're happy to pay this valuation you want you don't have anywhere near SPEAKER_01: the revenue that would justify it so can we just make an agreement that if you sell we get two times Chamath Palihapitiya: our money back so we get 100 million minimum you said it was a 50 million dollar round the last one SPEAKER_01: yeah so you know okay they sell for 600 100k comes off the top then the rest of the preference stack the rest of the investors would all convert into common and they would just sell their percentage and get the percentage of 500 million which i think the folks at the browser company would be okay with and i would think the investor going back to their lps and saying you know it's a 500 million dollar fund we put 50 million of your money into this we got back 100 million it's paying back you know 10 of the fund plus you got you know it's going to pay back 20 of the fund and so we're getting closer to SPEAKER_00: the hurdle or if it's already a profitable fund the fund manager might say okay we're just dropping 100 million if that fund was at 2x now the fund if it was a 500 you know million dollar fund is at 2.x you know and that's a really nice thing to happen in a time when back to the wrath of lena khan there wasn't a lot of dpi so early dpi is better than no dpi and losing money um and there's also SPEAKER_01: a clause in some venture funds with which is called recycling dollars the first 10 percent of returns can get reinvested into the fund so in this case if it's a 500 million dollar fund 100 million comes back if they had said 10 can be recycled give 50 million to the lps and this would be the gps the general partner's decision and hey we're going to take that 50 million we also happen to have Chamath Palihapitiya: perplexity in that fund we're going to offer perplexity to that 50 million we're going to double down on an existing investment which you know the people who are lps and funds tend to like that recycling because it gives a little kicker at the end of the fund where you might have some inside information private companies should trade on inside information public companies you go to jail for doing so so you're on the board of the company it's private you say wow this is pretty good maybe we buy a hundred million dollars in secondary from the early employees or angel investors in the SPEAKER_01: company so great to see this happening um the wrath of khan is over and all of this m a is happening and this was the thing with lena khan's other comments with tim miller on the bulwark which you can go see it was this week um and i really appreciate him playing the clip because she was like well you SPEAKER_00: know we're not really seeing a difference in m a it's like yeah because people gave up doing m a because the the juice wasn't worth the squeeze they knew you were going to run them through the mill so that's like in san francisco being like oh car break-ins are going down nobody in san francisco for some period of time would ever report a car breaking because they knew nothing would happen Chamath Palihapitiya: and the police would tell you nothing's going to happen you can report it nothing's going to happen so people just went and got their windows fixed at the end statistics be damned SPEAKER_17: statistics be damned uh next up open ai jason uh this came out thursday evening announced that they're going to do an open ai jobs platform and also certifications this was a little surprising to me now i don't think they're going to take on linkedin but the ceo of applications at open ai fiji previously the ceo of instacart through its ipo announced a couple things so the open ai jobs platform is going to be a place where essentially workers with ai skills can be matched with jobs that need ai skilled workers so it's kind of a subset of the economy but if you're a business that's having a hard time finding the right people to help i don't know modernize or agentesize your business this is a way to go about it obvious question how do you tell who's qualified jason glad you asked well that's called open ai certifications a new tool that'll be inside the open ai app that will let people essentially prove and i also presume learn uh their ai chops so a bit of a surprise move from open ai i think i like it but i haven't really digested it yet you know one of the SPEAKER_01: things that happens when you build a platform is you start seeing opportunities everywhere so you study SPEAKER_00: the data and google saw wow people keep typing in stocks and they type in price oh maybe we should put the stock price right there at the top of our chart and they build google finance or they keep asking for i don't know uh movies like whatever so then they build a database of movies and they show you movies Chamath Palihapitiya: like get them to the greek and you know you get the 40 year old version that's one of my favorites oh SPEAKER_34: what a great film i wish they made films like that uh you know your tropic thunder is always a nice way SPEAKER_144: to to find stuff so that's what i knew a guy who wanted to be a studio head and had some money i mean like it's almost like if that person had money and time they could i mean making raunchy stoner comedy SPEAKER_103: seems like a genre that you know you could do some real damage uh that's like my personality after SPEAKER_147: 8 pm so i'm totally here for it that was a dad joke from alex i heard the crickets i heard that no Chamath Palihapitiya: don't apologize we love it i don't even mean to anyways um so this seems like a good idea um there SPEAKER_01: probably are people who are looking for ai experts to use open ai's tools to do stuff inside of their Chamath Palihapitiya: enterprise now just like the channel uh at microsoft microsoft would have like certified microsoft engineers i was a certified novell engineer at a point those certifications allow you to have a SPEAKER_01: little bit of trust that this person is going to do some good work for you they get to charge a higher fee for their services they get to um and then open ai has something to do with all the people SPEAKER_00: calling on the phone who say can you do this for me can you do this for me we'll give you a million dollars we'll give you 10 million dollars yeah talk to these firms go to this page you're going to SPEAKER_01: find folks so that's really what this is about they're building up a channel to help applications get deployed it goes back to that mit story we covered what's that two weeks ago 95 of corporate SPEAKER_111: yeah ai pilots didn't make it to production and they're sure the data was a little bit suspect not SPEAKER_17: suspect it just it felt like there was a lot of really interesting data points and people found the one that was going to make the best headline no one's ever complained about headlines before in the history of journalism so don't worry uh but in this case i felt like there was actually some more interesting news in there but jason that that report and that particular data point i think SPEAKER_151: took like 20 percent of the air out of the ai balloon right now it did and that just shows you Chamath Palihapitiya: people can get skittish during a transition we had this happen many times with the internet oh my god the internet you can't trust it everybody's going to use aol everybody's going to use compu serve you got to use one of these online services prodigy whatever it is that's the way commerce will happen that's the way content will happen and um you have these this hand wringing SPEAKER_153: this helps people make better decisions it'll help them execute better i think it's a good idea SPEAKER_154: every time you turn on the news it's about ai getting smarter and smarter these models are writing SPEAKER_00: perfect code they're acing the world's most difficult exams and it turns out they're also pretty good at making money that's why there's public.com the investing platform for people who take their money seriously what really sets public apart are their ai powered tools and features check this out you can ask public a question about any stock in plain language and get a straightforward answer if you want to see why a particular stock's price jumped or crashed they've got a clickable ai generate summary right there in the performance chart you can build multi-asset portfolios on public stocks bonds options obviously but hey maybe you want a little crypto in there some etfs i will advise you to try public.com and access industry leading yields like 4.1 apy on your cash with no fees or minimums plus for a limited time earn one percent match on all ira deposits ira transfers and 401k rollovers never too soon to get that retirement dialed in so go to public.com twist today to fund your SPEAKER_09: new account in five minutes or less that's public.com twist disclaimer pay for by public investing full disclosures in podcast description we were talking about browsers so i just want to get some SPEAKER_16: other data points for the listeners on who else is building what now brave jason you've talked about SPEAKER_17: is a privacy focused browser it raised some venture capital had an ico for its basic attention token or bat back in 2017 and to my surprise and this is why i included it it's actually pretty big so in august brave's monthly active users grew to just under 98 million up about four percent month to month now if you're a yc company four percent month-over-month growth growth jason doesn't blow your top off but for a browser it's pretty good and the uh the company's high watermark da use so in the last month what was their biggest day of usage was 41 million i that's you know if it was all american that would be 10 yeah it's quite significant and i think it just goes to show that when we think about browsing technology we think about chrome and then somewhere down there there's firefox safari edge but really there's a bit more dynamism in the market than i think we have been discussing so i wanted to bring that for everybody and there's a project called ladybird which is a open source SPEAKER_148: browser that i just heard over on hacker news so there's quite a lot of names out there i think if SPEAKER_160: you think about every percentage point of search being worth a certain amount of market cap every SPEAKER_01: percentage point of ride sharing being worth a certain amount of market cap i've been having this debate about you know self-driving again today i keep getting dragged into it so i have to keep making this point everybody you know i think self-driving is a 10 trillion dollar opportunity and that every Chamath Palihapitiya: that means every one percent is worth a hundred billion so here you have a let's just round it up to a hundred million users for their browser if there's four million internet users on desktop or using browsers i'm just going to pull a number out you know that means 400 million would be ten percent SPEAKER_01: they have two and a half they got two three percentage points of that possible pie now people might use multiple browsers obviously some do like it starts to get interesting um it does based upon how much SPEAKER_00: search there is that occurs through a browser and they're a takeout candidate as well they need to go all in on ai on top of having gone all in on privacy remember there is an attack vector for these llms they record everything you do and when the police come or a civil case comes whatever it is they dump SPEAKER_01: your information they use your information they're looking at your information sam maltman said this um now what if brave took their same privacy approach to browsing where they remove ads they remove cookies they they make your searches private all that good stuff and that's their commitment i think they even have a vpn built in or you can pay like 10 bucks a year it's de minimis i think they should just do a hundred percent vpn so they don't even know where you're coming from unless you want to disclose Chamath Palihapitiya: you know your city maybe um and then make all your ai absolutely anonymous and this is where i think apple should buy brave and duck duck go maybe perplexity and i have been thinking you know i got that domain SPEAKER_01: named begin.com i've been burning a hole in my pocket and i contacted one of these billion dollar startups the ceo and i was like hey you know you're doing something that this might be very good for so i started a dialogue there instead of me building the company i was thinking man maybe if i can get one or two percent of one of these great companies that's already worth a billion i get 10 20 million now for the domain and for the maybe be an advisor and then if they go 10x this could be a big hit for me SPEAKER_07: but begin would be such a great starting point for searches certainly because it's where you perplexity is a terrible name no i mean i'm trying to think of a worse name than perplexity that's what happens when an engineer named something perplexity okay how many here's the levels how do you SPEAKER_17: spell it begin google begin google well google was g-o-o-g-o-l and they changed it right to the the more phonetically and spellable friendly one but like that's what you get when you let an engineer name something you get a large number which is what a google is or a googleplex yeah once you get past SPEAKER_01: five uh characters you know now the person's still typing you know you can type in you know google six uh bing four begin five yahoo five like you can't you have to be able to say it over the phone this is like a really important thing for founders understand you have to be able to say it over the phone and you have to be able to spell it if it's hard to spell no bueno if it's hard to hear over the phone and you can misinterpret it no bueno it's no good it's boring you see that scene from the SPEAKER_13: spielberg movie with the horizon the horizon oh wait the uh the drilling rig what's the spielberg SPEAKER_01: hopefully lon's listening the one will tell us there's this incredible scene where spielberg is on the lot and he goes and sees this director incredible scene lon's here we go john ford this SPEAKER_92: is the john ford scene we'll pull it up here and um well maybe we shouldn't because we get a strike SPEAKER_00: on that okay it's the fablemans it's about it's basically the uh it's basically spielberg's biopic and there's this great scene where he goes to john ford to get some advice he happens to be on the lot john ford's on the lot and he says kid you see this picture over here and it's david lynch who's playing john ford and he's smoking a cigar they think he's got an eye patch on he's like kid look at this picture where's the horizon he's like i'm looking at the picture he's like yelling at him he's yelling at a 12 year old where's the horizon he said it's at the top he goes okay what about this picture and he's got paintings and he says uh it's at where's the horizon spielberg nervous is at the bottom he says and where's the where's the horizon in this picture it's in the middle he goes when it's in the SPEAKER_175: when the horizon's at the top of the frame it's interesting when the when the horizon's at the bottom of the frame it's interesting and when the when the horizon's in the middle it's boring as now get the hell out of my office and he gets him out of his office and then every movie has SPEAKER_102: whether it's jaws you know the horizon for the ocean and the boat are at the bottom right just you see it SPEAKER_126: now you can't unsee it this incredible moment this is me telling you about domain names and branding SPEAKER_182: if it's too long it sucks if you can't spell it over the phone it sucks this is honestly SPEAKER_17: this is why it's good this is why x.com no matter i'm not trying to bring elon into this but i will say compared to twitter which used to be twttr then it became something you could spell yeah x.com is SPEAKER_190: still a far superior domain name because to your point it's short you can spell it over the phone it's phonetic like i mean it's memorable i'm a big fan of short domains in general because much like SPEAKER_191: land they they're not making more of them so i think it's it's cool to see what people do anyway SPEAKER_19: i put begin.com up and i'm having people apply to tell me what they want to do with it i'll either SPEAKER_01: release it or lease loan it to a founder or i might try to find a big company like i think perplexity SPEAKER_32: should just rebrand as begin such a better domain they could do a national campaign and then people SPEAKER_00: would remember it i'm gonna apply i'm gonna such a great email from me later uh all right i mean this could be my biggest hit of my goddamn career i bust my ass on 10 different ideas and startups i'll Chamath Palihapitiya: probably make my fortune off of a five letter domain name all right let's keep going there's a lot SPEAKER_17: more to discuss a lot more to discuss i want to talk about polymarket we talk about polymarket on the show all the time uh this week jason the cftc kind of said that they're going to be good to go now there's a little bit of nuance here because they bought a thing called qcx that was in the united states and that was the entity that the cftc said they're gonna have a no enforcement agreement with but essentially it does appear that making prediction bets prediction markets as a concept are going to be allowed here in the united states and i don't want to get into politics i will say that uh 1789 capital and donald trump jr recently put a little bit of money into the company and then and then got the green light so that makes me a little bit unhappy as a capitalist but i do think that if you're a fan of play market as we are on the show this is great news and i'm looking forward to see what impact this has on their numbers because what's fun about polymarket is that it's on the polygon uh blockchain which is an ethereum level two which means that i've been watching their usage data pretty closely and i'm fascinated to see what's going to happen once you get a bunch of americans showing up and making wagers bets or predictions whatever you want to call i cannot Chamath Palihapitiya: wait and yeah there's a correlation between these two news stories they both happened in two weeks but i don't think it's a correlation i think the correlation is with the qcx acquisition they spent SPEAKER_85: like over a hundred million dollars to buy that company and essentially what they were buying is you know a company that already had the rights to do this because it does take years or so to get permission so okay here we are that was like my dad bought a second bar he bought out the previous owner who had the liquor license so you could just buy and liquor licenses in new york you know they cost five thousand dollars to apply but it took two or three years they didn't want to give out too many because you know you don't want your neighborhood to become like you know college town so you know there SPEAKER_99: was you could trade them for 25 grand or something they had they had about a market value like SPEAKER_139: medallions i was about to say just like taxi medallions yeah exactly so that's what's going SPEAKER_103: on here i don't think there's anything nefarious with uh dj t jr um well i'm glad that you think SPEAKER_17: that that's actually i'm yeah i'm glad there's less corruption that i was concerned about that that's a good thing i'll take that as a win yeah 100 so do you want to i think we should show some charts here jason because one thing people know is that the poly market and the prediction market game have done very very well in and around the election cycle but i think people don't know that they actually held up reasonably well afterwards so i pulled some charts for us from dune which we love and if you look here uh this is the polymarket monthly volume clearly spiked right around election time fell very rapidly and people were worried it was going to do that but instead it's actually Chamath Palihapitiya: recovered and it's doing i would say pretty well this is a known function in startup land and in SPEAKER_01: company land you have some event that drives a lot of attention to your platform product or service then that event ends and things come down but they come down to a higher average a new plateau if you will than the previous one so as an example on all in when we had vlad during the game stop or when chamath said something about the uyghurs being below his line or when donald trump came on or when elon came on each of those events caused a massive spike yeah but then when it came back down we retained some of those people and um the crazy thing about this if you look at the history of say ride sharing you would have bad things happen in a lyft sidecar or uber you would have people Chamath Palihapitiya: complaining about it you would have bad press and then people would go like what's ride sharing what's uber what's lyft it's an app okay the first thing people will do is take out the phone tell me more about the story oh yeah this is horrible that's horrible there was a car accident they killed SPEAKER_01: a puppy whatever it is and here's the dark secret it went up so you have this jeans company that uh sydney sweeney we talked about that ad nauseam surprised this didn't make the docket i thought for SPEAKER_00: sure you would have had this in your sights um but uh american eagle uh got crushed for this like oh is that eugenics or are you guys just dumb that you don't know that that's eugenics and you know like it SPEAKER_175: feels a little white supremacist um you know and when i say they got crushed they they got they were SPEAKER_75: criticized by some lefty tiktokers let's be honest jason it wasn't like there was a national campaign i think actually people mad about the response were a much bigger wave you have to fill a lot of time on SPEAKER_175: right-wing podcasts yeah exactly my point so this negative story this faux pas you know people were SPEAKER_00: like oh my god it's gonna damage the brand like that's some people's reaction they just had their SPEAKER_17: results um yes second quarter results total net revenue 1.28 billion uh down one percent year over year uh gross profit was 500 million 39 uh up 30 basis points not bad um operating profit was 103 million up two percent what am i looking at here oh maybe we have the wrong quarter but the the SPEAKER_85: quarter just came out in the last couple days and i saw they beat earnings they beat and and the share price went up so they had a beat on both was what i read uh where that's oh here you go the fault so SPEAKER_17: this is the right data um here's probably the key quote this is from september 3rd from their investment investor relations site quote the fall season is off to a positive start fueled by stronger product offerings and the success of recent marketing campaigns with sydney sweeney and travis kelsey shout out taylor we have seen an uptick in consumer awareness engagement and comparable sales so it does appear that their results into this were relatively blah but i don't know much about SPEAKER_214: clothing companies i'm not gonna lie i don't read these reports often top 25 as well so what yeah why SPEAKER_102: why i think people thought it was gonna get crushed so maybe just not getting crushed and having more Chamath Palihapitiya: awareness uh they think the hype is going to drive uh some future sales or it's gonna tip over into SPEAKER_216: meme category you know this is the thing when you have so many people it's not 25 25 38 today SPEAKER_17: 38 i'm sorry i didn't mean to interrupt but 38 is insane yeah and it's still rising after hours now the company's worth oh wow clothing's a tough game jason uh with over a billion dollars in revenue in the SPEAKER_151: second quarter the whole company's worth now 3.2 yeah so three times um well that's just quarterly Chamath Palihapitiya: revenue so yeah so it's less than 1x revenue less than 1x yearly revenue wow you do have this game SPEAKER_01: stop effect you do have the stonks effect i i remember i yolo'd into uh open uh door for 50k i then was like you know what i'm just gonna put a sell order in for a thousand shares at six seven and eight dollars or six seven and nine dollars or whatever so i'll clear my cost and then have the last two thousand shares for free and let those roll because i know how these meme stocks Chamath Palihapitiya: are i was like let me see i just got the alert before i got on the show that my first thousand sold at six dollars yeah uh and so when it hits seven or eight i'll sell another thousand when it hits 10 i'll sell another thousand i'll have covered the original maybe i just yoloed 25k in um and then SPEAKER_85: yeah i'll be uh you know sitting there with 2 000 free shares as it were so uh open door technologies SPEAKER_190: the stock we're discussing is up 16.2 today why are you so why look i just to be clear if everyone's listening to thinking that i'm just mashing my teeth i think cindy sweeney is is is a gorgeous human good for her um but i'm blown away by the stock market at times it does seem that stock market that SPEAKER_201: i learned about as a child jason is not the one that we're playing with today and i'm not blaming vlad i'm not blaming anybody no no there's a second stock market okay and that is the yolo market that SPEAKER_00: is the let's see if we can make something into a phenomenon and if the ceo and management team can take that momentum okay and actually do something with it and with open door you know the it seems the ceo has engaged this debate he started getting memey memey if that's a word sure memish he started getting you know he's not squeamish anymore he's memish good i like it better he's he's gotten memish on the twitter so he's kind of leaning in to being a stonk and stonks only go up is the joke over on SPEAKER_01: reddit so here we are folks it's just uh it's also like the consumers taking having their say and being able to participate in capitalism and holding equity so that in a way is also interesting that goes back to was it david lynch um the uh stock picker who said like you know go to the mall see which one stocks are growing etc um and then buy the ones where you like it you know and like you would have bought apple based on that and starbucks based on that so now like let's pick a retailer that's kind of middling you say hey i think this thing's undervalued let's all start using our dollars to buy more i don't know in and out burgers or maybe that's not public so uh shake shack we'll buy more shake shack we'll start doing videos on shake shack we'll say shake shack's underdone and then if the SPEAKER_00: shake shack ceo gives a salute to the yeah peter lynch sorry did i say david lynch i've got movies on my mind peter lynch um wall street yeah david lynch no he did um yeah but invest in what you know was his slogan thank you producer claude claude coming to my rescue thank you producer claude uh no david lynch SPEAKER_148: i was wrong sergeant wild at heart and blue velvet moholland drive oh blue velvet that was a creepy SPEAKER_75: film so you talked earlier jason about how companies that have a big moment will go to a new height and come down to a higher plateau interestingly enough this is not a great chart but if you look at this SPEAKER_17: you'll see this is gamestop's uh shares and here you can see kind of the pre-meme era yeah uh to my surprise it's held on to more of its you know post meme stock value than i would have kind of estimated so maybe there's amazingly enough more staying power to meme stonk status that's a sentence i never thought i'd say out loud uh than i thought because they've kept it afloat for four years now SPEAKER_85: it's what you do with the energy so i think what the gamestop ceo realized and i think the amc one realized this as well is if people want to buy the shares why don't i create more of them and sell them SPEAKER_00: the shares so if they don't want to go to the stores and buy physical games because they're getting them on steam or whatever well what can i sell them i can sell them more shares and then i can use them to promote the amc movie club so now you've got all these amc movie club people have become a little bit of a cult and that's what you do is you use that energy you say hey we got a new product or service can you go out there and be the ambassadors for us so you know how like vcs go on cnbc and talk Chamath Palihapitiya: their book and you know after i don't know bill ackman loads up on uber like he did he's like hey i'm gonna start talking about uber all the time or warren buffett gets his position in apple and then he talks about it all the time and then he gets rid of his position he stops talking about it SPEAKER_01: so that's where we get the term talking your book the public's doing it the public's talking their collective book more power to them more power to them and then to the ceos of these companies okay you know and tesla's one of them as well people always trying to figure out well how does tesla's market cap make sense it makes sense because a lot of people see in elon and those companies a massive amount of ambition and they're willing to pay ahead of the growth so you know if their market cap would be half of what it was based on performance the other half is based on promise and now you've got all Chamath Palihapitiya: these people this is what i was telling you i'm getting dragged into is the the people who hate tesla love tesla every time i talk about self-driving or uber they they get their what's the term i'm SPEAKER_88: supposed to say knickers and a twist yeah i don't know if i'm supposed to say that i was gonna say SPEAKER_236: panties and a crunch but i'm well i think i think knickers is british so i think you get away with it SPEAKER_01: yeah it was just like you know before we got on the show and you were using the c-word over and over SPEAKER_102: again and i was like you can't call me the c-word alex you're like i'm in i'm zooming in from england i'm in english right now i have the uk pass i'm australian i'm allowed to say that jason is SPEAKER_103: capacious you're correct yes you did say capacious multiple times i took it the right way i took it SPEAKER_113: in the spirit it was intended when i first went to the uk people started calling each other the z-word or started calling cigarettes fags i was i was like what yeah you're right there they're like if we SPEAKER_102: have to do this with every american you're in a pub yes you can say these things i'm like are you sure Chamath Palihapitiya: you can say this yes here you can say those things this is what it means and i was like oh okay yes fine it has nothing to do with the you know the slur words okay no there's your little social uh SPEAKER_17: yeah commentary for the day uh let's keep it moving so mistral my favorite french unicorn jason i know you love it when i bring it up on the show favorite favorite and only three seconds on your list of one SPEAKER_201: three seconds into the clip jason's like i hate europe all right no i thought that i hate europe i like SPEAKER_163: disneyland i like epcot center and i like europe i like all those places to go and pretend it's SPEAKER_103: another time and place i'm gonna take a long sip of coffee this is what i have to deal with every SPEAKER_00: single week three times a week everybody it's funny it is like a fantasy land you know people in spain spain is like this massive destination they were getting pretty bent out of shape knickers in a bunch did you see the squirt guns they were squaring people with squirt guns and then in mexico city um they had a little bit of this with um the not expats but what do you call the people nomads digital nomads digital nomads have been like hey this place is great i can get an apartment for 500 and i can go out to dinner every night for 50 and i can go to a michelin star restaurant for 100 for SPEAKER_85: two like it's crazy how affordable it is they also had some um uh protests there i found out after talking Chamath Palihapitiya: to them people who live there mexicans they were like oh that's those are those protests are paid for the socialist party pays people to just run around and get press headlines i'm like okay just SPEAKER_102: like america they're paying people to do this on all sides you can't you can't even believe any protest SPEAKER_189: anymore i do not know enough about the current political landscape of next to me liberals um i think i think glory shinebaum's doing fine that's my take my my mom's half mexican so i i have SPEAKER_190: a i care a lot about the country yeah um where was i oh europe right france right yeah mistral yes SPEAKER_17: ai so mistral um is going to raise money not at the expected uh 10 billion dollar valuation target that it had in mind just instead it's gonna be about 12 billion euro about 14 billion usd and it could raise according to bloomberg reporting uh kate clark over there two billion euro which is a which is i know not a lot for an american ai foundation model company but for any other company in the world that's an enormous amount of money and i think that we could actually see some some deuce in this firm not because of the fundraising not because i'm a fan of europe not because we disagree a little bit on the future of its economy but because i keep seeing uh token usage of its models over on open router it's ranked eighth on ellen marina yeah somehow they they're still holding down they're Chamath Palihapitiya: holding down i'm happy there's more competition yeah i mean it's not like the united states is the only place that great companies can be built there are headwinds in other countries on the margins but SPEAKER_00: some places are a great lifestyle and um they want to build a team and then the question is can that team compete long term with the work ethic here in the united states and if you were to look Chamath Palihapitiya: at happiness studies people in scandinavian countries people in europe have a much higher SPEAKER_01: degree of happiness because well you know they they they put their kids to bed and they go to dinner and they leave work at a decent hour and then in america people are less happy more successful and if you if you define success by career and money and so they're you know people get all bent Chamath Palihapitiya: out of shape when i talk about this stuff these are choices folks if you want to live an incredible life move to denmark move to denmark they have a thing in the un and you know at davos where they SPEAKER_00: say getting to denmark why it's a high functioning society where people play safe now they also have SPEAKER_01: to pay 60 or 70 percent taxes at the at the margins yeah so you you do pay for it but people are happy SPEAKER_00: and you know that there's a ranking of happiness this is when i run for president i'm going to make happiness oh joy that's going to be your platform one of my oh well it's going to be a pillar of my SPEAKER_163: platform is more happiness and joy in the country that's it so i have some pillars i i i don't mean SPEAKER_17: to keep bringing up my mom but my mom is is half danish half mexican so i think this show is actually dedicated to her shout out mom shout out to mom uh last thing here jason is on the mistral front they're expected to end the year on above a 100 million dollar run rate and well no and yes because if you think about anthropic going from 1 billion to 5 billion this year or open ai going from like 5 to 12. i think we've become desensitized to how insane it is that many other ai companies are getting from zero to 100 million revenue it does not compare to what we've seen from open ai and anthropic but any other time any other point in history a french company going to 100 million SPEAKER_88: revenue would be unicorn it's a decacorn yeah yeah it's fantastic the the this game that's being SPEAKER_00: played is being played at a level that i've only remembered few times in my career um there was a time when people were doing big m a in the media business you know which ended you know the peak was SPEAKER_01: aol buying time warner essentially yeah which was crazy uh but you know you had this kind of high stakes Chamath Palihapitiya: game of chicken who can really be the most audacious um i think in the on-demand economy we saw that like audaciousness who can lose the most money but get the most riders get the most deliveries um and SPEAKER_01: in e-commerce with amazon which didn't make a profit for how long 10 years 15 years they just decided to go break even um and you know that that's what we're seeing now so that does make you wonder can mistro for the long term carve a niche for themselves and what would that niche be would it be other languages outside of english and they just have the best french italian german llms is it that Chamath Palihapitiya: they are more privacy based or compliant you know and their data centers are in those locations or who knows but they're going to have to i think in the next year or two figure out how not to be roadkill SPEAKER_17: i think that's it's an interesting point and i think we're going to learn a lot over the next couple of quarters but this reminds me of a story i didn't throw in the docket because it felt a little bit too small but i'll just mention it now switzerland has built its own open weight ai model trained on public data and i this i feel the same way about that as i do when databricks made its own ai model a couple years back like a cool experiment i don't know what it's for but i kind of just filed it away SPEAKER_148: in the huh category so if you're curious about that guys or you're swiss well there you go you have your SPEAKER_269: own model now all right uh moving on stripe is building a blockchain just for stable coins jason SPEAKER_17: stripe of course is the enormous online payments nearly centicorns worth like i don't know 90 billion or something now and we don't know when this is going to come out but it's going to be called tempo it will not have a native token it will support a wide array of stable coins and i think this is going to be fantastic up to a hundred thousand transactions per second in theory starts working with paradigm on this and critically will compete with uh i think it's called arc yes arc which is circles upcoming stable coin blockchain so we're going to have two kind of neutralish blockchains SPEAKER_269: out there i think this is cool uh and i think it just shows how far siblings have come in the last 12 SPEAKER_01: months and this exists alex so that people don't need to pay a large fee to visa mastercard american express etc is that kind of the idea here is these things will be clearing houses to let people and wire fees the loser in all of this are banks and credit cards yeah oh no i'm going to cry an enormous SPEAKER_113: tear for my bank yes all of them i hate them all i mean it's so dumb when you try to do a wire transfer SPEAKER_00: and it's like they're like oh yeah let me just i'm going to get on my horse and buggy and i'll be at your ranch in a in a in two days and then uh i'll meet you at sunset at the back end of the ranch by the cattle and then we'll get some wax and some papers and simple yeah we'll use my ring to wax it and certified then i'll get back to you know uh san francisco by horse two or three days later and and it will be uh logged and it's like what how is this taking so much time and costing 45 dollars or SPEAKER_17: 25 dollars it's so dumb it's an amount of money that's shocking for the modern world when we're talking about literally just moving some numbers from that column to that column in a big spreadsheet i've made a grand total of one angel investment in my life and wiring that money was an enormous pain in the butt and i sat there going ah this is why these are always complaining about this it's miserable uh but if tempo does work out i think we'll see stripe own a good chunk of the rails for the future stable coin market which is i think going to be a pretty large market i don't know if it's going to be the 100 billion or trillion dollar markets that we're talking about but as stable coins become increasingly better understood and better adopted i think stripe wants to ensure that it owns that future too so good on them this will be a trillion dollar market SPEAKER_01: really i don't yeah in terms of the market cap of all these companies collective you got tether in there as well and my understanding is tether is going to clean up their act very quickly or they have been in the process of cleaning up the criticisms there have been of them and i'm not going to say i'll put allegedly i'll put criticisms i'll put actions taken against them all of the hand Chamath Palihapitiya: ringing you can look it up on producer claude yourself go to you know claude ai use the promo SPEAKER_290: code twist get 50 off i don't know what our code is it's something like that there's a claude thing SPEAKER_17: you can use twist and you'll make us look good it's worth looking into and tether if that does become the case jason is an enormously awesome business makes tons of money have you heard about the controversy though between banks and the crypto world about the genius act and um how they handle Chamath Palihapitiya: interest essentially yeah you can't earn interest that was the one concession they made by making SPEAKER_00: stable coins legal they can come up with some ideas to route around that but you can be certain in another two or three years we'll be sitting here and then stable coins will become a big thing and people will be like i need to make money on my stable coin the banks will catch up have their own Chamath Palihapitiya: stable coins and then all of a sudden miraculously everybody's going to be able to make interest on SPEAKER_17: their stable coins but that could really undercut elements of the traditional banking market because SPEAKER_144: what have we seen in the crypto world we've seen essentially higher apys than you're going to get SPEAKER_73: from the citibank from chase from wells fargo etc 10 000 atms to maintain and a thousand branches and tellers and people in the building i mean wells fargo has to have a large staff to do the amount SPEAKER_17: of fraud and abuse they've done over the years and i'm not even going to say allegedly because you can go look up the enforcements from the government it takes a lot of people to be that terrible a SPEAKER_151: business wells fargo american fraud i mean they were they were the one who got raked over the SPEAKER_01: coals in dc for like opening accounts for people that they didn't ask for yes because they were just SPEAKER_17: trying to hit internal numbers that that is that is i think hsbc got busted for making larger windows in their banks to allow cartels to put money through the windows faster um and then they were given a SPEAKER_01: small fine and allowed to stay in business so cool any uh do we have any um ask jason's or any other uh SPEAKER_17: important news we should cover today all right jason there was a great question over on twitter from a founder talking about churn and i know this is something that every single founder watching this shows deals with so he said i'll pay anyone a thousand dollars per percent they help me get off my churn currently at 21.6 for his startup post bridge and this chart uh if you're on the audio version just shows his turn rate historically over time churn jason is the death of sass so Chamath Palihapitiya: what are your tips for founders dealing with it well i did see this actual thread because it kind of um you know when we took the screenshot had 136 000 views on x but i think it's grown since and there were a lot of great replies so we should pull up the replies there because one of the first people SPEAKER_01: who responded gave him like three things and he was like i didn't think of two of those three i'm gonna go do them and i'll report back the impact it had on churn and so this is a really interesting idea a thousand dollars for somebody giving you an idea is like great i'll do that all day long i got ideas to spare but for him there's the lowest his churn is going to go is five percent so he's essentially bet fifteen thousand dollars that people could lower you know up to fifteen thousand uh could lower his churn now if he was making but a hundred thousand dollars it would pay for itself so if he's making Chamath Palihapitiya: a million he's paying out 1.5 of his revenue to solve that problem if he's making 10 million it's like SPEAKER_01: nothing so what a genius idea to also get to get great ideas to crowdsource is what we call this back in the day but additionally um to get attention for your startup i don't know who jack fricks is i didn't know the startup or maybe i met them and i forgot but this kind of was really interesting because yasser as you see there said add a form after they cancel asking why of course that's like a no-brainer some pieces of software have that built in but who knows if he did that or not email people who cancel SPEAKER_00: every day and try to understand why great watch people using your product for the first time and you will learn much then creating then create an onboarding flow of course um have zero bugs yeah Chamath Palihapitiya: obvious ui ux redesign to make it easier okay so um this is um really interesting uh as a concept SPEAKER_85: to crowdsource this to get attention for yourself and get your brain flowing i love it now while we're SPEAKER_16: on the screen though jason if you scroll down just a little bit here ep says no point hyper fixating on this SPEAKER_17: instead focus on distribution the best way to kill churn is to outpace it and like that point too is SPEAKER_141: that okay so you agree with that because i was really curious what you were going to say because when i read that i was like i don't know if that's true so talk to me two things can be true at the SPEAKER_00: same time you can lower churn because people let's say didn't understand your product or they were confused by it and your onboarding confused them or they don't know about a feature yet that is the SPEAKER_01: feature they need that all happens with communication the way superhuman had superhuman levels of engagement and low churn is because they did a 30-minute interview with you before you got to use to even buy the product so they pre-churned you they did pre-churn and so their churn was natural love Chamath Palihapitiya: somebody said i'm in my email for 20 minutes a day it's like well maybe you shouldn't pay 365 a year SPEAKER_102: this is not for you not for you it's not for you and who's the superhuman founder i forget oh raul SPEAKER_17: raul yeah we had him on when uh the grammarly deal was announced i never met the guy before but after 20 minutes of them i would sell my house to back whatever he builds next just one of those guys so SPEAKER_01: one of the things here in terms of outrunning it well what if you're trying to outrun it Chamath Palihapitiya: but you're damaging your product because 20 one in five people are saying this product sucks and they become detractors that's the problem of trying to outrun it and it eventually will catch SPEAKER_01: up with you because you have cac customer acquisition costs and you're not learning from the churn the point SPEAKER_00: of um studying churn and why there's even a term is so that you can make a better product or you can understand who your products for and not go after the wrong audience one of the major major mistakes people make is they go to a small company that's only got two people and they don't have somebody in charge of marketing and they try to sell them a marketing tool well guess what there's nobody there who even understands the basics of marketing now you get to a seven person company and they've got four locations for their bakery and the eighth person they hired is their marketing their cmo their marketing and their growth person now when you sell that tool to them that person's like yeah i've been in four different marketing positions over 25 years i've worked in retail i've worked in business i've worked here i worked there and uh yeah i've used tools like yours before and this one's SPEAKER_85: particularly great and then they just understand the value prop um so you know listen i could i could SPEAKER_17: sell you a saddle but if you don't got a horse what the good is it gonna do uh while we're here before we move on i want to give jack his flowers this is the website for post bridge post-bridge.com very cute website but jason my favorite part is if you scroll down way past the testimonials look SPEAKER_269: it's the founder i kind of love that it's kind of cute it's like hey it's jack the guy who made it here's why it feels very personal good design there's an even bigger reason for that personal Chamath Palihapitiya: means trust and so having trust really works um i had read a thing about um people and buying decisions somebody did a study where they put behind the sales person in the cubicle behind them an incredibly attractive well-dressed person uh and if the gender was the opposite of the person who was you were selling to so if it was a woman who was well-dressed men would be would more often buy SPEAKER_01: the product and if the person behind them was a well-dressed man i think the woman not to the SPEAKER_102: extent that men did and they were like how do we explain this how do we explain this one am i supposed to hire a model to sit behind me when i'm on sales calls but here we are folks get a color printer you Chamath Palihapitiya: know you could literally do a cardboard cutout but this is um you know they and they were all it was interesting like all these different psychologists were sort of commenting on they said oh well a man SPEAKER_01: does not want to not be decisive and buy something in the presence of an attractive female female because they would seem weak i thought that was a very weird explanation but maybe it's accurate SPEAKER_116: who knows i mean our lizard brain down here in our brain stem is a evolutionary relic y'all and you can SPEAKER_00: sell to it well and then the oh well listen if you can't afford that car you know i've got this other one so no i can afford that car so like you know negging somebody yeah is like a premise of these like SPEAKER_163: uh dating charlatans smarmy people who have like dating systems well what are they called um negative pick up artists pick up artists yeah typically do with negging they're like wow you SPEAKER_85: you know you could be a model if it wasn't for your earlobes and it's like what and then the person's like oh my god i'm going to date you because you nagged me it's bizarre i never understood that i don't know i don't know if it's true or not but anyway here we are folks um congratulations to jack uh for this and i guess it looks like it's got um a content schedule right it's a marketing tool so marketing tools are a thing and um if you price them right it's absurdly competitive space SPEAKER_01: but you can get to millions of dollars in revenue sprout social the chicago-based company SPEAKER_17: when public and still is buffer uh sprinkler i think it's public to somewhere radiant six there's a bunch of these we can just name a bunch um let's do one more founder question jason while we're here because this is a really good one you actually mentioned it on the wednesday show there was a man named jacob klug or perhaps klug over on the linkedin and he had a really interesting insight about finding things to build by reading reddit talk us through this all right so i saw this SPEAKER_01: and i was talking to uh our director lon and we're like this is interesting reddit is where people go to complain and vent right you hate a movie you had a bad experience at a car dealership you know there was a cockroach in your burrito whatever it is you're going to take a picture and you can go to reddit right it's where people get their revenge and so he came up with a system he started looking for rants and complaints in places like accounting realtors small business SPEAKER_00: freelance restaurateur and if you go to those you can find uh pain points pain points we say in startups SPEAKER_01: sometimes is it a vitamin something that's nice but maybe you're not going to notice any difference maybe you will or is it a painkiller where like you're in pain and the pain turns off it's much SPEAKER_00: easier when you take like a percocet or oxycontin to have like your twisted ankle turn off right whereas like if you want more energy and you did like a vitamin c drink like maybe you'd feel more who knows um and so you can tell if you found one of these pain points he says by them having 500 upvotes or comments like this is my life and you can find detailed descriptions of workflows you know i keep trying to do this non-compete and i put it into docu-sign and then it's got this stupid thing where you know you have to load it why doesn't it work in a on a mobile phone why isn't there an easy way to just instead of drawing the signature with your finger to just adopt a SPEAKER_01: signature from a collection of signatures whatever it is um and he says it's a pretty valid way to it's it's another after you've found a problem it's a great way to validate it so you write a follow-up post building a solution for a blank who wants early access and he says you know you can get like 50 dms from people just if you get 50 plus dms you're on the right track so it's an at scale community where people go to vent what a great idea and uh you know if you can message he says the next part of his playbook is message the 20 most interested user show them your mock-up to your solution get pre-orders going vibe code it quickly and ship man this is great and uh the vibe coding SPEAKER_17: service they recommend jason was uh lovable which i do believe is european ah it's become a recurring SPEAKER_102: theme for you defending europe i well i feel like no one else is the only person it's over it's over SPEAKER_01: if you want cheese or wine you want a classic car sold for a premium price like you can get a SPEAKER_297: all kinds of interesting things in europe you have a lovely time visiting for example you can SPEAKER_137: get arthur mensch the ceo of mistral who's going to be coming on this show not too long from now so Chamath Palihapitiya: look forward to my entire position like i was wrong now it's you can build a great company in SPEAKER_115: europe we all know you can i i know i know it's just i i feel like there's as often as we'd like to SPEAKER_17: see there is a uh uh there's that tweet going around about how like you know if we're all europeans we know about chinese pottery and cooking and the gdp would shrink by a percent every year i feel like that has become so the de facto position in silicon valley that we need to be SPEAKER_337: orthogonal to it to avoid groupthink that's what i'm doing i'll tell you there are some pockets of SPEAKER_01: interestingness that we've talked many times about sweden and denmark and some of those countries that's having really great design and taste and great products include that and if you look at SPEAKER_00: spotify and clarna you know clash of clans there's a lot of companies that have come out of that area that really do have a design sensibility a look and feel they do understand that germany obviously is SPEAKER_01: really good at building precision uh you know historically um but portugal i don't know how this happened i don't i mean maybe i gotta ask producer claude how did portugal be portugal become the place that digital nomads wanted to go they must have fostered it with visas they must have fostered it with taxes and then obviously they must have a ton of homes available and gorgeous uh places to Chamath Palihapitiya: live in an amazing lifestyle because there's you know every time we put a job description out like i was just looking for a cap cut editor cap cut at launch.co send us your clips you don't need a college degree we want you in the office here in austin however there was one person and she had SPEAKER_01: emailed us i'm in portugal and i said to producer oliver well let's engage her and just see what her hourly rate is because my understanding is portugal's like a third or a fifth of the cost of living in europe and therefore everybody's going there to have these colossal amazing lifestyles so there's SPEAKER_17: some arbitrage going on there uh just to be i don't want to get too deep into this but uh they had a digital nomad visa starting october 2022 if you make at least 3 000 euro a month you can live there english proficiency lots of sun and it's also about as close to the us as you can get in europe because SPEAKER_201: it's right there on the edge of spain so oh so you save an hour on the flight maybe maybe two you're also just not you're not in you know belarus further in on the time zone so i think SPEAKER_153: it makes a lot of sense yes yes yes yes so is it plus where is let me just type this into producer claude uh new york versus portugal time claude points out that there's the mild mediterranean SPEAKER_17: climate well i do love claude and everything anthropic does uh i keep hearing about wildfires over in the iberian peninsula so you know maybe it's not that far it's five hours ahead yeah okay okay uh jason i know we gotta go but you have an enormous event coming up with your other show the show that Chamath Palihapitiya: i won't mention but uh what's going on there and uh are you gonna be busy all in summit next week uh SPEAKER_01: yes thousands of people i think it's twice the size of last year wow crazy uh the good news is the first two years i did all the work the third year i did the parties uh and then this year i'm doing nothing but being on stage so i get to focus just on moderating these panels and being uh you know the the person who asked some hard questions well good luck at that we'll keep twist warm for you Chamath Palihapitiya: while you're out there and we'll see you all next week bye bye