SPEAKER_00: well what are the most frequently used staples what if we put them into a truck what if you park

SPEAKER_01: those trucks and the trucks can move yeah so you can have a truck with a dude in it or a gal

SPEAKER_02: or a person there we go gals guys everybody in between don't cancel me but what if this truck existed it was optimized you open up an app and i you know i got to tell dara about this idea imagine you open the uber app and the convenience stores were not convenience stores they were

SPEAKER_01: convenience trucks they had a refrigerator section got everything else and now i don't know if this is feasible somebody should definitely do it if somebody wanted to make this as a business i would be interested in a crazy logistics and tech person duo who want to do this i put you in the incubator

SPEAKER_05: give you 125k let's model it this week in startups is brought to you by squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain paddle self-serve software is global by default but selling to every country is complicated paddle's merchant of record manages payments sales tax chargebacks and refunds so you don't have to wherever you want to take your business go there with paddle go to paddle.com twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee-free period and lemon.io get access to lemon hire a platform with more than 80 000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours get two thousand dollars off your first hire at

SPEAKER_08: lemon.io today all right everybody welcome back to this weekend startups i've been doing this for

SPEAKER_10: 14 years and i'm more excited to do it today than i've ever been with me my loyal co-host alex wilhelm he's x.com alex i'm x.com jason and our editorial director lon harris is x.com follow us interact with us on x so we know what you want us to talk about we have a full docket today

SPEAKER_11: how you doing brother it's uh friday valentine's day happy valentine's day yeah happy valentine's

SPEAKER_12: day um you know jason i think i finally reached the point when i'm now accustomed to the new news

SPEAKER_14: cycle you know you call trump captain chaos and uh i think it's like individual news stories no longer

SPEAKER_15: land like a grenade on my head that i'm like oh yeah things are happening still so i'm feeling pretty good i'm hanging in there okay surviving you know here's my advice i've been giving this advice a lot

SPEAKER_01: of people are losing their minds because you know the world can seem like it's on fire at times

SPEAKER_18: this is independent of trump but you know trump is particularly good at you know uh maybe blowing

SPEAKER_01: a little oxygen on the fire that is planet earth and making things seem even more chaotic there's been

SPEAKER_08: a lot of talk about certain other podcasts losing their minds and and going viral and oh my god karen is going crazy and this professor is going crazy listen i got a lot of people in my life who are

SPEAKER_25: super lefty they're freaking the f out right now i get it let me calm everybody down everybody take a deep breath and release and understand the country got through four years of trump got through four years of biden the trump people were losing their mind during biden the biden left people are losing their mind during trump we got through those eight years and the only thing that happened was kovid a

SPEAKER_29: conflict in gaza israel the russian ukraine war and we went 16 trillion in debt in other words it was a complete utter disaster in the last eight years the world's always going to be a disaster the

SPEAKER_01: middle east will be on fire every year or two in different conflicts the united states is going to

SPEAKER_00: swing left right up and down it's always been this way it'll always be that way why because we care so deeply in a democracy and we have freedom of speech and we can debate these things

SPEAKER_32: so remember your family your work art nature it's all there for you your kids other people's kids your

SPEAKER_10: nieces your nephews enjoy all of that politics will always be there it'll always be on fire alex it's always going to make people anxious and just focus on your family and your work and we got great work to

SPEAKER_25: do here startups and founders changing the world and so much great stuff going on in capitalism that

SPEAKER_10: we both love so let's focus on that whatever's going on in the world it's going to be fine everybody

SPEAKER_14: it's going to be fine take a deep breath if it's not fine uh you can sue jason for your five dollar rebate and uh the check will be in the mail but uh i'm glad you brought up the tech news cycle jason because we have okay okay today's been busy i have a couple of quick hits we have to get through yes before we get into a couple of fun things let's get over first of all on the ipo front toro a company that filed originally back in 2022 and was dropping regular s1a filings has given up they've withdrawn yes today they have pulled their ipo it is over they have walked away from the public

David Friedberg: markets that's interesting didn't see that coming this is toro t-u-r-o the car company that you rent from

Chamath Palihapitiya: you rent other people's car airbnb of cars yes it's a good business oh you did what'd you get i

SPEAKER_01: rented a model 3 for 50 bucks a day when i went to tahoe for three weeks it was a pretty good experience i have to say i've there was some like ski business that i guess rents cars as part of their

SPEAKER_06: side hustle so i gave them i don't know for 20 days like a thousand bucks and change 1100 bucks

SPEAKER_43: yeah and i got a model 3 i barely used it but if i had had to take ubers when i did it would have

SPEAKER_31: been i think slightly more it didn't have snow tires on it and there were some instances of snow um so i was a little bummed about that but the owner was delightful to me they were they were solid um i lost one of the card keys whatever you know and um i like the service because you on toro you deal directly

SPEAKER_29: with the owner yes and um i think people are pretty reasonable they didn't like hit me up for

SPEAKER_01: extra money except for the card that we lost anyway toro is a great company they make a decent amount of money right they make a billion or more a year right or they wouldn't have filed to go public so

SPEAKER_14: they grew from q1 to q3 of 2023 the last data we have they had 666 million in revenue that grew to 722 in the first three quarters of 2024 growth eight and a half percent so profitable slow growth slow growth and i think right now the market just probably wasn't as excited about the company as they hoped it's still worth i mean even if it's worth 1.5x trillion revenue jason it's a billion dollar company so shout out but a disappointment there and i would say a little bit of a negative signal for near-term ipos but on the other side of that coin sale point is now again a public company we talked about it before on the show raised his ipo price range from 19 to 21 to 21 to 23 and then jason price at the top of that 23 a share raised over a billion dollars and as of the time you started to record it was up to 24 32 a share so a successfully well-priced ipo just not a startup this is a take private that's going back out again so it's interesting but not the thing that you and i talk about so much as the need for liquidity of still private companies so data points there one down one up maybe neutral overall yeah i mean listen sell point is an established company

SPEAKER_01: with a solid revenue base it was public when private and then public again we see this sometimes something is undervalued in the public markets what are the ceos what does the board do they buy back shares or they go private like zendesk did or like self that did cleaned it up get it growing again nice and private without having to tip your cards or deal with lawyers and the expense of being public and all the scrutiny that comes from being public and so here they are you know they're back going out public all the private equity guys get to cash in and like you said if they went public at 23 a share and it went to 24 they priced to perfection it was only was within you know low single digit points of being properly priced i do think toro there could be another piece to this sometimes people file to go

SPEAKER_08: public to initiate m a so what does that mean hey uh you are considering buying my company and you know it's you haven't given me the right price what do i do i file to go public i get priced

SPEAKER_01: by the public markets i get a bunch of offers and then people swoop in shortly before an ipo and buy

SPEAKER_54: something so don't be surprised if toro gets bought by airbnb or uber in the next 10 seconds

SPEAKER_56: airbnb would make so much sense to me just frankly from a from a personal use perspective if

SPEAKER_14: i was flying to a city and i rented a room and they said also here's your car i mean that just makes

SPEAKER_08: sense to me i think a lot of the people who run an airbnb also run toros or get arounds because if

SPEAKER_01: you think about it this was the shared economy and if you have a you know a guest house and you got your old car i was even thinking about this i have the model uh y and i've put 40 000 miles on it and i'm

SPEAKER_08: going to get the new one there's a new one they refreshed it finally it's called the juniper or something so i'm definitely going to get that and i'm going to upgrade and i was like do i upgrade or do i keep the old one because the resale value the trade value might only be 20k on this car so do i

SPEAKER_01: keep it and i was like wow you know if this thing rented for 75 a day and i rented it out 100 days a year 200 days a year i mean it would be i would basically have a free car now i'm not going to do that because that would take work but i if you're at home and you want to become part of the fire

SPEAKER_29: movement financial independence retire early yeah this seems like a great light fire technique which is keep your old cars acquire old cars bring them to cities like austin or whatever during south by

SPEAKER_01: southwest or have them in tahoe during ski season i think this is a good way to make a living squarespace makes stunning professional websites ridiculously easy it doesn't matter if you're just selling a product or a service maybe you're just sharing your ideas maybe you're an artist maybe you're a consultant squarespace is going to give you all the tools to make this happen and as you know

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SPEAKER_01: for making such a great product that we use year after year at an affordable price and we really

SPEAKER_68: appreciate your partnership this is a great way to make a living as is running an airbnb because you could work for a couple of hours a day running these things you could have 10 of these cars i think it

SPEAKER_01: actually the math makes sense and um as we see jobs go away job displacement you know if you're somebody who is an uber driver and self-driving starts taking off when some number of people are going to want to rent a car when you can't take ubers everywhere that gets quite expensive

SPEAKER_29: as i mentioned i want and it's not you know sometimes you have to wait so this is actually a pretty good idea i think for new jobs being a shepherd and having a herd of cars that you rent out through toro and get around that's not a bad business so i like the economy uh the sharing

SPEAKER_70: economy i do think it should be a feature of airbnb or uber or doordash still though i mean growing to

SPEAKER_15: three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue in three quarters i mean i mean that's that's

SPEAKER_14: incredibly hard so hats off to them now jason uh you love robin hood and we've talked about the company here on the show i want to just show a chart of robin hood's results because i think it underscores the boom we're seeing in fintech today we're not going to spend a lot of time on earnings but we did want to touch just briefly on a couple of things so if you're watching the youtube version i'm about to blow your mind observe this chart mr calicanis check that out let's take a looky-poo

SPEAKER_19: here oh my lord you know i haven't sold the share of my robin hood i was a pre-launch investor

SPEAKER_08: we distributed to our lp so there's like a real lesson here for me i could have held that money

SPEAKER_01: when did they ipo was it three years ago i like to distribute the shares in the ipo to our lps

SPEAKER_29: immediately what that does is i distributed them i think in the teen high teens i think we distributed at 15 to 20 somewhere in that range and i was like this stock is undervalued i should hold the shares which you can do as a fund manager and then distribute them when it goes higher but i consulted

SPEAKER_08: people in my orbit consulted some lps and they're like just let us make that decision well now on paper you know that fund i think is at 1.4 x dpi distributed and then it's at like 4.9 on paper and i'm not sure how much we distributed but it was a decent portion of that 1.5 that we've achieved if i had held it if it was out at 15 and it's at 60 now i would have forexed it yep oh my lord now

SPEAKER_01: that phone would be like a 678 x fund so now i have to go to the lps just to think practically and say hey when you're considering being an lp in the future just know if you had held your shares you would have been at you know i i guess that fund now on paper might be a 4 or 5 x dpi in reality distributed it might be on paper like an 8 9 or 10. yeah oh it would have been like so i mean i am like happy i personally didn't sell any shares and i opened up my morgan stanley account the other

SPEAKER_29: day or whatever i can i don't know where i have those shares custodian and i was like oh my god i have millions of dollars worth of uh robin hood for my carry from that investment and i tweeted and i tweeted i'd never sell a share and when i started doing j trading which i'm going to bring back i'm going to bring back trading and i'm going to bring it back aggressively uh because i think i should just consolidate down to like five bets like bill ackman does i went and i was like you know what i think the stock is undervalued what do you do when a stock's undervalued pull up my tweet i bought another 5 000 shares i was like you know i have to buy 5 000 shares at 10 bucks a pop is 50 grand you know

SPEAKER_81: what's happened it's gone up gone up 6x i made another quarter milli here it is yeah it's a lot

SPEAKER_84: of emojis never sold the share of robin hood app and i was a pre-launch angel investor j traded an

SPEAKER_14: additional 5 000 shares when they hit 10. now it's 62 and that tweet 64 today uh so i take it that when i hit you up for a raise in a few weeks the answer is going to be alex we're going to see five times as

David Friedberg: much i'm going to tell you what you should do take the money i'm already paying you and put it in robin hood that's exactly what's going to happen just wait until it hits the s p 500 then it'll go into the index funds anyway it's very important i think for people to really understand when the mark

SPEAKER_18: you should have cash around you have some cash around for when markets bottom out so that you can do things like you know and i guess you know nibble or you know buy when the market is down i think keeping a cash position right now not investment advice is wise if you could have some cash around and things hit the floor and you think that they're undervalued which i did in

SPEAKER_08: 2022 and i put like 1.6 million dollars into the market here alive on the show that 1.6 million i put in that i had just in a little uh retirement account or something it's now worth like 3.5 i mean i have two and a half x did in two years i don't think i'm good at it as a public market investor and and robin hood was my 6x and i think i have a six or seven x in um facebook now i don't

SPEAKER_18: know if that's the case now i think these stocks are fully valued right now um and the price

SPEAKER_92: earnings ratios bargain but they the revenue went up massively is the point here absolutely

SPEAKER_14: massively and driving that was an absolutely insane increase in the amount of money they derived from crypto trading the company did well across a lot of different metrics but that's the thing that really stood out to me and also coinbase had another killer quarter if robin hood does well on crypto coinbase does well on crypto as well all this i think fits under the rubric of fintech is back people have been talking about that and i really think these earnings underscore that point jason

SPEAKER_29: it's probably about time i mean if you look at the stacked bar chart equity in green options uh in light green or lime crypto and light gray other and dark gray and what you see here is they have a

SPEAKER_01: number of people buying equities the equities from q3 to q4 doubled almost from 37 million to 61 million

SPEAKER_29: and then the options went up 10 percent options and equities is kind of the same things options in more aggressive way but oh my lord you know crypto went from 61 in q3 and 81 million in q2 the revenue derived from that to 358 in q4 what i think this is is the value of crypto went up uh-huh and the number

SPEAKER_01: of people participating right because this is transaction-based revenue so they get a percentage of the transaction so if bitcoin is trading at a hundred thousand a coin versus 33 000 it's three

SPEAKER_08: times more valuable to robin hood in terms of their fee structure i'm guessing so i don't know how these transactions actually work here if it's on holding or whatever but people obviously the crypto business

SPEAKER_18: now inside of robin hood is bigger than the equity business then it well there's more transaction-based

SPEAKER_14: revenue from holy cow crypto compared to equities and options but robin hood does have other businesses they hold retirement accounts and they have a subscription business as well but to me this chart shows the power of patience i mean if you believed in crypto back in q4 22 when it was a what a sixth or a fifth of revenue on the transaction basis uh you might have to wait another eight quarters for it to pay off but here it is and um i i believe vlad and co are laughing all the way to the bank so good for them they're doing great would love to have vlad on well we will get vlad on um elsewhere in the realm of technology news of note that people need to know today jason nvidia updated its filings telling people what it owns shares in no longer owns shares and serve robotics or sound hound ai but it disclosed an equity position in a company called we ride and we've talked about we right here on the show it is a chinese self-driving company and here was the market's response

SPEAKER_29: jason oh my that's um that's a little spiky poo so we ride it went up to 31 a share from looked

SPEAKER_101: like 17 overnight and this is based on nvidia putting some shine on it yeah oh absolutely so

SPEAKER_15: essentially investors are betting that because nvidia is now investing in this company that maybe

SPEAKER_14: there'll be a deal maybe there'll be an acquisition anything nvidia right now has public market pixie dust anything that it puts a little capital in gets the pixie dust on it people get really excited i think this is good for self-driving because i think it boosts the value of we ride makes the whole sector

SPEAKER_15: look more interesting huzzah but it's it's kind of rare to see a a 94 gain uh in a stock in one day

David Friedberg: that's not a meme stock you know it's um it's really interesting what's happening in self-driving

SPEAKER_08: you you have the realization i think across the board that moving people from point a to point b and moving things your lunch your valentine's uh flowers etc and everything in between uh you know

SPEAKER_01: amazon etc is a huge huge part of the economy transportation is very big logistics very big and i think we're also recognizing that car ownership is going to change and habits are changing and the habit that's changing is people want their food made in a cloud kitchen and brought

SPEAKER_107: to them they don't want to cook they don't want to deal with it did you know you're required to

SPEAKER_108: pay digital sales tax wherever your customers are well no one likes dealing with this type of administration whether it's taxes or accounting especially when you're in a busy startup and that's why paddle has stepped in to put your billing and your taxes on autopilot whether you're launching a sas product or maybe you've got an app perhaps a game you now can reach billions of people globally that's the magic of the internet it's the magic of the app store and it's awesome and it's one of the things hey as an investor we love too but this scaling brings tons of challenges like taking payments and local currencies and navigating all those regional tax laws they're complicated plus you got to manage fraud you got to manage refunds right and that's different in every market and that's a massive headache that's going to slow you down from doing you know important work with product market fit hiring and raising money so let me tell you a messy payment stack is going to eat up all your time all of your energy and money these are big company problems that you're going to face even as a small company and they compound every time you enter a new market well paddle was built to handle this for you hey listen maybe this is unsexy but this is what building and scaling a startup is all about sometimes you got to do your chores and you need a partner paddle is going to be your merchant of record your mor and they're going to handle payment localization fraud prevention tax compliance customer billing support so that you can grow faster hey man if you need to launch in a new country you're done you want to add a payment method easy and you want to set local pricing and you want to do it intelligently one click so here's your call to action wherever you want to take your business go there with paddle paddle.com twist to get started with your exclusive fee free period that's paddle.com twist to unlock your no fee startup period you might like to cook and i think

SPEAKER_08: as travis said i think when he was on all in cooking might look like horseback riding you used to

SPEAKER_11: have to do cooking you used to have to ride a horse to get from one one but now you could choose something more convenient than riding a horse from point a to point b yeah and i think people are you

SPEAKER_01: know this is why i think doordash which i i have equity in uh and have shares in and so i'm talking

SPEAKER_03: my own book here i think doordash is a very important company i think uber is a very important company and i think cloud kitchens are very important companies i own all three of those and i would i don't think i'm ever going to sell my equity in these companies because they're so amazing at making people's lives

SPEAKER_01: more convenient and giving them more options and really if you're thinking about building a startup

SPEAKER_00: think about something that sucks tell me something you did in the last 30 days that sucked that you

SPEAKER_48: didn't enjoy and then pause for a second and think well what were the parts of it that really sucked yeah

SPEAKER_14: so last night when i was making our two-year-old her last bottle of the day uh we ran out of milk and it was late and very cold and i did not want to go to the grocery store at 8 pm so this morning i had to traipse my way to trader joe's at 802 a.m when it opened and i got my ears frozen off and i wanted

SPEAKER_01: to scream punch ball great so we'll sit here and meditate for about 10 seconds on this this is a staple yes this is something you need on a regular basis so everybody's minds are already flowing if you have a baby you need milk some people consider milk a staple some people can consider oat milk a staple eggs butter cheese bread whatever it is you know how you people used to get their milk there was a milk delivery and they would bring your bottles they put it on your doorstep and come straight from the

SPEAKER_08: count i just ordered 10 pounds of meat from a local ranch i paid 185 dollars 18 for grass-fed beef if you guys know the prices and grass beef is expensive 18 18.50 cents a pound pretty good to have it delivered

SPEAKER_01: to your doorstep i got osso bucco i got uh picanha slash uh bavette steak i got a ribeye in there i got

SPEAKER_29: some ground beef it was a really nice package and i thought huh what a convenient thing i should put this on subscription so i'm going to have a subscription every month at the start of the month and i think i trust these guys i'll see how the meat is so there you go really what you need is you need a

SPEAKER_120: subscription to milk so we have one and that's the funniest thing because you're dead on so there's

SPEAKER_14: a thing called monroe dairy here in the northeast and it's a little box that goes out of your house and you put an order on thursday nights and they bring you all sorts of local you know like the cows get petted and it's great uh but we just burned through all of our milk early because my family apparently can consume infinite amounts but you're you're right that i could use a better version well

SPEAKER_01: and then here's another idea you have identified another problem the other problem is okay you have the subscription but managing the consumption the subscription is a you know a a problem down this problem stack yeah how do you solve that problem somebody created and pitched me on this a smart egg container in your refrigerator it was it this is during the iot era you put the eggs in this it knows how many eggs you have it reorders the eggs we could do this for milk as well you could have milk you could have a camera inside your refrigerator that has where the staples go you keep them in there if it

SPEAKER_08: doesn't exist you order it now that's complicated i know but it is the eventuality that these things

SPEAKER_29: will be abstracted away from you there was another product that amazon made it was a little iot device

SPEAKER_01: and it had the logo of tide on it so if you were a type person i forgot what they were called but you would put the tide logo on your washing machine and you would press the button when you ran out of tide and would automatically put it in now ai is going to do this for you google's ai is extraordinary

SPEAKER_29: amazon is extraordinary you can put things on subscribe and save that's another interesting product and you could also order you know from these things the idea i've always wanted to do alex yeah i had an idea for something called mercury club i never did it but if somebody wants to do mercury club as a concept i'm down it was kind of like go prof it was kind of like cosmo urban fetch during the day

SPEAKER_00: which was i was thinking about well what are the most frequently used staples what if we put them

SPEAKER_01: into a truck what if you park those trucks and the trucks can move yeah so you can have a truck with a

SPEAKER_123: dude in here or a gal or a person there we go i don't know what i'm supposed to do now there was a there was an executive order what am i supposed to do i think guys i think guys is followers gender

SPEAKER_125: neutral yeah yeah i think guys is pretty broad okay okay gals guys everybody in between don't cancel me

SPEAKER_02: but what if this truck existed it was optimized and it just you open up an app and you know i got to tell dara about this idea imagine you open the uber app and the convenience stores were not convenient stores they were convenience trucks they had a refrigerator section got everything else and

SPEAKER_08: instead of being 45 minutes away from you because you had that option right you could have gone on uber

SPEAKER_14: eats and ordered it in your town or doordash oh yeah yeah i i could have but i have um uber eats has gone to the point when it's so much more expensive than me schlepping myself that i that okay okay i can afford it but i get angry about the fees yeah it's a bit so this i think would lower

SPEAKER_131: fees because the truck would be out there now i don't know if this is feasible somebody should

SPEAKER_01: definitely do it if somebody wanted to make this as a business i would be interested in a crazy

SPEAKER_03: logistics and tech person duo who want to do this i put you in the incubator give you 125k let's model

SPEAKER_48: it okay but also do you recall spoon rocket yes from 2013 this was a great idea and we invested in

SPEAKER_01: a company called bento somebody who had work it worked for me did bento version of it explained this concept and i think chamoc was in spoon rocket this was so brilliant before uber eats

SPEAKER_14: so you're you're at the office and you're hungry and let's say it's 4 p.m and you're going to be working a little bit late what you don't want to do is pull up uber eats pick a restaurant go through the whole song and dance and then have it arrive between you know 45 or an hour and a half later because traffic if you're at the office is bad spoon rocket had a set number of meals they made each day and then they put them into cars and then they had the cars out and about so if you wanted food now you could pull up spoon rocket app and you could see the three or four options you could click bring me that one and then they would just pull the car around and there it was so at the tech crunch office back in the day we used this all the time the economics didn't work out but it was

SPEAKER_01: great for me the economics were so close bento also did this and i remember the the founder was so great and he um he figured out you know at about nine o'clock there would be some left and what they did was at 9 p.m they told everybody in the app it's two for one at 9 p.m and in the app you would have these cars they would have the salads in a cool bag or in a cooler then they figured out that there were warm bags so they would make the food they figured out how to make the food in a proper kitchen

SPEAKER_141: you know like uh in san francisco there's a lot of right we're talking about regulations a lot of

SPEAKER_03: regulations in san francisco worst place you can launch any business i mean literally i think the

SPEAKER_01: most regulation ever is san francisco but they figured it out they tested everything and then what they did was for the hot meals you know because hot meals i think could last two hours on a hot tray

SPEAKER_31: at a certain temperature was the law so the truck you know the car leaves in the trunk they would have

SPEAKER_01: 20 hot meals in a hot bag then they wanted to make sure it was temperature close they put a temperature iot device in it and they put a heating pack in it so there were heating packs that you could connect to a mobile battery and you could keep the thing warm and then they eventually learned how to plug it into the cigarette lighter yada yada anyway this idea was really good but it turns out getting

SPEAKER_08: one of four meals in 10 minutes not as good as getting one of 400 restaurants in 40 minutes

SPEAKER_01: it's founders let's be real let's keep it a buck finding great developers is hard it's like one of

SPEAKER_25: the hardest things you have to do in our industry especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup but here's the good news i got a tip that's going to save you time money and a ton of headaches you need to check out lemon.io lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers who can help you they have done all the work to find and vet great developers who are experienced who are results oriented and who charge competitive rate great developers we know are hard to find and integrate into your team so lemon.io will handle all of that for you they're only going to offer you hand-picked developers with at least three years of experience and if something goes wrong lemon.io will find you a replacement developer asap a bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they have told me they've had a great experience so here's your call to action go to lemon.io twist and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less and twist listeners get 15 off the first

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SPEAKER_08: rather and that was the discovery they learned there was also a pizza company the pizza company had a

SPEAKER_01: mobile truck it was called zuma and zuma pizza was the robotic pizza i think softbank dumped a ton of money on them that then crashed and burned and i looked at investing and it was only 60 effective but all of these ideas are available to you as an entrepreneur just by looking at your own life and saying there's got to be a better way and then of course you got to figure out you know economics etc and there's always new technology that can give you a second chance at making it work

SPEAKER_152: so absolutely people who weren't around for the dash button thing this is what they looked like there

SPEAKER_15: was little buttons you could put them on this is 2019 okay so not too long and well i mean

SPEAKER_156: that's now five six years ago jason i hate to break it to you but time is moving quick yeah time is

SPEAKER_15: moving quick uh if you were curious this is what the uh zuma pizza trucks looked like i i think you

SPEAKER_14: know softbank got a lot of stick for the amount of money they put into this company but i mean if you think about fast delivery people love that and people love pizza literally the whole world around i can kind of see the the the effort there that piece of truck by the way was a domino's on wheels

SPEAKER_08: the problem is there's a domino's every mile or two in america so they were up against dominoes if

SPEAKER_101: there's a domino's every you know literally every five miles and you know any american suburb which

SPEAKER_29: there seemed to be yes and they're in like the dankest office space you know commercial space

SPEAKER_02: yeah they they didn't have as big of an advantage as they needed to have no no because the overhead for

SPEAKER_56: that dank office space is pretty low and maintaining cars is not that cheap especially if they're

SPEAKER_14: commercial i want to get back to the idea of finding finding ideas jason in our founder hacks section but quickly before we get to that right before we jumped on the show there was some breaking news i haven't had a chance to get into this much but the news is that xai is working on a potential 10 billion funding round that would value the company at about 75 billion now details to come we'll find out more we'll figure out if it's sequoia or andreason or valor that will lead this round but i think it goes to show that after all the deep sea hype hysteria enthusiasm excitement people that are building these systems are still looking to raise a lot of capital to put a lot of capital to work on building the infra and the investment and the personnel they need to kind of stay on top of the market so i view this as more of an endorsement of the ai market writ large than perhaps any individual

SPEAKER_56: company but it is of course a big deal for xai and its ambitions to take on anthropic open ai and

SPEAKER_01: other domestic and foreign ai companies there's a big prize at the end of the ai rainbow and if you were going to place a bet on who might do well here uh elon's not the person to bet against kind of the person you want to bet with he gets it he was early he funded open ai and he's got a unique data set inside of twitter that's real time and powerful in the same way reddit is in the same way

SPEAKER_03: and i sort of read it uh actually took a dive i think they had some search engine problems i'm

SPEAKER_01: not sure if it recovered and that lawsuit we talked about the other day those lawsuits are going to keep happening content's going to do great it could mean that these models are going to need more capital not just for service but also for content licensing and i think there's a big prize right now search i've moved half my searches to chat gpt gemini etc and doing research uh you know here on the show other things i've moved a hundred percent of mine there i used to ask people to do research for me now i just

SPEAKER_08: do it myself and i and i use deep deep research etc 20 bucks a hundred bucks a month personal or

SPEAKER_87: corporate is a no-brainer every single person is going to spend between 200 and a thousand dollars

SPEAKER_48: a year on their ai language model that's every human being yes do you know what i what how i

SPEAKER_14: benchmark it what do i currently pay for my cell phone service sure that's kind of my my benchmark for what i think the max for consumers will be because i am still blown away with the fact that deep seek shot to the top of the app stores and i know we have caveated that with you can game it and blah blah blah but i think it goes to show that what consumers want is the fastest cheapest best ai model period and i bet you that in time that will cost something around 200 to 500 bucks a year maybe it's a family plan but it's still going to be a lot of compute but people just love it um last note on ai models jason before founder hacks take a look at this chart and i was impressed so this is from uh the fine folks over at hugging face um we've talked about them talk to them they host a lot of the the ai models out there great service love it uh they have a chart here that shows how deep seeks r1 model became quote the most liked model ever on hugging face just a few weeks after release it's been downloaded over 10 million times across these different variants and if you're watching

SPEAKER_82: the youtube version of this you can see that the what's the number two one the blue one that catches up to it the yellow one goes straight up i see that black forest labs flux one dash dev okay that was a image making model that i think um grok used if memory serves likes uh and downloads you know

SPEAKER_01: on things like github people joining programs is an indicator of their future success or at least interest in it today uh what we're learning i think from deep seek is open source i believe is going to win the day respectfully to everybody who's doing closed source i think open source models are going to have such a distinct advantage uh that we could see a handful of winners handful being less than five in the closed source and they'll have some advantages as well and then we're going to see 200 open source

SPEAKER_03: projects being contributed to every day in every single niche possible and it's going to be wild uh it's going to be wild how effective these are uh and open source is going to win i believe

SPEAKER_14: 60 40 yeah that tracks me i do think that open ai anthropic etc will have value down the road but i think this is why when we see 157 or 300 billion dollars attached to open ai a little little scared but there's been an interesting shift out there when it comes to startups and ai because if you go back a year people were talking about you know gpt wrappers and that's just a skin around a model and that's not going to have long-term uh viability long-term strength but now it seems that people are talking about how all the value in the ai game is going to accrue to the application layer which means building on top of models so it seems that the thinking has gone entire 180 here not for me i said from the beginning

SPEAKER_08: applications and brand are defensible if you we just talked about airbnb toro uber you know these verbs

SPEAKER_01: when you have a brand and a network effect you know and you're on people's phones that is defensible

SPEAKER_08: that does whether it's instagram with network effects and already being installed and people having their history in it it's very hard to displace instagram very hard to just play store dash uber and airbnb in people's lives i've always felt that ai is going to give every single category of consumer behavior uh all those incumbents are going to have to adopt ai and when they do give startups the chance to get in

SPEAKER_01: there and maybe displace them compete with them or replace them any of those are possibilities when a new

SPEAKER_03: technology comes out you used to have there was an uber before uber there was a taxi magic app where you

SPEAKER_29: could text and get a cab to show up it never worked there was no gps it was over text it sucked but it was the same concept taxi magic when gps and the gorgeous iphone came out you actually had it work

SPEAKER_84: work so this is from 2008 observe this iphone 3 3g style uh thing look at that yeah looking successful

SPEAKER_29: use refresh button you had to manually refresh but this is in the age of like ajax happening is it there yes pick up location live updates taxi dispatch the driver's name taxi 0.13 model it was like literally giving you line item updates on where your car was now gps didn't exist i don't think at that time so you couldn't put it on a map yet gps came somewhere or google maps and apple maps and it came

SPEAKER_51: on the second or third iteration of the iphone maybe iphone 3 or 4. in other words just because

SPEAKER_31: something's been tried and failed multiple times does not mean it's going to succeed as we just mentioned

SPEAKER_29: with spoon rocket bento and those other zuma etc and yeah on demand skype was you know supposed to do what we're doing right here and now zoom you know figured it out so an irc people use before slack so

SPEAKER_31: there's a long list of inspirational gravestones yes for you to look up you get to that this is a

SPEAKER_187: founder tip our strategy you go to the graveyard you dig up a body you reanimated that is the best

SPEAKER_14: segue possible to the founder hack that i'm most excited to share on the show okay so uh one thing we're going to be doing over the next while is pulling out great tips for founders things we find from people we know we do find from awesome posts from venture capitalists pick your poison we have our ears and eyes open jason what i found today that i wanted to bring to the show is actually from the startups community over on reddit and it's from a thread entitled we built the wrong startup broke a startup golden rule and pivoted into success essentially this founder ended up building something for which they were not the icp or ideal customer profile now people often say build for what you know so they broke that rule i thought the post was very interesting but here's the bit that really stood out to me that i want to pass along to everyone listening from this post and we'll have a link to it in the show notes and on the youtube quote don't look for what's cool now look for what you would have wanted two years ago in your career this will help you find better less competitive opportunities that will probably be less sexy but i feel like this is what you're saying find the pain point but in

SPEAKER_59: this case just look back a little bit because there might be fewer eyes looking at it but probably still

SPEAKER_08: a pertinent place to deploy software i participate once in a while in the startups community if you see i think i'm jason m calacanis on um reddit and i you know i load reddit a couple times a week and so here's the thread in the startups community okay so to summarize they pivoted but they didn't

SPEAKER_70: work on the ideal customer profile being them they found another customer maybe highlight the

SPEAKER_84: section here and let's read it so essentially they had quote to ignore the dogma of needing to

SPEAKER_14: be your own icb because right now we don't have the complex pricing models global compliance headaches or enterprise building workflows that our ideal customers do so they couldn't dog food their products

SPEAKER_84: as much but the idea of building for yourself doesn't always always apply was the gist here got

SPEAKER_08: it so there is great startup advice build something that you need dog food it yourself force yourself to use it so if you were doordash you'd say i'm only going to eat what doordash can deliver and you're

SPEAKER_24: like okay when we've got a tex-mex place and we got a greek place i really feel like sushi or ramen

SPEAKER_01: well now the team's got to go out and find a ramen place to add to doordash okay fine fair enough but

SPEAKER_08: if you are trying to build something for cfos who have compliance issues on a global basis well you're going to need to go find those folks interview them do customer interviews listen to them maybe even bear hug them so this is a great point they're making um and a lot of times not having experience

SPEAKER_25: is an advantage because you can come to a problem and say i don't work in the hotel business

SPEAKER_29: so i don't feel the need to provide a concierge and a front desk and i don't think every room has to have a bible and needs to be cleaned every day now if you're in the hotel business you're like oh my god how many times do we have people calling for room service and the front desk and the concierge

SPEAKER_30: you have to have those are must-haves in the eyes of a hotel executive those are must-haves you know

SPEAKER_29: when joe jebbia and you know brian are doing airbnb they're like i need a place to stay that's cheap uh that i can afford and that's in this location where hotels don't exist so they could build airbnb and anybody who was in the hotel business would never have done it because

SPEAKER_31: they'd say okay it's got to be 500 a night they need to have a 24-hour concierge we need to have

SPEAKER_29: room service available stock the fridge whatever it is fresh eyes can also help you do not need to dog

SPEAKER_31: food your product you just need to have empathy for a customer base you need to be in contact with a customer base and i'll make this even more specific the way to get this done is to take

SPEAKER_00: five or six of your customers and build a customer advisory council a customer advisory council and

SPEAKER_25: you put them in whatsapp and you put three or four of your co-founders in there and you say hey we made a new feature what do you think and they debate it now they might send you on a custom software

SPEAKER_08: boondoggle where you're building something for one customer but if you have five or ten of them they might say this was good for me and six of them say it's great four of them say they don't need it

SPEAKER_01: okay move that up the priority list 10 of 10 let's say you had 10 customers at 10 of 10 want it okay you know you got to build it most times you know the customers want you to take the top one two or three

SPEAKER_03: features and just make them better faster cheaper increase in network effects what are the features everybody uses every day on their iphone well they make phone calls they surf the web and they use messages when you are watching a keynote and it's you know apple's doing a keynote or google's doing a

SPEAKER_29: keynote what do you see them talk about all the time here's the new features of imessage we did for

SPEAKER_01: phones we have new airpods that do noise cancellation that automatically pick up the phone when you nod your head we do transcripts we do facetime we do filters in facetime and oh our new browser is faster the battery lasts longer because the browser doesn't do that our browser does x y and z they start with the

SPEAKER_29: most frequent use cases and making them better with every iteration of the phone that's another technique

SPEAKER_31: take the core feature make it 10 better why because a hundred percent of your customer base uses that core feature on the case of zoom it would be the quality of the zoom every time zoom became easier to use and higher quality video better audio that's actually why skype never worked well jason they didn't even

SPEAKER_14: have to have high quality they just had to have video calls that worked right like that the bar was on the ground in that case and there was just there was billions of dollars sitting there but everyone

SPEAKER_48: thought that webex had it locked up and you know webex was complicated it didn't work the software

SPEAKER_08: to install was klugey there was just so many blockers and when you did a video call it didn't

SPEAKER_115: work as smoothly so taking out friction really understanding your car i like this as a as a first foray into um what do we call in this segment founder hacks for now until you come with a better a better

SPEAKER_14: name we have a question from um gary with two r's okay jason why wouldn't you want all customers suggesting and voting on directions instead of five to ten okay great question i'm talking about

SPEAKER_01: startups in year one or two and you want to have a certain type of customer on your customer advisory council you want the one who is spending money is demanding uses the product and you can't possibly take a hundred advice from a hundred people a thousand people it's too many and you won't build a relationship with them what you could do is you could have 10 people in one whatsapp chat getting to know each other getting to your team then you launch a second one say hey why don't you be on our customer advisory council you put them into a second one how do i know this well i started doing dinners because i wanted to understand our lp base a little bit better and i wanted to understand the

SPEAKER_70: members of the syndicate what did i do i had a dinner in new york at marks off madison great italian place my my friend mark strassman over by madison park i think a dozen people showed up i put them

SPEAKER_29: into this group and signal and i talked to them regularly then i started uh founder fridays and

SPEAKER_03: you can go to founderfridays.tech get a great dot tech domain name tell them who sent you founder fridays is eight founders in los angeles i think the los angeles was actually up to like 30 and so they have four

SPEAKER_31: tables of six or eight and then we have like 30 cities but they're all in groups that are smaller so you can actually have a conversation the the proper size of a dinner conversation is six people at a

SPEAKER_29: round table when you get to eight you have two conversations of four or three conversations of

SPEAKER_03: two or three so you just have to be thoughtful about how many people are in the conversation because it will lead to chaos if you don't if you if you go above 10 in my expectation in a whatsapp

SPEAKER_217: i think once a whatsapp group goes above 10 too chaotic so too chaotic i have a personal question to

SPEAKER_14: follow up on this point about customer councils and this is a really ticky tacky one jason but did you give discounts to the customers that are on your customer advisory council do you incent them

SPEAKER_01: to do this you don't have to it turns out the people who actually really need the product enjoy having access to the founders and the access and being able to have a say in the direction of the company is what is truly valuable to them getting your newsletter for free that actually if you were

SPEAKER_08: to do it for cautious optimism.substack.com it would actually not work because then you'd have freeloaders

SPEAKER_01: giving you advice taking advice from people who aren't paying for your product is the worst idea ever

SPEAKER_03: now you're saying a discount but even still users are called users for a reason they use you customers

SPEAKER_00: are sacred they've given you their credit card you're in a deep meaningful relationship with you you're making a transaction and they the beauty of subscriptions is will cancel if you're not providing

SPEAKER_03: value yeah so people over index on advice from venture capitalists users social media but they should be indexing on a smaller number of people who are customers and who use the product because there's

SPEAKER_00: really two types of customers you could have engaged customers and customers you want to find the most

SPEAKER_31: engaged customers and you know really index off of their feedback the person who's bought their third or fourth tesla that's a very important customer for elon to listen to and for the team over there to listen to my feedback as somebody who has you know is on their fourth tesla and is getting their fifth super important for them why am i going to buy the model y not the cyber truck i've been going back and forth why would my wife want the model x not the model s or the model y that's a really interesting piece of

SPEAKER_01: information for people to have that's why being able to segment customers into buckets so loyal customers who you've had already who have been on your newsletter for over a year and who open it up all the time they're going to have one piece of advice for you the the people who are in month one might have a different piece of advice so this is where segmenting cohorts so you'll hear cohorts come

SPEAKER_08: up very important the people who lease their teslas and who you know have the model three and buy the most basic model and use it for driving uber or their commuters and or the college kids that's that's

SPEAKER_03: one piece of advice the people who buy the model x and spend a hundred dimes on it that's a super user

SPEAKER_02: and that is critically important and you know what this this is a hit this segment's a hit i'm hearing people say this is super useful and uh commenting on it why don't we grab another question from the

SPEAKER_94: audience how big of a role do you think humanoid robots will play in the next 10 years do you

SPEAKER_11: really think it's worth all the hype in the next five years i don't think you're going to own one

SPEAKER_01: if you're listening to my voice right now in all likelihood i think five of us out of a hundred will

SPEAKER_08: own one i will be one and that would just be like the same person who buys like the newton personal digital assistant uh it's going to be that sort of level or people who bought pcs in the 80s in other words there's a bell curve the technology adoption bell curve and there's the masses they're the middle of the bell curve and then you have the laggers they're the last to use the technology and then there are the people who like to sample new technology the avant-garde and people call them different things but you see the innovators early adopters early majority late majority and

SPEAKER_01: laggers and this is the adoption curve and if you haven't seen this before it's super important for you to know where you are if we were talking about electric vehicles right now we are in the early majority and we're going into the late majority i was an innovator i bought the roadster early adopters bought the model s the early majority bought the model 3 and y the late majority is going to buy

SPEAKER_31: you know whatever comes after that and the laggards are the ones who get dragged along if you had uber on your phone in year one or two you know you were part of that you know vanguard front and the vanguard don't buy stuff not use it they'll try it yeah you know they're they're odd people they're coveted people but it's me you robert scoble and people who can't shut up about it who buy the vision pro and wear it and annoy people and bring it to thanksgiving it's that

SPEAKER_231: guy is that guy at thanks are you spying on my marriage because that sounds a lot like me

SPEAKER_31: i mean if you brought a vr headset to thanksgiving in the last 10 years you're that guy and you are by the way when you look at that chart we're not even anywhere near the early or late majority we're

SPEAKER_198: nowhere near that for vr some things get stuck there's in the early adopters era yeah it's

SPEAKER_08: important to know where you are because early adopters will buy anything they'll tell you it's incredible they'll try it they'll buy it they'll try it they'll throw it in a draw you know you really need to get to that majority and it takes time to get there if the product is a startup startups should

SPEAKER_147: not be going after markets where laggards are using the product no because that means there's

SPEAKER_14: competitors it's tons and there's more competitors there are the lower the margins are perfect competition economics 101 etc very hard to acquire customers for a you know an uber or an airbnb

SPEAKER_01: competitor or a doordash competitor at this point because they got that locked up why would you switch and to get people to switch requires a technological innovation or it requires being 10 times better

SPEAKER_101: which most often comes from a technological innovation so the example we gave of taxi magic

SPEAKER_01: the iphone with gps and maps was 10 times better and for some reason taxi magic couldn't make that

SPEAKER_14: jump and sidecar lyft and uber did oh i can tell you why taxi magic didn't make that jump is because it was only 15 better and you were still talking to our taxi company who didn't control their taxi drivers and you couldn't rate both ways and people were bad and they didn't take credit cards and they

SPEAKER_48: blah blah blah it didn't solve the pain points it just made it slightly easier if you're still at

SPEAKER_82: dinner to order a taxi and this what you pointed out was somebody who sat there and said what sucks

SPEAKER_02: about getting a taxi that was garrett that was ryan and that was travis they sat there and they

SPEAKER_08: obsessed over every step and one framing is what sucks can we take that pain out the other is what's delightful can we add that in and another framing that people will often use in the startup world is

SPEAKER_01: friction friction is just what's slowing you down another way to describe pain and one of the things that always slows people down in these systems is payments and tipping and i had major debates with travis about tipping i wanted to add tips early on he did not he was absolutely against it he said we're just going to make it fast for you to get in and out if you have to make a decision the decision should be to get an uber the decision should be to rate the driver if you want to because that helps the network effects let's not add any other decisions no more decisions and there were just two decisions ordering the uber you know putting in your destination which is the decision to use it or not which really isn't a decision so what are the decisions to do after you've decided rate the driver i mean i think

SPEAKER_243: that's the only decision to this day in uber rate the driver you can pick uh black x oh okay you do

SPEAKER_231: have to do that right what's that isn't there a middle option like well there's xl there's teen

SPEAKER_68: there's woman driver there's dog driver i mean actually because they're all below the fold the

SPEAKER_29: newspaper term below the fold of the newspaper less important information because they're below the fold you don't even see them yeah yeah so this is a fair point and adding that friction there's a good

SPEAKER_10: reason to do it because if you have a lot of luggage you need an xl and if you're an executive and a ceo you might want the black and if you're on a budget and you're a kid you might want that uber x

SPEAKER_56: you know how people joke that all technology is bundling and unbundling and just kind of going back and forth sure open ai when announcing that they're going to in the future merge their

SPEAKER_14: reasoning and non-reasoning models together after gpt 4.5 they said we also hate the model drop down selector because it's kind of anti-consumer you just want the best fastest one you don't want

SPEAKER_15: to pick between 40 dash mini or 03 dash mini flash and you used to have to pick dolly to make an image

SPEAKER_16: versus chat gpt to ask a text question now i don't think dolly's in the menu anymore so you should

SPEAKER_01: ask a question and it should determine if that question requires which model in pro mode you can expose those and that's what it really should be if you want to hit the drop down you hit it logging in is throttling so chat gpt their monthly active users went bonkers when they took out logging in now they had to have logging in because they had paid customers and they had an sla

SPEAKER_253: service level agreement that you know they wanted to do so there it is so why don't we talk about

SPEAKER_31: your favorite founder university pitches the reason we started founder.university was about half the applications for funding we get at launch fund that's the name of our fund the applications come to launch.co apply about half of them were people who were thinking about starting a company they had a couple of co-founders but they weren't uh they didn't have finished products um they hadn't even incorporated and so they couldn't come to our accelerator and the way i designed the accelerator

SPEAKER_03: was to take seven companies this last time we did 11. we did 11 because we had too many great companies coming out of founder university to be honest it's a 12-week course you do it online it's twice a week

SPEAKER_08: monday and thursday nights if you come for all 12 monday nights you submit your progress every week and then we offer a 25k check as your first check at a million dollar valuation if you want it rich people don't take it that's about 20 of the people starting companies the other 80 ask for it every week and then we also offer the standard silicon valley y combinator tech stars launch accelerator deal of 125k when the companies get towards graduation the best ones who make the most progress pitch myself and mike savino another general partner at our firm my partner and um you know we

SPEAKER_25: we rank them and we pick them and we like to invest out of the 250 teams who come to each cohort we just finished cohort nine uh we like to invest in the top 10 about 25 of them so of the 100 investments we

SPEAKER_03: do a year probably 50 60 of them are found university 25k or 125 cash checks and the other 40 come from the launch accelerator or our follow-on investments for the top five percent of our portfolio that's the portfolio strategy that's what we're doing here so these are very raw year zero startups but i just thought i would share some of them to give them some shine and tell you why we're considering investing in them or we have invested in them or why they were our top uh folks and um you know when folks do get an investment from us and they go through the accelerator i eventually have them come on the podcast if they make progress but this is like i just thought as a new thing we just run through

SPEAKER_51: their website show their websites you tell me the name i give you my feedback okay so let's pull up the

SPEAKER_14: first one then and it is poker gpt which is a combination of ai and poker jason two of our

SPEAKER_03: favorite things talk me through why this one is your jam okay so uh there is a very interesting business out there of training people to play poker these websites typically are subscriptions they

SPEAKER_29: cost 50 to 250 a month some of them cost thousands a month and um what this product does is you give it

SPEAKER_08: your hand and then the hand gets uh analyzed by chat gpt what they're trying to do here is just make you a better poker player so this business could reasonably get i would say hundreds of thousands of subscribers for 20 bucks a month so it's a small community but what i've noticed is there is a hundred million dollar revenue opportunity out there for a company like chess.com so i don't believe anybody's made the definitive poker coach search at gpt you see what's happening with poker it doesn't take a genius to figure out that there's enough of an audience maybe not as big as chess to get to low millions of revenue here perhaps even eight figures i don't need as a year one investor or a year zero investor to figure out alex if it can get to a hundred million if it can get to low millions i think as a team we can figure out what's the next card to tone over turn over pull up tone bass as an

SPEAKER_263: example for a second yeah so to speak you're not gonna you're not gonna take your uh your victory

SPEAKER_13: lap there all right so here we go i'm just gonna drop them so here's tone bass here's tone bass went

SPEAKER_01: through our accelerator they're doing phenomenal they started with i think guitar classical guitar and then they added violin yeah i've hit the drop down for violin right there thank you guitar piano cello flute trumpet voice clarinet double bass viola it's they're now up to their

SPEAKER_120: eighth or ninth category it's it's jason it's it's viola viola thank you sorry i've been in too many symphonies to have you defame i don't know it's not the middle the middle stepchild of the stringed

SPEAKER_31: instruments this is master class for these instruments now you would think when they came to us with butt guitar or violin that it wouldn't have been a big enough opportunity and you would be right it wouldn't

SPEAKER_00: be big enough for venture my job as the world's greatest angel investor is to squint and say yeah

SPEAKER_31: let's get that ideal customer profile to our point before and then that wedge is in there open the wedge let's open the wedge get in there how did uber start lincoln town card then uber f uber eats uber pool uber xl you can rent cars on uber now you can take trains in europe you know it just never ends and so i that's what i think is going to happen in the poker space there's other poker games and if they

SPEAKER_01: figure out how to coach poker i'm a poker player who also plays chess there are people who are poker players who also play magic the gathering so i love the idea i love poker coaching i think there's

SPEAKER_08: something here i want to see what happens on the flop or the turn uh what's our next company i played

SPEAKER_14: with it super cool and it's got me excited because i'm going to new orleans for a week which means i'm going to be playing a lot of poker i love it all right um next up is js mon uh i think this is this is super cool because javascript if you don't know is pretty much the most important language out

SPEAKER_08: there for programming so we're seeing a ton of security startups and there's uh companies like palo alto networks that acquire great companies put the ceos in charge so there's a clear path to an exit here and these security experts created js mon to help people who want to protect websites and run reports on them in security people are constantly running uh attacks uh what they call white hat attacks and they and they do security audits so automating security audits if you have the ability to do so

SPEAKER_29: is going to be a huge business ai is going to play a part in it so it is what it says it is and you

SPEAKER_03: know enterprise 500 a month you know security bro 50 bucks a month you get the idea i would get rid of the free and the starter and just go right to the enterprise or security pro and that's always the thing you know our number one piece of advice to founders who have products in the market is almost

SPEAKER_288: always how did you come up with the pricing and double it i was about to double it yep double it

SPEAKER_254: absolutely all right another one jason this one surprised me a little bit that it was your jam i'm

SPEAKER_14: gonna do my best explain to people what wide worlds is so its tagline is make memes build culture drive growth and this is really interesting essentially there's a meme inside of the crypto world that community is everything and that's predicated on a fundamental truth that humans like to work in groups and we are all kind of community oriented folks okay so what they do is this company wide worlds will help you define your brand language use ai to help you generate a lot more assets around that brand image and then use agents to help send those assets around to energize your community

SPEAKER_94: and i i think it's a cool idea but i'm i'm curious what about it grabbed your eye because to me there's a lot of moving parts i'm a little curious but i'm a little skeptical okay so this is a weird idea and

SPEAKER_08: when i see weird ones i get interested especially weird ideas with attractions there is a unique opportunity

SPEAKER_29: to create a character using generative ai i think we can all understand that and you see characters all the time mascots is one way to say it uh four different products right so uh if you look at any cereal brand fruit loop she got the toucan sam and jemima with the pancakes although they've changed that now i think there's a politically correct they actually use the if you look that up for a second this is interesting my daughter was educating me because she's she's uh very up on these uh social issues they actually changed the name of an jemima pancakes to the literal name of the woman who inspired it because it's using an archetype i think for aunt jemima i know we're getting down like a little political correctness here um but um the aunt jemima's considered a mammy quote-unquote um offensive trope racist kind of thing so they came up with the actual name of the woman who uh was the inspiration and pearl and it's now pearl milling company company yes yeah formerly aunt jemima okay i don't know if anybody knew this but now it's pearl milling and they have the woman who's do they still have the

SPEAKER_82: woman's photo or no they got rid of that too i don't think there's no it's just their brand image now but i'm seeing eggnog pancakes which means that i'm hungry i had i had waffles today man i got this

SPEAKER_08: great waffle maker anyway i don't know how i feel about this pepe the frog was a funny meme that got co-opted by the nazi kind of white supremacist anyway uh there's a whole range of characters here

SPEAKER_01: putting aside racist tony the tiger from frosty for getting me back on track so in order to make one of these and to make memes you need to have a tool and yes i thought well this is interesting uh if we made a twist uh character that went with this for our brand we could then have the twist tiger

SPEAKER_08: i don't know just an idea no no i love it and that that we could make memes all day with them

SPEAKER_01: it seems silly but characters in ip are what drive the mouse house disney it's what everybody's aspiring to in advertising so maybe there is a business here again odd with traction this is an interesting factor something strange you don't understand with traction get curious i'm curious this

SPEAKER_14: reminds me of uh the fact that most scientific discoveries don't kind of commence with eureka but instead huh that's weird yeah um thinking about the twist mascot we want to have alliteration so we want t t animals that begin with t include the uh the taper the tarantula tasmanian devil termite turn tetra tiger tiger shark toad tortoise etc if you have a idea for us alexwlaunch.co let me know

SPEAKER_217: what you think is pretty dope i mean it kind of rolls off the tongue twist tiger twist tiger shark

SPEAKER_84: it's interesting twist turtle i'm kidding okay we have one more to do which is oh okay this one i struggle with but you like this and we're going to talk about it ladies and gentlemen i give you

David Friedberg: lumix advertising lumix advertising here what they've done is on a vespa you know when you're delivering

SPEAKER_01: food there's a box on the back yeah and in this box which they created it's got three signs of it

SPEAKER_08: have an led display and i thought to myself low margin outdoor advertising business

SPEAKER_01: probably not venture scale when i see an idea that's working i get curious so it's working they've got prototypes out there they're doing it in south beach and i thought you know uber and doordash have a wonderful ad-based business right and so does instacart amazon right you're at the shopping cart so i started thinking about that and i started thinking about food delivery and i just thought hmm what else is there here again open up the aperture keep your eyes there the advice i gave to the founder was to look at the leasing business um uber had a leasing business i forgot the name of it you can look it up alex it doesn't have the name uber in it but there was a leasing business

SPEAKER_08: associated with uber at some point i think lyft had it too they might have spun it out um and there are finance companies like if you look at car companies today with the exception of tesla you know ford's leasing business or whatever so here it is introducing exchange leasing lease options

SPEAKER_27: built for uber driver partners so one of the things people don't know is you if you want to be an uber driver you may not have a car or you may have one car for your household that you can use for four hours but you know mom or dad have to go pick up the kids or they need it this weekend and then

SPEAKER_01: whoever's driving in the household for uber needs a car so you can actually go rent a car that's how taxis and medallions work in new york you rent a car and the medallion for 130 bucks the taxi driver drives like a lunatic until they hit 130 bucks which on a sunday might take them five or six hours

SPEAKER_27: you understand why they're under some pressure because they got a 12-hour shift they get to hour six now you know why they're peeing in a cup is because they're like oh my god i might lose money or

SPEAKER_31: i might make 200 today and i spent 135. so i just thought to myself you know i wonder if they provided and rented the scooter and the advertising box on the back what would happen then i thought to myself man if i was uber or doordash or i was like a local restaurant in partnership with them i don't know if you know like i think doordash and uber um they might have had exclusives with mcdonald's or

SPEAKER_29: um starbucks at different times yeah i might very much want to buy that fleet out for the year

SPEAKER_14: and not have duncan have it versus oh this is just like in search when you have to uh if you search for jason calacanis and you're a brand you have to buy your first ads thank you thank you everybody's

SPEAKER_140: buying calacanis.com you know yeah if you do that that'd be that'd be a great i'm gonna if you buy

SPEAKER_08: calacanis.com right now i'm going to send an army of people i'm going to find one of these manila army uh black hats gray hats to click your ad 10 000 times from us ip addresses and cost you a lot of money don't do it who oh oh no you own calacanis.com i own calacanis.com i'm just saying if you bought the ads on there so anyway oh yeah i usually don't like these hardware things but i do think i encourage the founder since they have traction to keep pulling the string and see what's happening here because maybe you know we had invested in this one other company that i felt like i

SPEAKER_03: got screwed on um pretty badly and they had some traction um but it was constantly having problems um i do think maybe another entrepreneur another team specifically taking a swing at this part of the puzzle without having to wrap a car could be interesting so i agree with all of that and i think

SPEAKER_14: actually if you think about bringing this technology to i don't know markets in asia that have high density and high scooter usage for example could be great my only beef with this is that it's just very visually loud and you know i still see ubers go by with the the light bar on top that has ads and i'm always like ah okay i guess everything ends up kind of being what it was before kind of like how you know youtube tv was cheap and awesome and now it's getting more and more like cable

SPEAKER_01: i'll take one more question from the audience there was somebody here actually you know i hate to delve

SPEAKER_03: into um politics too much but somebody asked something about like why don't i ever call out trump or elon and i wanted to address that actually if you look on my twitter feed i've literally talked

SPEAKER_29: about process journalism today and how an investigative journalism and how i felt like i believe the next

SPEAKER_31: step for doge uh is to hire a team of investigative journalists to take the stuff that's spilling out of doge right and i think the doge philosophy is radical transparency just put stuff out there

SPEAKER_29: that was called process journalism in fact your alma mater tech crunch believed in process journalism

SPEAKER_08: i did not okay the reason i didn't like process journalism is because that's what gawker did to a more extreme level they would release something that came into the tip line and then they would use that as a cudgel as a leverage to kind of get the story and get more information the problem is you know you could spread something that's false yes and that's why process journalism sometimes it's good to slow down now it's the people's money the mandate is let the information out there but as we've seen the information come out hey reuters is got this much money politico got this much money and then we find out okay that wasn't reuters the journalist that was reuters the data service or that was political the reason it seems like a lot of money anyway my advice to them is yeah sure you want to dump everything do a data dump that's totally fine that's what wiki leaks did as a journalist former

SPEAKER_03: journalist i like a little more thoroughness but i understand many people believe that they should be able to see the cia documents for wiki leaks or this or the jfk files i like a little vetting but i

SPEAKER_00: understand people disagree with me why not have five investigative journalists in a room every day

SPEAKER_101: talking about these contracts yes the condoms in gaza might be a different gaza whatever okay how much

SPEAKER_29: are we spending on condoms how much are other countries spending on condoms in other countries why are we doing that is that to prevent disease to change birth rates what's the cia's goal here you

SPEAKER_31: know the us aid stuff was driven by foreign influence a lot of times that's like a cia thing or hearts and minds like let's have an investigative journalist call people on the ground and say hey did this money actually buy 50 million condoms or did we get charged a hundred dollars per condom

SPEAKER_29: like that's the work of investigative journalists the problem is investigative journalism is expensive

SPEAKER_08: and slow and slow so to your point do i ever agree with do i disagree with trump i told everybody i gave him a b and i that the meme coin i don't like i don't like the law fair whatever's going on with the mayor of um new york and doing that like leverage i don't like that either i didn't like the law fair when they did it against trump when they upped those charges i said that very publicly i thought the upscale of the charges was ridiculous like just give them the speeding ticket whatever

SPEAKER_328: so it's going to be chaotic i can't even keep up with all this stuff my job is to talk about startups

SPEAKER_01: yeah that's what we're going to do here when it overlaps with technology yes i'm going to talk

SPEAKER_08: about it but i cannot be responsible for everything david sachs elon and everybody else is doing in the world i have countless friends in and around the administration i'm going to stick to my lane largely startups and technology no vicarious guilt i mean i i'm questioning things all day long are

SPEAKER_140: people not paying attention they're not okay so so i mean just to give you an example of this we

SPEAKER_14: touched on palantir the other day and and honestly we talked about how palantir is a great company with a visionary founder and products that are resonating in the market and then we said you know what though maybe this valuation is not entirely moored to fundamentals and i saw a lot of responses to talking about our conversation and people were just claiming that we're like on the take shorting the

SPEAKER_120: stock like one who would pay us to tend to ramble about palantir i don't want to i don't want to use

SPEAKER_334: the r word on the program but that is ray we are not stupid y'all so anyways it's people need to relax

SPEAKER_14: the thing that i'll say is and i know we're going to get this on monday but just my little point is right now there's a lot of people who are posting pro doge things to engender uh favor with the people on x that are the most influential uh this is not just elon this is the venture capital community and so forth and i i think that what they're doing is often getting ahead of their facts and their ability to understand the data and so we're having wasted news cycles of bs that could have been precluded with traditional reporting standards i love citizen journalism i love having more voices i've been on

SPEAKER_15: twitter since 2007 but if you're going to make an explosive claim about criminality uh you know

SPEAKER_29: somewhere between a data dump and you know biased journalism on the margin whether it's

SPEAKER_03: msnbc npr the daily wire you know opinion journalism there's investigative journalism there's thoughtful center middle of the road journalists just pursuing truth it's not that many anymore everybody seems to

SPEAKER_27: have picked a side in journalism there's a lot of sensationalism i just wish they were like more centered journalistic organizations i'm really dismayed that that model doesn't work anymore so

SPEAKER_14: what we should do and i i know we're we're gonna say this mostly for monday but what if we founded the um the center for boring journalism yes unprofitable journalism we are going to talk to

SPEAKER_334: you about these things and you are going to be slightly bored but they are what matters uh the center

SPEAKER_342: for boring and unprofitable journalism oh as opposed to tribal journalism that would be pretty great all

SPEAKER_29: right everybody a lot of show next week is president's day so we'll be back on tuesday i think yep we'll see you all next time he's x.com alex i'm x.com jason we'll have long come on on the news on tuesday and we'll see you all then