SPEAKER_00: Lon is back. Lon Harris is back. And we got to talk about all these Super Bowl commercials because so many of them are tech related. And there's a lot to say.

SPEAKER_02: First of all, I was shocked at the number of technology ads because we put together a list

SPEAKER_05: for the show today and it was like 10 or 12 or 13. That's like a hundred million dollars in tech

SPEAKER_04: spend. This is not something you should do when you have a small amount of money. But if you're a billion dollar company, you got over a billion dollars in your bank account, why not do it? And

SPEAKER_07: here's what you should do. If you have under a hundred million, you want to participate in this, I might do this next year. You should do a spec Super Bowl commercial, let it out and say,

Chamath Palihapitiya: if we could afford a Super Bowl commercial, this would be our Super Bowl commercial. So you can hijack the Super Bowl commercial by releasing your not Super Bowl commercial. Or we can't afford a Super Bowl commercial, but we made one anyway. You should punk rock this.

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SPEAKER_08: Week in Startups. With me, Alex Wilhelm. I'm Jason Calacanis. We got a full docket today. Some of you

SPEAKER_13: who are old school twist fans might remember Lon Harris, who was like the original newsreader here. He would read the news. I would comment on it. My friend Tyler Crowley would also comment. That was the old school crew. Well, guess what? Lon Harris is back in the fold and he's helping me with editorial across a number of projects, including this one. And today I thought we'd bring him on, Alex, because he's a pop culture wizard. Lon is back. Lon Harris is back. That's right. Back in the fold. And we got to talk about all these Super Bowl commercials because so many of them are tech

SPEAKER_00: related and there's a lot to say. And he's a good, good media guy. Lon, first of all, I was shocked

SPEAKER_03: at the number of technology ads because we put together a list for the show today and it was like 10 or 12 or 13. That's like a hundred million dollars in tech spend. So help me out here.

SPEAKER_17: Is that a normal amount of technology ads for Super Bowl or is this a much more tech heavy,

SPEAKER_19: you know, rundown? Yeah, we've seen the mix go a lot more tech over the last, I mean, five, seven years, something like that. A lot of tech projects have had huge hits and really like sort of come out of nowhere and like found a huge audience. So there's precedent to be, which we're going to talk about, their 2023 Super Bowl ads are widely credited with like, here's Tubi, start watching Tubi. And of course now they dominate the free ad supported streaming space. So I think that's what a lot of these other companies, that kind of precedent is what a lot of these companies are looking at. And we're going to talk about, I think booking.com is another one where it's sort of like this relatively little known service that did a bunch of big game ads. And now they're like one of the major players in their space. And I think a lot of other companies are trying to sort of get in on that. And at the same time, we've seen less interest from the kinds of brands that we once would have thought of dominating fast food, beer, trucks. They're starting to spend more of their ad money on, you know, digital platforms, other kinds of alternative media. So both of those things happening at the same time,

SPEAKER_26: we've sort of reversed the trend. Fascinating. What makes, in your estimation, Lon,

SPEAKER_29: as we get ready to watch these ads, what makes a breakout Superbowl commercial? Because that's a new, that's a different genre than just a normal commercial, which hits you with repetitiveness.

SPEAKER_08: There's something that's got to be tentpole or big about this. You know, when it comes to my mind, obviously the 1984 commercial from Apple. Sure. The Cindy Crawford Pepsi commercial from 1985,

SPEAKER_13: I think, because I think I was like 15 years old when I saw that one. And that one is burned in my memory. Pretty simple one. But I don't know if we make those anymore. What makes, to my original

SPEAKER_31: question, a great Superbowl ad in your estimation? And you can get in on that too, Alex, if you have

SPEAKER_21: noticed, I mean, to me, it's just, it's cutting through the noise. This day is like the busiest

SPEAKER_19: advertising day of the year. And so if you're going to do something big that day, it's got to be like, I've got to really do something extreme and crazy that captures people's attention. You have to

SPEAKER_21: avoid, I think, being too cheesy. I think like, if you remember the Mr. Peanut funeral thing from a few years ago, they built it up so much. They did get everybody's attention, but in a way that was

SPEAKER_19: lame. And then they had nothing to do with it. Once they got your attention, it was like, all right, Mr. Peanut's dead. And now he's like a baby or it doesn't really even make sense.

SPEAKER_36: It never made sense. You had to pay too much attention. And also I don't think about Mr. Peanut

SPEAKER_17: that much, like no offense to our friends that grow legumes, but you know, it's not really my,

SPEAKER_21: my jam lawn. Exactly. So I think it's a two part thing. You've got to cut through the noise, but then after you do that, you've got to have some kind of memorable hook or some kind of message or some kind of idea that resonates a little bit and people relate to and are interested in.

SPEAKER_44: What's your thesis, Alex? Do you have a thesis as to what makes a great commercial for you or just

SPEAKER_03: generally? I have a me test, Jason, which is that I love to see a brand take a shot on the Superbowl. I love to see people that don't have the money go for this prize and try to win. And so my favorite example of this was Oakley. They had that annoying ad of the CEO, like playing piano and everyone was like, that's the worst ad ever. I thought it was fantastic because it got everyone talking about Oakley. I mean, as an oat milk guy that worked for me, sadly, as I'm about to show you, I don't think it actually worked out for the company as much, because as you can see from this chart, they're now only worth about $24, but I still liked the fact that they went for it and tried something that was actually a little bit on the edge, not in terms of like amount of skin per se, but just like our CEO playing piano. Come on now. I love that.

SPEAKER_29: I think when we look at these, there seems to be some genres or formats, Lon, that are kind of

Chamath Palihapitiya: clicking with people. One is the entourage, the ensemble. I'm going to throw a lot of pop culture

SPEAKER_00: at you at once. Dunkin' Donuts. You know, we're going to send three, four, five celebrities at it. Uber Eats. We're going to put 10 celebrities at it. So that seems like one genre. We're going to

SPEAKER_29: just cameo the hell out of this. Another genre seems to be, we're going to touch on your heart strings with a country music song or a slow, thoughtful monologue, maybe like Harrison Ford did

SPEAKER_32: this year or other people have done before. Or a narrative about family, generations, parenting,

SPEAKER_54: American flags. Relatable emotional content that resonates. Shall we play the booking.com ad that

David Friedberg: we're all kind of talking around here? I feel like. Yeah. Let's get to it. These are generally 15, 30 seconds, but let's take a look at bookings. Okay. Booking.com has something for everyone.

SPEAKER_64: Okay. I love the Muppets. What about something more family friendly? One Vegas hotel for the

SPEAKER_70: private. What if we hate everything? We have free Kinsley. Stafford. Exactly what you're booking

SPEAKER_00: for. Booking.com. Booking.com. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I am a Muppets super fan. As you can see, I know each of these characters and I want to laugh and I want to have it connected in some

SPEAKER_29: way and nothing connected. None of the jokes mattered. They just threw the five most popular Muppets in there, but there was nothing in the storytelling here. So I give this like a wasted

SPEAKER_76: opportunity. It's a, like a, it's a D for me as in dumb. It just wasn't done well. Now compare that

SPEAKER_36: to what rocket put together, which was a almost homage to America back to the flags comment and having children and building their family. Watch this one. I did see this one. Man, it's a great

SPEAKER_19: song. West Virginia. West Virginia. Well, this, this has a tie into the game. It does. Yeah. To a river. This is exactly what I'm talking about in terms of like unique, clever ways to grab

SPEAKER_88: people's attention. I mean, we all know it's like really special to have kids and going home. Oh,

SPEAKER_19: here we go. Oh, and everybody knows all the words to this song, which is very like, there's not that many songs that cross every cultural barrier that an entire football stadium can sing

SPEAKER_94: along to. Yes, this is universal. Everybody knows this song. Take me home. And it's got the

SPEAKER_99: soldiers coming home, which that always, those reuniting videos get me every time on the dream.

SPEAKER_19: country road. Okay. So rocket.com. But they actually got the stadium to like sing along during the game. So this had a live during the game. Yes. Stunt component. Oh, so after the

SPEAKER_105: curse at wait, hold on after the commercial, they got the stadium to sing it. Exactly. Because

SPEAKER_37: smart. Everybody knows country road. Take me home. It's one of those songs. You can get a whole

SPEAKER_03: stadium to sing together. But the NFL originally said no. So there was going to be a pre-taped sing along, but then at the last minute, they got permission from the super bowl to essentially

SPEAKER_36: extend their ad by 15 seconds afterwards by inciting the audience to sing. So 75 seconds for

SPEAKER_107: the price of 60. Well done. Yeah. Or they paid a little extra, but either way, I think that this is

SPEAKER_06: an upsell, but, um, a smart one, because yes, I have never seen anybody tie the commercial into the actual live arena. I guess you have points for that. I did see online lawn. People were saying

SPEAKER_08: this was a pro-life ad. And I was like, okay, it's pro-life because there's babies in it or something. But I think it got co-opted. Like this is the pro-life ad founders. Let's be real. Let's keep

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SPEAKER_21: lemon.io slash twist. Yeah. I think they, they tend to claim a lot of media content that is just about

SPEAKER_19: parenting family. And that is not the exclusive domain of the anti-abortion movement. Some people who support abortion choice also have families. It is, it is true. Okay. It is true. Alex, you, uh,

SPEAKER_13: yes, you have a family and you are pro choice. Okay. So that has residents for him and yet he is not,

SPEAKER_116: uh, on the pro life side. So I don't, I don't know if that's entirely fair. I can see though how

SPEAKER_03: everything is viewed to the prism of culture wars today, Jason. So I think that people are looking for like, is this for me or against me? Is it for me or against me? That is the most generic pro family yeehaw America thing of all time. It's for everybody. I like, and also even that, even that

SPEAKER_21: song, it's about West Virginia. It's about like rural, the real Americans Americana, but you know,

SPEAKER_19: there's nothing in it that's offensive to people who live in big cities. John Denver was for

SPEAKER_124: everybody. So John Denver was for everybody. And, um, as I always warn my friends who want to become pilots, if you've got a great life and you're rich and you're famous or any combination of those

SPEAKER_29: things, love, you've got a family, you don't need to be an experimental pilot. It's like right in the name, like test pilot. You don't need to do that. If you're rich, you're powerful, you're famous, you could have a test pilot. You could let other people be the test pilots. Uh, I'm of course,

SPEAKER_31: referring to the fact that people don't know John Denver died young, lying like some experimental

SPEAKER_129: plane. Listen, some guys just have a need for speed, Jason. You can't, it's just, it's just how it

SPEAKER_131: goes. I gotta tell you, it's so dumb. It's so dumb. Cave diving, experimental flying, and motorcycle

SPEAKER_21: racing. None of that. Just don't do them. Also, experimental subs, please. Let James Cameron do

SPEAKER_136: the submarine tech. He's, he's the expert. That's another one. You don't need to be down

SPEAKER_08: there. A billionaire and his son decide they're going to go on an experimental submarine. If it

SPEAKER_116: has experimental or test in the word. If, if it's being operated with a PlayStation controller, you don't need to be on that. Do not do it. Okay. So I'm going to give D to the bookings

SPEAKER_29: one because they didn't use the IP properly. I agree. I agree. They hooked me in and I didn't get, uh, for example, when they had them coming down the slide, I was like, Ooh, I wonder who's going to be in the water. Muppets in the water. That might've hooked me in. Or like, it could

SPEAKER_140: have been a crossover with maybe Oscar the Grouch being in there. Right. And get a little Sesame

SPEAKER_21: Street. Yeah. I think Disney, I think that the contractually, I think Sesame workshop co-owns

SPEAKER_19: those characters. I don't know if Disney can use Sesame street characters in an ad. No. Disney fully owns the Muppets. They can do whatever they want with them. So I think,

SPEAKER_147: I feel like it might've come down to that. We're debating IP rights inside of corporate communications during a major sports event on television. God, this is America.

SPEAKER_150: What's the other, who did the, um, the rocket one. I give that a B plus. I liked it a lot. Made me feel stuff. Give it a B, B plus. What do you give it?

SPEAKER_03: Uh, I would give it an 85. So kind of a straight B, I think. I think it was good quality, but

SPEAKER_131: I'm not going to think about it a week from now. And bookings, you got anything for bookings? What do you give that? 23 out of a hundred F minus, F minus. What do you give it?

SPEAKER_19: What you said about it was the jokes didn't land. It didn't feel like the Muppets because it's not funny. Like the Muppets, if you had one or two Muppets show level gags, I think it would have been like, oh my God, the Muppets did a booking.com ad, but as it is, it just feels like, yeah, they're in it, but it doesn't matter that they're in it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And there is another opportunity here. When you're going to use the Muppets, the Muppets interacting

SPEAKER_08: with famous people, that always lands. So you have a Miley Cyrus in there with one of the Muppets, that could have worked. You get like a, uh, LeBron James or, you know, a Luka Doncic,

SPEAKER_29: some basketball player interacting with them at the hotels. Now you got something good. Can we just go to the number one ad? I want to go to the one that was my favorite. This I thought was the best

SPEAKER_158: one. This is a plus for me. I'm giving my score ahead of time for sure.

SPEAKER_160: No idea what he just said, but I love this guy.

SPEAKER_161: He's going to tell you the tale of old Squarespace. Oh. Oh, Squarespace. Oh, Squarespace from,

SPEAKER_163: from many youngs ago, more taught to be. Squarespace for yourself, yourself.

SPEAKER_167: Okay. So I saw a movie, Lon. You probably saw it as well. The Banshees. Of Inna Sharon. Yeah.

SPEAKER_170: Of Inna Sharon. He's parodying that right now.

SPEAKER_177: Yes. Yeah, for sure. I love that film. It was really good.

SPEAKER_167: And I like this because everybody could have a Squarespace. The local bar in the town, the,

David Friedberg: the musician singing musical lessons, everybody needs a Squarespace. And I like this actor a lot

SPEAKER_21: because he's weird. Barry Keegan. I also think it hits on the idea that Squarespace has been around forever, like by internet standards. Yes. They really are the oldest, most reliable,

SPEAKER_19: most infamous and iconic. So the idea of taking that and going back to like early 20th century, you know, like, I think that's, there's, there's something interesting there too,

SPEAKER_116: that they're getting at. It's, it's, it's, it's interesting branding for them.

SPEAKER_13: I like the whole look and feel of it. To me, it was my favorite. Uh, what, what did you think,

SPEAKER_131: Alex? You want to give it a letter grade? It's a plus for me.

SPEAKER_02: I liked it a lot. So I give it an A, a minus maybe I'm a big fan of certain Irish comedians and so forth. So all that landed really well for me. And I've always liked Squarespace,

SPEAKER_03: but I will say that it does provide a really fun contrast between like we having fun online and rural Irish countryside in the mud. And so I, that contrast to me really sold the idea, like the internet's better than the way things used to be. So it felt like progress to me while being very polite and that resonated quite well with me. I liked it. Yeah. I mean, it's great. It's funny.

SPEAKER_19: That's what I was saying. Like, it's funny in a way that like the other ads are like cute. Like you'd be like, oh, they got the Muppets. This actually has jokes like him throwing laptops and then crashing into the mud in front of these like peasants. Like that's funny. Yes. And I think just even that imagery lands better than most of the other ads we've been looking at. I feel like they

SPEAKER_08: took a chance too, right? Like somebody at an agency was like, you know, it'd be great. Did anybody see Banshees of Inner Sheeran? Right. And like two people raised their hand out of 20

SPEAKER_32: people in the room. Right. Like an Oscar nominated, a prominent movie, but not a movie

SPEAKER_29: everyone has seen. Why do I like this film so much? It was an odd film, but I found it captivating.

SPEAKER_48: Why is Banshees of Inner Sheeran captivating long? One of the things I think is so interesting about

SPEAKER_21: it is it was sort of conceived as like this kind of parable. It's sort of about the Irish national

SPEAKER_19: character. It's about the Irish civil war, which sort of takes place literally in the background of the movie. I think it also resonates just on a personal level. The idea that you can have a friendship that suddenly falls apart and that feels like a relationship or like a breakup in a powerful sort of way. And, you know, the idea of it, that male friendship is so mysterious and we don't really understand the nature of it and why it starts and why it ends and what keeps people in one another's orbit and not. And I think that that is very resonant for people. It's something we sort of don't think about all the time, but is there. That's such a great recap. Okay. We got to go open AI,

SPEAKER_04: right, Alex? Like we got to do it. Open AI has tons of money laying around. So Super Bowl ads are what? 5 million now? 8. 8 million for Super Bowl. And this wasn't one minute, I believe.

SPEAKER_195: My God, inflation. What are these poor companies? Yeah. All right. So they're doing something pixel.

SPEAKER_198: They're using the dot. So fire to wheel to horses. This is all about progress. We're watching

David Friedberg: things in agriculture. Okay. And the dot is what you see when you use it. Now we're getting into ships going to the new world. We're going to colonize other countries. Now the railroad is polluting

SPEAKER_204: everything. It's like pixelated in a way, but it also has that kind of pointillist, like that artwork

SPEAKER_205: sort of style where it's all made of little dots. It looks cool. Dial up. I like the animation on

SPEAKER_207: it. Summarize this art. Help me practice asking for a raise. All progress as a starting point.

SPEAKER_211: And then I love the way it ends. It does not say open AI. It says chat GPT.

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SPEAKER_213: So here's the thing that I was curious about, Jason. Before you give me your rating, I want you

SPEAKER_02: to vet the performance of this ad. So here is a Google trends chart of chat GPT. Oh, okay. The term, the word. Okay. Yes. So, so this is 730. I think the ad was around here and it didn't actually have that much of an impact compared to what I expected. And for reference, here's the same search with Kendrick Lamar over superimposed. So got it. So people were like, what is Kendrick Lamar? Who

SPEAKER_99: is Kendrick Lamar? Why am I watching him? Cause he is a niche kind of, uh, that's a deep pull in

SPEAKER_219: the rap space. I mean, compared to Jay-Z or Beyonce. No, no, no. He's bigger. Kendrick is huge,

SPEAKER_19: man. Kendrick had a huge 2024. That song was everywhere. I thought he was like the,

SPEAKER_02: the rapper's favorite rapper. He was, but as, as he said, how'd you let a conscious rapper go commercial Kendrick has 86 million monthlies on Spotify. Uh, and then, uh, Jay-Z

SPEAKER_213: Jay-Z has, we all love Jay-Z. Jay-Z is 34 million. Okay. All right. So that's all because

SPEAKER_54: of that song probably got really popular. He already had like, you know, that he did the Black Panther song with SZA at the Superbowl. That was a huge song. Humble was a really big song.

SPEAKER_29: DNA, DNA was a big song. I mean, I like him, but I, I, I, what I heard yesterday on the socials and from folks was who is Kendrick Lamar. So maybe that's a function of white rich people not knowing

SPEAKER_99: who Kendrick Lamar is. I think that's more of a function. You're following right wing commentators

SPEAKER_21: and they do that. Did you see, I don't know if you saw it, there was a collection of tweets. Literally this happens every single year, right? When guys are like, they should get a marching band. They should get a country music band. Well, who are these people? Why are they doing these offensive songs? It's every, it doesn't matter when it was the weekend. It doesn't matter who they book.

SPEAKER_02: That was terrible the weekend. Here's Josh Wolf from Lux Capital on the Kendrick Lamar, uh, Superbowl performance. He says, replying to God's odd, who said that this was a new low for the halftime show. Beg to differ. Says Josh, lyrical genius, double entendres and pure creative

SPEAKER_03: genre, breaking poetry. My kids know every word. So I think that, you know, even amongst the,

SPEAKER_00: though the rich old white people, it played. Okay. Uh, I think it's generational for sure that a lot

SPEAKER_19: of people that I would agree with. And it might also be, it might also be regional. Like I'm from Los Angeles where Kendrick is also from. Yes. He is enormous here. I mean, I, he's, he's the biggest

SPEAKER_32: rapper in the world right now in Los Angeles. For me, it's still Prince. I think Prince had the best. Oh, I love that. The Prince halftime show is, is, is a classic. It's a legend. It's legendary. No,

SPEAKER_150: nobody's arguing that. Let's rate the, uh, uh, the chat GPT one, the chat GPT one for me,

SPEAKER_08: I think aesthetically was pleasing. Like I think it was an interesting graphic design. I don't think it hooked me in in any way of like, this is why this is important or something. I'm a little bit cynical. Maybe I feel like this is a missed opportunity. They had that beautiful, engaging video and it should have delivered with a message at the end in the way the 1984 commercial

SPEAKER_29: did. So that was evocative, you know, it told the story. And then at the end they had this like iconic line, you know, find out why 1984 won't be like 1984. You know, it had like a little punk rockness to hear at the end of this, they were like, what, what did they say? Like, uh, how to do a term paper or something like that. They like threw in a couple of searches. Like that felt like that

SPEAKER_19: got bolted at the end. Yeah, you hear audio of people asking chat GPT kind of basic questions. But I think the weirdest thing of all is that they progress always has a starting point. Like that's their, you know, what that feels like to me is when like Enron used to take out those ads where it was just like a crop, uh, growing and a plant and like a grandmother hugging. And then it's like, we're building the future Enron. Like where it's so general. It's like, what do you do?

SPEAKER_54: Daniel's middling company. Yeah. What is this for? Like chat GPT is a product. You can like show me what it does and how to use it. All right. All right. So let me, let me tell you why I love it.

SPEAKER_19: I give it a C. I give it a C. I go. Yeah, I go. I mean, I, I like the ad as a piece of animation. It looks cool. I go. Yeah. C plus B minus something like that.

SPEAKER_03: Okay. This is my favorite ad of the super bowl. Really? Yeah. Because I love the way it started with the pre technology era, the first sparks of what we considered to be human innovation, fire the wheel. And then it took you through this really kind of fast paced rewatchable, I would say progression through the modern era. And to me, it's a very optimistic message that we are still making progress of, uh, the scale of first flight microchips, et cetera. And this is the future. And then it sells it at the end with a very easy and you can go play with it for free. How cool is

SPEAKER_29: that? Yeah, it's, I mean, it's okay. I would have done if I was going to punch it up. Okay. I would

SPEAKER_07: have directly connected what AI could possibly do in the way the AT&T commercial did you will. And if you pull up the AT&T commercial, what they predicted you will do, they predicted easy pass. They predicted like Netflix, they predicted a lot of interesting things. I would have used this to then take fire,

SPEAKER_08: the wheel, you know, dial up and then shown you a self-driving car. I would have showed you a robot,

SPEAKER_07: like feeding chickens and getting the eggs from the coop. I would have shown you how insane this is going to get. I would have shown robots on the surface of Mars. I would have really gone for like,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you know, a surgeon robot using AI. Yeah. So this is that odd, right? This is an interesting

SPEAKER_21: comparison. I feel like on some level we're in a much more cynical age than we were. And if you tell people here's what's coming, here's the future and show them moonshot ideas. I think we have a lot more built in cynicism toward that in 2025. People have been hearing that stuff for years, you know,

SPEAKER_32: like we're in a post where's my flying car era. That you will commercial. What year was that?

SPEAKER_07: Because man, you look at that, they showed a PDA, a personal digital device is long before the iPhone

SPEAKER_08: with a stylist on a beach. So that was saying like, you're going to send a fax from the beach. I mean, they kind of missed it by like 10 feet, right? They were, they were in the general facility, which is you could take a video of your kids and then post it to the internet for the world to see or something, or you could do a live stream. And then they show GPS, never getting lost.

SPEAKER_31: And they show going through a toll. What were the other things in there? It went by so fast.

SPEAKER_03: Uh, well, I'm going to scrub through it, but it was 1993, I believe. Yeah.

SPEAKER_255: Was that 1993? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Also wireless internet, because he was on the tablet from the ocean. I thought that was pretty important.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah. And they also showed that the book on the screen. Right. That's what I was going to say,

SPEAKER_54: some sort of research tool or in early internet, you know, you'll be able to read any book instantly,

SPEAKER_42: you know, right on a screen. Yeah. I mean, but it's better than they showed because they're

SPEAKER_36: in a library in that, in that, in that video, but you're just at home now. You don't have to go.

SPEAKER_262: And this was 1993. So this is before the web browser, just to give people an idea,

SPEAKER_99: this is during the AT&T dial up era. They showed a video phone booth,

SPEAKER_249: a remote medical consultation. But think about how much more optimistic

SPEAKER_19: people were about consumer technology in 1993, we were right on the verge of all of these innovations that were real and existed, but just were like, just about, you know, like the internet we all knew was real. It was just very slow. And you had to get like AOL to use it. I just feel like today there's been so many more, uh, promises that we then haven't quite lived up to. I don't know if you can sell people on the future is now in the same way.

SPEAKER_42: Osprey says that Nike was the winner. I did like the Nike at non-technology. It was kind of a women's

SPEAKER_197: sports homage. And I watched a lot of them. Oh, yes, that was good. I liked that one too.

SPEAKER_235: Yeah. I was like, oh, it's Aja Wilson. Oh, it's Caitlin Clark. You know, that was fun. I think there was an Uber Eats one again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: With Matthew, Matthew McConaughey playing key figures from NFL history.

SPEAKER_07: I like this one, not just because of my history with Uber. What I liked about it is when you drop

SPEAKER_08: historical references and you can follow along with this kind of rapid drops of things. Like they do the Refrigerator Perry, they do the Buffalo Bills, and, um, they call it a pig skin, like

SPEAKER_272: ice cream, Saturdays, ice cream, Sundays. There you go. Okay. Also Sean Evans from Hot Ones right

SPEAKER_54: there. Another one. Yeah. Another fun little cameo. Smart. I love hot ones. Me too. A big,

SPEAKER_281: big hot one. Founders like me, you've got a lot on your plate. Running a startup means you got to manage an endless to-do list, tons of tasks, right? You got to do your chores as a founder and you got to juggle dynamic priorities. One day it's sales, the next day it's development, then it's product, then it's raising money. And that's why I rely on CODA, C-O-D-A to keep everything in our organization under control. CODA is the all-in-one platform that brings together the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps all into a single scalable workspace. And you know, it's so much more than when I say a to-do list, I'm using that as like somewhere I start. Okay. I rattle off a couple of things that need to be done, but then my team builds databases and workflows into CODA so that repetitive tasks become automated and information is shared. And there's a single source of truth. Our training documents, our meetings with founders, everybody who we co-invest with, LP relations, we do it all on CODA. And it gives us the flexibility to adapt to shifting priorities. We set our OKRs and we balance all that ambition we have with practicality. There are templates that you can use to start you on second or third base. Projects like Twist 500, where we're trying to catalog the top 500 private companies that's being done inside of CODA. When you go to twist500.com, it's a CODA-based website, public facing, but a database and a system for us to track those companies on the backend. It's all in one hub for startups. It's literally a Swiss army knife that we can use in any situation without having to go research another SaaS product and another template and another login and another debate and negotiation with a SaaS vendor for yet another five or $10,000 a year. And hey, it's my money. I would rather use CODA and have everything in one place, one login, and then hook it all together. It's intuitive. It's powerful. It makes our workflow seamless. CODA empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track goals effectively. Take advantage of this limited time offer just for startups. Go to CODA.io slash twist today and get six months free of the team plan. Very generous. Thank you to the CODA team. That's CODA.io slash twist to get started for free. Well done, CODA.

SPEAKER_292: I give this one a B plus. I liked it. I love anything where there's like pop culture references

SPEAKER_99: seeded through it. Yeah. So I give it a B plus because I liked when they, this part, when they got the refrigerator, Perry, I always remember. Yeah. And he's playing Ditka right there.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. Playing Ditka. It's pretty fun. Yeah. It's fun. Yeah. I, uh, I also liked the Instacart. I thought it was kind of similar where it was all the different ad mascots together. Like it was, it was doing like an Avengers end game, but for at, you know, characters from other ads like that

SPEAKER_54: monkey baby from the Mountain Dew ad there's Chester cheetah. Uh, how do you know all those names? I told you he's pop culture. There's the wiener monkey,

SPEAKER_205: baby. There's the dough boy. There's the jolly green giant.

SPEAKER_32: Jesus. How do you do it? I'm, I'm like literally trying to keep up this jolly green giant. You're

SPEAKER_04: right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there's more to Mr. Clean. It's cool. A man. Cool. A man.

SPEAKER_54: There's the cheeto guy. I don't remember what the, the dogs in wiener suits. There's the energizer

SPEAKER_21: bunny. So yeah, it's another like point at the, do the DiCaprio meme point at the screen when you

SPEAKER_54: recognize a character going by. Okay. Ah, right. The DiCaprio meme. So they get it. It's really

SPEAKER_21: strong from a, yeah, there's the old spice guy. It's just, it's hitting so many memes and ideas and

SPEAKER_29: familiar characters that it keeps people's attention. Yes. Much like the Uber one. So that's a theme when you have the density of the plot with characters, et cetera, and you can point to it. And it's, um, it's like that South park episode where they had member berries. Remember? Exactly.

SPEAKER_19: Nope. You're exactly right. Yeah. It's, it's any, any chance to you, people love Easter eggs. They love references. Like it's like a, it's like Deadpool three, but for a commercial fan service,

SPEAKER_94: fan service, fan service. Exactly. But for commercials, which is a sad commentary in a way that you can have commercial fan service, but you can. In the Instacart ad, do we think that Instacart

David Friedberg: split the cost of the ad, which eat with everybody who got a mention? In other words, they pulled their

SPEAKER_08: money or do you think they said, Hey, if you give us your IP, you give us Mr. Kool-Aid, Mr. Clean,

SPEAKER_313: we'll just put them in there free of charge, but you gotta give us the rights to use it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_19: I mean, I don't, I don't know. That's an interesting, like, obviously if you are Pillsbury,

SPEAKER_125: why wouldn't you want the Doughboy in there? It's like, okay, he's one of the prominent mascots.

SPEAKER_03: We want him included. You know? I'm with Lon on this, but I'll also throw in that Fiji, the CEO of Instacart is on OpenAI's board. So in my personal 5D chess board that I have in my head, I'm thinking that everyone wants to be on Fiji's good side because she's so close to OpenAI. Ergo, everyone said you can have the Kool-Aid man for free in your advertisement. And so they didn't have to

SPEAKER_197: pay anything, but I don't think they contribute. So I give a B plus to this one. So we have,

Chamath Palihapitiya: we have some genres here. You got the, uh, dense fan service one. We got that as one. And then we

SPEAKER_29: have the heart strings country roads one. And another heart string one that I loved was my guy, Harrison Ford, who's a Tesla guy, by the way. I know that I, you know, I talked to him at a Tesla event, uh, one time, but he's a, he's a big Tesla guy, but he did a Jeep commercial, which was kind of like a crossing the aisle kind of commercial. And Hey, you might like to plug it in or you might like gas. I think that was kind of the point of it. Let's play a little bit of that

SPEAKER_321: one. If we have the Jeep one, but you saw this one, right? Lon, what do you think of this one?

SPEAKER_21: Yes. I liked it. I mean, I feel like Harrison Ford, the last few years, he's really sort of taken ownership of his role as like America's granddad. And I think we all, we all have such strong

SPEAKER_19: emotional connection feelings for him more than, you know, like you could put Walton Goggins in an ad and he's a good actor. I I'm a big righteous gemstones guy, but it's not the sort of person who evokes the same feelings as Harrison Ford. And so I think there's just a, a gravitas, a cultural significance that he has that only a handful of other guys have Tom Hanks. Uh, you know, how many, how many American actors are really in that, in that world? Maybe Samuel L. Jackson, who also made a, a notable appearance, but not that many. If you put him in something, everybody's paying attention because he's, he's America's granddad. I mean, he's, it's indie,

SPEAKER_02: it's Indiana Jones, you know, like Matthew McConaughey to me has become the Salesforce guy who also does some acting a little bit. He's in a lot of ads. He was in two ads this year. That's too much. That's saturation. That's brand dilution. Nothing. So they're doing like

SPEAKER_331: a lot of Americana. He's at a bar and he's in his J ranch era. He's in his ranch area here as well.

SPEAKER_29: And there's a part of this where it shows the plugin and it shows like people going different

SPEAKER_21: directions. If Kevin Costner hadn't bailed on Yellowstone to do his horizon films,

SPEAKER_217: he could have done this. Like it's the plugin. See, look, there's the Rubicon plugin hybrid.

SPEAKER_54: It's like that. Like, you know, he, every, everybody, it doesn't matter if you're a big

SPEAKER_21: city liberal, if you live in a red state, if you're a farmer, a rancher, everybody loves Harrison Ford. He's universal.

SPEAKER_335: And I liked the joke at the end where he's like at my last name and I love Jeeps. So I, I thought this

SPEAKER_06: was cheeky. I thought it was heart string pulling and I'll tell you how effective this was. I've

SPEAKER_48: always wanted to own a Jeep Wrangler. My wife has always wanted to own a Jeep Wrangler.

SPEAKER_337: And we just never got around to it. You know what I did after watching the set? What? You bought a Jeep?

SPEAKER_340: Yes. I didn't buy a Jeep, but I went and I looked at the Jeep inventory around me here in Texas. I was like, I should get a Jeep for the ranch.

SPEAKER_19: I just assume if you're, yeah, I just assume that's, that's on a level. You could just impulse. That's it. That's a J impulse purchase. It could be a J impulse purchase, but I didn't

SPEAKER_249: because I want to build up a little while. I have to think about it, do some research for you. Just,

SPEAKER_32: just go online by it. Well, the only reason you have to do a ton of research on this, by the way,

SPEAKER_29: now is I was on car and driver. Like Jeep has so many options. You can go hybrid. You can go regular. You can go two door. You can go forward. You can go hard top. You can go soft top. You go Rubicon. You could go six speed. You could go manual. You can go automatic. I mean, it's so many options. It's

SPEAKER_00: fatigue with the Jeep. I feel like that's part of the bit though, isn't it? It's like an all

SPEAKER_19: customizable, like your knee, whatever your specific needs are. There's a Jeep for that,

SPEAKER_32: you know? Yeah. But they do have a Jeep hybrid now. There's a Jeep Wrangler plug-in hybrid. I

SPEAKER_06: didn't know that. Yeah. I was looking at the Jeep Wrangler hybrid. I was like, well, that's kind of

SPEAKER_76: cool. I wonder how many miles it gets or whatever. They're getting their ROI on that, on that Ford commercial already. I mean, it made me want to know what's up and I don't think they have,

SPEAKER_61: do they have an all electric one yet? I don't think they have an all electric Jeep yet.

SPEAKER_17: I'm not sure, but I do know that every time I see a Jeep Gladiator with the top and the doors off, I'm like, that is the tank top of trucks. And I always really want one, but my, my driveway is not long enough to have that. Plus my wife's car in it. So it's just, I can't buy one because I don't have room for the ranch. Yes. It's not a very

SPEAKER_41: practical big city vehicle, but for the ranch, I could see it totally making sense.

Chamath Palihapitiya: What's the story, Alex, with Matthew McConaughey, uh, securing the bag from Benioff because

SPEAKER_07: Benioff is constantly running around with celebs. Uh, he's got the guy from Japan who is his like,

SPEAKER_06: best friend. I forgot that guy's like either an artist or a musician that he's always hanging out with. Then he's got Matthew McConaughey on the payroll. Yup. Um, and then there's another

SPEAKER_335: celebrity he had on the payroll for a while. Well, I, I, this idea that like Matthew McConaughey

SPEAKER_29: is like the strategy officer of what is his official role and how much money is he getting paid to do

SPEAKER_197: this? So I wouldn't look this up. And according to reporting from 2023, Matthew McConaughey is

SPEAKER_03: getting paid quote more than $10 million a year to serve as a creative advisor and TV pitchman. And that's according to the wall street journal. So how much money is $10 million a year? It's about

SPEAKER_355: $27,400 per day. And I gotta tell you what, Mark, I'll do it for half.

SPEAKER_08: I mean, it's a big number, 10 million bucks, but I guess if you've got like a hundred billion

SPEAKER_04: dollar company, I guess you can give somebody 10 million, but that's a lot of cheddar.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. I don't know what people get paid. Juan, would he be considered a list like Tom, like Harrison Ford is a list and George Clooney's a list.

SPEAKER_358: We're in a very strange time in the movie industry. Conventionally. Yes. He would have been

SPEAKER_21: like, he would have been who you'd normally think would be, you know, Oscar,

SPEAKER_224: like was in all those rom-coms, had a, had a, had a, has a big career.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah. He's a legit guy. But in 2025, there's really only a handful of people who like, we know can definitely open a

SPEAKER_19: movie. Even guys like Will Smith are no longer like sure things. And Bill Smith is more.

SPEAKER_363: So it's basically Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah. I mean, Bruce, even Bruce had a stumble with that last mission impossible. Like who is still an A-lister? It's hard to say.

SPEAKER_13: Lon, great job. We'll see you on another episode soon. We'll drop you off. And we got a couple of

SPEAKER_07: business stories to get through today that are critically important. Well, that was fun. And what I like about that is we really got to talk about all the great internet companies spending

SPEAKER_06: money on this. This is not something you should do when you have a small amount of money. But if you're a billion dollar company, you got over a billion dollars in your bank account, why not do it?

SPEAKER_07: And here's what you should do. If you have under a hundred million, you want to participate in this. I might do this next year. You should do a spec Superbowl commercial, let it out and say,

Chamath Palihapitiya: this is what, if we could afford a Superbowl commercial, this would be our Superbowl commercial. So you can hijack the Superbowl commercial by releasing your not Superbowl commercial,

SPEAKER_99: or we can't afford a Superbowl commercial, but we made one anyway. You should punk rock this. I'm going to advise a bunch of my startups. If you have 10 million in revenue and you want to go

SPEAKER_06: spend a hundred K making a not Superbowl commercial, I'll retweet it for you. I think it's like a really good idea to punk rock and gorilla market into the Superbowl and release it with a press release.

SPEAKER_147: And then also say, or if you wanted to take it up one, one notch higher, say,

SPEAKER_02: this is our band Superbowl ad. They wouldn't let us play this. It's two X or two Y. And then people

SPEAKER_147: will talk about that as a controversial free speech point. And then you get even more play.

SPEAKER_07: By the way, I think, um, you know, the meditation app did an election night commercial.

SPEAKER_366: I don't know if you saw that. This is 2024. They did it. Okay. So it was a couple of months ago. I remember getting a lot of feedback on this. They just did a silent ad. We brought this ad space

SPEAKER_369: to give you 30 seconds of silence. Yep. It's pretty effective. Cause I'm already talking quieter.

SPEAKER_370: I'm already on NPR voice. Yep. Just silence. You're welcome.

SPEAKER_373: I mean, it's so powerful when you think about it, like it's election night, everything is going

SPEAKER_06: chaotic and comms like boom. And I know this because calm was the number one app of the year. According to apple, they gave it the app of the year, not just health, but overall when Trump became president as a like kind of sub tweet troll of Trump, like, listen, I know it's going to be chaotic. Captain chaos is in, you know, get calm. So when Trump won, I was like, this is going to be great. We're going to sell a lot of eight sleeps and a lot of calm meditation apps. Uh, people are going to be

SPEAKER_375: all high strong and bent out of shape. Okay. What else do we got in the news? There's a bunch of news

SPEAKER_147: going on. This is rapid fire. Go through it. All right. So, uh, AI news to kick things off.

SPEAKER_03: Uh, there's an enormous event going on in France. We talked about this just for a hot second at the end of last week, JD Vance is going, I think Modi is going. Um, but the whole point is that France has unveiled a lot more spending than we expected. They're putting together a over $100 billion private investment pool, Jason, to build data centers, investing companies. There's a new, um, pan EU kind of like AI corporate consortium being put together that general catalyst is a part of. Okay. And I think it's a pretty big deal, frankly.

SPEAKER_99: So they put a pool of capital together. Viva la France. They're going to try to compete in

SPEAKER_08: data centers and AI. As we talked about, they got tons of nukes. They got tons of energy. This gives them a pole position. So what a forward thinking country in that they decided,

SPEAKER_06: you know what, we're not going to shut our nukes down. We're going to lean into nukes because we know we don't want to, we don't have oil in France that I know of. So, uh, if we don't have that, let's go clean, let's build extra nuclear. They were 80, 90% nuclear at one point. Now they're probably 60, 70% nuclear and 20% renewables. But if you have extra capacity for

SPEAKER_323: nuclear and people need data centers, absolutely. Why wouldn't you put data centers in France and, uh, get some pan au chocolat. And, uh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I mean, I hear croissants in France cost a lot less than croissants in the U S so I'm aboard. Um, it's 109 billion euros and it's called the EU AI champions initiative. Oh, that's the general catalyst thing. There's a bunch of AI stuff coming out of France right now. And I know people have given Europe a lot of stick for its regulatory posture. They do seem to be shifting Jason. And I

SPEAKER_05: think that it would be great to have two hubs of AI development in the free world to, to counterpoint China. Um, and then finally, one last thing here, Mistral, the French foundation, AI model company

SPEAKER_03: and Helsing, the European defense company are going to work together on AI defense tech for Europe. And I thought that sounds very American. So we have a big investment, we have less regulation and we have guns. Europe is going American on AI. Yep. Hey, pay your fair share. I love it. And then, uh, yeah,

Chamath Palihapitiya: we had talked last week that UAE was going to invest, uh, in data centers there. And so this is great news. And, uh, if you want to play a part in the AI future, there's a couple of ways to go about it.

SPEAKER_99: Obviously you could have great PhDs coming out of your universities who know how to write code, et cetera. You could have energy, uh, you could have data centers. There's a lot of ways to go about it and you could lower regulations so things can move faster. Good on them. I also saw, you know, and I, and I, uh, replied to you, uh, Sam lesson who worked, um, he's, uh, I think he's slow ventures is his venture capital firm and he had work, uh, at Facebook for a long time. And obviously his wife

SPEAKER_06: is the Jessica lesson from the information, which we sometimes quote here. Oh yeah. He did a really interesting tweet. You can pull it up. He says simple slash obvious AI company to build replace,

SPEAKER_99: do not reply at email addresses with please reply at, and you know, you could read his like little pitch

SPEAKER_06: on it, but my Lord, I always hated do not reply emails. Cause I'm like, if you could get a reply from a customer, like, why wouldn't you want that? Like that makes total sense. But you know, with AI, you could have people reply and then send them a thoughtful AI based reply first. And then if they need a human, they could ask for a human at any point in time, just kind of like you do on the phone where you say, I need an agent and, um, yes, somebody should build. Please reply at, as a

SPEAKER_07: company, just take his advice here. This is a great idea to just build an AI email gateway that does this

SPEAKER_06: and this only where it's human in the loop. You make a web interface. I mean, this could change everything for small businesses. What a great obvious idea. And, you know, uh, you just have to be willing to

SPEAKER_375: iterate on it, but I just wanted to give him a shout out, uh, because that is a great idea.

SPEAKER_390: I think it's a great idea. And it actually makes me pretty encouraged about how much space there

SPEAKER_02: still is in the market to take modern AI technology and apply it at legacy systems to improve the overall consumer and customer experience to use kind of a buzzword term. This isn't even that hard

SPEAKER_03: off the shelf technology, Jason, you could make it with pretty much, I think any major LLM API. But here's the question that I have, build it or buy it. If you're a company,

SPEAKER_05: would you want to pay a SaaS fee for this? Or would you want to just have your own crew spin up

SPEAKER_07: your own version of it? Sure. I mean, in all cases, you have this, it's a feature,

David Friedberg: it could be done internally, yada, yada. I would say if you make it and it's $99 a month for up to

SPEAKER_99: 10,000 emails and it's $1,200 a year, why would anybody build it? Because it's cheap. A developer's

David Friedberg: going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars in a year of work to do it. And like Squarespace, you know, when I always tell people about like using Squarespace, they constantly add features to it. So it wasn't like a Shopify competitor. It was like more for like a beautifully designed website and Shopify was for e-commerce, but they added the e-commerce features. Then they, you know,

SPEAKER_99: it wasn't for selling content, like maybe Patreon or some of those other platforms are for where you can sell content or email newsletters or videos. And then they added that. So what you could do with this is you make it for email, then you add it to WhatsApp, you add it to text, whatever, but it's

SPEAKER_06: a really great wedge. And what I would do is I would make it free for under a thousand emails and just see what happens. So if somebody wants to do this idea, you know, find a friend or two, email me,

SPEAKER_99: Jason at Calacanis.com, go to launch.co slash apply and build a prototype. If your prototype's good, I'll give you 25K or 125K to go to Founder University or, you know, to the launch accelerator.

SPEAKER_375: It's just such an obvious idea. I'm happy to give people their first check to give it a shot if they're actually developers and they make a prototype. So somebody can clip this and put it on, uh, you know, uh, our request for startup shout out to Sam lesson. Great idea. Uh, I think you could build it for 25 to 125 K no problem. So in baseball, you're on your weekends. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: The Mendoza line is kind of like the threshold at which someone becomes like ineffective at batting.

SPEAKER_03: I think it's like a 0.2 batting average. I wonder if they'll be like a SAS line. Like if you charge less than one 10th of the cost of a developer for your SAS product, no one's going to build it because it's so much cheaper to buy it. And I wonder if there's a way we can, we can use that to like frame what software products might be at risk. Yeah. I'd say three developers. If you have to put

SPEAKER_06: three, if the cost of building something and maintaining it in your company is three developers,

SPEAKER_99: you're probably not going to do it because you got other things you'd want to put the three developers on, but under three developers, you probably just want to buy it. Right. So for us internally,

SPEAKER_06: we built all of our systems for tracking companies using Coda and notion and Zapier and some other tools that was under three developers of work. Like you could have, I think we probably have in total three,

SPEAKER_99: P four people on the team spending 20% of their time each, like less than one full-time person. And they're not even developers. They're just savvy business people who know how to use these kind

SPEAKER_06: of scripting tools. So yeah, it might be like a two developer rule. If it's over two developers or more, just, you know, we'll do it in turn, you know, or if it's under takes under two developers, just buy the software that's out there. There's something there where you, you don't want to waste

SPEAKER_238: too many developers on a project. So you don't have too many projects. I mean, we talk a lot about how focus is so important for startups. And then we also talk about rolling your own software. Well, those do

SPEAKER_366: kind of contrast a little bit. Well, now you've got a management team that instead of doing their job

SPEAKER_06: is managing the building of the infrastructure for the company. So you've got to really think is this worth doing? And I can tell you at the core of running an accelerator or an incubator is processing a large number of applications efficiently, tracking a large number of companies and their progress. So when you're an at scale investor, it does make sense to build custom software. If you're a firm that does six investments a year and you process 2,000 applications, yeah, you can use off the shelf software. We have 20,000 applications. We do a hundred investments. We're tracking, I don't know, a thousand companies that we've either invested in or that are in our programs like Founder University. So yeah, we need custom software. You know, there was another story that you had put on the docket about, um, IT unemployment on the rise. I thought that was a very

SPEAKER_03: interesting story. So on Friday, we showed a chart showing that there's been a pretty sharp, uh, decline

SPEAKER_02: in how many new people were being hired into tech roles in the U S and I found some more data on that.

SPEAKER_03: So according to, um, Department of Labor data that the Wall Street Journal, uh, published the number of unemployed IT workers here in the States rose from about a hundred thousand to about 150,000 last month. And that pushed IT unemployment from 3.9% kind of below the national average, just a little bit, to 5.7%. Now, some of this is end of year cleaning house companies, letting people go and so forth. But I, I wouldn't have thought in today's moment when there's so much opportunity in technology that we would have a higher unemployment rate for IT folks than the average American

SPEAKER_197: worker. And the question is, is this AI showing up in the numbers, Jason? I think it's two things.

SPEAKER_06: One there's, um, the software in it is getting better and better and it's being offshored. So the, that combination of offshoring and let's call it self-serve. So you are in a remote company, you have a problem with the Mac mini or whatever I sent you, or the camera, if the microphone, the camera and the Mac mini are, you know, well-constructed in the software, like restreams well-constructed, are you going to ask for tech support from producer court or Chris, or are you just going to try to solve it yourself? You're probably going to just try to solve it yourself to not bother them. And you'll be a little self-reliant and the answers are there. So

SPEAKER_29: I don't think it's AI replacing the person. I think it's the person replacing the IT person. I think what it is, is the customer, you know, the executive going to chat GPT and saying,

SPEAKER_147: how do I underline in word? That's what's happening here. Okay. So essentially people are more, uh, empowered by improved software and improved ability to go out and find their own answers.

SPEAKER_02: So in an IT context, going back to your early IT experience, we just need fewer bodies. Okay.

SPEAKER_07: I'll take that. You're not going to call the support desk if you can call an AI. So instead of calling the support desk, go to chat GPT, go to YouTube, go to Gemini, ask the same question. Yeah. Go to Grok and you're probably half the time going to solve your issue. So the number of calls coming into the help desk go down because of AI. So this is a very weird one. It's not that AI is like exactly

SPEAKER_99: replacing the person. It's that people are going to AI to solve their problems. And I suspect this will happen with lawyers and accountants as well. And doctors, all of those professions. Before we call

SPEAKER_150: our attorneys, we upload a document to chat GPT and we ask it, is this a standard safe? Has anything been changed? Here's the standard safe. Smart. So before you call your attorneys and spend 800,

SPEAKER_06: 1200 dollars, shout out to expensive attorneys everywhere. Shout out. Yes. Shout out. You should,

David Friedberg: as a founder, take the document and just ask chat GPT to analyze and say, how is this

SPEAKER_07: term sheet I got from a venture capitalist different than the standard term sheet? Then when you go talk to your attorney, you could also upload as an employee. Here's my non-compete, non-disclosure, whatever you signed when you, you know, my assignment of IP. You could ask chat GPT to analyze it, summarize it. And then you can go to your employer or your employment attorney and say, hey, who owns my IP in this case, if I use my own laptop on the weekends, all of this is to say the first

SPEAKER_99: third or the first half of questions for professional service people are going to be answered not by

SPEAKER_03: Google, but by chat GPT. Oh, we're done. This goes back to, we talked about glean the other day on the show, which is essentially AI for internal corporate answers. And I, Yahoo was a customer. So I actually got to use it for a second before I quit and they just hit a hundred million ARR. So there's another example of just this playing out in the market. I will say though, I think for biggest, the biggest companies, you're going to need it staff because their internal systems are so complex. It's a little bit harder to chat GPT your way out of them. Um, but for anything under a thousand people, I think you're dead on.

SPEAKER_99: All right. So we're going to have a big week this week with earnings. I'm just going to pick my top three that I want to go over. You can pick your top three and we'll meet in the middle. I really want to understand what's going on at Robin hood, read it. And my third choice, let's see Zillow, Shopify, Freshworks, similar web, Lyft and solar winds are going to come out on Tuesday. So I guess I got to go Lyft is my choice there because you know, I want to see how they're responding to the situation, um, with self-driving. I got to go Robin hood and read it. Cause I think those two are crushing it. It's super important to Robin hood. I never sold a share of Robin hood. We, we distributed from our first fund or Robin investment at like, I don't know if it was 18 or $20 a share. I think it's at 50

SPEAKER_02: bucks a share right now and growing six, 34 shirt up 0.6% look, but look at that tear from the big beginning of 2024. When it was 13, 14 bucks a share, it has been ripping all through the last

SPEAKER_427: year in the lifetime one, because what happened this, this is a really important lesson for

SPEAKER_29: everybody lifetime. This is a, this is yes. So this is the lifetime chart. That peak is when Kathy would, and when it went public and I was locked up for the first six months. So if you look at that chart, I think it peaked early at 50 or $60 a share. What was the peak? Uh, this was the peak was 70. Okay. So this is really important. It went to $70 a share and did it go public in 22 or 23?

SPEAKER_151: I think it was very early 22. It's August 21. I'm sorry. Okay. Wow. August 21. So I couldn't sell

SPEAKER_29: August 21 was so Zerpy kind of Zerpy in the air. And so people went nuts for Robin hood and then it came crashing down. Everybody's like, oh my God, this is a terrible company. I was like, this company's great. People love this product. I'm not selling. I'm going to hold Robin hood forever. Little did I know that Robin hood would continue to crush it. And if you just watch it, it comes back.

SPEAKER_06: It does. And now here we are $56 a share. You know what? And it's peaking right now. I'm not selling it. I think I told everybody, I think that this is going to be a trillion dollar company.

SPEAKER_03: What's the market cap of Robin hood right now? 50 billion. Exactly. So I changed the chart if we're watching the YouTube version and I threw on Jason, this is just the federal funds overnight target rate, the fed rate, as we call it. Got it. And what happened was you can see this was very much in the Zerp era, the early trading period, and then rates went up and there's a bit of a lag and then Robin hood rises. But one thing I think people forget about Robin hood's resurgence was frankly, it made tons of money off of holding a lot of cash from its customers. And so when the price of money went up, a lot of fintech companies saw a pretty substantial boost to their revenues. So the fed giveth and the fed taketh away. But Robin's one of my favorite examples of how the fed can really be on both sides of a trade. Now you wanted Reddit. Let me pull it up for you.

SPEAKER_99: Yeah. So Wednesday, I think we, we have Robin hood and Reddit. I don't know if they announced

SPEAKER_06: beginning of the day, end of the day, but we could probably grab like Zillow is an interesting one on Tuesday coming out as well. Cause that would give us some insight into the changes that occurred with that settlement in the real estate market. So maybe Tuesday, we grab Zillow lift Wednesday, we grab Robin hood, read it Thursday. I guess we got to do Coinbase with all the changes in crypto.

SPEAKER_04: Yes, absolutely. And then maybe Airbnb, cause that's like an interesting bellwether. So there I got six that I'm interested in. You can pick a couple as well. And that gives us like what we'll

SPEAKER_99: cover this week. Cause there's so many startup lessons from, from that cohort of six. Right. And

SPEAKER_375: it's a marketplace marketplace marketplace, content marketplace marketplace. So it's five marketplaces, one content company. I want to, the one only one I want to add Jason is what I

SPEAKER_17: have pulled up right now, which is monday.com. They're up 28% today because they reported this

SPEAKER_03: morning. And I ha it's rare to see a SAS company jump that much in the current moment. And just so people know, what does it take to crush as a public SAS company revenue growth of 32% year over year, faster than expected, um, better adjusted EPS than expected. And they've, they guided to about 1.21 billion for this year, which was above estimates and they're generating tons and tons of cash. So all you have to do is be at the pinnacle of public market growth, have expanding profitability, insane free cash flow generation, and be analyst expectations. And you too can have a greater

SPEAKER_04: than 10X multiple. I mean, they got a billion in yearly revenue. That's great. They're making money. They're profitable. They're growing at over 30% year over year. All of this is great.

SPEAKER_07: So maybe this is the beginning of the return of SAS. And I bet you that their employee count is half of what it was at the peak. I bet you that's the trend is that they probably had like a thousand employees and now they have 500 because in order to get the earnings to go up like this,

SPEAKER_52: you gotta have some discipline, right? There has to be some discipline and look at all that free

Chamath Palihapitiya: cashflow. Wow. They can start buying their shares back. I mean, and this is one of the things about

SPEAKER_06: if SAS is gonna be perennially undervalued by the public markets, then these SAS companies can go private like Zendesk did, I believe, or they could start buying back their shares. So they really have

SPEAKER_375: two options of how to take advantage of valuations being low. Start buying back shares, which Uber's doing because they perceive their shares were low or you could, um, take the company private and then

SPEAKER_17: No, no, no more of that. No more take privates only publics. All right. I, I just, I really want

SPEAKER_02: more IPOs this year elsewhere in the world. Open AI is taping out its chip with TSMC, which means that

SPEAKER_03: they're moving forwards on having their own hardware. Keep in mind that, uh, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, everyone's doing this. We also have a bunch of chip companies in the twist 500, including etched, which we're trying to get onto the show. They are making transformers specific.

SPEAKER_337: Everybody wants etched on the show. So if somebody knows somebody at etched,

SPEAKER_06: let's try to get that locked up. Founder Friday's announcement, uh, founderfridays.tech is where founders host other founders in groups of ideally six to eight or enough to go around a round table and talk about what was your big win for the last month? What are your big challenges? That's the format. That's all it is. But imagine if you're a founder, you're home alone, you're in Miami,

SPEAKER_29: you're in Austin, you're in San Antonio, wherever you are. And you got to sit with five other, six other, seven other folks and answer that question. What's working, what's not working, and then give each other advice. It's the simplest format I ever came up with. It's the most effective format I've ever come up with. We decided we're going to do a founder of Friday's city competition. Oh, we used to do this in the old days with meetups. We're doing a founder

SPEAKER_06: Friday competition. Each city is going to have the ability to have a little startup competition amongst their six, seven, eight founders. You know, each give their best pitch. Then whoever they want to represent them in the nationals will get to go. We're going to make a bracket.

SPEAKER_335: We'll have eight international cities, eight U.S. cities, you know, they'll all battle each other.

SPEAKER_29: And then we will wind up with like four quarter, you know, whatever, four people in the finals, and then we'll rank them and we'll have a show where each of these folks get to pitch for two minutes, take a question from Alex and I, and then we'll pick the winner in each of the brackets. So there'll be an additional great reason to join a founder Friday's group or run one in your city.

SPEAKER_36: It's free for founders. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love demos. I love founders. I love vetting things. I love asking questions. I'm a hundred percent.

SPEAKER_07: There it is. So share it there. He's Alex, x.com slash Alex. I'm x.com slash Jason. He's got a newsletter. It's called cautious optimism. I have one. Just type in Jason Calacana stub stack. You'll

SPEAKER_13: find it, sign up for it. I'm going to start writing some email newsletters. I decided. Now that we got Lon here to help me, uh, with ideas and we'll see you all next time this week in startups.com slash docket to see Wednesday's docket ahead of time. You can ask questions in the docket. Thank you to notion for hosting the docket. Bye-bye.