SPEAKER_01: Well, we do love to look to the future here at Twist and we love to look to the future also at funny events like CES, something that I've been to many times, Jason.

SPEAKER_00: But there's also a lot of kind of what I would call CES slot, Boston Dynamics' new robot. This one has an LLM attached to it

SPEAKER_04: and will eventually be available to consumers or businesses.

SPEAKER_01: But Jason, what is Hyundai good at? Mass manufacturing. They're good at getting things right at scale in a real world environment. So if this is what they're showing off on stage, I presume it's probably 80% as good as we think it is.

SPEAKER_00: And it really kind of rivals the Sunday Robotics robot and these partnerships with auto companies.

SPEAKER_08: It's going to become a common trend that we'll continue to just watch.

SPEAKER_09: This is going to ramp up quite nicely. These companies will have no problem making hundreds of thousands of these and eventually millions. So if people want them, they'll get these down to, that looks like $5,000 to $10,000 eventually. Optimus and the Hyundai one, I would put at $20,000.

SPEAKER_10: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Century.

SPEAKER_12: New users get three months free of the business plan, which covers 150,000 errors. Go to century.io slash twist and use the code twist. Circle.so. The easiest way to build a home for your community, events and courses, all under your own brand. HubSpot. Check out the guide, how to get your first 100 customers. Download it for free at click hubspot.com slash twist one.

SPEAKER_15: All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. Today is January 9th, 2026. Alex is about to go on.

SPEAKER_17: Paternity, new baby coming. Congratulations, Alex. Number three. I'm so excited for you.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, I was talking to a venture capitalist that I really like, and she was like, hey, you're doing the thing no one does. You're making a middle child.

SPEAKER_07: And I'm like, great. I'm glad I'm keeping that TFR up. You know, I am a middle child

SPEAKER_21: and middle children rule the world because they don't get as much attention as the first or the last.

SPEAKER_09: So you have to just kind of carve your own way in the world. It's an advantage in a way. But yeah, I think there is something to it. And there's a lot on the docket today. We're going to go over, I was at CES earlier in this week and had a great fireside chat there that went really well with Bob from McKinsey and 1,700 people in the audience. It went out as an all-in episode. If you're on the all-in feed and yeah, you can go check that out. Bob from McKinsey, really great guy. Got to talk about all the AI stuff. But we're going to go through producer Oliver's here who's just crushing it on This Week in AI, our new spinoff podcast, Weekly Roundtable. He's going to come on

SPEAKER_03: and just go through some of those great products. And Alex and I will just have a quick reaction to them at the end of the show. But we got to talk about IPOs. This was my big trend for last year when we did our trend show on all-in and here, which was M&A would come roaring back and IPOs would come roaring back. I think you had the same take. M&A did come back this year. We saw the Grok acquisition, the Wiz acquisition, DoorDash did three, striped it a couple. The M&A is back on the menu, boys.

SPEAKER_09: And IPOs apparently are back on the menu. Let's talk about it.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah, first of all, we have two bits of IPO news here from the United States. In the same week, Jason, which is fantastic and very exciting.

SPEAKER_01: The biggest one is that Discord, the consumer gaming chat service that everyone likes to use, has filed confidentially to go public. Long-awaited, long-expected. I think actually on Monday, Jason, we went through a bunch of the Polymarket odds for who's going to go public. And we both thought that Discord was pretty high up there. Well, here we are. So it's a filing that's confidential. So we don't have all the numbers yet. We don't have a per share price. We don't know much that's new, Jason, other than that this is coming. Though I did want to provide a little context for folks. If you recall, a couple of years back, Microsoft tried to buy Discord for between 10 and $12 billion. The company said no, went out and raised capital at a $15 billion valuation. And now, a couple of years later, according to secondary trading, the company's worth something a little bit more like $7 to $8 billion. So it's looking like the 2021 era valuations were a good time for Discord. Still a very valuable business. Still great to see it go out. Probably a little disappointing for the last money in, Jason, but I think a lot of folks will still make a lot of money.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah, and we need to get more public companies out there. The public doesn't get to participate very early on because of the state, private, longer movement.

SPEAKER_27: Discord's been around for a long time. I'm trying to remember when I first heard about the startup.

SPEAKER_28: You can tell us when they launched their product. Always a really interesting.

SPEAKER_15: May 13th, 2015. 2015. Okay, so it's only 10 years old. I thought it was more on the 15th,

SPEAKER_09: but what an amazing story this is. 200 million global monthly actives, I believe, which is, you know, that's a pretty big footprint, folks.

SPEAKER_11: If there's three or four billion people online, you know, that means 20%, whatever, 10%, maybe 5%, 10% are using this product every month.

SPEAKER_03: And they make money, I believe, through subscriptions, right? That is this Nitro product. And then they may have some advertising on the margins, but I'm not sure exactly how that works

SPEAKER_28: because it started as a gaming platform, but then people took the platform

SPEAKER_07: and started using it for everything, right? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_19: I'm in like 15 different discords for different things. It's great fun. Everything from like fantasy authors to individual video games and early access.

SPEAKER_01: It's super popular. Nitro is the consumer subscription side of this, Jason. I think individual servers or kind of instances of Discord can charge for access and the Discord takes 10% of that. They did roll out a number of new advertising formats in 2025 after they swapped CEOs. I think clearly gearing up to juice revenue ahead of an IPO. And also they have a new product called Orbs, which is essentially a kind of like a virtual currency that you can earn by doing certain advertiser-driven tasks that they're expanding. So they're really trying, I think, to have a full court press on the advertising side to try to probably, one, augment growth and then de-risk them from just having a single main revenue line.

SPEAKER_09: I'm looking at my Discord right now. We have a This Week in Startups one. We're actually hiring a community manager here because we have so many disparate communities. We have angel investors at the syndicate. We have founders. We have founder universities. So we have the founders we've invested in in One Slack. We have founder university now global. We're using for Saudi WhatsApp and we're using the same thing in Japan, a WhatsApp instance because in those cultures, that's predominant here.

SPEAKER_31: That's what everyone uses. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: And then here, I'm in my Knicks fan TV Discord. So when they have a live show and they go over what happened in the Knicks game, it's kind of like a call-in radio program. They actually take the calls for Knicks fan TV through Discord. Why? They used to have a phone number, et cetera, but it always was low quality according to my friend CP, the franchise over there. And they just push everybody through Discord. Leo Laporte is very successfully running something called Club Twit, which I'm a member of. Everybody should join. It's like eight, 10 bucks a month, but he's got, from what I understand, a decent audience there. And his business, you know, has moved, I think, into subscriptions as a big denominator for him. And that's just great because it becomes a foundation and then you become less reliant on advertising and audience size. And then you can stay true to your mission. And in Leo's case, I think true to the mission means just that OG, Silicon Valley, Bay Area, look at tech and just people who just love the products and services, passionate about it. Whereas, you know,

SPEAKER_09: it's hard to compete now with so many podcasts out there. You really have to carve a niche for yourself. And I think people have now made Discord, Substack, Beehive, Patreon, you know, people pick which one of those they want to make their central hub. But it's a juggernaut of a program and a platform. And I think it has great upside. Also, it seems to have used the tried and true Reddit

SPEAKER_15: and siphoning off Reddit users to sort of create a new experience. Reddit didn't have chat. They kind of have

SPEAKER_09: a kludgy chat on it. It doesn't seem to be app-based. So that has also become a big win. I saw our friend Kevin Rose is now doing communities in his new Dig reboot. So he's back in the game and people love a good community, right?

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. The interesting thing, though, in the case of Discord

SPEAKER_01: is I'm not sure how quickly its user base is growing. When we think about Reddit right now, Jason, to go back to that example, they're seeing a boom right now in usage, actives and so forth. In the case of Discord, they've been saying this 200 million plus monthly active user number for at least a year. I think I saw a data point from like 2024, that was the same number. So my question is how good are they at driving increased monetization from a, let's say, roughly static user base? And if they're not very good at that, then I'm not sure what the growth story here is. So this is an IPO that I don't think

SPEAKER_19: we have all of our thinking done ahead of time. I think we're going to have to read this document when it comes out and learn quite a lot about the business and figure out how good its 2025 monetization efforts were and what kind of hope that gives us for growth down the road because Discord is doing, you know, I think the last number I heard was like $600 million revenue a couple years back. So it's at scale. But, you know, as we can see from Box, if you're not growing, your price sales multiple drops to the low single digits pretty quickly and that's brutal.

SPEAKER_36: Yeah, Reddit doesn't report their mouths, but they do report their daily active users

SPEAKER_11: which are 444 million, which is crazy. And then people estimate Reddit is at

SPEAKER_15: 850 million to a billion. So community you can make money on. It has to be a platform.

SPEAKER_03: It has to be user-driven. It's very hard to build like these community websites without the audience really driving it with these subreddits, these sub communities. If you want to be our community manager and you're passionate about startups, we're looking for a bar raiser for people who don't know the term bar raiser. That comes from Amazon. This is one of Bezos' big innovations. Hire somebody who would raise the bar of everybody on the team.

SPEAKER_11: So community at launch.co if you want to apply for that job. We need somebody who's been doing community for five or ten years

SPEAKER_03: and can tell us what we should do and how to run communities. We have ideas but this is always the tension, Alex, when you're running a business. You can hire maybe a young person or an enthusiastic person and kind of train them up on the job but if you're not an expert on it, it's going to be slow going, right? Whereas, you know, we're experts on podcasting

SPEAKER_09: and launching a new podcast is not very difficult for us but I need somebody who can teach me about community if you're that person.

SPEAKER_15: communityoutlaunch.co One of the core challenges facing every single early stage company is getting your first 100 customers and I say this all the time here on This Week in Startups to get there, sometimes you have to do creative things, even things that don't scale. So what does that actually mean and what are some tried and true techniques that have worked for founders in the past and which one of those can you tap for inspiration? To find out, you could join an accelerator or you could just check out this free resource online at HubSpot called a little pamphlet with generic ideas. No, it's a full framework and that framework is filled with practical tips and real-world case studies from amazing founders and experts including my pal Sam Parr and Sean Puri, you know, the hosts of My First Million which is a great podcast. I listen to every single episode. They're just awesome. So, download the guide for free at clickhubspot.com slash twist1 or just find a link in the description

SPEAKER_46: of this show and thanks to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring today's episode.

SPEAKER_01: That's a lesson I first learned at a startup actually when I was at Mattermark before things got a little wonky at the business side I had some headcount and my then boss Daniel Morrill was like, hey, you know what you should do? You should go hire the most senior person you can find and I was like at the time you know, 25, 26 I kind of viewed that as insulting in a way because you know you're younger your ego's more fragile but there's a lot to be said for hiring someone with a boatload of experience who can come also fill in your gaps. I love that.

SPEAKER_09: It is an ego thing. You correctly pointed out why people don't do this and what you have to learn in an organization is if you're the person who brings in an all-star

SPEAKER_15: who makes the team better if you were the person on the basketball team who recruited Kevin, if you're Draymond and you recruited Kevin Durant to join the Warriors and you win a chip or two with him that's like a very powerful position to have in the organization which is probably why the Warriors organization coveted Draymond even despite the fact that he's effervescent and unique in terms of his you know performances on the court. That's polite. Well no he's a basketball genius his IQ and I'm friends with him but his IQ is like way off the charts but he also has that passion like Dennis Rodman

SPEAKER_03: or any number of people where you know the double-edged sword of the passion can get you a technical foul but you want to be that person in the organization. You bring in an all-star what the boss man or lady's gonna think is okay this person cares about the business as much as I do and then you will always have a place in the organization because you can point to it and say yeah I've recruited that person. Anyway there's an important founder lesson in there congrats to all the people over at Discord and another great example of you know not selling opens up a lot of opportunities. The thing that sometimes happens

SPEAKER_09: when you do an IPO like this is you force the hand of acquirers. So now you've actually put a price on the company. When Slack went out I'm sure they had many offers to be purchased before they went for IPO but people don't remember Slack was a publicly traded company and then eventually that puts a price on it the price discovery happens the management team has to own the results every quarter the discipline comes in processes come in you can't wing it right and Reddit can't wing it anymore Steve Hoffman is one of the few founders who made that jump to being a public CEO and really guiding that company then acquirers can get really interested and say hey well we know the price of this company let's start building a position in it let's start talking to management and then you can get taken out like we're seeing with Netflix and Warner Brothers. Okay let's keep going.

SPEAKER_01: Really quickly Strava is also filed confidentially to go public Jason not as big of a name in this community as Discord is but it's worth noting that the company was last valued at 2.2 billion in a round that was led by Sequoia Strava if you don't know is an application for exercise people I have used it to track my runs for example it's a super great application they make their money off of consumers and remember when Reddit before it went public had that big fight and beef with its communities because they shut down third party application access to Reddit data and everyone was pretty mad at them

SPEAKER_06: for a bit Yeah you know people were creating a lot

SPEAKER_03: of value with their data but that wasn't getting back to the mothership and then the mothership said hey you know we gotta go buy whatever it was there was like Blue something which was the top Reddit app and they were like let's just buy it and we'll have a Reddit app that is actually up to speed X or formerly Twitter had a similar thing when you're growing and you can't get to everything yeah you provide

SPEAKER_09: API access when you become public sadly for developers and the community you kind of gotta capture that value which is why Zuckerberg shut down his APIs X shut down their APIs or charged a lot of money for them so at least if people were gonna build something competitive that was on your roadmap you could get paid for it

SPEAKER_05: that is the

SPEAKER_07: natural tension there I bring that up because in the case of Strava they did make some API changes

SPEAKER_01: some third party access changes and that made people really really mad but if you want to ensure that you're capturing all that value because you're gonna go public you do it so I'm not shocked to see Reddit do that and then list and then Strava go through a similar kind of internal

SPEAKER_19: fiasco with its user base and now list the company was valued at one and a half billion in 2020

SPEAKER_01: just to put some historical context here and it grew more than 50% last year and the information reports it's profitable so my question is how the hell did Sequoia manage to get in for such a cheap price but when this one does go out it should be around 500 million revenue profits so it should be a win for all of its prior backers and I'm excited to see more mid cap public companies Jason

SPEAKER_05: I just want more it's 80 bucks a year I believe is a subscription price

SPEAKER_11: and people are extremely loyal to it and this is another important founder lesson when people have their data in your product you know it's very hard for them to unsubscribe that's the best moat the best lock-in because I use as an example

SPEAKER_09: a product called Slopes Slopes has my last four years or five years of skiing data

SPEAKER_03: for me paying 50 bucks or 40 bucks whatever I'm paying for it I don't even know and if it was 150 bucks I'd still pay it I mean I might think about it at that level but I like to compare my stats from this year

SPEAKER_11: to the previous four years and that's one of the most important things you can do in a subscription business

SPEAKER_03: is have streaks have friendships and community all of those things equal the moat and so while anybody in the vibe coding era you know could pop out lovable or another tool and make a Strava competitor very quickly the data lock in is what makes these

SPEAKER_09: very special 90% of their revenue from what I've read comes from all of these subscriptions they could layer on ads and other things we will see consolidation in this space as well we have an incredible investment in a company called FitBod that just focuses on cross fitness there's obviously Whoop or a ring and then you have the function health the superpower dot com and those blood testing all of this eight sleep they're all going to come together and at some point there'll be a roll up of five or six of these products

SPEAKER_05: and then you'll get a really good picture of your health where should that stack

SPEAKER_01: be built because I could see eight sleep buying companies I could see Strava buying companies I could see the scanning companies buying other companies but if you were to pick some place to build

SPEAKER_07: that vertical integration where would you start

SPEAKER_03: well Apple Health obviously really cares about this Tim Cook cares about it and they've tried to maintain an app store where like the Google

SPEAKER_09: the Apple health data is not a really good app it's just kind of like the raw data and then other people build on top of it but people I think got frustrated I certainly did with my data inside of Apple because I was like just tell me my sleep score

SPEAKER_15: and it's like oh you want to get something out of sleep purchase one of these I bought an Apple watch already just give me my damn sleep score and they wouldn't do that so I got Whoop and I

SPEAKER_03: love Whoop and now I'm addicted to Whoop I can't imagine and I think I paid 200 bucks a year for Whoop it's like 20 or 30 bucks a month it might be 250 so I think between and Whoop just launched blood testing so they're going to put those two together everything's going to move to singularity it's just a matter of who has the hootspot to do it Strava going public means they have a currency to buy let's say if they wanted to buy FitBod if they couldn't buy Aura Function Health those things are worth billions but they could go down to the next

SPEAKER_09: year of you know apps and services that are worth hundreds of millions or even a billion and start to do that so we'll see who does it and now that M&A is back on the menu and IPOs are back on the menu this is what we want in our economy we want to have a vibrant

SPEAKER_15: IPO market and we want a vibrant M&A market and here we go we finally have it the best is yet to come the next three years are going to be gangbusters gangbusters this will be the year of the IPO and M&A I would say last year 2025

SPEAKER_09: was the return of M&A

SPEAKER_07: M&A will accelerate in 2026 and 7 Whoop is

SPEAKER_01: considering an IPO in 26 or 27 just to put some more context there and Aura Ring I think is going to be like $2 billion in revenue soon but they're not looking at an IPO soon so that's

SPEAKER_06: a content

SPEAKER_15: creator or you're building any kind of community oriented business like I am just making great videos or awesome websites it's not enough you need to spend real time with your community and you need to do that with tools that allow you to see what's going on and communicate smoothly and crisply with your

SPEAKER_32: community members that's why I'm so happy to partner with Circle the complete community platform for creators and brands with Circle you're going to get an easy way to build branded websites that help you that's super clutch and AI agents that can help you design manage data and even do the branding we use Circle here at launch to keep up with our founder university community we've done 14 founder universities around the world and they've helped us grow that from this tiny little program out of our

SPEAKER_46: that c-i-r-c-l-e dot s-o slash twist

SPEAKER_01: now you're saying the IPO market here's nuts you should see what's going on in Hong Kong there's been so many interesting AI IPOs you know we talked earlier about how companies go public so late here in the United States well two of China's AI tigers went out this week Zipu AI or Zeta AI as I think of them and Minimax both went public and they both do quite well Zipu AI was up 36% from its IPO price and Minimax doubled on its first day all the way up to 345 Hong Kong dollars per share they're both worth about six seven billion dollars and if you know the GLM models that do quite well that's Zeta AI and Minimax of course put out the M 2.1 preview which is doing quite well on LM Arena these are companies Jason that we talked about a little bit on Monday but they're small and I just love seeing them go out early so if any of

SPEAKER_19: them does well well you could make a lot of money and

SPEAKER_15: that means you get to play late stage VC late stage VC is not a guarantee it's not

SPEAKER_03: like buying Netflix folks it's not like buying Nvidia you're going to be taking a lot of risk and I think these companies if I'm reading correctly here Zipu Z-H-I-P-U AI which

SPEAKER_09: reported 53 million for the first nine months so very similar probably at 70 million or so maybe they'll hit 80 million in 2025 I think is the estimate so these are tiny when compared to the IPOs we see in America where I think a billion dollars is what people are looking for again increases risk increases opportunity if one of these goes 10x year over year 10x again year over year like Claude did where Anthropic or OpenAI or Lovable you know

SPEAKER_22: or MicroOne a lot of these companies can have 10x year over these AI companies can have 10x revenue year over year do you get to participate in that

SPEAKER_19: I mean Anthropic went from basically a run 1 billion dollar run rate to a 9 billion run rate last year that's 9x at scale

SPEAKER_01: the thing though that I'm just a little worried about is these Chinese AI companies are punching way above their revenue weight in terms of model quality but because they pursue this open approach to just kind of letting

SPEAKER_19: people take it it does seem to be a little bit tougher on the revenue side of Jason and I wonder if they're going to be able to keep funding

SPEAKER_01: their research at the pace that they

SPEAKER_11: billion he was also on my panel earlier in the week along with Bob

SPEAKER_03: from McKinsey and the three of us were chatting things up and I got to talk to him backstage and during the panel and after that anthropic

SPEAKER_09: investment for them has been tremendous and he talked about you know we used to talk about triple triple triple double double for SAS companies you market there's also just massive adoption of this technology which we will see in the GDP prints around the world with people who are adopting it and we'll see it in the head count versus earnings versus top line revenue where head count as we talked about for three years now static team size you're just going to be able to do more with less

SPEAKER_82: now

SPEAKER_19: I want to talk about Anthropica a little bit more because why not so Jason

SPEAKER_01: you mentioned them and their fundraise and how their venture capitalist partners have done so well the company is looking to raise 10 billion dollars more at a 350 billion valuation now that number 350 is actually the reported price that both Microsoft and NVIDIA late last year pledged to invest up to $15 billion as a pair so we've kind of seen $183 billion valuation we seem to have scaled past what VCs can afford to put up themselves so GIC the Singaporean Sovereign Wealth Fund and COATU are set to lead this round it's going to close in the next couple of weeks it's not done yet the numbers could still change but this is the reporting on the ground and I just want to answer everyone's questions about this is this froth no because

SPEAKER_19: I went back and I pulled all the data Jason it's kind of crazy to me how this company's effective multiple on its run rate hasn't gotten out of hand it's not crazy whatsoever so if you think about the company's growth through time it had a run rate multiple

SPEAKER_01: of about 31x March of last year it was about 37x September of last year and then it was about 20x at the end of

SPEAKER_09: judged on performance

SPEAKER_15: you go from a voting mechanism hey who do we think is going to win in the private markets to a weighing a

SPEAKER_09: scale that just weighs the quality of these earnings and the quality of the company the management etc and so you'll just see eventually this will be priced not on price to sales but eventually earnings that's going to take years just like Uber Lyft Door Dash were losing money on every ride while they built a scale and then at some point they flip the J curve which shows the investment you're losing money losing money investing investing investing whether it's in factories or software or team and or building a brand and a marketplace and then

SPEAKER_11: come out of the J curve and then you become money printing and a company like Tesla could be sitting on 30 40 billion a company

SPEAKER_09: like Meta Apple could be sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars and so this is you know anticipated and a healthy part of the billion is incredibly rare almost never I mean Google Apple Facebook Tesla you would have to go into those ranges and typically people would be selling into that kind of strength SpaceX would be another one so I think SpaceX if you

SPEAKER_11: not 20% anymore it's between five and 10 is what the venture firms wind up

SPEAKER_22: having in ownership I

SPEAKER_01: think you just really outlined the difference between today's venture capital market and the one in days past because I

SPEAKER_07: Google was at IPO so you can make a lot more money if you can stay in these companies longer the outcomes

SPEAKER_05: are much bigger because people stay private

SPEAKER_09: longer and because the opportunity space is not just niche software for enterprises not just niche consumer products or even

SPEAKER_11: mass consumer products these are industry changing and leading companies eventually they wind up having two or

SPEAKER_09: three business lines that could be contributing to the bottom line in the case of Amazon you have AWS you have their traditional you know selling stuff e-commerce and then you have their booming ad business so you have three ways to win with that stock right Tesla you have power walls solar cars self driving

SPEAKER_28: and optimus that's like four different ways to win if you put energy together I

SPEAKER_19: just did interview with zipline the drone delivery company for for twist coming out to your podcast feed soon and they started off people kind of forget this doing medical deliveries in Africa and now we think of them as the oh they're the Chipotle delivery company oh they're the Walmart delivery company in Texas but they have

SPEAKER_07: several large business lines as well

SPEAKER_05: and I think it's such a great way to have a durable company and they went from doing fixed wing aircraft being slingshotted into the

SPEAKER_15: air they have

SPEAKER_09: these now you know backyard units forget about what they're attaching like the drive-through windows they're attaching to you know the Starbucks and

SPEAKER_03: Chipotes of the world but they have these sort of backyard bizarre looking netted out arrays I guess is what I would call them with their drones coming in not fixed wing but quadcopters

SPEAKER_68: or whatever and man they look crazy and when you see them buzzing around it's like okay that's the future

SPEAKER_19: this is from their Chipotle launch video it shows how they drop the package down Jason into the little catchment that you're describing yeah this is a company that has

SPEAKER_07: multiple approaches to the market and they're all crushing it and I just can't tell you how excited I

SPEAKER_09: plan this is critically important because you don't want to get injured with a quadcopter right there's rotors and they're big and they're noisy but if they can stay up 100 feet or 200 feet and drop a tether down put their

SPEAKER_96: fork it you know that's like

SPEAKER_09: somebody jumping in front of a delivery bike if you're dumb enough to do that you know it's your call but yeah this is going to be an incredible

SPEAKER_11: new future

SPEAKER_68: and I

SPEAKER_03: was when I was in LA or the Bay area they literally will tell you you order something at 10 p.m. at night they're like do you want this from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. or 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and you're like well nobody's going to be at the gate until 9 a.m. so I don't care but sure leave it there between 4

SPEAKER_15: tech startup you need to keep your eyes on how your product is being used and you definitely need to understand what happened when things go wrong but logs are notoriously messy it's especially hard to gather the insights you need when your logs errors and performance data all live in different tools but now there's a solution Sentry Sentry Sentry's logs are trace connected and structured allowing you to follow everything clearly and understand the context even if you're a non-technical founder whether you're debugging your front end back end your mobile

SPEAKER_32: app whatever it is Sentry will give you the context you and your team need to get the problem fixed and to get on with your day you got other things you gotta focus on that's why more next

SPEAKER_01: up China is mad about the Meta Manus deal now if everyone recalls I think it was on Monday we talked about Meta buying Manus they are the formerly Chinese now Singaporean AI company they've built a very popular agent in fact they were probably the first viral AI agent service that we saw out in the market Jason and the deal was for I think $2.5 billion including $500 million for employee retention so 2 billion to the company a half billion to the staff everyone's very happy hunky dory Meta wins no China's very mad they're looking into the deal now from everything that I've read and understood I don't think China actually has a mechanism to stop this transaction from happening but

SPEAKER_19: so this might be kind of a one and done situation a manis only exception which I think is too bad because there's probably a lot of talent inside of China that American companies would love to purchase via a Singaporean domicile but

SPEAKER_09: we design them it's a great you know you got factories you trying to get people from farmland and no running water and living on you know a dollar a day and hey we can maybe create a middle class and we can get iPhones every six months or 12 months that are incredible you know now we're in the standoff TikTok being spun out meta buying manis this is all part of a theme

SPEAKER_03: around can the two empires coexist and can they do business together I actually am hopeful I think there's so much opportunity for these two great nations to work together that we may see some type of deal

SPEAKER_09: from our chief deal maker that results in a little more fluidity in investment because China needs investment and maybe just a little less saber rattling we'll see but I am actually hopeful for it this is a very dangerous thing for China to do because China has been trying to get their entrepreneurial chops back going after Jack Ma was relieved of duty re-educated whatever happened to Jack Ma exactly with Ant and the financial arm of Alibaba Alibaba thank you and

SPEAKER_15: now what we'll probably see is great entrepreneurs there who have the ability

SPEAKER_09: to move around the globe are going to just move then start something so instead of redomiciling and moving the company which hey listen if you're in America and you want to move from California to the great state of Texas or Florida as we've seen Larry Sergey and others Peter Thiel David Sachs you have that ability here in the United States what they're going to have to do is do it ahead of time and Singapore is a great landing pad the UAE Saudi Hong Kong used to be the landing pad but that now that's obviously controlled by mainland so I think what we'll probably see is Chinese entrepreneurs leaving the country not will mute entrepreneurship and they need to actually get entrepreneurship going

SPEAKER_03: again so it's a short term mistake for them to try to block these kind of deals and it's a big win

SPEAKER_09: for Meta and for Benchmark remember Benchmark got really hammered for being anti-American you know not patriotic for investing in the company I think it was kind of patriotic for us to engage other nations somehow that became not patriotic which I understand especially if it's like military

SPEAKER_05: applications or AI do you not buy

SPEAKER_07: into the idea then

SPEAKER_05: that the China versus AI battle is essentially

SPEAKER_07: to the death because

SPEAKER_05: I read a lot of people who are critical I think it's important that we be the leading economy in the

SPEAKER_03: maybe 60 70% of the revenue will go to closed source like we saw with Android and iOS that's the likely scenario and we saw that this week at CES and we're going to get to our CES segment in just a moment the most interesting thing in 2026 at CES in my stack available to any automaker

SPEAKER_32: so I think we'll have an Android which

SPEAKER_76: would be the NVIDIA stack

SPEAKER_09: versus the proprietary stacks which would be Waymo and Tesla and so we're going all that does is accelerate adoption the fact that Android came out after iOS just drove massive adoption of smartphones and the mobile ecosystem so

SPEAKER_30: that's what's upon us

SPEAKER_19: before we jump over all this is the NVIDIA announcement that I recall seeing this drive Hyperion ecosystem to accelerate the road to full autonomy just to make sure I understand this this is essentially NVIDIA putting together the software and hardware necessary to turn any car into a self driving car but they're not going to be building themselves this is just to enable OEMs and ODMs to do it on their

SPEAKER_03: quickly get to level four very quickly being I don't know a year to three years essentially they're probably halfway to

SPEAKER_09: where Tesla is now in other words they got to 98% 99% the

SPEAKER_03: to buy sensor arrays chips and then do world building inside of their tools so it's the end-to-end AI open sourced it's the world building data that tool so you can build worlds and synthetic data and they'll have some basic amount of world data whether you're doing robotics or self driving

SPEAKER_09: both operating in the human world and then you can buy the sensor arrays what is NVIDIA's goal here they just want to sell more on-board computers so they're looking at yeah they just want to sell it's like selling H100 so I think in an arms race they're like we've got ammunition here who needs guns and ammunition you figure out what war you want to fight are you fighting a war to sell more Mercedes Benz or are you selling to Lyft Uber and DoorDash to enable their fleets to deliver stuff doesn't matter to them who's buying it it matters that they're selling it and how many can they sell if you want to sell a lot of chips you know Android being

SPEAKER_03: accelerate the road to autonomy the road to autonomy is going to accelerate and there'll be many more players

SPEAKER_01: yes thank god I love competition here because as I've said 10,000 times on the show I hate driving so really excited about having

SPEAKER_19: this on all my cars in the future I

SPEAKER_09: please keep your eyes on the road it's so good that I think people are now starting to trust it so implicitly that they are assuming that you know because it's better than a human they can take their eyes off the road they can sleep they can watch a movie they can text you might be able to do a quick text you might be able to change your podcast you know flip back and forth between this week and startups this week and AI and all in you can flip between those three I think that's allowed but not other ones you can just you have enough time to flip between my three podcasts but no other podcasts I think that's enough

SPEAKER_116: for

SPEAKER_03: now but don't go to sleep because if it hits a construction zone or one of the Tesla

SPEAKER_15: Uber Neuro WeRide Pony they're putting so much pressure on these companies that they have to get this stuff deployed immediately no shame in the safety driver no shame in a contained area please stop putting it's all these stock promoters there are all these stock promoters who have built a position in a day I watch these stock promoters it's a really weird phenomenon people have placed bets on the stocks then they've started YouTube channels and every day they'll release two or three videos about you won't believe that Tesla solved FSD the stocks going to the moon you won't believe that Uber has doing this and they're just in this social media war and they're making money two ways they're making money off of advertising and their revenue share they're also making money through their bets on the companies it's a very weird moment we're in so I really hate this phenomenon it's like GameStop but in the real world which makes it dangerous like hey this is the world we live in people can

SPEAKER_05: place bets I'm less worried about the safety driver game Jason

SPEAKER_19: because every time you talk about FSD you get slightly more rapturous

SPEAKER_07: and every time I

SPEAKER_09: well and then if you can drive or if you can be driven by it and you were taking Ubers now for 10 20 bucks a day for your car it's essentially what you would have paid 30 or 40 bucks for ride sharing it's pretty compelling so

SPEAKER_05: you got to get on the FSD trend well we do love to look to the future here at

SPEAKER_01: twist and we love to look to the future also at funny events like CES I

SPEAKER_04: mentioned you but it wasn't whatever it is let's not

SPEAKER_68: make it about me let's get right to what the audience wants which is what people thought the top 10 products were

SPEAKER_21: we had producer Oliver go through and ask producer Claude what the top 10 consensus

SPEAKER_09: product was across all these top 10 lists from Engadget the blog I started with Peter Rojas and Brian Alvey and Sean Gold and Brian Block to Vox The Verge which was a bunch of refugees from Engadget and here's

SPEAKER_68: what they said so this is like a meta list yeah we

SPEAKER_137: created

SPEAKER_00: yeah exactly with the help of Claude obviously there's a lot of reporting at CES but there's also a lot of kind of what I would call CES slop that I'm some other people the weird stuff you're saying the weird stuff there's a lot of really cool stuff as well the first one I application of

SPEAKER_04: those so let's

SPEAKER_03: play here and see what this one does and

SPEAKER_68: I'm

SPEAKER_03: assuming the reason this is important is this one has an LLM attached to

SPEAKER_00: and backwards arm spin all around which we haven't seen from any other humanoids up to this point it also can handle I think around 100 pounds of load which is pretty heavy this is kind of my first 10 products from CES

SPEAKER_09: okay and everybody remembers there was a massive M&A movement at Google in 2013 or so and they actually bought Boston Dynamics as Mecca Robotics and Bot Dolly which did computer vision industrial perception that did robotic arms and computer vision you probably remember this really well Alex because you

SPEAKER_15: leave out of Google when they went on their cost cutting so

SPEAKER_05: probably a long term mistake yeah the reason why I'm excited about this one is that Hyundai

SPEAKER_01: owns Boston Dynamics table 80% of it and SoftBank owns 20% but Jason what is Hyundai good at mass manufacturing they're good at getting things right at scale and also the Boston Dynamics bot really

SPEAKER_05: going

SPEAKER_01: head to head which is

SPEAKER_05: great because it means the steel sharpened steel and figure yeah I mean we're going to have a dozen

SPEAKER_11: of these fascinating that the car companies are particularly good at building

SPEAKER_03: these I think it's two reasons they know how to manufacture stuff right with chips in it and batteries and they have production lines and they also use robotics to build cars so that's kind of interesting the people who are applying robotics in their factories are going to be building the robots to go into other people's factories

SPEAKER_11: and other use cases all right really interesting anything else you want to add

SPEAKER_145: there Oliver let's get to the next one

SPEAKER_00: just another example Aptronic has a huge so this particular robot the LG's robot called Cloid and it really kind of rivals the Sunday robotics robot Mimo I remember if you remember we talked about it a couple weeks ago with the hat so the main difference between you know this version of robot which is really meant for to be in the home folding laundry doing your dishes maybe even doing some baking is it doesn't have any legs and

SPEAKER_09: and it can have batteries in it so the not having legs means you can't go upstairs but it does mean you can put a vacuum in it does mean you can put batteries in it so it does come with some advantages that's

SPEAKER_57: kind of an ugly

SPEAKER_05: bot I'm not going to lie it doesn't do much for me LG well it's coming from LG and

SPEAKER_09: if you don't remember LG that's the South Korean conglomerate LG used to stand for lucky because they were a chemical brand back in the day and gold star if you remember that electronics they rebranded the lucky and the gold star as LG and then in 1995 they started calling it life's good for their international but the Koreans no manufacturing LG Samsung make great TVs great appliances dishwashers they're going to be able to scale this as well so now you've got LG you know on top of SoftBank and Hyundai this is going to ramp up quite nicely these companies will have no problem making hundreds of thousands of these and eventually millions so if people want them they'll get these down to that looks like five to $10,000 eventually Optimus and the Hyundai one I would put at $20,000 eventual price point

SPEAKER_00: I will add that the demo they showed it had the LG robot putting some laundry in in the machine and it was super slow and all the other demos looked really slow so they're obviously behind some of the other manufacturers but it'll be interesting to continue to watch but and then next I thought I was super excited about this one I think Jason you commented about it

SPEAKER_68: Neuro Neuro friend of the pod the founder came on the pod yeah Neuro

SPEAKER_00: yes and

SPEAKER_09: is now down to under 10k so they're going to be able to add these to the lucid the lucid is me this is the lucid gravity the electronic maker and uber has ordered I think 20,000 of these already

SPEAKER_17: and this is in the gravity which is their best selling highly regarded SUV slash minivan hybrid

SPEAKER_00: what I'm interested about here is there's four different companies that are coming together obviously still pretty similar so it'll be interesting to see how they compete

SPEAKER_09: this is uber black essentially so this follows the uber playbook Alex of starting with the high end and then going down the gravity so we're showing the Zooks here as well but the one we saw originally is the lucid gravity that is a six seater that's a big luxurious model x you know escalade competitor and it's a really nice car for an airport ride or a CEO you know somebody who doesn't mind paying for uber black waymo and fsd robo taxis model y that's more of an uber x experience and eventually zooks is more like the uber pool lift line multiple people will be in those like a on a route and all those are going to have different price points and what's nice about it is we're moving into the name of it but they were also at CES producing a

SPEAKER_03: robo taxi for you to buy as a consumer and sit in the back seat of and the steering wheel will retract into the dashboard and you have a robo taxi like experience if you're in the geofence zone where they're allowed to operate then if you go outside the zone Alex that company then has the steering wheel come out if you want to drive it to Lake Tahoe so let's say you're in the bay area and hey you can go up and down the peninsula you can go to berkeley oakland but you can't go but they're doing a ground up I believe Hyundai might be making it's a contract manufacturer making the car for them

SPEAKER_87: here we go here's the steering wheel folding up and

SPEAKER_19: going in so you can see it retreat if you're on the audio version we're basically watching a car that has two large iPads on the dash and the steering wheel literally retracts in

SPEAKER_68: was it was robotics and self driving

SPEAKER_17: okay let's keep going

SPEAKER_161: so next we got the longevity mirror from neurologic and I thought this was really interesting I think

SPEAKER_00: what their thesis is that you could get a lot of longevity health aging data just from simply camera that you sit in front of for 30 seconds and I think there's going to be a lot that we're going to be living for longer and there's going to be a lot more tech just like this okay keep going we have two pet health projects one is a collar so this collar will basically go on your pet and it does it obviously works like a normal collar you can attach at least to it but it also goes beyond and just kind of on the health side of where yeah so this is another pet health tech company that focused on cats how your cat is eating and this is just another example of more health tech so it weighs the

SPEAKER_03: food you're giving to it or it some way

SPEAKER_04: will tell you how much your cat is eating for health

SPEAKER_03: reasons that's

SPEAKER_04: the goal

SPEAKER_178: that is the goal because

SPEAKER_00: I

SPEAKER_68: these cat ladies overfeed their cats and then they get three or four of them and this is more about the cat owners being too permissive with food that's what this is for you know

SPEAKER_30: as a dog owner I've know what you're talking about exactly you need to meet only one cat lady

SPEAKER_03: okay next up on top 10 consensus list

SPEAKER_00: the plod note pin s so this is a another wearable AI note taker it's on your maybe collar or you can probably just throw it in your pocket and this was announced at CES and what I thought was really interesting about this and I've played with the pocket I made a demo about it which will be coming out soon on this week in AI I where basically they have microphones they have a certain amount of storage on device you know they have a certain amount of battery life but what's interesting is they basically all will go to your phone and then you'll be able to use AI features and just use the transcription data from there so it doesn't really seem like any of these devices are that unique and for someone who's on Zoom all day I can just use a granola or a notion AI to do this exact same thing I would say that the use case that makes the most sense for tools like this would be someone who's out in the field maybe door-to-door salesman someone who's in real estate they want to remember what their client was talking about so I think a lot of us in tech were on computer

SPEAKER_03: a button on them it starts recording then you press the button you turn it off it puts it into a large

SPEAKER_09: language model and when you process it Alex you can process it as a doctor you can process it as a meeting you can process it as a therapy session if you were a psychiatrist etc and then it will make notes for you they are all extremely privacy based they're giving massive disclaimers about hey please don't use this to covertly record people but that's what people are going to do with these you're being recorded right now on every call you do all of these have a functionality Alex on

SPEAKER_15: take a regular phone call and we'll do it now this is illegal in some states so they come with tons of disclaimers and there is a rumor that the Johnny Ive OpenAI product is not a puck or a pendant it's a pen and I had a pen called Livescribe and that pen when you wrote into a book would take whatever you wrote in the book and make a visualization of it and then use OCR and I was addicted to this I gave it to everybody 10 years ago in the company as a

SPEAKER_03: Christmas present it's kind of neat to think of never forgetting things and

SPEAKER_37: anything else that was particularly interesting

SPEAKER_00: before we drop you off two more one would be the Samsung Galaxy tri-fold and I think that this is interesting because I have a question which is how many times could you fold a phone but I do see the use case it basically becomes a full tablet I

SPEAKER_03: for me to switch to it but if Apple makes one I guess I might buy it I don't know do you have any interest in these

SPEAKER_190: Alex the double fold the triple fold I like to have

SPEAKER_07: my my computers be computers and my phones be phones I like to have my iPhone do iPhone things but I will say my father in law has a folding Samsung that he carries everywhere and he never ever unfolds it he never unfolds

SPEAKER_190: it

SPEAKER_03: ah interesting I was unfolding it like playing chess or watching YouTube videos and I think the software hasn't caught up what really needs to happen is you need to be doing your Gmail on one side and on the left side have it summarizing it or doing AI I

SPEAKER_15: one of the folds it giving you coaching on the other folds is giving you the history of the match and then the main fold it showing the chess board that could be interesting but nobody's built interesting apps yet

SPEAKER_09: and that's the missing piece for these

SPEAKER_15: well done

SPEAKER_09: producer Oliver for your first hit here not bad not

SPEAKER_07: bad thanks see you guys next time thank you Oliver on the using your phone to do stuff and have help on one side and the actual thing on the other my first thought was oh we

SPEAKER_09: screen and two thirds being something it hasn't been finished and what really needs to happen is somebody like Google has to take Gmail which they just released some AI features for today I saw trying to catch up with superhuman they really need to figure out what each window is for and then you could become addicted and then say oh you

SPEAKER_11: this really is when you this happens all the time somebody comes up with this incredible hardware but you need the application the killer app and the killer app

SPEAKER_03: for foldables if you know of one put it

SPEAKER_11: up when you fold the phone interesting that's bizarre yeah you're going to break your phone pretty quick

SPEAKER_06: if you're flapping it open and close it's a terrible idea terrible idea yeah I will say though I just think that we're going to be building

SPEAKER_01: our own stuff I've become fully oh the phone did break

SPEAKER_201: you said the phone broke well

SPEAKER_01: it's CES you know I've become really a big fan of Claude Code this week I've been building my own stuff and it's like whenever we talk about now waiting for permission to do something because someone else needs to

SPEAKER_19: build the software I just immediately now think can I build it myself like I built myself a financial news dashboard and

SPEAKER_01: then I made my own GTO trainer app for both six max and eight max and also pre and post flop it took me like 20 minutes

SPEAKER_189: it's getting there it's getting there I mean production

SPEAKER_11: ready versus vibe coding obviously you know pushing stuff to production you're going to need a developer to lock it down but if you're just doing it on your computer I think in a lot of cases we might

SPEAKER_03: be sitting here a thing like Salesforce for my three person company and I don't care if the data leaks or something inside my company it's not

SPEAKER_09: a big deal and there is a theory that soon we will have a phone that you open and there's no apps you just open it and start talking to the LLM and then you say I need a word processor and

SPEAKER_11: apps it's an interesting future

SPEAKER_07: that's an interesting way to frame that because what you just said is

SPEAKER_01: we are going to have a personal AI that we take with us and it will have a phone based distribution point but at

SPEAKER_19: that point the phone is just a piece of hardware that's bringing you the software so it's not really a phone per say it's more like a

SPEAKER_09: chassis right and you just have the chassis you can build whatever you want on top of it you could build it into a van for an executive you can build it into a van for camping you could build it into a food truck right I think that's how people might start to look at these slabs of compute and maybe you don't even need to have too much local compute maybe had a really interesting prediction that Tesla and SpaceX would become one company and then you could think okay the Teslas have satellite dishes in them and they're creating their own network of internet access across the globe and you have satellite access and there's a SpaceX or Tesla phone that comes with your car or with your satellite hookup and you

SPEAKER_03: know it together

SPEAKER_30: sounds more like Starlink plus Tesla instead of SpaceX plus Tesla yeah I mean pick your poison and that

SPEAKER_03: XAI building the back end for all of these things so now when I get in my Tesla it's got grok so you can tell it like hey I

SPEAKER_06: interfaces I'm curious is it good

SPEAKER_03: you know you can see some people doing demos online and I'd say it's two thirds of the way to perfection which is a way of saying it'll be perfect in 18 months like I coffee I want a pour over and I really want a great coffee I don't mind taking 15 minutes out of my route to get a cup of coffee and just get me to my first meeting 10 minutes before time and park the car drop me off outside and find me some decent parking I'm going to be in to the drop off and to the parking really interesting future

SPEAKER_07: I just had a great idea so remember we were talking about zipline earlier

SPEAKER_19: and it drops the droid down from the main drone and then you kind of pick up yourself from the ground okay flip that around and add self driving cars you want

SPEAKER_01: coffee you want to get specific coffee why can't you interesting you

SPEAKER_09: bring that up you know the company autolane which we incubated is doing like the navigation essentially air traffic control for the parking lot at your target or at your mcdonald's etc and I saw people are now saying FSD Tesla's FSD specifically understands oh yeah and there's autolane they basically do the orchestration level for when you go to you know when you send your car to pick up packages for you like the person has to put it in the right car they want to put your package in my car so somebody has to be responsible for that coordination the coordinator the air traffic controller and that's what autolane is in

SPEAKER_15: in the US of a and good luck with the baby next week Alex we'll see you in a couple of weeks after you get back from

SPEAKER_215: paternity

SPEAKER_15: good luck yes sir all right I'll see you all day fly safe bye bye