SPEAKER_00: how long until x and xai are the same company because we know there's like financial ties

SPEAKER_02: there's product integrations and it really feels a little arbitrary i think the x shareholders

SPEAKER_01: got ownership in xai xai needs to be i don't i'm not an investor in either but i know the

David Friedberg: guy who's running it and a lot of my friends are xai is doing something interesting which is i think they get x's corpus which is a huge advantage so the huge advantage is what i was talking about on glenn back today the huge advantage is if you have a real-time data source giving you information and so whoever's got real-time data whether it's reddit or x or facebook they're going to have such a huge huge llm advantage yeah well they have a couple hundred

SPEAKER_00: thousand of my tweets elon where's my check anyways everyone on the xai investment team you're welcome

SPEAKER_09: for all my tweets this week in startups is brought to you by squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain northwest registered agent starting your business should be simple with northwest registered agent you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes from llcs to trademarks domains to custom websites they've got you covered get more privacy more options and more done visit northwestregisteredagent.com twist today and add quick easily plan deploy and measure out of home campaigns as easily as digital ads visit adquick.com twist to learn more and just for twist listeners they're waving their feet on your first campaign all right everybody welcome back to

David Friedberg: this week in startups monday wednesday fridays we come to you live on the youtube on the x on the linkedin

SPEAKER_13: from my personal linkedin we got a big docket here i'm sorry i'm running a little bit behind but uh i was on glenn beck's show the glenn beck the glenn beck yeah who's still on the radio i i did not know that

David Friedberg: so i guess jason how did it go it was great you know he listens to all in as some people are want to do and um he heard me talk about ai and what an impact it's going to have and you guys uh help me

SPEAKER_21: with my little essay that i'm writing for my sub stack and just jason calacanis on startups on

SPEAKER_23: sub stack you'll find me but i'm just writing this little piece on the static team size and how

David Friedberg: having spoke at ut a couple of times in the past month these students actually think they're going

SPEAKER_26: to like get job offers and i'm like yeah i don't think this is like five years ago where like uber airbnb coinbase the sort of upstarts are going to give you an offer and then you're going to like work that offer against the classics mckinsey and goldman consulting firms just for mbas i'm talking about they used to mbas had a lot a lot of uh places right to go work and i don't think they're hiring

SPEAKER_21: in these places all that much anymore so be resilient start a company is my best advice yes here's a

SPEAKER_27: headline from forbes from january 15th when harvard mbas can't find jobs how the job market has changed

SPEAKER_26: this is going to be a permanent state of affairs we see it inside of our tiny little 21 person outpost here launch where we're getting more done every month we do a little bit more we get a little bit more done but we use the same number of people because if you embrace the tools you get 10 better so i kind of went through the upside in these tools which is if you use them every day and your boss asks you to do something and you haven't asked three four five llms hey my boss is a jerk he wants me to get this done he's totally unreasonable how do i get this done and make him happy or her happy and what questions will they ask me what are the follow-up questions you can literally give that prompt and it's going to give you a really great way to address complex research projects or or complex projects your boss might give you and it could even anticipate what their follow-up questions are if you don't do that it would be kind of like i don't know you know being a handyman uh and you don't type into youtube what does code 17 mean on a dishwasher that's not working like you gotta know what code 17 is you figure out oh that's like this receptacle or this fuse and you flip it that's not

SPEAKER_00: extreme enough i think instead it's more like a handyman not using power tools like can you imagine

SPEAKER_28: rolling up with like a hand saw you know or no tools just showing up with no tools and i'm going to

SPEAKER_34: use my manual no internet like yes yeah oh it's not working yeah let me kick it i mean i'm interested

SPEAKER_38: just just one one thing you said so you don't need an nba to start a company like a lot of the founders that we have on this show they don't they didn't go to business school they just graduated high school or college and started a company so do you think is there any use case for an nba at this point like if i was graduating as an undergrad is there anyone you would be like well you should maybe consider

SPEAKER_41: business school i'm biased because i work with entrepreneurs there are things you're going to

David Friedberg: learn at an nba program i would consider it kind of like going to a yoga retreat or a meditation retreat that's incredibly expensive like on the white lotus right if you can afford it and you can go to the

SPEAKER_43: white lotus and do yoga or meditation and it costs you ten thousand dollars a week great you could save the nine thousand nine hundred dollars and go on youtube and learn meditation for a hundred bucks or

SPEAKER_26: for zero dollars and if you're a self-starter you know i would take the money your parents were going to give you for an nba program let's say it was a quarter million dollars to go to stanford or harvard or like a really elite school you take that quarter million and you do three 75k businesses or so you know projects you would go further you would go further so there's that but you know some people have kids who don't have the chutzpah the resiliency the self-reliance the executive function so you're kind of sending them there to build that muscle right yes it's finishing school for trust fund kids here's the thing ut is wonderful because it's 9k a year when you talk about the value proposition

SPEAKER_17: there's like two costs opportunity cost your time and then money actual hard cost right you know

SPEAKER_50: spending 50k on a degree and then graduating to a 50k a year job that's fine that's my 1x rule

SPEAKER_26: whatever you spent on the education let's assume kids have more time than money so no big deal they

SPEAKER_21: spend four years growing up mature you know getting through the maturation process of developing the

SPEAKER_26: frontal lobes yeah 50k you come out of school you make 50k you got to pay down 10 of your loans every year you can do it quite effectively and in in 10 years you you'll be done with your your 50k in loans or if your parents can afford it maybe you have you know zero in loans or maybe halfway 25. that's a big difference than graduating with five times your starting salary or 10 times your starting salary in debt which means you'll never own a home and uh you'll never be able to get married and have

David Friedberg: kids because you're going to have a thousand two thousand dollar a month mortgage payment that you're paying to harvard or columbia so anyway i think that's sort of where i come at it with i come at it from but you know we have found a university which you pay 500 bucks to go to with two of your friends build a prototype and if you come to all 12 weeks you give you the 500 bucks back so i'm kind of thinking i've got a better model here that we've developed i might even take it to the

SPEAKER_43: point at which i charge ten thousand dollars to go and then if you finish we invest the ten thousand

SPEAKER_12: dollars back into your company like literally round trip it yeah like i was thinking like creative

SPEAKER_56: models like that but i don't want to exclude people who you know maybe you know you know like myself

SPEAKER_58: who wouldn't be able to afford the 10k scholarships or something for for people who couldn't pay the 10k

SPEAKER_43: up front maybe we have people i asked that for the 500 and what i say to them i say oh you can't

SPEAKER_26: find 500 and they're like well i mean i could and i'm like okay yeah we don't have a scholarship program you can't you don't have any way to find 500 and get it back in 12 weeks what you typically get is the whiners and the entitled will come up with why they can right and then the other people are like yeah no big deal i'll just you know i'll work uber for 10 hours or i'll work uber for 20 hours

SPEAKER_69: or doordash make 20 bucks an hour and i i'll get it back your body's gonna replace that plasma yeah

SPEAKER_00: okay we got a lot on the docket let's get to work gentlemen i think we should start with uh with nick denton and then jason after that i want to dig into project europe which is all about founders but you want to talk about one nick's back and two he had a bit of a thesis about uh kind of the the

SPEAKER_76: trump musk thing you wanted to dig into this yeah sure you know i'm i'm always reticent to get into

David Friedberg: too much elon territory because people will assume that i have some inside information you know i haven't been talking to elon all that much since he's been busy at doge i'm kind of you know even when my friends are cooking so i'm kind of letting them do their thing so i don't have uh any information on this but nick denton for people who don't know i was a journalist he's like a witty bitter interesting intelligent journalist from the uk he's old like me now but you know in the heyday he created gawker which was you know absolutely disastrous and fabulous at the same time it did incredible moments of real investigative journalism it did incredibly loathsome things as he would tell you and got shut down spectacularly uh by peter thiel when he sued it because they were trafficking uh gawker that is in stolen sex tapes and uh he wound up yeah paying a ginormous settlement to the hulk

Chamath Palihapitiya: uh the hulkster but he um he wants to be a journalist again apparently and he wrote a um really interesting thread i think which touched on a lot of things in the news around

David Friedberg: byd and some of the the cars we've been talking about here so we'll pull up his tweet storm here

SPEAKER_13: and then just what the major points are and how we think about them all right founders let's talk

SPEAKER_82: about your website yes i know it's embarrassing yes i know you're too busy to upgrade it well if you're going to launch something new or you need to give your brand a refresh which i know you do you need squarespace it's the all-in-one platform that makes building a stunning professional website ridiculously easy whether you're selling products offering services or showcasing your portfolio like i'm going to do with one of my kids they want to go and do artistic things in the world so i'm going to make them a nice beautiful squarespace site when they apply to college squarespace gives you everything you need to grow and you know what obviously you've heard me talk about how beautiful squarespace's templates are but now you can get a fully customized website in minutes with their ai tool called blueprint here's how it works you just answer a few questions and then you get

Chamath Palihapitiya: a beautiful bespoke website in minutes personalized layouts visuals that are going to stun your customers and voila you're done want more control choose from award-winning templates and use intuitive drag and drop tools so you can make it your own easy peasy lemon squeezy you get to do it the way you want to do it so here's your call to action just fall in love with squarespace like i did squarespace.com

SPEAKER_82: twist for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com twist to get 10 off your first website or domain purchase that squarespace.com twist the longest running partner for this week in startups because they were a startup and they still build their product with the

SPEAKER_84: enthusiasm and the cutting edge technology of a startup founder we love you square space yeah so we

SPEAKER_86: went through all of nick's uh twitter storm and frankly it was like 25 tweets so we pulled out the

SPEAKER_00: four most important ones i'm going to walk everyone through these really quickly so the headline from nick i'm going to quote here the merger is complete elon musk and donald trump collaborators in the rationalization of the federal government are now full business partners trust industries i call it with trump as car salesman in chief and musk as the genius founder uh jason this is in reference to i think the the tesla show off event they held in front of the white house in which the president

SPEAKER_01: endorsed musk and his vehicles uh trask industries is from marvel comics this is trust industries what

David Friedberg: you can take from this is nick denton is a fan of what's happening in doge and apparently a trump fan because he's saying the rationalization of the federal government which i think is kind of where i stand on it whatever you think of doge going too fast moving fast and breaking things i think we all agree waste fraud spending too much is common ground for everybody independent of political isles we might obviously disagree with the process of doing it so let's just make that note about nick denton's position here it is true that yesterday trump had elon's cars at the white house this is in my interpretation again i don't have any inside information a make good in some ways a make good for biden not inviting trump to the white house and joe biden driving like a corvette and basically stomping for the great american car company gm and i'm getting a corvette i think i'm going to test

SPEAKER_13: drive one the folks at gm are going to let me borrow an e-ray really yeah well you know i'm a corvette guy

David Friedberg: my whole life i had a c6 and um now that i'm here in austin i'm going to get a barn like a man cave barn type thing wow i decided i'm going to collect one of each generation c1 through c8 i'm going to

SPEAKER_94: have one of each i think when i first met you you had a corvette like before the yellow yeah yeah

David Friedberg: before that was like pre-roadster yeah so i just you know i just have an affinity for them as a collector so the c8 is the greatest sports car ever made in america uh i'm sure elon will one up it um with the roadster too which i'll also get but yeah i think that's my interpretation of it and he he goes on in his thread there nick denton and he's using x as the way to get the story out there because doing a thread of 30 or 40 tweets like this is going to get him more views than doing it for the financial time so smart move for nick denton to do that here and uh i think trump said

Chamath Palihapitiya: yesterday he made he had a funny meme it's all computer is that what he said he said everything's computer everything's computer which i think kind of sums up the last 30 or 40 years of my life everything is computer everything's computer the con the context there is that the new radiohead

SPEAKER_72: album that just came out and oh that's okay computer with the radio okay computer yes that's

SPEAKER_00: the most gen x joke i've ever heard in my life nick goes on on his x thread to say quote i'm also a technology investor unlike most journalists i have skin in the game uh lots of thoughts about that i'll get to that in a second but quote my portfolio is long xiaomi and byd and he's also betting against tesla quote i put my money where my mouth is and i'm now highly motivated and then he goes on to kind of point out that um as elon works more with the presidency and links his cars to the administration the two are increasingly insufferable and jason i think the gist there is that their fortunes will rise and fall somehow together in a kind of conjoined entity way if that's fair why not okay but i think

Chamath Palihapitiya: the more interesting part of this is if we go down is his warning about how just how amazing the xiaomi uh cars are so i think maybe jumping to that part is the most interesting part innovation in evs is on a tear and that was always elon's big vision he wanted to make evs cool mission accomplished everybody's making them now and these byd and the xiaomi ones are dirt cheap and man are they good

SPEAKER_00: looking yeah here's the xiaomi su7 which is uh on the screen if you're watching the video version of this uh it's one of the cheaper cars out there and they've just made a sporty version of it it's also not that expensive and i really gotta say china has gone from being a laggard in evs to being essentially now the global low-cost leader and in some ways a technology innovator i didn't think they were going to get up to parity with the teslas as quickly as they did jason i know there's state support but it's still an impressive growth especially from xiaomi a company that we think of as

SPEAKER_109: a a a phone oem i mean that's quite the jump to cars it is a trend that we're going to track here

David Friedberg: 20k cars 20k cars let's put it on our theme list uh along with static team size but 20k cars that are sexy that are self-driving elon's going to do that with the cybertaxi which will go into production next year i think around this time he said and um you know the the chinese have no respect for ip they just steal everything and if you look at those cars they've stolen you know all the innovations from tesla and other places and xiaomi you know made smartphones what is a car there it is donald

SPEAKER_37: trump's mugshot wow everything is computer there's actually kind of a conversation going on right now i don't know if you saw the the volkswagen ceo the other day uh was talking about he he thinks they're

SPEAKER_38: gonna we're gonna move away from the everything is computer version of cars he was like they're putting buttons back like it's too much screens it's not i believe the quote was it's not a phone it's a car

SPEAKER_116: so yes indeed here's the full quote from the volkswagen exec yeah basically they're going back

SPEAKER_117: to physical buttons which i'm not gonna lie suits me because they're easier to navigate when you're

SPEAKER_38: actually driving a car i gotta say i'm sort of i agree like i have a prius seat by the way only i believe msrp is only like 225 on that so close to a 20 000 car i think it's pretty effective but uh when i when i rent a car and it's got all the like screens like the tesla s sort of interface i'm i'm

SPEAKER_121: not a huge fan i i kind of i'm old but i do kind of like the button the analog kind of driving a little

SPEAKER_82: better the way they save money is by reducing the number of parts as you reduce parts you save money

SPEAKER_38: you have the prius c is that right yes it's like a small it's like it's like the it's like their honda fit competitor but i also had a honda fit before the prius c i like the prius c a lot better well

SPEAKER_125: congratulations lon your car according to car and driver oh boy here we go you want to guess the

Chamath Palihapitiya: rating of your car on a scale of one to ten uh my new corvette will be a ten my model y is a ten seven six four keep going oh come on come on that's because car and driver likes cars that are for

SPEAKER_117: drivers of cars the prius c is a car for people who just want to get somewhere city car it's like

SPEAKER_137: boop boop boop like it fits in any little spot like i'm not drag racing in this thing here's the

Chamath Palihapitiya: dislikes vanishing point reluctant to accelerate harsh ride quality not especially nimble congratulations

SPEAKER_140: lon wait what do they say about the model y i'm looking this up car and driver model y cabin is

SPEAKER_25: cramped for tall folks few available features backseat lacks cubby storage i mean they hate this

SPEAKER_38: car it is safe i'll give you that it's safe it drives great for a big city because it can fit anywhere and it's very easy to navigate two of ten they did give the model y just for comparison

SPEAKER_00: a 7.5 which is okay pretty solid grade actually no jason 7.5 is not bad from car and driver i trust

SPEAKER_13: car and driver that's my brand um and doug de muro i like too what is the ranking i wonder on car

SPEAKER_32: drive the model y model three model three eight okay yeah i think it's because the price of these

Chamath Palihapitiya: is a little bit high is part of it anything else in his uh thread there i just want to talk a little bit about the vandalism i i really don't like the vandalism as a form of protest if you want to sit in

SPEAKER_43: the capitol building if you want to do peaceful black lives matters protests if you want to you know do peaceful protests on columbia's campus all good when you start burning stuff you start chasing

SPEAKER_26: people around when you start you know breaking things or shutting down a bridge when people are

David Friedberg: trying to get to work that's where i'm kind of like yeah no no bueno so i just don't like the violence

SPEAKER_37: in a lot of these uh protests that are going on i think we're kind of conflating two things in in

SPEAKER_38: the discourse today around around tesla which is it's always a little bit like troubling when that happens like there are the people in front of a tesla dealership with signs which is very i think legitimate public protest like they don't like elon they don't like the company i you know if you're on the sidewalk in front of a business and you're like unfair that's allowed everybody knows that's allowed sure if you're spray painting somebody's car if you're burning or damaging somebody's car obviously that crosses a line now you're destroying someone's property legally it's a totally different issue so it troubles me to see those two things conflated into like any protest against tesla is

SPEAKER_138: wrong like no no standing in front of a dealership with a sign is fine that's not domestic terrorism it's damaging somebody's car correct hey founders you want to build the next great billion

SPEAKER_152: dollar business right well you're gonna need two things a killer idea and a properly set up company i can't help you pick the idea but i can help you get your business started the right way with northwest registered agent with northwest registered agent you can form your business for just 39 plus state fees one of the most affordable options out there no hidden fees no upsells just a simple straightforward process and here's how it works in 10 clicks and 10 minutes your llc is officially formed and ready to operate northwest handles all the paperwork fast accurate and hassle free so you can focus on building your business not navigating all those crazy legal forms thousands of entrepreneurs trust northwest registered agent because they make business formation affordable efficient and stress free and with their expert team standing by you'll always have the support you need so here's your call to action don't let paperwork hold you back from your entrepreneurial dreams get started today at northwestregisteredagent.com twist that's northwestregisteredagent.com twist for just 39 plus state fees your business could be up and running in no time at all get more value more convenience and more peace of mind only with northwest registered agent with this arson what people have

David Friedberg: to understand is when you do that you know come from a firefighter family arson as a form of protest

SPEAKER_82: seems like non-violent in some ways like i'm burning something down this is what happens with arson the

Chamath Palihapitiya: building next door gets lit on fire and the security guard or you know the building next door some mom and her baby get smoked you know in their apartment and they die it's not a wise idea no just don't burn

SPEAKER_138: stuff down don't start fires people why why why do they have to come on our show and tell you not to start

David Friedberg: fire but i mean i think the startup takeaways here are if you and this is the one that i think is

SPEAKER_149: important for people to get for founders listening to the program because i always try to bring it

SPEAKER_102: back to founders if you um pick a political side you can lose half of your customer base in a media

David Friedberg: enterprise msnbc losing the republicans and fox losing the dems that's great there's enough left the question is when you lose half the people for a consumer product like uh bud light did right or

SPEAKER_26: like elon's doing right now you know bud light lost the republicans elon's losing the libs and the democrats uh in some percentage that's kind of hard for consumer products so i think this is really challenging i think for the tesla brand molly wood who was on this program was a co-host for a long time she traded in her tesla for a pole star because she didn't like elon in the direction he was taking the brand so i think tesla's really gotta think and elon's gotta think long and hard about you know after he finishes the doge thing you know building bridges and selling to all customers and i think cyber taxi is going to be you know a huge hit two years from now and i think that's the future of the company and so he's skating to where the puck is going the model y refresh by the the way is absolutely gorgeous and uh but it's going to be a tough year for car makers with all

SPEAKER_161: these tariffs and everything is there anything else in his piece that is notable the dented piece that you thought lon or he's saying you know unlike other journalists i have skin in the game

SPEAKER_00: that sounds like other journalists are being lazy and cautious but in fact they're following

SPEAKER_16: traditional journalistic rules now nick and the gawker crew clearly blazed our own trail and here he is doing that again uh but just don't don't take that to be clear about that

SPEAKER_23: he has investments in b he bought byd stock is what he said and xiaomi i believe yes and xiaomi

David Friedberg: okay she yeah the chinese stocks have been undervalued get in the game that's the whole he plays the bet you know i think he's kind of following the all-in playbook which is hey it's all capital allocators talking about their bets in a way that random act of journalism as biased as it is gives you one piece of information traditional journalism where you don't have a financial interest should give you the other side of the coin which is calling balls and strikes of course we all know the problem is humans are fallible and uh sometimes they do journalism based on their you know voting patterns or which party they're part of and man it's so hard to do a journalistic product these days that calls balls and strikes because you lose your audience and you're hated by both i am hated hated by magna as you've all seen who replies the only group that hates me equally or more than maga are the people on the left who believe that i'm part of magna so maga hates me because i'm not part of maga and i criticize trump and the left hates me because they think that i'm

SPEAKER_149: too pro doge or pro trump so you basically lose everybody i've lost a 60 of the audience because i

SPEAKER_173: won't pick a side probably well hi everyone who's still here uh welcome to uh well i mean you're here to

SPEAKER_23: listen to startups but i would say on the all-in you know oh yeah craziness literally people are

David Friedberg: like i hate jacow because he criticized trump coin yeah he doesn't get it and on the other side they're

SPEAKER_37: like i hate jacow because he's supporting doge whether or not like what whatever you believe if this is fascism if this is autocracy or if people are just you know getting uh beyond themselves or or

SPEAKER_38: that's that's embellishment or exaggeration whichever you believe once the discourse gets there where that's being thrown around every day you guys are fascists how can you it becomes very hard like what's in the middle of fascism and not fascism like those are kind of binary things

SPEAKER_121: so yeah i do think it's just going to get harder and harder to be like i don't pick a side when

SPEAKER_13: those are the sides i mean you were uh you were a um i think a double hitter as well lon me you were

SPEAKER_184: a double hater weren't you oh yeah i definitely get it from from from both sides all the time of course

SPEAKER_111: you hated both candidates all right so other stuff in the news we got inflation data yeah so running

SPEAKER_86: people through the headlines here so um cpi the consumer price index was up 2.8 year over year in

SPEAKER_00: february below a three percent rate in january that's what you want to see you want to see that number go down better than expected on the core front which strips out a couple of things give you a less volatile number it was uh plus 3.1 year over year again better than january stocks jason pretty happy with this the expectation that is if inflation comes down there's room to cut rates so tech stocks are up today tesla rebounding from its prior declines nvidia rebounding from its prior declines so a couple stocks we've seen trade pretty hot lately are regaining some some territory today and i'm sure that's popular with investors around the world i uh don't look

Chamath Palihapitiya: at the stock market day to day all that much or certainly i'm not day trading great companies

David Friedberg: are going to grow through these the most important things for founders in the game and startups listening just focus on your customers and all this meta stuff that you see like inflation etc it's fine to understand it it's fine to geek out on it but probably not going to change your day to day you have a certain amount of runway you know raising money could be affected on the margins by it but great companies that are growing let's call it in the early seed stage 10 month over a month which is a pretty easy bogey to hit if you're growing 10 month over a month you're doubling every seven eight months you're going to be just fine so eyes on the prize focus on your growth focus on your team

SPEAKER_00: it's a big news today and we're going to bring harry stebbins on to talk about this couldn't quite get them on for today's show we tried like hell but didn't quite work out the point is project europe now we've talked a lot on this show about american dynamism jason how american companies have the leading market caps in the world america's leading the ai race blah blah blah big deal so the thing is in europe there's a new effort called project europe and it's about 120 european technology folks like the leaders over at shopify clarna mistral and they're teaming up to invest and mentor younger european founders they're putting together a 10 million euro fund uh that'll put 200 000 euro into individuals who are building stuff and critically they're going to assign a founder who's already been successful to that young founder to provide mentorship so it's kind of like a hybrid venture capital teal fellowship model to build more startups in europe and i i think this is brilliant sounds like founder university a

David Friedberg: bit i like the mentorship model that's always good when they do this project europe thing are they taking equity in that person's company or is it a grant is the question are they giving people 200 k like a grant which is what teal fellows does with a hundred k i believe 90 sure this is equity uh

SPEAKER_00: this came out literally this morning so we're still chasing down every single details of the terms but given that 20 vc 0.9 and adjacent are all putting their capital into it i don't think

SPEAKER_13: they're going to be giving away their combinator knockoff with a different spin so not impressed

SPEAKER_70: if it was a hundred k or two hundred k that you just gave as a grant to the person yeah that would

David Friedberg: be disruptive doing this not impressed it's just a y combinator knockoff founders let's talk about

SPEAKER_197: building your brand here in the real world we know digital ads are amazing but if you want to stand

Chamath Palihapitiya: out in 2025 maybe you need to think a little bit bigger and a great way to do that is out of home advertising yes you know those really impressive billboards you see everywhere or even the beautiful murals that everybody loves this is how you build a brand and adquick makes out of home advertising easy measurable and fast they've taken the headaches out of ooh you've probably heard ooh out of home by combining ad tech precision with real world impact so now planning deploying and tracking your campaign is as easy as running digital ads with adquick they're going to hyper target your campaign in minutes then they're going to use their data and technology to ensure your ads reach the right audience every single time plus they're going to give you real-time insights to measure performance and optimize your spend so whether you're building brand awareness or looking to drive customer action right you want to acquire customers you can see why adquick is trusted by everyone from the fastest growing startups to the s p 500 take your brand to the next level with adquick the smarter way to do ooh and just for twist listeners adquick is waiving their fee on your first campaign that's an amazing offer get started today adquick.com twist that's a-d-q-u-i-c-k.com twist

SPEAKER_86: so harry after dropping the news the financial times cover it instead to cover it um said that in the first couple hours he had another four dozen founders paying wanting to join his argument is that europe

SPEAKER_00: can build i'm much more bullish on this than you are jason because i think what they need to do is reverse the brain drain and stop having people leave europe go build in silicon valley and with more capital more mentorship and frankly better vibes like optimistic feeling i think you could keep a lot of folks in europe and i think also the rearmament of europe the removal of the german debt break and i would say rising eu polite nationalism are all going to be things that consolidate and kind of help founders stay in building europe which is going to be good i think for american tech companies

SPEAKER_201: more competition and also i think it's going to be good to have another poll apart from the china

SPEAKER_203: russia axis so i'm i'm surprised you're not excited about this i thought i thought you were

David Friedberg: going to be all like about it pragmatically in terms of innovation the reason i'm not impressed is it's not innovative it's a copycat kind of thing and it's self-serving so in order for it to be a movement and be disruptive the reason peter teels was so disruptive is it was a grant and what he did that was really interesting about it was those people became loyal to him because it was a grant and he was still able to invest in them but you still had then wild cards like pirate wires i think came out of it or other things that weren't necessarily financial so it just feels derivative not particularly innovative and if you're a founder first-time founder and you stay in europe uh that's a bad decision it's just a terrible decision coming to america coming to california coming to texas coming to new york will be much more creative to your business terrible idea to stay there if you're a serial founder fine if you're in the nordics perhaps if you've got a an investor there who's a lead investor who committed to you great but for every clarna for every spotify it's de minimis um the the impact those european companies have had even like london you don't think like london you

SPEAKER_26: could start a problem is they're all anti-entrepreneurship there the reason why this is notable in europe is because they're so anti the reason this is needed in europe is because they're so anti-entrepreneur when you're in london and you say you're running a startup or you're an entrepreneur people look at you like you're a charlatan like you're a con man like you're a grifter entrepreneur equals grifter in a lot of these markets i'll leave the nordics out of it because they have a special sensibility for design um and a special sensibility for building product that i think is very unique to them but you know they just they don't have big winners coming out of europe for a reason it's because they treat entrepreneurs terrible there harry and the spotify people are the opposite

SPEAKER_32: but it's just it's too many headwinds and i i think when you're an entrepreneur what you want to do

SPEAKER_26: is remove as many of the headwinds and things that can flip the car and you want to increase the number

SPEAKER_13: of things that could be tailwinds if you're running a company in europe you're going against the

David Friedberg: jet stream you're going to burn twice as much fuel it's going to be slow and dogged might be to your point alex that there's some great change that's going to occur and europe's going to get their act together and be more entrepreneurial i doubt it europe is epcot center right now as far as i'm concerned it's a place for tourists to go and and you know get to see like this old world charm and

SPEAKER_70: you can bounce from country to country and it's quite charming but they treat their entrepreneurs

SPEAKER_220: terrible okay so i'm not gonna try to go through that but i i think the idea here is there's a lot

SPEAKER_00: of people who want to change that and so here's hoping that that that works out but i do want to say jason if we lost 60 of our audience because you're not picking a left or right side here in the states i think the other 40 were the europeans who are also now gone no hello to nobody i think they

David Friedberg: are um exactly agreeing with me i think anybody who's a european entrepreneur or a vc is probably nodding because jesus like they're they want to regulate every company they want to make it harder to build platforms they don't have section 230 like we have here you can't fire people it's not as fluid as an environment the regulations are crazy you can't do m a it's just the worst place to do

SPEAKER_149: business it's a terrible terrible decision to do business in europe as an entrepreneur just you got

SPEAKER_197: to go where the action is it's like if you wanted to be in hip-hop in the 90s you go to new york or la

David Friedberg: if you want to be in tech you come to austin new york you know maybe you go to i mean i would say dubai or abu dhabi or riyadh if you're a european entrepreneur you go to those three cities they're gonna throw money at you they're gonna celebrate you they're gonna give you a golden visa and you're

SPEAKER_26: still gonna be able to fly home and ski wherever you want or go like you know spend your summers in

SPEAKER_38: italy i'm glad you've given me this opening because you've mentioned riyadh in this context a few times and and i know things are changing in the kingdom like i i understand than you could imagine i understand there are progressive people now like sort of looking to well in some ways progressive but like how far along would you say that process is would a western person today going to riyadh find a traditional kind of city where they can do all the usual things they're used to doing in a

SPEAKER_229: in a normal city so let me work backwards dubai will feel just like new york to you right i feel

SPEAKER_38: like dubai we've sort of established is this kind of very like western friendly like you can get a drink at a bar and like totally people dress however is that is that riad as well now that's what riad's

David Friedberg: chasing and i'd say they've closed 80 of the gap and so when you look at what they've done in dubai riad's just right on that track and they are particularly obsessed with entrepreneurship and creating companies and we'll have a big announcement about uh some work we're gonna do in uh the kingdom that i've chosen to do i'm gonna make the announcement next month but uh i have been spending a little bit

SPEAKER_149: of time over there and i believe company formation in that region is absolutely critical for democracy in

David Friedberg: the world that whole region has its own power base plus they're trying to get pulled towards china india uh and russia on the other side you know the bricks kind of situation and on the other side they're trying to get pulled into the west and who they align with in the future is going to determine i think human rights it's going to determine democracy it's going to determine um you know peace and

SPEAKER_234: uh uh it's going to be one of the great forks in the road i think you know in our lifetimes is where do those countries end up affiliating themselves with now they're their own entities their monarchies etc but personal freedoms economic freedoms those things are all starting to happen in a major way

SPEAKER_149: and uh i'm particularly excited about it as somebody who worked at amnesty national and cares about human

SPEAKER_236: rights and cares about entrepreneurship yeah yeah but i i can't bring edibles to saudi arabia so i'm

SPEAKER_111: gonna you know politely pass for now i mean interesting you you bring that up i think that

David Friedberg: their view on alcohol has changed and there are that tourism is the big attraction there so they're doing new cities like neom and stuff like that so in those cities westerners are going to be able to have alcohol and i think you'll can assume that cannabis or other things will come after that i did this tweet the other day i got a huge reaction on my twitter where i said hey here is my protocol you know like brian everybody's got to have a protocol since i'm an influencer now and a micro celebrity i gotta have a protocol very simple sleep exercise diet meditation focus on those four and then i gave sort of sub things that i'm working on everybody knows i'm on a health kick and i'm doing it for myself for my daughters my family i just want to be around and i want to be healthy in my older years here man has it worked for me i got a 99 sleep score that's off the charts i slept with the bulldog last night it dropped down to the 80s what am i going to do max was in the hospital he's safe now he just he had a pneumonia happens these these bulldogs are like fine-tuned machines like they're like ferraris or something they're always in the shop so i felt like i needed to sleep with him but you know i kind of did this protocol and i have and this is kind of a startup my understanding is brian johnson who's going to come to the all ending tomorrow night here in texas that he is making a hundred million dollars a year on the blueprint as i said maybe pull that up one more time so i can read it um those i have those top four things i'm focused on but then i'm telling people hey listen see if you can add two or three of these things without your phone play a game i played clue with my twins the other night we had a riot read a book you'll see some more physical books on the shelf here i'm i'm just starting to get into just 15 minutes of actual physical reading as opposed to audiobooks which i do when i'm hiking or driving listening to music shout out to my friends at headphones.com andrew over there um who i'm going to do a partnership with because i've been so taken by he's very generous and sent me these five thousand dollar headphones and i listen to them and man i'm really hearing the music and i'm using co-buzz i'm going to become an influencer in this space next cook some meals together share a meal with folks you love i have institutionalized my thursday night dinner with my friends here in la lon you've come to the atx supper club we have a six-person dinner we book out the best restaurants over like the next 12 weeks one of my friends is doing that william barnes who worked at uber and we're good friends and he's here so we just go every thursday to a

SPEAKER_13: different restaurant hang out with animals or kids i do that hiking walk in nature i do that every day on the ranch where i try to these are the things that are going to help you sleep is the new drug

SPEAKER_26: in the startup community people are leaving events at 10 pm saying i got to get a good night's sleep i got to get a good night's sleep i'm tracking my score you measure it you manage it whoop hate

SPEAKER_21: sleep they all do a great job as does the apple watch in doing this but anyway i i like harry i

SPEAKER_26: think he's got great intent here can't wait to talk to him about it maybe he's floating a balloon we'll see what the terms are and then so the terms on the 200k also important yes very important uh okay

SPEAKER_00: moving on i'm going to throw this in because i think it really matters anthropic jason the ai foundation model company backed by google amazon lots of investors etc has grown its annualized revenue according to the information from about a billion dollar run rate at the end of 2024 to 1.4 billion as i said earlier 40 growth from a billion dollar foundation in less than a quarter is insane and you know frankly i think this kind of makes a point i think their valuation now is somewhat unreasonable the question of course is can they keep this pace of growth up but holy crap that's

David Friedberg: a lot of revenue really fast if it's true it seems like that would be really great revenue growth i'm assuming this is not for the consumer product this is for the api and that they've seeded the consumer product race to chat gpt and gemini and grok yeah yeah so open ai makes more of its money than uh sorry

SPEAKER_00: more of its money from chat gpt subscriptions than its api anthropics the other way around uh but keep in mind they also dropped claude 3.7 and then also claude code and they are inside of a lot of the breakout stuff so everyone's talked about manis well that's some claude technology built in there okay we had the ceo of replit on the show that's claude et cetera et cetera et cetera so people are really using what they built to make products and that's why i think it's durable and not churn

SPEAKER_234: uh at risk the great news for startups is you can get these api credits from google cloud which we've had a partnership with uh you can go to get startupcredits.com i put all the credits that we're doing at get startupcredits.com you sign up there you get white gloved just doing this as a a service to our founders so go to get startup credits you can get the google credits there other credits people

David Friedberg: are giving ai credits out to startups you know like candy uh which is great and you know people are building their systems so that if you know one service gets too expensive they can move to another or one is better you know at images than voice you can move it around and so the big winner in this race

SPEAKER_26: is going to be startups they're going to keep lowering the prices they're going to keep increasing the value and i have always believed that the application level is where the value is going to be i think that these companies are in a race to the bottom and it's getting so cheap when we had raul from superhuman online he said they're writing their summaries for your emails ahead of time most people like you do a google search and it does that little real-time snippet from gemini so they're not wasting time you know building these results ahead of time i don't believe they're doing that like in caching them it's getting so cheap that it's going to run on your m4 you're going to have a local version on your phone ripping through stuff and so you know let's say you wanted an analysis of every mp3 on your phone every audio file it might just do that in the background and have it sitting there for you why wouldn't it do it if it was going to do an analysis of your photos you know normally it would wait till you query hey show me all the bulldogs it might take the top 10 queries top 20 queries and run them every day and then present you with the results in a proactive way like a great employee might a great team member might be proactive so we're going to see some really interesting things happen here as this stuff plummets in cost and um it's still trading at

SPEAKER_236: what 40 times revenue 50 times about about 40 right now but given that their base case is about 2.2

SPEAKER_00: billion in earned revenue this year their progress case is like 3.7 so to me that that multiple is going to come down precipitously and i think they're building not just a technological mode jason i think they're building a brand like i think claude's the claude family of models people just trust and like because they're they're good they taste and so i think that's really worth something

David Friedberg: there's more competition to come i think you know what we saw with uh manis recently that's got millions of people on the wait list and it's like an you know agentic which just is a fancy way of saying agents which is a fancy way of saying does stuff personas that persistently do stuff we used to call them cron jobs back in the day just jobs that run every hour run every day and so you know

SPEAKER_234: lon you frequently will look through like you know the subreddit for entrepreneurship and startups and

David Friedberg: this week in startups and then we don't have other communities you're going to be able to write an agent we could do it right now maybe lucas from our team who's good at this could write an agent that goes so you give it all the places you like to look it goes to those places in the morning and sends you an email or post it into our production team here's the interesting new discussions that i found and then you click from there so that first level sort it might do for you and that's you know

SPEAKER_26: really powerful stuff that's going to happen or is happening right now it just it's an interesting thing

SPEAKER_37: with these a we were talking about this a little bit before the show with these ai models and branding

SPEAKER_38: because some of them just like you guys have been saying they're kind of more discreet it's not like everybody's going to claude.com and using it like a lot of good products that people like are being built on top of claude but claude's kind of this discreet layer so it's interesting how some of these ai companies like chat gpt are already becoming brand names that are very familiar household names they're very visible but others like anthropic and claude growing just as fast if not faster but kind of under the surface like everyday mainstream people might not have heard of anthropic or claude yet even if they're

SPEAKER_234: using a tool that was built on top of it the number of people using chat gpt every day is extraordinary i think they were in the top five or ten websites in the world it was six or seven on the chart we were looking at the other day yeah so they have an incredible consumer business they're you know independent uh of anything else and the chat chat gpt is kind of like the verb it's kind of like saying

David Friedberg: taking an uber and they also bought chat.com so you know this is the innovators dilemma that google has

SPEAKER_70: when you do a google search now i think it does a snippet every time right if you're logged in pretty much

SPEAKER_86: yeah well no it's worse it gives you a snippet jason and then it gives you four ads

SPEAKER_265: so like that's they really do not want you to use the blue links because that's not the google offering

David Friedberg: now sigh yeah so i mean i think people you know chat gpt's got really good consumer adoption but by the way before google came out yahoo had all that user adoption so it's quite possible that there'll be a better product than chat gpt and that whole thing could um just collapse we were saying

SPEAKER_38: grok is nipping nipping at their heels now grok you know inside of x where you press that button

SPEAKER_26: and it gives you the context we talked about it on all in last week is a really killer feature that i think most people who use x haven't even realized but there's a little grok ai in the top right of every tweet so take my tweet where i did um you know hey here's my protocol if you pull that tweet

SPEAKER_149: up and you hit the grok button i'm curious what it says there here is the grok uh summary and

SPEAKER_73: response to jason your um formula for a good life and um yeah it is a reasonable encapsulation of who

David Friedberg: i am and it gives you a good starting point that's not a really great one because what i'm saying is really simple how healthy do you think that jason is that's funny yeah here you get a little bit of a deeper one but if you were to pick let's say zielinski talking about something you know and you want the background that's where it gets really interesting or if you were to you know click on talking about columbia losing like its grants or something that's when you could get into like a really good background because you might not know if you look at i i retweeted somebody from columbia who lost their grants and he's like oh my god this is so shocking and i'm like columbia's got a huge endowment they could easily afford this like and these elite universities like they i don't know why the taxpayers are paying for elite universities with hundreds of billions of dollars to do their research they should be given the grants from their endowments which just continue to grow to a level of absurdity i'm gonna put that aside for a second but if you were to find one of those yeah this is me saying hey fafo and it thinks it's fell fast fell off and that's a very polite that's a really

SPEAKER_18: polite edit there grok yeah that was a pretty good way yeah that's f around find out but okay if you

SPEAKER_26: click on the quote i was retweeting that's the one to click on because here with this person you know uh professor uh edward go or go uh this is where it's a money look at this a columbia university bioengineer professor shared an email from the nih announcing the cancellation of his integrated musculoskeletal training program this really explains the background in such a great way this is like if i were to send it to lon and say what's going on are you alex and said hey what's

SPEAKER_149: going on here you would write me back here's what's going on that's really compelling for me how long

SPEAKER_00: until x and xai are the same company because we know there's like financial ties there's product

SPEAKER_01: integrations and it really feels a little arbitrary x is i think the x shareholders got ownership

Chamath Palihapitiya: in xai and xai needs to be i don't i'm not an investor in either but i know the guy who's running

David Friedberg: it and a lot of my friends are xai is doing something interesting which is i think they get x's corpus which is a huge advantage so the huge advantage is what i was talking about on glenn back today the huge advantage is if you have a real-time data source giving you information and so whoever's got real-time data whether it's reddit or x or facebook they're going to have such a huge huge

SPEAKER_00: llm advantage yeah well they have a couple hundred thousand of my tweets elon where's my check everyone on the xai investment team you're welcome for all my tweets okay so pokemon go the company behind it selling the games to another company for 3.5 billion dollars yeah oh wow that's nantac

SPEAKER_149: niantic is selling its games business yes i am banister was um an investor in that so they're selling

SPEAKER_26: that uh pokemon go for people who don't know is the first augmented reality game to hit scale these things were going on in japan for a long time augmented reality when you put digital assets in the real world through the camera and you remember people were like driving around trying to find these pokemon go characters and getting in car accidents it had that huge pop culture moment

SPEAKER_38: i mean hillary telling people pokemon go to the polls it was like a big deal uh i in my mind think of it as being like it fell off and it's not a big deal anymore but that's not actually true it still has a huge fan base of people that remain obsessed with playing it and are still driving around looking for pokemon it's just like it stopped being a headline but it remains like a

SPEAKER_117: huge mobile who bought it so scopely okay which what's that well it's owned by savvy games group

David Friedberg: what's that it's the saudi pip ah the uh the investment fund in saudi this is their sovereign wealth fund which owns a everything from sports teams yep to doing the investments in neom i think it's sort of the umbrella it's run by a gentleman named yasser who i met when i was there and uh they have a group snobble that does the venture stuff so they have a a dozen activities they are investing in that they believe will be the businesses of the future when maybe pulling oil out of the ground isn't uh necessary right or you know it runs out which they think is a 30-year story 40-year story and games would be one of those and so remember i said earlier this is not dumb money there's a perception in our industry that the money coming out of the mina region is like dumb money they'll just invest in anything you go there you secure a bag you leave au contraire mon frere these are some of the smartest people i've ever met in business for decades they've been sending people from abu

SPEAKER_26: dhabi from saudi from qatar to the to the you know west to become educated and to work in places and then they come back so they're boomerangs and they have the king abdullah scholarship there's all these scholarships and when i meet people over there oxford harvard you know university of you know hawaii everything in between like literally it's not just you know ivy league schools and then they've worked at google at sequoia wherever you know vet top venture firm and then they've gone back they're not just putting money into venture firms they're on the boards of companies they're doing company formation they're doing roll-ups like this because of the sovereign wealth funds they can take a 20 or 30 year view of investing so they're not just giving money to masayoshi sound like they did for his uh you know giant fund they're now making thoughtful decisions and rolling up companies that's what we're seeing here that's what we're going to see a lot more of and for context about the

SPEAKER_00: roll-up part of this so scopely the company that's actually buying the niantic gaming assets i believe is the company behind uh monopoly go which if you're a hardcore gamer you've never played but that means that you're outside the mainstream it's i think the second or third highest grossing mobile after 2024 and to the point that lon made about pokemon go still having staying power i think it was the 13th highest grossing game and keep in mind that's hundreds of millions of dollars like mobile gaming is huge and i really gotta agree with jason i am a bit more critical of media governments than some folks in this space but hey what i will say here is this is smart this is buying a serious company doing a serious roll-up i i have to say if you're going to diversify off of you know uh digging stuff out of the ground great place to do it great use of money no complaints it's a brave new world

David Friedberg: folks we are not living in uh a unipolar or a bipolar world where it was like russia in the u.s it's multi-polar now and that's you know a lot of i think what's informing this administration whether you like it or not whether you agree with it or not we we all understand it's multi-polar now there are regions that have their own sovereignty and the eu now as you pointed out uh alex i think very correctly is like you know what the united states is not the piggy bank they're not going to fund what we want to do you know we have our own world we'll do what we want to do canada's like oh you guys want to neg us great we have a lot of hydro we'll just turn off your electricity

SPEAKER_43: we'll sell it to somebody else like i think the united states sometimes believes we have a little bit more influence than we actually do and that people you know will just do whatever we tell them

SPEAKER_298: they will not i think it's the people our age that remember a time when that was still kind of

SPEAKER_38: true like if you grew up in the 80s the 70s the 90s america was kind of the the you know the pivot point around which the whole world sort of was organized and we still think of it that way but

SPEAKER_125: it is not true anymore it's not true and the eu can go it alone if we don't want to back ukraine if

David Friedberg: we don't want to be involved in that you know what eu has plenty of money these are sovereign countries they have a vested interest in containing putin they're going to do it themselves they're going

SPEAKER_00: to make their own weapons they don't need us but the the tension that i find here is that the us is saying multipolar world go off and do your own thing and then we're turning around and saying eu stop finding our companies well do you know how you have influence over those things by having soft power and if we don't have that then we're going to have to eat some crow along the way i'm not taking a position in this conversation but i'm just saying you can't you can't have a win-win when you're not

SPEAKER_234: going to win yeah the the idea that we're going to be able to be splashy cashy around the world and buy influence that's ending we're broke as a country that's just the truth we don't have the ability to

David Friedberg: spend like we used to um and so whether you agree with you know um the velocity and the chaotic nature of the current administration which you know if you ask anybody who's a republican like they're like yeah this is chaotic putting all that aside we're in a multi-polar world right now south america is going to make their own decisions canada's going to make their own decisions obviously mean uh india india is like i think really the most interesting one to look at they are going to make everybody believes like oh we have influence whatever india's like yeah we're the largest country in the world we're the fastest growing economy we have the most number of people going from poverty into the middle class going into the upper class we've got this great education system we've got a driven india is the america of the 21st century in many ways in a way that maybe china isn't because it's more democratic right it's not a perfect democracy you can look up the democracy ratings china can never really compete in a sustained long-term fashion in entrepreneurship because they keep rug pulling the entrepreneurs if you rug pull the entrepreneurs and you don't have a vibrant investment system and it's top down it can't really be vibrant in the way a competitive

SPEAKER_26: playing field in the united states is or in europe to a lesser extent or mina the middle east north africa region or india india really is fascinating to me i need to spend more time in india and singapore i'm going to go to singapore for the first time and then i need to spend some time in india i really think that's the economy i have the least knowledge of firsthand and i need to get up on

SPEAKER_00: yeah all right uh just before we jump i do want to say there's news that tsmc is working with other chip companies possibly put together a deal to buy a chunk of intel's foundry business great we'll see about that but something to keep an eye on and then uh gail slater was confirmed uh to run antitrust of the doj okay she's a little more hawkish than i think jason's going to be excited about but her term will kick off something to keep an eye on and then jimma three models from google apparently very good

SPEAKER_214: very cheap and very efficient it's going to be um really interesting in terms of gail slater there's a

SPEAKER_26: lot of saber rattling this administration is going to be very pro m a they just like to have their they like to have influence i think they this is like why the tariff thing is so appealing to them because having a tariff system means everybody's kind of got to come and bend the knee and negotiate m a is the same tool now everybody whether it's bezos with amazon you know or zuck with meta you know the weather vein of you know the political weather veins known as mark zuckerberg you know he he's gonna want to buy tick tock he's gonna want to put a bid in he's now gonna have to go through gal he's gonna have to bend the knee he's gonna have to come to mar-a-lago and this you know kleptocracy approach uh is very real and you're gonna have to bend the knee and you're gonna have to come and this will give the president undue influence i think over you know this corporate landscape net net trump likes

David Friedberg: influence trump likes money trump likes success i think they're gonna let it rip they're gonna let

SPEAKER_26: it rip uh anyway this has been another great episode of this week in startups he's at lawns l-o-n-s on x he's at alex i'm at jason we're all in the four or five letter club 4.3 letters between us on average

David Friedberg: and uh you can read the docket that lon and alex put together at thisweekinstartups.com slash docket

SPEAKER_70: yes sir all right everybody we will see you next time on this week in startups bye bye you