Jason Calacanis: Hey everybody I am back after my long weekend thanks to you all for letting me go to Tahoe had a great time uh and now I'm here doing some solo news Jason is speaking at Stanford today like the badass that he is uh but we have a great show and a bunch of interesting news first I break down the news that Google has invested 300 million dollars in Anthropic the AI startup that we talked about that's trying to be safer and more responsible than open AI we also have a former Google executive building an AI search bot to compete with Google and Bing that's called Neva and I want you to tell me if you are ready to pay for private ad-free search because I am then we briefly talk about shift med startup of the day a massive 200 million dollar raise to combat the nursing shortage in the United States not using AI to my knowledge by the way so good for them then we wrap up the show with a great series a interview with Jessica Alderson of so synced which is a dating app that matches people based on their personality type it's actually I you know listen I know it's better when we're both here but it's still gonna be a great show

SPEAKER_03: stick with me this week in startups is brought to you by LinkedIn marketing to redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups acquire.com whether you want to sell a solo project or a booming startup with hundreds of employees acquire.com has the tools experience and most importantly engage buyers to help you achieve your acquisition goals sign up for free at try.acquire.com slash twist and element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything you need and nothing you don't that means lots of salt with no sugar get a free sample pack with any purchase at drinklmnt.com slash twist all right let's dive into our solo dolo news

Jason Calacanis: with a little generative AI update for you because it is in fact a day of the week in 2023 so you know we're going to be talking about generative AI again uh Friday the latest news is that on Friday the financial times reported that Google is investing 300 million dollars in Anthropic at a three billion dollar valuation giving Google a 10% stake in the company now you remember hopefully last week we talked about Anthropic which is a newly launched very very similar to open AI product that is full of messaging about building safer more reliable AI systems we had covered these reports that Anthropic was raising 300 million dollars from an undisclosed investor and so now there's this news that in fact the investor is Google which isn't too shocking considering that you know there aren't i guess that many companies with that kind of money to make that investment but also that Google and Microsoft are now locked in a possibly existential race to get to and deploy generative AI soonest there are though a couple of interesting things about this deal okay so if we look back at Anthropic itself remember that it was founded by Dario Amodi and a few other researchers that left open AI and according to the financial times they left because quote they were concerned that Microsoft's first investment in open AI would set it on a more commercial path and detract from its original focus on the safety of advanced AI so that gets kind of interesting because you wonder why then they would turn around and raise 300 million dollars from Google which is obviously a commercial enterprise um according to other reports Anthropic is planning to develop an intelligent chatbot called Claude which will rival open AI's chat GPT and i would argue it's always a good idea to give your chatbot a cute name so Claude cute good one it has not yet been released publicly but here it's worth noting that Google is also reportedly working on its own chatbot called apprentice bard so if Google is planning to use its own AI chatbot it's unclear why they would invest in Anthropic in the first place and this is where it gets even more interesting because the financial times notes that this investment is coming from Google's cloud division not its venture arm GV and the question becomes if you are if you're a corporate venture capital arm a lot of times you're investing strategically so that you can incorporate this technology into your parent company in the case of Google GV is actually not a very normal venture arm in that sense they they don't do investments in the same way it's more they call it balance sheet capital only so they're investing they're hoping to get a return is not necessarily about uh helping out the parent company so let's give a little background on this here's a 42 second clip of Jason talking to Sarah Cannon back in 2020 she's currently an investor at Cotu who previously worked at Google's growth stage venture arm and she's talking about this kind of distinction now capital G

SPEAKER_06: is the corporate investing arm that did I believe Uber so they alphabet makes this very confusing and then they have Google ventures which then became GV which operates outside of Google with Google's money company but has independence and Google theoretically Google's employees business units don't know or get the information it's firewalled with the GV investments so you know more about this probably

SPEAKER_11: than most people at alphabet um but so I so that's right we were balance sheet capital um and so we were independent so we were not investing for strategic reasons it was for financial return just like a Warburg

Jason Calacanis: Pincus or KKR or TPG would do okay so that's what would have happened had this investment come from GB the venture capital arm that spun out of alphabet but like we said it seems like it came out of the cloud division which makes it seem like it's more of a strategic investment of the kind that could eventually absorb uh Anthropic in some way but it gets kind of even weirder it sounds like according to the Financial Times Google's relationship with Anthropic is limited to acting as the company's tech supplier which again is totally different from the way that Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship works because Microsoft has been very upfront about how they intend to incorporate OpenAI features into its Azure cloud services about how they intend to eventually incorporate some chat GPT capabilities into Bing but in this case it sounds like Google is making this 300 million dollar investment will provide cloud computing and hosting for Anthropic so deal you know help it deal with costs related to compute but that's it then continue to launch its own chatbot called apprentice bard and maybe in some way incubate this safer right this again we go back to this in theory safer and more reliable and trustworthy the AI systems so it's a little unclear what Google hopes to get out of this I have a hard time believing it's purely altruistic but maybe they do have an interest for some reason in figuring out a safer backstop in case its AI goes up the rails maybe they're just like incubating Mothra in case they turn into Godzilla unclear um but a reminder though that uh Jason and Rachel covered Google's q4 earnings on Friday and the cloud division was uh a major bright spot revenue up 32 percent year over year the segment cut its operating losses by 46 percent year over year and of course has been locked in sort of that three-way race with Microsoft Azure and AWS all of this and we're just going to kind of keep putting a pin in this because it's sort of one of those conversations that keeps bubbling up and I have learned in my uh somewhat brief time here at this weekend startups that when Jason keeps bringing up a topic that probably means that there's a reason and it probably means it's a back channel from the poker table and so this question of round tripping the way that these investments are being made by these big corporate partners keeps coming up so in this growing AI arms race between Microsoft and Google you've got this situation where these companies are making these big investments in these in these AI companies right and they're saying you can use our compute which you will pay us for and so they are getting revenue from their investment and if you are watching this on YouTube right now you see me making a circle because this is a practice called round tripping according to accountingtools.com it's uh round tripping occurs when one company sells assets to another party in order to generate sales and then later buys back the assets we know that in the case of Microsoft they're going to reap a portion of open AI's profits when and if it becomes profitable until they get to the 10 billion dollars that they initially invested so an example from accountingtools.com is that let's say a real estate company sells several condominiums to a related party for four million dollars and then they get to recognize this four million dollar sale and a year later they buy those condos back for the same price in these arrangements doing so generates sales not only for the original seller but also for the related party when it sells the condominiums back in these arrangements there is minimal net long-term change in a firm's profits in this scenario the round tripping would involve Microsoft getting that large percentage that i mentioned of open ai's profits while also being its largest customer i'm pausing so you can digest that for a second friend of the pod bill gurley tweeted the following about this serious question for accounting twitter now that there are two of these when a company uses its balance sheet in a transaction that requires boomerang use of same dollars for their services are they able to recognize said revenue couldn't you juice your own numbers writ large as usual the simple question with the most convoluted uh potential answer mike garrett matt garrett responded and said this is round tripping i ran salesforce ventures for years this was a big issue we could not at salesforce ventures use venture dollars as quid pro quo or even have the perception of this if so we could not recognize revenue up to the amount of the investment we had safeguards to prevent this otherwise he went on to tweet as you point out otherwise you are using cash on the balance artificially to generate revenue even if there was the perception of round tripping he went on and it was just coincidental the accounting team would not recognize the revenue so the real question here is like a nerdy accounting question but those are the questions on which everything always hinges if microsoft does not recognize this open ai relationship as revenue then it's probably not

SPEAKER_21: round tripping we think we might need an accountant on here but what we do know is that this is like again

Jason Calacanis: a major back channel topic of conversation especially as these big corporate investments keep happening into these ai products that rely on massive cloud compute services so once you have google and microsoft doing this you do have to ask the question like do these big ai companies then end up being a money maker and a customer and what does that mean for the larger industry tldr important people are talking about round tripping a lot so we think you should probably pay attention and we'll

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Jason Calacanis: generative ai news because once again it's a day of the week in 2023 uh i'm a big fan of this one though this is a really interesting story neva n-e-e-v-a is a startup led by former google executive sridhar ramaswamy and it's building a paid subscription ad free version of google so we've been talking about how chat gpt should have google on notice clearly does have google on notice but that this starts to become the way that search should look the way we would have all wanted search to look if advertising had not come in and mucked it all up and if algorithms to feed you some sort of a you know personalized bubble like a filter bubble um had not come in to make your results slightly suspect because of targeted advertising a different business model for search is kind of long overdue but google's had such a monopoly on search for so long and there was this assumption that nobody would pay for it that uh we've never gotten it until potentially now so neva has come along it is in fact paid search uh and it's doing citations so when you see the search results you actually see little footnotes that lead back to the news stories uh where this was reported and they're charging four dollars and 17 cents per month for searching that's the premium annual plan if you pay all at once uh the premium monthly plan is six bucks a month and then you just get these kind of super simple search results that are ai ai fed ai generated generative ai i guess so neva for background purposes was founded back in 2019 launched this paid search project in 2021 and then according to pitch book has raised about 78 million dollars to date and was most recently valued at 300 million dollars in a march 2021 series b led by graylock i want to like focus on that number for a for a minute just side note because 78 million dollars actually isn't that much compared to what open ai and anthropic are raising although it's possible that neva is more of a you know it's a delivery mechanism as opposed to a full like neural net ai engine on its own um but ramaswamy posted some tweets showing these sort of quick summaries of events with neva and one of them was you know the us military shot down a suspected chinese spy balloon off the coast of south carolina on sunday footnote with china expressing strong dissatisfaction over the incident second footnote the balloon was initially spotted over billings montana on wednesday shout out to my aunt and uncle and billings let me know if you saw it and is believed to have traveled over western canada and alaska it's just a super straightforward bullet point result that gives you the information that you want and i keep going back to jason's kind of accident looked an accidental tagline for all of this which is why search when you can get answers now the question remains as we look at products like this my initial response to this is like i would absolutely pay for this i have every reason in the world to need fast unfiltered information i do not want to say i mean i already use duck duck go because i don't want to sift through google's like 50 million the button of the bubble over here and the like the summary and the ads and the this and that and all these things i just want information without tracking so neva i believe also includes that sort of basic privacy um at least in the sense that you're they're not doing targeted advertising they have this monthly an annual plan and the free plan even offers limited ad free searches a limited number of devices on one account and no premium passage password manager or vpn so a little bit less privacy so this again this has like been the dream like can i or would i be able to pay for search that doesn't track me and search that just gives me information six dollars a month i'm a hard yes on this but i do think there's still a reasonable question about whether people would pay for this so um to give you a sense of how massive the search market potentially is in 2021 google was handling about three and a half billion searches per day that's over a hundred billion searches per month so imagine that neva is able to grab you know fifty dollars a year from even one percent of that at this view at this moment one of our producers is definitely doing that back of the envelope math because i'm not jason and i can't do it that fast but i'm gonna like make it easy for you and say that's a lot that's a lot uh and then you know neva has just sort of burst onto the scene let's check out actually a 77 second clip with neva ceo shradar ramaswamy on cnbc's tech check from back in 2021.

David Sacks: with this model you're not doing any ads at all no affiliate links either so this is even more pure than duck duck go you're just going to charge consumers a monthly subscription feed what convinces you that people are ready to subscribe to search neva is the world's first completely

Chamath Palihapitiya: ads free private subscription search engine now all of us use search we don't really think that much about it but and it's a giant business 150 billion dollars across the globe but the fact of the matter is that what started as a way to get you and me great information has now become an enterprise where most of the energy is on advertisers so neva is super innovative here because we want to put you at the center of the service by being a subscription service we think we can create a much better experience for you one that is more personalized one that is deeply private because the model says we don't take money from anyone other than customers um and we are able to bring all of this together into this singular experience and more we also support publishers from early on because search engines are based on great content right and so you're going to see lots of great content on neva it's

Jason Calacanis: all of these that we think will convince people that neva is worth paying for i mean also side note when you look at the pricing plans on neva.com there's a little note at the bottom that says choose premium and let's fight climate change together and then there's a pop-up that says neva will contribute one percent of our profits to fight climate change and until they reach profitability they'll contribute five thousand dollars a year to the environment defense fund and 350.org so like you know they're talking to me i am privacy obsessed i've been using duck duck go for over a decade and they're going to contribute to climate change what i really want to know is are you in i'm obviously all in on this vision i also think though as an interesting data point it's really worth pointing out that neva ceo was at google for almost 16 years so he knows exactly what he's up against he was in the end he was an engineering executive in google's ads and commerce division for his last six years at the company is very familiar with the business model the incentives i think that do potentially pervert search results that's one of the things that people complain about a lot and he knows exactly uh what kind of money he's facing and probably has a sense that there is a business opportunity i can tell you i'm like so hungry for this and i can't wait to get the sort of chat gpt version too where it's just like i just want the answer and then the sources i think is really

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Jason Calacanis: angle here so one of the things that google has in general when it comes to search and particularly to personalizing results is a data advantage they have a data advantage in terms of selling ads and as we continue to talk about generative ai you've heard jason and i am now many times i think mention the data data problem right fundamentally ai doesn't work without data and that data you may or may not have permission to use it it may or may not may or may not consist of a copyright or ip violation and the quality of the data is directly correlated with the skill and the ability to learn of the ai garbage in garbage out we say it over and over and over and so the data sets and the training data become truly fundamental if you don't have good data on which to train your model you are at a disadvantage in a fast growing arms race and jason has been saying for months now that the ip lawsuits are about to become a huge part of this and i think even said last week that open ai could find itself in a situation because it's not being rolled out with citations where people sue to prevent their data from being included in the training sets and so uh ashridhar ramaswamy had this 14 tweet thread starting uh over the weekend about how publishers need to be aware he said your content is going to get sucked into ai bots pulling your work into their large language models your referral traffic will go down and if you just side note if you know anybody who works at a media company that relies on referrals and i am talking about my home base where i grew up cnet for 13 years i am intimately familiar with the situation where google changes something in the algorithm to either punish or encourage certain behaviors or language or link procedures within their articles and all of a sudden your traffic plummets like everybody in media knows that they are 100 at the mercy of google and have been for like two decades and it is a really abusive relationship and so he's pointing out that instead of bothering to refer back to the original source a lot of these engines something like open ai and he says for example if google clones neva which we expect then publishers are at risk because as search engines become answer engines referral traffic will drop this is an existential threat for publishers of news publishers of recommendations review sites all kinds of publishers out there on the web and he points out in this thread it's happened before google featured snippets and uh you know the featured snippets are the thing i was just complaining about the little box that's like here's the actual information that you want don't worry we took care of it for you that caused a massive drop in referral traffic on 10 to 20 percent of queries in the past writes sridhar this is dangerous for publications unless they take control of their relationship which with their search overlords there are three ways to do this he says one don't get crawled which we all know is virtually impossible and then he says unless publishers band together unilateral disarmament is hard for a single publisher to achieve against a monopoly then he says ask for payment for llm inclusion again tough against a monopoly neva he says is committed to pub revenue share that is they're going to implement a revenue share model with publishers as part of their rollout and then he says or three publishers take ownership of the relationships with their users with ai transforming the web what does it look like for referral traffic from an aggregating answer bot google to become sticky traffic that originates and stays on an app or website so he gives the example of adam d'angelo and the quora team uh creating this vision where you're sort of where users can kind of use the best bots for their various information needs and in fact this is a really interesting this harkens back to my interview with albert wenger from usv he talked about the idea that all of us should actually have the right to create and utilize our own bots that we shouldn't necessarily have to use the bots that are given to us from any one of these companies we should have agency over a bot that goes out and finds information on our behalf without us having to trade for example our data or our attention in terms of ads it's a long thread i'm not going to necessarily uh read the whole thing but i encourage you to check it out because i do think we are entering you know we've talked a lot about the ai race we've talked a lot about all the different ways that this is going to change information delivery and change our relationship with information and there are just so many many many billions of dollars at stake here and an entire digital advertising universe and all of the publishers behind search like if you think about the way in which search did ultimately change everything it became the entry point for the information h in which we live all of that is about to be disrupted again and it is a huge deal huge deal all right i'm just going to do one last mini update here a startup of the week if you will shift med is a company that has just raised 200 million dollars to address and sort of digitize the massive nursing shortage that's going on in the united states right now the u.s unemployment rate of is of course uh three and a half three point four percent um all of the increase many a huge increase 20 of the increase in jobs that were reported in the latest jobs report in the united states involved education and health care nursing shortages have been this huge problem since before the pandemic the bureau of labor statistics estimates there will be over 200 000 rn openings each year through 2031 we do not have enough nurses and that has led to all kinds of things it has led to this sort of travel nurse situation where you can actually make like three to four to five times as much money if you become a travel nurse as opposed to staying with one hospital that has led to that on top of the fact that nurses although there is a huge shortage are also underpaid and poorly treated there have been strikes all over the united states the pandemic uh led to tons and tons of burnout obviously travel nurses by the way side note single travel nurse can earn up to ten thousand dollars a week and can cause a host cost a hospital as much as 10 times more than a regular staffed nurse but meanwhile a hospital might be paying this for a travel nurse while the other nurses are outside striking over their pay it's absolutely bananas the whole nursing situation in the united states is banana pants hot mess disaster so shift med just came in and this is kind of maybe why you can imagine a company raising 200 million dollars that's not on generative ai uh there they want to reduce operating costs for hospitals by 30 to 40 percent essentially by kind of gigifying the healthcare industry so uh the app works by filling open shifts at hospitals or long-term care centers assisted living communities the company negotiates worker rates and then splits the difference with health systems and then also offers health facilities the option of white labeling the app so that then workers could use it to pick up shifts after hours so that maybe they can take advantage of any capacity that exists in the community without having to hire these travel nurses which is of course disrupting all of the economics of nursing within hospitals now i don't want to understate how hard it is to deal with the healthcare industry in the united states there are like unions there are probably insurance rates to think about there's sort of all of the hospital bureaucracy here this is a very very very difficult industry industry to disrupt but it's probably one of the industries that needs it the absolute most so as these labor shortages have grown uh significantly we've seen actually a lot of other job placement platforms raise capital to combat this kind of lack of healthcare worker incredible health raised an 80 million dollar series b last august valuing it at 1.65 billion gale healthcare raised 60 million from ftb capital last january and bemlo a yc alum raised a 3.3 million dollar seed round backed by y combinator long journey ventures and uncommon capital in july of 2022 it's almost like instant delivery services or you know gig work uber and lyft and doordash for healthcare and it kind of is one yet another example of where uh an ancient industry cannot overhaul itself and so startups want to come in and do it and we'll see how the success works out all right we have we don't normally do this on this show we don't do the like it's valentine's day so we're going to do valentine's day content but it accidentally happened and it's absolutely delightful i have an interview up next with the co-founder of so synced jessica alderson and so synced and is a dating app that was built by jessica and her sister luella and it matches people based on their personality types it is not a myers-briggs test specifically they did all of these research all this research and sort of determined that personality types are a huge indicator of compatibility and created this like jason called it horoscopes for tech dudes and i actually asked her i was like you know we're in this point this stage of like extreme self-examination and astrology is super back and this is kind of exactly that we have this great conversation about which personalities use the make for the best matches and the surprising age group that is taking to so sync it's a great conversation uh with jessica alderson that's coming up right now element

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Jason Calacanis: interview in our seed and series a series i should come up with a better way to phrase that but here we

SPEAKER_58: are today i'm super excited to talk to jessica alderson the co-founder and ceo of so synced which is a dating app designed to match compatible personality types which is i feel like a big promise like we've all been trying to do that but you're taking a unique take in terms of how you're pulling it off welcome and i can't

SPEAKER_60: wait to hear all about it yes thank you so much for having me excited to be here all right so tell me how this works so you sign up to the app the first part is kind of like a typical dating app and then

SPEAKER_63: the big difference is we have a personality test and it's based on the 16 personality types model um which a lot of people probably know already because it's the most popular personality framework in the world um and then yeah we essentially let you know your personality type um you get like a description strengths weaknesses um it's you know hopefully quite fun we have a very high completion rate so i think people do enjoy it um and it is actually pretty quick it takes you know just a few minutes for most people depending on i guess how well they know themselves and then yeah you basically see uh different profiles on the app you see their personality types and we have um like a unique matching algorithm based on personality compatibility um which we yeah have now refined the data we

SPEAKER_64: started off with a kind of theory ourselves and now it's based on a pretty big data set which is

SPEAKER_58: a pretty pretty fun really so um let's talk let's start a little bit on the with the personality test it it is the or it's based on or it's very similar to the myer myers-briggs test that people are familiar

SPEAKER_60: with it kind of those letters yeah not not officially a myers-briggs test right not associated with the

SPEAKER_63: myers-briggs company um so it's yeah basically this the 16 personality types framework is kind of how how we describe it um but yeah it's like intj esfp enfp those personality types got it and then

SPEAKER_58: talk about the matching why why why that i wonder like is is and also kind of and i mean this as a compliment how come nobody thought of that before like this is something we're all so familiar with we all do it for work it's like a framework that we incorporate into lots of relationships but not

SPEAKER_62: necessarily dating apps yes and you're definitely not the first person to say why hasn't this been done

SPEAKER_63: before and we were really surprised so my sister is my co-founder um and when we were kind of talking about this idea we googled and we're like why why is no one doing this it makes so much sense it's such a popular personality test people love it it's used like extensively in a kind of work environment um and so yeah basically we chose that because um i used to work in finance i worked at morgan sanley for five years um worked in london for the majority of that time and i dated someone who was australian and we ended up moving to australia together after like a couple of years of dating and which was yeah incredible love australia a lot amazing yeah and so i got a transfer with morgan stanley which is also amazing um and yeah it was there for a year and then unfortunately the relationship didn't work out and i was leaving my job at the same time so these two natural ends happened and i had been super into personality uh types and personality tests particularly the 16 personality types framework um for a long time but had mostly been using it in a work context um and when these two natural ends happened i was like right i'm just gonna take a bit of time out like backpack around the world just you know had been working super long hours and investment banking i was like i'm just gonna read about things i'm interested in you know it's like very lucky to be in that kind of position where i could do that right like not everyone gets that opportunity um so yeah and because i'd had this breakup i started applying personality types to like love dating and relationships and i spent like yeah i can't tell you how many hours kind of researching it but it was the trip ended up being a year um and a lot of it was spent looking into personality type compatibility you know i met lots of people when i was traveling um there you know spent a lot of time on reddit there are people posting all day every day on you know like entp forums isfj forums saying you know i'm dating this person and this personality type this is why it's great this is why we're having challenges so there was a lot of information out there i guess is my point and i just saw really strong correlations between which types were i guess more natural fits and relationships and which weren't um and then i got back to london and i was telling my sister about this over some drinks in soho and um yeah we decided to to go for it because yeah like you said we were kind of wondering why this hasn't been

SPEAKER_58: done before yeah um some of these for people who are not familiar like some of these are are things we've been talking about a lot i think in society like introversion you know i versus z introvert versus versus extrovert has been coming up a lot there's a lot more sort of awareness i think about the introverted personality and what that can mean the um the other letters are s for sensing i for intuition t for thinking f for feeling j for judging and p for perceiving and then you get this sort of four letter personality type um i wonder talk to me about the matching then and where that comes from because i'm assuming it's not it's certainly not a one-to-one i can tell you i you know recently tried

SPEAKER_17: to date an enfp like myself and that didn't go you know it's like a hot mess nobody's in charge of

SPEAKER_83: anything yes oh my god that must have been quite fun it was chaotic extremely fun and complete chaos all

SPEAKER_62: the time yeah like yes yes no one ever wants to make it you know you can imagine so it's not a so i

SPEAKER_58: i would imagine that a lot has gone into creating that algorithm around the matching right yes um

SPEAKER_63: exactly and actually enfps um are one of the types that are most likely to find a relationship on our app it's like the most kind of common couple that we see enfp and intj and it's it's kind of funny because it's this almost like magical couple that like lots of people in the personality type well talk about um and then actually now we have the data and it is the couple that we see get together the most um i know actually quite a lot of enfp intj couples so um okay yeah the bigger picture concept is to match couples who have some similarities so they're on the same wavelength they understand each other and they have great conversations on a daily basis but then a certain amount of differences to create that spark and that sense of intrigue um and you know so it's it's kind of fun exciting and there's that chemistry because i think sometimes when we talk about personality compatibility um people assume that it's like it's not that kind of fun chemistry aspect as well but it definitely

SPEAKER_89: is it's kind of all of it packaged up it's kind of great too because it gives you an immediate

SPEAKER_63: conversation starter yeah i would imagine yeah it's that's a really good point and we have a super super high um like match to messaging conversion ratio it's like close to 10 times higher than a typical dating app um because yeah i mean like i guess firstly there's the intention side of things people sign up they take a personality test um the vast vast majority we did a survey about this the other day are looking for a long-term relationship which you know you'd imagine right um and then the second part of that is yeah there is this kind of more fun interesting aspect to it that makes it easier to start a conversation you see this in people's bios on the app as well they're like oh this is i'm this personality type this is really accurate or oh this has really intrigued me and it's yeah a good good

SPEAKER_62: starting point to chat really and then the the rest of the mechanics of the app are pretty

SPEAKER_94: standard dating app right like you swipe or you i mean how does how does kind of the rest of the app

SPEAKER_95: work compared to what people are familiar with kind of the matching um is similar to kind of i guess like

SPEAKER_63: most dating apps um we have a personality hub um which is again kind of where we're different where we do daily polls um like you know questions do you believe in love at first sight um you know do you usually make the first move that kind of thing we break the answers down by personality type so say you're chatting to like an intj on the app you can kind of see how intjs answer all these questions um and we have like a compatibility calculator as well which is kind of i guess like the start of the route we want to go down more in the future where um you can kind of you you have your matches and you also have famous people as well if you want to see your compatibility with famous people um and then there's a kind of like detailed breakdown of different aspects of compatibility say like how you would likely interact on a daily basis the type of connection you'd likely have um like sexual chemistry all these kind of things um because i guess like yeah where we kind of want to go with it more in the future is i guess really expand that kind of self-awareness self-understanding part and then the understanding of the other person as well right can you just create a cup

SPEAKER_58: hub called how to choose a restaurant like i feel like that's where it all breaks down how to choose

SPEAKER_99: yeah yeah that's true yeah exactly just have like a spinner and just be like right yeah let's just go

SPEAKER_58: just who is going to be in charge of choosing the restaurant yeah that's all i want to know um yeah you are it looks like seed stage so far right raised a seed round in 2021 what um how many like what can you tell us about your traction so far users who they are you know how it's been going you were written up in forbes almost immediately which is great congratulations thank you yeah um so

SPEAKER_63: in terms of traction um we now have like hundreds of thousands of users um which is yeah super exciting um yeah we we do like a lot with like journalists and the press so yeah as you mentioned um we're featured in forbes is the next big thing in dating um we were the youngest company last year to be named um by fast company as a top tech startup to watch globally um and yeah we're like yeah featured a lot really in the press like vice mashable huffman post daily mail all kinds of publications um because we do a lot on the kind of like relationship expert side of things um and we've actually like started now commenting more on like celebrity compatibility so um my sister's uh last time she did a column a weekly column about love island i don't know if it's as big as yeah yeah um and we're doing like a lot on that now because it's restarted we're not doing like a weekly column we're kind of taking a slightly different approach but um yeah so a lot of traction there and we've helped yeah thousands and thousands of people now find relationships um have like a lot of so sync marriages i'd say it's about probably about 20 that we know of um already many many more we actually found out about a marriage on tick tock last week um which was kind of crazy just someone commented on a tick tock post and said by the way i downloaded your app a year ago and i'm now married to my

SPEAKER_65: partner who i met on it oh that is so great okay so now talk to what is it like to go from

SPEAKER_62: investment banking to now i'm helping people get married i mean this must just be like a pretty

SPEAKER_61: fascinating journey overall yes yeah definitely fascinating um and like to be honest there isn't

SPEAKER_63: anything i would rather be doing right now like i just love what we do and it is just so fulfilling

SPEAKER_100: and you know sometimes if i'm having a bad day i'll be like but we've helped like loads of people you know find their life partner um and like you know even if you help just two people get together like that

SPEAKER_63: actually changes their lives if you know someone that they stay with long term and they really kind of i guess you know just have a great relationship um so yeah it's definitely been interesting i'm yeah i'm really glad that i started um in investment banking that was great in terms of learning about you know businesses and financial modeling and all these things that definitely come in handy now um with a startup um but yeah i feel like yeah very happy with the kind of path that um i've gone down really

SPEAKER_62: and then talk to me about as long as we're talking about is investment in business um how do you make

SPEAKER_63: money pretty standard membership model yes so yeah exactly um like a subscription package um like similar ish features to probably um ones that you've seen kind of you know paying to see who's liked you travel mode um we have like a golden message so if you want to send a message to someone that you haven't yet matched with um if you pay for the membership package you can send one golden message a day um kind of like profile boosts um that kind of thing so yeah the golden message is like a more thoughtful kind of mega like if that makes sense so you actually send a message with it so kind of gets more of um people's personality across um and yeah i mean like that is i would say like one of the great things about dating apps is they you know monetization has definitely been worked out there's quite a lot of i guess maybe like social apps that struggle to monetize um but you know people definitely do pay for pay for love and they yeah pay for like hookups and short-term relationships as

Jason Calacanis: well in a kind of a different way yeah absolutely you mentioned that the more data you get the more helpful it is to the algorithm like what i mean it it is pretty like i will confess that i sent it to

SPEAKER_58: friends who are in relationships because i was like dude you have to do this like we have to know our personality types do you matt does that help you or hurt you was that a bad thing should i not do that again

SPEAKER_121: no no that's yeah that's completely fine does it you know it helps because you get more data or

SPEAKER_63: yeah i mean i guess the data set that we use at the moment is when we have success stories so when people leave the app because they found their partner and you know we ask them um what the personality type of their partner that they met on the app is and then we also have quite a lot of people that write in or like you know even like i said on tick tock just message on social media um and then we always ask them you know what is the personality type of your partner that you met um so that's the kind of main data set that we use now um and then like going forwards you know we don't yet have say like a data scientist but going forwards there's a lot of interesting things we can do i guess like pre-success story that could increase people's chances as well what have you

SPEAKER_62: found do you have like high level i mean i think it's so interesting that for example you said the

SPEAKER_58: enfp and what was the intj is really successful have any other kind of insights like that that you found about personality types and how they mesh or don't or yeah what's the biggest disaster

SPEAKER_63: yes you're the biggest disaster yeah i mean any any personality type pairing can work and i'm always you know want to be careful to say this you never would say to someone this is not going to work because it's simply not true it's just that some pairings will you know require a bit more effort or you know obviously different people like different things as well um so i think the kind of the biggest learning um from like a personality compatibility's perspective is um and it's something that we have the theory of in the beginning and the data has proved this um is that you tend to see like intuitives matching with intuitives or i guess pairing up with intuitives and then sensors pairing up with sensors so that's the second letter n or s um and that yeah that's something we expected because they just kind of like tend to be more um like on the same wavelength in terms of like daily conversations um there are like you know advantages to sensor intuitive pairings as well but that's i guess probably the biggest learning um in the data or it's just it's very consistent it sounds like

SPEAKER_58: yes yeah yeah exactly it is how sticky are dating apps like do people bounce around once they find one i mean you know you're it's a a crowded world out there when it comes to options for dating this is a

SPEAKER_62: great differentiator but i also wonder how you continue to sort of keep and engage new people

SPEAKER_100: yeah so i say it kind of depends on um the type of dating apps so if you've got dating apps that are

SPEAKER_63: more focused on like short-term relationships more kind of hookups um then you do have those kind of repeat users that will use it and then they might not use it for a couple of weeks and then they'll use it you know in like a couple of months say um and you know because they're not getting into a long-term relationship they're just using it repeatedly essentially um and then you have a kind of like the other end of the spectrum where um people are actually finding long-term relationships potentially lifelong relationships on um your dating app and this is actually really good in a different way because this is something that you know quite a few investors brought up when we were raising our funding round and they're like oh but if you you know if your matching algorithm is so

SPEAKER_100: great then you'll put yourself out of business yeah yeah yeah exactly but it really it doesn't happen

SPEAKER_63: like that because those success stories are literally like the best adverts for the app that you could ever imagine um you know imagine like how often you ask couples how they met to like you know when you're in a relationship how much you talk about it yourself um and it's you know like literally it and it i guess it has the added benefit of having this interesting talking point so we've talked to our success stories about this and they say that you know they bring it up at dinner parties and things like that and then people at dinner parties are doing the tests around the table because they want to know their personality type um so yeah there are kind of like different ways that that i guess you can have or can kind of grow and if you don't have repeat users as such um then you know that kind of word of mouth from people telling their friends how they met is really really powerful and we see this with press as well actually when there's a press article about a success story we see like a lot of downloads um because people just like to actually see real people

SPEAKER_117: and hear their stories yeah there's well there's just a built-in kind of easy virality around like

SPEAKER_58: everybody you know every can grasp this immediately everybody's somewhat familiar although i keep saying everybody and i wonder about your demographics because i could imagine like a lot of us do this at

SPEAKER_62: work i could imagine you might skew even a little older than a bumble or a tinder which is very

SPEAKER_137: maybe millennial focused but maybe yeah yeah i mean that was the exact theory that we had um but it

SPEAKER_63: actually hasn't really worked out like that um we thought the exact same thing you know lots of um people take the test through work and so you'd think it would kind of be you know lots of say like professionals um that have found out about it then become interested um but actually it's kind of it's like quite a gen z audience um and i think one of the reasons for this is that it's like a big thing on social media um so you know it's not not unusual for a personality type like tick tock video to get say like you know a million or sometimes millions of views um and particularly during lockdown like personality type instagram really blew up so i think that has kind of encouraged this i guess like slightly younger audience um and there are also probably people who spend like more time on reddit

SPEAKER_62: and that kind of thing it's interesting too because although it is not that astrology has been having

SPEAKER_58: a big moment like i think that there's sort of like i think everyone's doing this right now like a lot of people especially gen z's are like really into this particular type of examination and it feels a little bit like that like the way that you've it's it's quite clever i think the presentation and the writing and how you know kind of excited it is about your personality type that it's got that kind of vibe um with more science behind it more science but a hundred percent is that kind of self-reflection

SPEAKER_63: vibe and that is very much a structural trend like it kind of ties in with you know therapy becoming a bigger thing over the past say like five years and um like the way i think about this is using like maslow's hierarchy of needs um so like you know at the bottom you've got like food water shelter that kind of thing and then as you kind of like go up it goes to like all these different things self-esteem and then like the top of the pyramid is self-actualization that's you know like essentially reaching your true potential and a lot of people use like frameworks to help them understand themselves and that's kind of where personality tests come in um so i think like i do kind of think we're just at the start of that really and that it's just going to like keep growing and growing when you look at data of how it's kind of trended over the past few years it does have that like hockey stick growth curve yeah you know like people are just gonna come more and more kind of i guess like wanting to be self-aware and going down that route as we go on well then a great timing the app is called so synced

SPEAKER_58: with no e s y n c d and you can find it at so synced.com uh jessica is the co-founder along with your sister luella which by the way we didn't even get into but that is adorable yeah i love it yeah it's great fun actually wow that's wonderful um well congratulations and i'm sure we're going to be hearing a lot more about this in the future because i can tell you i'm already

SPEAKER_89: telling all my friends yes thank you so much for having me congrats thanks for the time all right

Jason Calacanis: thanks for listening everybody we have an awesome interview coming tomorrow about a potential calamity event coming for startups later this year i'm not trying to bring you down i'm just saying you might

SPEAKER_148: want to listen so we'll see you then we'll also have some quick news too stay tuned have a great rest of your day