SPEAKER_00: when founders see a big time and competition this rabid should that push them away from building that space or should it draw them towards building to that space you should be drawn to going into

SPEAKER_01: that space if a lot of people find a great beach to surf um you probably want to surf that beach

SPEAKER_05: right because it could get better and better and people could be underestimating the tam so if i told you when sidecar and lyft were battling it out for ride sharing should uber join the race yeah they should um if i told you before xi had released an llm and chat gpt and claude had and gemini had run away with it should xai jump into the race uh you might say no it's too late it's never too late somebody could start an llm right now i know that sounds crazy but you know if all of a sudden apple decided this is strategic for us let's put a hundred billion dollars into it and let's double the offers everybody else have and let's find a way to put this on every iphone

SPEAKER_06: and we'll design the entire iphone around the idea of it being an h100 like and the idea of building an h100 competitor and competing with nvidia okay it sounds crazy but if there's a big market there's

SPEAKER_07: always going to be room for innovation this week in startups is brought to you by alpha sense get deeper

SPEAKER_09: insights into your business with the power of ai search and market intelligence start with a free trial at alpha dash sense dot com slash twist public you take investing seriously public does too build a multi-asset portfolio and earn an industry-leading 4.1 apy on your cash with no fees or minimums learn more at public.com twist and dot tech say it without saying it head to get dot tech slash twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean sharp dot tech domain today all right everybody welcome back to

SPEAKER_11: this week in startups it's friday and there's a ton of news alex uh let's get to work here what's our

SPEAKER_13: first story first story today jason is all about an application that reached the top the pinnacle of

SPEAKER_00: the app store before being taken offline by the founder because there was an enormous security problem the app in question is called neon and its model was interesting it paid people to upload their phone calls that it would then sell the phone data to ai companies for training in theory you could get up to 30 cents a minute if both people in the phone call were neon users or up to 30 a day max if it was just a one side of a phone call the problem is tech wrench took a look at the application did some i would say reasonable testing on it because they have an excellent cyber security team over there with zack whitaker and they found that quoting here loosely uh the backend servers were capable of spitting out reams of other people's call recordings neon servers could produce data about the most recent calls made by the apps users as well as providing public links to the raw audio files and the servers in question could be manipulated to reveal the most recent call records so talk much told them about this and they took it down didn't actually say there was a huge flaw when they told their users they were improving security but in the wake of t the app we talked about a couple weeks back that also leaked quite a lot of user information i thought it was a

SPEAKER_15: great moment to sit back and say cyber security for startups we should think about it and i was curious what your take is and what you tell founders i mean if you look at palo alto networks and

SPEAKER_05: all these cyber security firms and how amazing they're doing the cash over there is just a beast and he's been buying up all these you know um disparate uh cyber security firms and it feels like there are vectors all over the place now as a consumer you should use um this um really elite technique it's called common sense oh my uh yeah it's um it's a new technique it's you know it's it's trending in some subreddits but common sense would tell you that recording your phone calls is an absolutely stupid thing to do uh so uh but this is the world we live in where everybody's transcribing everything at a recent management team meeting i just told everybody bring a moleskin and a pen uh you know we'll use the notion has the built-in transcribing software so one person will do that who's hosting the meeting but everybody else laptops close let's try to have a um concept where everybody writes down what they're working on and what they think is important and then we can compare it to the the ai notes what i'm thinking is happening is we talked about work slop the

SPEAKER_06: other day yes we did and that is when people create work product using ai and their co-workers think they're dumb and not trustworthy there's another one that i think is super important which is um how you think so i'm gonna coin a term here think slop i think a lot of people are getting sloppy in their thinking because they're not doing the basic steps required for first principle thinking or just i don't know logic you have to process information in your brain to come to conclusions and have strategies then you have down time and then you go back to the product this is why bookmarking and taking notes and then having on your schedule a time to review your bookmarks or notes and so i started doing this i've been bookmarking stuff um and i'll say oh there's a potential blog post this is an interesting business idea this is an interesting investing idea and then you know a couple times a week when i don't have down time um i will go through my bookmarks and just say why don't you bookmark that and then sometimes i'll unbookmark something or i'll actually take action on it it's the same thing with notes when you write stuff down you remember it when you then transcribe it into a slack message you have another chance of thinking it through so it sounds inefficient and certainly it is to take notes in a meeting when you have a note taker and then it seems incredibly inefficient to read your own notes and then write them into uh you know your notion page or your slack but i made everybody do it and i just felt people were more present um and so i just i'm putting that out there as a good strategy for people who are into getting stuff done yeah so what jason's advocating

SPEAKER_00: for here as far as i can tell is one of the best study techniques that you should have learned in high school and college which is take your notes and then if you rewrite your notes you get an amazing refresher of what you've learned to prep for a test or just to have that information in your head but jason you also said something about taking a break and a pause and getting a little distance from what you're doing i found that if i'm having an exceptionally busy work day the best thing i can do to get more done is to get away from my desk for 20 minutes and take a walk because in that time i actually had the ability to think digest and then come back with some ideas some thoughts some ways to move the ball forward so a lot to be said about that don't do work slop folks but this story in particular jason this neon startup uh two things here i'm kind of curious about one do you think the economics were ever going to work out for paying people up to 30 bucks a day for phone call recordings and and two uh what steps should founders take to ensure that when they build something before it goes viral that they had the right cyber security bricks in place you know there are firms

Chamath Palihapitiya: that are processing large amounts of data with experts asking experts to answer questions to do

SPEAKER_05: reinforcement learning all that kind of stuff um and i think this is an interesting concept if you were i'm sure the people who are doing the note-taking for doctors or therapists we have somebody in our accelerator who's doing it for therapists um yeah just having an expert who is i don't know doing

SPEAKER_06: taxes talking to their customers and recording the calls and then training based on those calls that's a very interesting idea if the person is giving great advice and somebody else looks at that training data because garbage in garbage out yep and you see this in customer support all customer support

SPEAKER_05: calls are logged right they tell you that on the recording when you call so that's why um

SPEAKER_06: everybody's going after that first it's an expense and it's all recorded so you have the data set already you can go backwards and look here's the data set for this product oh we have a second product line yeah here's the data set for this set of speakers here's the data set for this set of headphones they probably have nothing in common in terms of customer support calls and you can just make little language models out of those and make that the inference data etc or in the context window rather and man super powerful so um i think it's not a terrible idea okay but i think as a large scale project it's kind of weird because it assumes that people are intelligent which going back to your

SPEAKER_33: common sense point maybe a bit of a stretch of an idea could be a stretch like what exactly are we

SPEAKER_06: trying to accomplish here uh do people say things on the phone that are more valuable than they the people who choose to contribute to a quora or a social network or a reddit thread or a hacker news thread or email like i would think they're when people write stuff down uh perhaps they're more thoughtful but who knows i mean it it is data and signal but you know what if you are on the phone and people are just spewing off things they they read that they never verified so now you've got things people overheard or you know we see this in breaking news right people think they understand a situation uh in an emergency news situation and they just they've heard a couple of theories and then they repeat them right is that what you're putting in your training data it's kind of weird

SPEAKER_36: garbage in garbage out we all understand the importance of a crisp memorable easy to spell domain name one of those names you can say over the phone and people know how to type it in without asking you the spelling but let's get real the good ones are either taken or there's some poacher who's holding it and waiting for some huge payday and they don't reply to you if you even if you want to pay for a premium domain you don't want to use up all your runway on a domain name that's just the truth for a startup you want to put that valuable cash back into your startup's operations so you should consider this a dot tech domain you can get a clean crisp super memorable name for your website and company and signal out loud to your customers and investors we're a tech company that's instant branding for you that's why over 500 000 founders have collectively raised over 5 billion in investment building their companies on dot tech so skip the hassle head to www dot get dot tech slash twist or go to your favorite registrar and grab your dot tech domain today um yeah so i

SPEAKER_33: think we're going to see a lot more of this people were really talking about how like oh this must

SPEAKER_00: have been vibe coded etc etc etc i don't think we have any evidence in the case of neon that it was in fact built with a cursor or a windsurf or a similar sort of service but as people do use those services more as they become more popular and as it becomes easier to go from prompt to app to publish service i think we're going to see a lot more problems like this so if you're listening uh and someone's offering you money from an app probably don't trust it it's probably not exactly as built as well as you'd hope it to be to protect your data all right next up uh the big tick tock deal a lot of questions about this we've touched on it before jason about the consortium the delays in the law that was going to ban or force the divestment now we're here we have outlines of what the trump administration is proposing and most importantly people are confused about why tick tock the us operations of tick tock are being valued at a mere 14 billion dollars i went back through all the reporting the most recent and most accurate number that i could find for tick tock scale was that it did 16 billion dollars worth of revenue in 2023 so it's rather dated figure implying it's much larger now and just for fun if you presume 25 growth in 24 and 25 it would have about 25 billion dollars in revenue this year my question is why is the value to 14 billion dollars i don't want to be a conspiracy theorist but i also don't understand that figure so i wanted to get your take on the number okay that

SPEAKER_01: number doesn't make any sense people are right to question it where what is the source of this

SPEAKER_05: number is this officially from the white house is it from bite dance is it from um you know oracle

SPEAKER_06: who's paying for it do we know the source and the providence of this number jd vance the vice

SPEAKER_44: president jd vance said that in the oval office about 20 hours ago yeah okay so the administration

SPEAKER_05: said the valuation is 14 billion about 14 yeah so something's wrong here um and it could be that

SPEAKER_06: the 14 billion is for the 80 folks are buying and the 20 that china is keeping or 14 billion is the amount being invested that's what i think is going on here somebody misspoke i think the existing investors like jeff yas are keeping their shares brad gerstner keeping his shares i would assume in all of this uh great trade for him by the way bestie brad so let's say the new group is investing 14 billion and the there's a communication area here where the 14 billion isn't the valuation it's the 14 billion going into the company 14 billion going in for a third of the company if we assume the other two-thirds is the chinese shareholders are keeping 20 percent and the existing shareholder

SPEAKER_05: base let's say only a third of this is new that would make it a 45 billion dollar or 42 billion dollar valuation 42 billion dollar valuation would be three times revenue two times revenue something in that range maybe and so it would make more logical sense that's what i'm going to say is going on here

SPEAKER_44: i just pulled the numbers it's uh expected to be a 45 stake from the new investing group that includes

SPEAKER_33: oracle and michael dell and murdoch so that would value tick tock at about 31 billion okay okay so it makes more sense makes more sense but i i pulled a bunch of it's still low it's still low and the

SPEAKER_00: reason why i think that is there's two kind of comps for this company there's the social media world and then there's the e-commerce world so if you look at price sales multiples from public companies that we have data for meta about 11 snap about two and a half pinterest about six and then on the e-commerce side shopify is valued at uh 18 19 times revenue and uh amazon's worth about three and a half x so no matter where you look size of company sector whatever comp you pick it still feels incredibly cheap the the the steel man of this is from keith roboi an investor that we've talked about on the show quite a lot and he responded to um shiel monhot from um the fintech venture capital firm that i always forget the name of btc ventures and he said the company would have been worth zero

SPEAKER_05: under federal law so this is a heroic outcome um that is true but this does not feel like the correct valuation for the company uh if you told me i could buy shares of tick tock right now for 14 billion i would sell every share i own of every company and i would plow or i'd sell 80 of every holding i have and put it in there because one times revenue makes no sense uh or less than one times revenue if that's in fact true uh and so i don't believe that's true uh so we'll have to wait you know a lot of times he's breaking news stories especially out of this administration which tends to talk into microphones a lot i've noticed and they like having five different announcements a day about different topics whereas the last administration like we biden had two press conferences in four years

SPEAKER_52: like it's such a stark difference here in terms of communication strategy i think they're kind of like

SPEAKER_05: your friend at a bar who's like yeah totally we're we're taking tick tock private and it's like okay you took tick tock private like yeah we took a private i'm like okay yeah oh can i get it on the deal like yeah yeah right as we sign the papers i'm like wait wait you just said you closed the deal it's like yeah just closed wait but you haven't signed the paper so the deal's not closed he's like yeah yeah no no we have a letter of understanding and then every time you double click on something with this administration it's like okay what's the exact reality of this oh we have we closed a trade deal with the uk in principle and it's being papered or it's a memorandum of understanding it's always a little bit like that right it happened with just this week to give another um example with h1bs it's a hundred thousand per year or it's a hundred thousand for one time fee or a hundred thousand for 10 years so it's 10k a year or five years 20k a year all these details seem to you know get a little mixed up it's uh and it is what it is uh i i like the fact that we get like more real-time information but it does make us in situations like this come to the conclusion

SPEAKER_06: that we're going to have to wait and see so i always tell people whenever trump tweets something there was 72 hour rule always is in effect all right next up is an interesting bit of

SPEAKER_00: news about radiology of course this is not a medical show jason but one of the places where people really thought that ai was going to have the most direct impact on employment and also on our lives was going to be in the radiology department reading the scans of your body that we use humans for today to find cancers to find tumors to find anomalies i'm saying medical words it's not my world but it was supposed to be a big darn deal but as it turns out according to a study from works in progress not really the case demand for radiologists is at an all-time high they're actually expanding the resident classes from medical schools to include more radiology positions because we need more of them so the question is why didn't this really go the way people thought condensing dramatically here to fit it into our show but essentially medical imaging models often don't perform as well in the wild as they do against benchmarks not a huge shock but it gets more interesting than that if an ai model was trained on imaging data from one particular hospital it doesn't actually translate as well to other hospitals that are doing similar tasks so there's some data biases inside of how we're training these that are making them not quite as good on the ground another thing is that they tend to be trained for single issues versus a radiologist being able to look for all sorts of problems on a scan at the same time etc etc etc and this all echoes a 2024 study from i think it was harvard medical school that found as well that quote use of ai can interfere with a radiologist's performance and interfere with the accuracy of their interpretation so i bring this to the show not to just say boohoo ai but because there are a number of startups that i keep tabs on that are working on medical imaging ai models and bringing ai to the medical world and so i just wanted to talk about this as a have we oversold what ai can do jason or are we just sitting here in kind of the trough of despair until we get these models to be a little bit smarter a

SPEAKER_40: little bit more multimodal so that we can take on this type of challenge and i'll live a little bit

SPEAKER_52: longer okay it's hard to know what's going on here because they're saying that these models

SPEAKER_05: models are not as good in the field as they are in testing am i correct yes that is the core of this so why wouldn't it work in the field like it worked in the laboratory is my question what's the theory

SPEAKER_44: there is there a theory there a couple of things one of which is the way um people present data is a little bit different so you won't always get the exact same data brought into a prompt scenario so if you take a scan it's not always in the same format or the same size the same location okay so

SPEAKER_05: standards the data going in could be variable whereas the data is cleaner going in during testing okay that's found that feels like an iteration problem um and i wonder if in the field in practice there are radiologists who are i don't want to say they're trying to sync the technology but they're

SPEAKER_06: creating roadblocks for the technology all right folks the secret is out smart motivated people are

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SPEAKER_00: so that's really interesting because i was thinking about the same thing wouldn't a radiologists want to say hey this doesn't work look at how good we are they actually looked at uh what they call a pair system i believe when you have one human and one ai don't you think that would be a great combination have the human have the ai work together it turns out that that actually yielded worse outcomes uh more callbacks of patients and no improvement in cancer detection because the doctors were immediately like well the ai will take a look at it and so they weren't trying as hard so when we tried to have kind of the um human in the loop or expert in the loop back to your earlier

SPEAKER_13: point it actually made for worse outcomes so they're not trying to stand back it they're just

SPEAKER_05: trying to work less yeah interesting um i think we'll probably see more and more of this uh as ai hits the field you know if you go on um uh self-driving reddits uh subreddits and you look at fsd or you look at zooks or waymo you know uh you will see tons and tons of real world situations where these cars get confused etc you'll have a hard time finding you know a crash because they're typically not on highways they're doing things at low speed they're doing things on controlled courses essentially and they're the companies are almost universally being extremely cautious uh in fact i would say universally they're being extremely cautious either with a safety driver or low speeds

SPEAKER_06: etc so you can uh have these trials of despair where you know you're correct uh the technology was hyped and you had this hype cycle and then the reality is we got to figure out how to deal with cones being put on the hood of cars we've got to figure out how to deal with you know somebody double parking on both sides of the street like they do in brooklyn you know fifth avenue third avenue where i grew up people are double parked they're triple parked these mafioso guys would park their cars leave them running and you'd have like you know three cadillacs outside of my dad's bar you know double parked the police wouldn't give them tickets because they knew the guys were connected if the guys did get tickets they could hand them for the cops with a 20 bill they get ripped up um you know it's a whole thing and so did you grow up in a movie because it sounds like you grew up in a bit of a movie a bit of a

SPEAKER_66: movie like you're describing like the opening scene of like some sort of like 1960s gangster film like oh no don't worry about it really uh 70s yeah so i uh i think the other thing that'll

SPEAKER_05: happen and i had some feedback from amazon where i was you know somebody from corporate comms at amazon you know kind of was like hey just want to make sure we check reality and you know here's some information for you um so that you're more informed which i appreciate by the way um and they were like

SPEAKER_06: even though we've put tons of robots in amazon factories already we've still grown our uh employee base and you're like and the reason is because we keep adding new products or services that the

SPEAKER_05: robots haven't gotten to like same day delivery like this like that you know just tons of different things they're doing you know packing uh groceries groceries a big business for them now and and you know putting pairs into brown bags and making sure they don't get damaged not exactly something you want a robot doing yet eventually the robot will do it better uh than a human but for now um so yeah it's going to take a little time and then additionally consumption could go up uh and people have been talking about that paradox um jevon's paradox jevon's paradox if you make something cheaper it induces more use uh induced traffic is another example of that paradox at work which is oh you're like we're going to add two more lanes to this highway and then all of a sudden traffic gets worse and you're like why did traffic get worse it's like oh because people saw us improve the highway and so they lived further away because we went from a two-lane highway you know out here in hill country they've they're doing this to the 290 it was like a three lanes each way and uh tons of stoplights now they're building trenches and overpasses and no stoplights and putting in another six lanes and so that means more people will move out to dripping springs or wimberley because you'll be able to get there quicker which then fills it up so yeah i think radiologists aren't going to magically go away what will probably happen is people will go for x-rays more often and the idea of like sending somebody

SPEAKER_06: for an x-ray i'm sure because of the cost insurance companies might turn it down or might say it's not necessary you know when you get a common cold they don't send you for an x-ray but if you get like severe upper respiratory they do send you for one right but i think that costs 200 bucks so are you going to send everybody who's got a cough to get an x-ray also x-rays i think there could be some side effects so you don't want to go for them too often yeah that's why you have to wear the lead

SPEAKER_44: vest at the dentist when they're doing the scans of your face um i also want to make the bullish case

SPEAKER_33: here i didn't just bring this up because i wanted to say boohoo ai so i read the article and i read some

SPEAKER_00: other studies just to kind of get my my arms around it quite often these seem to rest on historical data from 2018 from 2016. so when you read these analyses i think it's good to keep in mind that we're always looking backwards a little bit in time and ai has gotten smarter and better and more capable so i think that that's important also there are several startups that are working in this space that are doing quite well so one's called rad ai they built what they call powerful radiology ai they raised 151 million total jason and they ranked number 107 on the inc 5000 this year with uh 3 229 three-year growth so companies that are startups are doing well another one ai doc building a holistic ai system for medical imaging and raised over 400 million dollars so even though some studies are saying this the startups are on the case and i am optimistic that they are going to get it right and then we can all have free and faster and smarter medical imaging and we don't pay radiologists an average of 500 000 per year yeah and um it'll be cheaper that's the thing i'm looking

SPEAKER_05: forward to like just make everything so much cheaper and getting your blood work done you know you can use superpower function i think whoop is adding um the ability to just go with self-directed healthcare and get your blood work done people are uh like nutrisense we're investors in you can get one of those glucose monitors directly and start checking that out so all of this is going to result in consumers buying healthcare like they buy travel services you used to have to go through a travel agent to figure out is there how do i get to italy how do i get to rome what are the flight options and they would type on their computer and then explain it to you and give you some advice and now it's like ah you know just open up an app and go to google flights or go to expedia or whatever it happens to be and you know you disintermediated that entire layer of flight um or travel consultants right travel agents was there were storefronts of travel agents when i was growing up i don't know when they went away but sometime in the 90s travel agencies went away but if you were going to plan a vacation you would walk down the street walk into a storefront for people who are listening and you'd sit there and do an hour or two consultation with somebody of here are different and they give you brochures here's different places you can go on vacation here's how you get there here's the hotels now all that information is online so moving on uh xai has priced its government ai product at jason i'm

SPEAKER_00: very proud to report not 69 cents they didn't do that instead they went with 42 cents and so we all need to give google points because google priced its ai product for government at 47 cents so xai had to go

SPEAKER_33: lower than that what's the only meme number under 47 i guess it's 42 if you're a douglas adams fan yeah so

SPEAKER_00: we now have uh four different offerings available to government agencies from now through 2027 open ai for a dollar anthropic for a dollar google for 47 cents or xai for 42 cents so i guess we're going to bring a lot of great ai to the government my question is how the hell can these companies afford that because they're all losing so much money and now they're going to support the government for effectively

SPEAKER_44: zero as an investor jason doesn't that make you a little scared if you don't have the right data

SPEAKER_36: your company can't make the right decisions it's really that simple folks but your information it's spread out all over the place you got shared drives you got legacy systems maybe you're taking meeting notes uh using ai to do that you need one source of truth where you can find the most reliable accurate and real-time information possible the answer is alpha sense they're the ai search and marketing intelligence platform trained on over 500 million business documents their gen search platform gives you a blazingly fast start on your research projects pulling together an analyst level deep dive on any topic industry or a company in just minutes plus you can use gen grid to keep tabs on multiple different companies or topics right now or over time they've even got an autonomous ai interviewer keeping you plugged in to the latest thoughts from industry experts without the need to spend an entire afternoon jumping on zoom calls it's time to remove uncertainty from your process and start making better smarter decisions we're gonna start you off with a free trial go to alpha-sense.com twist that's alpha-sense.com twist for a free trial i think they're trying to jump start

SPEAKER_05: the government's interest in these technologies and if they do get value from it long term they'll want to buy the newer fresher models that come out in the future and they'll eventually want to pay for it they'll eventually want it to have on-prem versions of it so it's this is the same number one it's awesome that the technology is doing this as a group uh all the technologists all the technology companies and supporting the government to lower costs um and i think they will wind up benefiting

SPEAKER_06: from it if the government becomes uh dependent on this technology and implements it just like you know

SPEAKER_78: you can start out with notion i think notion has a free plan slack has a free plan a lot of these products start with free plans and then eventually i'm for government okay i think this is i would say

SPEAKER_83: this is i'm not saying that to be cynical no no no no no that makes sense to me i think that's what this is because there'll be other ways to monetize this like i said you know if you're the cia if you

SPEAKER_06: are you know the department of defense if you i mean if you're the irs and you want to start implementing this technology at some point you might say you know what can i get some on-prem and one of these companies xai might say sure we're going to set up a bunch of h-100s at your location or we're going to cordon off in our data center a bunch of these inference machines it'll be your own world nobody can get into it we can't get into it there's all kinds of ways uh for this to get monetized later but the governments and gov the government health care and education are usually the three last cities to fall when a new technology goes on a you know on a on a global empire building quest those are the last three cities they're the most resistant so how do you make them not resistant

SPEAKER_00: 42 cents per agency or 47 cents or the shocking cost of 100 cents from open ai and anthropic so i can't believe those money grubbers i know they're charging what are they doing they're charging a dollar how dare they well so a couple things i think about this one i think google's in a really good place here because they can afford to subsidize any amount of inference for the government the other companies have to raise either equity or debt capital to pay for this so we'll see how that works out for their economics but i do see the freemium option i had a more cynical take that i wanted to bring up do you think that we're seeing private sector companies offer the government low-cost high-quality services essentially to curry favor with the white house is that something that we should now keep in mind in these moments or am i being too tinfoil hat yeah i mean you're a

SPEAKER_05: lefty i'm a moderate other people are you know far on the right uh or maga and you know you you are correct that people will interpret behaviors based upon the lens they're coming from in fact that's how

SPEAKER_06: people will determine how they feel the economy is going there's this economic paradox where during the biden presidency republicans felt the economy was doing terrible during the trump presidencies 45th and now this one democrats over index thing it's worse i think it's like 20 points of difference in terms of approval ratings for these things uh and so that phenomenon um also will happen when interpreting any business relationship between private companies and the government and when you have the

SPEAKER_05: president of the united states bring every giant leader to the white house for a dinner that can cause challenges where you just assume uh causation correlation um at least these things are happening

SPEAKER_06: in public that's the one thing i'll say and we do have a pretty good system for conflicts here so to the extent people are um you know doing anything nefarious uh that is going to get investigated as we've seen both of these parties and i'm not a member of either of them and i'm just praying there's going to be a third party option and that's what i'm putting my energy into is the third party option because i think both of these uh groups uh are going to just keep investigating each other one of them gets out of the white house or the congress flips you know they're going to just start investigating each other over and over and over again it's never going to end it'll be law fair and investigations forever and uh i think people will generally keep their um keep their books clean okay good that's my guess because think about the cost of getting dragged into oh my god you did something nefarious you did some quid pro quo uh it's just after what happened with like hunter biden um or the meme coin stuff with the trump meme coin all of these things take an enormous amount of energy to then go clean up or defend juice may not be worth the squeeze it might just be much easier to donate to a campaign donate to a pack like jeff yas donates a lot of money to packs i understand or i read online and millions in the last election yeah yeah and he has a seat at the table when it comes to uh tick tock right which is his big breakout investment he can at least get his message to the white house does that mean they're going to do everything he asks obviously not but i think that that's the nature of a of our country is you can give a large amount of money to

SPEAKER_109: packs maybe that's the thing that has to go away two things have to be fixed one we have to get some

SPEAKER_33: way to prevent people from being able to drop 100 million on an election love to your friend elon but

SPEAKER_112: i do think there's multiple people who've done that right i know elon i know i know yes i mean i just

SPEAKER_33: want to point out that i'm not trying to make some sort of subtle dig yeah and then also gerrymandering has to go because then you end up with people that are only on the extremer sides of their parties

SPEAKER_00: there's no one in the middle like yourself and then we end up with no one making any progress but jason just to back up what you said i pulled the chart this is the one that i was thinking of this shows how public opinion about the u.s economy changes by administration so no republican thought the economy was good trump got elected 100 did buying and then it flips it's it's both parties that are doing this um except for look at the spread between public opinion on the u.s economy

SPEAKER_118: democrats think like 60 of them um wait this is very good yes so during the biden presidency look at

SPEAKER_05: the gap it's so polarized 60 of democrats at the peak thought the biden economy was great and republicans

SPEAKER_02: like 10 thought it was great it's a 50 point swing yeah insane and it's it's so dramatic too because he can literally just right here this is where biden got elected right or inaugurated and

SPEAKER_00: then immediately all the flips just flips so so that shows a lot about our country and i think we need to

SPEAKER_121: get as far away from that as we can which is why i really think we need to pass something on gerrymandering but yeah that feels like another leak in our system our system has leaks you know

SPEAKER_05: sometimes you got to plug the leaks you got to iterate on them things change over a couple of hundred years or 250 years you know since the founding of this experiment like things have

SPEAKER_06: changed you got to tweak them hey can somebody ask producer claude what that phenomenon of your opinion tracking your party affiliation according to the economy is i've i know there's a specific

SPEAKER_05: psychological term for this so i'll just ask producer claude to do some deep research on that for us and we'll break back in when we have it all right what else do we have in the news so jason

SPEAKER_00: next up we're talking about a company called factory sequoia backed 300 million valuation 50 million raise nea jp morgan and nvidia also in the deal it's another company that wants to help you write code their product is called droids what they call their ai agents and their idea is that you can have a lot of them working at once no matter where you code be it in the web in your ide at the command line whatever you want they follow you around cool fair enough the company says it's going to reach like maybe like a 20 million run rate into this year whatever the thing that i'm really amazed by is how much money is flowing into the space the ft reports via pitchbook data that five billion dollars has been invested into ai software development startups in the third quarter and or seven and a half billion if you want to count in the windsurf exit to um to google so what do you do if you're a founder because on one hand it is clear that people think the tam here is enormous sean mcguire from sequoia said that the market for coding assisting startups is going to be 10 trillion dollars but at the same time the competition is so rapid because the tam is so large so how should founders kind of balance going after markets where the tam is very attractive and also balancing out how many more competitors are going to have by going after those larger tam environments i was just curious what

SPEAKER_05: you thought about that yeah so this is going to be a huge space i've heard there's 30 million developers i've heard there's 50 million developers globally and i think the reason this is such a huge tam is because of that fact right 50 million developers um so if the average value of a developer is 200 000 you know 50 million times 200 000 that's a big number i'll have you pull that up in a second um but then you can then say well if you may if you can make if you can double the number of developers with this software so people who are bad developers who aren't in that 50 million group if you can just but double it to a hundred million you've now doubled the tam you've doubled the number of developers i think that's what's happening here we talked about induced traffic earlier you make more roads uh you make more lanes you get more cars because people will decide to live further and further from their job or the city center that's what's going to happen here these things are going to take the number of

SPEAKER_06: developers and i would say very easily in a decade if i if we had to make a bet here a polymarket of how many developers there were from now until 10 years from now which is people who as their primary job

SPEAKER_05: function ah primary job function yeah not like some of the time but primary job function push code um and develop software just develop software because that's obviously going to change uh like what that

SPEAKER_06: means to develop software i would say we'll go from 50 to 250 in a decade 5x in a decade that's an

SPEAKER_27: absurdly uh fast growth rate absurdly fast it also begins to become an actual large chunk of the

SPEAKER_00: human population if you extrapolate out how many people are going to have at that point in time 250 million no matter how you cut it up is going to be a single digit percentage of the total amount

SPEAKER_33: of humans um jason you wanted 50 million sorry 50 million developers times 200 000 a year that turns

SPEAKER_00: out it's 10 trillion i wonder if that's where sean mcguire got the number he was talking about kind of a very simple bit of calculation um but that's okay it's a big tam we all agree big tam but when founders see a big time and competition this rabbit should that push them away from building in that space or should it draw them towards building into that space you should be drawn

SPEAKER_01: to going into that space if a lot of people find a great beach to surf um you probably want to surf that

SPEAKER_05: beach right because it could get better and better and people could be underestimating the tam so if i told you when sidecar and lyft were battling it out for ride sharing should uber join the race yeah they should um if i told you before xi had released an llm and chat gpt and claude had and gemini had run away with it should xai jump into the race uh you might say no it's too late it's never too late somebody could start an llm right now i know that sounds crazy but you know if all of a sudden apple decided this is strategic for us let's put a hundred billion dollars into it and

SPEAKER_06: let's double the offers everybody else have and let's find a way to put this on every iphone and we'll design the entire iphone around the idea of it being an h100 like and the idea of building an h100 competitor and competing with nvidia okay it sounds crazy but if there's a big market there's

SPEAKER_05: always going to be room for innovation and even if you lose in a big market the the bronze or the honorable mention could be huge it'd be huge i mean lyft investors were super bummed that they got their asses handed to them um you know by uber uh and they got this they got the silver well the

SPEAKER_06: bronze depending on the market silver bronze still pretty good it's like a 15 billion dollar company if you invested under 5 billion you at least tripled your money or something to that effect so yeah still a good win uh i think this is a space where there's also going to be things that emerge that you didn't expect so for uber um or for airbnb i don't think in their initial business plans premium dedicated locations for staying somewhere like entire apartments or houses or complexes being built to be air dedicated airbnb inventory i don't think was ever in the business plan and i can tell you like as amazing as travis was of pointing out where this would go i i don't think ride sharing was in the original business plan it was always going to be lincoln town cars ride sharing came after that

SPEAKER_05: like uh as a concept uh and so here we are folks um yeah partisan bias by the way uh if we asked we asked producer claude partisan perceptual bias or partisan motivated reasoning is the cognitive uh biases you know you have these cognitive biases that everybody likes to talk about when you're an investor you like to study cognitive systems how people think so people like to think about thinking that

SPEAKER_141: phenomenon is partisan perceptual bias so you're partisan and your perception is biased makes total

SPEAKER_44: sense i have stock market bias my view of the economy is where the stock market is because then i

David Friedberg: either have more money or less so right now economy is great and if you are uh not in the market like

SPEAKER_05: 50 of the country is not yeah then their view of the market is their hourly wage which is why we have a bifurcated you know when you look at the moderates that's where you can kind of start to get a really good idea of what the country actually thinks when you could you take out the partisan bias of the moderates with moderates and wages not moving is how people perceive the state of the economy so you're like wow the stock market's at an all-time high bitcoin's at an all-time high housing all-time high how can people feel bad about this economy it's like they're still making you know 12 an hour 14 an hour and it's just not a living wage and they're the primary breadwinner in their family or they're you know the a duo of primary uh you have two primary uh breadwinners both making under 20 an hour it's kind of tough to live a sub 20 an hour you have to make 30 40 an hour in this country to sustain yourself um so really if major cities aside new york not everybody is entitled to live in manhattan beverly hills and san francisco you take those three cities out and you start looking at every other

SPEAKER_06: city in the country yeah you can live off 50k 60k if you have two people making that you can live off

SPEAKER_05: of that going to public school and you know it's not easy i'm not saying that but man under 20 bucks an hour you really need to figure out how to get above 20 and you know do it fast because you're

SPEAKER_109: not raising a family on 20 bucks an hour uh 40 bucks a year um so meta's ai team the much vaunted tbh

SPEAKER_00: alexander weighing from scale ai the smartest folks in the world jason nine figure salaries they've announced a new product and it is called vibes and i'm gonna play it for everybody vibes sounds

SPEAKER_152: promising what is it here it is coming to you live i know what it is i i know here we go folks all

SPEAKER_06: right this is the promo video and this is part of meta ai so there's a meta ai app by the way folks that lets you use your meta glasses and so here we're seeing a bunch of ai videos that you can create

SPEAKER_05: with tools and you can make your own ai slop and then it's a feed of really increasingly better looking ai slop so this is tick tock slop this is tick slop slop talk it's slop talk tick slop i think you won i

SPEAKER_153: think slop talk it's slop talk uh yeah but it's not even good so we're watching a guy kayak and there's

SPEAKER_33: whales flying overhead or an astronaut on a bike or a bear fighting another animal or it's just to me this is just the absolute nadir of imagination it's like what if x was y and i i don't know why

SPEAKER_02: they built this they got a lot of criticism for jason i'm gonna go ahead and cut off the um

SPEAKER_33: whatever the hell that is uh everyone dunked on them immediately uh nikita beer who now runs a good chunk of x made fun of it alexia bonazzo's formerly aic of tech run mocked it uh even sean the cto of

SPEAKER_00: palantir said read the wall of proteats that categorically reject this ai slop we are so back so everyone just despises it right thinks it's terrible i'm gonna steel man this for everybody

SPEAKER_44: okay because i i think i think alexander wang is getting unfair hate this is not for us everyone who's

SPEAKER_33: on x does not want this does not need this but the core facebook audience right which is probably where

SPEAKER_00: they want to eventually bring this is full of older users who famously and historically love ai slop you heard about the shrimp jesus phenomena over on the big blue app uh go ahead and explain that for some reason for a period of time there was a ton of people of the boomer generation sharing images and memes of essentially jesus that looked partially like a shrimp it was all ai and i never really understood it but it was a huge phenomena so i think because older folks love ai slop what meta has created is a slop trough that cost them little to put together and might dramatically increase their advertising inventory with a critical and lucrative demographic of users so it's all so they got rid

SPEAKER_53: of paying content providers for content like disney has to and they got consumers to make content

SPEAKER_05: content and uh some platforms like youtube share that revenue uh x.com sharing revenue and now they've decided consumers creating the content we're just going to have ai created and not have to pay anyone no this is users actually making the slop um i'm with you i think this is going to become

SPEAKER_06: uh i think if people use it creatively they're going to come up with interesting ideas like they could make little mini stories or memes so i saw somebody raise three million dollars a startup for meme lord dot com did you see that they kept at mentioning me i did not see the someone meme lord dot com i if you if you go on to um x um they made a video of me um and so the keyboard is the new battlefield meme lord

SPEAKER_97: dot com and it's um buddy it's got like a 80 it's got like a 90s windows interface and you can sign up

SPEAKER_167: and then um yeah you go make memes you make memes there's this new phenomena by the way of having the website look like a fake computer do you see the new post hog website they did the same thing i have not oh there it is yeah yeah so yeah making the desktop yeah yeah this is a new trend um what jason what

SPEAKER_06: this is just a meme maker yeah it's um because there's like other meme makers on the web but i guess the idea here is this is to make movies um and uh yeah oh man i don't i don't know if i love

SPEAKER_33: this new hype train actually this is a good topic for founders i've seen a lot of people talking about launch videos building viral hype and really trying to leverage and hack social media in a way to draw

SPEAKER_00: outside attention to your startup and of course attention is good jason but yes tensions everything

SPEAKER_176: well i mean famously according to the google paper um but do you think that becoming a meme

SPEAKER_44: uh advanced user i'm not going to say master um is it actually a skill that most founders should have or is this a younger slice of the founder demographic that should get really good at this stuff

SPEAKER_05: um the memes are a way to make people feel an emotion uh in a way that a logo used to do it so i look at them as something between a joke and a logo um or a quip um or a clever title from a magazine

SPEAKER_06: they kind of fill that space it used to be like magazine titles we'd sit in a room and we tried to come up with a really good one and when they were at their best you know and people always did the same one i am pitching a story about microsoft and their new product and it's called the empire strikes back because isn't that clever and i'm like this is literally every third pitch session the empire strikes back as a you know concept for a meme comes up and then we're gonna like make a montage or uh what do they call yeah like a montage of like you know bill gates as darth vader or something and luke skywalker is you know steve jobs or something it's just all ridiculous um so that's where i think this sits is where memes sit and i do think there are opportunities here to build a decent sized business and i think there'll be a new art form that comes out of things like meme lord or this vibes i think there'll be a new art form that might not be as sloppy as it appears today okay the slop might turn into art people said um rap was like slop they said electronic music was slop when it first came out and then rock and roll sure rock and roll it's just noise right and so over time people have learned to appreciate or people have elevated things that started as slop i'll just leave it at that so we

SPEAKER_33: should all essentially invest in shrimp jesus and put down our fine art and invest in boomer memes okay uh you're here first folks uh one more jason we have time for sure yeah what do you got all

SPEAKER_00: right uh let's talk about ads coming to open a i now we have a clip here from an older twist episode that i'm going to play because we have talked about ads coming to open ai before um let's take a

SPEAKER_182: listen to these fine folks named jason calacanis and alex wilhelm oh those guys are smart yeah here they go

SPEAKER_78: it could be cost per click it could be cost per acquisition it could be cost per lead cost per click or it could be cost per transaction all of those are on the table let's do a long bet

SPEAKER_185: advertising and chat gpt within 18 months they launch an advertising test in 18 months you take the over the under oh the under by by by okay 12 months over under under okay 12 months it is i say i take the over okay you take the under 100 bet one year from under so i was taking notes on my

SPEAKER_52: pen my physical notepad when what date was that where how far are we out from the bet here that's the other piece of information we need to know because i might have to ship you a hundy oh jason that was that was a month ago okay so you got 11 months for ads to show up now it's looking good

SPEAKER_192: your bets looking like you're in the money because uh of these factors these clues these breadcrumbs

SPEAKER_33: so a couple of things first of all if you go back in time to april of this year open ai did some reporting on revised open ai revenue growth and if you take a look at this chart right here jason which i pulled from their reporting check out the information.com love those guys uh they expanded

SPEAKER_00: their revenue projections here on the right and they added this little bit called new products including free user monetization essentially they were telling they can't just say ads free user monetization jason does not necessarily mean ads it could be uh selling their data selling

SPEAKER_02: their data stealing their blood you know who knows uh but they're expecting quite a lot of revenue to

SPEAKER_53: come out of this so that was clue number one then most they expect 25 billion it looks like is that

SPEAKER_05: right in 2029 they expect to have 25 billion in ad revenue yes um actually uh while i talk about

SPEAKER_00: open ai producer claude can you get me uh the latest on amazon's advertising business from uh let's say q2 of this year i just want that number for reference in a couple seconds uh the other thing to know is

SPEAKER_33: that according to basically everyone online the moment that open ai announced a new product called pulse

SPEAKER_00: which is currently only available to people on their pro tier the 200 a month tier it's essentially like like a morning app for you it takes in all the stuff you've talked about tries to find stuff for you to give you a like a morning shot of information i guess something like that and people are like wait it wants to know about you and show you things ad platform and then finally alex heath on his sources newsletter uh published alex he's i respect alex because you know all these writers are just not

SPEAKER_52: good at writing he's he's a good writer i like to read his stuff and now he's gone solo dolo he's

SPEAKER_193: still independent let's go ahead and i'm going to drop a screenshot here of his article just to give him some love sources.news and i pay for sources.news i'm i'm going to start uh actually i had missed

SPEAKER_33: that he got off on his own i knew he had a uh a page it was only a week ago so or two weeks ago you

SPEAKER_00: didn't miss it by much i didn't i feel i feel better than anyways the headline here from sources is open ai is looking for an ads chief fiji simo of course previously the ceo of instacart through the ipo is now ceo of applications over at open ai she's going to hire someone underneath her to sell advertisements and also work on monetization so if you take the plans to grow revenue from ads the the new product that's good for ads and the fact that they're hiring an ads person jason it may be

SPEAKER_05: that ads are coming to chat gpt ads are coming to chat gpt uh and you know the reason i took the over on 12 months is not that i didn't think they were going to do it just how quickly would they do it if it's growing really fast you know sam altman is uh lived through web 2.0 participated in it and he watched uh people just grow user bases and get them addicted to products before turning on monetization and so and you know the zuckerbergs you know uh zuckerberg and google would be two really good examples of that gmail has marketing in it today i understand i don't really use gmail anymore i use super human but i understand that when you go to your promotions tab they insert promotions from people you didn't subscribe to have you seen that i wound up on my gmail account and

SPEAKER_06: in the promotions tab i saw you know like if it was putting j crew or tom ford in there it would go put amber crombie and fitch in between them as a promotional email being served to me that i didn't sign up for in my promotions tab um and uh yeah they didn't do that until whatever year 10 or

SPEAKER_33: something maybe but that to me is literally how big companies fail because they had to find some place to stick a new ad and they didn't think you'd care and you know what the first seven times they they

SPEAKER_92: they sweep the knee i don't fall down but eventually i'm like you know what f off you know what you and i

SPEAKER_05: are weirdos at the tip of the spear that's not how anybody else thinks nobody uh cares about

SPEAKER_27: advertising okay it's only like 10 of us care that's depressing uh but we do have the information

SPEAKER_33: from our dear friends on the production team amazon's advertising services revenue was wow okay i was off by a couple billion about 15.7 billion in the second quarter of this year up about 23 so thinking about open ai's uh user base jason 700 million weekly actives on chat gpt i think is the last number we saw how much money do you think they could pull out of that per quarter if we presume

SPEAKER_44: that let's say 90 of them are free so call it let's say let's just say they're all they all have ads

SPEAKER_01: just for so 700 a week and so i think you would just look at how much you could make from them yearly

SPEAKER_05: which you could then look at how much does facebook or google make from them it's a big difference when you have boots on the ground in india japan australia and you have ad teams they are getting ads online so the international ad network is going to take a long time to build you know google took decades to build it facebook took decades to build it but if we just said u.s users i i could see them easily monetizing with light advertising at twenty dollars an american uh twenty dollars if there's

SPEAKER_06: a hundred million americans using it a year um you know um that would be two billion right there and that would be very low monetization you're talking about making a dollar a month a dollar 50 a month per user which means they clicked on but two ads a month at 75 cents a click or you know 1.5 ads if it's a dollar a click let's say you get people to click five times a month now you're going to make at a dollar 50 a click 750 let's say these are really high quality clicks so we're just making a dollar make it easy so let's just say the average user some users might click on 20 ads some might click on zero but let's say the average user clicks on four ads per month four dollars a month 12 months a year fifty dollars forty eight dollars a year in ads uh per user now you compare that to the people paying 15 or 20 bucks a month free users are making fifty dollars a year and then the paid users are making two getting a 250 a year however over time they could make very aggressive ads i think the way they should do this is an interstitial on the free product you type in what you want to do while it's

SPEAKER_00: thinking it's showing you the ads oh so it doesn't slow your work down but it monetizes your wait time that would encourage slower ai models and slower inference which actually would save them on

SPEAKER_33: compute because they'd have more time that's it that's a perverse inverse incentive yeah let me ask

SPEAKER_06: my team to uh make me a version of that show me a version of that somebody design uh lucas or marcus uh like make a little mock-up of that uh lucas is going to make a mock-ups of it's doing deep research and while it's doing deep research i say hey what's the best um i ask it a question like

SPEAKER_05: what's the uh best vacation i could go on with a family of five and i want it to be warm and it's in december and while it's doing that i just see the ads for that right while it's doing its research um and it shows me three different options for cruises whatever man that could be so powerful and what if it was an ad what if it was a video ad in the interstitial page so it's deep thinking about your answer and it just plays you the ad while it's waiting and it counts down in 10 seconds

SPEAKER_97: you'll see your answer i think anybody's nobody's going to complain about 10 seconds or five second

SPEAKER_00: interstitial i know you're part of the 10 i know that i'm a freak but i'm still mad that they put uh ads in my paid prime videos um anyways i'm trying to get to say that uh the question about monetization for open ai in the realm of advertising is actually going to be very variable based on where their users are so jason if you look at this this is from snap's latest earnings report and it shows their global average revenue per user basically flat year over year about two dollars and 87 cents however in north america eight dollars and 33 and then in the rest of world 96 cents now why do we care about this because i think i saw recently that open ai launched a five dollar a month service in india probably a large market for ai given a lot of people that are online a little harder to monetize than the u.s market because of different um income levels so they're probably gonna maybe lean more towards pushing certain markets to pay subscriptions maybe other markets are a bit more monetizable on the ad side i'm just really curious where you know the 700 million weekly

SPEAKER_182: actives of tag gpt are because that will determine quite a lot about how the calculations work out for

SPEAKER_05: the ad business yeah it's um you'll make much less per user in certain markets but um it is what it is you know just getting to billions of users is you know means you're going to print money eventually and uh that eventually is coming soon and you would have to print money if you go and buy claude pro at my url which is claude.ai twist to get started over there you get the first three months free twist listeners get 50 off their first three months of claude pro claude pro is what i use alex uses the

SPEAKER_224: whole team claude.ai twist to get started all right next up on the program we have a special treat for

SPEAKER_225: you this is our twist pitch deck competition it's brought to you by our friends at gamma and um in this little competition we're doing we're trying to teach people how to make great decks how to pitch really well so we got the founders from 10 great startups all of which have made their beautiful elegant effective pitch decks using uh gamma dot app and uh after we hear all the pitches one of these companies is going to receive 25 large that's right 25 000 from launch and uh what is gamma this is uh your ai design partner helping you generate presentations websites social media posts all that great stuff they do it in a lightning fast way all without any coding so check it out for yourself at gamma dot app

Chamath Palihapitiya: all right first up on our competition is britney from where to wheel this is a marketplace for off roaders and landowners they went through our founder university in our accelerator class uh britney are

SPEAKER_232: you ready to go are you ready to do your pitch i am ready hi i'm britney founder of where to wheel a

SPEAKER_233: marketplace that connects off-roaders with private landowners meet caitlin she's an off-road enthusiast and she wants to take her jeep off-roading but like most off-roaders she has nowhere nearby to do so as current locations are extremely secluded and unwelcoming and caitlin is part of the global community of over 160 million off-roaders with over 70 million of them here in the us while searching for places to go off-roading caitlin comes across where to wheel on the where to wheel map she is surprised to find new off-road spots in her area called w2w parks which is our marketplace inventory on here she can view descriptions buy tickets sign waivers and go wheeling so the off-roaders buy tickets to our marketplace inventory and we take 50 of those bookings and the market is much larger than most would imagine with off-roading being the second largest sector in outdoor recreation right behind camping with a tam of almost 18 billion and in 2023 50 million americans went off-roading but our product is so convenient that we're already more than doubling this behavior we found early traction and crossed 100k gmb this year as well as strong product market fit backed by these metrics it's also worth mentioning that we have no competing disruptors for go to market we have a really really large brand and megaphone in this space so the minute we post about a new location to go off-roading it spreads like wildfire and on the landowner side we've lined up strategic partnerships to give us access to over 30 000 landowners in the us as well as a real estate collaboration that guarantees us penetration into our beachhead markets and we're going to use those beachhead markets on a tipping point growth strategy to reach mass market adoption and we're targeting the northeast corridor here because this is the most populated area of off-roaders with the most severe lack of off-road access the team at where to will we're all former founders and we have over 35 years of off-road experience and the ultimate vision for where to will actually has three silos a media marking silo a marketplace of locations as well as insurance as no auto carrier in the us offers on-road and off-road insurance and the time is now for this market there's booming demand it's more than doubled in under eight years supplies stagnant and outdated and we can also leverage agritourism for

SPEAKER_235: quick expansion thanks for listening again i'm britney founder of where to wheel a marketplace that

SPEAKER_238: connects off-roaders with private landowners wow as close to a perfect pitch as you could do uh

SPEAKER_225: incredibly well done britney you know what makes a great pitch like this is being super efficient and understanding what's important and your audience the audience of people who are off-roaders they know all these problems right you wouldn't have to explain to them that it's hard to find a place but if you were raising money from venture capitalists or you're pitching people to come work at your company you know they may not understand how big this market is so what you did really well is you integrated education into uh the deck and into your presentation i also love on the bottom you have

SPEAKER_240: those nice uh hash marks for each slide so i knew where i was going and this is where pacing matters and up front you did a great job of showing a real person with a real problem in the world and a real solution um also you explained the business model very well towards the end we said you know hey there's a marketplace and then there's the events and then there's insurance what that did was it built credibility that as an entrepreneur you're very forward-looking you have a big vision here

SPEAKER_225: and you come away from this kind of intrigued it's almost like you're bringing me into a world i've never experienced i see people off-roading uh on social media once in a while but i don't know how it works exactly and i didn't know how big the community is i don't know who these people are but you did a great job of explaining that then what was amazing was you um talked about your go-to market strategy and that also built massive credibility with me so for people who are wondering you know anybody can come up with an idea this idea i'm sure 10 000 people have had it why isn't there a marketplace why isn't there an airbnb for this there's got to be a better way but a small number of people actually go build it and so there might have been a dozen people who attempted to build this and just nobody succeeded or they didn't have a good go-to market strategy you really studied the space and you said hey the northeast corridor has the most density it's got the largest amount of people and it's the lowest

SPEAKER_240: serviced so i would have guessed maybe they'll go with texas or you know i know in california there are beaches people go to i know in florida people go to beaches but you know i was just thinking appalachia i don't know where where's the best place to do this where there already are locations there aren't locations and i think airbnb went through something similar they were in california trying to get this sleep on your couch rent a place but in california there's plenty of places to say it's a huge giant state with many options then you look at new york and new york was expensive there weren't a lot of options and they typically were overbooked whereas in california you can always get a hotel room it's just a matter of if it's the one you like and how far it is from whatever event you're going to it's almost never the case maybe during coachella in the hour drive around it that things become so booked up that you can't find a place so at some point paul graham did the really smart thing and told them hey why aren't you guys in new york doing this in new york so i love that as well just across the board check check check check check um and it feels super credible now what could you add to it um that's a question i have for you when you've pitched it um this deck specifically what are the questions you typically get because you don't want to in a short three minute presentation or less like this you don't want to answer everything but what are the first questions you've gotten from investors after you know a quick presentation like this that's a great question so usually the top two

SPEAKER_249: questions we get are you know can you like how are you defining the market size right so we go into

SPEAKER_233: that really quickly with 160 million internationals 70 in the us so then i go into when they ask that question we have statistics and data points different research that i can share with them on how they're actually qualifying that but we used to just say you know 160 million off-roaders so then we kind of broke it into the different buckets so they could actually see you know more of a us market versus an international market um and then obviously go to market is always one like how do you reach them where are you hitting first so we actually added the beachhead market slide in there instead of me having to answer that all the time the questions we built that out and added that in so i was

Chamath Palihapitiya: it's nice to see that that helped well you know every time you pitch somebody it's an opportunity

SPEAKER_225: uh to learn something about that investor where they're coming from and you know 95 percent of investors are not interested in any particular startup and the the high art of pitching is finding

Chamath Palihapitiya: the five who are into it i know this because i introduced uber to 21 people and three of us invested so in that case you know it was literally 95 percent were not interested right which is crazy when you think about it and i love the fact that you got granular on the um the market size in the northeast even down to the state level if i were going to say you know something to consider adding when you do the

SPEAKER_225: longer one i'm very curious about who these people are and that falls under a persona and you did a

Chamath Palihapitiya: persona a woman at the start she has a jeep wrangler i noticed um and but i didn't know too much more about her uh this is where i wonder if you were to bucket say if i said give me the three top

SPEAKER_240: personas of people tell me about those three top personas so in our market it's it's a range you got men

SPEAKER_249: and women right and so if you're going to go three top personas you have women off-roaders where our

SPEAKER_233: customers are more um geared towards women that are newer to the sport right they're looking for a safe space to go they don't know a lot of information they don't want to get lost out in the middle of the woods on their own so we have that bucket uh you know they're usually around the range mid-20s you know into like their 50s 60s the off-road sport goes all the way up i have people coming out and they're 76 years old i mean it was awesome i mean he just did amazing but i was like good for you um so usually it's about 25 to like 60 is usually the range um so females into outdoor sports looking for a community something outside of technology you know to get into so that's one

SPEAKER_240: bucket okay so you call those touch nature um and they're a wide age group and and that's women specifically as one group and you've identified that women are adopting the sport in some major way is that correct yeah we thought it would be mainly men yeah yeah what's driving that is it a specific group of women is it single women is it women with kids who want to bring their kids out to nature are

SPEAKER_238: they looking to meet people are they bringing four of their girlfriends unpack it a little bit if you

SPEAKER_268: can yeah so this one actually really surprised us right because we were under the assumption this is a more male dominated field or sport which it still is but the off-roading industry is just

SPEAKER_233: absolutely exploding right you see every vehicle manufacturer is bringing back or adding an off-road market they're targeting women now as a sport you know you can learn how to do this it doesn't take a lot you know you have a bronco they want to drive with their you know the top down the hair blowing in the wind um there's a jeep hair don't care that's like one of the things they say interesting that's

Chamath Palihapitiya: wonderful that there you've identified that persona let's go to the male persona the classic persona that makes up the majority so that's like an emerging group i think who's the majority who's the majority is it you know i i was thinking like it's a redneck uh you know somebody from down south but then i was also thinking you know my friends who do this who i know are rich venture capitalists and ceos who are spending like they buy some jeep for 30 40 50k used or slightly used and then they spend another 30 40 50k on it so i wonder if you could unpack let's just say the

SPEAKER_225: elite part of the audience and then we'll get to the the the big major middle but who's the who's that like you know dream customer with a lot of money or is there one yeah i'm curious on our side

SPEAKER_249: you know it's one of those where if you're willing to pay to do your sport you know there's kind of

SPEAKER_233: a certain connotation that goes there right like you're not the redneck rodeo out in the middle of nowhere you know with a rust bucket you know you're gonna go on your friend's farm for free like you're not our customer and we're not really interested right in that so we kind of price it based on the certain region and what that clientele looks like so like our northern virginia markets dc loudoun county the richest region in the united states has a different price and kind of you know offerings to cater to those people so on the more elite side i mean it can range from any kind of occupation lawyers dentists doctors vets you know up to venture capitalists we have a lot of ceos and executives that come out and they're usually driving like you're saying you know those 100k vehicles you know that g392 or we had a um a brand new bronco raptor it was like 120k from the dealership with no plates came out and it's like oh my gosh um so they're just you know they're looking for a way they can bring their kids with them a lot of um dads bring their kids you know the moms like get out of the house and this is what they go do they can come do it for a couple quick hours and then get back

Chamath Palihapitiya: you know get out i'd love to do that with my kids so let's talk about that group i'm wondering uh if there is a premium service that because you're charging typically 50 bucks 100 bucks to go run

SPEAKER_233: around on somebody's land is that the average ticket price yeah the average is 55 it can range up to 150

SPEAKER_268: are more expensive markets you're you're low and you're going to have to get 65 or more per vehicle

Chamath Palihapitiya: to get in the door so me as like an elite customer of this service or somebody with a hundred thousand two hundred thousand dollar car etc they're a dentist they're going to look at that and say that's too cheap i want to have a place with great bathrooms i want to meet other people with this

SPEAKER_225: similar type of car i want an instructor there i want waiter service or a beverage counter or a latte is there an equivalent of the uber black if you will or the one fine stay if you know that company

SPEAKER_97: one fine stay does like elite airbnbs i believe and then airbnb has select but you know is there a

SPEAKER_267: one fine stay uber black version of this currently no so what we're doing to try to combat that is we

SPEAKER_233: actually partnered with constellus which is it used to be black water it's a massive facility out here so they have 5 000 acres they have cafeterias hotels bathrooms you know medical on site you know all these things that create more of a premium experience and that ticket is more premium ticket 500 000 right now the one down here it's if you buy early bird it's 150 up to a certain amount of people and then it kicks up to 200 and that's about three to four hours of off-roading so you get a little quick snippet um and that works really well and so we've looked at partnering because there's other facilities like this across the u.s and making those more of like if you want a you know black

Chamath Palihapitiya: level experience that's kind of where you go i would like to see you push the envelope on this and so i think taking a shot at a uh one thousand dollar experience okay that included some merch that you get included um waiter service premium bathrooms and an instructor and it was targeted towards people

SPEAKER_225: with certain vehicle types and maybe some instruction i think there's just so much opportunity here

Chamath Palihapitiya: to um capture some of the high end and learn about that people greatly underestimate what people are willing to spend on experiences i know this because over time as i was able to move my station life up i would go to disneyland on a tuesday because i didn't want to hit the lines then i was able to afford a fast pass yeah then i was able to afford like um the vip tour which by the way i think is like i don't know 600 an hour and we do it for 10 hours or eight hours and then i have a friend who took his

SPEAKER_225: thing up to another level with club 33 their private club membership and that's like a quarter a million dollars or a half million dollars to do it and then maybe 30 000 a year something yeah not insignificant and there always is another level another level so i think sometimes exploring those now the one thing we didn't talk about we'll end on this is the manufacturers and all the gear people you don't have a sponsorship partnership anywhere in the deck but i think understanding in the persona of the top two personas um that you're targeting i think understanding their uh salaries on average in who they are what car they drive the amount of money in it i think understanding that would propel this into more of a golf or a skiing type persona and if you ever notice the car companies market to golfers and skiers right especially in your category actually so they're always i'm i get more defender and um i have um like the suburban fancy one i don't know it's grand wagoneer or something it's got some fancy name uh we know with the bigger engine and you know whatever better leather so i think that group to me could be absolutely magical and change this from feeling like it's you know poor to middle class folks to hey maybe people need to understand from the presentation this is high-end folks so anyway i just think so much to noodle on there i think education you can really hit a home run where you just sell people you know a two thousand dollar weekend where they learn and there must be people out there who have those businesses already yeah i think either including them or acquiring one or making one could be a total unlock because now you you know all those people who don't do this yet but who have the car my lord like what percentage

SPEAKER_238: of people who own a land rover defender or a suburban have taken it on one of these courses would you say

SPEAKER_233: um we actually just had a defender last weekend so uh we we just launched classes to help with this

SPEAKER_240: so because we get a lot of beginners yeah back to my question of the yeah if there's a hundred thousand land rover defender like the new fancy one that have been sold let's say i'm just yeah the pretty one yeah too pretty that's why i didn't buy it um of those um there's like a grenada or something that's like the old school one i don't know if you've seen that it's a creator i think that's the one i want to buy um so of that group of a hundred thousand let's say land rover defenders fancy new one how many of those have been off-road do you think and done of course with us or just across the board ever have ever probably 20 percent you think 20 000 about one in five i thought it would be like one in 20 but okay so that means those other 80 percent might like this

SPEAKER_225: experience so back to tam if you can show i think one of the things people will want to see is you're growing 10 to 20 percent a month month over month that makes this a fundable startup so that's one

Chamath Palihapitiya: at a certain point people are going to say okay you're going to reach the market saturation what does that look like etc and so you can answer that question with and this is growing and we are helping onboard people as part of this revolution i think you will cut the series b investors off at the pass so to speak so great job we're what's the growth like month over month what have you been

SPEAKER_232: hitting 10 20 percent five percent yeah somewhere anywhere between about 15 and 40 depends on like

SPEAKER_225: what we've onboarded that month yeah so this is what i would say the most important thing is you show

Chamath Palihapitiya: you can grow your marketplace in terms of you know the actual um gmv 10 to 20 percent a month consistently

SPEAKER_225: once you've done that for 10 months for 20 months all of a sudden the funding discussions all the

Chamath Palihapitiya: questions go away so there's two ways for founders sometimes to figure this out one is they figure it

SPEAKER_225: out by um you know uh not getting funding because they're not growing and then the other way they figure it out is they have they put a couple of months of growth together and then people are like they throw money at them so what the chart sometimes a chart will get an investor to take a meeting sometimes a chart will get an investor to write a check okay so just keep that in mind if you have the chart how many months have you had double digit in a row um about five perfect so you're right on the cusp of greatness when you show and you know you don't have to go for 50 a month 100 a month just to show you understand how to maintain the quality experience and do it at 20 percent a month 15 a month you know something in that average man the investors will start taking meetings at two to three times the rate so just keep that in mind and that's something that's very important with you as the leader of the company to just absolutely um absolutely create as a north star for your company

SPEAKER_240: marketplaces if they prove they can't grow they got a problem because now the investor community is like oh thank you for going down that rabbit hole and eliminating this as a category for a great next marketplace uh so amazing job uh great job and i guess if anybody wants to go off-roading where the number two wheel.com where to wheel.com and you're britney at where to wheel.com b-r-i-t-t-n-y if you're an investor and you want to meet her or a partner great job uh really really excited for your company everybody if you're feeling inspired and you want to come on the program and pitch me go to gamma.app and start working on your own presentation britney's got a pretty great one here you can just take hers and deconstruct it thanks again to our partners at gamma cannot wait

SPEAKER_189: to give somebody a cranberry 25 dime skis coming at you all right everybody see you next time

SPEAKER_141: all right everybody another amazing another amazing episode of this week in startups have a great weekend

SPEAKER_05: we'll see you on monday make sure you go to youtube.com and go to youtube.com and search for this weekend startups hit subscribe hit the bell and you'll get an alert when we go live and we'll take questions from the live audience like we always do all right alex have a great weekend we'll see

SPEAKER_97: you monday jason bye bye bye