SPEAKER_00: i want to talk just for a minute about core weave filing to go public jason we've been talking about neo clouds these gpu hyperscalers that are buying up you know billions of dollars SPEAKER_01: worth of gear it's a pretty interesting company you ever open an s1 and not know what you're going to see because that's that's how this is like a box of chocolates you never know what SPEAKER_00: you're going to get yeah well let's talk about it so this uh for those folks who are on the audio version i'm going to pull up the income statement uh jason you and i love an income SPEAKER_01: statement but i just want to say that core weave's revenue grew from a little bit under 16 million in 2022 to nearly 230 million in 2023 oh my god more than yeah exactly yeah more than 1.9 billion last SPEAKER_10: year this week in startups is brought to you by northwest registered agent starting your business should be simple with northwest registered agent you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes from llcs to trademarks domains to custom websites they've got you covered get more privacy more options and more done visit northwest registeredagent.com twist today lemon.io get access to lemon hire a platform with more than 80 000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours get two thousand dollars off your first hire at lemon.io slash hire today and horatio customer experience can make or break your business horatio provides top-tier outsourcing solutions to support and delight your customers so you can focus on growth visit hirehoratio.com twist and get two thousand dollars off your initial setup all right everybody SPEAKER_12: welcome back to this week in startups it's wednesday it's march 5th he's alex wilhelm i'm jason calaganis the docket is so full that we should really just get started but i wanted to let people SPEAKER_13: know that i will be doing a bunch of different things at south by southwest i'm going to make a couple of SPEAKER_12: appearances tomorrow morning at 10 a.m i am going to do a founder x fireside um and you guys can pull up the pages for this we'll put all these notes somewhere where do these exist publicly these are SPEAKER_16: going to be we'll tweet them and they're also going to be in the twist 500 newsletter today in case SPEAKER_13: people need to see it okay so go to our twitter handle x or our x handle x.com twi startups and we'll just post all this information there but tomorrow my friend adeo from the founders institute is doing a founder x fireside 10 a.m and that's at the mccombs school of business at ut it's limited but if you SPEAKER_21: really wanted to go maybe you email maddie at launch.co and she'll get you in uh bill gurley's SPEAKER_13: going to interview me at south by southwest at 4 p.m on friday you have to have a ticket uh and that was a really great thing bill called me and he said hey i'm doing a fireside chat on friday SPEAKER_24: uh at south by southwest at 4 p.m and i was like oh do you want me to interview you and fevers calling for me to be the interviewer he said no i wanted to he said i want to interview you ah so i was like oh SPEAKER_13: well that's a great honor so um i'm going to talk about venture capital startup trends moving to austin SPEAKER_12: all in launch podcasts on saturday night march 8th 7 p.m i will be doing dignation live uh plus the tim ferrer show is happening plus mix master mike uh from the beastie boys their dj uh all in is doing an event it's sold out on march 13th 2025 but i will tweet um one free ticket to my followers so look for that we'll do it from the this week in startups account so follow the this week in startups account maddie give away one free ticket i'm going to do a q a with the all-in fan meetup and the this week in startups fan meetup on march 12th at cosmic pickle in austin you got to sign up for that uh we'll put the rsvp link it's on river.io if you go to get river.io you'll find it um so this will be a q a with me it'll be on our twitter account it's at SPEAKER_13: cosmic pickle which is kind of a fun food truck location 4 p.m to 6 30 p.m on march 12th march SPEAKER_12: 12th is what day of the week wednesday wednesday wednesday wednesday uh and that's it all right so what do we have on the docket let's let's figure out what we could choose from here there's always so SPEAKER_27: many great things on the docket and you can follow along this week in startups.com slash docket to see the docket in real time well the question just jason is do you want to start with SPEAKER_00: uh with the main meal or do you want to have some fun and do some more light fun like poppy topics because we actually have a mix today of like serious financial news and also dig is back SPEAKER_16: let's start with dig i have inside information okay uh we have a cut down of the dig video jason SPEAKER_01: announcing the return of the platform and it's two uh people so why don't we play that first and SPEAKER_13: then i'll hand you the baton we can talk over it a little bit uh sure i watched it this morning David Friedberg: it's quite nostalgic it is if you were a web 2.0 baby this means a lot to you there's kevin rose SPEAKER_37: now a gray beard it makes sense that you would be relaunching dig.com and um they peer behind it SPEAKER_39: and you see alex from reddit is now partnering with kevin on disliked you for a long time and SPEAKER_24: yeah so dig is gonna be back for people who don't know what dig is it was similar to reddit i think one of them launched a couple of months before the other i think it might have been dig then reddit SPEAKER_45: um and they were social aggregators was the category social aggregators were hey you put it in a link the community talks about the link and then uh people click on it and they voted up like i.e you dig it zuckerberg stole the dig concept and then uh made the like button from it and then this made everybody put on their websites a little snippet for the like button or the dig button what that did was it gave facebook all the data of who was visiting your website so it was actually a data play for advertising but then the idea would be if you liked SPEAKER_12: it on you know this tech crunch article and gadget article you could automatically share it to facebook etc it created a bit of chaos um dig went out of business it got sold in a fire sale SPEAKER_13: a company called buy sell ads bought the remnants of it dig.com they kept it alive for a little bit somehow kevin was able to buy it out and as many people know for some reason the owners of reddit SPEAKER_46: have beef with alexis and they didn't include him in the s1 SPEAKER_00: yes so alexis ohanian best known jason still i would say as one of the reddit boys um since then has done quite a lot of things in the venture community most recently seven seven six SPEAKER_01: and it's to me this reads as a i have been removed from the reddit legacy i'm now going to go team up with my arch rival and take another shot at this but i also feel like it's the right time for something that is a bit more community driven this is why i love subreddits because they're they're small niche and lovely but if it did come back out and do what dig used to do which was create really like a tech meme for the web with all the top stuff you need to go see i think we could use that it's not based on an algorithm it's not based on an evergreen scrolling feed i don't think so i'm i mean i was stoked i think is the is the word here i was a big dig guy back in the day so i love dig SPEAKER_49: uh for people who don't know the history when i had a gadget i was uh you know uh let's just say SPEAKER_12: i was on a heater had raised the money from um uh mark cuban and i saw this dig thing kevin had just used an outside developer spent like five thousand dollars on it but i saw i was sending like i don't know a thousand people a day doing gadget and auto blog and joystick and our other blogs and then it was you know two thousand a day and five thousand a day and so i said hey let's get sushi kid and i took him for sushi in santa monica he was working at tech tv or g4 tv or whatever and he's a couple years younger than me and i said hey i'll i'll buy this off you for a million bucks in cash and i had SPEAKER_24: talked to mark cuban and i said mark if you give me the million bucks in cash can we buy this and put it as part of weblogs inc because it's sending so traffic to be like a great like another blog or SPEAKER_52: part of it and just let me pause you yeah a million dollars back then was money like that yeah i was SPEAKER_53: going to give him a million straight up for it and for for basically a website that he had spent SPEAKER_13: five thousand dollars building so he had to think about it he smartly declined and raised money from a couple of folks it was super interesting and then when buy sell ads bought it i i talked to the guy SPEAKER_24: over there who was selling some ads for insights newsletters back when i had a newsletter business um and he would sell into some of the inventory and i asked him if he would sell it to me and SPEAKER_27: uh then i was going to give it back to kevin so i was like gonna try to buy it and then try to and i had pitched kevin on like hey maybe you want to start this up again i think i think there could be SPEAKER_24: something for it there's another interesting app out i don't know if it's publicly available or SPEAKER_56: now it's called mozi mozi it's by evan williams a friend of mine ah i saw this basically a new take on SPEAKER_13: mobile local social so i have it open here and um i see everybody in my address book SPEAKER_12: and i see that my friend ev williams the founder of twitter and amanda from the league and other people from my phone book are going to be at south by southwest next week and i can also see the other events that evan williams has put in i won't say where he's planning to travel to but my friend dave samuel um a vc put in his trip now i didn't know he was going to this foreign country but he's going to be in a similar foreign country to me so i should trade notes with him on that foreign country i say this because i think there's an opportunity to build smaller social networks now that twitter facebook meta threads blue sky i mean the whole thing has been just shaken up and it's basically been ripped apart and balkanized and i think people are looking SPEAKER_60: for more authenticity less politics so uh it's a sort of interesting moment all right founders okay SPEAKER_61: digital nomads and my remote entrepreneurs i need you to listen to me right now i know you want to build that next great company well you're going to need two things right you're going to need a great idea and you're going to need to properly set up your business and that's where northwest registered agent comes in for just 39 plus state fees here's what you're going to get privacy by fault keep your personal info off public records with a business address phone number and mail forwarding and unlike other guys they're never going to sell your data and you're going to need to look super legit that's important to customers employees that you might hire team members you're looking to hire and of course investors so you want to have a professional online presence and you can get your domain website and 10 business emails right at the start so you're building the right way and if you ever have questions you won't be stuck talking to some chat bot nope northwest registered agent has expert corporate guides not bots so you're not going to get run around just real people who know every single state's rules and will walk you through the process in 10 clicks and 10 minutes boom your business is live so join thousands of founders who trust northwest for just 39 plus state fees you can launch your SPEAKER_45: business fast hassle-free and with total privacy so go to northwestregisteredagent.com twist to start SPEAKER_12: your business today full disclosure i am an advisor and shareholder in the new dig SPEAKER_13: oh um just tiny but i offered it to kevin and said hey i would love to you know help in some way and he said oh would you be an advisor i said sure i don't know exactly what that means i'll do but i agree to it and okay i will be emceeing i will be emceeing the dig nation revival on saturday night uh at mohawk in austin so i will be introducing kevin and alex and then a bunch of our friends who SPEAKER_65: from the old web 2.0 days will be coming on stage to say a few words so he's like hey would SPEAKER_24: you come on stage and say a few words i said i'll do better i'll be your hype man would you like me to SPEAKER_12: emcee the event because you know it's it's always awkward when you introduce yourself right but to have somebody else introduce you is cool and the cooler the person who introduces you like the cooler it is SPEAKER_15: so i told kevin like and you know hey i'd love to introduce you guys i want to throw in some notes SPEAKER_00: about why now though because i think this is the question you said you talked to kevin about this why don't we bring it back in a post uh i think it was on the times um kevin said uh quote just recently we've hit an inflection point where ai can become a helpful copilot to users and moderators not replacing human conversation but rather augmenting it allowing users to dig deeper while at the same time removing a lot of the repetitive burden for moderators and what kevin did was interesting he took thousands of dollars and ran like surveys on reddit asking subreddit moderators what their pain points were and then tried to build against that so to me that is brilliant research and the time is now because of ai advances so i mean i'm never going to stop being a reddit user but i would love to also have another place where i can have fun and honestly upvote cool SPEAKER_71: stuff so my little nerd is singing jason yeah it's it's super cool congratulations to the team SPEAKER_12: um for alexis little revenge startup never hurts for cairo like fantastic to be back in the game with SPEAKER_13: a brand that meant a lot to people i think he's got unfinished business there because people don't remember um dig for version four kevin was under a lot of pressure from venture capitalists and this is where the founder lesson comes in the vc community was like you have to compete with SPEAKER_12: facebook so they redid dig and it was going to use machine learning and make everybody's home page unique which is an interesting idea so they were trying to copy like that feed as opposed to having one canonical feed and they spent months and months and years doing it millions of dollars and you know what reddit never changed its design you go to reddit today i think they've had one design refresh in almost whatever it is 15 20 years that was just very modest like just a little bit of polish it feels kind of the same in ux you know left hand column right hand column main column and you know SPEAKER_45: they didn't even have an app for many years there was like some many third-party apps that would you know do reddit and now they've done uh one but what reddit did focus on was the quality of conversations getting revenue figured out figuring out mod tools so of course there's work to be done on the mod tools there always is but they really did a great job of not getting off track and knowing what they were sometimes the best thing to do in a startup is knowing you have product market fit and make the SPEAKER_12: main feature make the main feature two or three percent better every month and then if you make it three percent better every month every three years it'll be twice as good what was the main feature of dig it was high quality conversations and surfacing the best conversations and making the largest footprint of subreddits in other words topics and so i recently fired up the all-in official subreddit you can show it it's chaotic but it's better than like some of the rogue ones where they just like are podcast haters so that's kind of a genre is hating hate listening to podcasts and trashing SPEAKER_13: them so we created an official one it's a little bit messy but it's in the top ten percent we have a this week in startups one twi startups and the twi startups one is um the one you should show i think it's now in the top 50 percent so go ahead and search for this week in startups or twi startups and join our uh subreddit we're starting to post there and have conversations with the fans i also SPEAKER_15: started a j trading one etc uh which one are you showing this is the this week in startups reddit SPEAKER_12: perfect um so we're in the top 48 we were top 52 last week so it's growing i'd like to get it into the top 10 percent um and then you can follow me i think i'm jason calacanis or maybe jason m calacanis i think reddit's a great place for startups to hang out and so there's the entrepreneur community SPEAKER_24: which i'll go into sometimes and answer questions people don't believe it's me and there's the startups community so those three i think four are worth checking out the two podcasts all in official SPEAKER_12: this week in startups entrepreneurs entrepreneurship and startups uh and the actual there's an there's another one like all in podcasts or some weird one that they blocked me from because i would write comments and correct the hate sometimes when i because you know i subscribe to it so it comes up on my feed and they would say like jay cow owns solana but i actually don't own salon i said it on the pot SPEAKER_13: you know just like little cleanups here and there of things that were factually incorrect but they SPEAKER_16: blocked me i i i think i so i was shown the unofficial all-in subreddit via the reddit algorithms who knows i like technology and podcasts and i was like this is it's dark this is uh this is but it's not it's not always jason dark it's actually i mean i think chamoth gets most of the stick well whenever SPEAKER_15: you get like micro famous which is like what i call my level of fame it's like micro fame um i think SPEAKER_89: podcast fame comes after like reality tv on the bravo network fame so like yes we're like just under SPEAKER_39: real housewives of i don't know pick uh well that's just coming to rhode island so watch out world SPEAKER_90: real housewives of rhode island then podcasters uh but yeah it's a little more informative it's a SPEAKER_93: little it's a little more clever hopefully podcast um but yes they they pick something to go after you SPEAKER_13: for so for chamath it's always fax for sax it's always ukraine for me um it's uh having tds trump SPEAKER_12: derangement syndrome which is like i mean if you call balls and strikes they'll they'll say you have tds but putting it all aside reddit is a great place for founders to hang out why i think you can build a great community over there so i am working with the startups in our accelerator and i'm doing it personally and we have a slack channel so i created for my founders a reddit channel in our slack and i said hey why don't we all just talk about reddit here and best practices i wonder if every startup should start their own reddit about either the topic they're in like if you're we have a really cool SPEAKER_13: comic book company that takes the prints from comic books uh artists and the it turns out yeah nerd SPEAKER_39: nerd crawler yeah you can pull it up this is the coolest startup i'm so excited to be an investor in it so nerd crawl and let's have him on the pod um really cool guy it turns out you know if you draw SPEAKER_45: wolverine for a marvel comic you get to keep the original artwork because they pay you so little you get that original piece of artwork you printed and you can do whatever you want with it you could gift it to somebody you could sell it now you you can't like uh make your own wolverine comic obviously that's their ip but you can go there and bid on like the original sketches um and so SPEAKER_24: and you can even commission ones it's a really cool website and so imagine nerd crawler created a reddit SPEAKER_12: called nerd crawler or they did one just based on comic book art right so i think you can do both SPEAKER_13: so we have this week in startups but there's also startups and entrepreneurs or entrepreneurship or entrepreneurs and i participate in those but we didn't start them but if those weren't created i SPEAKER_15: would have created startups right yeah i think having your own subreddit makes a lot of sense i SPEAKER_01: think every brand needs to have its own pizzazz and its own like fan base that goes out and kind of fights for it i think that's the arrow of capitalism we're in so if you don't own your subreddit as the SPEAKER_00: all in pod learned accidentally other people will make it for you and then you'll have no control and SPEAKER_89: then it can become a cesspit founders let's be real let's keep it a buck finding great developers is hard it's like one of the hardest things you have to do in our industry especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup but here's the good news i got a tip that's going to save you time money and a ton of headaches you need to check out lemon.io lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers who can help you they have done all the work to find and vet great developers who are experienced who are results oriented and who charge competitive rate great developers we know are hard to find and integrate into your team so lemon.io will handle all of that for you they're only going to offer you hand-picked developers with at least three years of experience and if something goes wrong lemon.io will find you a replacement developer asap a bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they have told me they've had a great experience so here's your call to action go to lemon.io twist and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less and twist listeners get 15 off the first four weeks so stop burning money hire developers smarter visit lemon.io twist SPEAKER_24: and then they'll even ban you so they're slandering and banning you so you can't even reply it's like SPEAKER_108: super crazy yes that's uh that's lovely so it's all good i mean it's part of being micro famous that's SPEAKER_112: that i'm just telling everybody jealous you're gonna go and do dignation because and this is a slight confession but i was like a dignation super fan back in the day uh well you liked to have a beverage SPEAKER_115: back in the day yes i did it was a beverage based thing and it was so funny i remember i remember SPEAKER_12: they had the last episode and actually lon harris was there i was there and SPEAKER_13: it was in um los angeles they had this final episode and i remember kevin pollock went lon went i was there a bunch of our friends from la i remember talking to kevin about it and he's like SPEAKER_12: yeah i just don't know if i want to be 40 or 50 years old drinking beer you know and doing this like it was kind of like a bro-tastic pod with alice um albrecht albrecht who's a really cool actor from la and um yeah anyway long story short he was kind of limiting that then they started dignation up again they've done like maybe five or ten episodes and uh i just had this funny moment SPEAKER_120: they're not drinking beer they're drinking really expensive wine because they've both done so well SPEAKER_12: for themselves so that's really funny actually it's kind of funny yeah but kevin is a really you know he's watch having grown up with kevin i might be a couple years older than him yeah uh but watching you know his journey as an entrepreneur investor done a lot of really i think SPEAKER_13: important work in the world he did an interesting thing on his kevin rose podcast where he's been dealing with anxiety he's been public about it so that's what i'm talking about it and he i think he had been dealing with some anxiety or something and he uh did ketamine therapy like you know SPEAKER_120: not like recreational you know at a club uh you know in london in the 90s ketamine SPEAKER_39: um that's a very specific reference just like you know i remember when i was a kid they would talk about you know in new york they would talk about people going into k-holes and not my bag but um SPEAKER_120: london and i was like that sounds like a really scary thing to do it's a horse tranquilizer SPEAKER_12: anyway um he did a ketamine injection and went you know this is in like a clinic he had to deal with the the anxiety he had and he said he had a profound impact so he literally recorded himself going under he didn't record the whole trip uh the journey i think was what they would call it and then he came out of it and he talked about and he edited it down a little bit and just talked SPEAKER_13: about how it had an impact for him which i thought was very brave and so i just want to give him a SPEAKER_01: shout out for that as well also he was at gv for a while and now he's at true ventures is that right SPEAKER_12: yeah i think that was the journey and i don't know if he's like a full-time partner at true or like what you would call a venture partner yes so a venture partner like might do a deal a year or maybe every two or three years so you're kind of affiliated you might get a small salary token salary or no salary but then you would get carry on your specific deals or maybe a little bit of the overall calorie it's a way to have people who are like kevin you know busy but they still want to you SPEAKER_13: know dip a toe and they might have a great network so congratulations to those guys uh what else is in SPEAKER_130: the news i want to talk just for a minute about core weave filing to go public jason we've been talking SPEAKER_00: about neo clouds these gpu hyperscalers that are buying up you know billions of dollars worth of gear and core weave reporting kind of came out over the weekend that the listing was coming i think bloomberg reported they're looking at like a 35 possible billion dollar valuation might raise for SPEAKER_01: billy and it's a pretty interesting company you ever open an s1 and not know what you're gonna see SPEAKER_03: because that's that's how this is like a box of chocolates you never know what you're gonna get SPEAKER_00: yeah well let's talk about it so this uh for those folks who are on the audio version i'm gonna pull up the income statement uh jason you and i love an income statement but i just want to say that core SPEAKER_01: weed's revenue grew from a little bit under 16 million in 2022 to nearly 230 million in 2023 SPEAKER_08: to god more than yeah exactly yeah more than 1.9 billion last year okay we gotta pause for here this is SPEAKER_13: like 15x year over year and then almost whatever 8x and you know these are big these are big consequential SPEAKER_24: numbers yes um and they they lost almost a billion dollars in 2024 making that 2 billion right if i'm reading that net loss from continuing operations so i'm sure that includes the depreciation of these giant you know uh investments but what you're seeing here is my understanding is they got in early you can correct me if i'm wrong sure into the neo cloud space neo cloud new cloud neo being new um is just a SPEAKER_13: fancy way of saying a gpu cloud so let's just call it what it is it's a gpu cloud we won't use the fancy SPEAKER_12: so they i think they ordered a lot of gpus early then think about the timing chat gpt 3.5 comes out what date and and that's kind of like the starters pistol for we all got to get as many gpus going i Chamath Palihapitiya: think that was probably in 2020 was it the september of 2022 that it came out and we're now in or around SPEAKER_148: there yeah yeah look at that so we we can we can put a pin in it um because i consider like a lot of SPEAKER_13: the modern day llm craze it comes not from the 2 2.5 it was really i think the 3.5 that people were SPEAKER_01: like wait a second this thing's pretty darn tootin good uh so chat gpt.com came out in november of 22 and chat gpt 3.5 uh came out also yeah so that was november of 22. so i think that's when they put SPEAKER_12: it on the web right and and let the public use it because it wasn't super embarrassing you know it still was embarrassing and people would screenshot it making mistakes everything and you can still do SPEAKER_120: that to this day um i saw somebody tweeted that grok thinks that it's an 85 chance that trump is a russian agent which you know just so you know how these things work they pull in a bunch of data SPEAKER_58: yes and then they spit it back out it's not actual intelligence it is like moments of thoughtfulness or SPEAKER_24: moments of impressiveness but it is not fact checked or factually correct all the time and if there's SPEAKER_45: something disputed or unknown you know something like grok or chat gpt could pick up you know a blog post about allegations and then spit that back out to you as an allegation or somebody notable might have SPEAKER_24: said i think it's an 85 chance on like a cnn transcript somewhere that got ingested and maybe that's the only data it's got so it spits it back out okay but isn't is polymarket really any different than SPEAKER_139: that just done with humans instead of an llm well yes okay it's interesting you say that because SPEAKER_12: they are both making claims uh or trying to predict things sure they're both capable predictions but in one case people are have skin in the game in one case they just have gpus in the game the point being uh core we've had a bunch of gpus when everybody needed to catch up they had pre-ordered them and i think then it would be like having an ice cream stand you know in dubai in a prime location and you got this great amazing ice cream stand and then dubai's built around you and you own a water park with an incredible ice cream stand it's like yeah we're very popular now and it's like yeah you used to be 10 people a day and now it's 10 000 like well timing can be timing you know is everything as they say in life and i think core we've timing's great they had to get out though right because they had so many loans weren't they the ones doing these crazy loans against the gpus yes so that's i have a SPEAKER_00: chart here of their indebtedness which i'll pull up and then i'm gonna tell you why they're going public now so this is just the balance sheet showing their cash and then their various uh types of debt they have two delayed draw term loan facilities jason a term loan facility and then they have some oem deals and a revolver that's currently not being used what matters here is that this term loan facility which is about a billion dollars worth of debt uh matures at the end of this year calendar so the company was looking at essentially a billion dollar outflow of cash and they don't want to raise more debt so what do you do well you fundraise and an ipo is a fundraising mechanism and they say specifically in their s1 that apart from you know general corporate uses and so forth they're paying that loan off entirely so that's going to take care of that and reduce their leverage a little bit SPEAKER_162: in today's market your business is judged by its customer service right we all know that one bad experience that's it kaput customers gone for life and you know what they may start saying negative things about you online and they have the power to do that so stop thinking about customer experience as just a department it's actually your entire business right that makes sense and horatio is the trusted outsourcing partner for hundreds of startups and fast-growing companies looking to deliver exceptional customer experiences horatio provides dedicated teams who act as an extension of your brand delivering world-class support 24 hours a day seven days a week whether it's chat whether it's email or even on the phone horatio will make sure your customers are happy loyal and coming back for more right you want those customers you've already got those are the best ones to continue to buy your product or service and when you have horatio on your team that's going to give you the ability to focus on running your business and scaling it see why fast-growing brands like built rewards bark and dr squatch rely on horatio to provide exceptional customer service so here's your call to action horatio isn't just outsourcing it's seamless integration with your team and the best part their solutions are cost-effective and completely tailored to your business needs visit higherhoratio.com twist to learn more and get two thousand dollars off your initial setup that's higherhoratio.com twist SPEAKER_12: i think a lot of what we're probably seeing here is um there they when you see that kind of revenue SPEAKER_120: growth it's probably not you know uh a large number of clients it's probably a large client or two so my guess is there's a whale or two in that revenue jump or maybe three SPEAKER_170: yes dead on uh oh really yeah so i oh i i thought you were teeing me up just to like read off my notes SPEAKER_03: no no i'm not teeing you up i didn't i didn't read all the notes today i'll be totally honest SPEAKER_00: yeah oh no so i'm well you know what that means detention no i'm kidding um you're dead on jason so in 2022 the company's top three customers were 41 of revenue okay in 2023 that scaled to 73 okay in 2024 two customers were 77 of the company's business of which microsoft was 62 SPEAKER_39: last year alone oh so that's that's actually probably something they would put in risks SPEAKER_52: um that's a major client dependency um and you know your friends over at the bg2 pod yes SPEAKER_181: brad gerstner and um bill gurley bill gurley thank you interviewing me friday at 4 p.m at south by SPEAKER_03: southwest on march 7th in two days 48 hours from now teamwork um satya nela ceo of microsoft went on SPEAKER_186: that podcast and talked about things and he said that the core weave deal was a one-time thing so the SPEAKER_01: so right so you begin to on one hand the company's gross margins have improved to the mid 70s fantastic uh it's adjusted to operating income pretty solid it's just an ebitda pretty solid the company puts all of its depreciation costs in its technology and then for line item very clearly so you can know exactly where all the costs are going the growth out of this world but it's spent like seven or eight billion dollars last year on gear and its chief customer wants to leave and so SPEAKER_00: on one hand jason i'm so impressed with this company and on the other hand i'm kind of thinking is this just a temporary blip based on microsoft not having enough gpus at the moment you mentioned SPEAKER_13: which was chat gpt i don't know i um wow so fascinating i would say i'm guessing the issue is that um they needed more capacity because of the chat gpt deal yes and azure i wonder if the those gpus SPEAKER_12: are part of the azure cloud you know and and they're just abstracting them so when you buy from azure it's using the core weave cloud do you think that's what's happening that's my guess or they're SPEAKER_16: offloading some of open ai's uh compute they committed to open ai off under core weave would SPEAKER_12: be another guess of mine sure fantastic um i think this company will get bought i'll be totally honest um you have aws azure google cloud and oracle in a race i don't know if those companies are investors SPEAKER_13: but sometimes you will see strategics come in so i don't know if any of them have the presence of mind or the ceo of core we've had the presence of mind to pitch them on investment but um you know that would be a very smart acquisition to take this customer base off there uh and here we have core weaves class a shares nvidia owns six percent that's around tripping type craziness right fidelity which does SPEAKER_24: um private markets and publics uh and by the way they just came out with a um cap table competitor that's quite good oh and uh yeah i i know this because they're going to be doing a little advertising on this podcast as cap table software companies sometimes do but they're kind of undercutting the market you're like why is fidelity dripping down into cap tables of year one startups and it's like oh SPEAKER_45: those startups grow up and then fidelity has active um investor bases like family offices and high net SPEAKER_13: worth individuals uh like myself and sometimes they will offer someone like myself or a family office um you know shares in something like core weave right you know three years ago two years ago so SPEAKER_12: there's this whole thing that's happening with the stay private longer movement we talked about over and over again where they will this new group of individuals wants access to privates high networks SPEAKER_13: family offices not just other folks and then you have here magnet car financial is that a SPEAKER_12: hedge fund based out of illinois well that's crazy so um yeah you know sometimes a unknown or a little known um firm will make early stage investments know they have a winner and keep investing my guess SPEAKER_60: is magnetar financial which i've never heard of doesn't mean it's not like a well-known firm but SPEAKER_206: i'm not in the private equity world i bet you they were early investors and often investors so SPEAKER_12: one of the strategies correct both ways yes it is yep okay so after 2000 episodes i kind of can uh i SPEAKER_24: know what i'm talking about um so what happens in these situations um is you invest in something like i didn't do this with uber or robin hood because they didn't have a chip stack back then i was a one-and-done investor but i watched bill gurley do the series a mayfield uh shirvan do the series b etc any of those other investments would have been fantastic investments that they would have been five or six thousand x they would have been 500 x or 200 x which by the way most venture capitalists the best investment they ever make in their career is 100 or 200 x a 200 bagger is one SPEAKER_52: for the the personal achievement board yeah yeah i mean that would be and and for me i have those SPEAKER_13: like 500 x 200 x and things like a robin hood or a calm etc but what you want to be able to do is place that second and third bet and so we corrected that with com i only did one bet as well but we own SPEAKER_12: five and a half percent of the company but then with a company like grand um a company that went through our accelerator i think we made five bets over time company became worth a billion we were actually able to sell i think 18 million dollars in secondary and when it hit a billion and you know that was peak syrup we timed it perfectly but we made multiple bets because we just saw the revenue tripling or doubling every year when you see revenue doubling or tripling every year probably not happening by accident SPEAKER_13: and so that's when you would place a second or third bet this becomes a challenge for me when we are when you have a portfolio of 400 companies everybody thinks that we should follow on yeah with every investment and we tell them well we only have like five one in 20 companies gets a follow-on investment SPEAKER_24: it's a bit of a competition for that very scarce resource in a small seed fund for the reserve dollars and uh you know right now unless you have two and a half three four times year over year revenue you probably wouldn't hit that benchmark that we've explained to our lps is why we would do that the SPEAKER_93: most famous version of this was whatsapp and sequoia what's that sequoia sequoia offered whatsapp SPEAKER_12: preemptive funding i think three or four times and i think that fund that sequoia did might be a 30 20 or 30 x fund i know this because i'm in it i happen to be an lp in that fund and so this is one of the SPEAKER_13: great things that can happen in a venture fund if you know you have a winner keep betting on the winner because they're so rare uh and so there's just a little behind the scenes of what you can interpret when somebody owns 30 and you don't see other investors there that was the other notable SPEAKER_00: thing where are the other investors so that's an interesting question jason and i was trying to chase that down but there's been so many secondary transactions debt rounds and so forth it seems that everyone else kind of got diluted quite a lot that it came on later um it did have some money from goldman and such people that are kind of like ipo hunting uh but just so everyone knows core weave is again tipped for a 35 billion dollar valuation and a four billion dollar race that's their goal we'll see what they get to i'm watching this like a hawk because i'm so excited by it what was the last SPEAKER_16: round of funding if it's going to be a 35 billion dollar ipo you said yeah let me just pull it up so i SPEAKER_15: i'm curious what the last round was so just so people understand these late stage investors they SPEAKER_13: might invest at 20 billion 25 30 billion even 32 billion you're like well why are they or even 35 so why are they investing at you know just below the uh ipo amount well they might be long-term bettors and they're just securing their position for the next five years or they might be in fact uh doing something interesting which is they just see this as a one or two year investment so if they got in at 25 or 15 20 25 in the last couple of years they they're only planning on SPEAKER_45: holding it for one to three years as opposed to a venture capitalist with our winners now SPEAKER_00: you tend to hold your winners 10 to 15 years before that yeah so to answer your question the final data point in the crunchbase database of the material round into the company was actually a secondary transaction it was in november of 2024 650 million dollars at a 23 billion dollar post so i nailed SPEAKER_15: it so that was 2023 right 23 billion uh no 24 so that was last november oh okay so here's a thing i Chamath Palihapitiya: want you to do just for fun pull up your favorite llm doesn't matter which one it is and just type SPEAKER_12: what's the irr on uh investing 650 million at a 23 billion dollar valuation and exiting two years later SPEAKER_24: at 35 billion and we will get uh a very interesting uh explanation of that uh just to be sure what is the SPEAKER_00: irr of investing at a 23 billion dollar valuation and exiting at 35 billion two years later correct SPEAKER_226: and you just have to put the amount that you invested uh okay i'm investing i'm going to say SPEAKER_181: um 100 million sure and uh i'm using gpt 4.5 for this because anyone's curious what it will do is it SPEAKER_227: should explain to you the formula there's like a really crazy formula most people irr it's actually SPEAKER_45: a formula in most modern spreadsheets so you don't actually have to do this crazy extensive formula uh but it will give you the percentage you made each year so in this case going from 23 to 35 is SPEAKER_24: obviously a 10 12 billion dollar increase which is a 50 increase from when you invested so that's not 25 each year because that would be more it's 23.4 got it so there you go and actually this is this is SPEAKER_00: totally off topic but um i didn't get of the big breakdown of a formula maybe i should have used SPEAKER_12: oh one oh three or one show your work and explain to me how you calculated it and it will show it to you so if you wanted to be a venture capitalist these were very hard things to do is understand how all this works now i'm training new people i'm like what's the ir and they're like i don't know how to do that i'm like chat gpt it uh use any use gemini whatever you prefer grok but um this is what SPEAKER_00: it did instead i think this is very interesting so i'm going to pull this up i just pulled a screenshot into chrome here but if you click on this little blue button it brings up an analysis window which is entirely distinct and then it just kind of broke down the math that it did and it wrote out the formulas in um how you would do that if you're writing code versus doing math on a SPEAKER_170: chalkboard amazing but that's very cool i hadn't seen that before welcome to twist where we do it live SPEAKER_12: we'll do it live the reason i'm doing this with you is because you can do some of this sort of higher-end analysis and i was doing it the other day on an investment that's going to pay 42 ir each SPEAKER_13: year of three years so it was basically like hey it's clear americans don't have the desire to fund SPEAKER_12: a war in europe even as economically check notes very profitable and then i put there uh like we spent or we least loaned i don't know if people remember these arguments i had with sacks you know over hey we lease loan these weapons we're going to get the money back like that's the intent if it was just a gift we wouldn't have gone through the paperwork of a lease loan and biden said that over and over SPEAKER_13: but you know how politics are and political people i'm an independent i'm not on either side i call balls and strikes just a friendly reminder sacks obviously is a die-hard republican he's the definition of partisan because he's actually in the party and he's in the administration so he used SPEAKER_12: to tell me oh we're never going to get that money back well here we are trump is demanding not 175 billion back he says he wants 500 billion back so it turns out trump is the best investor he SPEAKER_45: beat nancy pelosi and myself over the last couple of years in terms of irr well jason not to get SPEAKER_00: political because i know we're trying to get the show focused on startups but this mineral deal has not been fully signed yet so we're gonna have to wait and see what i'm obviously making the joke that SPEAKER_226: he's gonna get it done yeah you know even if he gets it done at half the amount the ir drops down SPEAKER_24: to 20 percent yeah you know the us uh is you know what's the interest rate right now on treasuries SPEAKER_45: that we would have gotten on the money for it turns out weapons technology selling weapons on loans and leases you might be able to make a pretty penny you might be able to make a pretty penny and then SPEAKER_24: somebody dm'd me and they're like how dare you whatever and i'm like do you not understand the SPEAKER_45: concept of like satire or you know any of this like obviously i'm not making an equivalency that we try to make 42 and start wars based on it i'm just talking about yeah the cynical nature of folks being like oh we gave somebody a loan and a lease on weapons we're never going to get it back and then the very next president who they are supporting is insisting not only do we get it back but we get it back not with interest but with interest that would make a mobster blush and say pump the brakes like that's that's too much you don't want to you don't want to you want to you know slowly bleed them out you don't want to kill them like 42 interest is nuts we got to work on your uh your bloodletting SPEAKER_16: analogies when it comes to nations under attack but okay i hear you and i do think that absolutely what SPEAKER_00: we need is a sarcasm font for the internet uh that would solve all these problems and i'm being sarcastic when i say that but at tech crunch we had a piece of software we use called convo jason it SPEAKER_16: was kind of like yammer internally and we had a rule which was no jokes on convo because consistently people would make a joke and everyone would get it wrong or miss it and so we just had to SPEAKER_00: hilarious sometimes just yeah it's tough i did not read those tweets as i read them as tongue-in-cheek SPEAKER_234: versus satirical for what it's worth but yeah but here we are yeah here we are uh last thing on core we were moving on but this is a chart jason a map sorry of where their data centers are europe north SPEAKER_00: america i think that oracle is the the buyer here of the clouds you mentioned that's my guess if they don't if they don't go public at the valuation they want i think it's oracle because i think they're hungry for a place at the table and they're tired of being the database company with more lawyers SPEAKER_227: than customers they are very big on cloud computing right now and they are being very aggressive in SPEAKER_39: their approach so if you are looking to move clouds i can tell you they are like looking to beat SPEAKER_93: everybody uh in terms of how much they're willing to spend uh to get you as a customer and discounts SPEAKER_255: yeah actually i i wrote some of our ads back in the day for for oracle and now i'm remembering all SPEAKER_00: their little sales points anyways totally um this is a tweet from someone that i know rather well his name is jason and he's talking to someone from a company called av ride about their upcoming partnership with uber and i think this is a a pretty big news story for folks who don't know av ride um is the SPEAKER_01: spin out jason of yandex which had to deal with uber back in the day and then they got sanctioned and then anyways av rides doing autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots and they announced a deal with hyundai that's going to bring them into the uber app in dallas i believe and i think this is fantastic SPEAKER_13: wow yeah it's um i i don't remember av ride there are so many av players um doing this but there it is av ride uh you can pull up their website beautiful looking cars um and that's a hyundai yeah so these SPEAKER_12: is av ride a hyundai company or owned by hyundai or partially owned or they're just using hyundai's as SPEAKER_186: their base vehicle i think they're using hyundai's as their base vehicle and i'm pretty sure hyundai SPEAKER_00: wants a play here to avoid being relegated to the dusty history i don't know if they are a direct investor would not shock me if they were um but they're going to be working with the uh ionic 5 which is their it's it's an electronic mini suv i want to say and i've seen a bunch of these around providence they're they're popular amongst the yuppies um but and they also have the robot delivery SPEAKER_15: service that goes on the sidewalk i see on their website i don't know if you're pulling up the SPEAKER_228: website oh i i pulled it up and put it and took it down but i'll put it back up again yeah no problem SPEAKER_08: um so here is the cute little robot that they do they have partnerships click on that robot page it's SPEAKER_56: kind of cool if you scroll down if you click from the navigation on the robot page um you know it looks SPEAKER_13: like a little mini r2d2 four wheels uh you put a package in it it's really got lighter on the top but they have this like really interesting thing where it's showing you what it sees SPEAKER_12: um and i think these things i'm trying to think at what speed if you got hit by one of these things you would you know obviously at 30 miles an hour that's no bueno right i wonder what the speed these SPEAKER_13: max speed of something on the sidewalk so if somebody was running at top speed that would be a five minute mile uh they'd be going 12 miles per hour so 12 miles per hour if somebody ran into you at that speed that would not be pleasant so it's probably these things that can only go up to five miles an hour they need to have some cushions on them or an airbag i guess if they went faster so they're not going to do that five miles an hour means it probably can go 10 blocks which is half a mile um you know in 10 minutes or something so it's kind of an or five or ten minutes they're probably good for five or ten minute you know deliveries which is probably a 10 if you do a if you do a block a SPEAKER_00: minute yeah three miles an hour yeah sure i don't know the av ride top speed but i just found some information reporting about um robots from serve a company we've talked to here on the show yeah and a new drivetrain allowed them to up their speed from seven miles per hour to 11 which is quite a lot of 60 gain i don't know if i'm in favor of 11 miles per hour on the sidewalks but that gives SPEAKER_03: another data point to your thought experiment it will depend on how often they crash into people SPEAKER_12: um and you know what if you're in new york if you haven't experienced the electric bikes in new SPEAKER_13: york people don't know this but a lot of the bike rides are done with electric bikes i have these electric bikes if you type in any of the electric bikes like if you type in rad power bike which i SPEAKER_24: have one of really cool bike and you say unlock speed you could unlock the speed i think it's typically fixed at 20 miles an hour you could unlock it to go to about 30. there are other kits you know listen you can go 30 you can go 50 miles an hour on a bike i love the rad power bikes but not an advertiser i didn't get a free bike i paid for them but they're very cool especially like off SPEAKER_45: terrain you see those thick chunky tires oh yeah but they're they're a pretty penny i have i had the one that let me take my daughters on it and they loved it uh pull up the pull up the version for the family wagon um you would like this it's got like a little cage you can put on the back and your SPEAKER_24: kids can sit in the cage my daughters went crazy for this when they were younger and i would drive it around i would drive it from hillsborough down to san mateo um it's got this like little box in the SPEAKER_281: back oh i found it okay i was looking for something different so you're talking about the rad SPEAKER_13: wagon which i believe i had the rad wagon in addition to a power bag i had two of them i liked them so much but i bought these so you see that one's got the little seat in the back you can SPEAKER_12: sit there and then they have a cage option where you and the accessories you can put a cage on it and they can kind of sit in a little cage where they can hold on to bars and it kind of protects them SPEAKER_13: a little bit um you know it's it's super nice um and a very cool product i highly recommend it um but there are other ones you can buy that can go 40 50 miles an hour and in new york there are SPEAKER_12: people definitely doing this uh and then they pop onto the street it's completely unregulated it's chaos uh it is what it is um but i do think they'll compare the number of times those things crash into people yeah and knock them out and you can get seriously hurt um like getting hit by a bike at SPEAKER_03: speed is that's dangerous that's really dangerous but higher center of gravity so my hope is that these things end up just barking your shins yeah they just tear your acl up and they just rip out SPEAKER_52: your my next meniscus when you get hit from the side and the knees i i hope that doesn't happen i mean i mean here's my what are the chances of these things hitting you they must have a collision alert SPEAKER_12: yeah they must know so it would have to be like somebody jumps out into the middle of the sidewalk you know from between two cars or something but i think i would see it before you um anyway i think these robots are going to be a big win i don't know why these haven't taken over a city yet SPEAKER_13: um but man how crazy would this be if it was only a dollar to deliver your food as opposed to 10. SPEAKER_181: oh big game changer i think i'd weigh 30 pounds more and i would be two-thirds burrito SPEAKER_24: like i mean just send you some mangiarno you know what i saw in uh related startup news um yeah breaking story i heard it on cnbc when i was getting out of the shower SPEAKER_45: um you can look it up over nordisk is going to do direct to consumer d2c uh osempic mangiarno wagovi whatever at half the price this is nuts so i think there's a lot of SPEAKER_13: websites i just joined one which does your blood work and puts it on into a i just ran this service i wouldn't say which one it is um because there's two founders of these two competing services and SPEAKER_12: they both offered me free products and i was just it was like one of these situations where i asked on twitter like which is better this or this and i just signed up for whichever i just signed up for one that my friend had told me about the other one was like oh my god we want you to use ours anyway what it does is these are these new services where you do your own directed health care i did a blood draw last week they put my data online i have a concierge and this is like better service than i was getting from a concierge doctor in san francisco i was paying for my entire family i think 30 000 a year which seems like a big number but again imagine you're rich uh it's not a big number to be SPEAKER_11: able to have a doctor visit your house when your kids are sick so that's where you get a concierge doctor SPEAKER_255: the difference between my family and your family apart from one or two zeros is that my spouse is SPEAKER_15: a doctor and a pediatrician so like got one at home for free but what you're and your spouse i'm assuming i never asked you this if you're comfortable um they work at a hospital or at a clinic or they work at a clinic that's part of a hospital yeah got it now imagine you know she gets 10 years under SPEAKER_24: her belt and there's 10 families who would give her 30 000 a year that's 300 000 out of the gate to come to their house you know to give them personalized medicine you can actually probably do 200 as one practitioner because if 10 families call you a week that's 20 a week that means you're doing four calls a day basically five days a week um so that's how these things wind up uh immersing themselves long story short they had in there they had they have an rx section where you can get SPEAKER_13: you know the compounding pharmacy version of wagovi's you know you know all that stuff plus peptides plus Chamath Palihapitiya: plus plus so what you're going to start to see is they're going to take that concierge doctor and by SPEAKER_12: the way if you use somebody like peter atia or those really high-end people i i think that's like well into SPEAKER_13: the six figures is what i was told i don't know if it's true or not i'm not speaking specifically about peter atia but other ones you know there are billionaires or centimillionaires who you know spend a quarter million dollars a year a hundred million a hundred thousand dollars a year on these kind of services those are being abstracted down into um i think about maybe three thousand per family so ninety percent less than i was paying if i put five people on it for seven hundred five people for a thousand dollars each you know with all the tests that you can do boom uh so and then they track all your data in a beautiful interface over time this is where healthcare is going to move if SPEAKER_12: you're spending 10 20k on these kind of services what we saw in the pandemic where people could do therapy other things through remote telemedicine or get you know a z pack that's going to be productized and it will it is being productized right now and i think it's going to change the world because what it will do is high-end people will just say you know what i'll just pay cash i'll just pay cash it's easier give me the and i think i might have this myself personally um my partner takes care of most of it but i think i took the highest deductible maybe five thousand a year or ten thousand a year so we basically have i guess catastrophic yeah which is what you want SPEAKER_24: which is fine with me um because i think it's i'd rather direct it myself and and whatever so SPEAKER_39: nova nardis maybe you just read a little bit uh the opening uh graph or two of what this means because a lot of startups right hymns roman are doing the and the direct to consumer SPEAKER_00: oh yeah and i even have a friend who uses a compounding pharmacy or at least did uh before but here's from cnbc novo nordisk on wednesday said it will offer its weight loss drug drug we govi for less than half of its usual price per month through a new d2c option the cash hey offering is available to millions of patients without insurance coverage for the blockbuster injection so a couple things one it's 500 bucks a month which is apparently less than half of what it currently costs so savings is good still not cheap enough for the average middle class family i'd say but if you're one step above that this is now in your in your limit and also insurance coverage of glp ones is straining budgets for like medicaid and such i my father-in-law does medicaid policy so i i hear drips and drabs um but lower cost offering direct to consumer get around the SPEAKER_01: insurance companies this makes great sense to me and here's the funny thing jason don't people stay on glp ones so is novo nordisk about to have a 600 500 a month set of consumers in the us just shipping SPEAKER_307: them money i think this you know if you if you were to compare it to struggling with obesity which i did SPEAKER_13: for you know uh 15 years yeah and shout out to kevin rose i found out about ozempic because kevin rose was experimenting with it four years ago uh like during the pandemic and i wouldn't have lost the weight if i hadn't heard him uh talk about he didn't exactly endorse it but he just talked about his experience with it i think uh these things are going to change the world talk to your doctor SPEAKER_276: don't take medical advice from a podcaster slash venture capitalist slash blogger um from brooklyn but i do think um they will get down to 100 bucks a month and uh there'll be a 90 margin for them SPEAKER_13: and i do think a lot of people will be on them for life or a low dose of them i just saw brian johnson started who was on the program when he had his finance company back in the day you know what SPEAKER_24: episode that was but what was brian johnson's company but he's the guy who has the do not die SPEAKER_13: blueprint service now he started uh a regimen he talked about publicly of it not he doesn't have any weight to lose but he did it for all the other things that it helps with and so there's gonna there's a lot of research you know i made my own decision based on there were so many uh here it SPEAKER_12: is what what was his company uh braintree braintree right he sold us for a bunch of money just find like a still of him somewhere in there scrub to a still this is when was he on back in 2015 there's me i'm a little chubby and look at how different brian johnson looks now yeah uh compared to that Chamath Palihapitiya: he's probably his face is so much thinner now and he's in such better shape but he's still like it was David Friedberg: a really nice guy i gotta go back and listen to this episode what episode number is it from 20 that is SPEAKER_34: we used to number them we still number them but i i don't know if we have the number in the title but SPEAKER_16: um just search for brian johnson it's from september 18 2015 we don't have an uh episode SPEAKER_00: uh number on this and i can't count that fast but i just googled uh brian johnson this begin startups and it came right up so if you're listening you can find it there you go uh all SPEAKER_13: right so we have any founder uh so this is amazing by the way i just want to say av ride i also saw today and i tweeted today about my belief system when it comes to av rides and uber's role SPEAKER_93: in all of this so i am talking my book i'm long uber since you know being the third investor yeah but SPEAKER_13: here's here's your tweet you wanna run us through it yeah i mean i said to uh balaji a different biology who works at uber excited to see uber partner with so many amazing fsd players to deploy this technology widely they were announcing um they were announcing austin waymo which is going to be a huge hit it launched yesterday if you want to use it you have to go to your settings and in your settings there is uh autonomous rides and join and so you can just look that up or google it but you'll find it in settings and you have to opt in to get those rides and then they will SPEAKER_12: start showing you them more often if you think about how hard this rollout is going to be for autonomous and how long it's going to take and what's important here for me this goes beyond my personal net worth you know and my shares in uber and i have exposure i won't say which companies but you can be sure i have exposure to every one of the companies so no matter who wins i'm going to SPEAKER_13: win yeah it doesn't matter if uber is first second or third place if they win gold silver or bronze it's going to be a spectacular win for me i don't think anybody would argue they're not going to be one of the top three and if tesla wins and if google wins i have exposure to everything so don't worry about jake here's what i think is important this is going to save a lot of lives SPEAKER_24: and trust is going to be important my best advice to the market is to be thoughtful in the rollout and only do what is extremely extremely safe we cannot have another uber crash like they had in arizona with a safety driver playing candy crotch where tragically uh a woman was killed it was a homeless woman walking across an eight lane freeway with a bicycle at night the goddamn safety driver who was getting paid a pretty penny and i'm i'm very angry about this because of the loss of life not just that one woman's loss of life but you have to look at the actuary tables alex i think and say how many lives were SPEAKER_12: not saved because that set back autonomy and how much further along would autonomy be if cruise didn't drag that person and then cover it up so goddamn cruise whoever did that cover up not only did you drag that poor woman not only did this safety driver kill this woman think about all the lives and you know people who could have could have been hit by cars that would have been saved i'm coming to this from the purest place possible which is saving lives and then enabling more people to be able to take safe rides and have more transportation options which is you know virtuous and great for everybody SPEAKER_13: you know if you're a nanny or a teacher and you know you you want to be able to um you know teach somewhere and you can lower the price that helps right because then that nanny or teacher can send their kids to school and and make a little bit more money or whatever it is or get to their school with less pain and suffering because they had to take three buses you know and they could have gone SPEAKER_234: direct and instead of taking some crazy route so i just want to clarify here um because of the safety SPEAKER_00: driver playing candy crush you killed the woman my nanny is more expensive i see now i'm mad too i joke SPEAKER_12: all of this is like you gotta think in systems right i i've been around long enough to know that you know one mistake can have repercussions they close the butterfly effect the ripple effect you know you throw a ripple in a pond so this can work for positive and work for negative the positive here is if everybody in the industry joins forces and works together to roll it out safely i know everybody's in competition but there's no rush here and if the rush means another person dies and we set it back like let's not go ten step backwards to make two step forward and get you know whatever so SPEAKER_00: right be thoughtful be cautious yeah go as fast as we can without killing people and that will save the maximum number of lives i'm actually all jokes aside in complete agreement here and i think the actuarial table point which shows that self-driving cars have fewer engagements of emergency braking blah SPEAKER_15: blah blah yeah faster please but safely and what uber's doing i think is the greatest thing ever uber SPEAKER_12: doesn't need to open their platform up they could just buy one of these companies uh because these companies are worth you know with three to fifty billion dollars they can buy one they could open source everything and you know start their own project they obviously have but SPEAKER_13: they've decided to say to 10 players 15 players come on the platform and of the 15 players they invited SPEAKER_93: i think 10 or 12 have said yes uber will do great taking 20 of each ride and giving 80 to that other SPEAKER_13: company great business for everybody so i'm very excited about that possibility i wish zooks and tesla SPEAKER_39: would consider running pilots with uber or lyft or both you know i don't care you know uh do do uh SPEAKER_24: pilots with both and let's get the maximum number of on the road and the maximum utilization this can't SPEAKER_12: work if these things are only utilized for a small percentage of the time and it's not going to work for you know if you if tesla and zooks want to build their own app in these markets and they don't have critical mass then they don't have human drivers to fall back on during peak times then those apps are worthless because the times you need it it'll be a 30 minute wait time what we learned at uber uh was it has to be under five minutes or people are just not going to use it or SPEAKER_13: they're not going to regularly use it they will not rely on something when the wait times are you know eight nine ten eleven twelve minutes it's got to be five minutes or less it's not going to be five minutes or less in waymo as we've seen uh or uber you know unless they do it in a very dense area and it's certainly not going to be that way during rush hour or when you need it most okay that's it SPEAKER_60: i'm very excited about all these different players uh joining together yeah one lesson on this we SPEAKER_01: didn't get to it i forget when this data point came out monday last week but waymo is now over 200 000 paid rides per week which is up 50k per week from before incrementally we're still moving but i can't wait until we get an update and it's another zero versus a smaller edition but everything seems to be accelerating self-driving jason from tesla to everyone else and so i'm just so bullish so excited and this is one of those those great things right now in the world that isn't political that's just doing well we can all enjoy it everyone has a big old hug for self-driving SPEAKER_92: oh thank god i can't wait it's totally awesome i'm trying to get my follower count up i have 475 SPEAKER_60: followers right now um it's um i'm user slash jason calacanis just my first name last name reddit.com slash user slash jason calacanis or you just type in reddit jason calacanis and you should get to my profile page and then you'll see everything i'm talking about um on reddit and you can join the discussions i'm in so you see my comments and then follow me i'm at 475 followers so let's get me up to SPEAKER_01: a thousand that would be super helpful thanks to my fam can i can i just say that jason's uh reddit account was born on june 6th 2013 making it 12 years old nearly very impressive there's this other guy SPEAKER_65: alex will have another one jason m calacanis or i have another one that's like oh no i have another one that's like my secret one with my old alias um which i won't give here but what's yours alex SPEAKER_01: uh alex wilhelm and uh mine was born june 19th 2008. a solid half decade before mr calacanis so i'm SPEAKER_344: gonna take two that's because i created a second one alex wilhelm if we can't compete and throw SPEAKER_03: popcorn at each other jason what's the point of a podcast okay fair enough fair enough all right SPEAKER_13: uh do we have the do we put the link in for alex in the uh we didn't put the link in but we'll put the link in the show notes better to follow us over there we'll see you all next time on this week in star wars bye-bye