SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's your boy, J.Cow, Jason Calacanis.

SPEAKER_01: You can follow me on Twitter at JasonX.com slash Jason. I invest in 100 companies a year,

SPEAKER_00: if it's your first time here with a team of 20. We also have a podcast called This Week in Startups. We've done almost 2000 episodes. And my co host is Alex Wilhelm. He is formerly of a

SPEAKER_03: little publication called TechCrunch and an amazing database called Crunchbase. And is the guy who in high school was excited about stocks and startups. He confessed this to me.

SPEAKER_00: He was Alex P. Keaton. And you know what? I was running all kinds of great businesses. Jason's

SPEAKER_04: Hot Fave, my first business when I was making copies of The Empire Strikes Back from a guy from I think it was the Gambino family. And I don't know. I don't want to be a rat here and eat cheese. But

SPEAKER_06: anyway, we're both into it. We're both really into startups, technology and business.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much my three favorite things to talk about. And it's what I've talked about for a long time. So it is always lovely, Jason, to see you. I am Alex over on X slash Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn and we stream the show live when we do it. We're doing two to three new shows a week. So make sure that you have us on YouTube. You have us on X,

SPEAKER_09: LinkedIn, whatever your platform of choice is. We're coming to you wherever you are.

SPEAKER_00: Or finance, tech, media, lifestyle, politics, like maybe way down the end. But it's really finance,

SPEAKER_14: tech, markets, all that good stuff. And we got a full docket today, don't we?

SPEAKER_07: Full docket. We're talking about the massive market demand for GLP ones, what that can mean for startups and also new technology there. Then Adobe's problems with the FTC over their subscription business and what that means for digital product companies everywhere. New Twist 500 members. It's going to be a back show. Let's dive right in.

SPEAKER_17: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Dot tech domains. Don't miss our jam session with jcal contest coming soon. To apply and get more details, go to jamwithjcal.tech. Brought to you by dot tech domains. And lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist.

SPEAKER_07: The biggest news of the day that I saw right before we jumped on is that Nvidia has taken over the top spot. It is now the most valuable company in the world. And I'm so glad that didn't become not true since I put this thing in the docket and then we showed it. But, uh, as you can see in the video, we have a list here of all the companies by market cap, Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, steep drop to Alphabet, then Amazon, Saudi Aramco, Meta, TSMC, chips, Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate. And then we have Broadcom and then Eli Lilly, Nova Nordisk and Tesla top 13 in the world in videos on top. And Jason, I have to say, uh, it feels a little weird, great company, but I don't know if I would say that if I had to pick one, it would be Nvidia over say a recurring software business.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah. I think this is a moment in time. It's clearly not the most important company on this list

SPEAKER_29: in my mind, uh, in terms of the future. If you told me I could only bet on one stock and hold it for 10 years, uh, it would not be Nvidia. So, you know, if you were to just

SPEAKER_00: do that mental exercise, a company that 10 years from now, you would still want to own. If you went through this list, Alex, just, you know, work me through it. Who on this list,

SPEAKER_06: you know, you look at Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet,

SPEAKER_33: Alphabet. These are very big bases of users, both enterprise and consumer, right? In each case.

SPEAKER_07: Absolutely. So Microsoft has been one of the most valuable companies off and on for my entire life. So thinking about just value preservation clearly stands the test of time, enterprise and consumer, huge businesses, AW, sorry, Azure, open AI. That's an easy one. Apple depends on how much you think consumer hardware will do. Alphabet. I don't think it's going to be, uh, I just don't think they have

SPEAKER_36: the juice anymore. Amazon. We talked about it. Tell me about that. Why, why do you think Alphabet

SPEAKER_38: has lost its mojo? It lost its way. Ah, that's a controversial, you know, position, I think.

SPEAKER_42: Okay. So search came out, they made search, they made search ads, they changed the world.

SPEAKER_07: They had this unbelievable profit cannon that just fired money at them for a long time, but then they failed to have a major second act in the same way that Apple ends up with, you know, Mac, then iPhone, then iPad, then I, uh, the headphones and so forth. And so what they've done is increasingly squeeze search for more and more revenue. That's why I think Google search has gotten worse over time. They're panicking. They're doing search generative experience, which is pretty crap. And I think fundamentally they're not run by a technologist. They're run by a management consultant guy, and it shows in the products and decisions they make. They're good at near term EPS, but in 10 years, I don't think we're going to be using Google for search. I don't think we're going to be using Gmail for email. I don't think we're going to be living in a Google world. You got me on notion.

SPEAKER_46: You broke my Google docs addiction, right? Yeah. So, you know, I do think they have a problem

SPEAKER_47: about innovating at home. If you were to look at the second act, if there was a second and third act for, um, Alphabet, AKA Google, you'd probably say it's YouTube and Android. Both of those are purchases,

SPEAKER_41: not built there. So if you look at what's been built there, Gmail obviously was built there. Chrome was built there. Uh, you know, there, there are great things that have been built at Google, uh, docs as well. Although they did buy a docs company that started them off with the Google docs franchise. I think they built the other pieces.

SPEAKER_29: You put all that together. Um, I think you have a very, um, important insight here. It's not founder led. It's led in a management way. And I think Sundar has to just clean house. I think he's going to, he would have to become a wartime CEO, right? And he's not a wartime CEO and he's in a war.

SPEAKER_03: He is a consensus builder, manager of people, keep everybody rowing in the same direction, but I don't get the sense. He's the guy who's going to walk in and say, you know what? You guys are doing a good job. You're fired. I need somebody to do a great job because we're up against an elite competitor. And this is a very hard thing in management. I have struggled with this, my whole career. I have a rule. You ever hear of this term of PIP, a performance improvement plan.

SPEAKER_59: I have been a manager in modern corporations. So yes, I am familiar with all things.

SPEAKER_03: It is a load of BS. If a person needs to be put on a PIP, they need to be shown the door. Now I have had many instances in my companies, companies we've invested in companies I run where somebody will secretly put somebody on a PIP. They'll give them a talking to, you know what? Business at this level is an elite sport. If somebody comes to practice and they forget their

SPEAKER_62: shoes, if they come to practice and they were at the club till 5 AM, unless you're Allen Iverson or James Harden, like you're some unbelievably elite talent, undeniably elite talent, you are fired. There's no performance improvement plan for the guy who shows up without his sneakers or the person who shows up and they were out drinking. You just fire them immediately. This is a message to all startups that I've invested in. When in doubt, there's no doubt. When you have doubts about a person, there's no doubt of what you should do. In an elite pursuit, you fire them. Now, if you're part of a

SPEAKER_41: union and you're part of the Writers Guild at Business Insider or Vox and you have a bunch of rules, I get it. You negotiated that. You bought into it. Management bought into it. You went with the union thing. You got to control salaries. Okay. That was your decision. Jim Bankoff, Lanzone, whoever is dealing with these unions. I get it. You have to do it that way. It's leaving.

SPEAKER_62: But in small companies or even these big companies, you're going to have to make a decision. You're up against Zuckerberg. Yep. You're up against Elon. You're up against Satya Nadella,

SPEAKER_67: Nadella. These people are hardcore. You're up against Sam Altman. These people are no joke. No. These people are no joke. You'll get shivved.

SPEAKER_69: Two things about that. One, pips, I think are a charade more than an actual technique. The way that

SPEAKER_07: I've always heard them explained to me is this is how we avoid getting sued by employees that we fire, which means that they are at best smokescreen. And everyone kind of, I think, knows what they mean,

SPEAKER_42: even though they're not detailed that way. So I agree with you there. On the kind of like who

SPEAKER_71: competes at Google side of things, I just think that even if you did a pretty big staff reduction,

SPEAKER_59: it wouldn't give the company the courage to go back on the crapification of search because that

SPEAKER_07: would hurt near term results. And this reminds me a little bit of, I think it was the interview you did with the intercom guy when he said that this AI way that's coming to software searches, software of a sort, is going to let smaller companies attack market share because incumbents are going to be too busy protecting what they have then building for the future. And that to me is the thing that Google is going to trip over and hit the deck. Moving on the list though, just quickly here. Amazon, great company, great business. AWS has lost its growth momentum. It's just not what it was. So I wouldn't pick as my top company, top three, probably Saudi Aramco. I mean, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: Just an asset. That's like saying, here's a pile of diamonds. You know what it's going to be worth. Those diamonds are not going to magically turn into uranium or something. So

SPEAKER_29: no, it's, it's even weird to have it on this list. Right. But then you get to Meta, TSMC, Berkshire Hathaway, Berkshire Hathaway is going to have a leadership problem. Obviously you take them off

SPEAKER_04: the list. TSMC. I think that's like a very predictable business. Meta is a wild card. You got to put Meta in your top three, I think, or it's got to be in the running.

SPEAKER_07: I would say in the running. Broadcom did well in their last earnings report. AI chips are doing well for them. And then there's two companies that I, that I included in this chart specifically because we're about to talk about something. Eli Lilly and then Novo Nordisk. If you don't know these two companies, they are big in the GLP one game and Novo Nordisk is single-handedly

SPEAKER_79: boosting the Danish GDP. Isn't that crazy? Yes. I love that story. Didn't they have a problem

SPEAKER_51: with monetary supply in the country? Cause they made so much money. Like they didn't have enough of

SPEAKER_83: whatever the Denmark dollar is and they have too many us dollars. It just screwed up the banking system.

SPEAKER_59: I remember seeing that. The kroner, I believe. Yeah. I think is, well, at least that was the Danish currency. I'm sure the EU people are gonna make it's the Euro. I don't know. But I do know that, that Novo Nordisk has become this giant, instead of a relatively small country, I will say I'm part Danish, so I'm not being rude here. And then Tesla's number 13 at 587, $188 billion. So this is a list of big kids. You know, everyone on this list we're talking about is worth a half trillion

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SPEAKER_07: about Eli Lilly because you and I have been watching this GLP one phenomena for a couple of years now. And the growth of these drugs has been simply amazing. So just start. When did you first hear

SPEAKER_74: about a GLP one? I don't care if it's from Eli Lilly or Novo Nordisk. I was in Italy. I remember

SPEAKER_41: it like it was yesterday. I was in Italy. I had, uh, commandeered, uh, Chamats beach house. I was public about this. We joked about it on all in. He was away for a week or two. I was writing my book. Uh, and I was like, can I borrow your house for 10 days? Or can I stay at your house for 10 days? He's like, sure. So I'm in Forte de Marme. It's not his house yet. They rented a house. Anyway, putting it all aside, I'm in there. I'm going for my bike ride. I would hit the beach. I would ride at the beach. Then I would, uh, you'd have my tradition of smoking a cigar. I would reward myself if I hit my 2000 words and maybe have a little cigarillo or cigar, which I never do.

SPEAKER_92: Uh, and then I'm riding my bike. I'm listening to my, my friend, Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, and they're talking about taking an Olympic shot. Got it. And I was really concerned about my weight.

SPEAKER_29: I was struggling with it. I peaked at two 13, had gotten down to like one 93 or something. One 85 bounce back up to one 98. I just, it's really struggling with it in my forties into my fifties.

SPEAKER_41: And, or this was in my forties, I guess, late forties. And, um, I said, you don't want to get back. I'm going to try this thing. Cause he had talked about how he turned the pen dial all the way up to a

SPEAKER_04: high dose and he started vomiting, but like, it's crazy. Like I stopped craving food and he had lost all this fat. So I started it and I did three or four cycles of it from, I was epic to a govy

SPEAKER_29: to Mon Giorno. I was covered for a while because I was in fact, pre-diabetic and obese. Uh, my BMI was

SPEAKER_04: like really high and it was very early. So I guess doctors could get you, um, this under a prescription or it was covered under insurance. I thought it was a pretty big copay, but it wasn't a big deal. Um, and so anyway, that's why when you see old videos of me three or four years ago, my face looks like Ernie and now it looks like birds. So I got a little ozempic face and this big round face and now I have a slimmer face, but this was the face I had up until I was 35, 36.

SPEAKER_41: So I am now at 170, 174 pounds. I've been as long as 169. So anyway, it's, it's about

SPEAKER_29: yeah, 40, 40 pounds of weight loss. I would attribute 30 pounds of it, 75% of it to these

SPEAKER_62: GLP ones. I feel great on them. And I would say the defining thing here is the danger of being obese

SPEAKER_00: versus, you know, whatever the side effects of these, uh, drugs are, I made the decision being thin

SPEAKER_41: and being healthy was better. Cause I had sciatica in my leg. I couldn't sleep. I was having breathing problems. And so I couldn't run. I had like a large list of problems. And then all of a sudden I'm skiing 40 days. I feel great. I'm running again. I mean, this has really changed my life. And so I think you have to consult with your doctor and be thoughtful, but I am currently

SPEAKER_04: on Monjarno, uh, and I'm just trying to get to 164, which is my lowest adult weight.

SPEAKER_62: And that's the weight I used to be when I ran the New York city marathon. So I want to get to 164 and I want to start running 10 Ks again, just as a, you know, start. Yeah. So anyway, it's, it's, I am so enamored by this technology and this innovation. Um, and I think

SPEAKER_41: that if you're overweight or obese, um, you should just at least do a consultation about it.

SPEAKER_04: I was able to acquire Monjarno now from a compounding pharmacy, um, which puts it at a price of about $200 a month. I think it's unbelievably affordable and there's more to come because, uh, there are significant investment being put in this. I do think this is going to solve the obesity problem in the world. And just to pause for a second, Alex, to think in, you know, first principle sitting here 10 years ago, what are the biggest problems in the world or in the United States? We could say education, big problem. We could say wealth disparity. We would certainly say obesity, right? And you could sit there and debate three or four of those things.

SPEAKER_58: I don't want you to solve one of them. This is like, I'm convinced the solution.

SPEAKER_07: So yeah, I, I think that the level of excitement you just showed to talk about your own journey with GLP ones is exactly why I'm so glad they're on the show because that was not in the show docket. That's not a bullet point that we were going to hit. That was just Jason being so excited about it. And that's why I think they're so popular because the impact is enormous. So I think if you think, look at Eli Lilly, um, they did more than $5 billion in revenue last year with GLP ones. And to quote the journal, these drugs are quote on the way to becoming some of the best selling pharmaceuticals of all time. I would scratch out the, uh, some of the, and just say best sellings. I think we're going to end up there and for business heads out there, Eli Lilly stock has risen 50% in the last year, a hundred percent in the last 12 months. We've seen charts here for

SPEAKER_27: everyone to take a look at. Give me a five year on that if we have it, because you know what I,

SPEAKER_00: when I started taking it, I thought to myself, I should put a trade on. So where was it like three years ago? Uh, 21, 2022, you could have made a lot of money. Yeah. Three or four X. So this is a really important note. You know, when you actually experience something that dramatic, yeah, you gotta place a bet. Right. So it was a stupid decision I made there. Um, but and the reason,

SPEAKER_04: you know, I, I actually, I don't think I've ever talked about my use of these at this length,

SPEAKER_41: but the reason I, I didn't talk about it for the first two years, for two reasons. One, they told

SPEAKER_29: me, Oh, Zempic was for people with diabetes, not just pre-diabetic. Therefore it's going to be a shortage. So I actually took like six months, nine months off from it. When the shortage happened, I just told my doctor, like, let me just, I don't want to be on it. If there's a shortage, right. I'm not very sure signaling. I just, I also, it was like twofold. One, I wanted to see if I would gain the weight back. I did gain like a, maybe a 20% of the weight back. I was getting back five

SPEAKER_04: pounds after I get off of it, but I don't gain back 20 pounds. Yeah. Um, and, um, you know, there's a shortage and I also wanted to make sure like this was safe, right? Like I can be a little experimental with my health, but I wanted to make sure it was safe. I, I, my gut tells me if my family members came to me, uh, and said, Hey, should I take it? If it was a family member, I'd say,

SPEAKER_41: absolutely. You should take it. Now. I'm not gonna make your decision for you. Confirmed the doctor. This isn't financial advice on the show nor is the top advice, but there's a big, there's a couple of

SPEAKER_04: big things coming here. And one of the big things I think is you're gonna be able to do this without an injection and an injection every week is a little bit or every two weeks. Some people take it.

SPEAKER_41: I think that's a hurdle for many people. So maybe, uh, I don't know if you have that in the notes.

SPEAKER_92: Um, but there is a pill form that they've been discussing and Eli Lilly, I believe is all in on a new drug. That's not true. Zep, but tied not Sema glue tied. Um, Chris, two is cheers. Zepad.

SPEAKER_121: There's Zepad is, is, is the giorno? Yes. And so I think the new one is tied is osempic. And then

SPEAKER_42: there's a new one coming. Yes. So it really has a drug in the pipeline called or for Glipron. I presume they'll come up with some better name so we don't have to say that out loud it sounds like

SPEAKER_123: one of the enemies are the clans in dune well you and i were cool growing up we went immediately for lord of the rings and dune in our references um but the critical thing here as jason pointed out

SPEAKER_07: is that this could be in pill form so right now there is a shortage of these drugs that are injectables it turns out it's a lot harder to actually create drugs that are injectables to make liquids is more difficult to scale up the plants takes time in the years so they want to make it in a pill form that's tough because they're very complex large molecules that are hard they tell me to synthesize down into a pill but eli lily wants to get there first and the article that we're looking at on screen if you are on the video with us does just discuss how eli lily is being very aggressive to ensure that as we get past this first generation they're ready because after prozac lost its patent back in the day eli was a little bit flat-footed so this is their new thing and they want to make sure they have a next act afterwards going back to the google point so i think if we

SPEAKER_127: make this a pill jason yeah triples triples the market for it i think so i would say yeah um and

SPEAKER_27: i know there are millions if not tens of millions of americans on this drug right now you know i listen

SPEAKER_00: i'm praying that this is a safe drug and that there's no side effects again i made a personal

SPEAKER_29: decision i could not control my weight i tried everything working out trainers diets uh fasting and

SPEAKER_132: i i kept doing 10 pounds 15 pounds and then i gained back five it was just there's like somebody explained

SPEAKER_04: it to me very interestingly who was on osempic and had this similar type journey they had lost 50 pounds

SPEAKER_29: this woman and she said there's the will yeah using willpower to lower your calorie intake and then there's not being hungry yeah and this is very different when you're constantly thinking of food like

SPEAKER_03: i was and then you stop thinking about food and food goes from being the primary driver in your life or one of the top drivers you're constantly thinking about food which is i fell into that group and then it becomes like i haven't thought about food all day yeah maybe i should eat something and i talk to people who are not on it who are thin and they're like yeah that's how i feel all the time

SPEAKER_04: it's like okay this chemical my thesis i'm not a doctor my my theory here my thesis is some people have more of this therefore they don't have hunger pains all the time and that other people have less

SPEAKER_29: of it and they do have cravings all the time this is also working to help any number of long tail their symptoms including addiction yes and to gambling alcohol like all kinds of addiction they're giving this drug so there is something going on here and we we talked yesterday i was

SPEAKER_142: yesterday i was thinking about the show after we talked i think one of the good things about having as a partner we're kind of getting to like interesting areas to focus on and one of the

SPEAKER_62: most thing is like what can ai solve for us remember i said my definition of super intelligence was like it'll solve a problem for us that we have not solved a unique problem in the world finding aliens

SPEAKER_145: for example it'll say hey there they are you idiots you idiots i think like it's gonna figure out

SPEAKER_62: how these drugs work or other compounds around them and like there might be a compound that we're taking that lowers your cravings for food and sugar lowers alcohol cravings stops crazy behavior gambling whatever violence you're like and it might also like lower your cancer i mean they're

SPEAKER_41: going to find all kinds of little compounds um there's a bunch of work on peptides going on now too which is adjacent to this and the people who were part of this ozempic thing like the hubermans and

SPEAKER_29: uh peter atia i think that's how you pronounce his name all that like those guys who are like

SPEAKER_152: optimizing rich people's health for them no i mean i it's a big business i heard those and i'm not

SPEAKER_29: huberman but peter atia type doctors these consult with you know billionaires hundreds of millionaires whatever and they you know they charge six figures to be your concierge doctor which for somebody who's incredibly rich would be like you know you spending a thousand on it a year me spending ten thousand on

SPEAKER_00: a year and be like okay yeah it's it's worth it not a big deal uh in other words and they're doing peptides and there's a whole series of peptides now i haven't done this but i have been researching it because now i'm moving into my weight lifting phase i want to increase the muscle mass and at 53 it's

SPEAKER_29: harder to do it's a whole thing around uh this wolverine protocol and peptides that increase the healing so you go do some crazy workout and you heal faster like wolverine from the expert so that's kind of the next card i'm going to turn over again not health advice here but technological and finance

SPEAKER_04: advice these companies are rocking and they're going to continue to rock the fact that they're number 10 and 11 in market cap is crazy yes i was blown away by that i'm like world's easiest segue

SPEAKER_18: from market cap chat to glp ones thank god that everyone bought the stock okay folks we announced

SPEAKER_161: the jam session with jcal contest just a couple of weeks ago and we've gotten some fantastic submissions but the submission window is still open you got time in the coming weeks five founders will get the chance to do a jam session with me jay cow your bestie you'll get unfiltered feedback visibility on my podcast and if your pitch resonates with me hey you never know maybe i'll fund your startup again you get to have a one-on-one session with me and we tape it and we put it on this weekend startups and so the whole audience gets to learn from our conversation about your startup and you get all that great exposure here's the two rules to get into this one-on-one session you need to have less than two million in funding we want really early stage startups and you got to have one of those awesome dot tech domain names so apply and get more details at jam with jay cowl dot tech that's jam j-a-m with jay cowl no spaces no dashes dot t-e-c-h and i'm partnering with dot tech domains because some of the most innovative startups i've seen are using that dot tech domain rabbit dot tech aurora dot tech one x dot tech and of course we do founder fridays dot tech every month founders get together at founder fridays dot tech in their local city if you're using a dot tech domain name for your startup website i want to hear about it apply with the jam session with jay cowl contest today at jam with jay cowl dot tech we're gonna start picking the winners this week so go to jam with jay cowl dot tech and join me for

SPEAKER_163: a chance to showcase your startup and potentially take it to the next level all right i want to narrow

SPEAKER_07: this down though to startups uh there are a number of companies out there in the digital health space jason that are working with glp ones uh rose sesame care um him and hers also they're public now but you know what i mean so you know what else is there for startups to do when it comes to glp1 usage my first thought was make foods that people will eat if they're on these to replace what they were eating before aka my love and joy doritos like maybe there's a health food play here there's probably some d2c plays here as people change their lifestyle and feel better but what's like the

SPEAKER_42: positive case like hey people are going to be slimmer so what do startups do with that so telehealth i

SPEAKER_47: think is the future uh you remember during covid uh we were allowed to do our health care it kind

SPEAKER_29: of just sped that up we talked about the acceleration during covid we're all locked in our houses i don't know if everybody remembers this like wiping off packages of captain crunch or you know milk bottles with glasses on like in hazmat suits i'm on my front porch my wife is looking at the groceries going oh my god we're going to die i'm out there wiping them down with clorox wipes somehow i hit the i hit the covet lottery and was able to like the first two weeks i just ordered like an industrial size not a pallet but like literally a large case of clorox wipes and got them you remember that lottery system and so

SPEAKER_41: i had like plenty of clorox wipes i was giving to my friends telehealth is the big unlock here and you

SPEAKER_29: can go on to various telehealth sites now and get a large amount of um prescriptions and services and i think that's the big win for startups this is but one of them and so i think this is something that the next administration current administration should look at is to help telehealth policy we i believe have an emergency policy during covet and then i think they've started to pull back those restrictions of what you can deliver what you can't deliver so if you wanted to get i don't know you have adhd you want to get adderall i don't think you can get that now if you wanted to get obviously opioids you can't get that that's something way hard to get i was talking to a dentist who told me like for them to give two pills post oral surgery which i just had like they have to do like four phone calls right which were doctors debt or phone calls from the golf course such a waste of time yeah and so i i do think that's the big win is delivering services over zoom and that's what we're doing right here right we're delivering our service over zoom it it all works perfectly and and i think that's the big unlock and they're all going to have

SPEAKER_41: um these glps and and whatever the future of these are you got to be careful though because there are

SPEAKER_29: rogue pharmacies and there have been rogue startups we're doing you know things that were on the margin probably not safe and so some of these compounders are making compounds in china uh and not testing them some of the compounding pharmacies are doing tests so they do each batch they do a test and so there's going to be a lot more regulation around this but i do think telehealth

SPEAKER_04: has unlimited upside for startups if you can crack the code yeah i don't i don't know if it's a

SPEAKER_41: commodity or not but you know i do think these services are incredibly popular for things that are embarrassing drugs personal health sdds etc so fantastic that that exists as an option for people

SPEAKER_121: but also i think it's cheaper we want health care to be cheaper so and faster please yeah well we have

SPEAKER_07: a we have an ob appointment today and i know my spouse i usually go to this but we're recording today so i'm gonna miss this one but i know she's gonna sit there for 45 minutes before she gets shown

SPEAKER_59: into the doctor area yeah and then she'll wait 45 more minutes for what is about a three minute appointment to check the baby's heart rate you know like it's it's a little you should have at home

SPEAKER_29: a sonogram machine that they can give you it should be connected to the internet or an app and then you as papa and mama can check that anytime you want because you got anxiety it lowers your anxiety and then you send it to your doctor and what we what this was going to require is really taking the

SPEAKER_00: hipaa requirements and i've asked my doctors and everything can i just waive hipaa like you can just email and text me my and i can just get my stuff and they're like no we're not allowed to do that i'm like yeah let me sign some sort of a waiver that i want hipaa light that everything doesn't because these

SPEAKER_04: doctors are so scared that you're they're going to send you your blood report or your whatever and it's going to get they're going to get and they're or they're going to get sued and they're

SPEAKER_00: going to get sued because somebody intercepted nobody cares nobody cares 23 and me everything's been hacked already blood tests are all going to be hacked it's all going to be hacked anyway so

SPEAKER_07: i mean well i'm not curious cyber security note i want to make the negative case though so that's what is going to be good here for startups i'm thinking a lot about what happened to chegg are you familiar with chegg the bookstore yeah they sell books they do uh textbooks for yeah textbooks for college kids they ended up working a lot more into like question and answer services and tutoring help and uh they became a big deal for cheating in college and if you write that down in an article uh they will complain vociferously to you over email i learned uh but chat gpt took chegg's share price from about 113 dollars per share at the peak of covid mid 2021 early 2021 and crushed it to less than three dollars per share down 92 percent yeah because they were replaced by chad gpt people wanted to use check to cheat they use chad gpt to cheat now that's what happened their market cap has been absolutely decimated and so i'm curious to see in the glp1 world who are the losers it's not quite the nicest thing that i that i've ever looked forward to figuring out but i'm curious to learn what this messes up weight watchers for example or certain diet programs or health gurus on instagram i don't know but it's going to have a big impact and i saw a tweet saying hey let's just put the stuff in the

SPEAKER_69: water and i was like that's a bit much but now i mean we do a fluoride fluoride helps i mean here's

SPEAKER_04: the thing if you want to know who this is going to really hurt i think it's going to be junk food it's

SPEAKER_41: going to be fast food it's going to be junk food and so i i can tell you already we go out to dinner

SPEAKER_00: i order for my daughters my wife orders something and i don't order anymore i'm just like i'll have a little bit of what you're having or a lot of times i go to a meal now and because i eat two meals a day not three and i eat smaller meals sometimes my friends are going to dinner and i already had a late lunch i'm not hungry and i'm fasting from you know 3 p.m till whatever 12 the next

SPEAKER_29: day i'm like not like a micro fast you know like an 18 and whatever six you're doing 18 6 okay

SPEAKER_41: 18 like an 18 6 right and so you saw that with fasting in a microcosm you probably if you were in

SPEAKER_29: silicon valley or a major city people were doing the fasting yep and again kevin rose tim fair shout

SPEAKER_41: out to my guys um and so they're probably doing that fasting and you would skip a meal now you have

SPEAKER_29: this similar thing happening people are on ozempic you go to dinner and the check sizes are going way down and you can't drink wine on this thing i have friends who are wine drinkers and they would drink you know their whole lives were centered around you know going to dinner and ordering food was a canvas for the wine yes like okay we now have a canvas we're at a steakhouse we have a canvas we're getting sushi we're at a seafood place now what can we paint on this with wine and now they're just like i'll have a glass but you can't have the third or fourth glass you get indigestion you get

SPEAKER_41: uh heartburn whatever it is depending on the person so i think it's going to really impact

SPEAKER_07: the consumption of food well if we get short alcoholics anonymous then that would be quite the quite the trade um sadly they're not publicly traded or are they worth anything just a manual

SPEAKER_36: just a program folks just a lot of people sitting around drinking coffee

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SPEAKER_07: let's move on to adobe you and i were both pretty well okay i've got a hot take on this i'm going to tell people the news and then let you go first the department of justice and the ftc are enforcing a quote civil enforcement against adobe and two executives uh the allegation here is i'm going to quote to get the phrasing right that adobe fails to adequately disclose to consumers that by signing up for the annual paid monthly plan they are agreeing to a year-long commitment and then there are hefty termination fees and adobe makes it very hard to cancel so essentially adobe has been accused of being nefarious in how it signs consumers up for its subscription product and then for being very very hard to cancel and hitting people with fees yes i've looked into this a little bit more i have some information about it adobe has shockingly enough denied the complaint but i'm curious jason first

SPEAKER_04: thoughts about this as a business guy yeah so um let's talk about lena khan and her approach to

SPEAKER_29: uh what she's doing in fair competition which we want to have some rules if we don't have rules

SPEAKER_00: on the field for capitalism people start doing crazy stuff like dumping chemicals into a river because it's cheaper than processing the chemicals right we don't want that kind of stuff they'll also price fix right three ceos go to a golf course they decide this is going to be the price everybody will lower their prices and do all kinds of crazy pricing for their cable modems but at the end of the day

SPEAKER_29: nobody's going less than 79.99 for their lowest package so that kind of price fixing not in the best

SPEAKER_03: interest of consumers and so i love when the ftc and lena khan governments get involved in tactical

SPEAKER_29: things that are bad for consumers and bad for competition i am not a fan of future competition and

SPEAKER_03: trying to be like the precogs in minority report and predict who's going to commit crime in the future and lower competition future because as we can see it seemed like google was in it was insurmountable that google would ever be beaten intel tm you know sc whatever you know like all these firms seemed seemed aol that they were yahoo they were absolutely never going to be uh you know taken on and disrupted

SPEAKER_62: and they have been and so it it does take 20 years but you can generally stay out of it so i like tactical i like looking at apple and saying you need to allow people to install whatever software they want on their iphones because they bought their iphone it's their iphone you don't get to pick what software they put on you could say if you put unverified software on here we're going to remove your warranty you can't go to the genius bar but just give me a switch and i've said this for a decade give

SPEAKER_41: me a switch steve jobs i told him in an open letter that lets me go into experimental mode and sideload whatever i want on my phone so i like the tactical this is tactical therefore i like it there are companies like wall street journal as an example who were doing this and the wall street journal

SPEAKER_62: um you had to call them up you could subscribe to the wall street journal in under 10 seconds in 17 different ways paypal credit card venmo apple android you could get in wall street journals

SPEAKER_41: then you want to cancel and you've got to solve the rubik's queues you got to call them on the phone all this stuff it was crazy um and so i i kind of like these type of actions um and california has a renewal law that has addressed this california came out with a law years ago um to have like very clear disclosure and like acknowledgements of like and notices of renewal so when you subscribe

SPEAKER_62: to a sub stack uh like cautious uh optimism dot news is that the url you nailed it you get 10 points yeah thank you you send a monthly a note you're paying 10 bucks a month if you want if you want to

SPEAKER_41: change it click here that's what we all want so stop hiding this stuff stop doing i think they call these dark patterns in our industry and these dark patterns by the way are from the cfo they're from the

SPEAKER_62: product managers this is a very deliberate strategy to make it so hard to unsubscribe and to say the second you subscribe on january 1st you can't cancel it and we won't prorate it that should be against the

SPEAKER_41: law if you subscribe to something and you want to get out there should be like some max number

SPEAKER_07: of days or something and so i like this what do you think well i like it too i have a very similar perspective on this i also love tactical things um last time we talked about ai regulation you and i were both being a little bit worried about the scope of essentially pre-regulation back to your point about that so this sits very well with me i went ahead and went to adobe and tried to sign up with the process as it is right now and i am a savvy online consumer i was going into the adobe website looking for this information and what i figured out was i had to hover over certain links that were small or small little buttons to learn that the subscription which is listed as a dollar per month number was actually an annual plan and that i had to find really the small print to figure out that if i cancel it i would get charged a fee didn't tell me what it was if you are an average person you are

SPEAKER_59: not going to be hunting for possible ways you're being screwed over so to me this is pretty clearly a good bit of enforcement action and i think that everyone who offers a subscription service should make it easy as easy to cancel as it is to sign up the times got in trouble for this publicly um amazon

SPEAKER_07: prime service is being dinged by the ftc for this i i to me if you're going to have a big door in you got the big door out and i it's being pro-consumer makes a sound to your point virtually signaling but

SPEAKER_59: like the consumer does matter and i think having these rules makes for a better marketplace and fair competition because if you can leave adobe you can go to an adobe competitor if you can go to a competitor there's more competition and more competition is more good now the irony jason is that adobe shares we're up 1.3 today so the market is is is that just the presumption that this is going to be a speeding

SPEAKER_04: ticket okay fine okay it's a speeding ticket yeah they'll settle this um and you know this is the uh law um this was assembly bill number 390 that counted that uh i think uh gavin newsom uh the governor

SPEAKER_29: of california kind of worked on and this bill just made it like very black and white like um this is like just such a simple thing here um let me make it a little bit bigger so you read it a business

SPEAKER_00: that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer shall provide a toll-free phone number electronic email address a postal address if the seller directly bills its consumers or it shall

SPEAKER_41: provide other cost-effective timely and easy to use mechanism for cancellation that should be

SPEAKER_29: described in the acknowledgement specified in paragraph three of such a run uh and so this was what we were all looking for and i went crazy on the wall street journal one time because i went to call them i'm like how come i can't i can sign up online let me just ask him how come i can sign up online but i can't cancel online and she said to me um well that's because we you know for your security

SPEAKER_03: i'm like well that's the opposite of logic canceling saves me money yes buying a subscription costs me money so if you were trying to protect me which one would you be protecting me from

SPEAKER_06: taking my money or stopping taking my money and she's like that's a fair point i don't know i don't make the rules i'm sorry sir i work in a telecenter i was like fair enough yeah now i turned

SPEAKER_251: into the karen like asking to talk to the manager i'm like what am i doing here i i give this poor

SPEAKER_42: lady a break so i never never shout at the person who doesn't make the decisions um i never shot at anybody also a good rule also a good rule but this is why i really do think that the old riff that ceos should do at least one day a year on their customer support channels just to be there

SPEAKER_59: because i think you can get insulated or like like almost separated away from the pain of the consumer which is your customer and then your cfo can tell you well it's where you know it's plus

SPEAKER_257: three percent growth so you okay but if you go listen to jason tell you that you're screwing him over it might change your view a little bit you know it's this is uh the kind of action i'd like

SPEAKER_41: to see lena khan take more of you know if somebody's doing something around privacy you know just fugazi billing you know that's the kind of stuff where or you know blocking competition i love the fact that like i messages we talked about this i think last week they're starting to open up a little bit and stop the green bubble problem and maybe allowing tap back to not do stupid things like

SPEAKER_62: this person did a thumbs up and i can write that out in text yep interoperability that seems like

SPEAKER_41: a noble fight uh the right to repair that seems like a good tactical thing to allow people to do i love this framework pc i don't know if you know about the framework my brother-in-law is a huge fan

SPEAKER_07: and so i've gotten to play around with them fantastic it's a modular piece uh laptop you can essentially

SPEAKER_41: swap out the components yourself willy-nilly i had the uh founder on and you know i just think like if this thing would run mac os this is what i would be using um and because you know why can't i just here's a picture of it i had the founder on it you can go to frame dot work and as you can see these are you can take out the motherboard the keyboard you want a clacky keyboard i don't know your wife likes a regular quiet one you decide to give her your laptop whatever you're switching and just change the keyboard swap it out um you you get these like little chicklets um these little

SPEAKER_04: standard boxes that um you can swap out one of them could be um a um expansion card so these expansion

SPEAKER_29: cards i don't know if you remember pcm cia was that what it's called the cards you would slide into your laptop pcm i'm pulling that up uh pc cards yes pc cards you would slide them into your laptop one would be for a modem one might be a storage anyway they basically brought back this concept so here's a one terabyte expansion card 125 bucks it's amazing like what would that cost you an apple i i think it would be five times that five yeah maybe a zero or five times that oh you you want to have a new you want a second display port you want an hdmi 19 you're you're making my wallet tremble uh the fact

SPEAKER_123: that i don't need any more computers because i had too many but i kind of won't oh they come in different

SPEAKER_204: colors yeah so you want it hey you want it hey you're into the next you want orange and blue here's your

SPEAKER_29: usbc orange nine dollars you had a usbc to your laptop nine dollars and you know you can swap these out so you're going on a business trip let's say you're going to be doing a lot of photography you need extra storage now you put in your you know card reader and your storage you're ready to go you want to have like a bunch of movies with you yeah you have these like little cards and your little gear

SPEAKER_161: bag fantastic and this is the type of stuff where i think we can put pressure on companies like they did

SPEAKER_29: to get usbc on the iphone 15 that i give europe a lot of credit for doing this this is the perfect example i believe yes set of why are we buying lightning cables like what are we doing here like this is terrible for the environment and when usbcs became uh the standard now and i upgraded my wife's phone the first thing she said what do we do with all the lightning cables i'm like put them all in a box we're going to donate them they're going to eventually wind up in a landfill yes whereas had they just been usbc from the beginning we'd be using them for all time there would be a use for them and you gotta think environment you gotta think consumer competition interoperability um

SPEAKER_41: i'm sorry i just love this is the type of action i like yeah a couple of small notes before we move on

SPEAKER_07: if you're thinking well there's a california rule i'll just incorporate in virginia and then i'll be a real jerk to all my customers you can't because of the restore online shopper confidence act or rosca from 2010 and that is the law that adobe has tripped up here at the federal level though jason i think makes the point that they could be also hit with state law if that happened and jason mentioned an idea earlier that when people get together on the golf course they price fix um he is paraphrasing a quote from adam smith's wealth of nations which i'll just share because why not let's call book talk but people of the same trade seldom meet together even for

SPEAKER_59: merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some

SPEAKER_69: contrivance to raise prices aka if you get together everyone wants to make more money and that's just the way business works and that's why we need rules um and the question is just where to put them but we

SPEAKER_07: can put all that aside because now time for my favorite part of twist which is the twist 500 and jason i i have we got a lot to do here today quick reminder to everybody on the monday show we added built which is a fintech that offers rewards for rent payments and is taking wells farco to the cleaners as part of that deal uh we added them because they're worth three billion dollars and they're highly notable so they made the list and then we also added sakana which is a japanese ai company that focuses on building japanese language models and sorry japanese language large language models and also cheaper llm training we have a number of new names but i want to start with yours jason color hit the list because

SPEAKER_41: of their new deal with open ai yeah so color is an interesting biotech company and you know this is

SPEAKER_29: something we all know is coming which is when you have a narrow data set proteins dna cancer whatever it is um and these are large data sets but so they're basically going to be uh using ai to figure out and help doctors figure out what's going on with your tests this is um going to be awesome for early stage cancer and that kind of stuff so i do think color is worth uh keeping an eye on it's not the color photo sharing app that raised 40 million 15 20 years ago no it wasn't that long there's no way wasn't it 15

SPEAKER_42: years ago please tell me it's not i thought that was like six years ago hold on uh color it's quite

SPEAKER_47: quaint right now for people who don't know the history there was this uh apple executive who left

SPEAKER_29: to do color.com in the photo sharing era after flickr had been sold and photos becoming the thing instagram was becoming a thing and it was a super hyped and they had raised 41 million dollars my friend peter fan was involved in it um and it you know it wound up shutting down um in 2012 apple acquired some of the assets i think for their photo sharing business um but it was shocking to people that a

SPEAKER_41: startup had raised pre-launch 41 million dollars and i talked to the folks i think at sequoia and other places they said listen we think it's such a big opportunity we took the series a and the series b we

SPEAKER_04: decided to give them both at once they bought this incredible domain name color.com which eventually wound up going to this company so um i do think it's worth us putting this one on there and to watch it i'm very interested in the intersection of ai and biotech and health um not as an investor myself because we're early stage investors i think it's kind of hard to play in that role yeah definitely

SPEAKER_162: yeah but i do think it's interesting and so that was one i wanted to add to the list i i'm pissed

SPEAKER_74: off that it was 11 years ago that's that's too many years past you remember covering it yes i remember

SPEAKER_07: the whole i've been around i'm starting to get to the point now when i've been around for a while and that's both amazing because every year you get older you get less stupid and i it's been such a blessing to not be 20 22 anymore but at the same time sometimes i look back at stretches of time and

SPEAKER_123: i'm like there's no way that's oh it is okay fair enough yeah so when you start like i mean imagine

SPEAKER_188: you were talking about dial-up modems in the 80s sometimes i'll go back that far and i'm like oh man

SPEAKER_92: i'm literally talking about dos and not windows yeah my dad loves to break out things like we didn't

SPEAKER_74: have laptops in my day we had luggables and i'm like what's that and he's like well it's a laptop

SPEAKER_301: the size of a briefcase and i'm like what's a briefcase and then he walks out of the room and

SPEAKER_92: yeah um yeah the original uh luggable um was a compact made one and when my dad bought his

SPEAKER_41: restaurant they had one in the in the um yeah he had bought a bar in brooklyn and they had had one in the basement it wasn't functioning but it was a very famous compact one and this is what it looked like i'm going to show you because it's really incredible where we've gotten to and it really shows the power of compounding oh boy so this is 1983 i remember this one because i had a pc jr at this time and uh the way this worked is you had this giant box which literally was like a small piece of luggage with a crt and it two floppy dish drives um and a a big clunky keyboard like you like like the clack keyboards yes sir what was interesting about this that keyboard would fold into the top of the

SPEAKER_62: luggage and then you had a handle and you would carry it and it probably weighed i don't know i'm gonna guess 15 20 pounds oh yeah 20 here it is 28 pounds yeah wow which was truly uh pretty amazing but the

SPEAKER_29: idea that you could take a computer from one location to another where there was no computer right was crazy and then laptops came out and then you could connect by vpn and you could i remember like in the late 80s early 90s we were on call um as local area network um um and pc support specialist when you were on call they gave you a compact laptop and they gave you a mobile phone that costs three dollars a minute and you would have people call you and you got paid like a 12-hour shift or something even if nobody called you just got paid a 12-hour shift to be on call for the weekend and people would call at any hour of the day that their server was down and you had to spring to action and so i love

SPEAKER_04: that it was like my favorite thing to do not because i got paid the 12 hours for doing nothing most weekends but because i got the laptop for the weekend i mean that was back when gadgets were rare

SPEAKER_123: and expensive i mean i have related stories about early computer technology that i that i hold very dear

SPEAKER_07: but i'm glad that luggables haven't lost uh all of their their memory yet now color uh for people who don't know 482 million dollars raised thus far according to crunchbase last raised 100 million at a 4.6 billion dollar post money valuation we have a chart on the screen if you're on video so this is a highly valuable company and the open ai partnership is all about a co-pilot that will bring i'm going to try my best here oncology specific information to general practice doctors so

SPEAKER_36: that way they can be better at preventative medicine jason okay so somehow they're going to

SPEAKER_29: interpret your results of different tests and then know i'm guessing here yeah you are possibly you know at risk of breast cancer colon cancer prostate cancer whatever it happens to be and i just took um a blood test last year because i asked my doctor like what's the latest just tell

SPEAKER_41: me everything and prunovo was one thing and we had talked about that on the all in pockets and i went and got a prunovo scan um and i'm going to do that every two years where they scan your entire body daniel eck from um spotify invested in a company that does a 3d body scan that's not as good as prunovo it doesn't do as deep but it does get you some information it's much cheaper and then i heard about this blood test you can take and it's just a blood test um i'll remember the i'm looking at

SPEAKER_03: right now blood test for cancer screening called um and this blood test just will tell you if you um

SPEAKER_41: gal eri g-a-l-l-e-r-i gallery is i guess the brand name and it just tests for a large number of cancers 50 different types and you do this blood test it's a simple kit i think it costs a thousand dollars and i was like you know what my mom had breast cancer my dad has prostate cancer they're both survivors and

SPEAKER_62: screw it i'll just get this gallery test yeah i'll do it uh 88 accuracy and so if it does show you that you have a cancer it's not bulletproof then you go in for further testing right yeah so i think

SPEAKER_41: this there's going to be a lot of this stuff happening and eventually um you know back to the

SPEAKER_235: conversation man why can't this be done in you know imagine there was like i don't know where do

SPEAKER_42: people where people stop for a couple of hours um dmv okay oil change um airport driving anywhere in providence dude airport's a great place i have nothing to do in the airport so now imagine that

SPEAKER_41: gal era has a a booth in the airport and they just say hey you're in the airport you're late you got to lay over two hours here's cancer screening 300 bucks come in get a blood test and by the time you

SPEAKER_322: land we'll send you a result that's what we need to do with health care put a doctor with glps you know if i'm nova nordisk i'll put a booth nova nordisk explain all these glp ones to uh individuals at the airport wherever make health care easy make it easy not hard your poor wife's gonna spend three four hours of her day for what should take three minutes this is the inefficiency that we need to change we have to change the entire approach it should be convenient like coffee is convenient let's make health care like coffee you want to get a cup of coffee go do it to your specification you order it in an app you get it for four bucks three bucks six bucks depending on what you want thing in and out nobody gets hurt i love it i watch my spouse who is a physician for

SPEAKER_193: context do paperwork well it's actually not paperwork it's just data entry and software and

SPEAKER_07: she's expensive man her time is expensive and she's doing the most grunty work that is such a waste of her and you know what those minutes are minutes that she doesn't have to spend with her kid to be

SPEAKER_36: kids like and so to me it's for other nations having more meaningful interactions oh i mean after work when she's at home when she's catching up on all the stuff that she didn't finish

SPEAKER_00: it's just we should take entire categories of this productize them and have competitions remember we

SPEAKER_189: used to have competitions to i'm starting to sound like trump remember we had these great competitions

Chamath Palihapitiya: amelia airheart who can fly circumvent the globe beautiful okay we're going to make a circumvent the globe who can make cheapest blood test under a hundred dollars blood test at an airport it's actually

SPEAKER_331: not a bad trump impression but i i've managed to not hear his voice now for well up until now i think

SPEAKER_333: i'm getting ready for another get ready for another four to 12 years i'd be somewhere in that somewhere in that zone i think he's gonna i didn't think biden was gonna win the first time pleasantly surprised not gonna lie i'll maybe jason there's another surprise waiting for me again i'm telling you i'm

SPEAKER_04: sticking with my theory i've said on all in for four weeks running hot swap is coming the hot swap is coming i know my guy sax doesn't like me to say it because my god trump's gonna run away with this

SPEAKER_121: as it looks right now a hot swap is the own democrats only chance of winning that's my belief

SPEAKER_69: uh one man's belief yeah no i i mean i i see the logic behind it um i'm trying to get it

SPEAKER_207: more okay okay yeah oh yeah no let's let's thank you for grabbing us by the caller employees back in

SPEAKER_29: i just want to i just want to mention you know i know you're so into s1s and stuff like that i did see

SPEAKER_41: neighbor very cool company in um which is kind of the google of korea i got to meet with them when i was doing mahalo back in the day because i had seen their search engine and i saw on their search engine they included images and books in the search results and i was like whoa and that's where i came up with the concept of comprehensive search which is kind of what perplexity looks like today when i did mahalo failed startup i did um but they had this product called webtoon and it's incredibly

SPEAKER_339: popular and it does have some revenue and i see that it's next up maybe in tech ipos it's the next

SPEAKER_07: tech ipo that i think we care about and you're kind of underselling it ever so slightly because its revenue grew 18 from 2000 to 22 2023 from 1.08 billion to 1.28 billion so it's it's in the you know large revenue bracket and it does uh it does recently reached profitability i took a look at the company a little bit the only thing that's not great is that its usership has stopped growing and it does have a bit of um an arpu problem across the world in which different countries are worth

SPEAKER_59: different amounts of money and so it needs to grow in most highly valued markets which i believe are south korea uh the us and europe maybe uh but it's a really cool company i really recommend everyone reads the s1 we are putting it on the twist 500 for about nine days because the ipo is supposed to

SPEAKER_341: land on the 27th perfect there's no minimum time requirement so we're throwing it on there i mean

SPEAKER_41: look at this they they've paid out 2.8 billion to creators they've got 1.3 million in revenue they basically have um you know people reading comics there and you can post your own comics there so this is kind of like youtube where there's a creative version of it and you know you can sell your comics

SPEAKER_29: and you know these comics then become big ip sometimes i don't know if they've had an example of ip spinning out into a movie series or you know a comic book series or whatever but it's um you

SPEAKER_41: know they they do own wattpad as well and so i think they acquired wattpad at some point wattpad for people don't know is where people write fan fiction and so wattpad um has um a big history of um authors

SPEAKER_04: um who get published based on starting there so the way wattpad works is it's really interesting you

SPEAKER_06: kind of write your first chapter and it grows and then you get feedback and some five people read your

SPEAKER_41: first chapter then you write your next one you get 10 people and so it takes out the arduousness of doing a full book over two years and then waiting to get feedback and it kind of makes it more fun right just like having i guess a youtube channel um most famously 50 shades of gray was originally

SPEAKER_346: twilight fanfic i i knew that it was twilight fanfic i did not know are you saying that it was on a

SPEAKER_06: webtoon back in the day it was on wattpad yeah and then okay i remember andy weir who i had on the program he lived in san jose at the time and so i went to his house and we did an interview it was a

SPEAKER_41: lot of fun andy weir who wrote the mart yeah the martian which i loved um and his follow-up was really good too um he started as a wattpad and he was working at one of the big tech companies was fuel packet or whatever and then all of a sudden he starts having his his book made tens of millions of dollars and you know i'm sure he got paid a million dollars for the rights to the movie or something and so you know this is like a really cool meritocracy i think it's one of the things we always thought would happen when we first saw the web we thought hey this takes out gatekeepers yes and then talent will rise and that's exactly what's happened yes uh the wattpad points interesting

SPEAKER_42: so i recall that neighbor bought wattpad and then webtoon bought it from neighbor i presume that was

SPEAKER_07: some fancy corporate accounting there but now it's part of the webtoon brand um and if you think about their market opportunity the company does put a lot of stock in ip adaptations as it calls them it says that it thinks its market opportunity is 130 billion in paid content 680 billion in

SPEAKER_59: advertising and then 900 billion in ip adaptations those numbers are whatever but they show the scale of their ambition which i quite like and on the wattpad point there's another service called royal road which is big in the progression fantasy subgenre and it's exactly what you say people post story

SPEAKER_74: they post a chapter a week or a day and they kind of build their audience that way i'm writing a novel right now and i am not well it's not very good but it's it's it's making progress there's no way in

SPEAKER_59: hell jason i'm going to go to a legacy publisher demand that they change my book pay me four dollars and make me wait three years i'm just going to put it on royal road or maybe wattpad so yeah i'm totally

SPEAKER_04: you should do it by chapter i would highly encourage you that and then i'll read it and we can talk about it here on the pod it'd be like a nice segment to read your book alex's trash fantasy

SPEAKER_121: book yeah oh it's a fantasy book okay i thought it was about working with a narcissistic angel investor who has his own podcast no i've already worked for aol that was my that was my attempt

SPEAKER_362: at deflection that i realized i brought it back to you by accident it's all good you're actually not

SPEAKER_29: that big of a narcissist actually um i just play one on the internet no i mean when you be here's what i learned if you become successful you know like you have to just change your approach a little bit

SPEAKER_04: because the the follower count right or the micro fame or people asking for selfies at an airport or

SPEAKER_41: whatever that can kind of make you seem like a narcissist and you just have to learn how to combat that um framing that gets imposed upon you and so the way i do that is i tell everybody if

SPEAKER_03: you see me at an airport please say hi and tell me your favorite episode and give me a high five just say high five jacal and i'll give you a high five and if you want a selfie please ask me i'm more than happy to take a selfie people come up to me i say if you want to take a selfie let's do it

SPEAKER_41: uh let's do it for the gram uh and i say just please tag me so i get more followers so i kind of jujitsu it a little bit like i yeah oh i would love for you to take a selfie because then i get more followers so you know i i candidly could take or leave taking selfies but yeah it seems to be what the young kids like to do now they don't want an autograph they don't want your email they don't want a meeting they literally just want the selfie for the gram they just want the social clock

SPEAKER_69: i've been recognized a couple times in my driveway yeah oh okay ah ah tech crunch and i'm like i'm

SPEAKER_42: like i'm like taking out the trash wearing like one sock and like half a tank top and looking like

SPEAKER_71: you know it's a bit much all right um more companies for the twist 500 i have three more

SPEAKER_59: names for us one albedo they are in the space category i put up a call for startup ideas uh in the twist newsletter and i got a couple but this is one for me i've been tracking this company since yc i've talked to the ceo tophar haddad a couple of times the reason why i like it is that they are doing cool things in what's called v l eo very low earth orbit so not leo low earth orbit we're

SPEAKER_07: really far down and that matters because you can do higher resolution for cheaper so what they want to do is like essentially very high res both images and thermal imaging for the world at a low price

SPEAKER_59: point at a very low orbit and they make that work by electronic propulsion and all of this when i met

SPEAKER_07: the company was it was like three dudes you know and like they had a white they had a whiteboard they are planning on putting up their first satellite i think in 2025 they have a shared slot on a space x

SPEAKER_378: rocket sure they've mocked up their satellite they have customers small how big is that is that like

SPEAKER_381: a suitcase size or something refrigerator refrigerator size okay yeah does it burn up on

SPEAKER_04: entry is that the concept is it goes around the earth a couple times takes its photos and then

SPEAKER_59: burns up or no the electric propulsion actually will keep it aloft in v leo and this is all predicated on the new space supply chain what's been called space 3.0 to me by a couple founders and the idea is

SPEAKER_07: that there's going to be in orbit essentially gas station satellites that have either electricity or propellant and you can push your satellite back up they'll come down to beat you you'll trade off

SPEAKER_68: fuel and then you'll go back down to low earth orbit right dude space is the coolest thing gas stations in space well probably chargers in space batter yeah superchargers in space batteries yeah yeah and

SPEAKER_41: i bet you that giant battery opens up into a solar thing and just it's going to be up there forever charging these things and this is where skynet starts to become real so when we start thinking about the eye bring it on i mean it is like they have this aws starting to manifest so this is uh albedo a lb e d o dot com right looking website and yeah yeah you know and one of the great things about taking this imagery of planet earth is obviously we have storage obviously we have transmission now

SPEAKER_29: and now we have ai to analyze it whereas previously there were banks of people at three letter agencies

SPEAKER_03: you know looking at these things maybe they had some algorithms to point to hey that might be mh 370 at the bottom of the ocean and then they would say you know they would queue up images and say hey

SPEAKER_41: look at these images do you think this could be the missing plane these things are going to find the missing plane without any analyst looking at it they're going to just find some scraps who knows how they'll figure it out but they'll find some stuff floating in the water and say you know what there's too many things floating around this area and this trajectory plane's got to be right here and

SPEAKER_235: i bet you it gets it right like two or three times in our in our lifetime so i love this kind of stuff

SPEAKER_07: it's going to be amazing um also in the space category don aerospace a reader of the twist news that are sent this one in it was new to me and so i looked into it this company has an existing business that does satellite propulsion systems that's their bread and butter they've raised 19 or 20 million dollars total to date and what they're doing is they're taking their money from their um their relatively stable space satellite propulsion business and they're putting it into these ridiculously cool jet rocket planes that are going to go all the way up to a low earth orbit in time and they're working on the second generation now moving towards the third if that works much lower cost um to the lowest levels of orbit which could make you know space freight easier and so forth i just i love the company the ambition and then jason just to cap off here oh there's the um

SPEAKER_59: the uh the current tester plane which they've done 50 missions with so far so don mk2 aurora i like

SPEAKER_04: it and this is dawn aerospace yeah i mean incredible when you what we did with amazon web services to

SPEAKER_41: startups and sdk software development kits and apis chat gpt's api etc is we've just made it so

SPEAKER_29: if you've got a problem you want to solve there are probably 19 tools that you don't have to build

SPEAKER_41: anymore they're just waiting for you there you got to store images great you just store them at aws you got to process the images great here's a open source project oh here's an api you want to tag what's in those hey put it uh to mechanical turk and have a human do it and then have ai do it and test the the deltas that's happening in space and so what you just described like they're going to be images there's going to be refueling there's obviously what spacex has done in terms of carrying people to space that cheaper and cheaper uh uh flights um and per pound costs just going to open up

SPEAKER_162: so many interesting uh opportunities really really interesting and what's really funny is

SPEAKER_07: there's actually a connection here between aws and the satellite companies because amazon has amazon web services ground station as a service essentially they will they have infra to help you talk to the satellites as i understand it and i think also google's in the same business as well so even if you just want to talk to space you can do that now via these cloud platforms which i think is is tremendous uh and then last last add to the list here um a little company called space x i hear it's

SPEAKER_405: still private and i think it should probably be on the uh the space list i think they uh are

SPEAKER_04: absolutely on there and then we'll put in the total amount raised for these companies uh the

SPEAKER_41: year of incorporation um and uh number of employees whatever we'll put some data into this

SPEAKER_04: uh database that we're building at twist500.com it's not launched yet um we're just gonna use

SPEAKER_92: code yeah i've seen the coda you know start that we're doing code is just great um they've sponsored

SPEAKER_04: the program before i don't know if they're current sponsors but shout out to my friends at code it's an awesome piece of software um i think they compete with notion code is a little more programmable

SPEAKER_29: a little more databasey so it's better for this application notion's a little more righty texty um

SPEAKER_41: and so we picked coda for this application because of databases and it's going to be kind of a fun database and in the newsletter we're going to kind of focus the editorial focus of the newsletter on these companies so they'll each have a number twist 400 twist 402 i guess we'll give them a number

Chamath Palihapitiya: at some point maybe but we'll come up with our algorithm and sort them by the number and the

SPEAKER_01: number will be most likely to go public and have the highest market cap so that's a new announcement

SPEAKER_07: it's good it's gonna be a lot of fun i'm uh currently the person who's doing the database and because we have now added i think six or seven names uh this week uh that doesn't mean that i have given myself some homework but it's going to be a very useful list and we will do our very first company exit with webtoon once it does list oh but just the last data point on that it has dropped its initial ipo price range fully diluted valuation jason at the midpoint 2.6 billion dollars so just about 2.2

SPEAKER_42: x trailing revenue which i think is because it's not growing too fast but we'll have to see but

SPEAKER_41: they'll get it out and then as a public company will be under scrutiny management will have the pool of their public equity to buy other assets yes and then it will be forced to have discipline as opposed to private companies which do have the ability to meander that stock price is going to force them to uh hit notes or be replaced as management teams so i like the idea of more one to five billion dollar companies getting out there we have seen the five to ten very frequently reddit and instacart i like this cohort i like the cohort of one to five billion dollar valuation

Chamath Palihapitiya: companies with hundreds of millions in revenue did you mention the revenue number for them yeah 1.28

SPEAKER_413: in 2023 up from 1.08 in 22. seems like it's a heck of a deal too and i wonder who who will

SPEAKER_322: would want to acquire this at some point like a disney there's like a no-brainer disney acquisition in my

SPEAKER_41: mind you include this in your disney plus subscription and they get first look i would um i could see a disney or an amazon buying this uh for that reason just to get a first look you know a warner brothers discovery uh a disney who else in that space amazon you know this could be like a really cool thing for them to own because many of those things do make it into the hollywood system and let's just say part of you putting your book on there i don't know you tell me if you were to put your book on there and they said it's part of this we want to have uh the ability to have first right of refusal on any sale over a million dollars uh something like would the average person bark at

SPEAKER_07: that probably not you know that that's like telling me there's a there's a tax on income over five billion dollars per year i'm not exactly worried about that happening um but i think i'll be fine with that i mean yeah if there was a if there was if if if the the result of having the ladder

SPEAKER_69: built in was that it's easier to climb the ladder i don't particularly mind how wide the individual rungs are so sure i'm fine with giving you the first one i would do it is now i'm thinking about it man

SPEAKER_161: i have an idea here very simple idea why don't they just say if you uh why don't they just offer to

SPEAKER_41: incorporate create llcs for the top projects and they say to you hey listen you got a top project you're in the top one percent we'd like to form an llc for your asset this fantasy series that you're doing uh game of thrones and we want to purchase 10 of it today just on the chance and we will get 10 of the revenue going forward and so whatever ip and you can do the ip through here and you know i don't know writers and publishers can go here to look at it and they'll see we have 10 ownership on it and we'll put in a hundred thousand dollars for that ten percent ownership we'll put in fifty thousand dollars they just pick a number and then that author can say you know what i could use the 50k for this project i can go to my spouse and then say hey you know i got 50k for 10 of it that puts

SPEAKER_29: the value of the whole thing at 500 i built this over the last two years that's a pretty good payday should i quit my job and go do more of this and they might say yeah you know you should and so you

SPEAKER_36: should at least try at least try yeah get it started like make a little incubator out of it really interesting business i i love trying things like i'm doing my little newsletter i'm trying to

SPEAKER_07: write some fiction and doing some podcasting with you i i think we should all get a little bit more comfortable with dabbling and failing publicly like i i think for me the longest fear

SPEAKER_26: that i've always had is that i'll do something and then i'll fail and people will will be be rude about me behind me back and then i realize that no one cares what i do you know oh this is like one

SPEAKER_41: of the great things you'll learn as an entrepreneur and doing entrepreneurial things is nobody forgets

SPEAKER_03: your failures because they're all consumed with themselves and what they're working on and what they're dealing with in their lives no one remembers your failures nobody remembers so you're sitting there i'll give you an example let's say you ever fall down a flight of stairs like lose your grip

SPEAKER_435: and you go boom boom boom but you save yourself you know that move yeah everybody's done it like we

SPEAKER_04: all do it like maybe once every couple years and you have this moment of embarrassment or oh my god did anybody see it you know it was in front of the whole conference whatever it is you know the whole class

SPEAKER_41: saw me do it and then you think about it you ruminate on it for like a week or a month or a day

SPEAKER_03: depending on your level of anxiety by the way all the people who saw it forgot you did that yes in about 17 seconds because they're consumed with their issues in their life they don't care what happened to you on the stairs five minutes ago that's the equivalent of startups like i brought up mahalo

SPEAKER_62: today nobody remembers mahalo like you might have covered it and like i look at it now and i'm like wow i got so many things right i just didn't have ai to do this and it took too long to make my search pages if i had had ai at that time as tools man i would have nailed it i had the right concept

SPEAKER_36: i was 10 years too early why why aren't you incubating mahalo now jason because when you brought up earlier i was actually kind of like should that be fantastic because in the era of google search back to the top of the show getting it as bad as it has yeah that'd be funny human curated

SPEAKER_418: search i yeah i can actually see that being a business inside stay tuned i'm working on a

SPEAKER_04: project with inside.com i got a new ceo over there which is the uh the company that came out of mahalo and it makes a couple of million dollars a year on newsletters but the newsletter business is so hard i've just wound it down because it was costing like yeah i remember this yes yeah yeah play yeah

SPEAKER_00: and so it was it was making a couple million dollars a year but i realized like it's the newsletter business is now being taken over by subject matter experts and the idea of aggregating

SPEAKER_29: news in the age of ai when people are getting it so crisply from other places like i don't think

SPEAKER_41: there's a news aggregation business um through ai but i do think you know there are things with

SPEAKER_04: humans and ai curating that i'm working on so i'm working with the new ceo over there inside.com

SPEAKER_448: we'll have like a sign up form for email um but yeah okay well i think we did enough show i think we should stop we have a lot more for for next week let's go into our sign-off jason and then we'll

SPEAKER_04: grab a question from the audience oh great sign off uh he's alex i'm jason the show is three days a

SPEAKER_92: week some weeks we'll do four we get sold out the advertisers are like please one more show and i'm like okay twist my arm oh okay we'll do one more show twist twist your arm twist my arm so to speak

SPEAKER_41: and uh alex is going to be doing some solo shows too so i'm excited about that uh when i'm on vacation mark seuster just did a great run of like five or six shows with us thank you to him and ai

SPEAKER_04: episodes with sunny we'll start we'll do two two a month we're going to do it every other week and alex i'm going to ask you to join us for a couple of those so we get to pass the ball around even a little more right get a little pick and roll and then we kick it out to you for the three twist 500 is coming you can go to ticker.thisweekinstartups.com yes sir if you don't mind go to this week in startups and hit the subscribe button and turn on the bell so you

SPEAKER_450: can know when we go live oh wait question from the audience you want to share let's grab it i love

SPEAKER_07: people do this um on linkedin anders bill says i think there's a case for amazon to try to buy tick tock would love your take here okay i can see this making some sense they already have data centers they already are pretty deep with the us government in some ways because of their uh

SPEAKER_69: rocket i'm sorry no because they're that business that they do yeah uh i just don't see amazon

SPEAKER_34: wanting to get into that much moderation listen it's 20 to 100 billion dollars in value depending

SPEAKER_04: on who you talk to uh for that asset let's put it at 75 billion um it's got a shop in it i notice

SPEAKER_29: between like the subscriptions and then your for you page as a shop feels like a layout so i think this person has a great concept here if that shop was amazon pretty great which then makes me believe

SPEAKER_04: that walmart and target are the other two great people who could own it um and why wouldn't walmart or target want to have that and then in terms of moderation man you put a sopranos clip on there

SPEAKER_29: and there's any violence in it they cut away you can't shoot somebody you can't use certain words

SPEAKER_03: on tick tock tick tock is the most curated censored platform i think other than linkedin maybe i don't

SPEAKER_41: know if you talked if you gave a put a sopranos clip somebody can do this in the audience put a

SPEAKER_62: sopranos clip where somebody gets whacked and or you know goodfellas clip on each of the platforms tell me which one turns it off i guarantee you tick tock will turn will not let you post it it will know somebody's getting shot in the video and not that you post it and if you're on tick tock sometimes

SPEAKER_03: you scroll up and say is this appropriate for tick tock or not so they are doing a level of duration

SPEAKER_06: that is bonkers um so i think it actually is the easiest purchase in the social space reddit 4chan

SPEAKER_41: you know twitter x those ones that are allow pseudonyms hardest for disney to buy that's why bob eiger who was gonna buy twitter at its peak canceled the deal at the last minute because he realized like okay we're going to be moderating some fake news discussion and it was during the trump era like we're going to get into some debate over i think it was in the trump era um might have been suddenly before but anyway he didn't he didn't want to inherit all the politics whereas if you inherit tick tock like well what's the worst you're going to get like some

SPEAKER_168: you know misinformed kids talking about gaza you know or something well i think you could end up with

SPEAKER_464: um i mean just to paint a scenario trump gives a speech he uses profanity as he does at times you

SPEAKER_07: put it on tick tock it gets censored all of a sudden big tech is censoring conservatives again amazon gets caught in that trap that's what i'm worried about i do agree though that it is highly curated um i'm not a huge tick tock user just to be clear i have friends that are very active on it and i watch tick tocks but i try to not give my brain extra junk food to chew on because god knows i'm enough from the computer enough as it is but amazon would be interesting i guess they do have a big consumer

SPEAKER_42: playing media so they could allow their clips to play they already they already plugged into all the music companies because they had deals for amazon music okay all right anders 10 points to you

SPEAKER_04: that's that's thought-provoking um threads um did like and this has become a big topic of

SPEAKER_00: discussion as we get closer to the uh election this is from february 2024 continuing our approach to political content on instagram and threads they basically opted out of doing it so suck was like

SPEAKER_41: you know what juice ain't worth the squeeze you can follow political content on instagram and on threads they will not proactively show it to you yeah so we're extending this what they say in their

SPEAKER_00: notes so we're extending our existing approach of how we treat political content we won't proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across instagram and threads if you still

SPEAKER_41: want these posts recommended to you you will have to control you will have a control to see them

SPEAKER_92: uh and so what they've done much to the chagrin of the left which has now moved to threads and tick

SPEAKER_04: threads and um instagram in a large way as well as mastered on some other places blue skies

SPEAKER_161: they've infuriated the journalists over there because they're like we could take on twitter x if

SPEAKER_189: you allow us to do our journalism here about politics but it's not worth doing because we're

SPEAKER_29: not getting picked up by the algorithm yeah and then on x formerly known as twitter you write something about politics if i write biden's you know i've done a couple posts where i'm like listen i'm i'm for neither candidate like none of the above for me like let them both retire their tool let them enjoy their grandkids when i write something like that man it gets 500 000 views i write anything about politics

SPEAKER_161: 500 000 views so the algorithm is trying to train me get more political jake out get more political get more views get more followers yeah pick a side and write it home whereas on threads they're like i posted this great article this great thread on threads where instagram and i did this great political content and it gets no engagement why because that's not what they want there and and uh it's a private

SPEAKER_07: corporate well it's a public corporation but it's privately owned it's not a state organization so it can do what it wants right uh i know you could even employ similar strategy over on tick tock but to me if i'm amazon and i make so much money off of my e-commerce ads business and my compute business and my massive like infrastructure business tick tock feels like a distraction to me but then again

SPEAKER_36: it would be a bold play i can see it uh most people don't even know about this by the way here

SPEAKER_04: it is look all right political content limit political content from people you don't follow limit political content from people you don't follow blah blah blah blah and so like they're

SPEAKER_41: turning it off by default but they have now the ability on threads and instagram to know it's political content it doesn't take a genius figure it out you look for trump you look for keywords

SPEAKER_486: whatever biden you know uh who is searching for who's going to threads and just type it in biden

SPEAKER_51: i know i i i know i'm saying the algorithm knows it's a biden post oh oh okay okay okay okay i was

SPEAKER_488: like i was like i don't man that would be it that's like going to google i mean i did that for a

SPEAKER_04: while like i there was some show i can't remember what it was but there was a finale coming up and i knew i wasn't gonna be able to see it so i just said do not show me whatever the finale was of

SPEAKER_167: game of thrones or something i just said block any game of thrones got content i uh i don't want

SPEAKER_86: to get back to the gt discussion because i'll get really mad about the last season

SPEAKER_07: um last thing uh josh coats uh on x said science corner topic this week solid state battery news from a company called tdk i will take a look at that because i love battery news my friend tim deshaunt over at tc is all about batteries and taught me a lot about uh how they work turns out

SPEAKER_235: complicated uh like the people who make blank cassette tapes and i that's the last time i used

SPEAKER_07: the tdk product uh tdk corporation is a japanese multi it is yeah yes so i don't know josh works there or not but uh i'll take a look and see other oh they tried on like the the pink sheets

SPEAKER_41: yeah you know if you remember tdk you and you got cassettes they were like the most affordable cassettes you could get um you could get like a five pack of 90 minutes and make your mixtape

SPEAKER_36: oh man i remember buying those spindles of blank cd-roms and feeling like i was a king i'm like i

SPEAKER_14: got enough cds here to make like 50 cds i can make everybody my playlist of the grateful dead and

SPEAKER_502: you're gonna love it all right everybody see you next week bye bye bye everybody