SPEAKER_00: if you launch a crypto project maybe instead of a free market if you want to be able to do it in the united states you have to state your position on the project's website you have to disclose all the owners above one percent how they're affiliated to each other just like in an ipo you see like the

SPEAKER_01: major holders and then if they want to sell their tokens or move them they have to file and say hey i'm going to be selling these just letting you know because obviously i have inside information because i'm writing the code i'm writing the code under which this token works i mean you want to talk about an advantage the advantage of somebody who's writing the code of how the project works that's like being like i control how the money is printed how the diamond mine extracts diamonds and you're the buyer of the diamonds or you're buying into the system but you don't even know how the printing machine works maybe i can print a billion dollars maybe i can print a million

SPEAKER_03: you don't know so this is all about disclosures and i think a regulatory framework would be a really

SPEAKER_05: really great step forward this week in startups is brought to you by eight sleep good sleep is the ultimate game changer the newest generation of the pod the pod for ultra has arrived head to eightsleep.com twist and use code twist to get 350 off the pod for ultra zendesk the best customer experiences are built with zendesk qualifying startups can join their startup program and get zendesk products free for six months visit zendesk.com twist today to get started and cla innovation takes balance clas cpas consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up get started now at claconnect.com tech all right everybody welcome to this week in startups we're

SPEAKER_03: live across all channels twitter linkedin and of course uh youtube go search for this week in startups on youtube you can follow my partner in crime here alex wilhelm he's alex on x.com alex i'm at jason uh we're going to be going live with news three days a week that's our goal and this is the first

SPEAKER_15: week we've done it congratulations alex it took a couple weeks but here we are we are doing our third

SPEAKER_18: news program of the week uh it feels fantastic i love podcasting because i am a yapper i think to use

SPEAKER_19: the uh the modern vernacular and so i i just love doing this and the cool thing is we're talking about this just before the show is that unlike many summers in the past when news would slow down

SPEAKER_21: everyone would go on vacation kids are home no one's really working things are so busy still in

SPEAKER_22: technology that we actually had to cut a lot of stuff from today's show docket so crazy man we're

SPEAKER_27: back and i think it's going to be uh you know they had that hot girl summer uh that megan the stallion did then they had hot boy summer i'm calling it right now it's hot tech summer okay we got big docket energy today and it's hot tech summer we're going to be with you the whole way through the docket today i know um i had sent you a couple of items there was this waymo crash yes the apple post wwc glow and performance i want to get into um and then you want to talk about inflation uh and it's cooling and then we got hey we we really are into this twist 500.com we're going to be tracking the 500 most important private companies uh so if they haven't gone public yet they're not uber doordash and google we're going to be covering them as part of this database project to track the top 500 today we're going to start with our top 10 startups most likely to ipo but let's get into the docket what happened

SPEAKER_22: with waymo so this was interesting to me because self-driving cars have gotten a lot of bad press

SPEAKER_19: lately and so it was really good to see i think waymo be incredibly proactive so go back about a month a waymo self-driving taxi ran into a telephone pole and we have a picture of it coming up now if you're watching the video and it's a crash that you definitely don't want to see from anybody but i do think that self-driving cars are just held to a very high standard jason and so we'd expect them to be flawless some mistakes like this are a big deal the news is that this week waymo has executed

SPEAKER_22: a software update for all 672 of its cars this is technically a recall because it's an update it's

SPEAKER_34: software so to me it doesn't really meet that threshold but that's quick a couple weeks new software patch the issue be proactive about it i love it yeah you're absolutely correct these are

SPEAKER_00: held to a higher standard there was nobody in the car the car was coming for a pickup it was in an alleyway and in the alleyway instead of the phone poles being on the sidewalk where they belong they were in the road there were some lines but this was an edge case so when you hear about self-driving

SPEAKER_38: or any new technology edge cases are super important you'll hear people talk about five nines that means the reliability of a system nine nine point five nines would be nine nine nine nine so when you have a data center you want it to be five nines when you have a nine one one call system or a military

SPEAKER_00: satellite these things need to have really good uptime that's what we're seeing with self-driving that's why these things aren't on the highways yet the cost of this accident on a highway would have been death dismemberment you know it could have been catastrophic but if these things are going on average probably 20 to 35 miles an hour the chances of death at those speeds is incredibly low now you

SPEAKER_38: are you going to break your leg or could it kill a dog or a child of course yeah but here eight mile

SPEAKER_03: per hour crash into a phone pole i want to see these kind of accidents these are the accidents we want

SPEAKER_27: to see now a little ticky tacky and then hopefully these systems become more reliable and to your point

SPEAKER_38: higher standard there's a much higher standard for robo taxis than a taxi driven by a human 30 40 50 000 people dying every year from drunk driving distracted driving and speeding uh and reckless driving you

SPEAKER_27: know we we know the short list here these things don't have that so it'll be a 10-year process i think for us to trust these things fully but people are trusting them in san francisco and arizona

SPEAKER_03: despite this you know ticky tacky uh eight mile per hour fender bender i guess is the best way to

SPEAKER_22: describe it so i wanted to bring it up for that reason yeah i mean the pole looked fine the car looked dinged you know it wasn't like it ran into it and split the jaguar eye pace in half it wasn't going 90 it was down an alleyway on an edge case it hit it very slowly but still to you know to weigh

SPEAKER_19: most credit got on it quickly proactively went ahead and did the recall didn't get forced to by the government which i think is a way to show good faith up as opposed to what happened with cruz

SPEAKER_48: which was bad faith right yes cruz man i mean what a disaster all right i mean just summarize for

SPEAKER_22: the audience yeah yeah so cruz got in trouble um a couple months back because one of his cars hit a pedestrian and dragged them 20 feet the extenuating circumstances are that a different car hit the pedestrian first knocked the person into the way of the cruise car which then dragged them talk about the edge case of an edge case right yes but there's a saying in politics it's not the crime it's the cover-up what is worse than the crime yeah they submitted a video that didn't include all the footage and then they got in trouble for it and now they are slowly tiptoeing their way back to market waymo on the other hand um yeah being super smart here this is their second recall of the year by the way they also had a recall back in uh february after a couple of waymos ran into the same towed pickup truck in phoenix so clearly again not good but have you ever seen a 16 year old with a suburban especially if they've been smoking weed i mean that's terrifying so i i'm just less scared of these cars than i am of children driving multi-ton vehicles at 80 miles an hour down the highway as

SPEAKER_60: if that makes great sense you've heard me talk about how great my sleep is sleep is a superpower and my superpower is eight sleep they've got the amazing pod that you add to your existing mattress it will cool you down or warm you up depending on which side of the bed you're on i like it nice and cool i sleep deeper i am a sleep king and you might be a sleep king or queen too and you can be one if you get the pod 4 ultra that's right pod 4 ultra is out and it is definitively the greatest tool for helping your sleep pod 4 ultra can cool down each side of the bed to 20 degrees fahrenheit below room temperature it's a better cool than the air conditioner so i can put the air conditioner on a reasonable temperature and then keep my pod ultra even a little bit cooler than that and they also introduced an adjustable base that fits between you and your mattress and your bed frame so you know when you want to read and your partner wants to sleep well now reading and sleeping positions are right there to help you unwind after a hectic day can even elevate just a few degrees automatically to help with your snoring if that's one of your challenges not only that it has sensors that will track your sleep time all the phases of sleep your hrv and your heart rate so it's basically a wearable that you don't need to wear i think i get like an extra hour of deep sleep every night because of it i'm coming into the game with good energy so here's what i want you to do get the sleep you deserve at eightsleep.com twist and use the code twist to get 350 bucks off of the pod 4 ultra currently shipping to the u.s canada uk europe and australia i love this product so much i designed it to invest in

SPEAKER_38: the company literally was that guy uh who i was driving recently and a kid in an old like classic bmw pulls out of their driveway without looking like and just almost takes out my car and the two people who were on a hike on the street and i got out and i just talked to the guy and i just had

SPEAKER_67: great compassion i said hey what's your name was names you know eight 17 years old i said you got this great classic car it doesn't have a review mirror and it doesn't have a backup camera or beak beams so

SPEAKER_38: if you got a cool car like this just make sure you go extra slow out of the driveway because man if if that kid had been there you'd be in jail right now or if you hit my car your parents probably take your bmw away from you and they probably wouldn't fix it so i had a nice conversation with them because i just saw myself you know when you're 18 19 20 years old your frontal lobes are not fully developed

SPEAKER_03: you're going to make stupid decisions this is why uh the technology in a tesla needs to be replicated in all cars it must be standard which is you can speed limit the car and you know where it is and and uh some people tesla doesn't have this one but i did uh bring it up with elon i'm going to remind

SPEAKER_38: myself to to bring it up with them again geofencing the car for the teenager key because you give keys now in a tesla by person not just by car so you can give a key you can speed limit it but it should also and i don't know if they have this yet but it would be a very cool feature to geofence it the car is not allowed to leave the peninsula it's not allowed to leave brooklyn you know so you can have that conversation with your kid but if it does leave brooklyn you know it's on the brooklyn bridge my

SPEAKER_03: parents didn't know we were going to manhattan with their car it would send them a text message and so i'm really in favor of trust but verify and there's a really great piece of software for you

SPEAKER_00: you'll deal with this now that you have babies um called bark b-a-r-k it monitors kids phones and devices and you know if if a song or a youtube video has something in it that's inappropriate it sends mom and dad a text message it tells you how to have the discussion with your kids about the topic and then it also does like these educational things like hey by the way this emoji is for cannabis

SPEAKER_38: this emoji is for sex this emoji is for this and so it's not like a nanny it's more like a

SPEAKER_00: guide on the side best friend like hey you know or a guidance counselor it's kind of like having a guidance counselor so i just want to give a shout out to the bark team b-a-r-k okay jason i want to i

SPEAKER_74: have so many thoughts about this so first of all the geofencing thing for cars it's one of those things

SPEAKER_53: that my first thought about it i'm like that's an amazing idea and my second thought is how would

SPEAKER_77: i have liked that growing up man that's tough we were free range you got to remember we were free

SPEAKER_00: range and we probably took a little too much risk which made us strong as gen xers we've had this conversation and we have claimed you in the gen x draft i talked to the millennials and we we won

SPEAKER_80: that trade so we gave up uh you know some some annoying gen xers to get you i don't know if it was

SPEAKER_83: a lot of the smashy pumpkins fans yeah gave away some special pumpkin friends no i don't want to get

SPEAKER_00: you but um i do think like there's a good balance here and the one i like is trust but verify so i think it should like hey you're leaving brooklyn and it's fires off a notification to you mom and

SPEAKER_38: dad on the same thread oh hey the car's leaving brooklyn yeah um just wanted to make sure everybody's in sync with this like i just think those kind of things are cool um and i i set speed limit regulators on all of my cars um just so nobody gets speeding tickets and everybody gets reminded to be safe so you know everybody can make their own thoughts on this and for our family i don't mind a little bit of spicy language in music or i don't mind a movie having a little cartoony violence in it like fallout the tv show yep but you know i do want to know about drug mentions or sex or maybe you know some other things uh suicide suicide self-harm all of that stuff depression and so i do think like there are tools um and we just need to get to a 16 year age limit we talked

SPEAKER_03: about this on the show monday i think yeah monday when we talked about um what was the startup called fizz and i didn't get any reaction from them yet but i just want to uh i thought about it afterwards

SPEAKER_23: because i was a little harsh was i harsh you you were um emphatic i don't think you were unnecessarily harsh i think you actually said what you thought and i can see how the people might think that you're trying to okay you weren't you weren't grandstanding because it was heartfelt if you had been insincere

SPEAKER_14: it would have been too much got it so yeah i just want i i collecting on my thoughts two days later i just want to say to the fizz founders you're welcome to come on the program and i'll talk to you

SPEAKER_27: about it alex and i will do a quick conversation with you come on anytime maybe you have some

SPEAKER_03: learnings from this and to the my friends who are investors in the company and the i was a little bit strong um i take back none of that zero yeah you you know what you're doing you're the adults in the

SPEAKER_14: room so as the adults in the room i stick my position earlier today i was on x and i was going

SPEAKER_22: through my mentions and i ended up running across or my notifications or whatever the hell they call it now and i did run across an nea investor who was i think on the fizz board so he follows me so definitely people are aware so anyways you got the you got the follow okay come on the show let's talk about it we'll talk about it yeah yeah uh really quickly though so waymo is now in four cities jason if you don't know it's austin sf phoenix and la everybody fantastic to me this just goes to show that they're ready for more i'm i just want providence to be on the list so my question to you is how

SPEAKER_103: do i get my little ponock town on waymo's radar so i don't have to drive um it's not going to happen

SPEAKER_00: in new england i apologize you've built the grid system uh in a very strange way so manhattan good grid system parts of brooklyn good grid system but you know you go to austin you go to um phoenix you know some of these places have perfect grid system and they need a grid the better the grid the less education the better you got a lot of back alleys it's also not coming to spain it's not

SPEAKER_38: going to be in barcelona it's definitely not going to be in florence italy yeah yeah i mean in italy like you're driving with two cars on a sidewalk half the time in a tiny little car and knocking mirrors off so you know those are the places that'll be last the places that'll be first perfect

SPEAKER_00: grid system phoenix is perfect because there's no pedestrians places with pedestrians no bueno places without pedestrians great and you know one of the things we need to do as well um is making cities better for pedestrians i don't know if you've been to have you been to hong kong before i have not been to hong kong i've been to shanghai but not hong kong yeah so in hong kong you know it's a very dense city obviously absolutely they have walkways for humans and then they'll have streets with no walkways for humans just cars or a barrier between the humans and the cars so and they they

SPEAKER_114: experimented with this in manhattan in rockefeller center area by putting up metal things because

SPEAKER_38: pedestrians and tourists would just wander into the street and get clipped so they just kind of corral humans and i think that's really how we have to design cities more of like the highline kind of experience where you can have your kids running around off leash no problem they're not going to get clipped by a bike or a car and that really is what we start have to start thinking about is taking back

SPEAKER_03: areas for pedestrians and then separating them from the cars especially the self-driving ones because then you just remove the number one concern we have which is like child getting hit by a car hey

SPEAKER_121: there's been a lot of afterglow for the apple um let's let's let's hit that real quick yeah all right

SPEAKER_23: so when we talked about apple jason was super positive about the overall results he said this might

SPEAKER_19: be a seminal moment in the future of technology and the market says not to gas you up jason but i do

SPEAKER_21: think that uh mostly they agreed with you so we have a chart here of apple share price if you look

SPEAKER_22: at the lowest point that is i do believe before wwdc talked about ai and then the last two days are the

SPEAKER_19: post ai glow as you said you know this is a lot of money because when we're talking about apple we're talking about trillions of dollars so if my math holds up it's about 300 340 billion dollars in additional market cap whoa for apple since it dropped all of its ai news i'm sure price was about 192.50 and when i wrote the notes for the show it was 215.85 now it's actually up higher it's

SPEAKER_22: 219.64 good trend so did you did you buy more i didn't put more i didn't buy more i have a nice

SPEAKER_38: apple holdings over at jtrading.com but i'm gonna start trading here now that i got you here as my partner in crime i'm gonna start putting some trades on i'm gonna rebalance the portfolio this summer i kind of placed a lot of bets in the bottom of the market um and to kind of learn and then somebody told me i could start my own etf so thinking of taking my j trading and uh making an etf out of it and then people could buy my etf the j trading etf uh and then you could if you wanted to trust my lunacy bet alongside me so anyway somebody stopped me on a flight recently and was like oh my god you need

SPEAKER_67: to start an etf for j trading i was in the austin airport getting my uh brisket at uh shout out salt um broken tooth worthy and uh so yeah i'm thinking about putting that in there i you know i got

SPEAKER_03: demolished by warner brothers demolished by disney my twilio went sideways everything else boom and so there's a lot of lessons there you know warner brothers disney i i'm sorry warner brothers and

SPEAKER_27: disney i i thought those companies had really great potential but i think like it's they're struggling

SPEAKER_19: they're both struggling yeah media is tough right now streaming economics are particularly difficult i mean if you want to think about it in a kind of crude sense software or anything delivered

SPEAKER_22: digitally is having kind of a hard time right now but in apple's case given that people expect this

SPEAKER_19: new ai set of services to sell more hardware this is effectively a hardware boom because as it turns out and this was a surprise to me you have to have an iphone 15 pro or the future generations to actually run apple intelligence on your device which means that my iphone 11 is now it has to go

SPEAKER_132: like i just i can't gen behind wow that's shocking behold behold my phone just don't particularly care

SPEAKER_19: we have a chart coming up if you're watching the stream we have a list of all the different devices that can run uh the new stuff the good news is only iphones are are restricted jason so if you have

SPEAKER_22: like an old m1 imac or you know you're fine yeah yeah okay cool so it's just your phone's not gonna

SPEAKER_38: i've been sweating that new uh m4 ipad i have no reason to upgrade my ipad and but it's just looks like it's sexy and thinner and they may have me i don't even know why i have an ipad i'm being honest

SPEAKER_145: i just kind of like to travel with both sometimes i like an app um but i may may upgrade just for the

SPEAKER_148: heck of it because i love these things yeah i have an ipad pro that i bought i bought the keyboard for it yeah and i haven't upgraded it in years because i just don't use it just to be honest

SPEAKER_150: no you like to write on your desktop i i mean i collect mechanical keyboards which i think it kind

SPEAKER_22: of details my entire stance on this sort of thing um although i do run a mac an apple magic keyboard on my my work computer because i love those just for lots of typing but i just don't have a use case

SPEAKER_148: for it and so when apple drops the new m4 ipad pro it looks incredible it's such an achievement

SPEAKER_96: but it's like uh it's like a ferrari engine in like a right like you just like what are you gonna do

SPEAKER_38: now that you couldn't do with the m3 chip if they continue to put an uh an ankled operating system on it i don't understand what the point of making it the most powerful computer in their lineup is if i could run mac os on it i and put a mouse with it i'd be pretty great if i could have windows on it

SPEAKER_27: i can tab between windows a little bit easier like i hate this concept of like split window it's like

SPEAKER_01: it's almost like they're purposely making the ipad um like i said ankled or restricted in some ways yeah i don't know what the word is here they're handicapping it maybe i can't say that because

SPEAKER_161: uh the uh ableist i think i can say handicapping it they're handicapping it and like hey why can't i

SPEAKER_01: run it with mac os or give me like the mac os feature so i can have a mouse with it i travel with

SPEAKER_27: and etc i'm loving my dell i got the dell like latest latitude man it is awesome uh and then i have a dell desktop over here so i you know i'm like you i go mac for when i'm recording podcasts i go dell for

SPEAKER_19: everything else so i think the reason why apple has not harmonized its operating systems between screen sizes is actually due to injuries and horowitz and i can explain this so andreason

SPEAKER_22: horowitz has steven sanofsky as a board member a board partner steven sanofsky was in charge of the

SPEAKER_19: windows 8 project if memory serves windows 8 was how microsoft had to harmonize tablet and desktop it failed and everyone made fun of them for it so essentially i think right now no one has a way to

SPEAKER_22: bridge the touchpad mouse interface that we all know and love on our desktop computers or our laptops and the kind of touch-centric tablet world and until someone figures that out i mean yeah apple's just going to be making the best possible hardware with very little to run on it but investors don't care

SPEAKER_19: apple's now once again the most um valuable company in the world it was 3.3 trillion when i checked before the show apply 3.4 now so ahead of microsoft ahead of nvidia um i don't think it actually

SPEAKER_22: beats aramco but that's cheating so shout out to apple for ones that can kind of been on top and uh i want to know how this is all going to work in china but i know we need to move on but i'm curious how apple's ai stuff actually will function um in more closed digital markets jason yeah i mean

SPEAKER_65: you you have to obey the local laws at all times or you cannot participate so that's always been a

SPEAKER_38: challenge for american companies to make those hard decisions and you know google has chosen not to operate in china they don't want to have their data services be used to collect dissidents and send them to re-education camps to put it mildly apple um it is in is there and they will claim they don't have to round up dissidents and the reason is because icloud runs through a third-party company there so there's a data company that runs icloud that means if you're an apple user there apple can say like oh no we don't cooperate in collecting dissidents and sending them to re-education where they lose 40 pounds

SPEAKER_174: in six weeks it's like a spa plus re-education uh in china yeah you kind of like get weight loss

SPEAKER_38: plus torture plus every education yes they can just point to the cloud provider and say yeah there's we don't do it but the cloud provider does so it's it's pretty gnarly when you think about it now you can make your own moral ethical determination should we engage and have less wars because we're intertwined and maybe move slowly ever so slowly towards human rights on a global basis or should you just not

SPEAKER_180: participate and drive a wedge between the two countries you know it's well we tried no easy

SPEAKER_183: answer there for a long time i mean i think there was a great expectation that the internet and you know

SPEAKER_23: a more capitalist system was going to lead china away from a more authoritarian government and up until the current premiere i think that was kind of on track but it just goes to show the power of

SPEAKER_19: frankly ideology over how things run um but just to make a point about the apple partner not the only company that does that microsoft of course worked with if memory serves 21 vionet when they brought azure to china so working with a local digital cloud provider is a is a i think a smart way for us

SPEAKER_22: companies to have a have a hold over there but not really get too deep into it um so that's just kind

SPEAKER_184: of how that plays out all right startups when you're a business you know it's crucial to treat your customers right unreasonable hospitality should be your goal right great book and you know who's great at helping you get delivering unreasonable hospitality zendesk we use it we love it the zendesk suite arms your business with all the tools you need to deliver exceptional customer experiences and it's made just for startups and they care about startups it's built so you can build strong relationships with your customers through amazing support experiences and without growing your headcount so do what shopify squarespace uber instacart and jcal does rely on zendesk they're your partner software company unity they saved 1.3 million dollars with zendesk automations and self-service and they saw an 83 increase in their first response time these companies love zendesk because it's so easy to set up it's made to scale as you grow and they give you all the metrics to make reporting easy keeping you and your business agile and investor ready and because you are a startup they created the zendesk for startups program when you join the zendesk for startups program you're going to get unlimited access to all zendesk products expert insights all the best practices you need and entry into their amazing community of founders all at no cost with the first six months free so there's no risk to you and there's all upside you're going to learn so much from them because zendesk does this better than anyone so apply to the zendesk for startups program and use zendesk for free for six months

SPEAKER_11: and get ready to scale with the best customer support go to zendesk.com twist at zendesk.com twist

SPEAKER_21: good news jason finally inflation it's finally it's doing things that we want kind of so the data came out today yeah so inflation bad less inflation good i think start there um so the cpi the consumer

SPEAKER_22: price index data came out today from the government that it was unchanged in may and was up 3.3 percent in the last 12 months it was down from 3.4 percent in april and april also saw 0.3 percent growth so definitely a better month reading and a better year over year reading i was pleasantly surprised by this i've been disappointed by inflation data a lot lately and so to me to have better than expected results i mean breath of fresh air open door a nice breeze i i'll take it i was surprised

SPEAKER_38: you know it's important for folks to realize when we talk about inflation slowing

SPEAKER_00: that doesn't mean it's going down okay it means the rate of increase is you know is what we're talking

SPEAKER_38: about here so it's still going up 3.3 percent which means if whatever you paid for a loaf of bread or your starbucks whatever it is if you paid 10 bucks for something last year it's going to be

SPEAKER_00: uh 10.33 this year okay doesn't seem like a big deal we can absorb that amount of inflation why can you absorb that amount of inflation well real wages real wages have been up employment's been very low so

SPEAKER_38: there's a dual mandate by the fed they have an unemployed they have an employment target uh and then they have uh this two percent mandate for inflation they want to see it at two percent and they want to see something called full inflation that's the fed is supposed to be independent why does all this matter uh well interestingly um you know how we loan money should be correlated with these two interests for some reason that's what we came to in terms of loaning out money and what rate it should be at uh it obviously got out of control because you had two administrations in a row that

SPEAKER_01: spent money like drunken sailors trump went crazy and then binding went crazy yes printing went so this is literally a non-partisan issue money printing machine went and it's it's existential now for our

SPEAKER_38: country at some where at some point it becomes existential because the interest payments are so high um yes but why i i was wondering why two percent not three percent or one percent four percent it turns out i did the research on this a couple months ago because we're having a back in the like macro days of all in when we're trying to figure all this out um in the 90s in new zealand an economist picked two percent as a target everybody adopted it yep there's no rhyme or reason behind two percent the person felt

SPEAKER_27: that was the right number they guessed they estimated it was a guesstimate so is the right is 3.3 crushing no it's trending down now why does this matter for startups then becomes the big issue and i think that's

SPEAKER_38: like a whole i mean i think you understand why as well um but maybe you could explain to the audience why this is worth even paying attention to if you're a startup or a vc yep i just want to throw in one

SPEAKER_22: little note on the two percent target because i've thought a lot about this too and the way that i've explained it to myself is the reason why we want some inflation now it doesn't have to be two

SPEAKER_19: percent over none is you really don't want to be dancing on the edge of deflation because then prices fall companies shrink it becomes harder to service your debts for example inflation generally makes it easier to service your debts better for the economy but you know i'm not going to sit here and say that one to 1.5 is not superior to two don't have a view there but definitely you want to be above zero to avoid frankly what china's dealing with right now which is deflate all right yeah so

SPEAKER_22: oh here we have a chart right now up on the screen of inflation historically this again shows the rate of change so the rate of change has decelerated but we're still going up oh my gosh inflation was so

SPEAKER_183: low for so long wow i forgot how good it was look at that yeah i mean it was it was a pretty

SPEAKER_00: spectacular rise there post pandemic so yeah you know when you look at 2020 you know obviously we

SPEAKER_38: were all locked in our homes then money got dropped on our heads stimulus and we obviously did too much now in hindsight if this gets back down to 2.3 2.1 whatever which it is trending towards uh what we'll be looking at is saying you know what we saved the economy of the united states and the global economy

SPEAKER_00: so as crazy as this felt to be on a roller coaster maybe mission accomplished and so i know people don't like to give credit to anybody for anything done by the government and everybody hates everybody and but we might look back on this and say you know what yeah we may have spent overspend sure surely we did um maybe we reacted too slow pretty confident we reacted too slow with the rate hikes but maybe

SPEAKER_23: just maybe all's well that ends well we'll have to see but now why does it matter that we were late with the rate hikes why do you rate hikes matter why does inflation matter for startups as inflation

SPEAKER_22: rises the government will try to cool the economy by raising the price of money which is effectively

SPEAKER_19: just raising how much it costs to loan and borrow and so people then have to be a little bit more conservative because money is just more expensive as interest rates go up as the fed looks to combat inflation what we see is assets that are correlated with growth and risk see their value decline because

SPEAKER_22: other assets like treasury bills or high grade corporate debt are more attractive because they start to yield more and so what we see is things like tech stocks go down now that matters to startup

SPEAKER_19: founders because jason public comps matter for how you price around um sometimes it matters more than

SPEAKER_22: other times but when we do see rates go up we do see tech stocks come down and therefore we do see limited exits in the ipo market like right now for example so it's all correlated i know if you're probably a seed stage founder you don't care because you're like 10 years out from an exit but you probably care if your vcs lps have any money and when the stock market goes down well they have less so

SPEAKER_221: it's it's all the same kind of bowl of spaghetti i think it's really important to understand it

SPEAKER_00: so that you can ignore it once you understand it it demystifies it in a high interest rate environment like you're saying you know an lp a limited partner who has money when i was in the middle east i was meeting with one sovereign wealth fund and we're just talking shop but it didn't raise money from them or anything and they said we are getting 12 15 on corporate debt so corporations paying their debt are paying us 12 to 15 percent venture historically pays that number but it's illiquid and it's not guaranteed and it takes 10 years so if we can be in instruments that have more liquidity uh thus the name of the conference and that are guaranteed and that payoff quicker okay uh i think maybe we'll go with that so that's why you see only one in six first-time

SPEAKER_38: venture funds have been able to raise their second venture fund of late the risk capital has been taken off the table everybody's getting conservative and people are just going to put their money in savings accounts even for somebody like me with a you know modest family office compared to these other ones i have to look at things and say do i build more businesses or do i retire sit on this money and collect five six seven percent and this is one of the john galt you know atlas shrugged kind of moments

SPEAKER_00: for an economy if you make it too easy to just sit on your money and collect a coupon or you make it too

SPEAKER_38: arduous to build a business because of red tape then what happens to business owners or you know capitalists in a system is they might just say not worth it i'll just sit on the sidelines which by the way when i went to europe and i talked to very rich families they don't invest in venture they don't start new

SPEAKER_27: businesses they take their existing businesses and they nurture them and they just you know stabilize

SPEAKER_38: them and care for them very deeply whether it's their you know farm or winery or hotel chain or pharmaceutical company whatever it is they are caretakers of these existing businesses and they don't take risk which is why in those economies have massive unemployment and you have this like you know kind of trending towards socialism kind of or socialism light kind of economies in our economy super vibrant people want to take risk people get greedy in a good way they get optimistic and they want to take risk so we just have to be very careful here that we don't clench up and make it so

SPEAKER_03: rich people rich endowments rich institutions don't want to take risk and they don't want to put money into venture capital right now because they're like you know what yeah venture capital i'll just put in a coupon i'll just buy the s p and be done with it right and that's a dangerous place for our economy um my money market was the next uber or coinbase yeah my money market funds

SPEAKER_22: are yielding like what five percent right now just like so my family's emergency fund just sitting there in fidelity is just every month just paying me lots of money and i'm just looking at that i'm

SPEAKER_19: like gosh this feels like cheating but why would i take more risk with that money when it yields so much and so again back to the point about why this matters for startup founders if we see interest

SPEAKER_22: rates come down which we're now expecting to see we'll get to that in just a second it could imply that people need to try a little harder and therefore more money for vcs more money for your company et cetera now jason um rate stock market is on a tear today right stock market is on a tear

SPEAKER_19: today when i looked uh the dow jones was up a little bit but the s p was up a point and the nasdaq was up 1.7 which for a single day moving in the stock market 1.7 is a lot so very positive reaction

SPEAKER_22: there and the reason why is that people are now expecting for rate cuts to come so we have a chart from the wall street journal we're going to put on the screen right now showing the change in expectations from uh the 11th to the 12th and basically what we're seeing here is that about 20 percent uh greater chance of a rate cut in or before september and to this year according to traders so it seems like jason the chance of us getting a rate cut this year is darn good and i think that's going to be the starting gun for a return of the ipo market eventually i think we just

SPEAKER_19: need to see the pressure begin to fall a little bit throw another one x on every sas multiple out there that's public just create a little buffer zone for these companies to try to get out makes sense i'm not sold on two cuts this year though curious what you think yeah i mean it does feel like

SPEAKER_38: they've got it under control and then one wonders if they have it under control then they are they

SPEAKER_67: going to keep it higher for longer uh you know as the as the saying goes now everybody's heard that over and over and over again so keep it a little higher for a little longer just to make sure but then

David Friedberg: you could risk uh maybe speeding into the turn a little bit too much and flip the car again yeah

SPEAKER_00: where you know you start to cause damage and so that's what we have to just be careful here because

SPEAKER_38: um these systems seem to be very delicate and so if we don't cut and then people start losing jobs and people have run out their savings we have a an economy that's to their consumer and so what you saw

SPEAKER_01: today was a lot of consumer stocks went up because people are like oh rate cuts happen people can buy homes again people can buy cars again people can plan a vacation again what was starting to happen

SPEAKER_38: after the two yolo summers post pandemic 2021 2022 and 2023 it was like three yolos in a row remember

SPEAKER_01: when people started to get the vaccine in 2021 they're like let's go you know we could all be dead soon then 2022 they're like yeah let's keep going this last year was great we're making up for lost time we lost a year or two and then 2023 happened and now 2024 and i think like last year people were like maybe not europe maybe disney you know maybe i'll go to san diego not uh cabo san lucas

SPEAKER_38: whatever you know they just sure they they maybe looked at the budget and said you know instead of a 15k family vacation we'll go for the eight uh you know depending on what station you're in in life and how much you spend on your vacation sure and so cars have been kind of frozen

SPEAKER_27: homes have been frozen all because of interest payments when you have these high interest rates

SPEAKER_38: and you're paying an extra 100 200 300 on a mortgage or and or a car payment and or some other variable

SPEAKER_03: credit card debt you might have that all adds up to clenching and lack of spending and so i think the reason you're seeing the consumer stocks go up today is people think okay yeah maybe the interest rates are coming down the variable interests maybe people have a little extra spending money and unemployment stayed low that's the other thing quite low the last

SPEAKER_22: employment um numbers were quite good but to show just how how excited people are to jason's point about what this could mean for the economy shares of zillow were up 12 percent today

SPEAKER_19: that makes sense because everyone's going oh thank gosh because once we get the first rate cut we are in a rate cutting cycle and uh like we've been in a rate tightening cycle for a long time now thank gosh to turn the page on that and start something else and that could unlock quite a lot of stuff i'm

SPEAKER_39: very excited about this all right everybody welcome back to the program steven estes is with us again

SPEAKER_11: he's a principal at cla they're a professional services provider they specialize in cpa tax consulting and wealth advisory his areas of expertise lie in vc-backed startups vc funds high growth startups

SPEAKER_180: with complex tax issues in multi-state and international filings welcome back to the program

SPEAKER_11: steven hey thanks jason appreciate it the last couple years it's been a little bit rocky in startup land after the bubble burst posts or tell me what are founders sweating right now what's keeping them up at

SPEAKER_266: night i'll take the low-hanging fruit here and say funding before the the pandemic vcs were just printing money and the last four years after the pandemic have been a bit of a roller coaster in terms of you know capital availability and i think things tightened up right after and then in 2022 23 capital seemed to open back up now we've got inflation and interest rates are higher so we're kind of back in a position where money's tightened up because investors can get a good return someplace else gone are the days when an ivy league degree and an idea on the back of a bar napkin would get 10 vcs lined up to invest in a seed round absolutely they're being asked to do more with less and anything they can do to defer the need to raise again for as long as possible because the valuations

SPEAKER_11: out there just aren't what they used to be all right you need a trusted advisor taxes accounting you don't want to play games with this stuff get it right get a great partner like cla go to cla connect dot com slash tech and let them know your boy jake al sent you once again cla connect dot com slash tech

SPEAKER_23: do you think that one or two rate cuts will be enough to fully resurrect the ipo market because i think

SPEAKER_145: we're going to need like breed yeah i think great companies can ipo and companies that are forced to

SPEAKER_00: walk the plank and ipo you know like and so i think you know when we look at maple bear aka instacart

SPEAKER_38: they were forced to walk the plank it was just getting untenable they had private market valuations 30 40 billion and then they settled into this eight billion dollar market cap i don't know where it's exactly at today um but you'll pull it up i think they 9.1 9.1 right and i think they were trending towards a billion dollars in advertising revenue so i just think it's an ad business i give it eight nine times i think reddit has a similar amount of ad revenue uh last time we did it and they're also eight nine billion dollars so yep i think all the profit in instacart comes from advertising but they they got out they're going to grow 30 of their 40 a year maybe their advertising revenue it's just going to be like a media company is the way to look at it kind of like a media company that

SPEAKER_22: delivers your groceries but but really better than a media company though because they don't have expensive cost to generate that advertising inventory actually you could actually note that probably it's gross margin positive to generate that advertising inventory that then has very high

SPEAKER_19: margin revenue on top of it i like instacart used to use it used to cover the company it was really

SPEAKER_281: small i'm glad they're doing um i don't i we you know i i live where you enjoy going you enjoy

SPEAKER_148: shopping they put a trader joe's literally like a three minute walk from my house well that's nice

SPEAKER_27: that's a nice thing to be able to walk to trader joe's is delightful with the kids i put the kid in

SPEAKER_19: the stroller i put the groceries underneath it's great the kid gets to like see the aisles and and

SPEAKER_282: grow things fantastic she gets to drop her bear then i have to go find it and see where she dropped

SPEAKER_43: it yeah exactly so long story short you know reddit got out the door instacart got out the door these

SPEAKER_38: were not perfect companies by any stretch of the imagination but hey almost decacorns bouncing close to a decacorn so the market's ready i think the market's ready right now i think you know when we talk about that risk capital you know for the right company i think you can do a float right now is it going

SPEAKER_27: to be like gangbusters is it going to you know go to either of those companies went to 20 billion so they'll be muted ipo so i think muted ipos will happen maybe that's a good thing maybe that's a good thing they get out there they get liquid and then it's up to that management team to impress under the microscope so stripes going to go out ad gen is going to go out what else do we have there's a we we this is a good time to go into the twist we have 10 companies you think are most likely to ipo

SPEAKER_23: yeah so i i have a list of 10 and i thought what we could do is i'm just gonna i'm gonna make a

SPEAKER_22: pitch i'm gonna say a company name uh data point or two how much they've raised and then you tell me if i'm insane or or on the money okay i like it okay all right here we go databricks

SPEAKER_19: last round was 500 million dollars 43 billion dollar valuation and at the end of the last fiscal year january 31 of this year 1.6 billion in revenue up about 50 percent year over year big ai story super smart ceo everyone likes them huge market they raise like 4 billion dollars eventually

SPEAKER_262: that pressure has to make them go public so i think that they are like the like canonical example

SPEAKER_290: of a late stage startup that needs to get out they need to get out for sure uh it's an 11 12 year

SPEAKER_38: old company i think um right around there yeah yeah and uh databricks is like the dot com of the apache spark open source project um it's a bay area company yeah uh they've raised a ton but their last funding round with a 30 40 billion like this was like a peak zurb valuation no no no that their last

SPEAKER_262: round was 2023 so they raised at a 43 billion dollar valuation last year up from 38 in their prior round

SPEAKER_38: got it which is essentially sideways maybe a 10 percent lift so they they kind of were overvalued probably in 2021 maybe now the valuation's getting close there's all kinds of protections on that last round so we talk about protective provisions that means whoever invested in that round is probably guaranteed a certain amount of return whether it's a 10 return or a 1.5 return they're going to get some minimum return so you don't have to cry about those people who worry about them if

SPEAKER_80: the thing goes public for 20 billion i don't know how much revenue they have do do we have an idea of what

SPEAKER_297: kind of revenue 1.6 last fiscal year yeah so i mean 10 times revenue 20 times revenue top line 15 times

SPEAKER_153: well okay but ai which is everyone's freaking out about they built their own llm pixie dust i can see

SPEAKER_19: them getting out of 30 35 everyone's pretty happy and oh my gosh go public you're over a deck if your company's old enough to go to middle school yeah i think you should debut yeah over i mean the what

SPEAKER_36: i've heard is a billion dollars if you got a billion dollars in revenue you go public i think they can

SPEAKER_03: be done at 250 500 but you know people are saying a billion now because maple bear bear i think was 800 instacart uh was 800 million when it went public i think so it is what it is uh i i think

SPEAKER_19: they're big enough they should go and i just really would like to stop talking to the ceo every time he wants to dangle one number in front of me just put them all out there let's go enough of that let's go let's get this one next now uh on monday we talked about some first companies for the twist 500 uh there was a bunch in the hr tech payment space that we quite liked i picked one for our list of most likely to ipo i picked gusto because i've spoken to the ceo i know they had 500 million in trailing revenue as of last april so they're definitely big enough they just seem like a very serious mature company that has its stuff together so i presume they have their accounting in order etc they raised 750 jason oh my gosh another one of these get out like go yeah um these competitors

SPEAKER_38: to adp uh rippling i think is the big one and rippling's trying to kill like all of the companies in this because they also have i.t provisioning in theirs hr management you know they kind of added expense accounts like expensify so what they try to do when they sell you like rippling uh or augusta augusta gusto is they try to say hey listen you got five sas vendors doing hr payroll taxes this that the other thing consolidate your sas into one buy it's a really good pitch um especially to a cfo or to coo hey we can use one system you know very much like netsuite is one system that you know when you grow up you can kind of get six seven different business functions with one piece of sas software so i think that's the great sas consolidation play gusto and then rippling behind them uh those

SPEAKER_21: companies definitely should go public yeah i didn't pick rippling because nascent it just feels more

SPEAKER_19: nascent and i i this is definitely a gut decision by me when i was putting this list together could have picked rippling could have picked deal could have picked remote there's a number of companies in the space that are doing well but if i had to like bet on the horse that would go out first which is

SPEAKER_27: kind of the game here i'd say i'd say gusto yeah why not and uh if they have 500 million in revenue that's on the lower end of going public but it's a good number yeah it depends 500 million trailing

SPEAKER_319: last april so you throw on 20 more growth it's 600 runner rate 650 you know yeah they're getting there

SPEAKER_153: yeah they're getting there all right um next one's a bit of a curveball jason are you a coinbase user by chance i am not you are not all right well i have no i should take that back our family is we

SPEAKER_19: have our we have we have some stuff in coinbase yes yes i i think i have like 37 dollars in coinbase from from testing various things um i bought an nft back in the nft moment just to get gary answer there and get him but not the only game in town kraken is said to be raising a 100 million dollar pre-ipo round looking to close that this year and the news is via bloomberg they're going to go out in early 2025 and i don't think we're going to see so many ipos between now and then that that won't put them in the next 10. so i like it um one to two billion in revenue this year it's a little bit hard to value because of how variable trading revenues can be but coinbase's current price sales multiple is uh 16.6 x so they did a billion in revenue 16 billion they did two it could get 32

SPEAKER_23: uh so quite an impressive company that hasn't raised much money as i could tell so i i think kraken

SPEAKER_324: looks amazing yeah it makes total sense uh and there's two corollaries on the market robin hood

SPEAKER_69: and coinbase so yeah why not jump into the mix there absolutely kraken seems like a no-brainer

SPEAKER_38: to go public yeah and i think they've cleaned up there a lot of the legal issues are starting to get cleaned up and i think trump in his absolute um brilliant ability to meet with somebody and then flip his position um has realized i don't know if you heard my call that he was going to change his

SPEAKER_69: position on evs and literally 12 hours later he did not that i have inside information but

SPEAKER_330: sometimes i think you might know someone who does evs i know a lot of people who are you know ev

SPEAKER_00: uh adjacent anyway it was pretty clear to me based on what i saw publicly trump would flip his position

SPEAKER_145: on that um because of you know everybody he was courting he's also flipped his position on crypto

SPEAKER_65: yep as per sax and chamat's uh big fundraiser last week so you know i think we're gonna see a crypto

SPEAKER_03: friendly regime in washington in all likelihood 60 chance 70 chance of that in november and if that

SPEAKER_335: happens then you just might get an executive order down to gary gensler hey we got to figure this out

SPEAKER_38: now um come up with a framework tell people what it is execute on it and let's stop with like

SPEAKER_27: telling people what they did wrong 12 years ago tell them what they did wrong eight years ago it's

SPEAKER_38: really hard and and i get his position which is hey we're here to protect consumers there's a rule

SPEAKER_27: book but crypto doesn't fit into the rule book perfectly there is an argument there that it's you know in some cases it does in some cases it doesn't like bitcoin's not controlled by anybody therefore

SPEAKER_01: who do you go to to regulate it right or you know some of these utility tokens do have value there's

SPEAKER_27: got to be some safe harbor or framework for it and also for the people who want to buy it and i've talked about this a zillion times here just give people a sophisticated investor test and then put this

SPEAKER_43: crypto stuff in a box where you have to have insurance a board of directors um and some controls at each stage of the way so when your crypto project breaks 10 million

SPEAKER_38: you know under 10 million you have very few regulations it's a sandbox over 10 million it hits another threshold of regulation when you hit 100 million another threshold 500 million a billion and as these projects get bigger the insurance requirement the board requirements the auditing

SPEAKER_337: requirements go up so you don't have a tether situation where somebody's got 75 billion dollars 110 110 billion dollars and nobody knows if it's in chinese paper or where it is and there's an attestation but not an audit like attestation sure up to 10 million over 100 million i think you can afford

SPEAKER_22: an audit i i think you can afford an audit way less than 100 million aum but i'm with you on that the thing is everything you just said to me is is very reasonable i would actually probably be i'd probably vote for that as it was without change i think i'm slightly more these are securities in in some cases

SPEAKER_19: than not but whatever if you took your opinion wrote it down and then showed it to uh brian from coinbase i'm pretty sure it would not be well received and that to me is the issue i think they're they

SPEAKER_342: think you're too conservative ah they want to be total free market small c conservative not like yeah not conservative democrat but like yeah i'm being too risk averse and they want to take more

SPEAKER_19: risk they want to take more risk but my my retort to that is you may take as much technology risk as you want but when you are working with consumer accounts you have to play by the rules and i i just i

SPEAKER_22: don't think that's a bad position to take but it's interesting how your relatively crypto friendly i think position is still insufficiently radical for where a lot of folks are in that industry and i wonder if they're going to end up letting the uh the perfect be the enemy of the good you know and want everything

SPEAKER_19: and then get nothing and so i think there's a great compromise to be had here because bitcoin is clearly a commodity and some tokens are clearly securities so yes and they're being i think also

SPEAKER_00: when you liquidate them you know this idea that like a venture capital firm can back a crypto project

SPEAKER_38: buy these tokens dump them on retail you know i'm not talking about any specific venture firms but you know there could be venture firms out there that eventually when these audits occur might have cleared positions and and that's part of the problem nobody knows nobody knows and so you know if you're a venture firm if you're the founders there should also be rules in place if you launch a crypto project

SPEAKER_00: maybe instead of a free market if you want to be able to do it in the united states you have to state your position on the project's website you have to disclose all the owners above one percent how they're affiliated to each other just like in an ipo you see like the major holders and then if they want to

SPEAKER_01: sell their tokens or move them they have to file and say hey i'm going to be selling these just letting you know because obviously i have inside information because i'm writing the code i'm writing the code under which this token works i mean you want to talk about an advantage the advantage of somebody who's writing the code of how the project works that's like being like i control how the money is printed how the diamond mine extracts diamonds and you're the buyer of the diamonds or you're buying into the system but you don't even know how the printing machine works maybe i can print a billion dollars maybe

SPEAKER_03: i can print a million you don't know so this is all about disclosures and um i think a regulatory framework would be a really really great step forward and you can do it on both sides more ownership

SPEAKER_38: from the crypto side and then more responsibility from the individual side certainly more than six

SPEAKER_03: percent of this country should be allowed to participate in alternative assets oh agreed but

SPEAKER_22: to give people an example about why this stuff matters um there's a new story today i'm just going to read a headline filings michael dell plans to sell 10 million dell shares worth 1.3 billion after selling

SPEAKER_19: 1.6 billion in shares earlier this year dell sold 1.7 billion in 1999 before the bubble burst as a potential dell investor wouldn't you like to know what dell himself is doing that's and jason the stock market works is highly liquid it's worth a bajillion dollars you can build lots of wealth in a system that has some regulatory oversight um throwing one more name in the crypto conversation circle filed privately to go public this year um we haven't seen the actual public filing yet that'll come they do the circles um stable coin doing quite well the second biggest one out there clearly a candidate lots of revenue there and then the other one that's in the super easy bucket is turo the car rental service they actually filed to go public back in 2021 and have been doing quarterly s1 a's ever since making them the most public private company in the world because they keep dropping new gap financials for us thank you turo we love it um pull the trigger it's time so those are kind of like gimmies and then uh xian the

SPEAKER_53: company from china is going to list in europe um i'm curious what you think about that company

SPEAKER_145: you know as a consumer uh you know this is the fast fashion company you buy something you wear it to

SPEAKER_38: coachella you wash it twice and then it's a rag and you can use it in your kitchen to mop up coffee stains i think it's terrible for the environment i think it's kind of gross um just as a concept disposable stuff as a it's kind of like anti-everything i think about now as a parent to children and somebody who cares about about planet earth not to i'm not virtue signaling here but when i buy stuff you know i buy my danner boots d-a-n-n-e-r you buy a pair of danner mountain light boots you're going to have them for your life i buy crockett and jones my shoes they're from england they ain't cheap those are 1100

SPEAKER_225: shoes they'll last you 20 years you only sold them twice in those 20 years they'll look as good in year 20 as they do in year 10 as they do in year one your danner boots they're going to get more

SPEAKER_01: character with age you can give them to your kids right and if you rip them open the side they'll stitch them together i buy briggs and riley as my luggage why it's really well constructed it is not disposable and if you break something on it you send it to them they repair it for you no questions asked

SPEAKER_00: or if you take a picture of and send it to them they'll say to you okay it's broken we'll repair it

SPEAKER_38: or here's 150 discount on a new version which has the four wheels not the two if you want to go that

SPEAKER_01: route but it's up to you i love stuff uh la crusade i use those uh la crusade i'm gonna give that to my daughters they can fight over it and they'll have memories of mom and dad cooking in that from their childhood and then they'll give it to their kids and you can get it real accurate so i just like thinking about things that are built with craftsmanship because that speaks to me and it's good for the planet i hate disposable fast fashion i think it's like really bad for the earth and i hate this chinese

SPEAKER_27: you know obsession with lowest price disposable stuff not the chinese people but the chinese

SPEAKER_359: market right yeah they're here and uh she and of course competes with temu and and some other

SPEAKER_23: companies in the space uh while jason and i share a perspective on this company uh the american consumer

SPEAKER_19: does not agree with us and uh the company had uh according to the information 32.2 billion dollars in sales last year up 40 percent which was actually faster than the 37 growth that had the year before and had about a five percent profit margin 1.6 billion uh it's gonna list in london the only fly in this ointment is that marco rubio a senator from florida um really doesn't want them to be able to list

SPEAKER_22: because he thinks that they are doing bad things as a company um there's allegations of use of forced

SPEAKER_364: labor derived cotton that sort of thing uh but i mean how could that not be true i mean look at this you see my screen i do eleven dollars eleven dollars for a dress nine dollars for a dress i mean what are we talking about here this makes no sense what are they made out of i mean tissue paper

SPEAKER_53: i mean that's you tell me this is not a 2.2 000 sold recently that's insane wow i mean this is

SPEAKER_38: awesome yeah i mean yeah but the only problem with this is you know you buy this 10 shirt here it is going to be destroyed after two washing so you know like i think what people are literally doing is they're buying 200 worth of clothes going on their cruise going to coachella and then this

SPEAKER_19: stuff is gone so i think this is the most random collection of things i've ever seen is there any rhyme or reason to these fashion styles prints or is it just a big hodgepodge fast fashion so this

SPEAKER_105: other thing is the ip here is they just constantly are stealing it so anybody does anything interesting

SPEAKER_38: the same factory that made you know the laura piana men's shoes you know like these casual loafers you know you could pay 800 for laura pianos you could pay 300 for you know something in the middle

SPEAKER_80: you know maybe johnston murphy's got it for a buck 25 and then here you can buy it for 12.

SPEAKER_38: for as a joke i bought a pair of these ones that compete against uh the laura pianos that they were nice enough to send me a pair of that costs like 1200 those crazy loafers and um they were so terrible

SPEAKER_01: they smelled like chemicals uh i bought it off of tick tock just to see how the store worked they came like three weeks later in a really weird bag directly from china the smell and then when i took them off

SPEAKER_380: i had like the color of the blue paint on my foot yeah so that's gonna be these things are filled with

SPEAKER_382: poison it's my bet if you don't have kids you haven't had to learn about materials and how you can

SPEAKER_19: ingest um things that impact your endocrine system and there's a reason why kids play with wooden toys for example uh so don't maybe don't shop on sheen or temu for your children's toys because it's

SPEAKER_303: probably not going to have the right lead levels but it's gonna list and uh that brings us to just

SPEAKER_19: a couple more names for this list um we talked about chime on the show on monday i think it's an ipo candidate bringing that back stripe of course and then i was just reading some stuff jason and people are talking about the chance that intercom might go out sometime soon and that's news to me

SPEAKER_293: but i know you have the uh ceo on the show recently last week yeah and he was also got barbecued for

SPEAKER_386: going to the trump fundraiser he got barbecued on x i saw as well uh you know sass is is the you know

SPEAKER_38: the the multiples have never been worse in sass the headwinds have never been worse and people are

SPEAKER_43: really down on sass which i think means it's probably an opportunity i mean when we want to talk about blood in the streets yep um you know and making a bet here i think the sass companies are being counted out because oh we're just going to talk to you know a chat gpt and it's going to solve these problems i do think they'll also benefit from being able to make better software at cheaper

SPEAKER_38: prices with less people therefore their margins will go up so my feeling on this has always been

SPEAKER_43: the efficiency of these companies will maintain the earnings and the quality of the earnings while there might be headwinds in other parts of the business so yes you know google could run their ad network with a thousand employees total you know literally get rid of 90 of the people there and if it was on set it and forget it mode right they weren't adding new features etc just talking about the maintenance of it so yeah yeah i agree with that you know you start looking at you know the sales forces of the world or quilios of the world zendesk of the world which just went private you know those companies got really fat they had really expensive sales teams and um you know people

SPEAKER_38: were frisky in a low interest rate environment to buy any software you just basically you know if your company was growing 30 40 a year and people were like we're going to increase our sass spend 10

SPEAKER_00: a year okay great we're growing faster than our sass spend we're growing faster than our headcount spend okay maybe we should spend more maybe we should what if we were more efficient and so everybody had that optimistic thing so if you came to your boss at when you were working at tech crunch

SPEAKER_38: and it was like you know a private equity firm owned and you said hey you know we're going to get this new sas software it's going to make everybody on the team 10 more effective they would look at and go okay it's going to cost us you know 10 000 a year and 25 people are going to be 10 okay ten thousand dollars we get quarter million dollars in value from the efficiency go for it

SPEAKER_67: but you know maybe that didn't always play out maybe people spent too much so i think i i just

SPEAKER_19: everything you're saying is dead on until you got to the private equity listening to employees

SPEAKER_22: suggesting that there's something that we could buy and use money for that would help because in my experience um that's that's not the case when you're owned by private no to everything

SPEAKER_309: well i mean no and you know to be clear i do think that the good the private equity from apollo that

SPEAKER_22: owns yahoo that owns tech ranch actually as far as private equity goes was a reasonable steward but um yeah it's not it's not i got a i got a really nice new laptop when i joined the show thank you jason and i don't think i would have gotten the same uh level of processor if i had gotten one

SPEAKER_19: from the apollo yeah that makes sense one last thing and then we're gonna wrap i think we should throw an ai model company into this ipo conversation sure why not they're getting big so my question

SPEAKER_53: is who do we like because there's anthropic there's mistral over in france of course there's open ai but

SPEAKER_135: um who do you i mean cohere sure is in the mix there's a lot of names xai just raised a bunch of money so who do you think is the first to get out i'm torn first to go public you know i think these

SPEAKER_324: companies have a long road before they go public i think it's going to be like a five-year spend and

SPEAKER_38: deployment cycle to get their infrastructure up and build it so i don't see them going public um

SPEAKER_67: anytime soon i think they're going to take a long time and i'm really wondering you know where the revenue is going to come from i do think a lot of these are going to start to look like aws more than they look like siri more than they look like a 20 copilot from chat gpt they're going to kind of look

SPEAKER_38: more like aws where enterprises are sending big jobs you know developers are you know hooking into them so

SPEAKER_67: i wouldn't be surprised if x.ai claude which is anthropic right um and um you know a bunch of these started to look more like aws gcp google cloud that is an azure competitors rather than what we saw because i think siri microsoft copilot you know that's a large percentage of users i think chrome will have this built in so i think chrome is a secret weapon from google imagine chrome having a bunch of ai tools built into it that's coming as well so i really think the consumer is going to get this

SPEAKER_19: for free yeah okay well that's free to close to free that does take this out of the ipo conversation but of course we are going to have a bunch of those names in the twist 500 which i like

SPEAKER_27: if i'm going to be honest hugging face i think is a very interesting company they are kind of like the

SPEAKER_01: github of this i could see them getting taken out or bought i think they're like the ultimate m and a candidate right now yeah because all the developers are hanging out at hugging face so i'll pick

SPEAKER_43: hugging face and x.ai as my choices who are you your two choices to add to the twist 500 oh my gosh

SPEAKER_23: well uh databricks honestly just even though that's a little bit of a cop out but but i bet you uh i bet you lunch that databricks buys hugging face if anyone does okay database because they're building their own llms they're a multi-model company they're really leaning into ai because they already store

SPEAKER_22: everyone's data what do you want to do if you want to get people to be building on your platform you buy

SPEAKER_19: the tool that builders use and if you're right about a hugging face being the github of this or

SPEAKER_94: the git lab of this that makes a lot of sense to me okay um we'll cost a lunch bet uh i don't know where that is but uh a hundred dollar max hundred dollar max hundred bucks lunch yeah you can double

SPEAKER_382: that i just don't want to accidentally go and oh like a 4k bill because you're drinking no no we're

SPEAKER_67: not doing anything i stopped it out at lunch at 100. um yeah so i'll go with that i'll go with hugging face uh and uh xai you can go with uh databricks and i think we we're starting to round out the twist 500 it'll be up and running at twist 500.com shortly uh and then you can join the newsletter

SPEAKER_38: ticker dot this weekend startups.com we'll put it in the show notes but you know this is the first week we're starting to discuss these things in the newsletter and then over time we will figure out the value of the newsletter and how we incorporate the twist 500 into the show it might be having them on the show it might be ranking them eventually by category right now we're just building the topics and who are the obvious people in each of the categories right so we just today the most likely the ipo is obvious and then they obviously belong in their own verticals whether it's crypto

SPEAKER_23: marketplace consumer ai we have a bunch of categories on there on the coda database that we're putting out which is public so you can watch us as we build this um i'm going to add the new names from the show today into that so by the time you get this in your podcast feed that

SPEAKER_19: should already be up there and of course as always jason on x alex on x we do this all the time on youtube any podcast platform you like we will always be coming back and if you have a beef alex

SPEAKER_03: w at launch.com hit me up and go ahead and um write a review of what you think of uh the new show with alex give us your thoughts write a review on itunes or podcast player of your choice see you all next time bye bye bye