SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, welcome back. It's Monday. We have big murder

SPEAKER_02: Monday energy today.

SPEAKER_01: Wow, big news coming out of Y Combinator. I'm going to break

SPEAKER_06: down why Gary Tan is going to do great and initialize is going to do great as he becomes the fourth, I believe, CEO and president of Y Combinator and why maybe some VCs hate on Y

SPEAKER_07: Combinator a bit and you know, spoiler alerts because they're jelly.

SPEAKER_00: As always, such a great it's going to be a great breakdown,

Jason Calacanis: though, like, this is the insight you want about this news and what it actually means for the venture industry and startups at large. Super great conversation. Then we're going to talk about

SPEAKER_11: some dishy Apple trademark filings when things might get a little real in the virtual reality.

SPEAKER_12: I might even make a J trade. Who knows? Anything's possible.

SPEAKER_13: The glasses are coming on. Grandpa glasses at the helm.

SPEAKER_14: The specs are out. Specs are out.

SPEAKER_13: You got me.

SPEAKER_15: And then we're going to wrap with some thoughts on Eminem and Snoop

SPEAKER_16: grifting the Bored Ape Yacht Club on the MTV VMAs. Absolutely gross. We'll break it down for you.

SPEAKER_20: Oh, my Lord. We meant to have a five minute dunk session. And I'm just saying we got a little fired up about this one. It is going to be a great show.

SPEAKER_21: Stick with us. It's punk rock.

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SPEAKER_24: Hey, Molly. Happy Monday. How are you? How was your weekend?

SPEAKER_25: Uh, so good. So good. So busy. Two brunches. Not one. A double brunch?

Jason Calacanis: But two brunches. One all-day brunch. I had an all-day brunch situation. Wow. It was lovely. Was it at a restaurant or at a home?

SPEAKER_27: I had one brunch at a restaurant, and then I hosted a brunch that went all day.

SPEAKER_29: Oh, you hosted a brunch. All right. So let me, you know, it's very important to me. Brunch is my favorite. One of my favorite meals. You know, for a long time, it was my favorite. What are you, what's your favorite brunch item? Let's go in the brunch draft here. What do you, what do you like?

SPEAKER_35: Are you an eggs florentine type? I'm a frittata. Frittata all the way. Frittata, you go frittata.

SPEAKER_00: Yep. I love to make, because a frittata like looks so fancy and you bake it in the cast iron and it comes out and you put the little garnish on like some chives or some parsley, a little fresh proshoot on top.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. I don't mess around. You got to boil some potatoes, right? Do that right with unskined potatoes and then throw those in or no?

SPEAKER_00: I'll do like a thin slice. They'll usually, and then what I'll do is saute them in the cast iron. It's a one pan situation. So you like soften and saute your potato slices in the cast iron.

Jason Calacanis: And then you throw in the onions and then you eventually pour in the egg on top of it all. I like a, I like a potato, asparagus, prosciutto with some goat cheese and chives. I'm a big fan of that one. Wow.

SPEAKER_41: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00: I like the, what's that, manchiego?

SPEAKER_41: I don't like to go to brunch. It's like a whole like, manchego. Excellent.

SPEAKER_46: Manchego. Oh man, when you were in Spain, you had that manchego in there.

SPEAKER_00: I like the shave of cheese on top and a manchego is perfect for that.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Now, do you serve in the, in the cast iron? Do you flip it over and serve it upside down? Like it's supposed to be. I serve in the cast iron. Yeah, cast iron is like a more romantic kind of serving thing, you know.

SPEAKER_27: It's like so pretty.

SPEAKER_52: Yeah, I would smash that.

SPEAKER_27: And then the key to my fruit salad is mint, fresh mint. Oh, always great. Always great. Yeah, gotta have that.

SPEAKER_55: Yeah.

SPEAKER_56: Do you put a little juice on it, your, your fruit salad? You pour something on lemon or something on? Yeah, orange juice.

SPEAKER_60: Pour some, a mango juice is a really good, a good punch up for the fruit salad.

SPEAKER_62: You're not using the filler fruit, are you? You're not like putting a bunch of cantaloupe and melon in there. You're using the high quality blackberries, you know, some blueberries. Melon is unacceptable. Yeah.

SPEAKER_66: I had a friend who was cheap and he would always use the filler fruit and I'm like, this thing's 90% filler. That's disgusting. Cantaloupe and what's, you know, it's like all these melons.

SPEAKER_34: I like a good melon in the summer, but I like to eat it in a slice. My fruit salad, like, let's keep the melon silver fruit too, you know.

SPEAKER_70: Like, I can have a banana anytime.

Jason Calacanis: I don't, I cannot point to a time in my life, I think, when I've ever actually purchased melon. Like, I don't, that's not a thing you buy in certain people.

SPEAKER_74: A cantaloupe, if it's very fresh and it's summer, you're out by the pool, you slice it, you eat it like a piece of watermelon, it can be delicious.

SPEAKER_75: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying, when you're doing a fruit salad, you put it in a nice cup, it's got to be some high quality, expensive stuff in there.

SPEAKER_34: I want a blackberry. Strawberry, blackberry, banana.

SPEAKER_77: Okay, a little banana's okay, but don't fill me up on a banana.

SPEAKER_79: No, just like a little, it's true. Just a little.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. Anyway. Anyway, a brunch the hell out of the weekend.

SPEAKER_01: I love, love a good brunch. I have just been, you know, I love that eggs Benedict, you know, I love that sauce and everything. But I, I always freestyle it. I'm like, do you have salmon?

SPEAKER_29: Do you have spinach? Okay. So I say, give me the span, and then give me the salmon and the spinach. Because I think of the Florentine. There's eggs Benedict with the ham. So good. Then there's a salmon Benedict, and then there's Florentine with the spinach. I say, give me the Florentine, and then put a little salmon on it too. And I just toast that English muffin up.

SPEAKER_83: I'll just kill that every time.

SPEAKER_56: Hey, do you want to enable me with a purchase idea? That I'm on the fence about? What are you on the fence about?

SPEAKER_84: I found, I know we're a little off the rails, but we gotta, we gotta, you know. Banter Mondays.

SPEAKER_00: A little Monday banter. In my house, I'm now almost two years in. In my house, I found the remains of what used to be the pool ladder. And the steps of the ladder are beautiful. Like they're from the 60s. They have these starfish on the ends, really pretty carving. They're super cool.

Jason Calacanis: And I really want to make them into something like a table. So I went shopping with a friend this weekend to this place that sells like live edge wood pieces. And basically it was like, okay, I can buy this piece of maple with like the cool cracks

SPEAKER_00: in it, have it cut in half, make two benches with like two steps on each bench as supports. Nice. How great. And then, and then they could be these like beautiful plant benches, which is awesome and would cost like $1,000.

SPEAKER_56: And I was like, am I really going to spend $1,000 on benches for plants? Well, wait, what would cost the thousand bucks?

SPEAKER_34: The piece of wood is high end? To just have them custom made. Oh, the person who would do it for you?

SPEAKER_92: Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: You would have a person who you're not going to do it yourself. So you'd be hiring a craftsperson.

SPEAKER_01: Yes. To do this.

SPEAKER_93: Yes.

SPEAKER_77: So it's not that much all in $1,000, but it's also like, this is. Yeah, I would put it up against what you to order something so unique as a piece of art.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And then I would look at the Delta. So if you were ordering something high quality, like two benches, it's got to be two or 300 bucks, right? For a decent one. For sure. Each. So now you're at 600. So the Delta between that and what you're getting is 400. So you have to ask yourself, this is why I would do this.

SPEAKER_74: If this is going to be a signature piece in whatever area it is, is it worth the plus 400? I think you earned it, Molly.

SPEAKER_01: I'm going to, my judgment, official judgment for excessive spending.

SPEAKER_97: For excessive spending. Exactly. I was like, you're going to enable me, aren't you? I'm going to allow it.

SPEAKER_00: I know, chat. The whole chat is like DIY. And I was like, yeah, I could probably buy this. But the piece of wood is $250. So if I screw it up, trying to DIY it, chat, which I would, it's not going to, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: I like the idea. I like the idea. You're supporting your local craftspeople. I'm going to go ahead and set up. Okay. It's okay. A little trickle down is okay. I'm going to do it. You earned it. I mean, it's not like you're going out to brunch. Put it this way. You do two brunches at home. You're saving $200 each time. So if this makes you entertain a little bit more at home, you get two extra brunches in a lifetime to pay for itself. Going out to brunch is a hell of expensive to go out.

SPEAKER_11: I will say it's also not worth it. Like brunch is not a meal I like to go out for. You wait in line. You spend too much money when you cook a better meal at home.

SPEAKER_29: That problem is if there's a great brunch place, there's a place called Bubby's in New York, very famous in Tribeca.

SPEAKER_01: And luckily I had, I had an end, but my Lord, there would be a line around the block. I happen to know somebody, but it was just like, am I really on a Sunday getting in line for half an hour, an hour to, to, to eat French toast or whatever the hell we're getting.

Jason Calacanis: And the answer was $15 for it.

SPEAKER_01: I don't know.

Jason Calacanis: It was like wheat and syrup. Like, uh, it just irritates me because I can cook a better brunch than I can get at a restaurant after waiting for an hour. And then having all these like hipsters screaming all around me.

SPEAKER_01: I lived in Chelsea and there was the empire diner where they would make me a huge egg omelet chat. I would do always do a chew cheese omelet. I would get like a cheddar and Swiss. Oh my Lord. If you put cheddar and Swiss in a giant omelet, it is delish. And I always read my New York times. I bring my dog with me, my dog Toro rest in peace, my favorite famous bulldog. I would give him half the omelet. And then other times I go to pasties, I order steak and eggs for, at the time, probably 20 bucks, 18 bucks, like a little breakfast steak and eggs. And then I'd order two, one in a to go container, one regular, and I would chop up the raw one and I'd give it to him. He would need a steak and eggs for breakfast. So that was my two go-to moves until one guy, terrible.

SPEAKER_07: I was like doing this with my egg, my thing.

SPEAKER_01: And the guy next to me, his, his, uh, wife, girlfriend, whatever, is like, Hey, you should get that for our dog. Cause you know, people would have their dogs along the fences. The guy complained to the waiter that I had done this. And the waiter came and said, listen, you can't feed your dog. I was like, well, he's done. He's like, yeah, just in the future. You can't feed your dog. Just so the other guy could hear it. Cause he said like my dog eating, it was making his dog go crazy. And I was like, dude, we both have our dogs at pasties. Like, are you like, come on now, Nick and I are going to be team brunch. Yeah. We're team brunch.

SPEAKER_107: You guys really are defending brunch to the death. I mean, listen, Sunday was basically like brunch.

SPEAKER_00: Like it was all day mimosa situation, but at my house.

SPEAKER_02: It's nice. It's nice to host your friends. All right. Brunch is not the worst. It's not the best, not the best. I love a great brunch.

SPEAKER_01: I like a two or three hour brunch. I get the New York times. I get some friends. You know, it's great.

SPEAKER_107: Life is good. I like sitting outside. I think the TLDR here is that we're saying life is good.

SPEAKER_119: Life is good. Enjoy your life. Okay. Listen, we're eight minutes in. We haven't even discussed the first story.

SPEAKER_121: Hey, Tom Eschbacher is here with us again. He's a senior sales manager at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, and we're talking about their amazing report today in startup marketing, as well as how to use LinkedIn to grow your startup. What are some tactical things, not big picture strategy? I'm talking tactics that founders can do today to figure out product market fit.

David Friedberg: One of the big tactics we see here is amplifying organic posting with paid advertising. You consider a startup that raises a seed round. They post the news on their LinkedIn page and see a bunch of likes, clicks, and follows come in. They follow that then with some updates about product, and they see continued traction with, for instance, HR benefit managers at tech companies that have fewer than 500 employees. That's a signal, and it becomes important to then get a larger sample. And to increase confidence, we've made it super easy to identify which audiences are engaging with your organic content, your LinkedIn company page, your website, and then extend reach into those segments with our best-in-class B2B ad targeting. So for early-stage startups who amplify organic with paid, we see a 13x lift in unique reach. And those are meaningful insights to help inform product and go-to-market strategies.

SPEAKER_121: Such a great strategy. Head to linkedin.com slash This Week in Startups and get the report. Now, so you have an edge on your competitors. And as a little pot sweetener, $100 off your first marketing campaign, thanks to Tom and the team at LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_29: Go get that report and get the hundy. Big news today.

SPEAKER_01: I saw in my feed when I woke up, a new CEO of YC, friend of this pod, Gary Tan. We'll certainly have him on.

SPEAKER_29: But Y Combinator has named, I guess, their fourth president, Gary Tan. Fill us in on what's going on here.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, this is a big deal. It's a big deal partly because, yes, YC, of course, incredibly influential. And, you know, I've seen some tweets to the effect that, like, any drift that people had maybe been sensing with YC, there have been some complaints. There always are complaints over the years that it's like the batches are too big or this or that or whatever. But people seem very excited that Gary Tan is going to reinvigorate it in as much as it even needs it. But also, it's a big deal because he is stepping away from the VC fund that he co-founded, Initialized Capital, which seems like a pretty big deal that I have questions for you about. Sure. I think, interestingly, the Forbes article about this move did not mention anything about YC's former CEO, Michael Siebel, or about Tan becoming CEO. It only sort of mentioned that he would be taking over as president, but then he tweeted like, oh, no, yes, I will be CEO. He also, I guess, got his start there. So it's sort of a return to a place that he is comfortable with and super excited about. Also worth noting that just in December of 2021, Initialized announced they'd raised $700 million for two new funds. And then this morning, so lots happening here. And then that firm announced that Jen Wolf and Brett Gibson will become the new managing

SPEAKER_135: partners and lead the firm.

SPEAKER_01: Okay, a lot to digest here. Yeah. I've come to the conclusion, you know, people complaining about YCombinator generally is people being jealous of the fact that YCombinator gets to invest at a $2 million valuation, and they get first bite of the apple with a lot of great startups.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So if you're a VC, somebody controlling the flow of startups, you know, you might get a little jealous of

SPEAKER_64: it. People say this stuff about us. Exactly.

SPEAKER_142: Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: So, you know, and that's part of what's informed. It is when you look at how hard we've done 26 classes of our accelerator and looking at it, you know, now having done it, and I wouldn't we're nowhere near a YCombinator competitor, our class is a very like bespoke thing that just for my enjoyment and the enjoyment of our team. So we only have seven people per class, like very bespoke. And we do it because we love founders and supporting them. And we did take a lot of we stole a lot of notes from Techstars and YCombinator. And Techstars and YCombinator started at the same time, they both get equal credit for this revolution. And really, if you look at Bill Gross, who did Idealab, he was sort of the grandfather of all this, but he originated the ideas. I think the big innovation for Techstars and for Paul Graham's YCombinator and David Cohen's Techstars was they didn't come up with the ideas, and they took a very small percentage of it. When Bill Gross ran Idealab, they actually tried to recruit me to run a company, and they were like, we'll give you 5% of the company, we own 80%. And then the investors own

SPEAKER_61: 15%. You know, it's like a whole different world 20 years ago, when people were doing this startup incubator model. Yeah, so you give him I give Paul Graham a lot of credit. He's in it for the right

SPEAKER_01: reasons. So you see, Paul Graham is like, I know he went off and raised his kids for a little bit, I guess, and handed over YCombinator. But he's suddenly very involved again, I think he's even in the Bay Area doing meetings constantly. So I applaud Paul's interesting. Yeah, you know, resiliency here and just dedication to the brand he created. And then the totality of the number of startups we've done is essentially the size of but one of the two classes a year that they do. So, right, you know, we're in totally different transfer. We've had people go from one to the other. People come to ours, go there, people go to YCombinator come to ours. So I don't see them at competition at all. Although like people have said to us like, Hey, should I go to yours or YC's? And I was like, you know, YC's got a much more well known brand, ours is more intimate, flip a coin, or go

SPEAKER_29: to both. You know, we'll see on the other side, whichever one you graduate from, we'll consider

SPEAKER_01: investing. But it has tweaked people because Paul has always been anti VC overreach, I would say he's anti VC, but he has been very vocal about, hey, VCs are the enemy, maintain control of your company, because he had a bad experience with VCs. And he's been very upfront about that. And, you know, listen, I've been critical of VCs to, you know, on their worst days, you know, they have been not supportive. So the other thing is, they've also YC has been at times, not just anti investor, but maybe a little, I'd say the most cynical thing I've heard people say is that they manipulate investors. And so how do you do that? We have a demo day, you put high pressure tactics on people, you have to sign or the valuations going up and teach founders how to manipulate investors. Oh, that's the back channel for the since inception, the critique, and then you know, every year, you'd have some VCs, I'm not going to go to demo a day anymore, you know, blah, blah,

SPEAKER_74: blah. And you know, there is some truth to the fact that there are techniques that Y Combinator

SPEAKER_01: teaches of, you have to put pressure on people, the handshake deal, once they give you a handshake, have them sign, don't let anybody put in more than 50k. So the whole concept of a party round, and these high valuations, and the safe note, the whole arc of Y Combinator has been to empower founders, and to take power away from investors that has tweaked investors. Yeah. So I might argue it went too far, some might argue didn't go far enough that that you know, the industry was, you know, to anti founder in the beginning. So as a pendulum, I really don't care either way, you know, when we want to get on a cap table, we provide so much value founders 96 times out of 100 make room for us because we have demonstrated in the field that we provide massive value. So the people who generally complain about this are VCs who don't provide enough value, and they can easily be replaced in that early stage with a dentist putting in 50k or 250k. And sure enough, like I told the story before, I'm at Y Combinator, I'm asking this kid what he does. He's like, I'm an angel investor. I'm like, Can I ask how old you are? He had introduced himself to me, you know, Oh, nice things

SPEAKER_29: to say about my book or whatever. And I was like, Oh, that's very nice. What do you do is Oh, my dad's a dentist. He's giving me like a half million dollars to put to work every year. I'm, you know, I'm doing 10

SPEAKER_01: investments at 50k each whatever. And I was like, that's what VCs are up against dentists flying in from Boise, right? To you know, take if these are million dollar rounds, take 5% of the rounds, you get 20 of them, you don't need a VC. Yeah. And if the VC wants to negotiate a board seat information rights or whatever, hey, you can just do a party round and neuter every VC, right? So that's what the totality of the criticism, I think? Yeah. Later this week, we're gonna actually have

Jason Calacanis: Sebastian Malaby on to talk about the power law. And he goes through a bunch of this history of the

SPEAKER_00: development of YC. And then this entire idea that like, there's lots of other places to get money and founders might just be like, No, thank you. We don't want this. And when in fact, you know,

SPEAKER_11: of course, the argument on the other side is that VCs could provide you with really good advice or a support network or, you know, people to hire or, you know, if you don't like it, Molly,

SPEAKER_01: go provide more value. And here's the hard truth. You see how much work Jackie puts into that

SPEAKER_66: accelerator. Yeah. Our managing director runs the accelerator for us. You see 16 weeks, you see 25 sessions. I mean, the amount of work that goes into that. And personal introductions to personal

SPEAKER_29: introductions of VCs. We basically every single person we write a handcrafted personal introduction

SPEAKER_01: on average to 50 to 100 investors. At the end, we introduce the companies to maybe 750 other 500 people because we do maybe 15 to 25 investors come every week to meet the companies, you know, over 12 weeks. Yeah, it's like 500. Right. So anyway, you put all this together. We have like two online demo days at the end, you put all this together. YC does a ton of work, like a massive amount of work, they earn their 7% as far as I'm concerned, if you don't like it, competing competing, make a competing product, which Sequoia made a product that's now their accelerator. Um, it's you know, it comes after it's a million dollars, a million dollars, right? And it's at whatever the prevailing valuation is. And it's a small number of companies, but they do like their own two or three week training course. So it's not what Y Combinator does or Texas what we do, it's sort of like a graduate school that comes after it or a PA, I don't know what you would call it. But anyway, create new products for founders and compete. We created a new one called Founder University for people who are not yet, you know, incorporated. That's how you compete not complaining. So to the investors who complain about YC, like, just shut up and just make a better product. If you can't make a better product, well, then just go to YCs, you know, then just, you know, the price you pay is you have to pay 50% higher valuation because YC has done a better job than you

SPEAKER_171: have and they work harder. Yeah, that's where everybody, everybody complains about the winners. So

Jason Calacanis: let's talk about what this means for initialized. So and the history here is that Gary Tan, as I

SPEAKER_00: mentioned, and Alexis Ohanian previously were at YC, they started investing as initialized while they were still there, and then eventually spun out this firm, which you know, less than a year ago, I guess,

Jason Calacanis: December 2021 raised $700 million. How does that work when someone who is a co founder, and a managing partner leaves a firm, Alexis, of course, already left? And is that 667 or 677? 776? I think 777?

SPEAKER_93: He started his own fund. He started his own fund. Yeah, so that's climate heavy. Alexis, come on the

SPEAKER_01: show. Oh, yeah, he's a friend of the show. He's been on a couple times. So what I would say is, when you look at, you know, they were two big personalities, right? And I think I don't know what the split up was exactly. But I think they're both proud of the work they did initialize. And they both went on to do, I think, you know, it seemed like to me, Alexis wanted had his own vision for what he wanted to do. And they both had access to capital. And so sometimes it's better to be a solo dolo than it is to, you know, be in partnership into the, you know, Batman Robin thing or whatever, Justice League. So that's what I think happened there. Now, this is amazing for initialized LPs. Now you'd say why? Why would it be great? I would say that? Yes. So let's say you were a basketball team, and Steve Kerr left. And Steve Kerr left to become the coach of the greatest, you know, college team, you know, with the

SPEAKER_183: greatest recruits. I don't know if that's Duke or Georgetown or whoever. Well, now you got a funnel of that great talent to the team. Right? And so that's what's happening here. Gary Tan is going to be able to whisper to the initialized founders. And look over here and look over here and do the

SPEAKER_29: interest. Now, this is the other thing, no conflict, no interest. There has been this thing that like YC is a level playing field and the VCs who come to demo day, everybody gets first shot at the startups, completely false. The truth is, I know this because I've seen it up close and personal, the best companies don't go to demo day, the best companies close close their rounds before demo day. Now, why commerce says please don't close your rounds before demo day, please don't start raising funding till demo day. If you're a top company, and you're in week two, and you meet mark injuries and a rule of both and they make you an offer. Are you not taking it? Of course you're taking it. So the whole name of the game is to meet the YC founders before demo day, who gets to do that? Who knows who's in it, the people in the orbit of YC. So it's been known for a long time that YC alumni, you know, founders, etc, like an Alexis or whoever, Justin Khan, whoever, they get first shot at these

SPEAKER_01: companies. And, you know, Ron Conway, who's worked harder than any angel in the history of Silicon Valley gets first shot at these companies, and they'll clay or, you know, Sam Waltman, famously, so they cherry pick them, they'll say they don't. But you know, of course, they do no conflict, no interest, and it's life is not fair. And certainly getting an edge in investing is the whole point of the game.

SPEAKER_38: So if you're going to YC, you're basically playing poker where the four aces have been taken out of the deck. So if there are 52 cards, I would say the top 5% of the companies 10% of the companies have

SPEAKER_01: already been picked off. So if you're okay, sorting through the rest, as your strategy, fine. But some people, that's why they also don't go because they feel like they've been cherry picked. Gary Tan will be able to cherry pick as he should be able to. The great companies for initialized and he's an LP initialized and he'll have his carry still. So it's frickin fantastic those LPs. If I was an LP, I would be overjoyed. This would be as if, imagine there was a position that was you're in

SPEAKER_38: charge of recruiting for the top 30 colleges. That's more of the analogy. It's not even like one college. Right. So he gets to see the sorting and who gets accepted. And who did really well, and then who progresses really well. And then all the people running the pods over there, he gets to read the reports of who the top companies are in each pod. And then he gets to say,

SPEAKER_29: introduce me to the top, you know, if there's 200 people per class, and there are 10 pods of 20, I'm just making those numbers up. I don't know exactly how they they they separate the pods. He just said, Yes, I mean, I want to meet on Tuesday with the top two from each pod. I want to meet those 40 on Monday and Tuesday, let's pick up the phone and or he just tells them in the meeting, you should meet my partners over here. Would you like an intro? Great. So no conflict, no interest. Congrats, Gary.

Jason Calacanis: I'm so glad that we're talking about this news on this show. Because that is the kind of like sort of context and awareness that is so fascinating. And you can only get to the next level to write like exactly like this is like, there's the news headline. And then there's the what this really means for this entire ecosystem. Yeah, that makes it an even bigger news headline.

SPEAKER_01: Listen, I have booked so many work trips in my day. I got to meet LPs, I got to do sales, I got to meet founders, all that great stuff. And it's always a major headache. Think about all the time you're wasting, especially when you have a team, and people got to do their receipts, they got to get the approved vendors, there's reconciliations, it's absolutely exhausting. And it creates a lot of

SPEAKER_38: drama and tension inside your organization, doesn't it? You know what, I want you to try trip actions,

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SPEAKER_01: twisty at that $500 Amazon gift card. What I learned very quickly is that this game that we do every day investing in serves is about relationships, network and advantages, and conflicts. Yeah, no conflict, no interest. What does this mean? If people who are taking some moral high ground are saying, well, like wouldn't it be more fair if like nobody knew the companies and nobody had access to them before demo day? Like, sure. Sure. You know, it also be really fair if everybody made the same

SPEAKER_74: salary in society. Yeah, teachers, doctors, CEOs, cops, teachers, everybody makes the same salary, right? And then nobody can every year, everybody's salary goes up 6%. And the more years you work,

SPEAKER_01: the more you get. And everybody has to come in at nine and leave at five. Like that's not how a capitalist society works. A capitalist society works by you finding an edge and exploiting the edge.

SPEAKER_74: Welcome to reality people. It's about edge. And if you're not getting an edge, then you're getting cut. Period. Full stop. I'm always thinking, how do I sharpen this blade? How do I get another blade? How do I put a pistol in my back pocket? How do I put a brass knuckles in my pocket? How do I put an extra knife in my ankle? I got weapons everywhere under this desk. I got a shotgun. I got a bat by

SPEAKER_01: the door. You know, I'm going to find a way to win. And guess what? That's what you're up against. You're coming into this industry. Everybody's got an edge. Everybody's looking to knife everybody to get that equity. And the earlier you get in, the more work it is and the more risks you take. And all these lazy VCs, you know what they want to do? They want to go to the market. And they want to have all the apples sorted. You know, you ever see like in Japan where like they sell a perfect pair for six bucks. And it's like in a little case and it's got a box around it and

SPEAKER_183: some cellophane wrap. You ever see that? That's what VCs want to do. They want somebody to hand them the perfect pair. They don't pay six, seven bucks for it. They want to overpay. You know what they don't want to do? They don't want to go out and prune the pear trees. They don't want to dig up the stumps and plant another one. They don't want to put fertilizer and get their hands in the They don't want to do that. They don't want to be out there in a cold fall afternoon, picking those apples and picking those pears, preparing them for market. They don't want to do

SPEAKER_118: any of that. They don't want to fight the bugs. They don't want to fight the crows. They just want to go to the market and just, oh, I just want to take that parent. They want to go off to Italy or

SPEAKER_74: Aspen. So if you don't want to do any work, you want to put your hands in the dirt, then you're paying seven bucks for the pair. Now us we do it by the bushel. We put a lot of work and we get seven pairs in that bushel. And we walk out with seven pairs for the price of one. Right? Now that means

SPEAKER_38: some of them might be dented or bruised or imperfect. And we got to work with them to try to make

SPEAKER_74: something out of this. Right? It's a little more raw. But what combinators got the orchard? These idiots in Silicon Valley allowed Paul Graham to take over the entire orchard. They let him. And they never

SPEAKER_01: came and said like, I think that's our orchard. He was just like, Oh, you guys don't want to do any

SPEAKER_74: of this work. I'll just Okay, I'll work the orchard. I'll plant all these trees. I'll make sure

SPEAKER_38: they're pruned. So you know, and VCs seem to be fine with it. They raise a bigger fund. And they pay a higher price. And they get the apples a little more polished, a little more, you know, refined.

SPEAKER_00: It's so interesting, too. And they make it harder. By the way, this Monday energy is amazing. It's amazing. This Monday action energy is my jam.

SPEAKER_77: I've been watching the X-Men series. Also, I started watching the series industry.

SPEAKER_34: Oh, so you got on the mind. And so industry is basically euphoria meets billions.

SPEAKER_93: Mm hmm. See, that's so funny. Because I started watching Paper Girls, which he recommended to me,

Jason Calacanis: which is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets like, it's a lot of time travel sci fi action. Yeah,

SPEAKER_46: and I watched like three episodes. And I was like, Yeah, it's amazing. It's fantastic. It's perfect for me. But I might have to watch industry. Also just to get like, the amount of energy, the amount of drugs,

SPEAKER_01: sex, backstabbing, and debauchery on the trade desk is like nothing I've ever seen. I've seen a lot.

SPEAKER_34: So it's like Wolf of Wall Street. Also, it's basically Wolf of Wall Street with, you know,

SPEAKER_38: people graduating from HBS, you know, in their first year as a banker in London. Yeah. And my Lord,

SPEAKER_222: the amount of I mean, they kind of make this a running drug, but the amount of drugs these bankers are doing, and the range of drugs they're doing is insane.

SPEAKER_219: Makes you feel great about our financial system, doesn't everybody? That's what's happening. Keith Richard watched the show. And he's like, pump the brakes, people.

SPEAKER_222: Yeah, it was like, Russell Brad was like, my god, you people are off the rails.

SPEAKER_01: It's a great show, though. But it does have me thinking of just, you know, and this is what I always try to do. I try to make new products, right? I'm constantly trying to make new products that help our founders. And then if we do that, we, you know, we're preparing to go out with launch

SPEAKER_38: fund four. And we're actually going to do a 506. So we're going to publicly raise our next fund. And I just approve the final deck, I got the bank account, set up the legal, all that stuff we can talk about

SPEAKER_01: on a VC Sunday school. Let's do it. Yeah. And so we'll start the fundraising process. And, you know, we're raising it, not exactly in public, but we will be able to say publicly, we're raising a fund, if you're interested in raising the fund, go here. Right? So yeah, you have to be a qualified purchaser or accredited investor, obviously. But I've been thinking about our advantage a lot. And, you know, trying to sharpen our blade and just be super competitive in terms of deal flow. And it really is about deal flow. And that's why people get so bent out of

SPEAKER_07: shape about Y Combinator. They have control. They're locking up deal flow, you know, and that's it.

SPEAKER_00: And to be clear, it's working. They've invested in over 3500 companies. They've got eight unicorns. I think I mean, it's, they're just spawning way more than eight. I think they may have a public

SPEAKER_236: companies now. Oh, really? Well, Dropbox is public,

SPEAKER_01: Airbnb is public. Those are the two. Coinbase, those three are the big, those were the big three. Yeah, I think Stripe will be, I mean, in the early days, it was very easy to criticize Y Combinator. And I said this to like, zero public companies. So let's pump the brakes on like, why how important Y Combinator is until, you know, they get some companies and some numbers on the board. And they have, you know, you can't have 3500 companies in the game we play and not have some big words. Now we have 350 portfolio companies. So we have but 10% of theirs. We're a 20% team, there are 250% team. So the numbers actually track. And I'm not, I'm not trying to

SPEAKER_66: do that many. That would be too much for me, because I want to actually meet the founders.

SPEAKER_40: Yeah. But you know, that's the other thing I was gonna say is that here, you've got YC, and they've locked up the early part, we're picking off good chunks of the early part.

Jason Calacanis: And then you have all these BC funds saying, Okay, fine, that's fine. We'll just keep raising bigger and bigger and bigger funds and get higher prices. But at some point, as you know, I think they even talked about this in venture deals at some point when a fund gets big enough, it's just really hard. It's diminishing returns, literally, right? It's really, really hard to return the multiples that investors are expecting from BC and you start to see all these extra machinations like, Okay, now we also invest in public markets, or we have an evergreen fund,

SPEAKER_00: or, you know, it's like trying to come up with ways to make the returns match the size of the fund.

SPEAKER_01: Yes, the the ultimate example of manifestation manifestation of this is SoftBank, right? They have such a large fund. We did a calculation either here on all and I can't remember, but they I think

SPEAKER_34: had to put to get put 100 billion to work in on all and yeah, in five years, they did 50 months. So they

SPEAKER_01: put 2 billion to week a month, and I think they did it in the last so, you know, you're talking about 500 million a week. And so that means if you're buying 20% of a company, the company's got to be worth 2.5 billion. So they were taking companies that were worth 2.5 billion, and suddenly anointing them,

Jason Calacanis: which is a crazy strategy, massively distorting, it's just distorting to marketplaces. And then you get insane outliers like Adam Neumann and we work because it's enabled by an amount of money that just

SPEAKER_38: like makes everything go off the rails. Yeah. Right. If you were to look at these as like race cars and stuff

SPEAKER_01: like that, like, you can only drive the car so fast, it needs to have the right brakes, it needs to have the right tires, you know, and if you try to take a rocket ship or a car, and you make it go

SPEAKER_38: too fast, the thing will come apart. You have to really be thoughtful about how fast these things can go before you and that's product market fit is what I'm talking about, right? So you try to like, spend money on marketing before you have product market fit, there's that classic leaky bucket syndrome. So you got all these companies coming into the top of the bucket, but there's two big holes in the bucket. So you're pouring customers in and they're just pouring right out where you're losing half the customers and keeping half. Well, yeah, that bucket is really and you know, depending on how often you're losing them, if you're losing 50% a year, you gotta, you know, really spend a lot of

SPEAKER_254: money to keep that company afloat. And we saw that, right? If you're building an enterprise app, you need to offer SSO. What is SSO that single sign on it is what it says it is basically the ability for enterprise users to log into your app with their existing credentials. So if you work at a company, a big company, you know that they have an identity provider and you say to yourself, well, I can build that myself, I can write all that code and put it into my app. That's fine. But that's hard. And you're going to be duplicating a bunch of work just like you might want to do payments, but you don't want to duplicate all that work. And then you have to maintain all those integrations in your app with every single identity provider your customers might use and new ones are coming out, the specs change, and then your login breaks, you don't know it's broken, yada, yada, yada. It is a ton of technical overhead. Well, this is why you need to check out Work OS. It's basically Stripe for all those important enterprise features. You know how people wanted to put payments into their products and it was arduous and painful and then Stripe came out and you just drop a little code snippet in and you're done. That's what Work OS does. Simple API plugins that let you move faster, spend less time on developers, and you don't have to worry about maintaining all those integrations. They don't just have SSOs. They also have APIs for multi factor authentication and much more. Work OS.com is going to teach you how to do it. It's app enterprise ready. And if you want to learn more about their different integrations, just go to their podcast. It's the Work OS podcast, Work OS.com slash podcast, or just search for Work OS podcast in your podcast player. Welcome to the This Week in Startups

SPEAKER_07: Family Work OS. You know, speaking of getting outside of your zone, the J trading portfolio has

Jason Calacanis: been absolutely demolished. Oh, you're not alone here, though. You're not alone. This is not a person, you know, this is not a poor choices situation, except for maybe the one. So speaking

SPEAKER_01: of which, Molly, getting outside your comfort zone, I have invested looks like $540,000 in eight companies, I'm down 32,000 minus 6% or so on the original investments biggest win only gain I think right now is Disney and Warner Brothers I'm down a bit. But again, I said I would take a 10 week attend I'm sorry, 10 year approach to this. Zaslav owes me nine grand general Zaslav, general Zaslav.

SPEAKER_20: Zaslav. Wow. Why didn't we think of that last time we talked about this? Zaslav.

SPEAKER_01: Incredible. But I am, I'm really happy with my bets. I actually have two that are up. My original bet in Amazon is up. It's green. But you know, it's a sea of red now. So this is looking like a reverse Christmas tree here. A lot of blood in the streets. But I've been thinking a lot about Apple. Mm hmm. And Apple is having the iPhone 14 launch, I believe in a week or two. And we also have some speculation

SPEAKER_38: about trademarks. And I have some thoughts on this that I'll bring up in a moment. But why don't you

SPEAKER_01: take us to through some of the trademark speculation? You know, this is always like a great way to figure out what big companies are doing. Sometimes they embed code in their app, and these hackers find the new code. And the other way is trademarks or filings. And then the other way is hiring big high.

Jason Calacanis: Yes, definitely. And job description say that the finding code is probably the most reliable, you know, if you have to look at the most reliable indicators, finding code is probably number one, hires is probably number two, trademarks, they file all the time as a just in case. However, there is some interesting reporting from Bloomberg about some trademarks that Apple filed that's now causing speculation that it might be getting close to a name for its mixed reality headset, which of course suggests it might be close to launching its mixed reality headset. So the filings in the UK, US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica and Uruguay are for the names. This is so Apple reality one reality pro and reality processor. Now earlier this year, trademark filings for the name reality OS were also found to be linked to Apple. So this all sort of suggests that something in the frame, you know, something in the realm of reality is what they are gonna call this super secret project, which is expected to use VR and AR, but nobody knows very much else about it. Like we keep, you know, having Mark Gurman, right from Bloomberg on to go through the rumors, but we're still solidly in rumor phase, but maybe getting closer.

SPEAKER_163: All right, number one, why wouldn't Apple create a subsidy?

SPEAKER_01: Why would they do that? Why would they get these, uh, domain? Why would they get these trademarks? Well, it's obviously because that's what they're gonna call this thing. But I have another question. Why wouldn't they

SPEAKER_56: create a subsidy, a subsidiary, I'm sorry, that was an LLC that nobody knew? Well, they did. Hilariously, they did these new trademarks. That's so funny. I hadn't read this yet. You're so good at

SPEAKER_286: this. Sorry, I don't mean to be really good at my job. These new trademarks are registered to the

SPEAKER_41: Shell Corporation, Immersive Health Solutions, LLC, which was incorporated in February. Okay,

SPEAKER_66: no, wait. So then how did somebody tie it back? They found the law firm? Do they tie it back to the law firm? And then say the law firm is related to this Immersive Health Solutions, LLC. This sounds to me

SPEAKER_01: like somebody is going through all of the trademarks. And maybe somebody looked for reality or something, or they know this address, where they know the law firm that did it or something. So there must be some vector that these journalists are doing matching law firms,

SPEAKER_291: because I'm sorry that I'm like the greatest Colombo detective ever. But I was a pretty great

Jason Calacanis: investigative journalist. I'll leave it at that. You're like, wait a second. Yeah, this is a multiple shell corporation, by the way. So there's Immersive Health Solutions, LLC, Inc. in February, according to records obtained by Bloomberg News. So Bloomberg seems to have been

SPEAKER_41: doing some good data journalism here. That company itself was registered by another Delaware shell corporation, the corporation TrustCo, which is typically used for filings by firms looking to avoid

Jason Calacanis: detection. And the RealityOS trademark used that same firm, the corporation TrustCo shell company.

SPEAKER_01: So now what they need to do is they need to hire a law firm, they got to get better call Saul,

SPEAKER_19: Saul Goodman, to find these trademarks on behalf of whatever the real IP company at Apple usually uses.

SPEAKER_291: But congratulations for figuring this out, Bloomberg. Shout out to our friends.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, that's some good detective work. I mean, Reality Pro is so Apple, that is just so Yeah, at approach. Now, we should also note that these have not been granted. They've just been filed. FYI. I'm just saying like sometimes, you know, we tend to get there's been years and decades, there have been decades of journalists getting very excited about Apple trademark filings that never go anywhere like there's a or that take a really long time. Like if this has been filed, but not yet granted, and it could take some time to be granted. And then it could be appealed. This could still suggest and I don't want to throw cold water. But I do want to like, room temperature us a little bit. Yeah, this could still suggest products or even trademarks that are a couple

SPEAKER_01: years away from being granted and then launched. All trademarks have various periods where people can object to them and fight the trademark. So when you go for a trademark, you put it in, you have ones that are for future products and you have a certain amount of time to have that product and you can file extensions. There are other trademarks that are for products that have already been in market and maybe you trademark after you've had it in market. And so people have a period. So they do a preliminary publishing of your trademark, then people can come out and say, Hey, I object to that it's too close to mine. And all of this is like a grand negotiation. The trademark office does the best job it can at making sure it doesn't compete. And they'll look at general products and what vertical so you can if I said gobbledygook 1400, and that was gonna be my brand for my new clothing, they'd be like, I can't

SPEAKER_16: find anything gobbledygook 1400 in the world. Now, if I say I want to create a new drinking glass. And

SPEAKER_01: it's a, you know, smart drinking glass, and I'm going to call it the apple glass now, okay, they would see Apple music, as in the Beatles Apple record label that existed before Apple existed, and all of these different apples out there that can get in trademarks. And those people would have a chance to

SPEAKER_16: file a grievance like the Beatles Apple record label did against Apple. And famously, they did a settlement that Apple agreed never to go into music. And then Apple when they did go into music, had to

SPEAKER_183: do some crazy settlement with them to have Apple music, literally the word Apple music and the iPod and all that stuff. And then eventually they got they did get the Beatles onto that platform. So I'm

SPEAKER_07: very excited. Actually, I've had a I've had a realization that Apple is going to win it all in AR.

SPEAKER_87: And it came to me because I was talking to some Facebook folks. Or I should say former Facebook folks. Oh, former. Okay, that's the key word there. No, I was talking to some former Facebook folks just

SPEAKER_07: socially. And I was had this realization of and then I was talking about Nest on social this weekend, because I'm so

SPEAKER_01: frustrated about Nest. Yeah, I'm just infuriated. That is perfect app. I asked Sundar to fire the Nest team, whoever's running Google Home, because Google Home is the worst product ever created. Nest was the perfect product. And now they sell Nest cameras that force you the Nest cameras force you to use Google Home. So now I have Google Home for like, four of my eight cameras. And they have Google Nest for four of my eight cameras. And the Nest app is perfect. Chef kiss beautiful. Yeah, but when they made new cameras, they said, You know what, we can make them backward compatible with the Nest and their Nest cameras. We already have Google Home and we want people to use Google Home. So I was like, Oh my god, this is incredibly stupid. It would be like Apple being like, I

SPEAKER_107: don't know, there's like two apps separate app. I mean, this is so Google. This is why I never buy

SPEAKER_00: Google stuff. I never do. Because you cannot I didn't want Nest stuff. They are not focused. Yeah,

SPEAKER_34: exactly. And so I'm literally gonna rip out 1000s of dollars worth of Nest stuff and Pro right in the frickin garbage. And so but I just don't environmentally feel like that would be the good thing to do. I'm like, please recycle it. You can take it to Best Buy. So I'm just like, Okay, you know, I'm just basically in

SPEAKER_38: one set of locations going with a new solution. And then I'm going to deprecate these and you know, maybe in a couple years when their lifespan is over, I'll replace them. But anyway, Google is so

SPEAKER_106: bad at hardware, that I think Google is going to lose the race. Yeah. And then Facebook is so bad at

SPEAKER_183: partnering with developers. And Lena Khan is not letting them buy but one app. Yeah, that in order to

SPEAKER_29: make this work, AR VR. And we there's no doubt that that's going to be the next platform. To what extent people use it, I think AR I could see the majority of people using the majority of days. So let me just pause there for a second and make an x y x y axis for you. The frequency of use, right? And the

SPEAKER_38: the number of people. So if you're making a four quadrant, the majority of people, the majority of

SPEAKER_01: days, you can put the smartphone up there, right? Yep. Every 80% 90% of people use that every day. That's chef's kiss what you want in a product, right? Let's put aside profits for a second. If majority of people are using a device, the majority of days, they make money, majority of people, majority of days are probably using a television, right? So televisions exist up there, majority of people majority of days are going to use a vehicle. So these are like the best products in the world to participate in, you know, the majority of people and computers, laptops or desktops, internet,

SPEAKER_06: yeah, internet, perfect example, streaming services, majority of people, majority of days.

SPEAKER_01: Now, right now, the minority of people on the minority of days, very few days, very few people are using VR. So you'd put the Oculus in that bottom left quadrant, kind of a bad place to be,

SPEAKER_07: right? Isn't it? Nobody's really I mean, if it was a surgical equipment or something really expensive, okay, fine, you know, like electric surfboard or a private jet, like a very small number of people,

SPEAKER_38: very not very often would be a private jet, or any plane or any boat. Now they have to have high

SPEAKER_01: margins. And so you know, it's a niche product, Google is not going to get it done. Yeah, not not

SPEAKER_06: as Sundar Sundar is running the company currently.

SPEAKER_00: Well, not as to be fair, not as anybody has ever run Google, Google has only ever been good at the

Jason Calacanis: one thing. And everything else has been distractions. And they've never committed. So anyway, yes,

SPEAKER_66: I agree with you. I think that's great hardware for a period. But of course, they bought it. Yeah. Yep. So unlike YouTube, where they put the proper person in charge, Susan, when Jackie, before that's

SPEAKER_38: law, they had the proper management, they let it be its own thing. And they did not interfere.

SPEAKER_06: With Nest, they interfered, right? Nest interfered. They forced Google home down our throat. So they just let Nest be Nest. They would have proven the point that they could actually run a hardware company.

SPEAKER_327: Right. And YouTube has the same business model as Google, its ads. It's not a hard integration.

SPEAKER_02: So anyway, yes. Yep. So I was just game varying this Apple, nobody makes better hardware than Apple, period, full stop.

SPEAKER_38: Mm hmm. Nobody has done it consistently over time. Sorry, that's it. BMW, I don't know, some fancy

SPEAKER_07: German brand, but a banging Wolfson, I don't know who makes that stuff, you know, the fancy dancing stuff that inspired Steve Jobs at a time. So we can complain, you know, on the margins about

SPEAKER_38: Apple, but nobody does hardware better. Yeah, who does the App Store better? Play or Apple? Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: would you give the edge to? I mean, Apple, of course, and developers would too, they make more money, like they can have more reach on Android, but they make more money on iOS.

SPEAKER_201: Okay, here we go. So what is going to define who wins VR AR? What are the hardware and experience?

SPEAKER_06: Okay. Yeah, Google can't do hardware. Facebook can. Facebook can't do apps, because they don't know how to share revenue and build an app ecosystem. And Google can. It's the only person

SPEAKER_337: who can do both. Who was the only person who can do both? Yep. It's Apple. Oh, shoot, the glasses are on.

SPEAKER_339: So I'm looking at this. Oh, snap. And I'm just thinking, if we all know that this is going to

SPEAKER_00: happen. When I said snap, by the way, notice I didn't mean snap, snap. No. Snap can't do it either.

SPEAKER_171: So anyway, I'm just looking at Apple. AAPL. AAPL. I'm looking at where Apple is today.

SPEAKER_344: Bringing it $161 a share. A good day to buy. So the J trades then. J trade alert.

SPEAKER_16: We made our biggest J trade today. I have conviction. Now I know I'm buying Apple. When it's the you know, the most held I believe it's the most held stock out there. I could be wrong. It's one of the top holdings of all. I've been super critical of Apple on all the margins.

SPEAKER_183: But I got to go with my analysis here. Mm hmm. I just bought 1000 shares 161.

SPEAKER_01: Damn. It's a big bet for me. That's a big bet. I'm making a big bet here. And I'll tell you why. I'm holding these things for 10 years. I think I don't think that Apple is going to announce any of this stuff at the next keynote, or the next. Yeah, the next keynote, which is coming. And then

SPEAKER_327: that's the Apple. Yeah, it's like the next Wednesday or something. And definitely not.

SPEAKER_38: Definitely do three announcements a year on average. Can somebody look that up for me? I think it's

SPEAKER_171: they should do three or four of these things. They don't do more than two to three, I think. Well, now there's like, there's usually the big fall announcement and WWDC. And then sometimes there's

SPEAKER_38: a rando like laptop thing. So I think it's three. And so I don't think they're announcing it now. But when they do announce this stuff, I think the stock is going to take off like a rocket. Because people are going to come to the same conclusion I just came to. Yeah, which is Facebook sucks at apps. And Lena Khan is not letting them buy anything and no developer trusts Zuck, nor should they ever trust Zuck. Yeah, Google is a mess when it comes to hardware. Yeah. So we know they're not going to in all

SPEAKER_201: likelihood, Molly, what year will they announce the headsets? And the Apple system? Yeah. Not this

SPEAKER_00: year, right? Oh, 1%. I would say 1% chance this year. I mean, because this is what Apple will do is

Jason Calacanis: that they will wait for everybody to fall on their face. Yep. And to have a consumer experience. I was looking at my Apple holdings to see if it is indeed my biggest single holding, which I think it is like my financial advisor talks about Apple the way that that MicroStrategy guy talks about Bitcoin. Yeah, he's like sell your house buy more Apple, I suspect that other companies will fall on their faces for at least two years. Yeah. Before if not longer, right? Because there has to be because Apple does play it

SPEAKER_00: safe. They wait until there is demand, pent up or otherwise, a proven business model and path forward.

Jason Calacanis: And then they innovate and iterate on the thing that already exists and come out and make it way better. And to me, that's a two to three year arc, right? If not a little more. Alright, so we know

SPEAKER_01: they're making it. That much we know 1% of a percent chance it gets launched this year. What percent

SPEAKER_165: chance launched in 23? Like a percentage? I have my own thoughts and then your percentage for 24.

SPEAKER_35: I'm going to say 25% for 23. Okay. And 50% 24. I think it's a 2025 play. So that's 76% chance it's going

SPEAKER_38: to be launched in the next nine quarters. I think it's 50% next year, they announced I think they're going to announce like the dev kit kind of situation and then developer goggles, I think there'll be, you know, like $3,000 to $3,000. So developers can start building stuff. And then they'll announce the consumer thing in 24. So I think there's a 90% chance. I'm going to put it at 1% this year, I agree for less than 1% chance. It's a little too soon. Yeah, I'll put it at 40% in 2023 45% the year after. So that puts me at I put 50% the year after. So 23 40 50% the year after I'm at 91% it's coming in the next nine quarters. Perfect time to buy Apple as far as I'm concerned, if I'm holding for more than two years, because my belief is when they show this, it's going to be so compelling. Mm hmm. When you see iMessage turn into your iMessage group, turn into a Facebook reality group,

SPEAKER_07: and your FaceTime turns into a FaceTime call in VR. It's going to be super compelling. And when they have all of their app developers, calm calm, I have no inside information, I still own 5% of calm. But

SPEAKER_38: when calm calm on the board, unfortunately, that would have been the dream. Imagine you put on you have calm, you have calm on your watch, you put on your calm headset. And now you're taken to a, you know, waterfall, we all namaste at that waterfall, right? It's gonna be pretty trippy. Now imagine Spotify, you put it on. And now you go to a Burning Man virtual Mayan warrior DJ set, and you're at a dance

SPEAKER_01: party. Okay, all of those apps understand how to build world class apps on iOS, Spotify and calm,

SPEAKER_38: FaceTime, pick another. And what's your favorite, three most beautiful apps? Let's see if we can back

SPEAKER_385: into imagine, like, Pinterest, I'm trying to do my book design, and I'm just walking through it. Like,

SPEAKER_56: I'm so excited about that. I can't even wait. Okay, so now Pinterest, and it's gonna be red.

SPEAKER_38: So okay, let's just take these. Okay, we got redfin calm, Spotify, and Pinterest. Yep. Big four,

SPEAKER_29: great examples. Nobody's tell us an example of your favorite iOS app that you think could have a life in

SPEAKER_83: VR. Those four app developers, were they going to build for first, right? Google, Facebook,

SPEAKER_00: Zuck, Zuck. What are they gonna build for app? Like, there's no chance they're building with Zuck. And it's just gonna be remember, like, when Apple launched the iPad, and then the developers were like, Oh, geez, now we have to reformat all our apps. And then they were like, Oh, I bet we could do an iPad version that would be a little more full featured, and it would offer these things, and then we could sell it. And then we can make money. And like, there will be shopping enabled through these apps. And I will buy every GD thing that I see on Pinterest, because it will look so beautiful, because it's in my brain, they will be lining up like bomber... Steve Ballmer was only

Jason Calacanis: ever right about one thing. And that thing was developers, developers, developers, developers.

SPEAKER_396: Insert the video here

SPEAKER_399: Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

SPEAKER_401: Yes.

SPEAKER_403: Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. That would be amazing.

SPEAKER_376: I mean, the remix of that is so great. And there's like 90% of our audience has never seen that. I mean, this was, I know we are old.

SPEAKER_406: This was the viral video before YouTube existed.

SPEAKER_376: i mean this thing went viral so great you didn't even think it could the sweatiest man of all time

SPEAKER_00: i went there one time to interview him and was told that you couldn't you were not allowed to look him

Jason Calacanis: and make eye contact when he walked through the halls like people had to look down really wow

SPEAKER_00: interesting guy he's a cool cat i interviewed him one time we um now that we have pumped up so much i feel like we should just take the last five to seven minutes of the show okay to just enjoy a good old-fashioned dunking imagine that we are at a kids spring carnival at school and this is the part where we get to wing beanbags at a teeny little target and drop a teacher in an ice cold

SPEAKER_412: tank it's where is it where you going it's dunking time all right this is a combination segment that

SPEAKER_414: we are calling we live in the future slash what the ah wtf it's a w-l-i-t-f wtf a version of mixed

SPEAKER_00: reality did occur last night on tv uh-huh in uh at the mtv vmas no goggles required you just had to sit there and enjoy this version of mixed reality wherein eminem and snoop dogg performed their song from the d to the lbc as their board apes oh yeah we're going to show this 50 second six second video with no audio and we're going to narrate it for you and what you have here is eminem and snoop dogg

Jason Calacanis: on a leather couch and eminem appears to be getting like a really big contact high from a blunt the

SPEAKER_418: size of a volkswagen that snoop dogg is smoking it's basically like a cone that you would use in a cheerleading squad yes exactly before there were you know uh bullhorns it's like a one of those old

SPEAKER_41: timey bullhorns it's a it's a super blunt embarrassed even describing this so eminem gets

Jason Calacanis: high snoop dogg smoking this big cartoon blunt then they're transported to because this is a combination music video and ad they're transported to yuga lab's other side metaverse mmorpg game where they become cgi characters and it the cgi characters there we go look like they're from 2004 about the time that bomber was shouting developers developers developers and then they transform really into their board ape characters as they keep wrapping the song and then eventually they perform on this virtual stage that again is just a giant ad for this other side kind of metaverse like is this a real

SPEAKER_01: video game thingamadoodle that they're promoting or this is just like a their idea of a clever video

Jason Calacanis: to do at mtv music awards i mean like kind of like it technically launched already on april 30th and they sold these other deeds and yeah you may recall that there was a brief uh flurry on the internet of people buying like digital land and they were like oh yeah this is a thing they sold those to the public it it doesn't like there's not very much available about it like information related to the infrastructure of the technology so far it seems like a play to sell digital land or sell these various nfts because you need to own one of these nfts in order to play and it's not your character apes it's some other ones that's your character they really are like if it sounds really general and non-specific it's because it is there's not really a dedicated website and then this was this big ad for this thing that only barely exists that was like i don't know how else to say this beyond cringe yeah i mean it's goofy um you know

SPEAKER_01: like these guys are now like the elder statesmen of rap they're obviously legends but they're 50 years old with a bunch of 19 to 25 year olds at the mtv music awards and they're showing a video game that

SPEAKER_107: looks like it was on a nintendo right from like the elder sellouts is what it came off as i think

SPEAKER_01: like well this is a super so remember yuga labs raised 450 million dollars at a four billion dollar valuation from guess the vc firm that would make an insane bet like that interesting of course so that

SPEAKER_183: was their quote unquote seed round so the grift here i'm going to take a guess is somehow they grifted eminem and snoop dog and gave them their maybe they gave them a crypto punk and a an ape and a board ape yeah they both own board apes but i bet that they are getting looped in and getting some grift here they've been handed a bag of digital assets i bet to do this they probably have some land they got castles they got probably got castles on their side so now they're going to flip that to some bag

SPEAKER_29: holders in the public i wonder if mtv got a bag for doing this or if mtv even knows that they're being grifted i wonder if eminem and snoop just came to himself like hey you know we own these like cool nfts we want we'll we'll perform if we can play our video which is a giant commercial for this

SPEAKER_183: multi-level marketing scam known as like nft play pay to play i mean i think that these things

SPEAKER_01: are going to get in trouble with you know ftc sec etc as being mlm ish or adjacent yeah when we look at this you have to own right a character to get in here so now we're going to ask kids instead of putting a quarter into a machine or buying a 60 video game or playing 10 bucks a month to play world of warcraft this whole play to earn or pay to play or pay to win category of games i consider evil

SPEAKER_74: i like a subscription easy peasy lemon squeezy five ten bucks a month i like the game is free you pay for if you want to dress your character but i hate pay to win like pay to access like this yeah this is

SPEAKER_01: predatory against children playing games it's gross in my mind i if this is what's going on i i suspect this is what's going on you're going to have to come up with thousands of dollars to have access to these games the people on the top have already bought their apes and now we're going to dupe kids or young adults into having to spend 10 20 30 000 on some dopey ape crypto pump to get peer pressured into playing one of these games it's just as loathsome as when they tried to convince kids they needed to have 400 500 600 sneakers to be able to go play basketball that they would then get

SPEAKER_437: killed for at school but they would then get killed for this is the same predatory bull it's i mean

Jason Calacanis: it's always the same thing and then the idea of and then you know the idea that you've got these like influencers who are going to do it but they're like what i can't figure out and we were talking about this before the show is like who on god's green earth is the target market for this because anybody who's like gen z eminem and snoop dogg are totally irrelevant the if you care about things like video games and you look at these like year 2000 graphics it's embarrassing and cringy the the board and then if you're mainstream you've never even heard of a board ape so none of this makes sense to you you're all of a sudden just like why are these two guys cartoon monkeys i don't understand so there's no like i can't identify a single audience on whom this would work and all of that is exemplified by like the reddit comments like if you went to r slash eminem last night that it was like somebody was like this is the first time in years i've seen everyone on here agree on something

SPEAKER_00: and that something is that everything about that was just a disaster these are like some of the nicest

Jason Calacanis: we can't really even show these but this like straight up ass was the response to this pretty

SPEAKER_00: much universally and we can't even show you any other comments it's just sad and weird and yes grifty

Jason Calacanis: like the vmas i'm not saying that everything about like a music industry show isn't some version of a

SPEAKER_219: giant ad but like what the come on this is what i hate straight up ass straight up ass i mean that's

SPEAKER_01: that's gonna stick here's the thing here's the thing um you're influencing kids to get involved in a very grown-up dangerous game which is spending money they don't have

SPEAKER_07: mm-hmm to be cool and i you know uh stefan marbury uh arguably greatest point guard to come out of new york city you know he he went at the peak of his fame created starberries uh with a local chain of stores and he made 15 to 25 sneakers kids and he said listen these are as good they're made in the same factories in china as you know the the 200 ones and uh i would rather you buy these and save

SPEAKER_38: your money and put it towards other things in your life your education whatever putting food on the table i have tons of respect for him for doing that they were cool as those sneakers you know what's not cool grifting on a bunch of kids and making them feel like they have to spend thousands of dollars on

SPEAKER_01: a stupid nft to play a goddamn video game mm-hmm it's gross gross and then trying to get them to it's a bunch of adults trying to grift a bunch of kids to spend money to be cool buy land etc if you want to make this cool let kids make their own characters for ten dollars if you go labs was cool they would let you use your creativity in a tool to make your own crypto punk they wouldn't have

SPEAKER_446: scarcity they would have abundance maybe sell it yes and let them make them for 10 bucks right do what

SPEAKER_00: roblox has done yeah just create a gigantic interactive platform where people can create and develop apps and like be a part of a real thing which by the way to be clear is why although

Jason Calacanis: everything you're saying is true they are targeting kids and trying to influence them whatever none of this is going to work because it's going to crash and burn actually you can smell a scam a mile away when you are a gen z or a teenager or my kid or whatever they're going to do roblox instead because this is embarrassing for everyone involved i agree i mean i hope we're not coming across as

SPEAKER_93: boomers but here's the thing i'm gonna ask my son well i hear what my son has to say about eminem all

SPEAKER_453: day every day as artists i respect both of them they've made some of the great you know rap songs of

SPEAKER_183: all time but i just there's something about being predatory with our children that you know this feels like they're trying to get them on cigarettes or something get them addicted to something that's

SPEAKER_01: not good for them yeah and i would much rather see these kids if they want to play a game with ten thousand dollars right like i would rather see them investing in stocks hell yeah and doing j trading and learning about stocks with it because if they buy the top 100 stocks by holdings what's the chances that those top 100 stocks that they trade are going to be worth more and they're going to learn more putting that ten thousand dollars if there was ten thousand dollars theoretically for them to spend and this whole it just feels profoundly unfair to me and i it's gross and i uh yugo labs for the

SPEAKER_66: people who are running this thing like think about abundance as opposed to scarcity and i think abundance

SPEAKER_01: will will trump i love your point about molly um roblox minecraft etc somebody needs to create a video game that people actually want to play where you create characters and your skill and your creativity is what define the value of it not how much you paid for it or how much of a celebrity or your grift and peer pressure and just literally make a copy of this entire concept that yugo labs is going off but make it so what your character has done in the virtual world and how cool it is how many friends it has how artistic it is how many people voted up some other mechanism for creating value yeah other

SPEAKER_38: than getting in early and obviously all these people uh on openc employees whatever uh coinbase front

SPEAKER_458: running the market it's just gross you got you got a real burning man vibe going on today sorry i

SPEAKER_23: i like you know i hate to share the art it's true though it's absolutely i'm a capitalist but you

SPEAKER_74: know capitalism on children is something that gets you know it has to be executed properly is what i'm

SPEAKER_171: saying and for kids you're right with respect it's not like you come integrity integrity with integrity

SPEAKER_18: that's the better word a hundred percent yeah just punch it up yeah you made two great points there

SPEAKER_183: kids are not aren't too savvy to fall for it that's the other great point yeah i mean that's the great thing thank god here's my chart and people and days this is the people days xy axis this is why i love

SPEAKER_465: my producers look at this producers unbelievable making the graphics in real time i am the king

SPEAKER_222: of the xy axis bow before it's beautiful general side all people every day tv and apple very few people

SPEAKER_19: very few days oculus and yuga labs on the bottom left four days you could also put low some to awesome

SPEAKER_418: you really could listen to awesome how accessible it is accessible to all people

SPEAKER_01: and awesome what's accessible to all people roblox what's awesome roblox you put roblox on the forget about people days awesome to accessible or inclusive and inclusive and awesome lame

SPEAKER_376: and an appearance exclusionary yes nfts yuga labs lame and exclusionary that's yuga labs crypto punks all this

SPEAKER_486: stuff i mean i hope it all goes to zero i'll be totally honest i'm not gonna lie i'm with you there

SPEAKER_34: i don't need to what are they schadenfreude schadenfreude schadenfreude schadenfreude i hate

SPEAKER_01: to have the schadenfreude but yeah i feel like if you own one of these cryptos or crypto punks or yuga

SPEAKER_335: labs nonsense sell it now and uh go build something inclusive because it's just gonna turn you into a

SPEAKER_00: criminal over time if you bought this thing for way too much money and you get increasingly desperate to try to recoup that money by getting other people in on your grift that's how you turn into a criminal

SPEAKER_201: this is the slow road to made off i mean it's mlm it's mlm like the whole point of crypto punks

SPEAKER_01: and all these things is they're not going to produce too many of them the people who got in early convince other people to get in and then that gets those people to to basically you know increase the value of it and it's unfair think of abundance that would be more in line with the crypto cyberpunk aesthetic

SPEAKER_00: anyway exactly you know having been instead of defending nfts to the death honestly crypto people

Jason Calacanis: should be online being like yeah no run them out of town like run them out of town because it is the in theory it is the exact opposite of what bitcoin and the blockchain promised which came out of

SPEAKER_38: cyberpunk and right my my original handle online from 1988 on was cyber surfer silver surfer with cyber

SPEAKER_01: like i was into this stuff like before these people were the whole cyberpunk aesthetic the whole cyber

SPEAKER_201: aesthetic was that your creativity your own independence your own voice is what made you cool

SPEAKER_74: is what gave you cred right and your ability to help other people participate was what gave you cred right your ability to teach other people to do what you had learned and to pass it on and to

SPEAKER_01: be you know radically inclusive and radically self-reliant and right all those things that are part of the burning man sort of um principles that's that's what nfts need is a set of principles and the principle shouldn't be thou shalt grift on the next group of people thou shall pass the bag thou shall increase the value of a limited asset in a world of abundance it should be thou

SPEAKER_74: shall be creative thou shall pass on what you have learned thou shall be more rad thou shall be more punk

SPEAKER_495: the furthest thing from punk rock is mlm like that's the furthest thing on an aesthetic basis

SPEAKER_00: that's such a good t-shirt and like literally i mean really the furthest thing from punk rock that has ever existed is these two old guys getting high on a couch and turning into bored apes as an ad

Jason Calacanis: like can this be this is the end i think this is the moment that marks the end of this particular whatever killed off icos this is its corollary like that this is the nadir put a bullet as far as i'm

SPEAKER_74: concerned seriously nfts can be created why not make a game i would actually back this company if somebody wants to make a platform where you can make these characters but as making them you have to contribute your assets to the collective so i make a cool set of glasses and i'm the first person

SPEAKER_01: using glasses so that's how i get my cred but that anybody else can take my gra that graphic of the glasses the 3d model of it whatever you're forced to put it into the library anybody who uses it like

SPEAKER_74: a creative commons license has to attribute it back to me even if they change it so it says i changed this jcal made it first molly made a version of it that's even cooler so she's you know version two and then she has her fork on my cool glasses that went on my eight and then somebody makes an even cooler version they're cooler version number three nick version three and let that be you and then the

SPEAKER_106: coolest glasses in the game are the ones that the most people have evolved yeah but it costs nothing

SPEAKER_74: to evolve them right and any creativity you do must be put into the collective that would be punk rock and then it's unstoppable so i took kanye west 800 sneakers put them in the game anonymously ripped them apart deconstructed them and devalued the entire ip of them that's punk rock yep i like this

SPEAKER_00: kid who created the yugo lab it's actually the ultimate it's the uh it's the exact opposite of nft which is non-fungible right this is fungible fungible creations like fundamentally like mod them up

SPEAKER_01: i mean the whole idea is to have them evolve right they always do these uh evolutions of them what do they call it when they evolve them they put the serum or something for anyway are you talking about pokemon now no they do a serum with these crit with the with the with the board apes where they evolve and they drop but then you own the drop it'd be better if you could just evolve them and so some

SPEAKER_66: guy created i don't know if you heard about this with work like almost as a minting creativity yes

SPEAKER_11: like by a contribution to the game you are able to mint an evolution yeah yeah so um there's an artist

SPEAKER_01: who created his name is uh writer rips he's a conceptual artist and he created a project called rr

SPEAKER_38: slash b-a-y-c i thought this is truly punk rock this guy was like you know what would be cool i'm gonna

SPEAKER_01: create my own version of board apes and this l.a conceptual artist uh made it and he said uh i'm

SPEAKER_34: gonna make an art project in response uh to this board a popularity guess how yuga labs responded exactly

SPEAKER_77: they guess what they did sued him they sued him i mean it's so great though take it out back yeah

SPEAKER_15: take it all out back the other thing that i thought was kind of interesting about this uh is that it turns out that maybe the board ape yacht clubs logo might be reminiscent of some other logos in history

SPEAKER_183: amazing i don't know if this is coincidental uh you know sometimes artists just you know do a google search and then they you know find interesting things and they build upon it but this guy right

SPEAKER_01: rips i gotta have this guy on the pod uh we gotta have him on yeah because respect yeah but

Jason Calacanis: no there's a whole long thing there's a whole long like 27 minute youtube video or whatever about all the like racist tropes and dog whistles and weird things that are also embedded in the board ape

SPEAKER_00: like look and it might be a little not everything about it it might be like there might be like some nazi stuff in here like it's all so dirty it's all just so dirty i don't think it's nazi stuff i think

SPEAKER_66: it's just some dipshit artist just found like some skater punk stuff and just did derivative works on it and never actually knew the source of it right right and i was like oh wait it actually oh wait i put a

SPEAKER_20: nazi helmet on my ape whoops yeah it's just just walk away like just we're just gonna walk away this is just gonna be the end anyway if you guys want to do punk rock stuff like you're dead now

SPEAKER_38: i think parodying board apes you know there's a there's a legal parity there's protection for parity

SPEAKER_342: there is transformative purposes yeah so i would just go crazy in just making better board apes

SPEAKER_66: so do like a b board apes shot club or better board hr club and just make more parodies of it and

SPEAKER_38: devalue the whole thing and then make open platforms where people can be creative and awesome and rad yeah and just screw these guys honestly the whole thing to me is just a grift of epic proportion here's my new accessibility to coolness graph got the best producer here's your new x y

SPEAKER_66: axis to wrap this up folks i know we've been going on for a while here all people punk rock right some people mid mlm very few people very few people get to participate in board ape yacht club

SPEAKER_16: and it feels like an mlm to me i don't know what all people get to do that's punk rock yeah that's

SPEAKER_35: a tough one burning man perfect all people are not going to burning man no but they can is the point anybody can or minecraft you have to know how to survive i'm just saying okay but it is

SPEAKER_183: theoretically if you're willing to risk your life you'll get saved that's the other thing about burning man if you screw up and you don't bring water and food you'll be taken care of someone will

SPEAKER_38: save your dumb ass somebody will save your dumb ass if you don't if you're too cold they'll get

SPEAKER_01: you a blanket that's punk rock i want somebody to use like ai like that dolly stuff yeah to then look at the greatest to take every time an ape sells um to make a hundred versions of it with dolly and then remint it as an ai interpretation on a hundred different vectors so they program the ai

SPEAKER_38: come up with different vectors okay make me um you know a matisse version of this make me a avant-garde version of this make me a noir version of this ape and then every time a board ape or a crypto prunk

SPEAKER_01: happens this thing anonymously on a distributed compute network makes a hundred versions of it and then lists it in a hundred different places for sale so you're basically saying like every time you do

SPEAKER_74: commerce here the ai is going to out commerce you how sick would that be love it the derivative

SPEAKER_183: like do something like that let's and give them for free it gives them for free to the first hundred people who buy them yep for a dollar each whatever a dollar each that goes into programming the ai to be even better be great be great and this land grifting that's the other thing that makes me sick

SPEAKER_484: because there's land grifting and land grifting don't even get me started like what i mean i mean

SPEAKER_38: really you can have any amount of land in minecraft and roblox right do you have to pay to build a house my kids are building houses and constructing things all day long in minecraft and roblox i don't

Jason Calacanis: think they're paying anything it's just financialization it's mlm all right before we belabor this even more thank you for listening that's it that's it for our big monday energy we're ready to fight we're ready to fight this week let's go we saddle up we ride at dawn on monday but it's gonna be a good week

SPEAKER_01: it's gonna be a good week like if you're really a crypto punk like yeah crypto punks are not worth

SPEAKER_74: a million dollars each okay if you're gonna be a crypto punk be punk rock punk rock that

SPEAKER_38: seriously people get it together all right we got a big week for you uh molly's gonna keep uh doing

SPEAKER_07: these amazing founder interviews thanks for doing that uh with the launch accelerator classes and we're gonna have the power law author sebastian mallaby uh later this week he got sick last week uh excused absence but we'll interview him this week we got all kinds of good stuff coming this week it's

SPEAKER_93: gonna be a great a great one we'll see you tomorrow yeah see you tomorrow and if you want to

SPEAKER_06: hear us live youtube.com slash this weekend hit the subscribe and then the bell join the nodi gang

Jason Calacanis: do it and join our this weekend startups community on twitter it's super fun

SPEAKER_552: this weekend startups.com slash tc slash tc boom see you tomorrow see you tomorrow everybody bye