SPEAKER_00: I came in here to a hostile environment. It was a road game. I bought courtside seats for me and my friends, Ben Stiller, Timothy Chalamet, and my brother, Josh. And we all went to the game. What a squad. I kid you not. I'm actually friends with Ben Stiller. I'm not with Timothy Chalamet. And so I was like DMing him after the second game. We're in the playoffs now. And I said, hey,

SPEAKER_02: are you going to the game? Because courtside seats in Detroit are basically like $17. So I was like, Ben, hey, let's go to the game. And I got these courtside seats. And he was like, oh yeah,

SPEAKER_03: I want to go. And they tried to block everybody from buying tickets here. So when you go on Ticketmaster, they said you had to have your IP address and your billing address of your credit

SPEAKER_04: card has to be in Detroit and the surrounding area. Of course, they're like, you can't do this.

SPEAKER_03: And I said, oh, I can't. I said, I have a Hulk. I have a Hulk. You know when they say that in the

SPEAKER_07: Avengers? We have a Hulk. That's Loki's big line. Yeah. We have a Hulk. You know what I have? I

SPEAKER_03: have a Heidi. She's not taking no for an answer. You tell Heidi, yeah, no, we can't do that for J. Kyle. You know what Heidi does? Finds a way. Hulk smash. And so Heidi Hulk smash and got me

SPEAKER_04: courtside seats. Shout out to Heidi. I'm going to give her an even bigger bonus this year.

SPEAKER_11: This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash This Week in Startups. Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers and get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. And superpower. The best founders know better health equals better business. Visit superpower.com slash twist to join and skip the wait list.

David Friedberg: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. With me again, Lon Harris, Alex Wilhelm, yada, yada, yada, at Alex, at LONS, at Jason. Yes, those are all incredible

SPEAKER_00: premium. Twitter, X accounts. And apologies for me not being suited up. I am in a delightful hotel in a delightful city, dare I say. Detroit, New Root. I am so taken with the city.

SPEAKER_02: So shout out, Timothy Chalamet. A new bestie for me. I'm just kidding. I'll probably never

SPEAKER_03: see him again. But Penn Stiller and I, my friend, we had a great time. And I wanted to hate the

SPEAKER_19: city. The city has so much love for me. I'm staying at the Shinola Hotel, which is like, I guess based on the watch. Great hotel. I went to this ghost place, had the best hamburger

SPEAKER_03: literally of my life. I think it might have been literally top two or three burgers in my life. Wow. And then I walked around the town. It reminds me of like when Venice, Brooklyn, you know, pick like a hipster, cool town. Austin, same vibes, incredible people. They were so kind to me, except for the one drunk guy who wanted to beat me up when I was walking back from the arena for my

SPEAKER_04: Knicks jersey and the bounce around. Well, you were, you were wearing, yeah, you were wearing the rival. I was in hostile territory, the Knicks one. Anyway, great time was had by all. Shout out to the city of Detroit. Knicks up to one. I have to get home to my family now, but you know, I got to tape the show and get out of here. So I'm going to miss all in this week. But yeah, I got to do some things for myself and my soul. Alex, how are you doing, sir? You look

SPEAKER_28: great. I like the shirt. I like the blazer. Looking great. Thank you. Thank you. This is,

SPEAKER_31: this is Saks Fifth Avenue, actually. I pulled it out of the deeper cuts of the closet. I'm doing good. I'm also very glad that it's Friday because I feel like this has been a busy news week and I could use a couple of days of peace and quiet. Yeah, sure. That'll happen. Something, something

SPEAKER_32: amazing has arrived on the scene, guys. And I think we all want to talk about trucks. So I think

SPEAKER_31: we should just skip right into it and just talk about it. All right. So for everyone, a couple of weeks ago, TechCrunch wrote a story saying that there was a new Bezos backed EV truck company called Slate, perhaps Slate.auto. And everyone was like, what are they doing? Why are they doing this? There's so many trucks out there. Well, the wrappers have come off. It's a small, very

SPEAKER_35: modular EV truck. I saw this and I was like, you know, you need to, you teed it up perfectly,

David Friedberg: Alex, for me, which is if you're going to launch a truck company in the age of Cybertruck, the

SPEAKER_00: electric F-150 and like Rivian, I mean, everybody's got a truck. There's a ton of EV trucks. You got to have a specific angle. And I saw this and I was like, that's the angle. Let's play

SPEAKER_39: the clip. All right, let's go. This is a Slate. This is a Slate. This Slate seats two

SPEAKER_40: and can carry sheets of plywood. Seats two people. This Slate seats five and can fit tons in the front. Oh, a nice frunk. It's actually the same Slate. This is now made by me, Jeff. I work at Slate. Looks like a Bronco. He really does. That's Chris, our CEO. Chris thinks new cars are too expensive and too complicated. A Slate cost in the mid-20s. Brand new. Wait, wait. 25K? Go ahead, Chris. Check out everything that wasn't a car. That means no fancy screen, colored lighting, cooled seats, self-driving, self-parking, automatic cup holders. Yes, that's a thing. But you can add accessories like little screen, big screen, SUV kit, fast track kit, open air kit, one speaker, a bunch of speakers, big bumper, spare tire holder, slatelets, fun grills. It's like a platform. Even funner lights. Colors. Any color. Oh, nice. Really. And you wrap it instead of painting it. That's brilliant. A Slate access point means you can add an accessory now. Oh, and those studs mean you can add other things. Yeah. It's like a potato head. Wait, maybe there's a better analogy. Actually, there is. Slate is the chameleon of trucks and SUVs. That's not a better analogy. Just add the SUV kit. There are three. A Slate is not like other cars or trucks or SUVs. And Slate is not like other car companies. Slate. We built it. You make it.

SPEAKER_19: Genius. I mean, you and I have talked about K-trucks or Kai trucks. What are they called in Japan? K-trucks. K-E-I trucks. These are little purpose-built trucks for small streets. And they have

SPEAKER_04: a little cabin. Sometimes it's two seats. Sometimes it has a back seat. And there's a mini flatbed in the back where you can cover the flatbed. They're super cheap. They're narrow. In a country like Japan, with cities like Tokyo, you know, you park it anywhere. It's got a tiny little engine and it's not meant to go like a hundred miles an hour. It's got like, I don't know if it's a two-cylinder, four-cylinder, tiny little engine. And people have been importing them to the States. There's a couple of websites that do this. And it's amazing. And when I see this truck, I started to think of that. But people like affordable. People love these kind of project cars. I could see this becoming a bit of a phenomenon. If you are, you know, a young person or you're not a person of means or simply you don't want to put your money toward a 50 to $100,000 car and you need a second car or a third car or somebody who just wants a primary car that's just dead simple. You don't want bells and whistles. They can

SPEAKER_03: make it for $25,000. Hey, I think this could be a phenomenon. And what do you think, Alex? What was

SPEAKER_30: your take on it? Like, I want one immediately. Yes, bursting with excitement. Like, this is exactly

SPEAKER_31: what I want. I want to be able to carry things because I have two different double strollers, Jason. Yes. I need some cargo space. But I also live in a town that's very, very narrow because it's made for horses, not cars. Yes. So what I need is a small get-around-the-city EV truck. And while I do see Rivians, I've seen a couple of Cybertrucks here. I've seen a pretty good number of 150 lightnings. They're all way too big for my driveway. Like, even if I wanted one of those very much, it wouldn't fit. And they're $80,000 all in. Yeah. Yeah. This thing, $25,000 before incentives, $20,000-ish afterwards, even if you drop every single option they have, you're still going to walk away for essentially like a quarter. And I don't like to spend my capital on depreciating assets, frankly. So I would literally, if my wife was home right now,

SPEAKER_00: I would be like, honey, guess what? I'm going to put a deposit down on it. And you know, this would be a perfect truck for me for like the ranch or like the nannies or like, you know, going and doing gardening, not screw up the really nice cars we have. Which sometimes I got to put like bags of dirt or chips or something in my back of my Model Y. And I'm like, oh God, you know, I got to put like something down. Like, it just could be a beater truck. Nowhere in this did they

SPEAKER_63: ever mention the fact that this is an electrical vehicle. That's interesting. That was not part of the

SPEAKER_64: pitch. It's not really. They're, they're very focused on the, like, it's a customizable platform,

SPEAKER_66: which I get like people like that. I think even the cyber truck, we've seen how much mileage people who own it are getting out of like, you could wrap it, you can make it different colors. You could style your cyber truck. It becomes a personal expression thing. And I think that's really smart of them to focus on that element of it, because I think people are going to love that, but they don't mention the, the e-venus and they really don't mention like I, I, you guys made fun of the, the Prius C that I drive, but it is great for cities because it's a little bit more compact. It's so maneuverable. That's what I like about it. And driving around Austin, all these guys in their massive trucks, like it's hard to park your four runner on the street in Austin. It would be

SPEAKER_69: much easier to get around in one of these. Yeah. It's super cool. I wish them great success with

SPEAKER_00: this more options, more affordability. And you know, I think this is going to be, if this trade war with China continues, if we go into a recession, value-based products, really do well. I remember this from two or three moments in my career when value-based products, not cheap, I'm using value. This feels like a, in the category of value and also fun. And it also empowers you as the individual to make decisions. So when you start thinking about products and product design, there are luxury products now, luxury products, Steve jobs, a Birkin bag, you know, the Amon hotel, they craft the experience. You pay a large amount of money to be in that person's world. And you have to be willing to trade a large amount of your money for the experience that somebody else has done for you. That is actually what you're doing. It is not about practicality. Luxury begins

SPEAKER_72: where necessity ends. Hey founders. I want to share with you an experience I love. It's when I get an ad that is relevant and not some nonsense. Like the other day, I got an ad for a fund management platform and it was like a new one I'd never heard of. I clicked on the ad because, well, I manage four venture capital firms. We scheduled a call with them and it was amazing. How did this happen? Well, I was on LinkedIn because I like to share links from the podcast, The Speaking Startups, right on LinkedIn. In fact, we live streamed to LinkedIn three days a week and we get a great audience over there. And I happened to be presented with this fund management platform and it was a direct hit. Like, I mean, talk about hitting the bullseye. If you're in business and you're making a product or service, it's really hard to find customers in the business to business space. And doing B2B advertising is hard, but LinkedIn makes it so easy because, you know, their tools let you target people by job title, industry, company size, and more. So this fund management platform obviously was looking for people in venture capital who had a fund size and a number of people, maybe 10 people, maybe 50 people. And they found me. They got me. They split the arrow, boom, right on target. And there's two things you really need to know about LinkedIn going into 2025. First, they broke a billion members and 130 million of those billion are decision makers and 10 million of the billion are C-level executives like myself. Where can you get to those people? It's really hard. And the second thing you need to know, LinkedIn makes an impact. B2B markers report two to five times higher return on ad spend or ROAS return on ad spend. You should know that acronym compared to other social platforms. 79% of B2B markers say LinkedIn is the best platform for paid media. LinkedIn is going to let you build the right relationships. It's going to drive results and you're going to reach your customers in a super respectful business environment. It's not a place where people are dancing around saying inappropriate things or debating politics. Nope. LinkedIn equals business. Business equals LinkedIn. Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. We'll even give you a hundy, $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash this week in startups terms and conditions

SPEAKER_00: do apply. Luxury begins where necessity ends. This is, we're giving you necessity. It's up to you

SPEAKER_02: what you want to do with the necessary components here. I knew this because I knew some people who are extraordinarily wealthy, like private jet wealthy. They would charter jets, you know, had own jets, whatever. And, you know, I was like getting on JetBlue and when JetBlue had its routes and they had like the mint service or whatever, I'd seen somebody who was extraordinarily wealthy, like in economy plus, or like I would see them in mint, which is like this great JetBlue service. And JetBlue was pitched as like, it's a great value. It has some of the feeling of a luxury product, you know, like it's thoughtful, but you could tell people like, I really love it. It's a good deal. It's really nice and a good deal. You don't feel like you're getting screwed. And so in a really bad

SPEAKER_19: economy, it like feels like we're going into consumer sentiments very low. We could go into a recession at any moment. We might have been in a recession for the last year as, you know, uh, Chamath has said he believes we'd been in a recession, but maybe government spending has made it feel like it's not a recession. So maybe the GDP had actually been a little under and the government spending had made it feel like, you know, we were over or yeah, on the borderline, it's recession technically is two quarters of negative GDP. So we might've had like zero GDP or negative. It didn't feel like it for most people, but when it does actually become a recession,

SPEAKER_02: everybody kind of gets into this frugality mindset and they just look for things that feel like value. The Prius was another one when the Prius first came out, Leonardo DiCaprio, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, all these, like, I guess it was the early 2000s. They were like, oh, it's good for the environment. And it's such a deal. And when you pulled up to a valet in one, you kind of got more

SPEAKER_64: shine and virtue signaling points. Yeah. Well, that was the South Park episode. You remember when they're all, they're all smelling their own farts because they just got their Prius. Yeah.

SPEAKER_85: Yes. And there's something about value people like, you know,

SPEAKER_32: but how far we've come. I mean, from the era of just having a hybrid being something that was

SPEAKER_31: kind of risible to now this, this truck's coming out with admittedly a pretty stripped down EV package, Jason. It's just rear wheel drive. It's only 150 mile range, but here's the thing. If I'm going to

SPEAKER_57: buy a car that is inexpensive and easy and low maintenance, I want it to be simple to maintain and run. And like an EV is so much better than an ICE. This is going to be everybody's second car.

SPEAKER_31: Yes. Yes. It's genius. The question is, is it a viable business? The company has raised,

SPEAKER_57: according to tech crunch, I think 111 million, not just Bezos, but also Guggenheim partner CEO and the guy who runs the Dodgers, apparently, but it's going to get a lot more capital, Jason. And these won't come out until I think late 26. So we're about 16, 18 months away from actually hitting the

SPEAKER_04: screen for one, just for sugars and giggles. I think it's going to work. It doesn't need to have a huge margin. And I think they'll make their money from accessories and officially licensed accessories.

SPEAKER_19: So because it's got those bolts on, you're going to have like a ton of creativity, but they're going to be able to come up with all kinds of interesting accessories that you'll buy right now. There aren't too many in there, but because this is a platform and it's just very base, people might be like, you know what? I want to have a speaker system. They'll come out with a

SPEAKER_02: speaker system. That'll be $3,000 for the most kick-ass, awesome speaker system. So when you have a

SPEAKER_19: beach party, you can do it. There'll be a four wheel drive or an all wheel drive or an extra battery pack. Like it's got 150 miles now, but they'll come out with a 300, 400 stackable battery pack. They'll do all kinds of interesting things. And you see this with Teslas because the owners also like to geek out about the cars. I almost bought this for my model Y, but I waited because I'm going to probably upgrade it. And I saw today, they're letting people transfer the self-driving again. So that's like, was the blocker for me. Like I have to pay another 8,000 for self-driving. It's

SPEAKER_95: Oh, transfer it between cars. If you buy a new one.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. So when you trade it in, you have to rebuy it. And I'm like, ah, you know, even me, I like a little bit frugal, even though it might probably need to be, but they have a refrigerator. It's a refrigerator for the back of a model Y that slides into in the model Y, because it doesn't have an engine, doesn't have a transmission, all this other stuff. You open up the back and there's like a little, kind of like the front, a little pit. Well, they made something that fits perfectly into it and then plugs into the power. You turn your car on, you get a little refrigerator

SPEAKER_04: in your trunk. So I was like, oh my God, I got to put in water bottles. I can put in energy drinks, tailgating and tailgating. And you just go back there. And you know,

SPEAKER_19: the Jeep Wrangler has a lot of this kind of stuff. So I think they're going to make a fortune on their store and you could get listed on their store. They could do all kinds of subscriptions.

SPEAKER_03: I love the fact that they took the, um, the screens out and they're just like, your phone's the screen genius. That's really clever.

SPEAKER_04: Like, um, and if you want music, I don't exactly like this. Like you have to bring your own little

SPEAKER_19: speaker. I mean, somebody will come out with an accessory, but there'll be a whole business in doing these. The other thing I thought was very brilliant was the wrapping, which is kind of what Elon did with the Cybertruck, which is like, hey, we're going to give it to you in stainless steel, but by all means, there's a wrapping culture around it. And I think wrapping, uh, wrapping

SPEAKER_28: those might be two grand, three grand. So it's not cheap for a Cybertruck.

SPEAKER_66: But you could also have, you could do pop culture themed ones. Like imagine if you could make your truck look like the Jurassic Park truck, or like make a Ghostbusters Ecto-1 truck or

SPEAKER_31: like people would get really into that, I think. Yeah. And, uh, the company says that wrap kits will start around 500 bucks, Jason. So they're going to start pretty cheap. Now, I think if you want installation and so forth, it's going to be north of the thousand dollar mark, but that's pretty affordable, frankly. And on the Tesla Model Y refrigerator, uh, because Tesla has so many fans, Jason, there's actually a bunch of different refrigerators you can put into your Model Y. Some of them are hidden. Some of them are larger. People love to accessorize, which underscores your point that there's going to be a lot of fat margin to be made there, but give me some knobs. Give me an easy EV. Let me throw some dirt in the back. Sure. 20K. I'm in. So a company, Jason, that we're all pretty excited to be about to see go public is Discord. They make a social chat application popular amongst the gaming world. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a big Discord fan. Uh, our friends at Twit have a big Discord group as well that they use to run their subscription program. Oh yeah. The news is that Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO, is stepping down from his role as CEO. He's

SPEAKER_57: going to be just on the board. They're bringing in a new guy, uh, Human Sakini. Sakini. Sakini, I think. Thank you. Previously of both King and Blizzard. So a gaming background more than a social

SPEAKER_31: or chat background. But the cool thing is this is a company that we've been talking about as getting ready to go public. And so Jason, when I see a major C-suite shift on a company looking towards an IPO, it just smells like traction and progress to me. So I'm pretty excited about this though. Of course,

SPEAKER_57: uh, I don't think we're gonna see Discord file and go out this year, but, uh, very encouraging,

David Friedberg: I'd say from a deck of corn Jason. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a great product. It's pretty sticky, very popular with young people on their desktops. And I use it because there's a podcast or really a,

SPEAKER_19: uh, YouTube show called Knicks fan TV and my friend CP, the franchise, not franchise, franchise. So the fans elected him as like the number one Knicks fan. And it's kind of true. And I went to game two of the Knicks versus, uh, Detroit Pistons at Madison Square Garden with him. So every time the, you know, the, um, season playoffs happen, I, I take him to a game, we go to a game together and, uh, we have a good time and talk about Knicks. Cause he's like the uber super fan. It's very funny because, you know, on the street, I'll get like two or three selfies to everyone he gets. And then we get in the garden, he gets 10 to one because he is like, you know, in his elements was very funny. We were, um, people were bugging out that the two of us were friends and,

SPEAKER_02: um, he uses discord for Collins. So we, there's a way with restream to use their video and their audio. So he runs his show the same way we use zoom to go out to restream and then a restream goes

SPEAKER_19: out. I think he uses, I think discord and then he takes callers cause it's a call in show. So the discord is better than using a phone system cause it's really crispy, you know, nice audio. And so I called in last night to talk about the game. I, I do, I do, we do like a field report. So whoever's in the opposing teams arena, we call it a field report on Knicks fans TV. He had like 6,000 people watching him live. He's a gonna break a hundred thousand subs becoming like a real

SPEAKER_116: business. He was able to quit his job at Cantor Fitzgerald last year and just do his YouTube channel, which is a really incredible. That's amazing. Not alone because my experience with discord.

SPEAKER_118: Yeah. Discord now has 200 million global monthly active users, according to itself. So that is,

Chamath Palihapitiya: uh, top 20 online platform Jason. Okay. Founders let's keep it a buck. Finding the right developers is tough. It's hard, especially when you're trying to run and scale up your startup. You got a lot to do and lemon.io is gonna save you time. They're gonna save you money and a ton of headaches and they're great at what they do. They've done work to find and vet developers who are experienced result oriented and they charge competitive rates. And you also know

SPEAKER_72: that great developers can be hard to find and integrate into your team. So lemon.io handles all that for you. Startups choose lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with at least three years of experience and who are the best of the best, the creme de la creme. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they had great experiences. Here's your call to action. Go to lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Hire developers smarter.

SPEAKER_00: Visit lemon.io slash twist. You guys use it at all for anything? You have like any fan community

SPEAKER_66: you're a part of? There's a lot of like independent creators. They run their whole like their patreon network, like all of their content goes through discord. So that's been mostly my experience with it is like, you know, when you follow like a popular YouTube channel, you sometimes will get active in their discord communities or that'll even be where they stream from sometimes or do event things there. Yeah. I mean, it's, I feel like it's very intimidating as a brand new comer. When you first use discord, the servers, there's so many bells and whistles and features that it does take a few minutes to sort of totally grapple with. But once you're in there, you realize like it's very robust.

SPEAKER_106: There's so much going on. Yeah. It's amazing how different our use cases are. Jason, Nick's lawn,

SPEAKER_31: independent creators and media. For me, indie game studios often throw up a discord when they're building a game in early access. So I'm in like 15 discords for different city builders and automation games. And I can simply just talk to the developers because they're right there. It's fantastic and

SPEAKER_57: very good as a business. According to Bloomberg, the company, uh, Forex revenue from 2020 through 24 to 600 million on an annualized basis. Now, Jason, my take is a company that was valued at 15 billion in 21 probably needs to have at least a billion in revenue to go public and defend that valuation. But again, probably four to six quarters. Like it's not too far away.

SPEAKER_19: So wait, they, did they announce they're going to file? Did they say they're considering it or this

SPEAKER_31: was like a rumor? So everyone's talking about it because you know, big company, big valuation, they turned down that Microsoft offer for 10 billion Citron in an interview with venture beach did say when asked about whether discord heading for an IPO, he said, and I quote, no specific plans, but as you can imagine, hiring someone like Homan is a step in that direction. So definitely on the way and God, we need the liquidity because benchmark, Greylock, spark, index, green Oaks, and dragoneer all lead rounds into discord, not just participated. So there's a ton of private market money, just kind of crying for this thing to go out. And, uh, maybe Figma will kick the door open,

SPEAKER_04: you know, and their business models membership, you pay for like a premium membership and features, or the person who runs the discord pays for a premium or both. I think it's both. You can go

SPEAKER_31: like, what's it called discord octane or discord fire or something like that. And so this subscription payments, but I mean, across 200 million people and given how much everyone uses, like my nephew, who's a big, uh, he's like a senior in high school. Now he only talks to me on discord because he doesn't have a phone because he doesn't want one. I also want to say they're doing a, and don't quote

SPEAKER_66: me on this, but I feel like they have like a Twitch like interface too, where you could do super chats

SPEAKER_103: and you can contribute to creators. I bet they're getting a cut of all of that as well. What else

SPEAKER_19: do we have in the news? This is great for them. Uh, we're going to have some more IPOs. Maybe the market calms down. I saw big news from Uber, you know, a lot of people, because they know I'm affiliated with Uber, uh, the ride sharing company kind of become a meme actually how many times I mentioned it was pretty funny. They're like, did you know, Jason was an early investor in Uber? They're like, no. And they're like, oh, well, when you meet them, you'll know in the first five

SPEAKER_103: minutes. Um, yeah, it's like your, your version of being vegan kills. Yeah, exactly. You know,

SPEAKER_136: yeah. So crossfit vegan Uber angel investment. Absolutely. So, um, you know,

SPEAKER_19: and I'm still along the company. I have exposure to everything else. I got exposure to Waymo, I got exposure to Tesla. I got exposure to everything. So I'm not like talking my book here,

SPEAKER_00: um, all that much. I mean, I am technically, but Volkswagen is one of the top car makers in the world. They came out with an incredible car. It's not the car for me, a Volkswagen bus right now,

SPEAKER_19: but I was, cause we, we have a suburban, which is like the largest SUV you can have. So when we have like a big family trip with a lot of bags, like we're going to Tahoe when we used to go to California, we're going on a road trip. We needed to have like a big, big, big max size, eight, seven, eight people in the car, or in our case, seven, five family members, one or two friends, or, you know, a nanny, tons of bags. Like it's the greatest car ever. Suburban

SPEAKER_02: tank. Love it. But the bus is so cute and it's all EV. And I've been looking at it. I'm like, huh? It's a very cute car. And it also has seven seats, six, seven seat configuration for captain's

SPEAKER_00: chairs in the back row. So like slate, um, it's a bit of a platform and they have self-driving technology. Uber has a network Volkswagen. Tell me how many cars they produce. I don't, I think I remember hearing top five producer in the world, maybe even top three. It looks like number two,

SPEAKER_142: it looks like in 2024, Toyota, number one, Volkswagen, number two, Hyundai three GM four.

SPEAKER_143: Yeah. So they're very, very large global auto manufacturer. Like if you go to South America, you go to Africa, like they're making stuff everywhere. And I don't know what all their

SPEAKER_19: labels are, but they got a big push here. They've been, you know, really trying to get into EV stuff and they're going to do robo taxis with Uber. I believe it's an exclusive, but even if it's not, I had said earlier, like, listen, there's like 20 people working on self-driving. Let's assume half get there. Now you got 10 people get there. Now, what timeframe did the 10 people get there? Well, Waymo's already there at a very high price. So Waymo's in the game, Tesla's almost there, imminently there. Um, and then you have, we ride, you have Zoox, right? So you've got arguably three

SPEAKER_04: or four people, like one really going for it. And then maybe three with operators or something. So we're, you know, we're on the cusp of this. It's going to be a long, you know, 10 year rollout, but Volkswagen has a unique ability to produce a lot of cars. If they're the number two car maker and Uber has the largest ride sharing network, you put those two things together and they took the right approach. I've been saying over and over again, my belief is that the second, God forbid, a kid runs in the street, your dog or your cat runs in the street. And we get on video, somebody getting hit by a self-driving car, whether it's a Waymo or Uber had

SPEAKER_66: one. Elaine Herzberg was her name. This incident happened in 2018. The first recorded case of a

SPEAKER_148: pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. Yeah. And I believe that immediately shut down

SPEAKER_103: Uber and it was in Arizona. It was in Tempe, Arizona. It was an Uber test vehicle. Yeah. And

SPEAKER_04: the woman was playing candy crush. So this was an operator caused problem in addition to self-driving,

SPEAKER_150: right? Because the self-driving was like, you know, level two or something at that time. You

SPEAKER_66: needed to have an operator. The backup driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide,

SPEAKER_149: pled guilty to endangerment and was sentenced to three years probation. Uber was not criminally responsible in the crash. Right. That's very reasonable.

SPEAKER_153: Kind of feel like she should have went to jail for a year. I'm being honest.

SPEAKER_19: Like if you're on your phone and you kill somebody like that happened to your family member to just

SPEAKER_00: get away with a warning. Anyway, I'm going to put that aside. Criminal justice is not our purview here. Exactly. But I think anytime you operate in a city, you should have to do one year and let's call it 10,000 successful rides. I'm just picking a number of folks, but it seems reasonable to me that 10,000 trips of an average of five or 10 miles each gets you into 50 to a hundred thousand miles. I have a

SPEAKER_19: major concern about the rollout of self-driving. I'm super happy about Uber. When we get back from this quick break, I'm going to tell you my concern that could stop the auto industry from doing full

SPEAKER_160: self-driving for years in America and globally. When we get back from this quick break,

SPEAKER_162: your business is as strong as you are. And as a founder, you know, listen, maybe you're running on caffeine four hours of sleep. That's not sustainable. Your startup moves fast and founders are pushing their health to the limit and it's going to catch up with you. That's just the bottom line. But what optimizing your health was as easy as tracking your metrics. Well, that's what super power does. I am a customer of super power. I found out about it from a friend. Now they're here and partners on this week in startups. It's like the ultimate founder health membership is designed to give your body full testing across a hundred plus biomarkers, organ health, hormones, inflammation, and more. You're going to get real data. You get a blood draw, clear insights. And then I did this consultation with a trained clinician and they helped me understand my ratings. There were some things I needed to work on vitamin D, a couple of other personal things. I started working on them. It has literally changed my life. So right now, super power has a 150,000 person wait list, but because you're a twist listener, you can skip the

SPEAKER_19: line, visit superpower.com slash twist unlock peak health today because better health equals better founder, which equals a better business. This is incredible news for Uber. Uber is really up on the

SPEAKER_00: news. I believe of the 20 people trying to do self-driving, half of them will get it done in the same,

SPEAKER_02: let me pick a number, 12 months. Oh, okay. The same 18 months. I'll say 18 months. I'll be a little generous here. I believe 10 companies in the next 18 months will have these products on the road. And in

SPEAKER_19: fact, towards the end of that 18 months without a safety driver, with just a remote watch driver in limited capacity, limited zone, geo fence zones. And it's going to be awesome. I have a fear. The stock market is obsessed with self-driving. They're obsessed with it. And I know this because when you

SPEAKER_00: own these stocks and you see the moves, uh, Tesla announces something, Uber goes down, Uber announces something, Uber goes up. Waymo announces something, Uber goes up, Tesla goes down. It's just, there's

SPEAKER_19: becoming about, or Zoox and Amazon. There's becoming a little bit of, and BYD now getting in on it because they have self-driving, there's becoming, and you know how markets drive this. I think the teams running the self-driving efforts are going to need to come up with a standard for safety.

SPEAKER_00: And it does not, because they're done in local jurisdictions, cities, states, countries have all different jurisdictions. And there's also like in other places, regions, we're going to need to come up with an industry standard, like the MPAA came up with the ratings. This is a PG movie. Oh, Indiana Jones is coming out. We'll come up with PG 13. It's going to be a little scary, but it's not quite an

SPEAKER_19: R. So, but if you have a 10, nine to 12 year old Raiders of the Lost Ark might've been okay, but definitely temple of doom, with the heart, not good for 10 year olds, nine year olds. It's too scary. So I think we have to come up with an industry standard. If we don't have an industry standard, now you're going to get some upstart who feels like they're going to go out of business. If they don't get the announcement, you're going to have a company whose stock is down or whose stock is surging and they, you know, they get pressure from their board or from shareholders or an activist shareholder, go faster, go faster, go faster. We have to catch up with Waymo. We got to catch up with Tesla. We got to catch up with Uber. We got to catch up with BYD. There needs to be an industry standard. I think the industry standard should be any city you go to, you do one year with the safety driver. Everybody agrees to that. So there's not this pressure where you know, Tesla has been giving mixed signals. Is there going to be a safety driver? Is there not going to be a safety driver in what timeline that's putting pressure obviously on Waymo to expand faster. Waymo is probably feeling like, oh my God, Uber and Volkswagen, they have a deal. Okay. Is Uber going to be the neutral platform? Okay. And then BYD in China is probably saying, you know what, we have to get this on the road in Europe and South America before Elon gets there because he's very capable one year with a safety driver, perfect record. Then you're allowed to do a 10 by 10 mile area where you had that safety record. If you want to expand again, one more year, 10,000 more rides.

SPEAKER_130: I think it makes a lot of sense because people, especially people of a certain age,

SPEAKER_66: they'll get into this technology, they'll use it, but they need to like dip their toe and they need to feel comfortable first. And so it's sort of almost a marketing strategy as well. It's like, give people time to adjust to the idea of driverless cars before you just throw them on the streets with them driving everywhere and make everybody feel sort of threatened at first.

SPEAKER_31: No, you guys are both so wrong. We should go faster. This is ridiculous. I've never seen such such mealy mouthed, overly safety conscious. And here's why I think we can go faster. I actually agree with everything. Oh, you're serious. I thought you were joking. Oh no, I'm dead serious. I actually agree that we should have stringent standards. We should have rules and regulations about this. And for context, the Volkswagen Uber deal is going to have people in

SPEAKER_57: the cars and it won't go driverless until 2027 to have time, Jason, to get it right. But I think once you've proven yourself in certain markets and you know how to roll out to new areas, I don't think you should have that many strictures on you because you're not replacing perfect drivers. You're replacing idiot humans behind the wheels of dangerous weapons. And so to me, as long as it's

SPEAKER_53: materially better, I just think we can go faster because we're taking risk out of the system,

SPEAKER_00: even with that. It is a valid argument that if they are even 10% safer than humans, you would want to adopt that technology. That is a very logical approach to it. However, on an industry basis,

SPEAKER_19: it does not matter. You will be judged so much harsher, a hundred times harsher for a self-driving

David Friedberg: car than a human. A human could be on their phone playing Candy Crush, be distracted, kill somebody,

SPEAKER_19: and we don't stop people from driving with their phones. And phone enforcement has not changed. I think they should have cars that ride up right alongside you, videotape you if you're using your phone, pull you over and they should take your phone. Yes. That should be the law. Your phone is confiscated and you get a ticket. Imagine, listen, we all do it folks. Somebody calls, you fumble your phone. You got it. If it's not in a tray, like if you're holding your phone, I'm talking about if you got it in your hand and you're doing this, like we all see people doing. If you're not using hands-free, you got it in your hands. You should get pulled over. You get your a hundred dollar ticket. They take your phone. They put it in the police station. And in 24 hours, you can go pick it up.

SPEAKER_83: This feels quasi legal to me. Like, I don't think they're allowed to confiscate your property. I feel like there's a due process issue. I don't think so. Because a civil asset forfeiture is an

SPEAKER_53: enormous problem with the American police force. If you have a lot of cash in your car,

SPEAKER_101: for example, they can just take it. Right. They can see it, but that's like, you know. Okay. Listen, I don't know the law. You're probably right. I'm going to go ahead and

SPEAKER_19: say you're right. This is the new segment we're doing here called J Cal for president. Yeah. Right. And I already put my first J Cal executive order. This will probably be executive order six through 10. Yeah. So I'm just putting it out there. We have two executive orders. Are you going to sign

SPEAKER_197: your executive orders and hold them up for the camera like Trump style? I'm going to actually do it on the

SPEAKER_32: show. Oh, okay. Great. I love that. Yeah. I thought Jason was going to say your phone gets confiscated and it gets crushed in by, by a machine. So all the information is safe. Yeah. But I, I,

SPEAKER_31: no, I, I really think that if you're driving and texting, you should lose your license. Oh, you're driving a multi-ton vehicle where they're children. I like the idea of a forfeiture.

SPEAKER_162: I mean, they could take your car when you speed over a certain limit. Yeah. I, I have a friend

SPEAKER_204: whose Corvette was put on a flatbed because they were going at a brisk speed. Was, was this friend

SPEAKER_207: going over a hundred, perhaps in a 60 zone? This friend of ours was dumb, young, and had run into a little bit of money and needed to learn a lesson that he has carried with him for a long time now.

SPEAKER_31: And it was before he had kids. I want to add to the story though. Waymo did drop this week an announcement that they are now doing 250,000 paid rides per week up from 200. There's a lot of noise Jason made about like, oh, Tesla did their thing. And now Waymo is trying to step on them. It's alphabet earnings week. Of course that we're going to drop the new number. So I do that as more coincidence than anything, but I want to reiterate that, uh, Waymo going to DC, I still think is clutch

SPEAKER_57: because I think it does show that they're confident enough to put Congress people in self-driving, which to me implies technology is advancing fast enough that we can go faster on the regulatory side because my Lord. What else we got on the docket? That's kind of what I'm saying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_174: You need to sell the old people on it. You got to show them that it works in front of them.

SPEAKER_116: I mean, it works in a controlled zone and controlled weather and you know, just no accidents, please. And come up with an industry standard. Why not? Why wouldn't you have

SPEAKER_53: an industry standard? All right, next up, we're going to the insect route. We're talking about Butterfly Effect, the Chinese company behind the viral Manus AI agent. We talked about this a couple

SPEAKER_31: of weeks back. Everyone was buzzing. It turns out Manus, which was a way to essentially automate tasks very easily, was using some anthropic technology. So some people were like, well, is this really

SPEAKER_57: a breakthrough? Is this discreet repackaging? Whatever the case, Benchmark is in Jason. Oh, they led a $75 million round into Butterfly Effect with participation from other folks, boosting his valuation up to the half billion dollar mark. Where is the company base? I struggled to track down Butterfly Effect. I was going through some, a lot of fire lanes. Wasn't it a Chinese company? Yeah.

SPEAKER_220: Or they were making this announcement from China. I'm a little, I think there's a rule against

SPEAKER_221: investing in China right now. Literally my, my question, my first question was, how did they do

SPEAKER_66: this? I mean, I'm seeing Beijing based is what I'm seeing. Maybe they're spinning the company out and

SPEAKER_04: put it in Singapore or in Hong Kong or something. They could have re-domiciled it and they might have an office in China, which would be fine. So, but there was a bunch of divesting occurring because

SPEAKER_19: the Biden administration, you know, during the Biden administration, they said, yeah, no more

SPEAKER_156: investing in China and China, you know, that's when that chippiness started. Uh, what else do we have

SPEAKER_226: in the docket?

SPEAKER_57: Perplexity has snagged a big deal with upcoming Motorola Razr phones. If you are not young enough

SPEAKER_31: to recall Razrs. Razr? They still make Razrs? Yes. Apparently they brought them back. They're little folding flip phones with a screen on the front.

SPEAKER_57: And, uh, there's the new Razr, Razr Plus and Razr Ultras, which launched on May 15th, will come with Perplexity pre-installed. Now, the context here is that Google's currently in a lot of trouble

SPEAKER_31: for having, uh, blanket, essentially monopolies on people you have been searching their apps on

SPEAKER_57: their phones, if it's Android. Uh, so good for Perplexity. My question for Jason is pretty simple

SPEAKER_31: here. Are they doing too many non-core things as a company? I feel like Perplexity is always in the news and it feels, um, frantic to me, but I'm curious if I'm just being too conservative about how

SPEAKER_57: companies should approach partnerships if they can get major ones. Yeah.

SPEAKER_143: So they seem to be very partnership savvy. I notice a lot of times you get a free year to

SPEAKER_00: Perplexity. So like, I don't know if it's like podcasts or other software companies that are really into bundling and trying to tap into other audiences and quickly get people into the subscription funnel. When you get a year free of something in order to get the year free, I think you have to put your credit card in and you get billed in month 13 kind of thing. I don't know exactly how they do it, but when you do that, you can then count paid subscribers. So your paid subscribers can go up even though they're on a trial, if you have their credit card, but you know, and then you're expecting a certain amount of churn. So you gotta be careful with that. I don't know if they're doing that, but I have seen that, uh, startups do that kind of aggressive tactic.

SPEAKER_66: There is a deal. Uh, you get Perplexity for a free year. If you are signed up to Comcast, Xfinity cable and streaming, uh, TV platform.

SPEAKER_239: So I don't know if you have to put your credit card in to get it for free. You might have to do that. Who knows?

SPEAKER_68: You have to be an Xfinity customer. So you would have to give them your credit card.

David Friedberg: So then maybe they're giving Xfinity half of the money in year two, if you do it. So these kind of commission based deals are very popular with credit cards. If you get somebody a

SPEAKER_19: credit card, you can make, I don't know, 50 to $200. If you get them to open a brokerage account and put a deposit in, you can get like $300. That's why a lot of you'll see, like, if you have Sirius XM or you have Hulu or YouTube TV, when they have like house ads that they run over and over again, it might be for E trade or something because E trade pays them a little bit of money, but then gives them a spiff. So there's an incentive for them to just run the ad in any empty slots they have. But Perplexity seems pretty good at these, um, deals. I do think Perplexity is

David Friedberg: going to have a differentiation issue when, you know, you start to see people get into the habit of chat, GPT, uh, grok, when they're in Twitter, Facebook's, you know, AI, when you're in those things, it's, you know, standing up and getting a hundred million, 200, 300 million people to pay

SPEAKER_19: for a product. Other people are giving away for free. So it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard.

SPEAKER_04: Then there's been plenty of paid search engines that people have tried to take the ads out and give you a paid search engine about five to 25% of consumers, depending on the category, like to pay for stuff. Most people like an ad base. So this is gonna be challenging, but I give them a lot of

SPEAKER_19: credit. So interest in chat GPT over time versus Perplexity. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of unfair.

David Friedberg: Yeah. Chat GPT is such a juggernaut. I might do a better one would be like, well, everything, but chat GPT. So if you did Perplexity, Claude, Grok and Gemini, AI or Gemini, it might be interesting.

SPEAKER_66: As a sort of lay person in the, in the AI world, it really feels like chat GPT, Gemini and Grok are way more visible. And then there's, there's a ton of other companies. And I mean, Claude is like interacting with a lot of applications and like other kinds of, yeah, that seems to be their

SPEAKER_103: sweet spot, Claude. Right. But like by far, those three are like the most prominent. And then everybody else I feel like is in a whole level. Claude is such a good product though. I mean, I use Claude all the time. Right. And Claude is interacting with so many other startups and so many other products that I feel like that kind of is. So this is interesting. You know,

SPEAKER_19: we're looking here at Perplexity, Gemini, Grok spiking there. Um, and it looks like Gemini,

David Friedberg: you know, and Gemini might include other Gemini's like there's a Gemini trust or something like that.

SPEAKER_136: So that's a hard one to parse if we're talking about the actual Gemini, but it's also a star sign,

SPEAKER_116: right? Yeah. Yeah. There might be some baked in interest there if they're using a generic name.

SPEAKER_04: You know, I, I bought a light phone three. I saw the former founder of Pebble wouldn't stop talking about the light phone. Have you guys seen the light phone before? You know, that concept I'm hearing about it for the first time. Okay. So I got a light phone, uh, coming, and this is what it looks like. It's an Android phone. I think it's using the Android operating system. It's, um, basically all the things you need, but without the stuff you don't. So if you need to get directions, you want to play some music, take notes, have a calendar, have an alarm, use your phone. It's got those basic things. It's black and white. You get rid of your screen. I'm going to try this. So when I'm out with my daughters, I have a phone with me, but I don't have like a global streaming YouTube device to watch, you know, Nick's games on and get

SPEAKER_00: totally distracted by and no social media on it. And yeah, I can take my notes if I need them, but I think this could be another trend coming. It kind of is like the slate truck we talked about. Less is more. This is a third of the price. I think I pay for my iPhone at this point. I think

SPEAKER_19: my iPhone was close to $2,000, which I embarrassed to even say that. Cause I always just, I'm just like, I'll get me a max memory, get me max storage. And now I'm actually like, I'm an idiot. Wait a

SPEAKER_00: second. Do I need max storage? I actually don't want to have cloud. So I'm like, yeah, get me the lowest storage. I was just every, I'm an idiot. And then I realized Apple is like literally making their margin from the idiots in their group. And then I'm like, for memory, I'm like, that kind of does matter. So with like laptops, I always try to max out the memory. Cause I feel like you get one extra year. So you have to basically say, what is the cost of the laptop? And if you have max memory, you can get one more year out of your Mac book, if you have max memory. So for an extra $400, if it's a 1500 and you like to keep it for two years, or let's say three years, you can get a fourth year from it. But I think on corporate,

SPEAKER_19: with these Mac book errors, I'm going to go to keep them for three years, sell them back for 500 bucks and then keep upgrading them. I feel like year four on a Mac book air is not fun. No, what do you guys do? How many years?

SPEAKER_66: Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I'm, I ride them until they're the wheels fall off. Like that's my philosophy in general, but yeah, it's, it's what you're from doing that. Once your past three years, you, you start to really notice the device is getting

SPEAKER_103: sluggish as opposed to when you first got it and it was super fast.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah. I, I get my smartphone until the battery is failing me and I change out my gaming PCs whenever I want to play something that I can't handle at max graphics. So it's, it, it depends, but probably three years is a good cycle. I just don't get people who still buy the new iPhone every year. Like, do you really need to have your camera, the back of the case things change?

SPEAKER_106: You're not going to notice. I'm not impressed by it.

SPEAKER_35: Well, I mean, the other thing that's in the news is, you know, the New York times

David Friedberg: is suing open AI for copyright infringement. They got a heck of a case based on my assessment of it. I think it will result in, you know, perhaps a record setting fine for theft of IP. Uh, and you know, these things almost always get settled. I think it could be a billion dollar settlement lawn. Um, and I think that would be fair because I used to subscribe to the New York

SPEAKER_00: Times for wire cutter. Now I ask chat GPT, which I pay for, or Claude, which I pay for. Yeah. Actually, it doesn't come up on club, but it definitely came up on open AI, but I, I will ask what did the review site say is the best air purifier. And I'll specifically say, what is consumer reports and wire cutting? I used to subscribe for consumer reports. I used to subscribe to wire cutter and I'll just ask what are their best ones? And they wind up giving you the answer. Yeah. And it's like, well, that's behind a paywall. And then I'm like, well, how did they get the answer? And it was obvious they were scraping it. Now they're not, they should have paid for a license. They should have done it in advance. And now they're saying, oh, we're going to lose to China if we don't respect IP. Uh, but Ziff Davis has now joined the fray. I see. And Ziff Davis has

SPEAKER_19: a lot of content, a lot of like real technical content. So what's going on with that?

SPEAKER_66: So Dick Ziff Davis says that, uh, open AI has quote, intentionally and relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives of Ziff Davis works, which it claims are infringing on its copyrights and diluting its trademarks. Further claims that open AI use Ziff Davis content to train

SPEAKER_149: AI models and generate responses through chat GPT. They're looking for nine figures in compensation.

SPEAKER_19: I think it's going to be because open AI is the biggest and they're worth 350

SPEAKER_73: billion dollars and they're making 10 billion and they're making that 10 billion because they have the

SPEAKER_00: world's knowledge in there. And, uh, you know, it's pretty clear that they were fast and loose in terms of the early days. I don't know about today, but you know, they're trying to be more thoughtful now, like in retrospect, I think they realized they did the wrong thing, which is great that they realized they did the wrong thing, but now you gotta make amends for it. And they should have a licensing program. You should be able to come to chat GPT and open AI. There should be a form where you say to them, you have my content. This is what my content costs pay me. So if they index this week in startups, I could say, you know what, as long as you link back to it prominently and you link back to the homepage and you link back to the YouTube page, uh, and you use no more than 30 seconds of a clip, I'm okay with it. Like if they came to me with that offer, I might be like, okay, yeah, 30 seconds. I'm fine with, or if they said we'll index, you know, 2000 episodes or whatever, and we'll give you a hundred dollars per episode per year, because it's great content. We'll give you 200,000 a year. If they came to me and said, I'll give you $20,000 a year. Like literally that would be $10 per episode. I'd be like, okay, fine money, $20,000. I'll take it.

SPEAKER_130: Yeah. And I mean, so many media companies, you know, companies that produce journalism, they're struggling so much now they desperately need this kind of revenue boost. They probably

SPEAKER_66: would take a discounted deal if there were some kind of offer being made. And actually we already can see how it would work. Like if you use notebook LM or use Google's deep research, it shows you where it got every piece of information. It hyperlinks it. There are footnotes that you could follow. Like every, every AI engine should be doing that. Did you see this story we posted in the chat? Oregon state lawmakers are now considering a bill that would require big tech companies to pay money based on them using AI, feed that into local newsrooms and journalists. So it would like use some of the profits you're making off of these AI tools to fund professional journalism and provide a financial lifeline to Oregon newsrooms, which is, I think a great idea. Like that's exactly how, you know, like when Netflix wants to go into a new market, like Turkey or France, the local government will sometimes say, okay, but you got to spend 15% of what you earn from the Turkish market,

SPEAKER_255: feed that back into Turkish original content. It's pretty simple to just be generous.

David Friedberg: It's a no brainer. Well, you know, New York Times is probably going to want to go it alone, but I think Disney, New York Times, ESPN, Ziff Davis, Condé Nast, like some of these are major multi-billion dollar, a hundred billion dollar brands. They should just all, tens of billion, they should just all get together and just pile these lawsuits on until opening AI cries uncle and says, okay, here's the

SPEAKER_66: settlement and here's the go forward. Yeah. And these companies have such deep pockets, they could save the next 10 years of American journalism and barely even notice it on their bottom

SPEAKER_00: line. Yeah, they don't care about that. What they care about is precedent, I think, and people in Silicon Valley, I'm not speaking specifically about open AI, they generally don't respect artists. They don't respect content creators because content creators have been suckers and they're like, yeah, we'll build YouTube. We'll build Instagram. Yeah. Give us a fun playground. You give us some traffic and free software and we'll put it there. But over time, people start to say, you know what? Enough's enough. We want some control over our content. It's our content. And, you know, they, they kind of do that. There's also, I don't know if you've seen it and it's kind of like a, I think it's kind of a breaking story. I sort of come up this week, not for private gain.org.

SPEAKER_19: A bunch of folks from open AI and these are, you know, real experts are doing one of these. So they've written this open letter and it's basically to this attorney general or these attorney

SPEAKER_00: generals about this nonprofit structure and what everybody bought into. And, you know, they want to understand these fundamental questions. So they, they really laid it out nicely. Like number one was

SPEAKER_19: understanding opening eyes, charitable purpose, why nonprofit control protects the mission. And, you know, they're using quotes from Sam Altman and other founders, you know, of open AI to kind of say, Hey, this is what we all bought into. Um, and they're really questioning if open AI is going to solve the problem of profit driven AGI and give it away for free to humanity. And it's very interesting because if you look at the signatories, these are some like pretty heavy hitters, people from open AI, but they also did a very smart thing. They went to all the law schools to talk about nonprofits and nonprofits is like a very, I don't know how this concept actually came to be. And I'm going to try to find the history of it at some point, but I would like to understand why we have this nonprofit structure, why religions, you know, why rich people can pop up a nonprofit, hire their families to work for it, donate money to it, and then use it, you know, for all kinds of purposes at, you know, like I'm going to have a nonprofit golf tournament and like all the rules around it, it all feels like

SPEAKER_00: maybe it's unnecessary for us to have nonprofits. Like if you're a rich person, you give a donation, would your donation change if you didn't get the tax break and should nonprofits of a certain size have to pay taxes? And it just seems a little bit weird to me, the whole nonprofit structure, but

SPEAKER_19: you know, in order to preserve the nonprofit structure, allowing open AI or any company to just

SPEAKER_00: flip, flip, flip into for profit. Right. And take the original mission and get rid of it. It's, as other people have said, well, if you can start with a nonprofit and I, as somebody who, you know, I, let's say I made a million dollars in profit from a stock sale, uh, or from income, and I get to give this million dollar donation. Well, then I get two for $1. Let's say if I'm in a high income tax bracket to donate to a nonprofit, I do that for three years. If it turns into a real company, I flip it into a for-profit company. And then I was able to fund it at half price.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah. It seems to purely violate the spirit of what we're talking about. Like the whole point of a nonprofit, we're giving you this tax exempt status, we're giving you all of these special benefits because you're not pursuing a private interest. You're pursuing the public good. So if you could just switch at any time, it's like, well, so this whole time you really have been

SPEAKER_149: serving your private interest, just quietly, you made it look like it was in the public interest. But, so yeah, that, that feels sort of ridiculous to me that you could just change it around at any point. It's like, no, you, you established this. It's, this is what you're doing now. It's a new organization if it's now for private games.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. I said the FT reported also that Apple is going to shift all their US iPhones to India as soon as next year, which is, uh, you know, China's not happy about it,

David Friedberg: but they had set this up as their escape hatch. And here we are, this is their escape hatch.

SPEAKER_19: Yeah. Let's do our founder Friday. Let's get one. Let's get another pairing.

SPEAKER_66: We got one more matchup left to go this week. We're in the midst of our elite eight. Last time, uh, you'll remember med simple from Florianopolis. They are our first final four contender. Congratulations to the team for Florianopolis Brazil. Today, we've got hitch fire from Portsmouth, New Hampshire versus another international contender, Takhtun from Yerevan, Armenia. So first we're going to look for, we're going to look at pitch fire. They are a paid prospecting platform where potential buyers can earn money for reviewing and responding to sales pitches from B2B companies. And just as a reminder, we've asked the companies for this round. They're giving us a insight into

SPEAKER_283: their two year plan. 80% of B2B companies are missing their pipeline number and everybody needs

SPEAKER_285: getting cold prospecting. Let's give you pitch fires to your plan on how we're going to fix this with our paid prospecting platform. Businesses pull buyers in by running paid prospecting campaigns to them over email, offering people money to respond to their sales pitches. Once a buyer responds and receives payment, they automatically join our marketplace and we push them to install our inbox plugins. So why would they do this? Because it removes them from that sales rep sales automation and gives them a shot at potentially making money for their attention. It also helps fund their sales team's paid prospecting efforts. A low level B2B employee gets prospected about 708 times a year. They would push at least nine new sales reps onto pitch fire every year. Pitch fire's path to average $100,000 in revenue in two years is all tied to generating responses from paid pitches. As pitch fire grows, buyer source pitches will be our main source of revenue. Over the next two years, we'll hire eight full-time employees heeding to $80,000 of burn every month in salaries. We'll start with growth marketing, another full stack rent engineer, and a sales rep to push

SPEAKER_290: companies to do paid prospecting. Next, we'll hire a life cycle marketing expert and another sales rep.

SPEAKER_285: At the beginning of next year, we'll have a machine learning and AI engineer on staff full-time.

SPEAKER_292: As we get more volume, we'll need customer success to keep customers on over the next two years.

SPEAKER_285: Our product burn takes about $9,000 a month to operate at peak capacity. Our roadmap will start with adding SMS notifications for people to get pitches, and user reviews to earn trust between buyers and sellers, a UI in our product for paid prospecting campaigns and a company wallet, an integration for marketing team's HubSpots and SOC2 compliance, a chat interface that welcomes rebuttals and allows upsell opportunities, vendor and buyer matching, and user management to expand teams on the buying side. In Q3 of 2026, we'll deploy an AI auto-reply application that will automatically detect cold emails and send it to Pitchfire. And by the end of next year, we'll have a buying agent answering pitches that come in from sales reps. If we can get 7,937 paid pitches responded to, with our 20% cut, we'll hit $100,000 in the last quarter of our two-year plan.

SPEAKER_00: What I like about asking them to do a two-year plan, if you can start to see if they actually have a thesis and they understand how to budget money, and that's what we got here. So your confidence as an investor goes up. Because if people plant that flag and say, Hey, here's what we want. Here's the ask. We're going to raise two and a half million. We're going to spend, we're going to burn a hundred K a month. You can start to have a really granular discussion and look at the assumptions and then start banging on the assumptions and, you know, doing 8,000 intros. I don't know if that was a quarter or maybe that's a month. It doesn't seem like a giant number. If you remember, this was an interesting SaaS company, you get paid to evaluate a product. So I'm making Zoom IML on, Hey, we have this new thing.

David Friedberg: It's better than using Skype. It's better than using Google, whatever they call Google's one, Google Meet. It's better than Google Meet. Would you evaluate it for us and see if it's great? You, if you do, you get this $40. They evaluate, say it's not for us. Great. We take you off the list. You got 40 bucks in your account, but you work at Slack and you evaluate it. And then your Slack team gets whatever they get, like 15 bucks. The other company gets 15 bucks. And you kind of, then you can go take Slack and you can ask people at Zoom and other places. By the way, this is what

SPEAKER_19: happens in the startup community. People always ask their friends to buy their products. Certain accelerators are known for like trading. And I don't think the accelerators encourage people to do this. I just think it happens when you're in a cohort. Hey, you buy mine. I'll buy yours. Founders hack things. So we always have to look at like, okay, yeah, tell us your top 10 customers or which five customers did you get this week? Tell us the names. How did you source them? And if they say, oh, we sourced them while in our accelerator, we say, okay, great. Of those five, we kind of, we'll just kind of laugh it off. Oh yeah, we know that trick. Like, you know, that's great.

SPEAKER_04: Do any of them actually use it and get value? And then once they tell us if they got value, then we're like in a, in a great place with them. Okay. Let's hear our next one.

SPEAKER_66: All right. So from Yerevan Armenia, this is Taktun. They're creating a platform that allows machine manufacturers to develop intelligent devices without having to write all of the complicated code themselves. Taktun is a no-code automation platform that enables machine

SPEAKER_303: manufacturers to make the machines they build intelligent, connected, and autonomous. Over the next eight quarters, we're scaling from a working platform and initial pilots to a robust AI-enabled product deployed across the US and EU. Our journey starts with launching virtual 1.0 and securing our new paying customers. By 2026, we reach autonomous deployment capabilities and begin European expansion. We target 5 million in ARR by early 2027. Revenue accelerates quarter over quarter, while expenses remain stable. We cross breakeven in Q4 2026 and stay profitable from that point forward. Our headcount strategy combines core human hires and full capability AI agents. As of Q1 2025, we have 11 team members. We add new hires quarter by quarter. By Q1 2027, the team includes 24 human employees and 7 AI agents working across engineering, DevOps, support, and QA. We track what matters. Growth in customers, operating efficiency, and cost ratio. Metrics improve quarter over quarter as we scale, showing strong fundamentals without exposing sensitive financial margins. Our operating plan is fully aligned with capital-efficient strategy. We plan to open a 3.6-minute seed round later this year to fund execution for Q1 2027. The capital supports product delivery, go-to-market, and Series A readiness. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_35: Huh. Okay. What do you guys think? Which one is your favorite and why?

SPEAKER_57: I'll start. Taktoon gets my win for a number of reasons, but the most interesting one is that they listed AI agents that they wanted to hire in their employee section. That's new to me. Very

SPEAKER_83: interesting. Yeah, I noticed that too. I thought that was really interesting. They're like,

SPEAKER_66: we're going to have 24 humans working alongside seven AI agents. It reminded me, one of our founder, you companies has created a virtual board of AI characters and they consult them every day, but they gave them different personalities. They're like, this is our marketing expert.

SPEAKER_149: This is our business operations expert. I thought that was really interesting too.

SPEAKER_68: Of these two, I don't want to make it non-competitive, but Taktoon also, I think,

SPEAKER_66: is going to get my vote. I just think it's such a smart idea for a platform. They seem to have already figured out how they're going to grow it and expand it. And I just feel like that to me feels like the future. We're going to have so many companies trying to make smart devices that work

SPEAKER_149: with their software. This just seems like a no brainer to me. Yeah. I think it's going to be a

David Friedberg: clean sweep. You know, as much as I think Pitchfire did a better job on their pitch and I thought their planning was better. I do think it's a bigger opportunity. So I think Taktoon, congratulations.

SPEAKER_64: You're moving on. Taktoon in our second final four contender. So wow. That's very impressive.

SPEAKER_00: Well done to Taktoon. All right, everybody. Another amazing episode of This Week in Startups, a lot more coming on Monday. We'll see you at 12 PM, Texas time, 1 PM, Eastern time, 10 AM, left coast time. If you're interested in Founder University, go to founder.university and learn more. We'll have another cohort starting over the summer. And that's where we have three, 400 teams of two or three co-founders, build their MVP, and then decide if they want to take a little bit of funding from us or maybe incorporate and take their, you know, business idea to the next level and go down the venture track. We're doing a lot of great content over there. You get to hang out in 25 sessions with

SPEAKER_19: us, 25 sessions over 12 weeks. You're going to learn a ton. Founder.university. He's Lon Harris. I'm Jason Calacanis and he's Alex Wilhelm. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_32: Hey everybody. Welcome back to Twist. This is Alex. Today, we have another interview with an awesome Twist 500 company. Now this startup is one that I caught wind of earlier this year when I read that it had gone from 5,000 corporate customers to 10,000 in less than a year after spending four years to get that first 5,000. I looked into the company, didn't fully understand the technology, but thought they were really up to something awesome. Threw them on the list, got them booked for an interview. And then the company, TailScale announced an enormous Series C right before we jumped onto an interview. So please join me in welcoming Avery Peneron, the CEO of TailScale to the show. Avery, how you doing? Hey, pretty good. Hey, how are you?

SPEAKER_315: I'm hanging in there. I love that you're here. And also you guys are a Canadian company, yeah? We are. I'm sitting here in Montreal right now. Montreal. Now, is the company based in Montreal? I thought it was Toronto.

SPEAKER_316: Uh, it's a remote company. So basically all the employees are remote. So, uh, my two co-founders, both named David, one of them lives in Toronto and one of them lives in Berkeley, California.

SPEAKER_32: How do you handle having two different Davids? Do you just call one like California David and one

SPEAKER_316: like North David? No, we called them by their last name. It's, uh, it's Carney and Krosha. Now that just got really complicated because the new prime minister of Canada, his name is Carney. Um,

SPEAKER_315: yes, Mark Carney, um, who got David at, uh, tailscale.com. Cause I feel like that's going to be the hot domain name inside the business. You know what? I haven't actually checked that.

SPEAKER_316: I'm guessing it's Carney cause he, he is sort of the operations focused founder and administrative stuff. I was really unlucky. I got, uh, AP at tailscale.com as one of my, that turned out to be a big mistake because, uh, accounts payable is AP. And so I get a lot of misdirected accounts payable related emails.

SPEAKER_315: Well, that means you're always, you have your finger on the pulse of how much money is going

SPEAKER_32: in and coming out. That's not that place to be. All right. Now, now listen, Avery, uh, tailscale works in the world of secure, uh, sorry, VPNs for secure networks. I want to talk about the technology behind this. Cause I think it's very important for people to understand, but instead of me trying to butcher an explanation of what this is, I think it's best to let you explain and then ask you a couple questions. So for folks out there who don't know, what does tail scale do?

SPEAKER_327: All right. So super simple, uh, answer is tail scale is technically a VPN. That is the like space

SPEAKER_316: in the technology world that it occupies. That doesn't really tell the whole story because VPNs have basically stagnated for 30 years, uh, before tail scale showed up. And so it doesn't work like IP sec or whatever you're used to tail scale uses this new thing called wire guard. And we can talk about wire guard. It's an open source project. I really like it. Um, and tail scale is a mesh VPN, which means it connects anything to anything in any location and all the locations at the same time. So instead of sending all your traffic through a VPN consultator or a VPN server that you might be used to, you can just make a direct connection between point a and point two things that are running tail scale. And so as a really simple example of what a lot of people use our free plan for, you can download tail scale from the app store on your phone and on your laptop. Uh, you log into the same often Google account or Apple account or Microsoft account. Uh, and when you do that, those two devices use our servers to find each other, no matter how many layers of firewalls they're behind without opening any ports or anything like that. And now those two things can talk to each other. So you can access a web server that's running on your laptop, or you can use a feature that we have called tail drop that list. It's sort of like airdrop, but it doesn't depend on Apple equipment and it doesn't depend on physically being on the same network. And you can just send photos from one thing to another. Uh, so if you've ever had the problem of trying to send a photo between an Android device and a Mac, uh, this solves that problem. Now there's many, many other things that does tail scale. Like, you know, it was a VPN that enterprises use for multiple data centers. It's all the same technological problem, which is the VPN problem, but sort of expanded to the modern world. So people are listening to this

SPEAKER_32: probably have heard endless ads from like Nord VPN and the other kind of major consumer players that love to advertise on YouTube and other social panels. Uh, so it is VPN in this context, the same kind of like underlying idea in which you can create essentially a, I was going to say artificial

SPEAKER_206: connection between two things, but one that is distinct from the network that you're on currently.

SPEAKER_335: So similar idea, just a different application. Yeah. There's sort of two kinds of VPNs in the

SPEAKER_316: world. There's the classic original kind of VPN, which is take your stuff, uh, and be able to connect to your stuff when you're not physically right next to it. Right. So it's called a virtual private network. The idea is you had a private network. Now you have a virtual one. It doesn't depend on the physical location anymore when you connect to your private stuff. That term has kind of been stolen by these so-called consumer VPNs or privacy VPNs, uh, that actually don't work like that at all. They let, they let you take your, your traffic and then you wrote it through them where they decrypt it and then send it out to the internet. And so it's more like a virtual public network, but I guess it's the same, uh, acronym. It's the same acronym. Yeah. Yeah. So tail scale is the first kind use it for connecting to your stuff. Now to, to make things a little more complicated, we have a feature called exit nodes that allows you to voluntarily, if you want, write all your traffic through one of your other tail scale nodes. Uh, and we have a partnership with mall VAD, which is the other kind of VPN. So you can subscribe to mall VAD through tail scale and use mall VAD as your exit nodes. So you can kind of do both things at once.

SPEAKER_32: All right. So I got about 80% of that. So I think that's probably enough to go back to the start of this. So I was reading a lot of tail scale material and you guys were talking about how the internet kind of hub and spoke model is just super inefficient because data has to be sent too far. For example, you had an example of going all the way across the United States and back, for example, waste of time, mesh networks allow for closer connectivity points. Can you just explain how that technology works? And then I want to talk about security in a second, but I think mesh is probably a good thing to unpack a little bit.

SPEAKER_316: Yeah. So the really neat thing about tail scale and, and the wire guard protocol that it's based on wire guard creates these super lightweight tunnels. So we're traditionally setting up a VPN tunnel was like difficult and expensive. And so you wanted to have as few tunnels as possible. And you solve that problem by like having one tunnel between you and the center point and then another tunnel from the center point to the other thing. And that's only two tunnels. And that's like pretty manageable as opposed to what tail scale does, which is like, if you've got a thousand nodes on your network, you've got a tunnel from each of those thousand nodes to each of those thousand other nodes, which is, you know, comes out to a million tunnels, right? That, that is a lot of tunnels, but because they're so lightweight, it doesn't matter. But as a result, it means you get a direct connection between the two places. You don't have to go through a center point and it doesn't add latency and there's no, uh, there's no place to get overloaded. So the more nodes you add to your network, the more capacity of the network goes up. So overall there's, there's not a throughput bottleneck like you would get in a traditional architecture.

SPEAKER_32: And the way that tail scale kind of does works is that it sits in the middle, but it doesn't pass all the data through itself, but instead it seems like pass, like pass keys and permissions to allow the mesh

SPEAKER_334: network to send things quickly without having the hub and spoke issues that we just described.

SPEAKER_316: Right. So tail scale, we divide the product and do into what we call the control plane and the data plane. Uh, and it's actually kind of clever. The control plane is very centralized. There's a SAS product that you can log into. It's got a web console and stuff. And it, like you said, it's basically an exchange point for the public keys that are generated on each node that you own. So the nodes that you own generate public private key pairs, the private key never leaves the node. So you get end to end encryption, but they find each other by basically telling the coordination server in the center. It's like, Hey, I'm node X. I'm over here. I have this IP address and I belong to Avery. Come and here's my public key. If you want to talk to me, come find me. Right. And that's basically all the coordination service does. Everything beyond that is a distributed system, right. With no single, uh, with no bottlenecks or single points of failure. So this hybrid centralized distributed system is what makes tail scale so magical.

SPEAKER_348: I started off with notes about your massive growth in the enterprise space. So talk to me about,

SPEAKER_333: um, who are the customers that need tail scale in the corporate world?

SPEAKER_327: So, oh yeah. So businesses, uh, use tail scale and we charge them money because they, they,

SPEAKER_316: they're businesses. They have money and they get a lot of value out of tail scale. Uh, the way that works is all of these people who use tail scale for free, the majority of them are kind of like semi or fully technical kind of people. Uh, technical people have jobs frequently, uh, and, and they find out about tail scale. They really get excited about tail scale. They solve their own problems at home using tail scale, and then they go to work and find out they have the same problems and the way they're solving it sucks. Right. And so they will complain to their coworkers and say like, how come tail scale at home that I'm getting for free can solve this problem. And this junk that you guys are paying tens of thousands of dollars for does not solve this problem. And that's basically how the conversation gets started. Uh, and then we sort of get, you know, either a small number of people using it at work on like some corporate credit card, or it turns into what we call a top down sales. So it like flips, some executive gets word of it and decides to buy it for the company. Uh, so as a result, the way we sell, uh, tail scale is almost exclusively through inbound leads generated in exactly this way. And I, I remember like it's so funny on some of these calls that I'll get called in and there's like the CTO of a bank. Uh, I was thinking, you know, tens of thousands of employees and they're thinking of buying tail scale. And we always ask like, okay, well, what, how did you hear about tail scale? And they're like, well, my friend runs an Airbnb, uh, and to control the Apple TV at his Airbnb, he installed tail scale on the Apple TV. And he was really excited about how well it works. So he suggested that I should buy this for my bank. So here we are. It's always some weird story like that. This really gets at a question that I had,

SPEAKER_32: because it seems like the technology you've built works from the, the, the hobbyist equivalent use case all the way up to the, you know, highly regulated banking use case. And I just, it's so rare to hear of a technology that works across that kind of scale. Was it hard to build it that way?

SPEAKER_333: Or is that just a, a facet of how tail scale works that it does function for people in their bedroom

SPEAKER_327: and then also people in the boardroom? Well, it's good that you mentioned the word scale, because it's also in our company name. Uh, so the, the, the, the name tail scale is actually

SPEAKER_316: started out as a joke. It's the opposite of internet scale. And so the purpose of tail scale, we're like, look, lots of companies, everybody wants to sell the enterprise. Everybody wants to build something that scales to billions of users. Like those problems are like solved more or less, right? Might not be solved really elegantly, but there's some way to solve your problem. If you, if you have billions of users and way too much money, right? The, the problems that are not solved are the ones that like, we actually have to deal with on a daily basis. The long tail of problems that every software developer or technical person needs to deal with. Like, I want to start a dashboard and serve it to my 10 person team. How do I start a dashboard? And it actually turns out to be a nightmare. Like 90% of the work you have to do, make a little dashboard for your team has nothing to do with making the dashboard for your team. Everything about like spinning up virtual machines and containers and opening ports and getting a DNS name registered. And what about a certificate? And how do I make the login process work? And how do I lock out the other people? Where should I open the firewall ports? And we made a list and we're like, this sucks. Why don't we solve that stuff? Right? So tail scale is like for solving the long tail of problems. So we're like, look, we, we are going to target the people that nobody else targets these teeny tiny teams and companies at the very bottom of the scale. And some of these tiny teams are in big companies, right? Like, you know, your small team still needs to make a dashboard and your tech, your corporate architecture does not make that easier. What has happened in the subsequent years is that tail scale keeps getting pulled up market, which is a good way to go. We very rarely try to push up market, if that makes sense. We have actually been really resistant to taking on big contracts that are going to distract us too much from building like the core product that we know is good for everybody. But every now and then the core product that we built is like just one little, you know, one little feature away from like, Hey, my 10,000 person company can adopt it now. Could you just do like this one thing? And we're like, yeah, that seems like a good idea. So we build the one thing, but like a bunch of other companies suddenly can now use tail scale. And so we are now up to the point where we're seeing like million dollar a year contracts with very big companies with really high regulatory requirements. Then we got there just incrementally piece by piece by not chasing them. If that makes sense, we do very little of the actual chasing. And that makes us pretty unique because the nice thing about starting at the bottom is that you can't build a product that is too difficult to roll out that is too expensive and slow to get started because people are just not going to do it, right? The five person company doesn't have anybody with enough time to roll out an actual complicated VPN product, but they have enough time to spend the five minutes to install tail scale. And that means this really nice experience can go all the way up to the enterprise where they're absolutely not used to that. They're used to products that they buy that are going to take a six month rollout period and a whole team of people to roll it out. And they're just sort of like boggled when they try tail scale. And it's like, Hey, I'm done already.

SPEAKER_32: Hey, I mean, great. But I'm a little perplexed between the fact that you're being pulled up market, that you have tons of inbound demand, things are going well. Why raise a 100 and I think it was 60 million dollar series. Because it sounds like you guys could have just kept growing without more external capital, a rare and awesome place to be in, but your GTM machine doesn't seem to eat 10 million a

SPEAKER_333: month. So why every why raise more capital now? Great question. So tail scale is a very efficient

SPEAKER_316: company and tail scale is a very product. So those two things together mean that we technically can, we can switch to a path of profitability whenever we want. And I try to run the company in such a way that whenever we need to, we could just say, Okay, that's it, put on the brakes on the cost growth, and like, get it under control. And we can weather any storm. Right. And that's obviously been super valuable in the last little while with the like ups and downs in the market and so on. But I also have another saying, which is that the best time to raise money is when you don't need any money. So, you know, not needing any money has been a really good asset to us. So we actually haven't at the time we raised our series C, which is we announced a week ago, and closed a few days before that. Or sorry, we announced it yesterday. Yeah, time flies. I was like, wait, can I really get my notes that wrong? It scared me. Closed about a week ago. There you go. Yeah. But at the time we had that announcement, we actually spent less than half of the series B round that we raised three years previous. And so the question is like, look, if you're spending money that slowly, why do you need even more money? And and the answer is pretty simple. Like, first of all, it's the right time to raise money right now. Secondly, we are getting pulled up market sort of faster than we expected. And those opportunities getting appearing faster than we expected. So we talked about this, like, you know, we doubled from 5000 to 10,000 paying customers, which does not include the free paying customers, by the way, it only includes core organizations in the two months since we announced that we've gone up another 20% in terms of number of customers, right? So it's just it's it's it's going up really fast. And the customers that that's the customers we're getting that we're making money from, there's also this like, even longer tail of customers that we almost get, right? But if only you had this, if only you had this, if only you had this, if only had this, and it's a whole bunch of little things for the most part, right? But if we just go after those little things, the revenue growth is going to be extremely high. And so this comes down to just the financial concept of ROI, like, do I need to spend the money? No, I can be profitable without spending the money. But if I spend this money, you can make even more money, and everybody wins faster. And so really, you know, you do the do the formulas is like, Oh, this is a really nice equation.

SPEAKER_32: You guys did mention AI, essentially demand is part of your series. And I presume that I've been thinking too small, because when I I'm learning more about, you know, high bandwidth memory, and how people are using photonics inside data centers to get data moved around faster and so forth. But I presume you guys come into play when I have a data center talking to a data center versus

SPEAKER_333: inside of said data center.

SPEAKER_327: Tailscale gets used in all of these situations, right? So like the the internet layer does not

SPEAKER_316: provide authentication or encryption by default, right? And people, especially in the AI world, are starting to realize, Hey, you know what, everybody's sending some incredibly ridiculously sensitive stuff to these AIs, maybe we should like encrypt it on the way there. Also, AI companies have this pretty much uniformly, they all have this problem. Their GPUs are in one place, which is the cheapest or only place they can get a GPU because GPUs are an extreme shortage. That place is probably not AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, right? The rest of their stuff is probably best hosted in one of the big clouds. And so they immediately have what's called a multi cloud problem, right? And before AI, the general advice is like, just don't have multi cloud problems, stick with one cloud provider and just be super loyal. Don't do it, it's horrible, right? Just stay away from this. But now everybody's got to get a GPU from somewhere else, they find themselves in a world with multi cloud problems. And so there is no product that makes your multi cloud problems not terrible, except tail scale, which doesn't care about the physical topology of your network. And so AI companies caught on to this very early. We're actually, I will remain a little embarrassed about it. We didn't notice until mid last year, that most AI companies in the world were using tail scale. We didn't know we'd like had won the market, we there was no mention of AI or machine learning or GPUs anywhere on our website, because we were just like busy with other stuff. Right. And then when we finally decided to investigate, it's like, hey, it seems like there's a lot of AI companies that are like showing up in our support ticket queue. Should we look into this? We looked into it. It's like, oh, they all love us a lot. And they all go to the same conferences. They all recommend tail scale to each other. Of course, there's lots of employees that jump from an AI company to another, they'll leave a big company, found a new one, they bring tail scale with them because tail scale is the networking thing that just solves the problem. So they can get back to their AI. If you had to pick a next project

SPEAKER_32: tomorrow, and you had no choice, you couldn't say no, you had to do two things at once.

SPEAKER_333: What's another thing you would want to bring to the internet that would improve the foundation for digital humanity the most for like the next 15, 20, 50 years?

SPEAKER_327: So that's a big question. I don't know the most impactful thing that we could add to the internet.

SPEAKER_316: I know what I would add. One of my friends, about 20 years ago, very insightful friend, he told me, Avery, there's only three things in computing. There's compute, there's storage, and then there's networking that connects them to each other. Right? There's many different kinds of compute, there's many different kinds of storage, there's many different kinds of interconnects, but those are the only three kinds of things. Right? And if you look at the way the internet works today, right? It works the way it does actually, because we failed at the networking part, it stopped evolving 30 years ago. Right? Therefore, we ran out of IP addresses, we had to create all these firewalls and things. Now the only things that you can connect are like your device to the cloud. Right? And then you can connect another device to the cloud, and you can get data to transfer like by going to the cloud and back. But you just can't connect a device to another device, the way the original internet was supposed to work, because we ran out of IPs. And we don't trust people, so we had to make firewalls. And then we had to have NATs. The fact that networking stalled, meant that how we do compute and storage had to evolve in this like really inefficient direction, where now I have to pay rent to Amazon for everything. Right? Because there's only they have enough IP addresses, basically, right? So now that networking is fixed, right? Thinking ahead a little bit, obviously, tail skill isn't in everyone's hands. But let's imagine a world where it is, and it's time for everybody to launch a new product. Right? And how that networking is fixed, you can start thinking, how am I going to do storage differently? Right? Peer to peer storage is an interesting concept that like dies every time someone starts, because how do you connect the peers to each other? Right? And they start connecting peers to each other, and you realize it's 99% of the work and you don't have time to work on storage anymore. Right? So I would love a world where you can just like, you know, I've got tons of free disk space on tons of computers. I've scattered everywhere, but I can't use it. I have to go rent it at 10 times the price from Amazon instead. Right? Or Google or Apple or whatever. Yeah, AWS is a stand in for any kind of modern hyperscale cloud. Yeah. And then I've got and then, you know, if you've got storage, well, what about compute? Well, I've got lots of extra compute. I joke sometimes about the supercomputer in my pocket, like my phone is, right? And my phone is actually a dumb terminal in the same sense as an IBM dumb terminal back in the 1970s. Right? It doesn't, if you unplug it from the cloud, it doesn't do anything anymore. Right? That's a really terrible thing to say about a supercomputer. It's like, oh my god, this thing is insanely powerful. It has evolved like hundreds of thousands of times faster in the last few decades. And I can't do anything with it without plugging it into some cloud and paying rent. Why? Because of compute and storage and network. Right? So we can solve that triad, but only once we've really truly fixed the networking problem. Once we fix that, a whole bunch of stuff is suddenly going to start sort of come on unblock. And I think

SPEAKER_333: that's where the magic can come in. Can I ask an idiot question? Because all that sounds great, but I want to make sure that I'm fully tracking you. So essentially, because we ran out of IP addresses,

SPEAKER_32: I can't have six different IP addresses for my six computers that I have here. And therefore, I can't access their storage super easily from anywhere that I want. So I have to go to a centralized bucket, which is AWS, etc. So if we could get around our problem, then any spare compute,

SPEAKER_333: any spare storage with proper encryption, and so forth, could be used levered and kind of brought online for general, oh, that's awesome. Yeah, that's, and if you want to get a little more

SPEAKER_316: complicated, so the reason I use storage before compute, because both of those things benefit from being remotely located, as soon as you stop using cloud for storage, you're going to run into the call so called durability problem, right? It's like, look, my storage is great. I have this really big hard drive in my house, but what if it dies? Right? It's no good if all my data disappears. That's like, that is definitely 30 year old technology stuff, right? If it's in the cloud, all my data is not going to disappear unless I delete it or somebody hacks it. But if you have a good distributed storage system, you can share storage with like your friends, hard drives in their houses, or even people you don't know, and it's encrypted, right? Then when your hard drive dies, it still exists somewhere else. And this is why it's so important for peer to peer devices to be able to talk to each other. So you can like spread this content around so that in case the drive dies, your system doesn't die. The only people who can do that today are the big clouds, because they have all this stuff in one place. And they're all doing these tricks with multiple hard drives in the background that you don't see. But we could do that with our own stuff at 10 times cheaper prices with the same exact hardware, if only the networking worked properly.

SPEAKER_331: All right, I'm being yelled at by the production team to wrap it up. Avery, I could talk to you

SPEAKER_32: all day long. This has been such a treat. Thank you for teaching me a lot of stuff. Two things before you go. What's the URL? And what is a role you are having a hard time hiring for?

SPEAKER_327: All right, let's see. Well, tailscale.com is the URL. I'm sure you'll have it posted somewhere in the

SPEAKER_320: It'll be in the section down below show notes, etc. Yeah. Excellent. And I'd say that the role

SPEAKER_327: that we are, of course, we just raised a bunch of money, we're going to be spending that money. So we are hiring for engineers in particular, the hardest kind of engineer to hire for is,

SPEAKER_316: is what I would call the networking platform engineer, people who really truly understand way down at layer three, and want to make a difference down there. And I know those people exist, but they are hard to find. And there's they're not making more of them. So there's this sort of like, a limited number of these people out there. And I would love if those people would apply for tailscale because we've got some really fun projects that we're working on.

SPEAKER_331: All right, well, Avery, a real treat. Thank you so much. And for everyone else is

SPEAKER_315: tailscale.com. All right, we'll see you all next time.