SPEAKER_00: And Bench, oh my God, that just happened last week, and that's a big blowout. And they did it in spectacular fashion by screwing over all of their customers, apparently, allegedly, according to reports. I got to put all these caveats in here so I don't create another Palmer Luckey situation.

SPEAKER_02: But if that's true, I got to give it to Bench because, my God, what a flame out. And Envision, what a great product that was. Everybody loved it. They were up against Figma. They were up against Adobe. Really hard to make it work. I'm not sure exactly how that one went out, but I got to give it to Bench, man.

SPEAKER_03: They just blew up in spectacular fashion this past week.

SPEAKER_05: At the end of the year, people doing their taxes. Taxes. God, f*** them at the end of the year.

SPEAKER_00: Bookkeeping company went up in flames. And then the founder went on like a tweet storm about his ousting, and now people are trying to figure out which VC took him for the death walk. Somebody took him for a Fredo walk.

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SPEAKER_02: All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis. He's Alex Wilhelm. And it is the end of the year, so we're doing our annual twisty award.

SPEAKER_18: Yes, these are the twisty awards for 2024. We've done this in the past, and we're doing it again.

SPEAKER_02: Let's get started. Breakout Startup of the Year is our first category. Who are our nominations? Alex.

SPEAKER_21: All right. So in the nominations for Breakout Startup of the Year, first on the list is Perplexity.

SPEAKER_24: This is an AI search engine that we have all heard of, we have all used. It raised tons of money. It grew quickly. It got embroiled in controversies about plagiarism and publishing and rights. It has been on everyone's lips. It has been, I think, a company that's been impossible to ignore. So Perplexity is the first one for our Breakout Startup of the Year. Next up is Blue Sky. Now, Jason, I know you're a big fan of X. I know a lot of people love it. I know some other people in my life who are on the other side of that coin. Blue Sky, I think, did a reasonable job of capitalizing on some people's disagreement with X's owner and has grown very rapidly, especially since the election. So I think they really have broken out this year.

SPEAKER_26: They did break out, yeah. Who else we got?

SPEAKER_24: Codium. Recently had them on the show. I picked Codium amongst all of the companies in the market that are doing AI programming assistant work because I think their new IDE called Windsurf, which is the place you actually do the programming on your computer in, is so awesome that they have really pushed the state of the art forward, and they grew a lot this year. So I think it kind of fits all those buckets at once. All right. And then finally, Harvey. It's the only vertical AI company on the list, but I was going back through a list of them, and Harvey said that it had tripled ARR in, like, the first couple quarters of this year. So to me, that is indicative of a company that has managed to take a new technology to an old vertical and crack the ARR code.

SPEAKER_28: All right. And who do you have as your winner, Alex? My winner is Perplexity.

SPEAKER_02: I think that's a great choice.

SPEAKER_34: They did break out. I'm going to go with Codium. I think these code helping stuff is, you know, these co-pilots are going to change the world. We'll have many downstream effects. I do like Perplexity. It reminds me a lot of what I tried to do with Mahalo before AI was really available in doing, like, these more rich search results. And I kind of got a lot of my ideas from a company called Naver, which is the search engine in Korea that was really the innovator in what we called, you know, at the time is this, like, dynamic search results. So I think Perplexity, I'm not, like, a long-term fan of it because I think that, you know, a lot of the UI interface stuff that they're creating is going to be easily coppable. And I don't think that they have, like, a lot of proprietary data there. So I do think they did break out, but I don't think they're going to have a lasting effect.

SPEAKER_02: But I could be wrong. So I'm willing to hold it. And, you know, there's another one I want to add to this space, which is Calci and Polymarket, I want to add here, as pencils, as nominations.

SPEAKER_15: And so then, for me, it would be Codium and Polymarket or Calci. If I edit those two, would that change your thing? No.

SPEAKER_24: So I thought a lot about the prediction markets because, I mean, we've all been watching them, especially the last six months. The problem that I have with them is that people, I think, misread the data. They look at a Polymarket chart and they say, oh, 77% chance that Jason has more than 19 sips of coffee on Twist today. And that's actually not true. It's the current market consensus is that there is a 77% chance. That does not mean that it is actually reality. And so I think people- That's true.

SPEAKER_34: People don't understand. Yeah, people don't understand it. I agree 100%. But it's serving a different purpose. It's just another data point.

SPEAKER_02: So I'm going to stick with Codium, but I just want to put as my second nomination, those two prediction markets. Okay.

SPEAKER_24: Look, other names that I didn't put on the list because they're too small, I think Tolbit and Human Native, with the AI media copyright marketplaces are going to be huge. Yeah, they'll be huge too.

SPEAKER_46: So maybe next year.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, maybe. Exactly. Maybe next year.

SPEAKER_15: Maybe next year. All right. Here we go.

SPEAKER_02: The next category is pre-IPO startup of the year. So this is a startup that's been around for a while, but it's before it's IPO.

SPEAKER_34: So these are private market companies. Oh, and look at this, a little graphic. Pre-IPO startup of the year. Who do we got, Alex?

SPEAKER_21: Beautiful.

SPEAKER_24: Well, coming up in this list are names that everyone knows and love, CoreWeave, Whiz, ScaleAI, Databricks, Andrel, and SpaceX. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. This is like everyone's favorite list of companies. Oh, my Lord.

SPEAKER_34: Yeah, just looking at these, CoreWeave, if people don't know, that's like what they call a neocloud, right? A new cloud made of GPUs. They really got lucky to have bought a bunch of these H100s early. There's a bunch of financing uniqueness to this company. I'll just put it that way. Yeah, and then you have Databricks, which just raised the largest private round ever. Andrel and SpaceX, obviously crushing it.

SPEAKER_00: So this one could go anywhere. You know, it's obvious to me that SpaceX is the biggest winner here because they're the largest. They're doing the most important work. So for me, this is an easy one. I'm going to just call it SpaceX. SpaceX, but I'm going to give my honorable mention to Andrel.

SPEAKER_08: Now, I know that's a little spicy because Palmer Luckey and I have had some differences in the past.

SPEAKER_57: Yeah, you guys get along about as well as two rats in the same set.

SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll just put it out here right now. The disagreement I had with Palmer Luckey was because we had a podcast. There was a bunch of journalists reporting that he had been fired from Facebook because he had funded a bunch of trolls to do anti-Hillary stuff.

SPEAKER_08: He denies that ever happened. He did get fired from Facebook. We know that because there's been a bunch of information since that actually the people at Facebook regret doing it.

SPEAKER_59: Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: They regret bowing to the pressure and firing him. He told me he doesn't believe that these reports in the press were accurate. I said to him, well, why don't you sue them? He says, well, it won't make a difference. I actually think it would, but I'm going to put it out here right now. Consider this a formal apology to Palmer Luckey. People can clip it. They can dunk on me. If those stories are wrong and there's a significant chance they were, my hot take on it was you should never covertly fund these political trolling things because it'll blow back on you, your family, your employees, et cetera. And as a leader, just own it. And if you want to host a Trump fundraiser like Sachs did and Chamoff did, they took the bullets. In this case, the idea was he was doing it covertly.

SPEAKER_00: But that may not be true. And if it's not true, then I made a mistake for which I apologize unequivocally for my hot take. And my hot take would be the opposite, which is if you didn't do it, my hot take's wrong.

SPEAKER_08: And since that time, I am always very careful now because we know we do have some bias in the press at times. It's just the nature of the press today. They pick sides, whether it's Fox News picking a side or Rachel Maddow picking a side.

SPEAKER_61: Pirate wires versus think progress.

SPEAKER_08: Sure. This is a different journalistic world than it was when I made those comments. People do pick sides. And at that time, they pick a side. Well, I'll just put it out there. I now am super cautious to caveat my hot takes with if it's true, if it's true that he did this.

SPEAKER_02: Allegedly. Like, I really lean into that. You can look at my early stories where I might just take a press story and say, oh, my God, Palmer's an idiot for doing this. I regret saying it that way. I should have said, if this is true, it's idiotic to do that and make it a little less personal because he obviously took it very personal. And I said it in a very personal way. So I apologize for saying it in a personal way. If it's not true, obviously, my take is 100% wrong. I do wish he would dunk and sue those publications to force a correction. Those publications still are holding their position that he was fired for doing that. He says he didn't. I don't know where that went on it.

SPEAKER_67: And then I think no one wants to go to Discovery and have.

SPEAKER_02: But even if he wrote a legal letter, I mean, he's a billionaire.

SPEAKER_34: He could write a couple of letters, put a lot of pressure on them, and then they would have to, you know, put up or shut up.

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SPEAKER_74: Depending on anti-slap lawsuits. But anyways, Anderil is on the list.

SPEAKER_38: And I put the Anderil there.

SPEAKER_02: I mean, I know this is going to get clipped. And some people are going to dunk on me. Some people are going to say I'm not apologizing. I'm explaining a nuanced situation.

SPEAKER_00: I have, over the years, realized that some of the stuff in the press, I don't trust as much as I did back in the day. And the press has taken sides. It's just the nature of the press today. It's more opinionated.

SPEAKER_77: It's more taking sides. So that's that. SpaceX is my obvious winner. And Anderil is my number two.

SPEAKER_43: All right.

SPEAKER_38: So I want to add a little bit on these companies just to provide people context why we thought they were. Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_79: And then you're. Who do you do?

SPEAKER_38: Yeah. But I'm going to work my way there. So CoreWeave, the reason why of the GPU clouds, Jason, this one was, I think, the pre-IPO one to put in.

SPEAKER_24: It's because the latest reporting, oops, after that spiel, was that it could target up to a $35 billion valuation next year, which is such a large number for an IPO even now in the unicorn era that, to me, it's a sit up and take notes kind of moment. So shout out to CoreWeave if they pull it off. Wiz, don't forget, is the company that turned down that buyout offer from Google. And they have cybersecurity, I think, with some Israeli roots. And it is growing so fast. And if they're targeting a billion dollars in ARR next year, then they just, they have to be on an IPO cadence. And they're just so impressive. Love them. Scale AI, I read that they, I think it was tripled or quadrupled their revenue in the first half of this year. Just a super impressive company. Was early in the AI thing. Clearly an IPO candidate. And I didn't pick Databricks because I am convinced that Aligazi is going to die as the CEO of a private company.

SPEAKER_38: He's never going to take it out. Really? And I'm saying this to jinx it. I'm saying this to deliberately anti-knock on wood to get the company to eventually go out. I picked CoreWeave. And then I changed my notes to Andrel because we talked before the show. Oh, so Andrel's your number one. Okay. And CoreWeave's number two. No, I meant CoreWeave. I changed it because I thought we were doing one for the two of us. I'm picking CoreWeave. I think it's going to be such a hot IPO. And I can't wait to see the gross margins.

SPEAKER_83: Who's your number two if I were to give you a number two?

SPEAKER_57: So SpaceX is probably it.

SPEAKER_24: But to me, I guess the bias I had in this list was who might go public next year, right? Is there a chance that we'll see them list in 2025?

SPEAKER_20: And to me, I don't see SpaceX doing that. I haven't heard rumblings about that.

SPEAKER_34: Imagine if Andrel did with Palmer's profile and the cool videos they're putting out. I mean, Andrel would be like the IPO of all meme stocks. That would be the meme IPO of all time because it's just like people, you say like new military technology, you just think Andrel. You know, it's kind of like Uber or Stripe or SpaceX in that regard. You say space, you say finance, you say transportation. Like one name comes to mind. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't want to be like, yeah, they are the Xerox.

SPEAKER_31: They are the Uber. They are the verb. All right. They're part of a consortium, Jason. SpaceX and Andrel and well, a reported consortium, a reported it hasn't been.

SPEAKER_19: Nobody has allegedly if it's true, if it's true. The lack of pushback, I think, indicates that there is there's definitely conversations

SPEAKER_02: are occurring, probably. I don't know who's driving it, but I love competition. We love competition. Main character of the year. This is something we've talked about is the main character every week on This Week in Service. We try to think who's the main character this week and get him on the program to be a minor character or whatever.

SPEAKER_22: But we love the main character. This is the person who takes up a lot of the energy in the room. Look at the beautiful graphic. Who do we got?

SPEAKER_92: So first of all, the PayPal mafia.

SPEAKER_24: This is several names in one. A little bit of a cheat, but let's be honest, it's the same crew we've been talking about for a while, all in one bucket. Then just because I know Jason is her number one fan, we made sure to nominate Lena Khan as the main character of the year. Then also the CEO of TikTok, Xiao Chu. I think that he has flown more under the radar this year than he should have. There's so much else going on. We forgot that TikTok has been on this countdown to destruction for so long. And now Trump's weighed in, the Supreme Court's involved, an easy candidate for a main character of the year, even if we didn't talk about him quite as much as our last candidate, Sam Altman, who has been, I don't know, Jason, ubiquitous for-

SPEAKER_95: Crazy, yeah.

SPEAKER_34: I mean, well, I mean, he's the dealmaker of all dealmakers, maybe a strength, maybe even

SPEAKER_02: like in terms of superpower, maybe even sometimes your superpower can work against you too much dealmaking to create a bit of chaos, right? So this is a hard one because main character of the year is not necessarily correlated with like success or whatever. It's just kind of like you're talked about. It could be infamy. It could be praise. It could be any of those. Who did you pick? Ladies first, give it a shot, Alex.

SPEAKER_39: Go ahead.

SPEAKER_24: I picked PayPal Mafia because I think that, yeah, I felt a little bad. Going back to the broadcaster's takes being spicy, I now understand exactly why award shows

SPEAKER_38: will take a big category and give it to someone random because then it gets people talking. Like I could have picked Lena Kahn here and pushed your buttons and made you do a reaction, but I really do think that the PayPal kids have been so inescapable that nothing else makes

SPEAKER_20: sense.

SPEAKER_34: On all sides. I mean, even, you know, Keith Raboy, Reid Hoffman on the other side of the aisle politically. I mean, they're just everywhere.

SPEAKER_77: And so it's pretty obvious that the main character of the year was the PayPal Mafia. Obviously, Elon, Teal, Sax, Musk, Keith Raboy.

SPEAKER_00: It's obvious that they're the main characters for 2024. But I'm going to give a shout out to Lena Kahn as my runner up and my favorite because, my lord, the wrath of terror and suffering and pain and anti-capitalism that she put into our industry has caused complete chaos. I am so glad that she is going to be a partner at Y Combinator. Congratulations on her securing the bag at YC.

SPEAKER_38: We need to have buttons on the show. One button that I can push that says, Alex does not entirely endorse this view. And then one for you entitled, I'm currently joking. She's not yet been hired by Y Combinator Orange. She will be.

SPEAKER_106: Guaranteed. Yep.

SPEAKER_00: You know how I know? She spoke there like three or four times. Yeah. Like, what is she doing going there pandering to startups?

SPEAKER_08: The only way she can justify her anti-capitalistic, anti-free markets, you know, approach is to say, I'm doing it on behalf of the tiny startups. When in fact, she has damaged tiny startups by not allowing there to be exits, which then would allow VCs and LPs to recirculate capital and allow founders to secure mini to modest

SPEAKER_00: bags that would then let them create a diaspora of people who were part of the Figma purchase or this purchase or that purchase.

SPEAKER_15: So I will give her zero credit. She did not help tiny startups. Her reign of terror is over, but I guarantee you she will be, Gary Tan, will offer her a position. I'm guaranteeing it right here.

SPEAKER_38: I'm just laughing because every time we bring this up, I'm like, Jason, you do know that I have a blog post from early 2023 all about this exact topic.

SPEAKER_113: Well, everybody can look that up on Cautious Optimism. Here we go.

SPEAKER_38: I'll throw a link to it. All right. Let's move on to our next category. This is fun. Okay. Bag Secure of the Year.

SPEAKER_115: Let's see who got nominated.

SPEAKER_116: Okay. Bag Secure of the Year. The snow effect is great.

SPEAKER_57: I love the snow. It's pretty great. Yeah. Here we go. All right. So Tabular, HashiCorp, Esterilats, and XAI.

SPEAKER_24: Now I'm going to explain these categories because not everyone's going to know what I'm talking about. Tabular sold to Databricks for reported, reported, allegedly, we've heard $2 billion. But the reason why I think they are a candidate for Bag Secure of the Year is that there was a bidding war. I think it was Snowflake and Databricks. And I think they got a exit valuation that was insane. But Databricks is rich. So I think Tabular made off with the bag and they are absolutely laughing on their pile of gold. Also, people behind them, Andrewson Horowitz, Altimeter, and Zeta Vichy partners probably did very, very, very well.

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SPEAKER_24: HashiCorp, I picked this one because it exited 42% premium, $6.4 billion exit to IBM. Great IPO, great technology company. And then Estera Labs from the very small IPO class of 2024. Went public at about 36 a share. Now it's at 140, 150, riding that wave. And then Jason, one company that we talked about at the Liquidity Summit and recently XAI, which raised like $12 billion in one year. Wow.

SPEAKER_02: I'm going with XAI. I'm just going to put my winner out there because this is a massive amount of money to raise.

SPEAKER_00: And they built Colossus in like under 60 days. It was like unbelievable. It's so clear.

SPEAKER_57: But who did you have? Who did you have? I picked Tabula because everyone's complaining about exits.

SPEAKER_24: Everyone has said there's not enough money recirculing. And here's an example of a multi-billion dollar exit of an early stage company that still had growth potential out of it. And it was turned into Databricks stock, I presume, which is liquid because they have secondaries. So there you go, VCs.

SPEAKER_20: You're welcome.

SPEAKER_02: Okay. Our next category. I always like to call this one CEO of the Year, who is not Elon Musk.

SPEAKER_34: Because every year, Elon does such amazing things across so many companies that he kind of runs the table. So we'll update the graphic to say CEO of the Year. And then in parentheses, that's not named Elon Musk. Elon Musk kind of gets it as a default because of all this crazy stuff he's doing.

SPEAKER_20: But, you know, here, look at this list. I mean.

SPEAKER_38: So Jensen and NVIDIA has been talked about ad nauseum, an amazing CEO.

SPEAKER_134: So there's a great book that just came out called The NVIDIA Way that I'm going to get a copy of. People are raving about. I can't wait to learn more about how he runs the company.

SPEAKER_34: Let's do like an acquired episode where we just do like that book. We'll both read it, do a book club. Maybe Elon will come on and do a book club with us. That'd be great.

SPEAKER_21: I can get the author to come on probably. We're Twitter friends.

SPEAKER_34: Oh, fantastic. Yes. I like having authors on only because as an author myself, it's kind of a nice thing to do to have read the book, have meditated on it, and really talk about it. No, no, I'll just buy it. I never take free copies.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Oh, no.

SPEAKER_141: Yes. I was going to buy some copies. Oh, okay. Okay. I'll buy it on Audible. Just send me the link. I'll buy it. Listen to it when I'm scared. Yeah.

SPEAKER_24: And by the way, if you have a write a book, I'll buy it. Jensen, of course, Alex Karp, Palantir. Jason, you had on the show just a couple of days ago. We went through Palantir's amazing appreciation this year. And talk about being right and being early. Palantir has been beating the same drum for a long time, and now they're reaping the rewards. Yeah. Steve Huffman over at Reddit, we talked about it on the show, an insane run in the stock market this year. And we talked about Reddit Answers recently, how they're going to bring back that search market share. Love that. Fiji Simo from Instacart. Instacart is not growing as fast as these other companies, but I think she's been very impressive because the company has found a new, better footing as a public company, not as a startup. So she's done the thing that people say you struggle to do if you're public, which is go through layoffs, retool some stuff, build out a secondary business. And I've known her since the IPO, and I'm very impressed with her.

SPEAKER_38: Let's get her on the pod. Invite her to come on the pod, yeah. Consider it done.

SPEAKER_24: And then Lisa Su, she was the time CEO of the year, and that made me look more into AMD and what she's done with that company. I think Lisa probably deserves CEO of the last five years because she's really saved that company. But that's the list of CEOs of the year. Jason, apart from Mr. Elon, who is your winner?

Chamath Palihapitiya: I mean, listen, you could say so many nice things about each of these candidates.

SPEAKER_77: They've all had an incredible, they've done an incredible job. And obviously, as public CEOs, you can just see how amazing they've done. But as much as I respect what Steve and Alex Karp did at Palantir and Reddit, man, and then Instacart,

SPEAKER_149: yeah, you know, that's like an AMD where kind of like comeback stories. You got to go, Jensen, because we've just never seen somebody dump this amount of revenue quarter after quarter, year over year.

SPEAKER_150: I mean, it just doesn't exist as a precedent to see a company doubling and tripling revenue, you know, that's kind of scale.

SPEAKER_153: So it's got to be Jensen. It's got to be Jensen. It's got to be Jensen. Was that your pick as well? Yeah.

SPEAKER_38: I mean, once again, I could pick someone who is, you know, a silly pick that isn't true just to gin up some controversy.

SPEAKER_24: But Jensen has so earned it. And again, it's a success story that is decades in the making that looks like an overnight success, but certainly wasn't.

SPEAKER_62: Twist interview of the year. This is a great category. My Lord, look at all these great folks on the list.

SPEAKER_24: So what we're going to do here is we're going to run through the list and then play a short montage of little clips from each of these interviews because we like to get fancy here at Twist. So we have Alexis Ohanian from episode 1893. We have Mr. McKay from Intercom episode 1962. A very recent one, Shashir Mahotra from Coda and Grammarly episode 2063. That was last week, but we loved it. And then Josh Silverman, Etsy episode 1985.

SPEAKER_155: Wow. I mean, these all brought the thunder. Let's play our little montage.

SPEAKER_157: The power of community was able to sustain Reddit after the sale to Conde Nast. In those four or five years when it was just a part of Conde, they didn't know what to do with it. It kind of just languished. But the community kept it alive. The community kept growing and engaging. And there aren't many products that should get away with basically doing nothing for five years and still succeed year after year after year. And Reddit managed to. And I think it's a testament to the community of those users.

SPEAKER_161: Say if you think about the customer world, it's like, hey, it's all one customer. Let's provide one seamless, beautiful flow and one incredible platform to do all of the above. And that's actually not wrong thinking if all you're doing is having a fun academic tech strategy conversation.

SPEAKER_165: And this was definitely a case of us saying, we're going to build this together. We have these two vision memos that are quite similar. And we came up with what we felt was a reasonable split between them that I think is appropriately fair for everybody. But I think that's it's much more looking to the future than it is looking to the past.

SPEAKER_168: There's about 30,000 sellers in Ukraine selling about $200 million worth of goods to the Etsy community. That's a lot of hard currency going into Ukraine. When the war broke out, we had all these people come to Etsy and just start searching for Ukrainian sellers because they wanted a way to to connect and they wanted a way to support people. It's those kinds of stories that are happening every day on Etsy that would never happen anywhere else.

SPEAKER_113: Jason. I mean, tough one for me because I enjoyed all of those conversations. And thank you for creating the clip because, God, it brought me back to those great discussions.

SPEAKER_173: I find it very funny how good money looks on Alexis. Did you see how stylish that guy is? He looks good.

SPEAKER_02: He looks like a billion bucks. That was also outside at the iConnections conference in Miami. So it was quite nice. You know, this is a tough one for me. But looking back on it, Josh Silverman from Etsy. I didn't know a lot about Etsy and I do know a lot about these other three companies. And so I'm going to base it on how much I learned. Okay. I enjoyed all of these. I enjoyed all of these immensely. But I learned a lot because I didn't know the history of Etsy. I didn't understand. There's a lot of controversial topics that he took on head on as a public CEO.

SPEAKER_34: I'm going to give to Josh Silverman, but I enjoyed them all equally.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Okay.

SPEAKER_24: I really respect that. And the Ukrainian element of that interview, the reason why we clipped it is it hit me because it shows how a technology platform can also be a vehicle for everyday folks to try to make an impact on the world somewhere else in a positive sense. I loved that. I'm going to go with Shashir Mehrotra and the Coda Grammarly interview because that came to get, people don't know, but behind the scenes, that came together pretty quickly. And a lot of people who are CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies will send their team out to kind of try to jawbone you down. What are the topics? What are the questions? You can't ask this. What he just kind of came on and just riffed with us. And it was a no BS, no holds barred. Let's just talk about what's going on.

SPEAKER_38: And I, it's rare. I respect it. And the fact that it came to us so quickly and it was so useful. That's my choice. Loved it.

SPEAKER_179: All right, listen, if you're a startup, you need to sign up for Notion right now. Just head to notion.com slash twist. That's T-W-I-S-T and sign up for free right now. Here at This Week in Startups, we run the entire podcast off of Notion and we run our entire investment business where we invest in a hundred companies a year on Notion. Why do we use Notion? Well, because it's a single source of truth inside of our organization. Everybody's learned how to use it and everybody can contribute to the same documents, but it also has a database built into it. And we use it for everything from taking notes to document sharing. It's kind of like a wiki or project management, but so much more. So when I want to see, hey, what are these associates doing at my venture firm? How many meetings have they done? Who are they meeting with? I can go into Notion and see all their meetings and it becomes like a living, breathing version of our whole organization. And I watch documents get updated and best practices get recorded, just like Amazon does this great thing where they write first. They call it a write first culture. Well, Notion allows you to have a write first culture where on my phone, when I want to start a document, I write a best practice. Hey, here's how we do first meetings with our founders. Hey, here's how we prepare for a podcast episode. Here's a checklist, right? You've heard me read about that checklist manifesto book. I put those checklists right into Notion. We do them for every episode, we do them for every deal that we're doing, and it works so well. Your workspace is going to be totally customizable. There are templates everywhere, and it's got an amazing AI features now. So here is your call to action. Get started for free at Notion.com slash twist. That's Notion.com slash twist to start for free. Best VC guest.

SPEAKER_180: This is not founders or CEOs. These are the VCs who came on this week in startups, and what a collection we have here.

SPEAKER_08: My pal, Sarah Tavill, she is great. I love having her on the program from Benchmark. That was episode 1983. Yep. Aileen Lee, she is podcast shy. She very rarely does speaking gigs. We got her to come on, finally, from Cowboy Ventures, episode 1997. And then you can read the next two.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah. Then we had Jam and Ball, Altimeter, episode 2045, previously of Red Point. I did that one. Had an absolute blast. And then we had the $97 billion VC panel from episode 1987 with Dana Johns and Tom Lovero. I freaking loved that one. That was fantastic. But you first.

SPEAKER_155: You got to pick one.

SPEAKER_77: You got to pick one. I am going, you know, I really enjoyed my conversations with Aileen and Sarah. These are two of the sharpest minds. Sarah is so aggressive and no bullshit. And Aileen's got like this Obi-Wan Kenobi wisdom, you know, Yoda. She's been at it for a long time and she's really thoughtful.

SPEAKER_08: She'll take a little time to think about her answer, you know, and it's really like she might say less words, but there's going to be a density in those words. Just two great, great interviews. But Jam and Ball, your interview, for me, was the most enjoyable because I didn't do it. I learned a ton, so I'm picking yours. Jam and Ball from Altimeter is so smart. For me, my runner-up will be, you know, probably Aileen Lee because I get to have Sarah on all the time. So Sarah's kind of like, she becomes every friend of the pod. She'll do it every six months for me. Awesome. But I'll give my runner-up to Aileen just because I get her once every 10 years. I think she's been on, I think I've gotten her to speak twice at events in 15 years of trying. So I'll give you the big win here with Jam and Ball.

SPEAKER_192: Okay. Well, I appreciate that. I'm going to give you the win right back and say Aileen Lee. Great.

SPEAKER_38: And, you know, Aileen is, I think the Obi-Wan Kenobi kind of vibe is pretty accurate with her. She always seems to know about twice as much as me when she answers a question.

SPEAKER_24: And that is the exact type of person that I want to sit as close to as possible and go, so what do you think about it? Because I would love to learn. So I thought that was fantastic. Now, let's move on to the sad category, sad trombone moment. This is defunct startup of the year. Who made the cut? Let's take a look at the list of nominations.

SPEAKER_20: I'm just going to queue up all these graphics because I'm so happy we made them. They've been me so much joy. These are great. Best ever. Nicely done, whoever did these. Oof.

SPEAKER_38: This is a big list of names. For folks who don't know, Envision raised, I think, more than $350 million.

SPEAKER_198: Bauer raised $600 million. Caffeine, Jason, nearly $300 million.

SPEAKER_20: These are some big, big names that have all joined the startup graveyard. And Bench.

SPEAKER_00: Oh, my God. That just happened last week. And that's a big blowout. And they did it in spectacular fashion by screwing over all of their customers, apparently, allegedly, according to reports. I've got to put all these caveats in here so I don't create another Palmer Luckey situation.

SPEAKER_02: But if that's true, I've got to give it to Bench because, my God, what a flame out. And Envision, what a great product that was. Everybody loved it. They were up against Figma. They were up against Adobe. Really hard to make it work. I'm not sure exactly how that one went out.

SPEAKER_03: But I've got to give it to Bench, man. Man, they just blew up in spectacular fashion this past week. At the end of the year, people doing their taxes.

SPEAKER_05: God damn it. End of the year, bookkeeping company went up in flames.

SPEAKER_00: And then the founder went on a tweet storm about his ousting. And now people are trying to figure out which VC took him for the death walk. Somebody took him for a Fredo walk.

SPEAKER_101: By the way, we're trying to book him for an upcoming show. So hopefully, we'll get him to come on.

SPEAKER_38: Matty and I are working on that. So first, I was going to pick Envision here because, as you said, beloved product, all of that.

SPEAKER_24: But I was prepping and I learned that they had sold one of their products to Mira in my RA in late 23. So it wasn't a complete failure. They had sold part of it off before shutting down. So I'm going to go with Bowery because Bowery raised $600 million, multi-billion dollar valuation. I believed in the idea of vertical farming. And to see that much capital go up in smoke, just real world bits versus atoms.

SPEAKER_77: Atoms are hard. All right. So there you have it, folks. Bench and Bowery.

SPEAKER_08: Next up, news topic of the year. This is like the theme of the year. My Lord.

SPEAKER_77: And, you know, I try to name these so that it's memorable. The race to superintelligence is obviously taking over a lot of the discourse. But nobody's really gotten there yet, right? The superintelligence, we're still waiting to see how superintelligent these things are. I was out on the mountain trying to get Siri to change my music and it didn't work.

SPEAKER_08: I bought an Android phone in frustration. I bought their Pixel Fold. What an incredible, bizarre device. I might be addicted to it or never use it. I'm like really in the middle of opening up this FanFold Pixel 9. But I will say when you ask it to turn off the phone and you do your OK Google, it works so much better than Siri because it goes right to Gemini. So I literally am not going to change from one operating system to the other. My iOS is going to say the same. But boy, do I think Gemini is coming on strong. The data center scramble.

SPEAKER_205: Do you own it? Do you build it? How do you power it? And the data center scramble is a big topic. But what else do we get?

SPEAKER_92: No exits.

SPEAKER_38: This is a rephrase of your theme, Distribution Dire Straits. OK. Wrath of Lena Kahn. Wrath of Lena Kahn. I knew she was going to make at least one or two appearances on this list.

SPEAKER_198: And then almost a reprise of the PayPal mafia, which is tech goes to Washington. Yes.

SPEAKER_24: We could just take several of our themes together about regulation and different, you know, different

SPEAKER_20: nations and blocks and put it into one bucket of it seems that tech really did get its political boots on this year.

SPEAKER_34: Crypto. A lot of the crypto guys giving massive donations. I read that the guy from XRP, Chris Larson, not a fan of mine because I've been so critical

SPEAKER_00: of XRP, but he gave like $10 million to the Democrats. And then you got Uber and Apple giving a million dollars each, I believe, to the inauguration funds. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_77: So this is, which I think is just super, just a payoff, right? To Trump for his library or whatever. That's just like kissing the ring and handing, it's like handing the maitre d' a million bucks

SPEAKER_34: in the palm of their hand, right? Like, hey, spend it and have a good time spending this on your library. I don't know where those inauguration funds go. Where do they go?

SPEAKER_24: I think they slowly disappear is what they do. They all end up in, I think, Trump property coffers. So all of these are kind of an amalgamation of themes we've really explored this year on the show. If I had to pick just one of these, I'm going to go with no exits, aka distribution dire straits, because it has been the slow poison that has been spreading throughout the venture capital and startup world, causing pain around the world, causing people like Jason to pull out their hair. And so I think for the news topic for this show, I'm going to go with no exit.

SPEAKER_36: Clearly, these were major themes.

SPEAKER_00: They came up over and over and over again. I will go with the race to super intelligence because, yeah, as much as the distribution dire straits and the no exits are a bummer, I think for humanity, we will work out the venture

SPEAKER_08: business in 25, 26, 27, 28 under Trump, freewheeling, less regulations, I predict, and a lot more M&A and a lot more fluidity there. Maybe even some rethinking of the accredited investor laws, allow people to become sophisticated investors. So as bad as that's been for the last four years and has caused pain and suffering, it's caused pain and suffering for a bunch of elite folks who will figure it out and catch up over the next four years. But the race to super intelligence is going to affect every single human being on this planet, from the richest to the poorest, everybody in between. So I'll go with the race to super intelligence.

SPEAKER_38: But I want to say that's brilliant because in my mind, I put your favorite theme, which is static team size, underneath the race for super intelligence because it fits directly into that.

SPEAKER_150: Yes. Yes. Static team size is an incredible theme.

SPEAKER_08: I mean, listen, it's going to be the reality that if you want your company to grow, you know, revenue 20% year over year, you can do it with the same size team because your team is going to become 30, 40% more efficient every year. Yes.

SPEAKER_149: So I believe we are going to see people just default to high or slow.

SPEAKER_02: If somebody quits, don't replace them. Look at what they're doing. Figure out how to automate it, do the ADD process, automate, deprecate, delegate, figure out if you can get an Athena assistant, go to AthenaWOW to get a month off, AthenaWOW.com.

SPEAKER_00: You know, see if you can offshore it, see if you can automate it, see if you really need to be doing that work anymore. A lot of times people have 100 employees at a company and 10 of them are doing stuff that is making no impact on the business, but it's also having no negative impact so they

SPEAKER_02: don't bother firing them because that would be bad for morale and people are compassionate. Yeah. I think as much as we're talking about cutthroatness, I think people are compassionate. So they're like, okay, those 10 people, their work is not mission critical, but it's also not hurting the mission.

SPEAKER_00: So we'll just let it meander.

SPEAKER_24: Well, I mean, I think Klarna has shown the power of not cutting half your company, but simply not hiring to replace people and using AI to fill in because they've seen their head count slowly decline as their profitability, clockingly, has slowly improved. But taking this all the way back to our discussion in the pre-show about visas and immigration

SPEAKER_38: and so forth, if we do manage to find a way to import global talent and then automate away all the jobs, it's going to be- That could be dangerous. I know.

SPEAKER_77: Because now you've got a lot of unemployed people. Right. Yeah. So that is-

SPEAKER_00: And importing people with the idea that they would become voters, as people allege the Democrats are doing, that could also blow up in your lap because the people who immigrated tend

SPEAKER_34: to be conservative, people like think Latinos or Latinx or Mexican folks are going to just by default be Democratic. They're not.

SPEAKER_150: What we saw in this last election is they're more populist and the populist party is not the Democrats anymore.

SPEAKER_198: Where is the apologies for people who are blaming the Democrats and claiming that they were trying to change the entire electorate when the people that they, people said they

SPEAKER_234: were importing to vote for them didn't?

SPEAKER_233: I would love to see some public apologies.

SPEAKER_149: Well, I think it's more like what they did may have worked in the past, but just might not work now. So I think it's a TBD.

SPEAKER_08: What's going to happen in 10 years? If the 10 million, 15 million people who came in during this last administration, allegedly, these numbers are so hard to pin down, but if those millions of people wind up voting Republican in 10 years and get amnesty, now I wonder if the Republicans are going to just say, you know what, hey, they brought all these people in, but we have a 10% edge with those folks. Maybe instead of deporting them like Steve Bannon wants to, we should keep them here because they're going to be on our side. It would give us an edge in swing states.

SPEAKER_77: So man, the political arena is so bizarre and hard to actually handicap.

SPEAKER_67: Yeah, no, I don't disagree with that last sentiment. It's going to be a busy couple of years, I think is maybe the way I'd phrase that.

SPEAKER_24: All right, let's keep going though. Let's talk about the best tech product. I'm going to run you through the nominations, Jason, and then we have a little montage to show off what we're talking about. So first off, Gecko Robotics. I think that their cantilever drone AI system is absolutely brilliant. That was wild. I also love the true Anomaly Jackal AOV or Autonomous Orbital Vehicle. We also had Udio's AI Music Generator on the show. We had Udio come by and talk about it. Notebook LM has been unavoidable this year.

SPEAKER_38: And because you and I both travel and we both would like to do less of it in terms of total

SPEAKER_24: hours in the sky, I'm saying not Boom Supersonic's future passenger jet, but their current one-third sized tester that they've been pushing faster and faster and faster this year is incredibly impressive. So let's take a look at these and then we'll pick our winner.

SPEAKER_245: I think Boom's XB1, the baby Boom, and the concept of being able to fly those over land,

SPEAKER_00: not just because he says he's going to be able to mute them. I think that for me, the ability to fly from New York to LA in three hours or two hours or whatever it winds up being, cutting that time in half, or flying to Japan, I mean, my

SPEAKER_34: Lord, this could open up a lot for me because sometimes, again, this is going to sound like a 1% problem. I get offers to do things and being in the air for 12 hours going to the Middle East or

SPEAKER_00: to Asia, it's just like, I can't, I got to be with my kids.

SPEAKER_149: But if you cut it to six hours or seven hours and I could do it and do a two-day turnaround without killing myself, I might actually do a couple more trips a year, so I'm going to go Boom. Wait, I need to pick.

SPEAKER_247: Yes. Boom. Okay, moving on. There you go. All right, funniest twist moment of the year. Oh my God. I'm sorry. These are hilarious.

SPEAKER_38: This is my favorite thing we have. So there's three nominations here. The first one is Mr. David Sachs during episode 2000. Then we have a CEO of a public company called Amplitude.

SPEAKER_24: I did this interview. I know Spencer. Talking about private equity and venture capital. And then there is a riff with Mr. Charles Dug about an embarrassing moment that Jason had on a plane. So let's play some clips and take a look at the funniest moments from Twist this year.

David Sacks: J. Cal, 2,000 episodes of Twist. What a monumental waste of time. Let's get on you, though. Congrats.

SPEAKER_256: How would friends like these?

SPEAKER_257: Sorry, I was going to rant on private equity for a second. I love that. This is going to be so much fun. They make tremendous amounts of money. You know, one of the great players in modern capitalism. But one of my rules is never be on the other side of a transaction for private equity, because they have a spreadsheet about how to take all of your surplus away during that transaction. So, you know, you can either do a transaction and get no surplus or not do a transaction. So you might as well not do a transaction. But I love them. I love them. They're great. They're great capitalists. So I have tremendous respect. Just don't do transactions.

SPEAKER_264: How about you? What's the most embarrassing thing you can remember?

SPEAKER_265: Everybody's flying out from L.A. to Sundays. But I said, you know what, guys, I'm going to meet you there. I get on the flight. I got a middle seat. Put my bag up. I sit down in my middle seat. And I feel a weird sensation, like a crunching sound. Then I feel wetness. And then I feel heat. And then I jump up and I look down. And there is a giant Starbucks cup and black coffee steaming in my seat. Oh, my God. And the woman in the window seat looks at me and goes, oh, were you sitting there? And I said, where your coffee was in my seat? And then I feel my ass is on fire. But the plane is taxiing. Like now at this point, I run to the bathroom. I drop my drawers. I see out of the corner of my eye. My pasty white Irish ass is red. This is hot coffee ass is the name of this story.

SPEAKER_38: So I have to add something. The reason why the second clip is funny, the private equity one, is because the CEO who got purchased by the other company used to work in private equity. We spent the entire show ragging on him. So good.

SPEAKER_275: I remember. Yes. Okay. I mean, I got to go with hot coffee ass. I think it's that story for the legends. But both the other two were pretty funny moments.

SPEAKER_276: Oh, dude.

SPEAKER_175: So I was going to pick the David Sachs one because I recalled when you when we prepared

SPEAKER_24: episode 2000, we got all these clips piecemeal as we were looking at them as they were coming in. And we thought that was the funniest thing. But then today I watched the hot coffee moment prepping for this and I was literally

SPEAKER_38: bawling on the floor laughing. So I'm going with that as well. Just just incredible. All right.

SPEAKER_24: Ladies and gentlemen, we have come to the very end of the 2024 twist awards in which we have to talk about the episode of the year. And there are a number of options. We are a total of I think it's six. So quickly, we had Owen McKay once again from Intercom episode 1962, a beloved show from

SPEAKER_38: this year. Once again, the Charles interview we just saw when Jason had hot coffee ass. That's episode 1938, episode 2000, the biggest lift of the year in which the team put together

SPEAKER_24: so many clips for Jason that he finally says, that's enough clips. Please stop. Then we have Will Gadara. I tapped out. You did tap out. It's fine. Will Gadara, Unreasonable Hospitality, 1966. You had a blast on that one. Rahul Vora, Superhuman, Jason's favorite piece of software, episode 2002. And then finally, Brian Singerman, Founders Fund, 1896. Jason, I feel like you should pick the episode of the year because you were here all year.

SPEAKER_34: I joined late. I mean, these are so many great episodes. Tell me who you picked, which one of the six you picked, because all six of these are just legendary episodes. You can watch them twice. You can watch it with your team, take notes, put it into a summary, take the transcript, make a summary out of it, and learn so much. Did you have one that you particularly like?

SPEAKER_173: Torn between Rahul and episode 2000. Episode 2000 because it sent us the archives, and Rahul was very interesting.

SPEAKER_38: I just like it. Okay. So pick your first and your second. Yeah. All right. Episode 2000, Rahul.

SPEAKER_34: One, two. Okay, perfect. You know, for me, these were all just very special episodes. Brian Singerman retired just last week or two weeks ago from Founders Fund. Um, so I feel like I'm, I kind of feel like maybe there's an argument to give it to him

SPEAKER_00: after a great run and career there. But I also love the Will episode on Reasonable Hospitality is one of my favorites. So on my personal enjoyment basis, on a personal enjoyment basis, I go with Will and Charles Duhigg because those are like, I love those big thinking authors. They get me really stimulated. And then on a founder basis, Rahul and Mr. McCabe, so great. Uh, and then, but I'm going to give it to Brian Singerman because he had a great run. He had a great career. My, and picking 2000 is a little self-serving. Thank you for doing it for me, but I'm going to give it to Brian Singerman strictly because he had a great career and he's done now. I'll give him the episode of the year. I don't know what he's going to do next, but, uh, I might go skiing with him at some point.

SPEAKER_77: Uh, so congratulations to Brian Singerman. I'll give him the episode of the year, but I'm going to give the runners up to Will and, uh, Raul, two other great episodes.

SPEAKER_198: That means of Jason's favorite episodes, episode 2000, barely cracks number four.

SPEAKER_149: Uh, no, it's, it was obviously my favorite because it was so nice to have so many people say so much amazing things to me and then sacks break my chops, but it's self-serving.

SPEAKER_286: So I can't pick it. I can't pick it. You can pick it.

SPEAKER_290: No, no, no.

SPEAKER_38: No, I, I think the Will Gadara one. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to love with you.

SPEAKER_24: Will Gadara is a very interesting person who did a great job at his restaurant and has some good ideas, but I feel like he needs to write like a new book.

SPEAKER_38: Yes. Because I'm prepping for that. I watched several of his interviews and like dudes hitting the stocking points. It's kind of like a stump speech. So come on, Will, new things. That's what I want.

SPEAKER_02: New things. Yeah. Okay. That's a good challenge for him. All right, everybody. This has been the twisty awards for 2024.

SPEAKER_296: 2024, we will see you on Friday, Friday, this Friday. What's the date on Friday?

SPEAKER_223: Second, I believe. Okay.

SPEAKER_02: So we will see you on Friday for our first live episode of the new year. And we got a lot of topics to talk about. I think we'll maybe.

SPEAKER_301: Third. We do? It's the third.

SPEAKER_34: The third. Okay. January 3rd, this Friday. I think what we'll do is maybe we'll lean into this immigration. We'll do an immigration issue episode. If we want to put something on the books to maybe just really deep dive into it. We had a little talk about it on this episode, but only for the live audience when we did our little live thing. If you want to watch us live, you get about 20% more show. Go to youtube.com slash TWI startups or slash startups. I can't remember. But just search for this week.

SPEAKER_305: We are at startups on YouTube.

SPEAKER_34: So just youtube.com slash at startups. Ah, slash at startups. So thank you for giving us at startups. I appreciate that. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.