SPEAKER_00: so jp do you think that the doj has gone far enough in its proposed remedies i was reading luther lowe who heads policy of a y-combinator and he was saying that some of google's complaints are them actually just pretending to be upset and that the doj could have gone further so was brave SPEAKER_02: hoping for an even more punitive set of um remedies so everything we need is in there and then some SPEAKER_04: it's all about monetization right and there's two ways you can monetize and there's two ways that google can remedy the situation one is if you have a browser like brave and you send a lot of queries to google because you know half of our users let's say are still using google as a search engine so we send them a couple billion queries a month for which they don't pay us right oh yeah yeah we're talking about big numbers and one billion queries a month are coming to our browser but we get no money on this on this traffic we send to google for free for a year yeah you're talking about hundreds of millions Chamath Palihapitiya: of dollars that we've given them this week in startups is brought to you by ramp the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and money get 250 dollars when you join ramp today at ramp.com twist dev squad most dev agencies only offer developers why because product management is hard get an entire product team for the cost of one us developer plus 10 off at devsquad.com twist and digital ocean whether you're just getting started with ai or seeing your project take off digital ocean is the cloud platform that lets you focus on what matters building killer apps right now get up to a hundred thousand dollars in free credits at do.co twist terms and conditions apply all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups i'm SPEAKER_11: jason calacanis x.com jason instagram.com jason linkedin jason calacanis add me on all the platforms SPEAKER_14: i interact with people dms are open and uh with me of course alex will help the famous tech crunch editor and writer has joined this week in startups to chop it up with me three days a week and we've got more guests coming in we're going to be doing some triplets and quartets coming up if you have people who you love uh and you want to see on regular rotation here on this week in startups let us know because SPEAKER_16: we're doing news three days a week with interviews we put it together uh alex how you doing on a SPEAKER_18: thursday yeah yeah no i'm doing good i'm just kind of amazed at how much is going on in technology SPEAKER_00: right now given that it's this time of year you know i've been a reporter for a long time usually back in the day things would slow down a bit but it feels i don't know if this is just post-election jockeying and so forth jason yeah it feels like the news velocity is about as high as it's been at any point this year so i'm feeling good thoughts to talk about you are right the velocity of news SPEAKER_23: is tremendous i just saw matt gates is not going to be attorney general he took himself out of the SPEAKER_13: running it's just non-stop non-stop and with trump you have to understand he's an entertainer and he does a lot of entertaining things and the press loves loves trump because trump equals ratings so there's going to be a lot of politics and policy on the show over the next four years we're going to try to keep it out of the lunacy and the matt gates craziness we're going to try to keep it policy based but of course here we are we're about to talk about google on the docket and the google breakup remedies yes and i think that matt gates would have played a major part in that but now we have to take that out so it's going to be crazy and one of the great things is having people who are first principal non-partisans to talk about it and that's what we're hoping to do here on the show let's get right to it you know i know you were very excited about nvidia last night and they SPEAKER_00: crushed it yes just give us the overview here i mean this is extraordinary it was incredibly impressive as we said you know if they just met expectations probably not enough we expected them to actually beat them by a little bit jason and here's the number so revenue expected 33.2 billion revenue actual 35.1 and then earnings per share expected 74 cents actual 81 cents and then yeah i know right and then critically their guidance for the uh last quarter of the year their q4 of their fiscal 25 did have guidance that met investor expectations so everyone's pretty happy shares SPEAKER_33: haven't moved too much jason but it does seem to be that this indicates that the hype train in ai can keep going for at least another quarter or two all right i just want to pause here and say SPEAKER_14: they beat the top line by two billion dollars 1.9 billion that's extraordinary yeah i mean that is just SPEAKER_37: bonkers on already high expectations they beat the eps by seven cents a share which is about 10 that's exactly what i was about to say about 10 yeah that is extraordinary um and they're saying revenue in the next quarter will be 37.5 billion or something to that effect which is another two and a SPEAKER_39: half billion another almost you know whatever 10 i mean it's just bonk and that's quarter over SPEAKER_23: quarter to go up eight percent or something yeah but the stock didn't move i think that means that it's SPEAKER_37: all priced in everything's always priced in so be careful out there folks it's this thing is a juggernaut it's not going anywhere and the question i had for you yesterday was is anybody going to compete for SPEAKER_44: these dollars is there a competitor for these dollars and it does not seem like that has emerged SPEAKER_37: i know amazon has a big project to make their own chips et cetera and competing products is there any on the horizon headwind or the night is headwinds headwinds would be things that are not direct SPEAKER_23: competitors they would be things like the economy etc i guess there's two things that people are wondering one will there be a competitor for this category of servers essentially in data centers for ai and then number two this hitting a wall concept that people have been debating you know is there going SPEAKER_37: to be some plateauing of uh ai and therefore the need for these so any insights on those two yeah SPEAKER_00: so the thing the way that i would answer the question about ai chips ai focused chips and competition is that as it stands right now they have already secured sufficient leadership in the next generation of chips that any material competitor from a startup or i would say a big tech company as well will be in the next generation so the investing call after nvidia's earnings focused a lot on blackwell jason which is the successor to the hopper architecture that we all know the h100s that are out there and uh just putting um from their earnings call demanded greatly exceeds supply we are on track to exceed our previous blackwell revenue estimates customers are gearing up to deploy black whale at scale etc etc etc so it seems that nvidia will retain the crown for the foreseeable future that said there are a lot of startups out there that are pursuing this because the company makes so much money and jason i think any business that has 35 billion in revenue and net income of 20 billion in one quarter is going to attract i mean a sea of competitors over time there's just too much profit there to not go SPEAKER_37: after i guess the amazon in-house ai chip tranium 2 yep that's the one that's designed to reduce essentially amazon's reliance but amazon is one of the biggest customers because they have aws so even if amazon does make a great in-house chip for lower cost jobs to reduce people's aws cloud SPEAKER_23: computing bills and you would assume other people will do the same people still might want to rent h100s so it's not blackwell chips well the new blackwells yeah so therefore it's not even amazon's choice they're providing to the startup community and other folks their cloud as is azure as is google cloud as is oracle's cloud so they're just going to buy what their customers want so we're going to see uh cerebrus is the other company i guess that's making ai chips cerebrus um etched and then also there's SPEAKER_00: a company called d matrix and um they're actually microsoft backed and there was a new story that came out this week which we just pulled up that they've actually kind of put together their first actual chip so there's movement here i i think one reason jason we haven't seen as many competitors out in the market as you might expect is that building chips is much harder than building software in terms of time to product and market so i would not be shocked if next year was a very exciting year for chip startups but you also asked about the ai wall and this was what i was most curious about in the earnings once we saw that the numbers themselves were good kind of what we expected SPEAKER_01: so the first analyst question that i saw was i'm going uh hey jensen ceo of nvidia what's up with SPEAKER_00: this ai wall are you worried and jensen gave i would say a very good answer and i'm going to try to just down jason to a couple sentences here tell me if this works essentially the old model of training ai models pre-training scaling is intact he says and it's still continuing but that does not address i would say the rate of progress which people say has slowed down but jensen says there's two other ways that they are improving ai models in the market today one is post training scaling and then essentially what we saw with o1 from g uh open ai which was test time scaling so there's two other approaches now creating a three-prong approach to improving ai models which jensen thinks is going to keep going and improving what we have in the market for a long time to come so some slowdowns in one approach but there's several approaches we're fine hey everybody SPEAKER_58: i want to tell you about an awesome corporate card and spend management software that's designed to SPEAKER_14: help you save money basically it puts money back in your pocket it's called ramp and we use it here at launch my coo heidi our chief operating officer loves it because ramp gives you visibility into your company's software usage and this is going to help you trim your subscription costs and it allows you to issue cards to every employee and then give them limits and restrictions so we do this sometimes we'll have the whole team go to an off site we send everybody a ramp card everybody has a certain amount of money they can spend and they don't have to worry about using their personal cards or submitting an expense report or any of that drama no and ramp customers save about five percent on their expenses every year because you can do things like dial up and dial down how much money can be charged to a card ramp software is so smart you no longer have to do manual expense reports either and they'll even play bad cop for your company chasing down missing documentation and requesting repayment ramp's so easy to use and you can start making payments in less than 15 minutes so join ramp right now and they'll give you 250 right into your account ramp.com twist ramp.com twist it is the best way to manage expenses for your team it's elegant it's dead simple and it's going to save you money disclaimer cards issued by SPEAKER_13: sutton bank members fdic terms and conditions apply so let's talk about google the doj um obviously has a case against google and now we're going to the remedy google lost the case maybe tee this up for us and then let's talk about the remedy and i have been giving a lot of thought um as to how this might go SPEAKER_61: down and i have a lot of practical questions about what would happen if google alphabet was forced to SPEAKER_63: spin out the google chrome browser yeah okay so just to back everyone into this uh recall that back SPEAKER_00: in august of this year google was declared by court to be a monopolist and one that put acted as one to maintain its monopoly this was for you nerds out there a violation of section two of the sherman act jason this sent shockwaves through technology this was a big moment the question then became though okay google's a monopoly what are you going to do about it so we've been waiting to hear from the department of justice what they were going to put out in their initial proposed final judgment or p SPEAKER_63: fj so if you see that acronym out there in the news it's essentially the doj's pitch to hey they're SPEAKER_00: a monopoly here's how we're going to fix it and jason the the headline story out there that everyone's talking about is that the doj wants google to divest chrome but there's quite a lot else in there including the possible divesture of android and a lot of other business rules about what google can and cannot do including investing into other ai companies or other search companies so it feels pretty SPEAKER_69: broad and google is uh peeing its pants is maybe how i'd put it frankly that's a technical term that's SPEAKER_37: a technical term yeah i mean i don't know that they need to i think what they need to do and this SPEAKER_23: is really the hard thing to do when you've got something as core to the business as you have two core pieces chrome which is kind of built into everything it's very integrated into search because you have the the default search engine it is very tied to your google account whether you have a gmail account or a google domains account like a google docs account because it syncs all your information into the chrome browser you know that when you log into a chrome browser so they have really integrated this tightly and then of course the reason they did chrome was to control the user behavior of going into the url bar and instead of typing in google.com typing in your cert and firefox was printing money for a long time as was the opera browser mozilla just a bunch of folks and so all of this added up to a way for them to kind of intercept searches before anybody else could intercept them that's why it was so critical for them to give tens of billions of dollars a year to apple to secure those high-end customers apple customers are the highest end customers because they can afford a 1200 phone so the default search there is worth more because remember google search monetizes through advertising whoever owns the apple user base gets the mercedes the tesla ad searches whoever owns the android users well yeah they get a lot of global users but they're going to get the toyota no offense to toyota you know the toyota prius searches and they use prius searches so just keep that in mind of how critical some of these deals SPEAKER_71: are to them and also jason the data that comes from those searches is more monetizable to your SPEAKER_00: point which is very critical but also it provides a lot of signal to google about how to tune its search engine and one of the points the doj made was that google bought access to the to essentially search audiences use that information to make itself better and then no one else could compete that with that virtuous cycle so one of the remedies is that google will have to quote disclose data sufficient to level the scale-based playing field it has illegally slanted including at least licensing syndicated search results that provide competitors a chance to offer greater innovation that's a lot SPEAKER_13: yeah so i had talked to you a little bit about maybe putting in context uh how much revenue google has from advertising versus other ad networks and stuff like that because one way to look at this is product base another way to look at it is revenue based on a product basis you can't debate that google doesn't have 90 of queries searches right now although you and i know people are doing searches on claude and chat gpt pretty frequently i would say the majority of my usage of search has gone to open ai with a trickle to grok and a trickle over to claude right now yep uh and actually some to gemini so i would say i might be you know the um the early adopter in this metaphor the vanguard of technology SPEAKER_23: adoption so i feel like that part of it is going to be solved by the market which is the great paradox of this by the time they got to 20 years later to google search monopoly it has viable competitors which is really weird it's almost like somebody got to the top of the hill and they started running down the hill and you just push them in the back and they're going to go tumbling down the hill and SPEAKER_78: then it's very weird for it as well like look what i did yeah it's like tripping somebody who's already SPEAKER_23: fallen you know they're already you know at peak search market share but if you look at this through online advertising they are also a smaller percentage of online advertising than people realize because they're competing with amazon uber instacart doordash and of course meta who have large advertising businesses so and then if you look at advertising overall which would include television advertising i think netflix amazon prime other people have advertising right oh yeah um and then you have advertising in newspapers magazines and then you have outdoor advertising so you have other places to ever put your advertising dollars do you have any idea percentage wise what percentage of revenue we all know that google has the majority of searches but what about SPEAKER_00: ad dollars i i want to make a point before i answer that jason just so everyone knows that when we talk about the google uh search monopoly just to be clear the doj reports that google has unlawfully maintained its monopolies in general search services and search text advertising so it is a very um it's a constrained point still a large market but certainly not trying to say that they own all the advertising market or all of search whole cloth so there are some distinctions there in terms of their total share of the u.s advertising market i don't have the number off top of my head but it's 27 SPEAKER_23: percent i was gonna say less than a third so there you go yeah and if you look at the duopoly of google and meta together they hold 57 here in the u.s so that means like of all advertising in the world they own maybe single digits that's the you know like the question i have um how much do they own of all so we'll bring that to you in another episode as we double click on it let's talk about what are some possible scenarios here and then we have a special guest uh which i'm very excited about because my favorite browser is brave and we have somebody from brave here a competitor who is directly impacted by all of this so if google is forced to spin out google chrome i have a series of questions okay who would buy it they have to spin it out yeah so that means somebody has to buy it or it has to be a standalone business yes so let's start with the first question who would possibly buy this because and then what SPEAKER_13: would you value it in yeah then what you would value it at would be based upon its ability to do a deal SPEAKER_23: for search so here we are if you are the doj you're probably going to say it can't be owned by the mag 7 right because that makes no sense you're breaking up one of the mag 7 you're not going to let apple buy it right you're not going to let amazon or meta buy it because then you're it's just like making somebody else you know one of the seven you know giant bullies or whatever you want to call them if you view them as bullies like the doj does you're just letting one bully get the weapon of another bully so that's it's got to be somebody below that group somebody under a 500 billion dollar market capital it's like okay then would you allow if a smaller company bought it let's say i'm just going to pick a random company here salesforce isn't in or hubspot aren't in the mag seven right they're under a trillion dollar market cap companies i believe so if you let a sas company at lassen i don't know some 50 to 250 billion dollar 500 billion dollar company buy it yep would they not be allowed to do an ad deal with google would that be not allowed because if salesforce buys it i don't know why they would but let's just say they did yep then they're going to be banned from having google buy it and google monetizes at the highest level which means they've got to let somebody else buy it then how do you value it because if you can't do a google deal well then it's i don't want to say worthless but it's gonna be hard to monetize this thing that means you have to sell the advertising to bing or brave or duck duck go or somebody who has a competing search engine or would you sell it to yahoo the private equity owned you know maybe five or ten billion dollar company that owns a collection of assets maybe that makes sense but you would essentially be sunsetting this browser now on top of all that is an open source company so i'm going to stop there because this is one of the most SPEAKER_13: complicated things i've ever heard strategically cutting out chrome okay no big deal it's a pain in the neck for google but how does it become a viable standalone business if it can't have a search deal SPEAKER_96: all right take a second and picture the ultimate all-star team for your startup okay you got that mental image maybe the avengers maybe even x-men wolverine cyclops pick your favorite superhero team and let's be realistic until you've raised your series a or your series b you might need some help building that dream team and finding top tier talent managing all the timelines you've got and maintaining quality it's a big lift for all founders i mean scouting for that elusive 10x developer that's going to eat all your time and that's where dev squad comes in think of them as like professor x you know they they know where to find those exceptional mutant developers who are 10x devs and dev squad offers a complete product team from latin america you're going to get two to six full stack developers a technical product manager and specialists in case you need them like product strategy or ui and ux design devops and of course quality assurance all for 75 less than a u.s based team all for 75 less than a u.s based team while being on your same time zone which is really important there's no long-term commitment it's just seamless collaboration so if you want a gsd if you want to get stuff done and you're ready to squad up head to dev squad.com twist for 10 off your first engagement that's dev squad.com twist and transform your startup with the all-star team it deserves i honestly do not SPEAKER_01: know and jason it's great you point this out um we were on hacker news earlier today looking for the most interesting commentary from the market and quite literally this is the thing people are chewing on SPEAKER_00: what is the value of chrome not inside of a search company and when it's unable to monetize via a major search deal all out what we've seen with ios and and google right i honestly have no idea and so normally when we talk about taking a large company and breaking it up into smaller pieces we think in terms of unlocking value that if you took something and made it smaller and more discreet people would value it differently and that the aggregate would be worth more than the whole in this case it feels like if you break off chrome it crumbles into your hands like sand and so i don't see it happening and so here's my pitch to you is this the doj doing the door slamming negotiation technique make a lot of SPEAKER_01: noise threaten this and then when they actually retreat to the position they expected it feels like a concession and then mountain view gets to say hey you know we got to keep chrome that i mean who SPEAKER_23: knows i do think they're probably trying to give google an off-ramp here to make a sacrifice you're exactly correct taking some things out of a conglomerate would unlock value taking youtube out would unlock extraordinary value and i think the greatest move for google shareholders would be to just offer that offer youtube that would offer youtube that's 50 billion in revenue a year plus the subscription base SPEAKER_103: it would be a netflix competitor immediately google would be bummed but it wouldn't be the end of SPEAKER_18: the world for them i agree with that and just to put it into into context everybody in q3 of this year SPEAKER_01: youtube ads were at 8.92 billion dollar business jason okay up from 7.9 in the preceding year so not the fastest growing SPEAKER_00: company but certainly one that has ample scale to be public and still maintain advertiser share and so forth so and they have subscription revenue too for sure how does but the the issue i have with this is not a product complaint but more of a how would divesting youtube answer the core issues the doj has with google's kind of search ads business and does it actually go at the heart of that particular issue as a sacrificial lamb i get it i'm just curious if it'll you know appease the right thing the search SPEAKER_13: a lot of youtube is a lot of searches so if you look at the percentage of searches it would go down SPEAKER_23: and i don't think they would be able to monetize the search deals with apple etc if they didn't at the level they're able to if they didn't have youtube i think it's that key of a piece they think they're making 50 billion a year off of youtube because the ad revenue is like 33 34 billion and then there's another 15 billion i guess in subscription revenue with youtube premium so yeah i i don't think it's a perfect match to the concerns they have but it would be significant i think it would actually be more significant than chrome in terms of hurting google in some ways in terms of the size of the business because i think you'll lock 500 billion off the mark interesting we trade at 10 times uh chrome yeah i'm not sure but let's bring our guest on and let's see what their opinion is here uh and so that will you know really help us contextualize this everyone we have uh jean paul schmetz or jp if SPEAKER_00: you want to call him that if you're here in the us head of brave search head of ads over at brave and also worked according to his linkedin at abe books way back in the day which if you're a long time ago SPEAKER_111: yeah if you're a used book nerd you know that company jp thanks for coming on the show man appreciate it SPEAKER_14: what's your take here jp when you see them spinning out chrome you work on the brave browser it's a SPEAKER_23: private company i love it it's my favorite browser the reason it's my favorite browser is you don't track anything and you have shields up and when you have your shields up on the margins some websites don't like it but i would say 95 out of a hundred it just works so much faster and it works really well on mobile and you have your own search engine which i do not change my default search engine i like to use brave i like to have a little privacy i like to go faster and i don't like to be tracked of course i use google sometimes i go back for google flights i go back for next scores but i have gotten quite used to brave's search engine so when you you run a browser company you're a standalone browser company so do you make money through a deal with google at all or is your money all coming SPEAKER_04: directly from your own ad network i guess it comes directly because one of the uh well one of the points that the doj is making is that google only gives you money if you agree not to compete with them and that is the crux of the matter so if you have a browser and you decide to make a search engine you're not going to get money from google you only get money from google if you agree not to compete which in the case you had the example of apple doing some deals with bing for siri and then google telling them we don't really like that so much or firefox was actually invested in clicks which is the uh company that uh created what became brave search and uh when they renegotiated they deal with google in 2017 google told them that they didn't like that thing in europe that they were doing so the the payments uh of google two browsers were always conditional or non-compete and this is the crux of the case and this is in the remedy if you read them carefully this is basically what is now SPEAKER_11: forbidden so these strong-arm tactics we'll call them what they are if you want this incredibly robust SPEAKER_13: the largest search ad network in the world and you want to monetize it on your search engine let's SPEAKER_23: say braves or duck duck go is a competitor you are the two i think largest independent search engines outside of google in the united states in the english banking language you can't use their ad network their ad network has scale and then if anybody tries to compete on the margins they swing a stick essentially and say yeah we don't like what you're doing there it would be terrible if something happened to that really nice car you have parked outside yep and uh you know in brooklyn you know when they told you like it would be terrible if something happened to the car you're parking in front of my house you would move your car because you would know what would happen you're you might have a broken window or SPEAKER_04: you know your tires might be gone when you come back now that's really one of the main monetization so one of the main anti-competitive move that google was doing was basically here's a pot of money but you agree do not compete and if you compete we basically make your life nearly impossible because you have to do you have to finance a browser which is since the day of explorer has become a non-profit right netscape did not monetize the b2c business they gave the browser away tried to sell the server when explorer came out there was part of windows so it was for free when firefox came out it was open source and sort of an outcast of netscape and they couldn't make money it was a non-profit right and then chrome was offered as a way for google to reduce their payments to third parties so the browser business has always been a loss leader right tell me how you built your search index and SPEAKER_13: how hard it is to compete against google's global search index because this is seems like a non-trivial SPEAKER_131: task it seems like it would cost a lot of money and a lot of time but correct me if i'm wrong or if SPEAKER_132: i'm right yeah i mean we we so first of all the we are at brave search the uh one of of three uh SPEAKER_04: independent indexes i think there's google bing and us they used to be yandex and baidu but i think both of them have pretty much given up on on trying to index the um american and european uh world uh companies like duck go perplexity or everyone else that you could call a search engine uh typically just worry about the user interface and i put it in a very nice way they basically use a search api in the back there's three search apis in the world bing search api brave search api and google search api which is actually underused because it's not a high quality and it's not exactly is it not high quality on purpose by the way yeah of course so this is one of the other remedies that the doj is asking google to make a basically cheap and high quality version of its search index SPEAKER_14: if your startup is all in on ai well digital ocean is the cloud platform that's going to help you scale faster without headaches with digital ocean you can quickly spin up gpu powered virtual machines and start training models building your ai agents and crunching massive data sets in seconds and when you're done you can turn those virtual 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not be so great for us so that's one of the stuff that we criticize but but there's only three uh independent search engine and to come back to your question yes it is hard that's why i started this thing in 2008 and it took a great team of people uh many many years to get to a level where we could get 200 which was only achieved by joseph and his team so joseph pujol runs the search engine it was only achieved after bing raises price factor 17 fold after they had to deal with open ai and we could not afford the 10 that we were still using bing on SPEAKER_127: and we decided to go to 100 so it took us 13 years to go to independence in uh in indexing so jp do you SPEAKER_00: think that the doj has gone far enough in its proposed remedies i was reading luther low who heads policy over y combinator and he was saying that some of google's complaints are them actually just pretending to be upset and that the doj could have gone further so was brave hoping for an even more SPEAKER_02: punitive set of um remedies so everything we need is in there uh and then some uh and so i do agree SPEAKER_04: with what you guys were discussing earlier that that there's a good settlement that can be made there and it it could very well be that they don't have to diverse chrome in the end but the main reason people don't compete in search right is it's not about data so much because you know there's a there's a lot of kids that went to stanford i went to stanford we know how to build it right the problem why we're not building it is because no one is going to give us money to build it because they don't think it's going to be remonetized right no vcs in the last 15 years jason knows this but it was a little but it was more like 20 years ago jason and i were fooling around with search engines like no one will give you money to build a search index right so you got to find it somewhere and they don't give you money because they don't believe that you will be able to distribute it number one because they know distribution costs money distribution would be possible if you had tons of money so it's all about monetization right and there's two ways you can monetize and there's two ways that google can remedy the situation one is if you have a browser like brave and you send a lot of queries to google because you know half of our users let's say are still using google as a search engine so we send them a couple billion queries a month for which they don't pay us right oh yeah yeah we're talking about big numbers and one billion queries a month are coming to our browser but we get no money on this on this traffic we send to google for free for a year yeah you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that we've given them on the other hand if you have a search engine they have a product called adsense for search which actually is made to finance search engine except you cannot use it if you have a browser because they don't allow you to monetize queries that starts from a toolbar they call it i mean this is ridiculous right yeah and both of these points are in the doj document meaning that there is somewhere in there well it's a bit lawyerly right because they turn it into negative they say that google is not supposed to pay us or to give special value to people who for exclusivity etc now let's play this for a minute does that mean that google cannot pay apple for the traffic well that would be interesting because then the market cap of google would go up by 500 billion right because 23 billion times multiple and apple's market cap would go down so the perpetrator gets up that doesn't make sense so they will continue to to pay apple i believe roughly the same amount of money but they will also have to pay brave the same amount of money but they cannot request exclusivity which means that apple will have to display a choice screen and say do you want to use brave do you want to use google SPEAKER_150: right there's a lot of choice queens in this remedy situation because jp just to make sure that i'm SPEAKER_00: tracking this because exclusivity won't be allowed your company will therefore be able to monetize the search queries you already send to google from folks who use brave but don't use brave search SPEAKER_04: so we believe so and and second uh you know whenever i had the chance to talk to the doj i always said look look if it doesn't help brave i don't know if it's a remedy that works got it now if you know if you spin out chrome does it immediately help brave well it depends because if they have a gigantic deal with google you just create another monopoly or neo monopoly not a monopoly but neo monopoly and they're the richest company in the world right and they can start uh i don't know i mean it's a different world but i don't think you really make a huge difference by just doing that not to be fair to the doj that's three lines in a 35 page document right obviously for the press SPEAKER_155: you have the impression that it's 35 pages out of uh 35 pages that is i think it's very easy for the SPEAKER_23: press to conceptualize spinning out a product what they don't understand is the deal structure and that's where the nuance is and i think jp you explained that perfectly which is if you run a SPEAKER_14: search engine you can't use their ad network if you compete with them on a browser or a search engine you can't use their ad network and just saying to them listen if you're going to let people monetize SPEAKER_23: it's got to be good for everybody you can't pick and choose and you can't strong arm people into not SPEAKER_14: competing with you because that is the definition of antitrust being able to say and and they could keep taking this further and further and further now they can't bully apple but they could have said to apple at some point and there was a a lot of rift here uh between apple and google over the iphone SPEAKER_23: because android came first and steve jobs felt very betrayed by the iphone i mean imagine if they said to apple like you can't make an iphone or else you know we're not going to allow max to have search can't use google search on a mac right like it's really crazy to think of telling SPEAKER_160: other people what businesses they can be in in order to have a business relationship with you but SPEAKER_04: that's what they did with samsung that's what they do with uh with firefox right they which are less powerful they basically told samsung you you can have your own browser but it has to have google search in it but you cannot have i i run a browser in asia and i tried to be on the phones and they would tell me no we cannot do it because we have a deal with google and even browser that we would pre-install on the second screen have to have google search as a as a default if not we don't get the app store yeah so that's one of the remedy as well that google cannot uh in the future condition the availability of the app store which you know you don't have the app store your android phone is a SPEAKER_165: big yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's like having a supermarket and you don't have anything on the SPEAKER_04: shelves it's kind of like it's just a shell yeah so so that was the it's another remedy you know you have like i don't know there's like 10 sections and and each section that's like five remedies and one SPEAKER_127: of them is google cannot condition the availability of a another product based on the uh supply of search SPEAKER_173: as a default yeah is google upset at brave for you know um protecting people's privacy SPEAKER_23: so deftly and removing ads and giving that control to users or is that part of their animosity towards SPEAKER_04: brave i i you know they just don't pay us but i think the fact that they don't pay us is more connected to they don't like competition and you know brendan is a person that has built two major search engines so two major browsers in his life so you know who's to say he cannot do it a third time and i remember that there was a company before brave that that was sold to brave i used to tell a prospective employee who would always ask the question why does the world need another browser and another search engine and i would tell them look there has been five browsers in the history of the web it's only 25 30 years who tells you there cannot be a sex one right like why does history stop at chrome and why do you only need a search engine in a world where i don't know like like i mean it's difficult to build so yes there are less search engine there are less countries in the world that make search engines and countries that make atomic bombs so yeah it's difficult uh but but having SPEAKER_127: another search engine i mean that certainly is a nice thing to have what do you think of um what SPEAKER_177: sam holman's doing over at open ai with their search experiment is it good yeah i mean first of all SPEAKER_04: they realize that uh they realize a number of things one is that uh an llm that's not connected to the web is a bit well it's it's less good than it could be right yeah and if it's connected to the web then it is most likely going to use a search engine to go to the web because you know and so without you know i cannot talk too much about other things but i mean they have to connect to some search engine SPEAKER_187: uh you know and maybe like an api with a company that we may have mentioned in the last five minutes SPEAKER_04: maybe uh and but the thing is that now the question becomes much more interesting is where does ai live in the future because you can answer that question by saying oh you will live everywhere but that's not an answer yeah the real answer is there is a place where people ask every question they can think of and that's the the navigation bar of a browser right um and so does ai like in brave i mean you use brave search right so you know that we have the summarizer which by the way we launched way before google uh did that and and way before everyone else and it basically reads all the results of the web for you and summarizes them on top which i think is a super useful feature for a feature for that kind of of queries and and so exactly how i mean people are going to use gpt of course in a b2b api type business business thing and it will have to be connected to the web as well some people are going to use gpt on the web page but i think you know a lot of people will use gpt in a browser-like yes product and that will have access to if i want to go to a restaurant tonight and i want to know who are the five best restaurant and you know you got to get some ai somewhere and and that is uh going to be in something of a browser so yes at open ai there's a guy who was one of the first SPEAKER_191: creators of firefox and one of the guys who created chrome so they work at open ai so yeah they're probably doing a browser right yeah uh and at some point they will launch a browser you're SPEAKER_04: right yeah one thing is that i i uh over the years building search engine i realized that some people talk think differently about things so many years ago i was trying to convince uh facebook uh dan rose and and circleberg like you guys need you should launch a browser like you're such a threat to google if you if you uh if you launch a browser you're going to be master of the world and they were like no we already have one and i said okay well the the my app is a browser people open link and and my my social discovery is searched so they had a different view of the world which turned out not to be correct because social is not a good search engine and and the facebook app is not a good browser but but they didn't feel the need so it could very well be that that open ai goes in the same direction and then say it's very ai centric and we don't care about navigational queries uh we don't care about this we don't care about that but what google discovered in the past is that you need to have 100 of the queries if you want to make money on the 18 and so sure you remember the queries you've done with perplexity and open ai but these are the the 24 that are not monetizable right so if you explore the the number of queries and you say oh there's a company that does the smart stuff there's a company that does the navigational stuff there's the company there's a company that does the porn stuff and then there's a company that does the commercial stuff that doesn't work so well because you have three bankrupt companies and you have one that makes all the money and that would be amazon right and and so so i think the magic of search is having this box where people just ask everything yeah and ai is going to have to live is going to have to live there we talked about how SPEAKER_71: there might be monetization you know opportunities in a post google settlement world for brave and brave SPEAKER_00: search i'm curious though what your expectations are for driving increased search volume because if you monetize your existing volume better great but do you think that the remedies as discussed by the doj will actually help smaller search engines get more net new users yes so we already have kind SPEAKER_04: of in europe we have a preview of this because the dma which is a new legislation in europe actually forces apple to give users a browser choice and the dma forces google chrome to give users a search choice so if you start chrome in europe the first time they ask you do you want to use brave search or google search etc so so we do know that this works and what's the impact on that like how much SPEAKER_00: acceleration did that drive in your ability to get new regular users oh it's very significant like SPEAKER_191: like our growth in you in europe is twice as big as it is in the us at the moment just because of that SPEAKER_04: uh i don't think that yeah yeah i think the you know the the word word of mouth growth is is probably the same across all countries because people have like social structure and stuff but but but europe we can see double the growth at the moment and it has to be coming from there okay thanks i really David Friedberg: appreciate it fantastic jp thanks for getting us into what actually matters here it was really great SPEAKER_160: to catch up and uh i appreciate you educating us on the nuances here it really is about these deals and the deal making uh and the browser is just like you said a couple sentences in this 35 pages really truly appreciate you coming on the show thank you jason thanks alex i'll talk to you soon okay well SPEAKER_23: that was great alex because this is like a breaking news story and absolutely i think when you get somebody who's on the inside who's got decades of experience on it you actually get to what is really happening here and he seemed very excited about not chrome being spun out but just the deal making being leveled and anytime you're in an organization you have great deal makers and the organization needs to grow incentives really matter so what we've seen happen over 20 years is there's a lot of great people at google building amazing things and it's been amazing for customers to get a free browser to get free youtube free storage you know we can stream to youtube right now for free all that infrastructure is paid for and the chrome browser itself and google docs which is available for free uh all this free stuff they give you gemini's free is because of that ad network but then you put a bunch of pirate business development people into an organization who have stock options and the incentive is to grow market share that's the incentive there's no incentive to not grow and so what happens over multiple decades in a business is if you've won everything your team is there saying well what do we win next what do we win next and some of the creative people will go over and do creative things like waymo some of the energy will go into buying things like android like buying uh youtube sure and then there's also some creative energy and cycles that go into bd business development and they are going to scour the earth and find incredible deals to grow the business right so there's multiple ways to grow a business you could acquire things you could create new credible new verticals like remember they tried loon to do low earth orbit i miss loon balloons that would do you know spread things obviously that worked better with satellite um you know when uh spacex lowered the cost to put those up there so make new incredible things like waymo and then the final piece is let the bd team scour the earth go to every corner but eventually when you're a monopoly and you have a monopolistic position that business development team is going to do more and more extreme yes cutthroat things just the nature of business and it happened at microsoft where they told people if you want the microsoft operating system windows on your machine you got to put on the desktop the internet explorer browser and that's what killed netscape or greatly angled netscape over time because netscape used used to be able to buy netscape it was packaged software at compu serve you would go and buy a 50 browser then they made it uh they had the server you know web servers and everything they tried to monetize it otherwise so anyways a really interesting case we'll keep watching it i believe uh google's gonna navigate this and we'll be sitting here 10 years from now and google will be a vibrant company and they'll have figured this all out and they'll you know maybe lose on the margin some of these really aggressive deals but they have other businesses like waymo that could become a trillion dollar business waymo is worth whatever it is tens of billions now yes i think that becomes a trillion dollar business itself in the next 10 20 years so there's other ways for them to make money i think youtube will continue to grow uh so great job teeing that up and i think you got for the audience really awesome information here and with this new lena khan with the end of the wrath of khan and a very frisky not matt gates uh and a very frisky uh m a environment you know google might be able to buy into other verticals that are not the core one so this is where m a kind of is valuable because if google could have been buying things all along like let's say they could buy snapchat or they could have bought whole foods or they could buy uber or airbnb and their m a teams were like you know we're sitting on all this money why don't we go buy uber lyft instacart doordash whatever then they wouldn't be doing these kind SPEAKER_00: of grinded out deals on the margins do you think so because to me google's a big enough company with enough smart people that they would do both at the same time the profit motive is a great driver of SPEAKER_23: activity but there's leadership at the company and the leadership if sundar is you know setting direction and you say you know what sundar you can't put any cycles on m a it's not we're not doing it right look at adobe figma yeah it's just not worth the time the jews ain't worth the squeeze so for four years or more they've just said you know what can't focus on m a so when he goes and puts in an eight hour day there might have been two hours in that day where they focused on m a opportunities or an hour and that's like well there's nothing we can do here so let's go figure out something else to work on okay let's work on squeezing more money out of the search business SPEAKER_00: jason that was the meanest thing you've ever said about a ceo i've ever heard that he puts in an eight hour day i that is such a all right 10. i mean when you work in a big company like that sure SPEAKER_23: i mean it's a 24 7 job yeah he probably puts in eight hour sunday some sunday soup i know but yes SPEAKER_237: you're right i'm just joking because it came out i know you i know how you approach work and time and SPEAKER_00: so forth so i'm just laughing because i think that's about the rudest thing you said it's someone who SPEAKER_23: supports let alone you know 200 this is a great this is a great segment jason wisdom well just if i have any wisdom to share here's what i've learned all right i'm taking notes there's a group of people who just love their jobs and careers you don't need them to tell them to work extra hours they just love it so much i don't have to tell you to check tech meme shout out gabe uh you know to check your twitter handle and and see what's buzzing in tech over the weekend you love tech and s1 comes out you're going to read it when it comes out it doesn't matter if it hits your desk SPEAKER_228: at 10 a.m and or 10 p.m you're going to be like oh that's why i'm in you're going to go read it because you're alex wilhelm and you love it and there are people who want work-life balance and when it's six o'clock they're like my phone's off my slack's off and you just have to determine if in your company you want to have people who are just naturally motivated and you don't have to push them SPEAKER_23: or if you want to have people who have life work balance and that's fine too or in some positions you don't care and in some positions you do right so in customer support you may not need people who are putting in 50 60 hours a week and they're just so enthused about the next episode of the pod they want it to be 10 better each time like you and i do and uh you know it's just the nature of things and what you have to do is just define what you want as an organization and make sure everybody who comes to that organization understands them and that's where young founders make mistakes is they think that they can get inside somebody's head and motivate them it's a narcissistic pursuit it is a delusion of grandeur that i could take another human being and make them as motivated as i am to watch the knicks or listen to dire straits or go skiing or read an s1 or you know yeah yeah put extra time into thinking about who the main character is so we can have a better guest for today's show you know i wake up every day i think who's a really interesting person that we could SPEAKER_173: talk to man yesterday how great was yesterday when we talked to um alan control systems alan SPEAKER_242: control systems like i don't know i think you picked that one i'm like that got me jazzed up for the 24 hours after it i was stoked that you found that guest and founders are the best to talk to you SPEAKER_01: because they will always give you that energy boost and that has been true my entire career is if you SPEAKER_00: find especially a founder who's doing well is like a double shot of espresso because not only are SPEAKER_80: they powered by themselves but they have a tailwind yeah they're they're in going to hypersonic mode SPEAKER_23: you know they're about to hit the pass to the space boundary long way of staying you know just define the culture you want it's okay to have a nine to five culture it's okay to have a 24 7 culture just make sure people know on the way in that's what it is and you got to tell them 10 times i tell people who come work for me i define how good you are for a match for our company and how responsive you are to me and your teammates that doesn't mean i expect you to put in an eight SPEAKER_228: hour sunday but it does mean if i text on a sunday or i slack on a sunday you're probably going to see it and respond i mean unless they're like you're off the grid or something of course yeah yeah everyone SPEAKER_251: gets sick here and there but i i think that's actually because this matters is responsive absolutely SPEAKER_00: matters and also one of the things that i've consistently noticed in people who are highly performant is that if you go to their preferred channel of communication they are highly responsive yeah that does not mean they're responsive across every channel some people love emails people love texts some people you have to call but people will find a way to be available to the right things and that does seem to track very closely to high performance so yeah all right speaking about founders SPEAKER_43: though let's do some fridays jason all right well let me tee this up for you fridays um i love meetups SPEAKER_23: last night i spoke at the all-in meetup here in austin uh and the 290 people had signed up when i was on my way over there in the afternoon and there were definitely over 200 people who showed up got to meet everybody did a q a i think people love using online to go meet offline and i wanted to do meetups for this week in startups and we've tried them three or four different times i used to do them ad hoc in fact in the first year of the show we used to have like a korean one uh and somebody who wanted to come into work for us did that one we had one in japan we had ones all across the country france and we would have them pitch their startups in these live meetups so i was bringing it back but we needed a platform and this platform river allows us to have these founder friday meetups but i wanted to come up with a purpose and the purpose i wanted was four founders by founders four founders by founders and i got this from nyx fan tv is uh my friend cp's slogan is um uh for fans by the fans you know it's a radio call and show after the next game we all chop it up i call into the show all the time and talk about the next game for me it's like my local wfan when i lived in new york um i never got on the air for that but i'm i go on the air you know every fifth or tenth game for nyx fan tv so this is four founders by founders SPEAKER_228: and we give them a format and we want them to have six to eight people in each pod and we have SPEAKER_23: dozens of cities now i've hired a half-time person to manage this and we've now got thousands of people sound signed up in dozens of cities and they've been doing this founder fridays once a month they get together here is founder fridays you can go to founder fridays.tech right founder fridays.tech it's very simple founders host a local meetup in their city on river that's the event that's the software platform we use they find a venue coffee shop co-working a restaurant whatever and they get together on that friday we have them in all different cities which is fantastic amsterdam calgary vancouver we're looking for hosts for these no lawyers accountants service people no looky lose you have to have a startup and it has to be run by two or three founders you cannot do it as a law firm or something like that or a real estate broker no offense to all those folks you know i use them all day long we have startup basics here with wilson cincini and cruise so we'd love the service providers to support these but we found that when we did these previously they would get taken over by people looking for customers and what we wanted to have was a tight little circle enough that you could go around the circle which i think is six seven or eight people once it gets past eight people like it takes too long to answer one question each month with each other hey what are you struggling on what's working and man it has a transformative effect i've been very low-key about this because we're about to hit a year on it i don't promote it too much because i didn't want it to get inundated but the conversations that are happening here are changing people's lives it's very lonely to be a founder we've now created a vehicle for it and you can sponsor it so on river for a thousand bucks if you're a law firm an accounting firm you can go but you got to buy everybody dinner or lunch 350 bucks yeah for each one so three for a thousand bucks it's a de minimis amount of money if you do go you can't be a pain in the neck you got to be supportive and helpful you don't get to promote SPEAKER_271: yourself at it you just get to be you just get to say i'm happy to buy everybody lunch that's it so if SPEAKER_23: you're like a law firm and you you got an office in vancouver and you want to do this feel free we don't have a sales department itself sir i asked maddie uh who's a researcher here in austin with me to talk to the founder friday folks they're in a whatsapp group and we have them all in a group fun because you get this persistent discussion of all the hosts in one group alex and i'll make sure they add you and then each of the cities has their own group so they're just talking about stuff all day long it's really wonderful small communities for founders by founders i asked maddie to talk to them and say hey are there any good stories that occurred and to coordinate that with SPEAKER_95: you and i think we have two of the hosts who are going to talk about the stories occurring SPEAKER_00: in their local chapter yes and the first one of those is geor colbert uh george founder friday host over in austin texas and uh george you are the ceo and co-founder of albatross.ai and that's albatross t-r-o-z.ai welcome to the show thanks for having me jason hollix happy to be here SPEAKER_23: i'm sorry i'm in austin i haven't been able to go because the founder friday is a fall when i was traveling but i will be coming to one and maybe we'll do it instead of we we usually coordinate them all on the same friday so everybody can do it they all share their photos in the groups they share it on socials and then my team likes and retweets and we get to promote the companies but how many months have you been doing it where do you meet and then maybe tell us about a discussion that's occurred SPEAKER_286: that's been helpful yeah so we've i've been uh the host for the past three months uh we meet at a bar SPEAKER_288: uh on the east side um the name excuse me right now uh but yeah so we meet every friday from 4 to 6 p.m we've had uh you know every friday no so every first friday of every month and 4 to 6 p.m central machine works that's where it is um 4 to 6 p.m the idea is hey if you're a founder and you want to get together uh one of my philosophies is uh founders learn best from other founders so especially in the early stage you know you might be very strong on the technical side you might be very strong on the business side you might come and say hey like i'm wondering how to approach this aspect of a problem and so that's what i've been doing and in terms of good stories there are two of them um i'm gonna go with the first one it's joe at talentway.io so he's a non-technical founder and he's working on a product and his key issue was he suspected um that the approach to engineering that they're currently doing was not the right way and as a technical founder one of the first thing we told him was he was absolutely correct if you let engineers they will try to over optimize everything and you know they'll tell you hey give me a long list of requirements and then leave me alone for two to three months while i go build it and then you can go present to the customer and one of the things we reassured him is like no like you have to be even if you're non-technical um confident enough to push back and say we're not going to get along those requirements we're going to minimize those requirements to exactly what we need to solve that problem at 70 of the way and then you're going to go back to your customers say hey this is a 70 solution is that good enough yeah yes exactly and so as soon as we talked to him about it he was yeah as i said you already kind of suspected it but he needed to hear from other technical founders that yes your engineer is telling you this because you know he's just being an engineer he wants to overmise worry about scale in SPEAKER_11: the beginning and he doesn't need to do that so that builds your confidence as a first-time founder hearing it from multiple co-founders hey there is a better way and it just allowed him to make a better decision you said you had a second uh discussion that occurred tell us about that one yeah and so SPEAKER_288: another benefit of learning is also you know there's a lot of talk about you know founders should be thinking about strategic partnerships right and that's one of the best ways to grow and so myself you know i'm a technical founder a little bit like a little bit on the distribution side right and so i had a founder who showed up uh michael at pussy.ai they build ai generated videos for social media and you know a quick explain explainer what alba charles is alba charles we build ai sales agents for the real estate space so specifically over the phone email and social media so here's the picture or ai connects to the property's instagram profile tick tock and when people are interested the ai engages with those people but as well as i said we are a social conversion talking to michael and twisty and looking at his videos i'm like huh could a property use this to generate videos to post on their on their twitter or instagram profile that can be a lead generation thing and then my ai sales agents can be the lead sales conversion tool so we got together we started talking and realized yes this is an opportunity here to bundle our solutions and start offering it here and so while he was originally a b2c guy there was an opportunity for us to work together and on an contribution and this allows me to say hey we have a almost you can think of as a full-stack ai marketing solution where you'll use twisty to generate ai videos for lead generation and then you'll have albatross ai as an ai sales conversion to engage with the leads and so that was one of the two things that i know SPEAKER_302: personally have come out of founder fridays super excited about it and uh all right so go to SPEAKER_177: founderfridays.tech and you can sign up for the austin one and how many people come each week uh what's SPEAKER_288: the range of people coming is it five ten so i hate to admit it but we've gotten something from like 20 to 30 35 people showing up all founders though but there is a i think austin is unique there is quite a bit of demand for this um and so yeah so we've got 20 30 people we try to split it up between hey uh b2b founders in this section uh b2c founders and and there's um you know i think amazon has a policy of like everybody caters around a pizza so actually we've gotten a sponsor we get pizzas and then we just you know put them on the table people get around the pizza a picture i think that assigning SPEAKER_23: people to a table and having a lead on each table is the way to go because the more people like structure in these things and you could have just the structure time hey we're going to do our round table and pizza from 3 to 4 30 you got to sit at a table you got to be on time you eat a couple slices you have a beer or a soda pop yeah and uh you know the leader goes around the table and and keep some time constraint each of the eight people gets to explain what they're working on what their problem is for two minutes there's four minutes of feedback that's six minutes told or we go to the next person six times six thirty six minutes six times seven forty two whatever it is and um you just have a uh a stopwatch and somebody's the timer so somebody's the moderator somebody's the timer so i really encourage you to put structure on it and then explain how that works with the other leads and the other hosts so that we help people uh do that do you think people would pay a membership to SPEAKER_288: do this and would it make them more serious about it i'm curious i so i think they would however um if i cannot share my opinion i'm a little bit against it especially for early stage founders um there might be you might want to throw a barrier or something right so like it's not just maybe yeah that might be fine and might be way to interpret it hey it's not like we're trying to make money off you here but it's more like we want to we want to make sure that you're your seat yeah yeah exactly we want to make sure you're committed and um yeah like i think early stage founders especially when they're you know they just launched a product or they're about to launch it i mean i have that conversation with founders where they had a product an idea but they were not sure if it should be b2b and b2c and they're asking everybody else hey what do you think yeah SPEAKER_184: i agree with a barrier but now what about um the vetting to make sure you don't get intralopers in SPEAKER_23: there trying to sell into it uh are you vetting each person who applies and checking their linkedin and making sure it's not a service provider or a looky-loo just somebody who's got nothing to do on a friday uh or does the river team do that now how is that working so it's a little tough SPEAKER_288: when you have 30 40 people coming up but river just launched a questionnaire and one of the easiest way to do to filter is just hey are you a founder and if so do you have a website and you know maybe if you're very early you may not have a website but i think it's kind of key like if you're a founder and you're serious and you know you're trying to build a business you probably have a website so show me SPEAKER_322: your website tell me about your company and then that should be enough to kind of filter out anybody who's you know he said so looky-loo yeah i mean that's gonna be the key um great success who SPEAKER_177: who became the sponsor of the austin one i'm curious if it was uh a law firm or a county SPEAKER_288: it was actually bank of california shout out to sophia reached out to me she was like hey this is SPEAKER_329: cool i would love to do it um she bought us all beer and pizza at the last one so that was pretty SPEAKER_23: cool yes awesome yeah so i'm asking uh all the partners to go through the website and to do those sponsorships uh through river so make sure they go through river and then they'll just send you the money we'll keep track of that make sure they get their deliverables it's kind of like alex in some ways like tedx we want to have some controls but we want to trust founders to do what's right and um we we're going to make no money on it like we're not going to take any of the money just so you know um we have one person who works on this and right now you know maybe we'll if the sponsorship SPEAKER_228: does become a thing we'll have her go full-time and be the coordinator full-time and pay her salary with it but for now uh enjoy the pizza thank you george uh and uh i will see you at the next one SPEAKER_310: hopefully hopefully that's really fascinating any thoughts alex before we bring on our next one i SPEAKER_01: love community i got raised in the chicago technology scene actually to be totally honest and so i'm a SPEAKER_00: big fan of people that actually bring the stuff together and uh these are getting big the culver city meetup says 58 people are going to that december 6th meetup so probably time to start breaking these into smaller groups but next up we have kitty bogel sherman and coco harman these are the founder friday hosts from long view texas uh shout out texas for having so many active hosts kitty how are SPEAKER_333: you guys doing long view texas i don't even know where that is okay long view is about four and a half SPEAKER_340: hours from you probably okay dallas houston between dallas and shreveport on i-20 got it okay all right SPEAKER_310: we're east texas i love it i love it uh i was just reading in the economist today about how SPEAKER_23: fabulously dallas is doing dallas fort worth is booming yes and a lot of people moving their headquarters there obviously austin is booming with the tech scene but even like a bunch of financial companies and manufacturing companies are putting their headquarters now alex in dallas and they're going to have their own stock market so um how many months have you been doing it how's it going you've probably heard the past uh the last interview with george tell us a little bit about SPEAKER_340: who you are and how it's going well i'll say thanks to george for being a great host because coco and i have actually attended the austin meetup and really fun made incredible connections can't say enough good things about that experience so on our end which is a little bit of sort of the opposite end of the spectrum we've i think we've hosted four or five and they have been really great and we've kind of been experimenting because you know jason you mentioned that being a founder can be lonely yeah and that isolation factor it doesn't have to be there but especially in our community it's almost like they're founders they may not know that they exist like the others exist and so founder friday has given us an opportunity to start finding those people and bringing them into the fold so it's been going great and we're really excited to sort of kick off the new year um we had the longview economic development council's ceo come to our november nice yeah it was awesome and he was really excited about it because part of their strategic vision right now includes a real emphasis on innovation which actually our area there's a lot of aerospace opportunity and so that's kind of random and interesting but it was really cool to have him there and we've got some other people like that lined up for january so i think we're really going to kind of try to take it to the next level SPEAKER_131: in the new year love it how many people have come and any good discussions absolutely so we've had SPEAKER_340: between like four and eight people come perfect the story we submitted to y'all is you know probably a little non-traditional but so one of our founders he actually wants to promote an album but kind of more just promoting an album he wants to build community so his passion is getting like neighbors to know their neighbors again so to speak and so he wants to build a community around that using art and so he is amazingly talented an incredible musician but he has almost no experience on the business side of things and so basically since coming and he's come to all of them and so since coming to the first one he's made so much progress and he's gotten help with like you know just understanding the barriers to entry on like a website are actually much lower than you would think right you know if you don't SPEAKER_23: what you don't know what i find is you know somebody might have done six hours of research on something and you don't even know what you don't know but that person's done the six hours and they can explain it to you in 60 seconds or six minutes and you're like by the way you're building a website just use squarespace or oh you're building that type of website oh there's a vertical provider who does just websites called motive and it's for deal car dealerships we're investors in that company as an example so you know if you're a car dealership there is a solution for you i found it i talked to the person there and so that's i think one of the magical things about the format of four founders by founders and small groups because you don't also have to worry about the motivation of the person they're doing it because they know you as a founder will be able to help them with something and man i have seen this over and over we do jam sessions with our portfolio companies and my lord sometimes they will come together and somebody has a problem and like three out of ten people in the circle are like oh you don't know about x product or service and they're like no i've never heard of this you know stripe you talk of you know back in the day right i've never heard about hubspot and they're like oh let SPEAKER_173: me show you my hubspot and they pop it open and they show them the details and boom they're done SPEAKER_340: so awesome well you know what's kind of crazy you mentioned the founder jam sesh so coco and i came to the founder jam sesh i think last november actually oh wow the other day we watched the recording back just like what actually you know what was said then and we went through and so many suggestions that the founders had are things that we've now built and implemented and deployed and just the network building opportunities i think the other thing is that founders are a certain breed and like you were also saying about the motivation very motivated and it's what they think about 24 7. that's actually part of the isolation too is because not everybody wants to do that and so it's like how do we friend friends who also want to do that and i think that's what you're offering yeah well that's SPEAKER_177: actually what you're offering coco any uh any highlights for you uh and maybe tell us a little bit SPEAKER_371: about your company well um so kitty and i are co-founders so we have the same and we run the SPEAKER_310: um what is the company we'll give you a little plug here yeah give us your really simple sentence SPEAKER_372: yeah indora we're mobile games personalized with the photos stored on your phone and yes i remember SPEAKER_23: easy and fun yeah awesome yeah what a great it's such a great idea uh and i can see like grandmas and moms and everybody and i'm on a family group thread now that is all the calacanises and then all the turchies and the mccabes and it just keeps growing i don't know how many people are on this i message thread but i'm sure that my sister-in-law dina or my sister-in-law carrie at some point will submit SPEAKER_373: one of your games to the group chat and everybody will talk about it for a month it's such a great SPEAKER_372: idea we're kind of nerdy about the science of nostalgic reflection yes and so it's actually one of the lead researchers in that category is our advisor and proven to be restorative and expansive in nature so just by looking back at your photos it's restorative and that it reduces anxiety loneliness and depression and then it's expansive it makes you more creative it inspires you and motivates you on SPEAKER_381: your future actually i love your idea so much so nostalgia alex going back with your family and SPEAKER_14: friends and remembering the good times yes makes you feel better and it's restorative i love that SPEAKER_23: and it makes you optimistic about the future so it's one of the things i love about you alex is sometimes i talk about when you first came on the show or you'll talk about when you were a teenager coming to tech crunch 50 or something and seeing me on stage or whatever nostalgia does do that it SPEAKER_160: fills your bucket as i talk to my daughters about and you know what literally warms your body temperature SPEAKER_340: really yeah reach the age of 40 it makes you feel younger so yeah for that okay i haven't had 40 SPEAKER_266: yeah nice of you to mention that i look younger thank you for that yeah i thought it was the weight SPEAKER_339: loss but i think it's all my nostalgia that you must be reflecting we was like plug that we did compete in SPEAKER_340: a pretty big competition last night and we actually won the investors award and the judges award and SPEAKER_339: thirty five thousand dollars so 35 dime skis oh yum yum is it an investment or is it just free money SPEAKER_340: it's an investment um and it's a it's an accelerator here in texas based originally out of frisco but SPEAKER_35: what's the term so they give you specific terms or is it like on your next note we set the terms SPEAKER_340: oh cool i'll have the best steel jcal but good at the terms and um yeah they're really growing SPEAKER_310: and last time it was their first what's the name of their uh of that let's give them a plug who's the SPEAKER_340: accelerator code launch accelerator and it's a product of improving which is a software development firm they've got a presence in the us and then all over south america smart move yeah if they are SPEAKER_42: building websites for people and apps they have a vested interest in startups we have so many of those SPEAKER_23: latin american dev firms that you know are really great have great developers uh that have helped our startup so i'm super excited for you all uh founders are mutants and so they're very strange alex to the rest of the world but when you get together it's kind of like oh yeah you can make ice i can make fire and uh yeah i can fly what do you do i fly really i i can run really fast and the mutants just immediately take to each other and so we call a founder fridays founderfridays.tech go there sign up if you want to start your own chapter i just ask that you have two or three founders of the chapter so we we don't have the chapter die because one person i don't know has life experiences going on so you have like a little redundancy i think three is the right number keep building them keep them pure please is all i ask is don't pervert them with you know uh other agendas let's keep this pure four founders once a month on the first friday we do the first friday of every month right is that the um is that the rule and unless it's a holiday and then we move it to the second friday but we wanted to make it easy to remember first friday of every month so i guess it would be december 6th is the next first friday so hopefully everybody gets that going uh and i am super excited and a quick announcement i'm going to host all of the founder friday hosts for a special barbecue here in austin if they want to come so SPEAKER_126: we'll have like an afternoon uh at the salt lick well it's on me we'll just eat a bunch of barbecue SPEAKER_23: and we'll just have all the hosts meet each other so it's like all the mutant the captains of the mutant super teams will come together at the salt lick and eat some uh they i think they have one or SPEAKER_39: two vegan or vegetarian dishes if you're into such things oh that would be sad if you go to a vegan SPEAKER_271: vegetarian mutant i can't help you but you can just bring a brown bag at brown bag it uh absolutely SPEAKER_23: fantastic this has been great i'm so happy for you guys congratulations on winning 35 dime skis that's great it's going to go a long way um and uh alex any further questions or i just want to give them SPEAKER_18: a plug if you want to take a take a look at what they're building it's indora.app e-n-d-o-r-a.app SPEAKER_01: and i have recently learned the power of nostalgia because my nearly two-year-old uh we make a quarterly book in my family of all of our photos from the last three months and then she carries it around the house and makes you look at all the pictures of her and she doesn't stop doing this so i've recently done market research and i agree kids really love our app accidentally so love it SPEAKER_228: all right keep grinding and we will see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye