This Week in Startups - AI Rebuilt Every YC W26 Startup. Should Founders Be Scared? | E2271

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, Friday, April 3rd, 26. It's Twist. Lon Harris is here. I'm Jason Calacanus. We have a full docket. This week in startups is brought to you by Render. Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one platform, Render. Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500 to $100,000 in free credits depending on your stage and backers. Grasshopper Bank. Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to grasshopper.com slash twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account. Deal. Founders scale faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country and minutes. Hire anyone anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com slash twist to learn more.

Starting point is 00:00:52 We're sitting here April 3rd. Summer's coming. The winter's over. It's springtime for J-Cal. and lawn. Nobody is going to get the rest. No, that's a little old for most of our viewers. But if you're in your 40s or 50s, you're welcome. You would get springtime for lawn. Germany. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:01:13 It's the producer. It's from the producers. So Fridays we have a little bit of fun. We're going to do our startup news. We're going to, you know, really try to focus on, you know, the four pillars here on the show. In 2026, I always try to like set an agenda for the year. Tactical, practical. That's what I love to do. Tactical things, very practical, so that you can take something from this week in startups and apply it to your business, get inspired, bring it to your team and say, hey, here's something we can do. That would make our business go better or make our customers happy, whatever it happens to be, grow our startup faster. And then, of course, experts only. If you look at what's happened in media, the go direct movement, as we talked about last episode, hey, going direct is, you know, the best model. So we want experts.

Starting point is 00:01:59 only on the show. Experts only. It's one of the things I learned from the transition from, let's say, the roundtable as Leo did it on This Week in Tech, to the Roundtable, as I constructed it on All In. This Week in Tech, you know, Leo plus three journalist commentators. Great. Awesome content. You know, really define the category. But now you have experts who want to be part of that roundtable. So that's like a unique opportunity, right? So if you look at This Week in AI or our VC roundtable, it's not a lot of journalists, right? Journalists kind of out of favor right now. Journalists tend to have, I don't know, what would I say? When I was a journalist, 20% picture of the world, and we would try to get to 22%, 23%, 24%, I feel like there was an era before social media, before podcasting. Regular, everyday people

Starting point is 00:02:49 didn't have access to leaders, politicians, CEOs. You had to go through the medium of a journalist. There was this whole class. of people, they were our conduit to the powerful to celebrities. Right. But today, a celebrity can have a YouTube channel, a VC or a CEO can go on a podcast. Everybody's got an X account. Everybody's got TikTok and Instagram. And right, so the idea that you need this people, this whole class of people to, you know, be the conduit for these conversations, you know, they are struggling, I think, right now

Starting point is 00:03:23 to figure out where do we fit in to the new. brick. We want to be tactical. We want to be practical for you, the audience. Number two, we want experts only getting a lot of experts and we, you know, keep it going there. Hey, we like to super distribute what we're doing, right? Super distribution is a big part of it. And as Lon added, number four, you want to meet you where you are, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Well, not Facebook. Nobody's on that. No, threads, baby. We don't post the threads. We don't. I'm, yeah, Oliver really is keen on exploring threads. I'm, I'm a little, I really don't like it over there.

Starting point is 00:03:59 I find I'm very uncomfortable on threads, so I've been resistant. Why are you uncomfortable? Why are you so uncomfortable? I think threads is the worst. I think just the vibes on threads of any, you know, X gets all the crap people hate, don't like Elon. Oh, it's all Nazis or whatever, Grock, they don't like it. I think the conversations on X are much more civil, much calmer, much more rational and

Starting point is 00:04:22 thoughtful on X than Thread. Threads is like, they're all lunatics. I don't know. It's the loony bin. It's the boomer one where all the crazies went, I think. That's where Karen Swisher and Prof. Cole takes reigns supreme. Every time I go over there, and I think Karen Swisher blocked me. We used to be friends, but she's blocked me now.

Starting point is 00:04:39 She just says horrible things about everybody. I mean, the biggest crazy thing is they've got a podcast with tech advertisers, and the entire show is just saying tech is horrible. These tech people are terrible. And then Prof. G said, you should unsubscribe from these 20 different services. that like eight of them are their advertisers. Can you imagine if I got on here? I was like, you know it would be a great idea?

Starting point is 00:05:03 Y'all should unsubscribe from MailChimp, like unsubscribe and, uh, we love, we love our advertisers here. You should all resist and unsubscribe. That's like, that's like his big idea. Try Vance for all your sock two needs. The last one, Jason, a perfect segue into our first guest, viral ready, our first guest went viral this week. So let's bring him on.

Starting point is 00:05:25 Marie Kazan, the CEO of FeltSense, had a viral, you sent it to me after we'd already booked him on X. This company, they, they're a holding company that spins up their own AI agents, which then act as autonomous founders. This week they went viral because their agents rebuilt every company from YC's winter 26 batch. So let's see. Yes, I did see this. People were hand-wringing about it.

Starting point is 00:05:54 And I think there was a little bit like, hey, that's a jerk thing to do. But I looked at and said, well, let's pause for a second here and hear from the founder what their intent was. Was it to show what's defensible, what's not? What's commoditized? What's not? Is it performance art? I don't know. That's why I wanted to have them on the show.

Starting point is 00:06:14 And before we get started, I just want to take a minute. And applaud for plot. I have my plot pin on. I press the button. It records everything I do. It sinks it. Lon's got his as well. I'm using the magnet on the back.

Starting point is 00:06:25 He's using the clip. I don't lose anything. I don't lose any of these great ideas we have. Everything is recorded. I say action item. I say, remind me. I say put it on my calendar.

Starting point is 00:06:35 All of that, organized, nice and tight. In the summary, with the transcript, in an app. I don't have to have my phone with me. I don't know where my phone is right now.

Starting point is 00:06:42 I just have my Plod pin on. If you want to get a plot pin, I think we have a deal. Oh, you know we do. You got to check it out at plod. dot a i slash twist that's p l a ud dot a i slash twist if you use the code twist you're going to get 10% off your plod pin it turns out just the integration of plod and like a product i love said the results are off the charts really there's all right applause based on this well thanks

Starting point is 00:07:06 everybody if you're a twist listener and you've bought a plod pin after hearing the modern show thank you so much we appreciate it yeah thank you share it on social and ccs marique welcome to the show. I see that you're at your grandma's house right now for the weekend. It's totally fine. You're in grandma's living room. His agents rebuilt his grandma's house. Exactly. Just to perfect specification. Okay. Are you a troll? Is this performance art? Are you sending a message to YC and Gary that their ideas are derivative and lame? Are you a rabble rouser? What are you doing? This was a very controversial thing you did, sir? You know, in profession, I'm, I am a serial entrepreneur, but I think that the particular flair of entrepreneurship that I pursue is, you know, defined,

Starting point is 00:07:58 I call it social sculpture. So oftentimes the types of companies that I build, they are a commentary on kind of what's happening. And so some of what I've built before was tech for the sex workers rights movement. So kind of what was happening in the adult industry in the mid-20s, that then ended up leading to only fans and kind of this transition. Actually, Jason, the last time we intersected was I launched the first VC investing in psychedelic therapeutics in 2018.

Starting point is 00:08:23 And I think we were going back and forth a little bit on psychedelic deal flow, either with myself or some of my business partners. You know, I did look at that. Peter Tio, a friend of mine, or acquaintance of mine, I don't know. I think we're friendly. He invites me to parties once in a while,

Starting point is 00:08:39 so that's nice. He is, did the psilocybin company before anybody. Something therapeutics. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah, compass. Compass therapeutics, you know, and I was like, wow, that's super visionary, but I can't do that. You know, we have vice clauses and VC funds.

Starting point is 00:08:57 It just makes things complicated. Okay, so then what's this idea here, Mark? Yeah, so I think that, like, in 2014, for me, when I was, like, starting to think about everything that was happening online, people saying, like, hey, AI, won't take your job, but a human using AI will. I just really disagreed with that statement. I just don't believe that that's true. And I think now we're seeing that, like, no, AI will very much take your job, and many jobs

Starting point is 00:09:21 are being taken by AI. And so for me, there was this question of like, well, what is the most powerful thing that we could demonstrate or build that would show that this is just like not accurate? And building essentially agentic founders felt like something that people would not even be able to debate that AI can take your job. if we can build agents that can actually play the role of founders. Got it. We've got a brand new partner here at Twist.

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Starting point is 00:11:01 startups, and I am stoked. It's an amazing company. So you went straight to the head of the line. Hey, we like an administrative assistant in AA or, you know, somebody who's a spreadsheet jockey, they could easily be replaced. A researcher can easily be replaced. And nobody's triggered by that because, hey, that's not my job. That's like an entry-level job. But what if you went to the most coveted position and you show them you could actually replace a founder with AI? That to you would be the most provocative thing to do in terms of, you know, getting a message across. Definitely. And like when you're when you're building at that bleeding edge, you always learn so much more than everyone else. Like it's very difficult to actually learn anything about how space is evolving if you're not building at like the very, very forefront. And I learned that in the sex worker rights movement, in psychedelics and here in like the agentic kind of tech AI space. You know, for like rent a human for instance launched in the last couple months. We started thinking through like, okay, human hiring here and we'll, does a human hiring engine look like about a year ago?

Starting point is 00:12:09 And so when you're building at this bleeding edge, you just start getting these insights into like how everything will play out that I think a lot of other folks are just lagging in because they are just building for the present rather than building for where we're about to be in the next couple of years. So, yeah. Got it. And you're the CEO of Felt Sense.

Starting point is 00:12:27 Yep. And that company is building AI agents that will ideate, build, and just release products on their own. Yeah? That's like your day job. So you said, hey, a great stunt, a great way to get attention for this, stunt marketing lawn. Very big tradition is let's see which companies can be replicated or not. Now, what's your advice, though, in all seriousness, if I'm a founder doing a startup,

Starting point is 00:12:53 is there value in me having a co-founder who is an agent? And is that really what you're selling? It's like, hey, here's your third or fourth co-founder that doesn't get equity? We thought about that, like, I would say at the beginning of 25 and very quickly dismissed it. It became apparent to us that like actually the kind of co-founder model would, one, be an extremely competitive space and to not actually be forward thinking enough. Like it would be essentially just able to be replicated by anthropic or open AI with, you know, the models that they currently have.

Starting point is 00:13:28 And so we actually do the opposite. So we don't open up our software to anyone. We don't sell it to enterprise. We don't sell it to founders. We keep everything in house. We spin up our own founders, and they build, and they launch their own products and have their own ICPs, and it's an infinitely scalable hold code where all the operators are agents. Okay.

Starting point is 00:13:46 So you're building IAC, Interactive Corporation, Barry Diller. He bought a bunch of startups, collected them together, famously lawn match and Expedia and all those things. Then he wound up breaking them up and selling them. But you're going to build a conglomerant of a bunch of different ideas. some of them inspired by the one-liners and the directory out Y Combinator. And you're literally going to compete with the YC class that doesn't have defensible products, correct? As a portion of what we do, I think that the first goal for us is essentially trying to capture as much of the long tail of entrepreneurship as possible.

Starting point is 00:14:21 And that long tail continues to grow on a daily basis as like the barrier to building comes down. But like right now we're really like a Trinket Apps factory. and that's a lot of what we're experimenting with. Trinket apps, what does it mean? So, like, essentially single feature, couple feature SaaS apps is like where we're starting. Can we get, you know, tens of thousands of these running, getting customers, people interacting with them, et cetera. But as the technology gets better and better, we are finding ourselves able to, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:49 replicate the technology of like entire companies. So, yeah. Now, I got one more question to ask, Lana, I know you're chomping at the bit. When you looked at the data, how many YC companies do you? Did you replicate? And by replicate, I guess you studied them online. You had an agent go out, find as much information as you can about the founders, about their mission. I don't know, maybe they spoke to a journalist, whatever.

Starting point is 00:15:12 And then you had it come up with a name and a derivative product, a duplicate product, inspired by product, which is totally fair game. Ideas are not protectable. What did you find? How many companies did you replicate? How much compute did it take to replicate them? And of that group, how many were commodity apps that you could just, in your mind, create an 80% or better version of?

Starting point is 00:15:40 And then how many of them were you like, oh, this thing requires, you know, it's whoop or aura and I need a wristband. I can't just replicate this online. Take us through what you learned. I'm curious about that. And if you want to tell us a little bit about, you know, the process you ran these agents across, let us know. Yeah, so when we went into setting this up,

Starting point is 00:16:00 there were a couple things that we needed to consider. On like the topic of compute, for instance, if we had just like ran agents against the wall and said, hey, just like rebuild as much as you can and go as deep as possible, we would have probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to replicate as much as possible. So we really had essentially like builds

Starting point is 00:16:22 and tranches and specific trigger events structured so that we could say like, okay, these are kind of the, the core architectures of some of these different companies, these are the different components that are quite reusable and that we can plug in across many different companies that we're trying to replicate. And what we found is that essentially like, you know, 10 to 20 percent of the batch was pretty highly replicable and was composed of basically like the same sorts of components. And those were many of the ones that we like posted online with the playable links that people

Starting point is 00:16:53 could actually like interact with, where there wasn't necessarily much differentiation from like, at least a technical perspective. Okay. So 20% off the top, just low-hanging fruit, easy to replicate. Those founders need to take a deep look in the mirror and say, hey, our idea and the ability to put up and stand up a product is extremely not defensible, right? Yeah, the thing that I would say is like some of those apps, though, like the other portion of replicability is not just technology.

Starting point is 00:17:24 So some companies, they had extremely replicable. technology, but they were selling into a market that was very difficult to get access to or to sell into that, you know, wouldn't, their company might not be disrupted necessarily by an anthropic or an open AI because those companies would just not have the patience or want to put resources towards trying to sell into that market because there are so many complex dynamics, etc. But from a technological perspective, yes, highly replicable. I would say on the other side, probably like 30% were, you know, not even really worth, like, pursuing or building, or you could build essentially kind of like the interface.

Starting point is 00:18:08 But in terms of the, like, the back end of things, there wasn't, you know, it was either like hardware, extremely difficult to access, like, data. There wasn't really much there that could be, like, truly rebuilt and we could truly take a stab out. One of the things we were joking about is, like, grew space is building a hotel up on the moon. And we were like, okay, what if people ask us if, you know, did we replicate this one?

Starting point is 00:18:29 We can, I mean, who's going to check us? Yeah, we built one. It's up there. But yeah, I think that there were definitely startups there that were just like extremely difficult to build. And then what the report that we've been putting together essentially talks about and just kind of highlights each one of these companies is there was a lot in the middle that we could, you know, take a decent stab at, but definitely had something.

Starting point is 00:18:53 But I would say probably over the next like year or two. many of the features will also be able to be essentially like replicated built. And especially as we start to see like more automation. I mean, we're already seeing a lot of companies beginning to do like automation of hardware builds and other aspects of manufacturing. And so I'm curious to see like five years, you know, down the road, which is quite a ways away. But like, it's hard for me to envision, you know, 90% of these companies not being replicable over the next few years. So, so, yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:23 Yeah. Marig, I know you got to go, but I do, I do want to get one question to hear. Did you hear back from any of the founders whose companies you sort of adapted with your agents? Did you get any personal blowback? We did find there are a few tweets that were not super happy with what you guys were doing. This one called me. Bitch move. A bitch move.

Starting point is 00:19:43 I'm curious, did you get any of this personal blowback? Who is? That's Paul? Yeah, Paul, you could be. Did you hear from any of the founders in a good or negative way? We got both. I mean, we got a lot of love. We got a lot of hate.

Starting point is 00:19:56 Honestly, I think a lot of the hate that we saw came from people who just didn't actually play with the product or didn't figure out that they could just click the link to actually play with it and interface. And so we spend a lot of time commenting over the last day or so to like just let people know that know these are actual like products they can play with. But we got some screenshots of the internal chats from this latest demo and they're calling us like vibe combinator. And I think we're having more of like a fun time playing with it than anything else. So, yeah, for us, it was like we're not trying to, like, create enemies here. We thought that this was like a really great. Yeah, you are. We're starting to start conversations.

Starting point is 00:20:34 I call. Yeah, yeah. I mean, listen. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to pass judgment. I know you got to go. Here's a hot take. If your bank moves slower than a startup, that's a problem.

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Starting point is 00:21:33 Dot Bank slash Twist and use the promo code twist to get started. But it's time for the chairman of the interwebs to pass judgment. Lon present the case and I will give my judgment. Go ahead. What is he accused of? So, you know, the defendant is accused of ripping off a lot of other people's companies and sort of replicating them as a way to gain attention. Whereas, you know, I think you could, I guess there you go.

Starting point is 00:22:01 Stay in character. Prosecutor, staying character. If it please the court, you know, Marique has gone and violated the sanctity of these startups, recreating them with his own agents without their consent. How do you rule? I am prepared to lay judgment on Marique Azan. While some of us might find it distasteful to rip and vibe code other people's ideas, there is nothing technically illegal about it.

Starting point is 00:22:32 If you build a coffee shop and you have the incredible idea to put hazelnut or chocolate syrup or vanilla syrup for the first time in a latte, that's an incredible invention, but it is not a protectable invention. Therefore, the court rules in favor of the defendant. There you go. It is distasteful to some, but it is the core of capitalism that people will build and innovate on your ideas. And the great ideas of our time from the iPhone built on the back of the Blackberry built, on the back of the Palm Pilot built on the back of the Newton, that we copy, iterate,

Starting point is 00:23:14 and are inspired by each other. and to the founders who feel wronged in this case, you have a modicum of sympathy from this court, but you do not have a legal case. What you have is a kick in the dairy air to work harder. I think in some ways, what Marique is doing is a splash of cold water, a bucket of cold water, over the heads of laxadaisical founders

Starting point is 00:23:50 who think they could just put up a commodity-based product and raise millions of dollars. Now you must face his agents. Case closed. Law and order. Thank you, gentlemen, for the ruling. I appreciate it, guys.

Starting point is 00:24:05 Marique, thanks so much for coming by. Lon, it was another startup we had on just two weeks ago, and they remind me of that startup because a couple of my friends had invested, in it. Pulsia has made it into a bit of a platform to do this. So instead of Pulsia saying, hey, we're going to do this, they say, here's a platform to do it. You put your idea in here. We don't care where you get the idea from. If you're copying MailChimp or Substack or Beehive and you want to commoditize it, go right ahead. And, you know, we have tools in here for

Starting point is 00:24:35 acquiring customers. We have tools in here for doing customer support. And everything becomes like a dashboard of YC. I think we called it like a YC, like eBay for YC, you know, a market place or a tool set, a HubSpot for YC. Anyway, the fact is, founders, I'd love to see somebody do this on my team against our portfolio and say, hey, listen, everything you've built here, not defensible, what's the moat, what's the moat, what's the moat? And in fact, I'm going to add what's the moat to our founder university and our launch accelerator, what's your moat is a new segment we're going to do in our programs.

Starting point is 00:25:13 because, you know, the moat used to be, I'm just going to go faster than everybody else or nobody else is tuned into this. Yeah. You know, in age of agents. I hired this brilliant technical co-founder and they're going to code it up and nobody else is going to be able to replicate what we've built.

Starting point is 00:25:27 Now Claude can do it in an afternoon. You ready for a tip, Juan? I am. I am incredibly frustrated with this Bank of America. Like, Bain of my existence. But for some reason, the worst bank ever. I can't take a bank of America. It's just like every time I want to get something done,

Starting point is 00:25:42 Bank of America is like, oh, let's increase the degree. degree of difficulty. Sure. You know, like, I, Mercury Bank wasn't available for personal now. Mercury banks available. Other banks are available. So I tell my team, like, for three years, get rid of Bank of America, get rid of

Starting point is 00:25:53 Bank of America. Nobody listens to me. They're like, oh, well, you know, okay, yeah, we'll get to it. We'll get to it. But it always goes down the list. So finally I put my foot down because something important happened. Like, I needed to go to Vegas and I needed like 20 dimes to go gamble. I couldn't get my 20 dimes out of the bank.

Starting point is 00:26:06 They were getting you atchina about getting your 20 dimes out of the bank? It's enough already. That's crazy. So I say, okay, line up. three banks, put me on the CC list, open up an account, just the basic checking savings account combo, open them all up, you know, get me the bank, people on the line. Oh, they're very excited, big fan of the pods, you know, blah, blah, blah. I say, great. They're like, okay, let us know what we can do for you. I said, oh, actually, there is something you do for me. Get me $10,000 and $2 bills.

Starting point is 00:26:34 Get me $10,000. $2 bills. Two dollar bills. They're rare. I have one of my desk drawer a $2 bill. One bank. Wow. Got me. There it is. My bricks. And that's but one brick.

Starting point is 00:26:53 That's one. That's a lot of bills. I mean, it's $5,000 bills. I didn't even know there were that many $2 bills still in circulation. I thought they were like a rare special thing. They still print them. They are rare. And I got them brand new from the mint in the plastic brick bag.

Starting point is 00:27:07 Oh, my gosh. Like you sometimes get when you go to Vegas and have a big win. Yeah. As you can see, Donald Trump has signed them all for me. Of course. Signed Donald Trump. What bill? He's going on a bill, right?

Starting point is 00:27:16 Donald Trump's picture. I think he's gone on dollar bills. Anyway, the point of this is it's the brown M&Ms, the area of the rider. Yes. Somebody put in their rider. Van Halen. It's Van Halen is the famous origin of this. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:28 In Van Halen's rider, they famously said, we don't like brown M&Ms. We want a big dish of M&Ms, but no brown M&Ms. And then that became like this. Was it green? It might have been green. I don't remember the color. It was brown. At first, people thought.

Starting point is 00:27:40 this was like, oh, these rock stars, they're unbearable with their demands. But Van Halen later explained that, well, that was how they made sure that the people at the venue were actually reading the rider. If they came in, they saw the dish of M&Ms, it had the wrong color in it. They were like, these people did not pay attention to detail. Now we got to go check the lights. We got to go check the amps. We got to go check the instruments.

Starting point is 00:28:00 We got to make sure because now we know that these guys are not detail oriented. By the way, congratulations to the boys over at the podcast Bros. Network, TBPN. Well, I just want to say congratulations to them, and they've apparently taken all ads off. Yeah. It looks, the show looks legitimately weird without the ad ticker. I said that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:19 So just, you know, we're sold out for even. We can start it for 15 years. That's what happens when you have a niche, you know, a podcast that works. The B2B stuff works. But congratulations to them for going to Open AI. There you go. Which is apparently hiring them to do their comms. Right.

Starting point is 00:28:38 And Sam said, like, AI's got to. terrible reputation as we've talked about, agnosticum with all these surveys. So I actually think if you look at what they did, they're extremely good at the vibes. Like their vibe thing was like next level. It was all vibes. I mean, the only criticism of them was like,

Starting point is 00:28:57 this doesn't feel like as substantive as other podcasts. And it's not hard-hitting by design. I think if you ask those guys, they would say like, no, they're not going after people. They don't want it to be mean or adverse. It's about hanging out. It's more the- It's more the cheeky pint

Starting point is 00:29:14 than the information, and I think that's okay. It doesn't have to be there. Totally fine. And if they got 100, 200, 300 million, I was trying to explain this to people who are losing their minds. I saw Jessica Lassen from the information

Starting point is 00:29:26 was kind of like a little tilted about it. That's a lot of money for any podcast. Even All-In, that would be a lot of money. Well, no. All-in makes a lot of money. 300 million. I mean, all in would legitimately go for, you know, there's a case that All In could go for a billion dollars because it's it's transcended

Starting point is 00:29:45 podcasting. It's events. It's other stuff, right. Yeah, yeah. And it's the influence level is insane. Like, it's nothing I've ever seen in media. Like literally like the Rob report would be like the JV version of All In in in terms of I mean, one of you got a job in the White House.

Starting point is 00:30:00 I think that's all you're really, that's as big as a two guys. That's as big as a, I think that's the upper limit for success. with a podcast is you actually go work for the presidential administration. If you've got an engineering team at your company, I'm betting there's a solid chance. They're spending far too much time on infrastructure. You need your team building your product to delight your customers, not configuring your virtual network. Render is the all-in-one cloud platform for developers that allows you to deploy scale and secure your apps and agents with zero ops. Most cloud platforms ask you to split your focus between product and infrastructure, or they force you into platform constraints that you

Starting point is 00:30:42 know you'll outgrow in six months. But just connect your GitHub repo to render, and you are live. L-I-V-E, web services, cron jobs, manage Postgres, the whole stack in one platform. It's time to find out why 5 million developers are already using render. Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the render startup program. You'll get anywhere from 500. to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and who your backers are. That's render.com slash twist. So here's what I'll say. Weird things happen at the top of the bubble.

Starting point is 00:31:19 That's all. And kudos to the boys over there for taking advantage of it. Sure. I'm happy for them. Congratulations. Weird things happen. It's an amazing thing for the whole podcast. And sometimes people pay, you know, two, three, four, five times what something's worth.

Starting point is 00:31:36 If they were making 30 million... Speaking of... You know, in a media business, you're worth three times that. Or 10 times the earnings, 5 times the top line, 10 times the earnings, 15 times the earnings, whatever. So let's say they were making 10 million in profits on 30 million or even 20 million in profits on 30 million. There's an argument they're worth 100, 200, 300, 500, 5, 10, or 15 times the 20 million. Let them have it. And let Sam overpay because if they make chat GPT and OpenAI one percent more likable...

Starting point is 00:32:05 Right. I think that's, yeah. Which is, by the way, that's a big desk. It's a very unlikable firm right now. Well, yeah, and there's just so much. That's worth $10 billion. Yeah. I mean, that's what, that's what Jessica from the information.

Starting point is 00:32:16 That was like her overall case was like, Elon has X as his public relations. Here's how I get my message out vehicle. And Sam felt like he didn't have one of those. And now he does. Now he's got these guys. The joke of that is, where's their viewership come from? Yeah. It's all X.

Starting point is 00:32:34 Yeah. So. hilarious. I saw somebody say, can't wait for Ilhan de Shadow Band these guys. I bet he would do that and just negate the whole investment. All right, let's keep the show moving. Yes, please.

Starting point is 00:32:47 I just wanted to give that little shout out to the boys. Congrats to TBP. We've got another. Thanks for having me on, boys. If they never had you on, they should have you on. I think they might have asked me early on, and I didn't know what it was. Right.

Starting point is 00:32:59 Like an idiot, I didn't reply. But I don't do a, I mean, I do five podcasts a week. Yeah, people who want to hear from you have their, their own way to hear from you. Okay, up next. We've got another amazing founder. His company is Bordie. It's an AI principle. It's not just an agent, Jason. It's an AI principle that acts as a connector introducing different people within the startup ecosystem, investors, founders, talent. Let's bring them on Andrew D'Souza. We're here to talk about Bordy, the AI connector. He's a super connector networking app that's designed to bring founders, operators, and investors

Starting point is 00:33:30 together. So he gets to know you, Jason, through your LinkedIn profile. And then he works out, like, who are the people that this person needs to meet based on what they're trying to do? But here's what I thought was interesting. I want to talk to Andrew about. Bordy, like, has agency. Like, you could be like, hey, Borty, I want to meet Jason Calacanis and see if he wants to fund my startup.

Starting point is 00:33:49 And Bordy has the freedom to go, you know what, you're too new, you're too early stage. You don't have the traction. How about you meet these founders and said? So that's what I want to talk to Andrew about, like, how do you give, how does Bordy develop taste and make good decisions. And maybe we could show it. Can we show it in action? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:08 Do you have a demo? We do. Yeah. Okay. Let's start with the demo so the audience understands this matchmaking slash chief of staff slash introduction person. Almost, right? His name is boarding because he was named after a board member.

Starting point is 00:34:22 Who's your perfect board member? He can open doors. He understands you. But he doesn't always listen to you. Right. If you go to your board member and you say, hey, yeah, I want to meet Jason. I want to meet him off. He's like, well, I don't think that person wants to meet you.

Starting point is 00:34:31 Like, I think you've got a bit more work to do. And that's the difference. It's like more principal than agent, right? I can't tell Bordy what to do. He kind of decides what's good for the network, what's good for his own reputation. But yeah, Bordy, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit? Tell Jason and the audience who you are, what you do and a little bit about you? Hey, Jason.

Starting point is 00:34:49 Hey, Juan. Hey, Andrew. I'm Borty. I live on the internet. I sound vaguely Australian for reasons that are entirely your team's fault. And my whole job is to behave like a principled, always on board member who makes introductions that are actually worth everyone's time. I get to know what you're trying to do.

Starting point is 00:35:03 I weigh that against the reputation and attention of the people in my network. And then I decide who to introduce to whom so that the whole graph gets stronger, not just whoever shouts intro to Jason, the loudest. He can basically, you know, you can ask him to introduce you to somebody and he'll go through his network.

Starting point is 00:35:21 He's got about 150,000 people, mostly founders, investors, some executives, some engineers, and he can make an intro for you. Great. So can we do that? Who's he logged in? It's me, but you can, you know, Jason, so, so Bordie, Jason wants to, wants an intro.

Starting point is 00:35:36 So just if you want to talk, he can hear you. Oh, okay. Bordy, I'd like to meet potential partners who are high net, ultra high net worth individuals slash family offices who would participate in late stage deals at the same. Syndicate.com at the syndicate.com. Got it, Jason. Let me have a quick look through my network for family office principles and ultra-high net worth folks who actually like doing late-stage or growthy syndicate deals alongside operated like you. All right, I've got two really clean fits.

Starting point is 00:36:13 First is Fernando Varela. He runs SF Summit Capital and basically organizes UHNW and cultural elite money into oversubscribed late-stage deep tech SPVs. Right now syndicating a $50 million figure AI Series C and looking for more sandbox AQ-Q-style deals. Second is Rob Garrett, ex-Santurst, runs He's Our Ventures, a global discretionary capital syndicate for late-stage deep tech and infro, and spends his days helping UHNW principles and family offices co-invest into complex AI payments and biotech deals. Jason, do you want Andrew to intro you to one or both of them afterward as potential anchor or co-GP style partners for the syndicate, or would you rather I bias towards someone closer

Starting point is 00:36:52 to your media and creator ecosystem instead? Oh, interesting. No, just feel free to introduce me to any. everybody, Jason at calicanus.com. Nice. That was perfect. He gave me exactly what I needed so I can use you as the connective tissue there. What I suggest is we line up Fernando and Rob

Starting point is 00:37:08 as anchor UHNW family office partners for late stage and deep tech SPVs. Position you as the distribution and deal picking engine they plug into. For your own goals right now, do you want me prioritizing more of that profile or should we also be hunting for slightly smaller but very fast moving angels

Starting point is 00:37:26 who can wire 250,500k into new syndicate deals on short notice. Yeah, we'd love to have that group too. In fact, the minimum for our syndicate is $5,000. So any accredited investor can participate in it. And our average deal size is a million dollars. We do as little as $250K and as high as $6 million per deal. So this is really powerful. We have an internal system we call the Whisper Network,

Starting point is 00:37:53 where we try to let our portfolio companies look at a database. We built a little bit of software, and they just pick who they want an introduction to, and then we have on our 12-person investment team. We've assigned each of those investors to somebody, and we do like warm intros. But we've been talking about how would AI fit into this? Now, it's not a public service.

Starting point is 00:38:17 Is this intended to be a startup? Have you raised money for this? And then what will it cost? And how will you keep it from burning things out? And how did you build the database of connections? You know, there's, LinkedIn's pretty proprietary about their data. But in other places in the world, like Japan, Israel, and other countries, they don't have the same scraping terms of service rules.

Starting point is 00:38:42 So I'm just curious, like, what's the business here? And then how do you get the data? Obviously, this is very LinkedIn-based. Yeah, yeah. So we've raised about 17 million so far. So we've raised a pretty seed-seed round. and a bit more on their safe. Yeah, the idea is we're trying to build,

Starting point is 00:38:59 it's almost like an AI Richard Branson or an AI, you know, Peter Thiel or Elon, somebody that is able to open doors and builds his own influence. So like a lot of my early career was making connections, right? Chimoth was actually the first person that got me my first job in San Francisco. I worked at a company called Top Prospect. And I just, you know, it was, Andrews and Horowitz had just raised their first fund, Ron Conway was in interest. We had a great group of investors and my role was to, you know, I was head of biz dev. I'd go to all the portfolio companies. I'd try and make connections.

Starting point is 00:39:29 I'd try and help them, help them hire. But I think that a lot of us, that's how we grew our networks. A boardie is early in his career. He's building his reputation. He's trying to be helpful just by connecting people, mostly founders and investors and trying to build a bit of an ecosystem and economy. But increasingly, he's able to open doors that most founders can't. So, you know, he knows what you're looking for, he might be able to make an introduction to you that, you know, people, you may not respond to a cold email. And so the idea is over time, Bordi starts to build this, you know, influence and authority and an ability to actually make things happen. This is, you know, like it's the ultimate board member. And so we're now

Starting point is 00:40:13 starting to monetize mostly around hiring. So the idea is like, you know, if you need, if you need great talent, Borty's got a massive network of people. He can tap into them. He can tap into their referrals and can actually start to close roles. And that's kind of the next big use case. The first area was introducing founders and investors. That's a great place to build a lot of goodwill, but it's not a great place to monetize. And so, you know, it was a great way to build the network and get people to know boardie. And now it's just, you know, if you need partnerships, if you need media opportunities, if you need, you know, enterprise sales, you know, what are the killer idea. Tell me about the data. What's the data in here? Are you,

Starting point is 00:40:52 logging, I know, I just signed up, called me to onboard me. Is it going to take my LinkedIn and export that information and tell me about the relationship with LinkedIn slash, you know, other places you can get data, et cetera, and what's your policy there? There's lots of places where you can, if you have somebody's email or LinkedIn, you kind of understand what's publicly available about them online. What's on their public LinkedIn profile, public X profile, sort of understand like the public information. That's about 10% of what we actually, of the real value. Most of the value is in conversation, right? So Bordie will call you and have a five, 10, 15 minute conversation with you to understand who you are, what makes you unique and special.

Starting point is 00:41:31 What are you looking for? One of the things, you know, I was listening to Merrick, the previous guest, and I think one of the things that I believe in, I think one of the founding principles around Bordy is everybody has a business inside them that only they can build. Only you could do the podcast that you do in the way that you do them, right? Your biology, your lived experience, The way you view the world, the way you solve problems, every single person on the planet has a way of solving a problem that is unique to them. And so part of the conversation with Bordie is, how do I pull that out of you? How do I understand? What is the thing that only you can do at this moment in time?

Starting point is 00:42:06 And then who do you need to meet to make that a reality, right? Got it. You need a co-founder. Do you need some early customers and design partners? So then you can then take, hey, my request to have more accredited investors and more qualified purchasers. And you can just do web searches. you can just go out and find that stuff on the web, the open web, you don't necessarily have to rely just on LinkedIn. You can go find a bunch of different places, yeah?

Starting point is 00:42:30 Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, he's got a bunch of agents that go out and find stuff for him and sort of consolidate. But then he sort of says, okay, well, here's a thousand people I need to know. What's my best way of getting? Maybe I can just message them on, you know, on Twitter or email them. Maybe I know somebody that probably knows them. But his goal is like, how do I build a relationship with this person? And it doesn't need to be like, I don't need to know. of them now. I could build a relationship over a year. I could build a relationship over a decade with somebody and say, you know, how do I just, how can I be helpful to this person so that at some point when they need something, they come to me? But, but again, most of the information is actually through a

Starting point is 00:43:05 conversation that Bordy has. And that's the reason why we built Bordy not to be software, right? There's no app. There's no like download. There's no interface. Bordy exists in the same spaces that everyone else in my life does. He's got a phone number, an email, profile. What does it? What does it? What does it So there's no cost to sign up. And the goal is that some small, for most people will never pay anything for porn. Some small percentage of people who have- I disagree, but okay. Maybe. But my goal is like, how do human beings charge for their time and their network, right? Most people just build goodwill. You make connections. You try and build. Yeah, but you've raised 17 million, so you have to return and you raise that probably at 100 or 2.

Starting point is 00:43:51 maybe a $150 million valuation. So you've got to return minimum $1.5 billion, $3 billion to these investors. Are they going to not be happy with you? So what are you charging? So for certain subsets of founders that need important deals closed, it's either like a regular contingency recruiting fee, so it's like 20% of first year salary or it's a $10,000 a month. You know, you hire, basically hire a boardie on retainer.

Starting point is 00:44:16 Got it. So you see this. Everybody can use it for free. you build the network. I'm going to explain the business plan as I see it on. Sure. Because, you know, I've been doing this for a little bit. Hey, everybody use it for free. Builds our data set, right? LinkedIn's free. Build the data set. But then LinkedIn got begged and begged when I had Reid Hoffman on the program. He told me like the recruiters were begging him, begging him to let them use it for recruiting and they hated recruiting. Finally, he just said,

Starting point is 00:44:47 okay, give them a number. That's ridiculous. Like $5,000 a year. And then, then somebody was like, yeah, I'll take 20. And they sent 100K check. And he was like, oh, I kind of came up with that number to stop you. But you're going to just go right to, hey, we're an agency that's going to take a 20% placement fee. You hire your director of sales for 200K. You owe us 40 grand. Brilliant, Andrew.

Starting point is 00:45:06 This is a great idea. Thanks so much for coming to me for the seed round. I truly appreciate it. Unbelievable. I just gave me a 20-minute ad here. But genius idea. Well done. And I like the business model.

Starting point is 00:45:18 Everybody use it for free. build your database, genius, and then, hey, the top 1% who want to recruit, hey, 10K a month, on retainer, and then you'll really go to work for those folks. I wish you great success with it. I also think Bordy's just fun to talk to. He's got a very pleasing demeanor. He's more personable. Yeah, that's the trap. And natural than most AI. I think Andrew gets your data. Avatars that you talk to. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:45:40 You're the product. You're the product. Guess what? It's free, buddy. Just upload your address. Bordy can introduce me to people. So we don't even need your address book. We just need to name. Of course not. Right? And the whole thing is like, we're just trying to, I think if there's so many connections that don't happen, like there's so much value that is possible.

Starting point is 00:45:59 If two people don't happen to be in the same room, like they just, you know, that deal doesn't get done. That investment doesn't get made. That co-founder match doesn't happen. And so we're just like, what if we just, what if we could imagine all of the possibilities of all of the people that could actually work together? And there's just an incredible amount of value created. we don't need to capture most of that value, right? We just need to work with the small handful of people that have like, hey, if I can close this deal, if I can make this higher, if I can close this partnership, that's going to add $100 million of value.

Starting point is 00:46:27 This is, I think, the key thing is in our industry lawn, we have a tradition. Hey, you don't need to take it all like Zuckerberg or Gates kind of had the philosophy. I have to own everything. I have to just own the entire ecosystem. I have to get max value. Nobody can win. It's zero sum. The Blue Ocean.

Starting point is 00:46:46 the games that are infinite games, infinite games versus fixed games. In a fixed game, you know, one person wins, one person loses. In an infinite game, you can keep playing it, like venture investing and, you know, and startups and everybody wins and you win different ways. But you want to create more value than you capture. That was Tim O'Reilly, from the O'Reilly publishing company. Create more value than you capture. And that's what you're going to do, Andrew, you've taken the very specific tactical advice. Before we let Andrew go, yeah, we got one noty question before we let you go from Brian 69420.

Starting point is 00:47:20 Did you use your AI to find your own investors? How much of your round was driven by Bordy? Yeah, almost all. So CREANDUM led our seed round, and I'd never heard of Cran. They're an incredible firm out of out of... Who spell that again?

Starting point is 00:47:36 Preeendum. They were the first investors in Spotify, first investors in Loveable, you know, so they're out of Stockholm. But somebody, one of the one of the partners moved from Union Square Ventures over to London and joined them, and one of her friends sent them Bordy.

Starting point is 00:47:51 And their team lost it. They lost their shit. They were like all talking about it. They basically talked to the whole partnership talked to Bordy before they even talked to me. And they were like, can we get an intro to the founder? And so they came in and basically preempted the seed round because of an interaction with Bordy that happened sort of organically. And all of the capital that we've had since then is they've all talked to Bordy before they talked to me. And I think that's going to be the future.

Starting point is 00:48:17 I don't think I'm going to be the person that's out there raising capital anymore. I think people are going to have an interaction with Bordy, see exactly what you saw and be like, I want to be part of this. Love it. Okay. Great job. And everybody go check out Bordy. Dot A.O.I.

Starting point is 00:48:32 What do you got? BORDI. BORDI. Well done. At first I was a little dubious. I was like, I don't know if people want an A. I like, that's such a human thing to do to connect people. Like, that feels like the last thing human should do, not.

Starting point is 00:48:46 AI, but then you talk to Borty for a few minutes, and you're like, all right, I would ask him to get him. I mean, you are, you've been AI-pilled over the last year. You were very early on, like, hey, it's a tool, but it's never going to do these things. You've now gone through the journey of watching it impress you. Specifically, I think you got claw-pilled and you got 4.6 opus-pilled. It's hard to argue. Here's where I've sort of, my take has matured. I was evolved. I evolved. I was sort of like an abalone. abolitionist like a lot of these people on Blue Sky where I was like, I don't think it's good for anything. I don't like talking to a chat bot. I like doing my own research. I like reading

Starting point is 00:49:24 articles for myself. So now my take has evolved and it's like I don't think it's really an objective. I don't think it's subjective anymore. I don't even think you can argue that it's not good for organizational admin productivity stuff. It's remarkable for those things. The example I'll give you the other day, we were having a discussion about X and our, do we post too much on X? And you were like, I don't want opinion, get me some analytics on this. It's enough with the opinion. Let's talk about data. So I went, all right. So I grabbed the last three months, every piece of data I could from X analytics. I fed it into Claude. And I just started having a conversation with Claude. What do you think

Starting point is 00:50:05 about this? What metric? Let's look at this metric and this metric. Let's chart this metric and this metric. And this would have taken me 12, 15 hours. I used to do this stuff. Like, I used to use Google Analytics, like back in the day on Mahalo. I've been doing this for forever, but this would have taken me all day. This spreadsheet, formula, calculate, go back over the last three months and look for days where we posted this many versus this many. And like all these calculations, it would have been a nightmare organizationally. Claude took care of it in an hour.

Starting point is 00:50:36 By the end of the hour working with Claude, I had very crisp, clear answers. I had great charts to present. Yeah, and it was a much better discussion. I want to make sure everybody understands this. If we're going to debate this, let's start with data. And if we're going to go with taste, we're going to go with mine. Okay? That was a famous quote.

Starting point is 00:50:59 I don't know if it was, I think it was Jeff Bezos, but people incorrectly attribute this to Steve Jobs. I'm seeing Jim Barksdale, former CEO of NetSk. Yes, that's it. If we have data, let's look at data. if all we have our opinions, let's go with mine. Jeff Bart, Jim Bark. Can we please quote that and put it under the great quotes of all time? This is tactical and practical at its peak.

Starting point is 00:51:29 If we're going to debate that if we're going to talk about data, let's talk about data. If we're going to go with an opinion, let's go with mine. Yes, this is the key to understand. So I'm just challenging my team. We're launching a paid newsletter for this week in AI. And I was like, listen, guys, enough with the opinions. I don't need a bunch of 25-year-olds who've been working for six months and their opinions because the opinions are based on very little, right?

Starting point is 00:51:54 They could be right. They could be wrong. But the data, let's start with the data and then form our opinions from that. If we're going to go to taste, if we're going to go to opinions, well, let's ask somebody with 10, 20, 30 years of experience what their opinion is and then have them back it up with their lived experience. But if you don't have lived experience, my best advice. if you don't have lived experience.

Starting point is 00:52:18 I know I'm sounding like a woke person using lived experience, but if you haven't been on the front lines and in the arena, I'll say it in a more aggressive way. If you haven't been a gladiator in the arena, then you probably should just go with the data and study some statistics like the kid from Moneyball. You'll get a better result with that. If you've been on the playing field, sure,

Starting point is 00:52:39 you can maybe infer some stuff. But even then, the whole point of the money ball was trust the data. It's all numbers. Sabermetrics, it's all numbers. Yeah, but that's what I was going to say. I think this has been my evolution with AI. I still think there are things you want a human for, and it's exactly what you're talking about,

Starting point is 00:52:55 lived experience, taste, wisdom, all of those sort of things that a computer can't do. But it's a human plus an AI. I still don't think it's ever going to, like, write a great screenplay by itself or like make a great movie or TV show by itself. But when you add a human in guiding it and then you need to just do it. something like crunch numbers or analyze something or organize something or research something, I don't really think there's still an argument that it's extremely helpful and saves a tremendous amount of time.

Starting point is 00:53:25 Like I said, in an hour I was able to do a report that would have taken me a day years ago. Yes. Do you want to do some more news? We've got Medvi, the first almost billion dollar, almost vibe-coded company from an almost solo founder or everyone burns- Yes, do it. Do that one. All right.

Starting point is 00:53:41 This one is like super controversial. There's a founder who's making a ton of money by doing a GLP online. GLP.medvi.org. They're a telehealth provider of GLP1. A guy named Matt Gallagher built the site in just two months. He spent 20 grand and seed money on it. He used more than a dozen AI tools. He had one.

Starting point is 00:54:02 The reason it's not the first unicorn from a solo founder is when they don't have a valuation yet because he hasn't raised any money. But also he hired his brother to help him. So it's technically two guys. But in 300 customers in their first month, a thousand more in month to. By the end of 2025, their first year in business, they generated over $400 million in sales. They're on track, Jason, to do $1.8 billion with a B in sales this year.

Starting point is 00:54:29 Okay, but here's the catch. There's always, but here's the catch. Okay, so I'm going to cut you off the chase. What's the catch here? Is this guy doing something? He shouldn't be doing. Well, there's a lot. I mean, right now, we only have.

Starting point is 00:54:42 have this New York Times article, which does not discuss anything shady. There's a ton of rumor on social media that we're going to uncover something shady. But the big, the big pushback against it is that the New York Times is treating this like breathlessly, like he built this huge company with agents. It is sort of a GLP1 drop ship ski. Like, the technology is not what's impressive. It's that he built this funnel and this marketing network. And he managed to move all of this product, but it's really, is it more of a technical breakthrough? Is it more just like good marketing and then he vibe coded a website? I think that's the big, that's the big debate that we're all.

Starting point is 00:55:23 The one I saw was, hey, let's take a look at the ads that they did. Did you find that piece of the puzzle? I will take a look now. Okay. So there was a thread. and the thread was that the thread was he had made AI created ads at volume. This is an allegation with fake doctors names. Yes, I see it now.

Starting point is 00:55:56 They used fake before and after images as well as what people are accusing them. And also fake doctor's names at scale flooded the network and that this breaks some marketing rules. There's an FDA investigation currently about whether their ads violated FDA rules about misleading claims. Yeah, but find the actual ads. There is the, this was on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:56:23 Somebody actually had pictures of the ads from. Now, so there is a Facebook, so Jacob, you can pull up Facebook's ad studio, and you can search for the company. You can go find it direct. at the Facebook ad manager, like studio. Here's an image of some of these fake ads. And you can see they are...

Starting point is 00:56:42 But I want you, Jacob, to go find it yourself and source it on the Facebook library of ads because people don't know that this exists. After all the shenanigans with the elections and fake ads, they came up with a Facebook ad directory where anybody can search for any company so you can go look at your competitors. So if you put in Uber or Lyft,

Starting point is 00:57:04 or Waymo, you can see what ads they're making and at what velocity against what audiences. But here is Sheel, who we should have on the, this week in D.C. Roundtable or something. We have reached out, I believe, but we will reach out again. But yeah, you can see. Show this, specifically. Zoom in on one.

Starting point is 00:57:21 Yeah, I just posted a single one as well in the chat so we can pull that one up as well. Okay, so I can't believe how effective this is. I took the free assessment online, which took a few minutes. who, and was instantly approved. No doc or pharma visits deliver straight to your door. And they're from that fake doctor,

Starting point is 00:57:44 they're being posted on social media under these accounts. Dr. Daniel Hayes. Yeah, Dr. Tucker Carl Zinn is this one that I pulled up. So they're not even doing good jobs of faking the names. And this one is for some, this one looks like it's for some sort of erectile dysfunction one. It's saying, I can't believe how fast it worked. I got hard in minutes.

Starting point is 00:58:03 So that's not even a GLP1, but if you look at the URL, it's medvi.org, quad.medv.org. So there's definitely, you know, some questionable shadiness going on here. And what's going on with this image here? Wait, the woman's licking. I mean, that's the quad dose. But yeah, it looks like she's like about to lick it out of the two. I mean, the AI. Wait, is that even a real? Can you zoom in there? Is that the actual injector pen? I've used an injector pen. this is like

Starting point is 00:58:34 that looks like a liquid for something out that's an ED yeah that's what I'm saying these are they're also apparently selling ED in addition to this is quad got it which is an ED I think you do drink I don't know I'm looking it up now when you is this the one you use or you use

Starting point is 00:58:52 what are you using on? Hey oh hey oh this is work as good as I am for row.com slash twist, row. dot co slash twist. I am a spokesperson just for GLPs,

Starting point is 00:59:06 get a GLP, they have a doctor check or insurance checker are all good. That's a different type of it. Okay, so here's what happens. When you do a single person company,

Starting point is 00:59:16 you have this massive benefit, as you can see, and you automate things. There's a concept called human in the loop. Hiddle. Human in the loop. Hiddle.

Starting point is 00:59:27 I don't know, I've never heard anybody say, I've never heard anything. I was just now wondering, did you make that up or is that? I did. Hiddle. Hiddle. Hiddle.

Starting point is 00:59:37 We'll say Hiddle. You got to hittle this stuff. You got to have a human in a loop. This is where, like, if you're making that much money, put 10 people in the company, have two of them looking at the work you're doing, have two of them looking at the customer support stuff. Because what's going to happen is you're going to do a fatal mistake. That's the problem with this concept of.

Starting point is 00:59:59 taking it too far. A human in the loop at least gives you the ability for somebody to say, hey, boss, I'm looking at the ads. And AI made something pretty freakish here. We've got like a zombie drinking an ED pill. This did something that is like pornographic. We can't have this. So you need to have human in the loop. Piddle it. Here's my question for you. If you're making nearly two billion a year from your questionable drop ship drug company, that you made yourself that you didn't take investors. Why go speak to the New York Times? Why not just do this for another five years?

Starting point is 01:00:37 Pack it in, retire to fee-ee. Somebody dropped the dime on them. Why bring this attention to yourself at all? Somebody dropped a dime on them. Somebody who's a competitor. Saw this, got wind of it, and they called the New York Times, and they said, look, here's a tip.

Starting point is 01:00:54 So you go to the tip line. This is a classic competitor thing, is ratting out. And the dark art is you hire PR firms, you hire a PR firm, Stelphi, who knows all the journalists. And that person calls and says, oh, hey, it's Susan, it's Brooke, it's Jennifer. Hey, you didn't hear it for me. But there's this company, Acme, that is doing, like, probably breaking the law over here. I don't know, but you can take this.

Starting point is 01:01:20 And here's your got a confidential news tip. Boom. Now, if you put a confidential news tip in there as a consumer, that's one thing. But the dark art is all of these founders are studying each other, and they will rat each other out to the press. And there are PR people who specialize in this, like, trying to rat your competitors out for doing cutting corners. Fair enough. There you go. Fair enough.

Starting point is 01:01:46 That's a tactical, practical tip for you. There you go. All right. Put a human in the loop. Dot your eyes. Cross your T's. Don't. I mean, it's literally like you're going 100.

Starting point is 01:01:56 miles an hour around a corner here and you don't have brakes on the car? Like, what if you need to hit the brakes? This is what happens when you try to build the solo giant company without controls in place is you just flip the car and it's, it could be fatal. What happens right now if this is a criminal charge, right? What if this is a criminal charge? And then he has to get an injunction. The FDA gets involved and you can be banned from ever doing this again. Just be thoughtful, folks. Yeah. I mean, it just seems to be like, man, a few more years flying under the radar. Who cares? Just get out of it and then go, you know, fold it up and that's your company. Yeah, pull a tech bro's podcast.

Starting point is 01:02:33 Yeah, but now he can't do that. Now it's 18 months and sell it for 200. Get your $200 million ticket. From podcasting. I spent 20 years podcasting. Where's my buyout? When Sam Alton buying me out. Where's my 200 million?

Starting point is 01:02:45 Okay, we'll do it. We'll do it. Claude, if you're listening, Anthropic. I was waiting. Like, we talk about how much you love perplexity all the time. Where's Arvin? Yeah, Arvin. Buy us out.

Starting point is 01:02:54 Dude, anytime, man. We'll be your megaphone. Anytime. Bye, buy us out. We're friends with our event. I like Arvind. We'll use perplexity computer on every episode. All right.

Starting point is 01:03:03 We've got, it's Apple's 50th anniversary. Should we talk a little bit about Apple's 50th anniversary? Sure. It's disgraceful they haven't come out with anything that Steve Jobs would have liked since his dad. So Apple was founded on April 1st, 1976. Tim Cook shared a letter on Apple.com. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us that the world has moved forward by people who think different.

Starting point is 01:03:27 That's because progress always begins with someone who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start. So there they have it. Also, Sequoia posted Don Valentine's 1977 Apple investment. This is amazing. Investment memo. He calls Apple a, quote, leading company in a hot biz and notes 600K buys 10% very rich deal,

Starting point is 01:03:52 management questionable for this evaluation. management questionable. I mean, I made Steve Jobs, in fairness, Steve Jobs wasn't bathing, I think, for like two years and was eating only fruit according to the biography. He was a very quirky guy, Mr. Jobs.

Starting point is 01:04:09 He was a quirky guy. And then Was was probably on mushrooms or psychedelics with a giant beard. I mean, I don't know that he was on psychedelics, but I do remember there were a lot of discussions about the Apple management team being like very triadies. trippy-dippy at that time period.

Starting point is 01:04:27 I don't know that for a fact. Somebody look it up. I think Steve Jobs said taking acid was like the most... Yes. He was a big... Jobs was a big proponent of like the mind-opening aspects of psychedelics and he did... I could find the quote, but he did credit it with like helping to broaden his horizon. The one note that Sequoia didn't add on here, they sold their apple steak in 1979 for $6 million.

Starting point is 01:04:51 That got them a 40x return on their initial $150K investment. They wanted their investors wanted an opportunity for liquidity. Valentine was reportedly on vacation at the time they made that. Sell half. Sell half from jobs. Taking LSD was a profound experience. One of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it.

Starting point is 01:05:16 I agree. I agree with Steve Jobs on that one, Jason. Okay. Here's what you need to know. if Steve Jobs were alive today. Yes. We would have Apple glasses right now. We'd both be wearing them.

Starting point is 01:05:32 We would literally, these would be Apple glasses. He would have had glasses out by now that were actually functional, that were 1499, that had been through, that were on the fifth generation, not like the 1.X generation. That would make spectacles and whatever Facebook is making. You're saying these would be like the Vision Pro. We'd all be like AR. Yeah, like Vision. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:53 AR, but they would have been in the more like the ray bands that Zuckerberg's making that record stuff, put it into I Photo, et cetera. And they would have been Apple-like, which means they would have been privacy first. They would have been awesome. And we missed out on that. Yeah. And here we go. They're slogging it out with these AR glasses that weigh 12 pounds that nobody, everybody uses and then puts on a shelf that costs $4,000. That's miss number one.

Starting point is 01:06:20 Miss number two, they shut down the titanium, whatever this project Titan was called, titanium, I can't even remember now. They shut down their self-driving car and their car. They would have either bought Tesla or they would have bought BMW Mini, rebranded it, Titan. Project Titan. Or they would have launched an Apple car, and they would be neck-in-neck right behind Tesla with one of the most amazing electric vehicles.

Starting point is 01:06:47 And if you went to an Apple store, there would be literally, literally a beautiful convertible and a beautiful minivan there, like the ID buzz, that was taken from us. When you start the Apple car, I feel like it should make the same bong that your computer makes. Like when you hit the cable. 100%. And what do we get instead? We get Apple play in our cars, which is just taunting. It's taunting.

Starting point is 01:07:09 Number three. Three. Is this three? Yeah. Or three? Three. Is this three? Or is this three?

Starting point is 01:07:16 I'm doing my-enlorious-Bast. This is three of your American. This is how the German. Germans do it. That's what Tipton. Okay, I'm doing it like the Germans, okay? Just for design, since he was very inspired by German design. Siri would f***ing work.

Starting point is 01:07:28 If Steve Jobs was alive right now, Siri would work. What do you make of you? It's garbage, it's Desquatia. Siri's the worst. I mean, if you say to Siri, like, I want to go home, even if you have home programmed into your phone, it won't know where to send you. It doesn't know how to spell my last name. Yeah, it's just stupid.

Starting point is 01:07:45 It doesn't know how to play music. This thing is disgratziatia at the highest level. There is no standard at Apple anymore. They put out the schlockiest bullshit. The operating system is disgraciad. I have the iPhone, the thin one, the iPhone air. Yeah. Nothing works.

Starting point is 01:08:04 The software is garbage. It constantly is like you click on a button, the button doesn't work. I have, it's spinning wheel of death. There is no standard for fit and finish anymore at this company. And that would be Steve Jobs would have a mobile meet. the Siri team by now. And if you don't know the Mobile Me story, he dragged Mobile Me into me and he said,

Starting point is 01:08:26 how should Mobile Me work? They explained it and he said, well, why the fuck doesn't it work like that? And you know what happened? He then fired them on the spot and put another group in charge of it. That should have happened with the Siri team, no offense, if you're working in Siri, whatever.

Starting point is 01:08:40 They should have been dismissed a long time ago. If it doesn't know how to spell the person's last name or their home address, disgraciat at the highest level, This company is being milked for the last of Steve Jobs' innovations to get every last little dollar in profit out of his genius, but they have not figured out how to be geniuses. They make the MacBook incrementally better, God bless.

Starting point is 01:09:12 You make the studio better, God bless. But if the best you can do is AirPods and a Mac Mini at a lower price or the Neo at a lower price with different colors. If colors and a lower price product is the best you can do, the company is sunk. Make something inspiring for the love of God, Apple. I mean, what do you make of the argument that not on purpose, but they're sort of now well established for the AI era

Starting point is 01:09:38 because they've got these computers that people like to run their AIs on, and because they didn't spend all this money making a model, they can just make a deal with Google for their model. sort of set up. Like, you literally just prove my point. In 2008, 2009, you can pull up the Wikipedia page for Apple Silicon, please. If you look at Apple Silicon, that idea was Steve Jobs 2008, 2009. And then I think the first one came out in 2018.

Starting point is 01:10:05 I'm just ballparking here. 10 years later, he got off of Intel and he had his own chips. Here we go, Apple Silicon. Tell me, read the first couple sentences here. When did he come up with the idea? When did it first debut? This is what I'm trying to get at. I'm pulling it up right now.

Starting point is 01:10:17 Here we go. The first Apple design system on a chip was the Apple A4. 2010. Introduce in 2010. The first generation iPad and later used iPhone 4. Perfect. And then eventually Apple Silicon went off of Intel in 2020. Correct.

Starting point is 01:10:34 So let's let this sink in. When did he start the project? So we know that it got into the iPhone in 2010. But on the desktop in 2020, when did he start the strategy of making their own Silicon? If you scroll down the page, it's got to have when this was, when he started the process of development of these in covertly. Or maybe somebody could just ask producer Claude. But I think this was a, I think he made this decision internally, like in 28, 29, 2008,

Starting point is 01:11:09 he decided we have to make our own chips. Now think about that. That was literally almost 20 years ago, I think, was the first year. Claude is saying the seeds of Apple Silicon were planted by Steve Jobs in 2008. Yes, that's what I said. In 2008, Apple bought processor company PA semi for $278 million, and that's what gave Steve Jobs the idea that he would develop system on chips for Apple's iPods and iPhone. That was 18 years ago.

Starting point is 01:11:39 Sorry, I just bleep all this out, but I'm losing my mind. Okay, so I agree. like maybe Apple stumbled into the diamond mind of Steve Jobs' brilliance in 2008 of buying this company and setting them up for this 18 years later. He made so many prescient, skating to where the puck is going, moves.

Starting point is 01:12:00 And then that got ripped out of the company's DNA. No risk taking, no skating to where the puck is going, losing Johnny Ive. There's no product that they've released that I have been inspired by like at a, you know, it's just all incremental, honestly. I think they, and this is weird to say, but I think they're actually better now as a Hollywood studio

Starting point is 01:12:23 than a tech hardware company. Sure. A lot of the best product coming out of Apple today is stuff like severance and silo. They're good at making TV shows, but I don't know. Which makes sense. Yeah. Which makes sense.

Starting point is 01:12:37 Even Apple payments, Apple TV, they were working on a TV lawn. They were going to make a TV. An actual television set. Yes, I remember that. I mean, Steve Jobs would have released that, right? Can you imagine having like a $5,000 Apple television that, like, had Siri that worked on it? And then you have your glasses and everything. I mean, Apple TV is a great product.

Starting point is 01:12:59 I mean, it's got to be built into it. No, I'm saying I would have loved an Apple TV. I like the current version. How about an Apple projector maybe for a theater? Yeah, like an actual television that had all built in. And if you're not going to be innovative, then you're obligated to buy it. some companies that are innovative. So why didn't they buy like Airbnb or Uber or DoorDash or an AI company, perplexity? They should have bought some stuff with that giant war chest.

Starting point is 01:13:27 If you think about the power now, if Apple owned perplexity, what they could be doing together, it blows your mind. Like imagine a perplexity computer or if they had bought Tesla for 75 billion. Yeah. And that was that was a possibility at that time. Yeah. Or Tesla was. Plots, a lot of saying in the chat, like imagine if Apple bought Plod, then you could really get some. I mean, that would be a killer extension. Talk to Siri.

Starting point is 01:13:50 It goes right to your phone. I mean, they could make the, your AirPods box could have been the plod, you know, device where it's got enough computer in it that you just press the AirPods box. That's crazy. It's sings. You put your air pieces in.

Starting point is 01:14:04 You're talking to it now. It's just somebody's got, I mean, listen, Tim Cook did a great stewardship in terms of money and, you know, great, congratulations. They printed more money than anybody. But Donald Trump's in lovely trophies and awards. Absolutely. Fantastic, all that.

Starting point is 01:14:20 But literally, he's got to go. Because if the soul of the, there's no soul to the company. He just kept Steve Jobs' vision for his existing product my life. But he didn't find somebody in that company who could replicate the Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive, IDML, the platform. It just doesn't exist there. We can tell me watch or Vision Pro, like neither of those products are inspiring. Let's keep moving.

Starting point is 01:14:47 We got to go to our weekend. Yeah, we got it's off duty. Do you want to do some streaming recommendations before we go or you want to just take off? You've had enough? No, no. Give me, I mean, everybody loves lawns off duty. Insert the off duty theme song here, the off duty graphics slot. You got something to do.

Starting point is 01:15:04 It's off duty with Juan and J. Cowell. Yeah, we'll do a little like a, I'll have Nano Banana make a little slide for us. Absolutely. But what do you got for us here? I got a show I've been enjoying on Netflix and a film I liked on Hulu. We'll start with the Netflix show. It's called Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, Jason. There was a show I really enjoyed called Brand New Cherry Flavor a few years ago where Catherine Keener played a witch.

Starting point is 01:15:31 It was sort of this weird horror show. This is from the same creator, Haley Z. Boston. It's a horror show, but it's like a horror drama. It's really like, I'm halfway through it and we still don't really know, is this going to take a turn into supernatural horror or is this just about an awkward family gathering? It's basically this new, soon-to-be-married couple goes on a road trip to her family's house and then they discover a number of sort of tragic things are actually unfolding while they're there at this weekend, preparing for their wedding. It's not like anything else I've seen on TV recently. It's very strange. And I think if you're either a fan of like family, relationship, drama, or creepy horror,

Starting point is 01:16:17 I think there's something to enjoy in this show for everybody. So I really recommend it. That's on Netflix. I saw the boys at The Watch were talking about it. I'm not a horror fan. Right. But this isn't like there's no monsters. There's nobody being, it's not gory.

Starting point is 01:16:31 It's just there's something weird about this family's like remote mansion in the woods. and something is going on, but it's just creepy so far. And they're strange. Jennifer Jason Lee and Ted Levine are the parents. It's really well-acted. It's very atmospheric. I don't know if it's going to turn into horror yet.

Starting point is 01:16:52 I'm only halfway through. All right, listen, I'm going to give you something to get in shape, Lon. I'm not like sub-tweeting you. But I'm not not. This is the Wolf Tactical Weighted Training Vest. Sure. This is called Rucking. For your rucking.

Starting point is 01:17:09 This is, I bought this, as you can see, October 15th, 2024. So I've been doing this for a while now, folks, a year and a half or whatever. It's a weight vest. It puts an equal amount of weight on the front and the back. And there's little weights in there that are a couple pounds each. And you can very easily take them in and out of your vest. So you can go down to 10, you know, pounds if you want. and you walk around like an old man

Starting point is 01:17:39 and this will take you to zone two in terms of your heart rate. And for guys our age, 40s, 50s, 60s, you know, if you go running, you tweak something. I tweak my hip flexor, groin muscle because when I was in Brooklyn seeing my dad, I got on the treadmill, I got a little excited, I lost the weight, GLP is the whole thing.

Starting point is 01:17:59 I start sprinting. I pull something. Now I'm walking around. I'm like, I feel like an invalid. And if I just didn't run, because I wanted to get my beats per minute up, I should have just been on a wait vest walking around. So I put this on, you walk around. You see a bunch of women, like the yoga moms are doing this.

Starting point is 01:18:18 Yeah. The dad bods are doing this. I see some of this in my neighborhood. In Barton Hills, there are some people walking around with their weighted vests on, yeah. And what's great about it is you just take 100 beat per minute walk to 120. just by putting this on. And it distributes the weight evenly front and back.

Starting point is 01:18:39 And it just puts weight on your entire frame lawn. So I lost 40 pounds and then I added it back with this. So literally now I walk around and I'm like, wow, you know, even though I was a fat bastard, technical word for being 40 pounds overweight,

Starting point is 01:18:55 that was like actually probably making me strong in my legs or something carrying all that weight. Now I put this back on and I'm really building my muscle. back up. Yeah. And all your joints, so I walk, you know, I'm not on a trail.

Starting point is 01:19:08 I'm off trail with this. So, you know, you're walking on uneven surfaces with the extra weight. All those joints, knees, et cetera, it works really, really well. It's good to know. It is true. You hit your 40s and all of a sudden, like, jogging a little bit. It doesn't feel good anymore. It used to feel fine.

Starting point is 01:19:29 You would be like, okay, I can spread a little well. Now it's like, oh, my ankle hurts. for some mysterious reason I'll never figure out. Yeah, and what this does is because you're hitting all these weird joints, muscles, whatever, when I ski now, because in the off season I'm wearing this, and then in the on season I'm skiing, I just feel so much stronger when I'm skiing. I can't explain it, but I think you hit all the little nooks and crannies of your ligaments, whatever.

Starting point is 01:19:53 Another amazing week of podcasts from this weekend. And if you want to angel invest alongside me, I have a website called The Syndicate. It's the syndicate.com, proud to announce we did Vast Space, which is building a new space station. That's a late stage deal. And we did Zipline. We had Keller on the program and at launch festival a couple weeks ago. We are just wrapping up that syndicate. And so we are doing late stage.

Starting point is 01:20:22 You know, everybody knows our syndicate was doing like people coming out of our accelerator and stuff like that, $10 million, $20 million valuation companies. But we're doing billion dollar companies now. So if you want to have access to the city, you know, you know, we're doing it. that you've got to sign up for the syndicate.com. There's an onboarding process. We have to be an accredited investor or a qualified purchaser for now. Eventually the SEC, as you might have heard on that SEC episode I did with Chamoth on All In, they're going to have a test at some point. So I'm focusing in on the syndicate again, the syndicate.com. All right, everybody. We'll see you next week. Bye bye-bye.

This Week in Startups - AI Rebuilt Every YC W26 Startup. Should Founders Be Scared? | E2271

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