This Week in Startups - Anti-Work Uprising, Copyright Wars & the StreamFog Solution | E2124

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

Today’s show: Jason, Lon & Alex are back with a spicy Monday episode of This Week in Startups. Jason goes off on unions vs capitalism, we dig into why fewer seed startups are making it to Series A, and look at OpenAI’s quiet copyright land grab. Plus: YC says Google should be broken up (then kind of walks it back), Perplexity’s wild $14B valuation, and Saudi Arabia wants its own national AI. We wrap with an Office Hours chat with Kevin Bondzio from Streamfog on the future of AR ads in livestreaming.*Timestamps:(2:38) Why Jason’s obsessed with Reddit’s anti-work community(10:30) Coda - Get started for free at https://coda.io/twist(12:21) Seed Stage Graduation rates(20:43) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(26:11) What’s going on with Tech M&A?(30:04) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist(33:50) What’s going on with the Copyright Office?(37:24) Licensing and competitive advantage in the AI era(48:28) AI and the future of subscription-based content(56:42) StreamFog wants to change the way creators advertise(1:14:13) Perplexity’s mega-valuation gets even mega-er(1:19:13) How Saudi Arabia just became an AI startup(1:22:05) Y Combinator pokes it’s nose in the Google antitrust case*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Links from episode:Check out Streamfog: https://streamfog.com/Check out Peter Walkers post on “Graduating from Seed to Series A” https://x.com/PeterJ_Walker/status/1921288778192200087Learn about the HUMAIN here: https://www.spa.gov.sa/en/N2316474*Follow Kev:X: https://x.com/kevbondzioLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-bondzio/*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(10:30) Coda - Get started for free at https://coda.io/twist(20:43) LinkedIn Jobs - Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(30:04) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist*Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I'm too old for this. And I'm too, like, cynical and, like, set in my ways. I just believe in capitalism. I don't believe in unions. I think that, like, there's union leaders who fight for folks to get the same amount of pay. I believe in meritocracy. Everybody should fight for their highest salary possible. But if you set this up like this, I'm going to retire. I think the anarcho syndiclist would probably want guys like you to retire. They would. They would want to retire me, literally like a replicant. They're aiming to get rid. of the capitalist.

Yeah, the upper echelon of capitalists and instill workers as the leadership rather than owners. And they'll be called, what would you call a worker who becomes a leader? What was that? It's like a bee or something? Like a boss.

This weekend startups is brought to you by Coda. Cota empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize plan and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.com.io slash twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. And Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwest registered agent.com slash twist today. Hey, everybody, welcome back. This Week in Startups, 2,000-plus episodes, this week and startups.com, TWA startups.com. TWAir startups. And you can find us on Instagram, Twitter. With me again, Lon Harris and Alex Wilhelm. We're here three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, right about noon, Texas time, 1 a.m. East Coast, 10 a.m. left coast. We go through the top big tech, little tech, venture capital and capital markets, and we'll take a detour now and again.

into a little politics, a little media. And of course, Founder Lessons is where we score our points. We put points on the board. I don't like the Knicks in Game 3. But we'll make up for Game 4 tonight. I was supposed to go to New York for Game 4, but I'm doing something at Austin University tomorrow night with Dave Rubin. Yes.

Let's go Nick's tonight. I didn't go to Game 4. And I'm a little bummed about it, if I'm being honest. But it looks like the series might go, five, six, seven, eight games. And seven is the max. so I might go to a later game. We got a big docket because what we do, folks, is you can go to this week in

startups.com slash docket. We get all your stories. We look at how you're replying to us on X, where, you know, the intelligents here are talking about tech. But just to kick us off, there was an interesting discussion going on on Reddit. And this was in my favorite group, which is called anti-work. This is a group of individuals who believe that you should. should be, have maximum free time. There's no such thing as lazy. It's kind of a little bit

communist and a little bit work-life balance. So you kind of get hardcore people who believe humans should not have jobs. Like straight up, there should be no work. The only work you should do is like raising your family, hunting and farging for food, apparently, etc. And they kind of resist modernity. And then there's also just people who are in jobs, not careers, hate work and just want to vent about work, but this was an important one. So let's, let's cue this one up, Lon. Yeah, so it's a user called Crimson, like C3 Rimson. I'm calling them Crimson.

I think notably here, they've tagged themselves, you know, there's Flair in Reddit. They've tagged themselves as an anarcho syndiclist. So they, in the shortest description I can give, they're basically an anarchist who thinks that trade unions should be the vehicle that liberates American workers. So this would be, you know, just like you were describing a person who believes that, uh, we need to liberate people from work and that their labor is being abused, exploited, and stolen in general. And what is their, what is that category called again? They're an anarcho syndiclist. That would be anarcho syndicisms. So it's like you're

anarcho, anarchist. Syndoclism being, being like you believe in trade unions and that that's how workers should be uniting. So long, just very limited government. And then worker based unions as the quantum of government, essentially? Yes. Okay. That would be the primary political organizing tool, not a like overarching federal government. They're anarchists. They don't want that at all. Workers unite based on trade unions. Yeah. Okay. So I thought this is interesting. I will say when I had a little micro flare up of unionism at one point in one startup, I had a meeting with the leadership. And I said, I'm too old for this. and I'm too cynical and like set in my ways.

I just believe in capitalism. I don't believe in unions. I think that like there's union leaders who fight for folks to get the same amount of pay. I believe in meritocracy. Everybody should fight for their highest salary possible. But if you set this up like this, I'm going to retire. Well, I think the anarcho syndiclist would probably want guys like you to retire. Yeah, I don't think they would want to retire me.

They're, they're aiming to get. of the capitalist. Yeah, the upper echelon of capitalists and instill workers as the leadership rather than owners. And they'll be called, what would you call a worker who becomes a leader? What was that? It's like a bee or something. Like a boss.

Well, it's a world without, it's a world without bosses, ideally. Wow. Okay. This particular post was not about anarcho syndicalism. They're a remote employee and supervisor for a human services agency in Pennsylvania. They leave their work cell turned off after work and on weekends to preserve work life balance. An admin recently chewed them out via email and said that their work phone must be turned on and with them at all times. Now, the OP is saying this makes them feel that they are expected to be on call 24-7.

They don't feel like they're being paid enough to meet that expectation. And they don't feel like that was initially sold to them as this is a 24-7 on-call. call all the time job. They're saying this is a massive deal breaker to them. And to the original post was seeking for advice, how do I go back and say that I'm not willing to be 24-7? They did follow up by saying the management has now confirmed they are expected to be 24-7 on call, but that it can be a rotation. So not everybody has to be on call at all times. They could make a schedule where some of them are on call, some days and some of them have other days off. It's an important discussion, especially for entrepreneurs.

and setting expectations. The reason this person was a bit upset is because their expectations changed. And so I'm going to give you some language to use as a founder when you have to change expectations with your team. And that would go something like, Alex, I know that when we hired you, we did not specifically address this. But starting in Q3, in seven weeks, we will be moving to an expectation that you're available to, you know, our caseworkers off hours. What this means is you need to have your work phone on. And if somebody calls, we expect you to respond within an hour or two. There can be mistakes that are made.

And if you are absolutely not available because you're on a rafting trip and there's no cell phone service, we'll either get you a satellite phone or we will make sure somebody's covering your phone number. And so that's the communication part. So this would have been, if level set previously, less of an issue or a non-issue. But it really does depend, I think, on your compensation level. And it depends on your line of work. Because in the line of work we're in, we do have founders who will text us and email us at three in the morning.

Having something between a panic attack, a manic episode, inspiration or a chaotic moment in their life, right? Founders are a unique group of individual. They own typically, you know, 40% of their company along with a co-founder or if they're a solo founder, maybe 60 or 70%. So they're well compensated to have this level of stress, which is they do not, like CEOs, Tim Cook, something happens on tariffs. Literally, he's being woken up.

Somebody, you know, his security team gets a phone call. Like literally he's got 24-hour security. somebody, Eddie Q calls, says, wake him up. Trump's in whatever. Here's the latest. Literally a security person comes and knocks on his horse and wakes him up just like the president. Compensation equals that possibility.

And so if you're making, and I'm going to pick a number in the United States, the average salary is somewhere in the 50, 60 range. And if you took the average salary and you said you're below the average salary I'd say it's, you would be an hourly employee, most likely not management. In most places, this isn't legal advice, but you can look it up. You would be entitled to overtime. And then this falls into a gray category. Is it overtime?

Because you're not working. So no. So what happens is you have to make the deal. Yes. And the deal to be made here is very simple. We're going to create an, if these people are paid under $60,000, $70,000, you say, hey, we're going to have an on-call schedule. There are a tenant.

of you. Each person is going to be primary or secondary on two weekends. We're going to rotate it every five weekends. Primary gets the phone call, then the phone, if you're using like open phone, we'll ring the secondary. If, you know, it's a second or third phone call, whatever, and the person's not available. As compensation for this, we're going to give each person who's primary four hours of paid time off, whether they get called or not. And if you do four hours, you know, you're compensated. And if not, hey, you got free four hours of paid time off. So if this happens 10 times a year or 20 times a year that you have this weekend and you're on call, you could earn up to 5 to 10 extra vacation days, one or two weeks.

This is the way to do it properly. Founders, I know you're swamped. You got a ton of stuff to do on your plate. You know, there's a lot of chores. You got to juggle your priorities. And that's why I want to tell you about CODA. That's what I use to keep everything under control. It's an all-in-one platform, and it's going to consolidate documents, spreadsheets,

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have 20 different SaaS products that everybody needs to learn. They need to learn how to use one. So instead of juggling all these different tools, you got one platform and the whole team is super organized. It's really intuitive. The workflows are seamless and getting more powerful by the day. So here's your call to action. Coda empowers your startup to strategize plan and track. effectively take advantage of this limited time offer just for startups. Go to coda.io slash twist today and get six months free of the team plan. That's coda.orgia.com slash twist to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. And then you could even say to people, here's the schedule, pick which weekends you want to be on call. And there might be some people say, this is the greatest

deal ever. I want two extra weeks vacation. Can I get as much on call time as possible? So you kind of flip it into an opportunity. Now, some of the people might be like, you know what, I like to turn it off Friday, 5 o'clock, I got kids, I got meditation, whatever, I read a book, I don't know, Tim Ferriss told me something, Andrew Huberman, whatever, I got a coal plunge. Therefore, I need these 48 hours for my mental health, my preference, and you do that. So these are the ways to handle it. But I will say, if you view your life as a career, you're a real estate broker, or you are a venture capitalist, when you get that phone call, I don't. end on this point on the weekend. That is a defining moment of your career. And it is a competitive

advantage to be available and to take it seriously. I get probably five of these a week, 10. They take typically three to seven minutes to disdance. They typically come in the form of a text or an email or a Slack message, not a phone call. If it's a phone call, something's really screwed up. I'd say one out of 20 is a phone call. 19 out of 20. Somebody emails me, term sheet fell through, CTO's quitting. We got a lawsuit. And I can say, great, we'll process it. I set up a time for us to talk and looking at it. Here's my initial react. Boom. My job. That's a job of any venture capitalist. If you're a real estate broker and your client calls you and says, hey, I saw this home. I really want to see it. And they text you on a Saturday afternoon and you wear their kids at their soccer game. You look at your phone. You go,

if I respond first, maybe I get this business. If I respond on Monday morning, 9 a.m. Maybe I don't get this business in your best interest to do it. So I wrote that. Of course, somebody said, so your position is you got to stay 365, 20, whatever, be on call all the time. No, there's like, realistically, how often does this happen is the question. Now, if it was a call center and you're doing like, I don't know, sure, microphone's call center and you're getting a call every hour, well, then you should be staffing it with full-time people or some other process. So I'll stop there and get your reaction. Alex or questions. Yeah, just a couple of things.

So first of all, I looked it up. Human services workers in Pennsylvania make a median salary of about 40. So this person could be making 50, say, so we're not talking about an incredibly well-composited position to start. Nope. I think, Jason, you nailed it with the expectation setting, schedule splitting, and letting people have a little bit of flexibility. My spouse and her career has to do on-call weekends, like, for example, the weekend we just had. And she gets paid extra for that. It's not voluntary.

It's mandatory, but they definitely negotiated in advance and get all that sorted out. a small fee, but it's not for every hour of the weekend. It's a fee that's negotiated for the weekend. It's a per child scene fee. It's the medical world, Jason, is a weird place. Okay, so if you have an engagement, you get paid for that engagement. You have to be around. Okay, great. Perfect. She went to the hospital both days this weekend. And I got to do solo child care, which, by the way, didn't get paid for. World. Come on. Anyways, I think you raised a really good one of the expectation setting. You're happy mother today. The last thing I'll say is I read a lot of the developer forums out there. And a lot of developers will occasionally work at a company that has a on-call

system, like, you know, tracking the pager in case the servers go down. Pager duty is a company that supports that. Indeed. You might even wonder where they got the name from because it's their duty to have the pager. I'll just say this. Those are also divided up based on who's on call to make sure it doesn't burn people out. And we're talking about higher paid careers in those two cases. So if I was earning 50, I would expect at least the same courtesy given my lower comp point, Jason. So I'm kind of on your side here, but I also think that this company that Crimson works for, Karimson, didn't handle it well and just kind of like poor internal management. You can't just tell your people suddenly, oh, you can never turn this phone off and then just drop the ball there.

Absolutely, yeah. Poor management. And Lon, Comrade, Lon, I'll go to Comrade Lon. I think this is a real, it really comes down to incentives. If this person felt incentivized, for some reason, it could be money. it could be the opportunity to move up. It could be just love of the game, like they're working on a project they really care about. If they felt incentivized, it wouldn't, I don't think, be that big of an issue to keep their phone on them and to check in.

Like, I check in with you on the weekends. We were talking about this weekend about. We were talking about that graphic design project and like some other stuff we want to do for social media. It happens every weekend because I'm compensated enough to work at this job. I'm motivated. I love the show. I want to make a better show. It's not misaligned incentives when we pass.

on a Sunday evening about the show. But if I was being paid a lot less or if I felt like the expectations were out of control in other ways, I would feel less incentivized. And I would be like, I got to check it on Sunday. It's a chore. So I think to me, that's what this feels like. The employer needs to do a better job of however you incentivize it, motivating this employee to want to go the extra step and check in on a Saturday.

And the chewing out was like an interesting part of it. So you didn't set the expectation, then you chewed out. It's like, that's kind of like, you know, you're setting up complete failure in the relationship there. Now, if you did set it up, and this was the third time the person like blew off the client, you could, as a manager, listen, there's two sides to every story. I don't know what chewing out means. The person could have been incredibly appropriate and delightful, but it could have been felt as chewing out. Because the level set it wasn't there. If they said to them, listen, John, this is third time.

you didn't pick up a client call. The last two times, we lost the client. They fired us. And then this time, we don't know. That's going to cost the company $100,000. And, you know, we're, if this happens again, we're going to have to let you go. And you're going to have to really have a give some consideration to if you want to hear or not, because we can't afford to lose clients because the companies, you know, we lost money last quarter. And we're trying to get back in the block right now. So there's a way to handle this that isn't like chewing out. And some people like, candid talk equals chewing out. If you have people, you know, in startup land, I'm going to bring it back to startups, who consider radical candor. Shout out to Kim, who wrote the bucket of Google. They consider radical candor chewing out, which is like a government employee, which is, I think, a government position. They're already in a toxic relationship, I'll be honest, a unionized relationship. It becomes very toxic, very quick. Management is against labor. Labor, is against management. Everybody is like, you know, being petty, you really can't have that radical candor. And so, um, you need to set a culture and say, hey, we're going to just speak candidly at all times. And you can speak candidly to me. You can say, as a boss, you should have told me about this. Uh, you know, I wouldn't have taken the job if you did. You should be able to have that, you know, conversation. You can say, you know, I think I, maybe I need to look for another job if you expect me to be on call every weekend. Right. This is a little too stressful for me.

I can't enjoy my life. So maybe it's time we part ways. It's a two-way street, that candidness. Okay, let's get back to the talk. Let's go ahead and talk about graduating from Seed to Series A. This is the thing, Jason, I've been tracking since by time at CrunchBased News. I call it just graduation rates. If you raise one round as a startup, how often and how long does it take you to reach the next?

And one thing we talk a lot about here on the show, seed state startups. Of course, Jason, because you're an investor in a bunch of them. And we care a lot about the pass-through rate to Series A. and well, the numbers don't look particularly good. I have some data here from our friends over at Karta. Shout out to Peter Walker from their data team. And if you take a look at this chart, if you're watching the video, I'll quickly explain.

Years are on the left and time passes as we go to the right. And you can see how many companies from a particular cohort done by quarter and year reached a Series A round after raising their seed. As time goes along, Jason, you'll note that more companies raise their Series A, unsurprisingly. Data goes up and down over time. thing that stands out to me is a deterioration in the rate at which companies are graduating from seed to series A in the last couple of years. And the most shocking data point, Carter actually highlighted, which is that if you look at Q1, 2003 seed runs, those that are now two

years old, only 15.5% of companies in their database that raised a seed two years ago have raised an A, which is, Jason, far below the highest watermark ever set, which was 2002 Q3, when 40% of C stage companies had raised an A in eight quarters. I was blown away by this. I'm curious, one, your reaction, and two, what you think is driving to filter? Yeah, 2020. Yeah, 2020 when that happened, which was peak zer. All right, we all know if you're a founder, or even if you're on a small business,

you're thinking about your company 24-7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder. This is not clock in, clock out nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's, of course, LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is like your co-founder. They're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn, where there are 1 billion members. You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place.

And also, LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people. whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants. So do me a favor. Don't take my word for it. I mean, you should. I know what I'm talking about. This is where I find my great people. But just understand that 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates. So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses already use LinkedIn for hiring. So here's your call to action. Post your job for free. Why wouldn't you do it? It's free. F-R-E. That's a good price. LinkedIn.com slash T-W-I-S-T. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com slash T-W-I-S-T to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. So when you look at this chart, the red is they haven't, right? A very small number of have, and then you go to pink and you go to this, you know, orange. Yeah, you can see that in 2002 it was at its worst. So that looks like it's eight, nine, ten, eleven quarters, right, for 20, 22 companies pulling through. Pull through is another way for graduation rate.

Now, we don't expect it to be more than 20, 30 percent, right? So if you invest in four, you put $100,000 in four different companies, and one of the four, in the seed round, makes it to series A, you will have paid $400,000 essentially for your equity in that company. That's a nice way to think about it. If you're pre-seed like we are, this is even less. This would be half of the amount, right? So very few pull through. But if you're pre-seed, like we're running an accelerator, you are investing at but a $1.7 million valuation as Y Combinator, tech stars, or ourselves the launch accelerator, or in our founding university program, even $1 million. So we will expect 40% of our companies, we track this statistic, we expect 40, or we've seen,

40 to 45% of people coming out of our programs on average, make it to another round of funding that is at a higher valuation, and I think we say over 100K in total investment. So if somebody puts a 10K check and doubles the valuation, maybe we discount that. So it might be 25, 50 or 100, I think we said, as like a minimum benchmark for what we call pull through or graduation, not to A, but to at least a round that's a higher round,

because people do multiple notes, et cetera, the card of data is but one subset. So a caveat, caveat, caveat. Other issue here at play is that founders are getting to profitability quicker

and don't need to get an A. They could do, and there's a seed complex out there where you can do bridges and notes, and it isn't as much about hitting that perfect series A. You could have companies like Tom or FitBod

in our portfolio that don't do a series A for many years. They might do one or two notes or none and just do a secondary because they're so profitable. In the case of FitBod and Com, both consumer subscription applications, they were so profitable. They didn't need to. I've also seen this with companies like Tone Base, another one of our, that's a web-based subscription for learning how to play musical instruments, and specifically classical. I've seen a lot of these companies where I'll offer them additional investment and they say no to me. Like all three of those were not interested in raising additional money or selling secondary because they were growing so nicely. So there's a little bit of that in there, what I call the alicorns. Unicorns, or my mind

unicorns, flying over rounds of funding because they got Pegasus wings. Really nice trend. What this means also is the number of startups could have increased. So if you have a larger number of startups, but the same number of Series A investors, it's harder to kind of get that series A. So you would do something creative like another seed round, another convertible note, and you just push it out, push it out, and try to reach profitability. If we had more M&A, which over the weekend, I'm not going to say which company, we were informed one of our portfolio companies was getting bought. This is a great transaction, apparently. We'll see the devil's in the details, but another great transaction for us if it goes through, and it looks like it's going to.

So the wrath of Lena Khan ending and the Trump MNA Banzah begins, which I would just say is a Republican MNA Bonaanza and hopefully less regulation on M&A. We need to let M&A rip or else we will not have risk capital at work. Let it rip President J.D. Vance. I mean Trump. I don't think either one of those is in charge. Now, Jason, I want to ask. you about series A benchmarks, because when I was learning venture capital, it's pretty simple. You wanted to have a million in an ARR, and then you could raise a series A. Clearly, those times are behind us. I was curious if rising series A expectations are impacting seed, pull through, or graduation rates. Of course, yeah, it's two or three million is going to be the number of revenue. Yes, yes, exactly. So I went around the internet and I found some stuff about this. So Valor VZ says two million plus ARR, founder institute was about 2.4 million ARR. And the, The thing that I'm trying to sort out is how fast do you have to be growing at, let's say,

two or three million A or R to raise a series A? Because I saw numbers from 200, 300%. I'm curious, like, what do you see now that are amongst your winning companies that are making a season? Yeah, ideally doubling. So 100%. Yeah. If you're going from a million to two million, then a VC can look at it and say, wow,

it's not an accident in all likelihood. Got it. Then look at the quality of the revenue. We talked about that many times here. Yep, yep. Are a lot of people churning? or do they have an incredible sales team that can sell sand to somebody in the desert

and now that person's like, yeah, I don't need any more sand. You got me once, but I'm not going to renew. So you've got to look at the quality of the revenue. But people are looking at the early stages on small numbers for triples, ideally a double would be fine.

And what that means is they probably have a theory. We're going to give you five or 10 million. You're going to add these two or three critical executives. You're going to invest in these one, two, or three areas, and then we can increase that slope, which is what venture capital is for, is to increase the growth rate. Startups are meant to grow, and they're meant to grow like rockets, not helicopters or airplanes. If you've got an airplane and it's flying and it's gaining altitude lawn, that's fantastic. Great, but we all know it's going to get 40,000 feet, and then

that's the tolerance of that vehicle. In venture capital, the tolerance is getting two, orbit. You want to be able to get to space and you need that critical velocity to do it. The critical velocity is jet fuel. And that jet fuel is not for airplanes for rocket ships. So the question then becomes, Jason, if we now understand the series A benchmarks and we say that the seed companies are struggling to graduate for a variety of reasons, are they simply just not meeting the series A benchmarks? And is that why they're stuck? No, a lot of them are meeting it. I think there's just not enough VCs to go around. And the VCs only have 10 dance

cards. So if you have a lot of these funds getting really big, they have to put bigger numbers to work. And then there's other people to come in and fill that gap, specifically SPVs. So we talked about the company that makes human robots over and over again here. I don't mean figure. Figure. Yeah. Listen,

I wish the founder tremendous luck, and I was on his side with the BMW issue. So this isn't like a a Palmer lucky situation, like or Zucker Berger's situation. Don't start clipping me and trying to get me in trouble here. But, you know, they're raising money according to what I've read in SPVs at 38, 39, 40 billion. Pre-revenue or pre-any any significant revenue, those would be the red flags that people would see in a market where

optimism trumps reality. And that's fine. Investors are willing to trade reality for this massive optimism. Founders are allowed to capitalize on that. But man, man, that can create a lot of a distance and a big bubble between things on the opposite. And so that means like a VC firm doesn't do that round. And the VC firm would be looking at it saying, well, what's the IPO going to be? Or who's going to buy this for how much and what's their theory going to be? They're going to look at those two exit potentials and then they'll work backwards. And they might give you credit for year three or four's revenue, but they might not give you credit for year 30s revenue because there's no room for a return for their LPs. Founders, if you're serious about raising money,

you need to set up your business the right way. Tight is right, and it all starts with having registered agents. Investors simply won't fund your business if it isn't structured correctly. Before a VC can wire you the first dollar, they're going to check, is your company incorporated, is it in good standing, and compliant? Missing a filing or losing your status, I mean, it's just going to be a deal breaker for the VC. It's like you're not taking things seriously. And that's what happens during due diligence. That's one of VC, make sure they're not making a mistake by giving you investment dollars and, hey, angels do this as well. And that's where Northwest registered agent comes in. For just $39 plus state fees, they act as your registered agent. They handle all the

paperwork. They keep you compliant and they make sure investors see you as a serious business that's worth funding. In just 10 clicks and 10 minutes, your business is officially set up an investor ready. Northwest handles filings, they protect your privacy, and they ensure that you never miss a deadline. These are the chores that you don't want to have to deal with. You need a partner, and Northwest registered agent is that partner. Thousands of founders trust Northwest because they keep businesses in good standing. And with their expert corporate guides, you get real support, you don't get bots, you get real people on the phone. So here's your call to action, very simple, easy, peasy, lemon squeasy. Don't let bad paper or cost you your next funding. Go to

Northwest registeredagent.com slash twist and get your business investor ready today. For just $39 plus day fees, you can set up your company the right way, fast, private, and compliant. Go to Northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today. That's the thing that's troubling to me in this whole space right now, and that some entrepreneurs, you know, and they're allowed to do this, if there's willing buyers of securities at a fair market price. We are selling to willing buyers

of the current fair market price. Is the figure fair market price $40 billion? Who's to say? The buyers are willing to pay it, therefore that's the fair market price. Literally, that's the definition of a fair market price. But if the VCs,

and what we'll call the sharps, the people who are really good at placing bets, are opting out at that level, that tells you one of two things. The VCs are wrong, or the other market participants, Discipients are wrong. Who do we think's wrong in this equation? Sequoia, Indrice and Horowitz, or a bunch of people who are high net worth individuals putting money into an SPV with a five or six percent load-in fee.

Yeah. People have been doing it for 50 years. People back to Apple, Google, et cetera. Or the people who, you know, they yolo'd a bunch of crypto and decided, hey, let's see if I can yolo one more time. Sometimes the yoloos are correct, as we've seen. Other times they're not. Overall, I feel like the industry is getting, is in the process of coming out of a brutal four-year struggle with like COVID. Like literally, if you look at like what the industry venture has gone through, it's kind of like having like some kind of like COVID. And now you're coming out of it. M&A's happening again.

Funding's happening again. We're seeing weird things. weird things always happen. So when you see weird things, that's actually a sign of a healthy environment. Some people get a little too frisky. Some people are too conservative. That's actually, as long as transactions are occurring, that's good. But my lord, I just hope we're not in the long COVID situation where Venture has long COVID. It's just constantly not able to hit the shrides it hit previously. We need to get more numbers on the board, more IPOs, more M&A. Let's talk about copyright. So we have confirmed news that the president has fired Shira Perlmutter,

head of the U.S. Copyright Office. Her office put out a report recently, casting doubt on the rights of AI companies to use copyright-protected information to train their models. So the report didn't say that what a lot of people who work in AI or invest in AI, they basically want the government to give carte blanche. There's no copyright protection for training your models. It's fair use. and this, the copyright office did not quite go that far. So they said, this report potentially arms the argument that tech companies can just hoover up all the published information in the world and use it for, you know, whatever purposes

they like. The wording is specifically copying expressive works from pirate sources in order to generate unrestricted content that competes in the marketplace. That would mean, you know, meta and other companies that use these, you know, sort of big pirated archives like Libgen, or we talked about the pile on another episode, these massive troves of already stolen material, they've been sort of sucking that up and saying, well, we didn't go violate copyright. We just use this third-party collection of copyright restricted material.

This report is basically saying, that's not okay, and it's out of step with copyright law. So that could be a big obstacle to training these, you know, models moving forward. I just want to say this report pretty good. Like I was going, it's long. I didn't get to read every word this morning, so I think it was like 100 pages or something. But if you're curious about how AI works, generative AI works,

copyright history, different arguments, it's pretty even-handed. So I would really recommend everyone take a look at it. There's a link in the docket. We'll also put a link in the show notes that go up on YouTube and so forth. But definitely just take a peek. I had to really narrow down

what I wanted to pull out for today, Jason, which is the quote we just went through. But I'm curious how much heat you think this puts meta under it. Because famously, they were known to use LibGen for their AI model training. This seems to me to be an inside job. I think there are a lot of people. You know, the way our government system works here in the United States, for those of you

outside of it, is you give donations, you get access. And you back money plays a big role in politics here in the U.S. You back your candidate, whether you're giving $100 to Bernie Sanders or you're giving $10 million to a super PAC for Biden or Trump or whoever, Clinton. So money buys access and entrepreneurs and corporate interests have more money than individuals. This is the nature of our system. So it is part of political speech that, you know, well-depocketed sources can do this. Who's depocketed? Obviously, Met is depocketed. Obviously, Google's depocketed, individual venture

capitalist, et cetera. And the law is the only backstop to this. So what needs to happen? and here is because special interests are fighting to break copyright, which I encourage them not to do because it will have so many second and third order impacts that you cannot predict, like people will stop making content that would make everything. It's much better for these companies to pay a licensing fee. If the opportunity is as great as it appears to be, then you should do what some firms have been doing, Microsoft and ChatGPT OpenAI, have licensed content from people and paid a feed to do so. You two gentlemen can go do your race right now in a GCP in LLM to find the deals they've done. But we remember, you know,

like some magazines had actually done licensing deals for them. Those deals are going to need to be done at scale. And those deals present an opportunity. The opportunity being when you open up your LLM to say, we have the rights to Reddit. And other people don't. So you could, you know, if you're GROC come out and say, hey, we're GROC, pay 30 bucks a month, and you get Reddit, Twitter, Disney, and Shimon, and the Wall Street Journal. And then chat CPT, or Gemini could come out and say, hey, and you can use our services, and you get X, Y, and Z. This could be a competitive advantage for each. And then you could explicitly say, tell me what Reddit users are doing. Tell me what Disney films, you know, make me a short film with.

Every time Boba Fett has appeared in a Disney film, those cool features tell me every New York Times article that mentions Bob Dylan and make me a timeline and give me the songs mentioned in it and make a playlist out of that with Spotify. Like these are really interesting queries. I just came up with all the top of head. Those should be used in the branding of LLMs in the future, and they will. And that is the brilliant way for this to emerge in the United States. And then you could buy Red.

You could buy Cora and you could have that forever, just like Elon bought Twitter. And it's now part of XAI. Nobody else can use Twitter. He will defend that. Sam Altman, I think Reddit did a deal. Am I correct that Reddit did a deal with Google? There is a Reddit OpenAI partnership from last year. And also there is the Google Reddit search deal that Reddit discussed in its earnings post IPO.

Jason, your debt on. Just answer your question, though. So Open AI partnerships include Washington Post, Axiost, Axiost. future, Hearst, Time, Reddit, Axel Springer, etc. So quite a number of them. And those are non-exclusive, as I understand. I don't know on a per-deal basis, but I do believe most of them at least are not buying my knowledge.

Also keep in mind, the Times is suing Open AI over this issue. But what's interesting is that the copyright office came down, I would say, a little bit generously on the side of if you're taking an information for training and then using it internally, 100% clear, or if you're going to take a data to train and don't allow it to be copied, as in the prompts can't spit out the original, probably okay. That's, I think, pretty fair, Jason. But if the political climate is so sharply opposed to what I would say is a very reasonable middle ground here, what should founders know and do? And then also, do you put any truck behind the argument that if we do have strong copyright protections here in the U.S.,

contra AI training companies, we're going to lose China? Or is that just kind of fear laundering? We will win because we will be able to put pressure on China and block those models for copyright violation. If a Chinese company tried to operate in the West and sell Microsoft Word, we would block and sanction that company in Italy, Africa, India, and the United States, South America. And by the way, Chinese companies have tried to do that. And Microsoft, as but one example, wound up being able to sell their products in China and block Chinese pirates from doing this kind of stuff. And this will make our industry stronger ultimately. So it is ridiculous to say, because the Chinese are stealing intellectual property, therefore we should be able to.

It is ridiculous to want to protect your intellectual property in China. And then at the same time, say that other IP holders in the United States shouldn't be because we won't win the AI race. We will actually win the AI rate. We will slow down to speed up. If it turns out that licensing, you know, axios and licensing the Washington Post and giving Washington Post 10 million dollars a year, or five people giving them $10 million a year, they can then hire more journalists. They can then do more projects. Those projects then will accrue to U.S. companies directly in real time. So imagine $50 million divide $250,000 in total compensation for the most extraordinary

journalists in the world. That would top top pay for like 40-year, 30, 40-year vets with master's degrees, et cetera. You know, now you're talking about four, for every million dollars, 50 million. You're talking about 200 of the pop flight journalists filing, I don't know, every, let's say, 220 pieces a year. They're doing one piece every two weeks.

Now you've got 4,000, and that's from one publication, extremely rich, detailed analysis and research pieces in our archives in real time. Smarter search results. Better way to take on Google. Not a bad way to go about it. Go ahead, Lonnie, Donnie.

And to flip it, I mean, I think if we say there's no restriction, you can feed all the history of published work into AI and use it to create any new thing you want. I think that creates an existential crisis for media, writers, journalists, publications. In general, we still, I think everybody or most reasonable, people would agree, you want to have both. You want to have the ability to use AI and generate AI outputs, and you want to have people still doing the original writing, researching, and reporting that some people are doing now. You don't want to create, we can't have the AI be the only writers. I think that doesn't really make sense. And so we need to do something to protect the media that we already have.

And I think we're watching it shrink down to a nearly, you know, like minimum size to function. And I think that there's a real danger of that. And so creating an AI ecosystem that still provides in some way for there to be income for journalists. And even if it is being licensed by AI companies, that's virtuous. We need something like that because clearly the ad market alone is not enough to fund the journalism that we need to function as a democratic society. Yeah. And created by humans as a company we've invested in that is going to work on creating clearinghouses. Here you can see on your screen, the AI rights licensing platform for books.

And they're starting with books. So you can put your book in there. And then you can get paid by each LLM. They do the clearing. You can pick the number of years, how much of the book they're allowed to put in there, how much they're allowed to quote. You know, you want books to be written. If people get paid 50K on average to write a book, you know, like real authors,

I mean, I got paid a million, but, you know, like because I have a big following. And that's kind of how books are done right now, you know, based on your following. Celebrity status, yeah. I think if you've, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's even more than celebrity. It's, do you have distribution? So celebrity without distribution equals nothing in this new world. It's celebrity, um, like Kelly Worssela. She's got like two million followers.

You know, she writes a book about design. She can get paid a lot of money for that book because, hey, you know, um, she got some, you know, number of followers. So she's like super popular. Now imagine, you know, she writes her book about design how much she could get from each of the language models for, like, let's say it's a coffee table book. Well, if you have a beautiful coffee table book of beautiful Italian design and they took all those original pictures and there's 200 beautiful pictures on 100 pages in the book with captions and it really makes a great point. Think about how great that could be to have in your LLM when people ask about modern design Italian and you can pull up the high-rest photos with a link to the book to buy it. So that can all be in the terms. We can do very granular licenses, Alex, where you say you can have a full res image. You could have up to three images for free.

If you want 10 images and 1,000 uses, it's $5 per thousand. If you want all of it and you want 100,000 user queries returned, you could literally price it per query returned and quoted. If you use one of these language models, go ahead and do a search your line and say, what does the wirecutter think the three best coffee machines are, three best coffee grinders over the years, and do that into your favorite three LMs and be ready to pull it up. Alex, while he does that, I will tell you a story. I paid for the New York Times for many years. The number one reason I did was because wirecutter. I'm a consumer of products. I trust wirecutters.

I love the guy Brian. I tried to buy a wire cutter. New York Times bought it behind a paywall now. Yes, it is. Consumer reports. Behind a paywell. Also, as lawn and consumer reports. Three best coffee machines, Alex, you have a New York Times subscription, I assume, paid, maybe, okay? If you would be so kind as to pull up those two pages. What you will find is Alex Wilhelm pays for New York Times.

He's going to pull up best coffee grinder. He's going to pull up best coffee machine. He'll show those two pages in a moment from Mark or Lon. Do you pay for chat chippy tea? I do. Okay, do you pay for New York Times? No. Okay, perfect.

So we have a chat chippy tea person. And we have a New York Times person and ChatGPTGERS. So, Lon, just pull up your pages and share them. What did it tell you with the number one, two, and three, according to those two sources from ChatGPT. ChatGPT is going a little slow, but the number one coffee machine is the Breville Burista Express. Number two is... According to... This is ChatGPT citing wire cutter.

Perfect. So he knows what it is. Yeah, Breville Barista Express is number one, number two, Phillips 1,200. series number three, De Longhi Le Specialista Arte Evo, and then it goes on from there. I'm going to share the Claude ones in just a second year.

So Alex, what does it say on the actual page? Is it relatively correct? I'm going to need you to specify they have like 16 different sections here, so best programmable drip, simple drip, budget drip, pour over I think the drip, just do the drip. But I would also add, chat GPT

also says, I don't have access to wirecutters articles due to restrictions. So I'm sharing some highly regarded coffee machines and grinders from the past few years recommended by experts and enthusiasts. Okay, so it knows now. Now, I have that one, the Technovorum. I have bought both of those. Those are great machines. I had the top one at the office. I had the second one in, you know, whatever, at home and in the ski house. Beautiful, beautiful. Expensive, but great. Claude notably did go to actual wire cutter and consumer reports and hold because it can search the web now.

So Claude actually lists here are wirecutters top coffee maker recommendations and consumer reports. And then the same thing for the grinders. So it says wirecutters top three are the OXO Brew Nine cup coffee maker. That's a great one. I had that for a while. Yeah. The Bonavita enthusiast eight cup drip coffee brewer.

And they breville Bambino plus. Perfect. So what you'll find from this if you do it yourself is it generally gets it right. and it generally means you don't need a New York Times subscription anymore. Grock also is able to search and actually pulled the real ones. So if it searches and it links to the page, that would feel more like a Google search, which would be okay. And a Google search might actually put it there in the snippet up top.

The point being, you now can just cancel your subscriptions. The consumer reports, and we'd have to do a better study here, but this is at the key to the lawsuit from the New York Times to, the OpenAI is that, you know, they're end running and they're confusing consumers and then consumers don't need to subscribe. I literally am Exhibit A for this.

I did not renew my New York Times because I was like, I can get this information for my chat, Shabit, D subscription. And there you have it, folks. I think this will keep happening. And then people have to put their stuff behind a paywall because of this unfairness. And, you know, to Sam,

Altman's credit, Open AI is respecting and fixing things now, the entire industry must unite as one and set the terms with each LLM. They need to write a legal letter to Google, they need to write a legal letter to Claude, meta, grok, etc.

They need to inform them. We are a consortium of people who have content that is valuable. Here's how we want it to present it. Here's how we want you to do robotics. And content people are so dumb and they're so disorganized and they're so meat

that they don't know what a slam-dung case this is. This is, and this is why the New York Times is not falling for it this time around. The New York Times has been screwed in the past, but now they have a subscription business. When you have a subscription business, you need to look at it with the music industry, and Disney has done. These two organizations will sue you into oblivion. Music industry, a hundred times more than Disney, Disney, 100 times more than New York Times, but New York Times, now that they're a subscription business, they know, there is no fair use. In their mind, The music industry believes there's no fair use.

That's ridiculous and absurd. And they have taken that position with YouTube. So when you watch the reaction videos I've played here before, they will try to stop reaction videos. They will try to keep them from getting monetized. YouTube came up with a great system called content matching, content ID. If you're dire straits and somebody, the Daily Doug, reviews dire straits. And he talks about this, how sometimes even though he's doing criticism,

and they will try to stop him from doing valid criticism on a song because, and he's interrupting the song five times, so it's not like you're getting the CD for free. He's interrupting it constantly. I mean, I suppose you could edit it down. But, you know, they will sometimes take his advertising revenue, I guess,

or if he has no advertising on it, but you have to fight for that. And sometimes he doesn't fight it because he's already got one strike against him and three strikes are out in the media channel. I mean, that's the problem. Like content ID, I agree. it's a brilliant solution, big picture to this problem. The issue is that on a, you know, because it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's so much content per day. There's a lot of false positive. It tends to really lean on the content owner's side. So, you know, for like honest trailers, we couldn't even include like a five second snippet from a movie where they're singing a song or we'll lose our entire video, even though, you know, we're making fun of it. We're not just playing the song and listening to it. And they can take, you know, and they can take,

your advertising revenue. The whole, yeah, the whole video would then belong to the owners of that copyrighted song. We played, you know, a three second. And what if you had three, you played five different songs from five different movies? Yeah, any one of them could claim it and steal the money. And even to an even more granular, we did, years ago, we did a parody of Mary Poppins and we rewrote all of the Mary Poppins songs, but because one of our parody songs sounded too close to the original chimney sweeper song.

They dinged us and we had to come up with a new parody chimney sweeper song that sounded less like the original Chim Chimony. So anyway, get together. This is an amazing moment for content companies to get paid. It's an amazing moment for the language models to create a sustainable fair system. The only way you'll get technologists to do the right thing in my experience when it comes to content is to do what the music industry did is, which is hold the line. And you just have to be relentless.

Never drop the suit, never compromise, go after every single infringement. Now, that sounds crazy because I have complained about the music industry and their approach before. But I think that's how you get their attention. They clearly got Sam Altman's attention,

and now he's like doing these things. And if you ask for Disney characters or to do stuff with Disney characters on chat GPT, it's stopping. So if you were to ask it to make you a Star Wars, you know, short video of, you know, Darth Vader fighting Darth Maul. I think Sora is not going to let you do that. It's really fascinating how specific it is now.

Like last week for All In, there were some parody videos of like, you know, a member of the all in team is the Pope or whatever, and that's allowed. But you can't make something that Chat GPT thinks is making fun of the person. So like dressing them as the Pope is okay. But if it was like, make them the Pope and there's ketchup. dribbling down the front of their Pope outfit and on their face, it'd be like, no, no, no, can't do that. That's over the line. That's too mean-spirited. Okay. But Jason wants the media business dig to aggregate, to kind of like maybe collectively bargain, perhaps as some sort

of like union against the major AI companies. No, it's got to be lawsuits. It's got to be capitalistic. The union is, no, but I mean, I get your point, but it is the difference is the content companies love unions. Let me say that one more time. Content companies love the unionization of content employees. You know what happened? One of the major content, I want to say farms, but major online publisher said to me when all these, I guess, Vox and Business Insider and BuzzFeed, they all went unionized,

you know, all those unions? I don't know. You ever dragged into that, Alex, to be a union person? No, but I was, I'm in favor of. of media union, so I've raised my hand to take part in one before. Great. Biggest mistake ever for both of you. You know what? I'm in the Writers Guild.

No, but that's fine. That's like for the, uh, for movies and TV. But I'm talking about for these content ones, the owners of those businesses were laughing at you, Alex. You know why? Somebody like you is, should get paid more than the average. And what they said was, these idiots, this is literally what they said to me, like, you know, late night bar kind a situation. These idiots, like, they don't, they have no idea how much money they're saving us. And when an all-star, like yourself, says, hey, I deserve a race, listen, I'm bringing all this traffic, or Molly Wood, or, you know, a carous swisher, pick somebody, Walt Mossberg, they would get paid five times, ten times what a rank followed. They would say, oh, you know, we wish we

could pay you more, but, you know, it's against the union guidelines. We wish we could give you, oh, you want more days off. We would do that, but it's the union. They loved it. Loved it. the reason why I'm only a 90% capitalist, maybe 95% is that I'd take a ding to support my friends. But let's not get into Alex's call a dig. You would take a pay cut and be like, let's say you were not an entrepreneur now because you went an entrepreneur. So you voted with your dollar.

You're telling me like a younger Alex would be like pay me 10% less so that like other people who don't drive the results I have. When I was managing crunch-based news and I was really advocating to get a couple of people some reasonable comp increases, I offer to take a pay cut to make it up. My lord. I mean, I take care of my people. I don't know, man.

My God. I mean, but this is the corporation who's, but when you're running a team at a corporation, you often can't take care of your staffs underneath you as you think you should. And so you have to really go out with every tool you have to grind the money out. But again, not about me. I don't know. Now I'm like,

this is sending me into a total tailspin. I know, I am a capitalist, but I'm also a person who has been broke before. All right. Okay. We're going to office hours. we're going to talk about something that I'm very excited about, Jason, which is,

what if you're a live streamer, as we all hear are live streaming, but you really want to be a frog or perhaps Darth Mall? Well, then you need some cool AR tooling. There was something called Snap Camera that got taken off, but don't worry, streamers of the world. There's a startup called StreamFog, part of Launch Accelerator 34, that is making all this possible and more. So please welcome to the program. It's Kevin Bonzio. Kevin, hey. Hey, how's it going? Hello, sir. How are you? Where are you calling in from today? Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas, I've been there.

Local guy. Are you coming tomorrow to hang out at the office with us? We're having a little founder day. Did you know about that? I know, and I will be there, of course. Oh, I will see you there. We'll be having some Stubbs barbecue, perhaps. Love that.

Lawn and I scouted Stubbs on Friday. It was good. Man, that pork rib was no joke. Yeah, that pork, the pork ribs are very good from Stubbs. Yeah, I recommend. And also that fried okra. I was, mm-mm, but fried okra does not travel. I had to throw it away when I got home.

No, yeah, you got to have that fresh. So, Kev, maybe you could show us what you're working on. You know, pictures worth a thousand words. And then tell us what's working. What are your wins? What are your fails? What's working?

What are the blockers in your startup? Yeah. So my name is Keth. So in content creation, Jason, and you know it as basically being our ideal customer, product placements and ads play a crucial role in like monetization. But the implementation can sometimes be disruptive. If you have like a full screen banner or even a clip playing,

some viewers will just hover the YouTube time. timeline to skip it or be on their phone, right? And we basically think that the streamfog uses augmented reality to place those ads organically as part of the content in a natural way. That's kind of our idea. And you already said it so I can like showcase it to you basically.

So as you can see, I can keep talking. I have an organic way of just interacting with you and the viewer just still sees an ad placement. And that's kind of how we think ads in video streaming should work. in today's world. For those of you who didn't see, an Uber Eats just flew by Kev's face,

and it was distracting, but not debilitating for the stream. Lon, Alex, if we did this during this week in startups, would you be appalled or think it's fun? If, like, an Athena assistant ran in and, you know, took some notes, would you be like...

I mean, I think these things always come down to context. You know, if it's a serious show for doing a very serious segment and then it'll goopy, animated character shows up and dances around behind me. Not appropriate. But I do think, depending on the vibe of the show and the hosts and the kinds of things you're talking about, something like this could be really fun and a great way to do an ad. It's not, it's not only not like distracting, like takes over the whole show and then the content

stops, but it's not, you know, like it feels organic. It feels like it's part of the show and not like this thing that's interrupting the show that you have to get through in order to get on the other side of it, which I feel like is the vibe of so many ads. Especially if it replaces an ad that I'd have to skip. Otherwise, like if Kev said, Alex, listen, you can see this ad live

while I'm talking to you, or I can stop and put a full-screen pizza hut ad. I'd definitely take what he just showed. That said, Uber Eatskev sends me so many push notifications randomly trying to sell me booze that I never want to see that particular animation again. Thank you. That's a great note.

There should be a setting for people who are sober to not get pitched on booze. That's such a good idea. But isn't it strange, too? I feel like for so many years we were told the algorithms are so smart. They're so advanced. They know everything about you. Isn't it weird that the algorithms don't yet know after years presuming that Alex is sober? Well, an algorithm might actually know he's sober, have figured out that sober people will binge and getting them back in. That's horrible. I hope it's not that. I think it is actually.

Remember, the algorithms are indifferent to outcomes. They're indifferent to anything but an outcome. The algorithm is indifferent to anything but success. Success is defined as increased orders. Yes. If you want to increase orders, getting a person who is sober to fall off the wagon could be a daily 12-pack. It might be that.

it learned that. In fact, we were just talking on Megan Kelly about how the algorithm at meta was taking deleted selfies or selfies that weren't published. Oh, right. Yes, yes. And then for young girls or women, then feeding them beauty products based on the selfies they either removed or didn't publish. In other words, I published a selfie and it's like, oh, I have bags under my eyes. Great. Here's like some cream that theoretically removes the bags under your eyes. It was targeting girls who deleted selfies. fees with B. I presume Kev is not trying to knock me off the wagon here. So I'm really curious about the split in your business because when I was just learning about stream fog, I saw you guys offer the service for free and then you can buy certain assets. So I thought, okay, cool,

kind of a simple freemian business model. But now the focus that I learned more really does need to be about creating this new ad format. So can you just tell us how much progress you made on having this be a product that is in the market versus a cool demo that you just showed us? Yeah. So maybe let me start by saying we have like a creator. tool for mostly Twitch streamers. They can use AR effects to just have a more interactive content. And that is and will stay for free. So they can just have fun.

We love them being engaged. But we have like kind of the other side of that marketplace or the B2B side where we allow marketing agencies or brands to run these campaigns on Twitch. And we recently started doing that on YouTube as well. So we have these two sides where the creator side is for free. But the interesting part is we can offer these creators no sponsorship. So we kind of act like a marketplace where we build both sides of that marketplace. simultaneously. And now every creator cannot only have these fun, goofy effects, but say,

hey, actually, I want to sell my camera space as a billboard and earn more revenue in an organic, non-disruptive way. So that's kind of our idea. We monetize directly the kind of the business enterprise side. Creators can use it for free and even earn money. Do you have the like Uber rates coming to you and saying here is an affiliate code? Any new accounts open, you get a hundred bucks and then you go to streamers and say, hey, we made this collateral. If you run it every time you get somebody, you're going to get 75 bucks, we're going to get 25, are you interested? Have you thought about that, like affiliate network dynamics? 100%. And we already have two affiliate campaigns running right now. Uber Eats was like a

one-off campaign where an agency came to us, here's the campaign, here's the four creators that needs to run it, and we acted just like a tech platform that created technology and the visuals for that. So we were kind of like just bought as a technology at that point. But we also run affiliate campaigns with others. Does it have to be a live stream or can you go to my previous videos that were posted and in some way put a layer on them? So if I did a deal with Budweiser, you know, Bud Light, you could go, like if I'm Dylan Mulvaney, you could go to every previous TikTok I did and somehow insert it in there. I guess it wouldn't be possible. We have to repost the video, but it would be kind of cool, you know, if there was possible. It's a great question. So we right now

integrates with OBS and mostly live streamers, but we ran our first YouTube campaign last month, and we're now looking at it's okay, how would this work with YouTube, right? Do you as a content creator upload your video? And then we can add those after automatically, like we're now looking into this YouTube market, like how will it look like for a video that was pre-recorded?

I think actually, sometimes closing the loop is a really interesting concept to get the flywheel going. So here, you know, you had the one offer from Uber Eats, But what would you say is the open affiliate product that has the highest commission rate? Is it still credit cards or an e-trade Robin Hood account? Do you know that answer? It's a good question.

I heard that in the gaming area, there's these energy powders that have great commission-based. Perfect. So let's take the energy powder as a concept. Here's what I think would be an interesting test for you, since we're doing office hours here. You make a relationship with one of those. You say, hey, listen. I got this thing. You're going to get not only the affiliate,

but you're going to get some shine, right? You're going to get some CPM campaign. I'm wondering if you would hire us to go and do these campaigns with influencers on their streams, but we will also, for this fee, flip their best of, and then we'll make shorts for you, and then we will run advertising of the shorts against their audience and retarget them,

and then we will share the results with you, and it will be a win-win-win situation. The streamer doesn't have to do any additional work because we're doing all the clipping of those videos and posting them with them. You don't have to do any additional work. We outsource it all to us, and we'll get you more sales and more eyeballs on yours,

and we'll do it exclusively with you. So we'll give you 12-week exclusive. We wouldn't do any other energy products. We have 20 different streamers we work with. we're going to get as many of them involved as possible. And then we win because, you know, you use our tool. We want you to be a lighthouse customer. And then we want to obviously generate revenue because we're a startup.

We need revenue to raise more money. It'd be like a very interesting packaging where you sell them a group of 20 people and you get some CPM. You know, it's just you say, hey, $500 per streamer up front, you know, so we need $10,000 for that. We need $10,000 to run the campaign and then we want whatever percent of the sales. What do you think? I think that's a great idea. And like, as you said, like, these brands and campaigns often want to have this full, all-inclusive solution.

So that would actually be a great upsell potential at that point. Anything with your business that you need help with? Now, you're in the 34th accelerator class. I'll see you tomorrow. So we'll have some barbecue. We'll talk some more. But just here for the sake of the audience. Anything you're struggling with?

Any blockers? Anything confusing in your business as the founder? I have one particular question. When we run these campaigns, the brands are pretty happy. the creators are happy. And we can measure in absolute terms engagement range. But for us, like I'm always trying to say, okay, how do we actually do a fair one-to-one comparison with traditional formats, right? And I always come back to the idea of do we have to run a case study, like a very official blind test to run this or are there other ways to really show them the benefit

like really in numbers? There are firms that will go do recollection kind of things. So if you've ever been on a website And it's like, hey, will you take a survey for us? And it's like, hey, you know, we're just doing some advertising surveys And like they do a post survey. Hey, did you see any of the following advertisers on this website? And like Samsung did some campaign and it's like Apple, this, this, this, and Samsung. And they're just trying to see if it lifted that.

Those are like for when people are spending millions of dollars, maybe tens of millions of dollars with a publication, et cetera. You're outside of that. People are going to do this for the vibes. And you can come up with your own metrics. tricks, which are, you know, we know, we have a list of 100 streamers, and we approach all 100 on your behalf. 40 of them, you know, who are in the top category, said no, because they want $5,000 to $10,000 in advance. So we'll manage that relationship for you if you want. But of the 60,

that didn't want in advance, we were able to hit 37%. So we hit 37% of the top 100 streamers, and so you had a 37% saturation rate or completion rate. And so you're making up this metric, but of available, so of available top 100, so it's not the 100, it's the available 100 who do these type of deals. You know, we got you 57%. So you can kind of come up with your own metric. And I think Reach is always the issue with these. So this is where it gets really compelling.

You know, you could then make a supercut of 10 different, oh, this would be great. So let's say you land the 37 streamers out of the 100, but they represent 37 of 60 available or 30, let's say, let's say it's 35 of 70 that are available. So you have 35% of overall, you got 50% of what's available. Then you say, we made a super cut for you. This is a seven-minute cereal, this is a seven-minute reel of the best moments of those 35 with your product that you can put on your website, 20 seconds each, 10 seconds each, and we'll also do marketing for that. So you're creating this extra collateral for them and you say, hey, you can use these clips on your social media for one year, and then they have to come down, and you can put up to $1,000

in boost against each one. Whatever you spend in boost, you just have to share it with us, so we can share it back with them. And if you boost, you know, $10,000, we just want 10% of that going back to the streamer and us. So that's where, like, if somebody wants to do a deal with me, I'm working on a celebrity deal, micro-celebrity deal with somebody for GLPs, right? I've been taking these GLPs to help me lose weight. So now somebody wants to do a deal with. And now somebody wants to do a deal with me to do this. Basically, I think what my people will negotiate is, hey, if you spend a million dollars on advertising, it's 15% back to JCal for appearing in those, so it's 150K. Let's say those ads really perform and they do 5 million of them. Whoa, whoa, yum, yum for JCal. Maybe it's

750K is my fee. But that makes sense because they wouldn't run extra ads if it didn't. So there's just a ton of opportunity there. And I think owning a vertical is also great because then you can replicate it. So is gaming the one you want to go after? Is it dating? Is it dating? Is it? Is it consumer goods? Is it product I'm back? Is it people who are doing, what's that called muck? Muck bang. That's where they eat a lot of food on camera.

Oh, I've seen that. Yeah. Well, I didn't look at you for any personal reason when I said muck bang. I've never done. People don't want to watch me. It's like an attractive person eating. It's not like a dude.

You're beautiful to me, Lon. It's not just watch somebody eat. It's watch somebody charismatic and charming eat. Not, yeah, watch the big tubby guy eat. Kev, don't grow a beautiful. Okay. Jason doesn't like that. What do you think? What's the ideal vertical for you to really get the ball rolling here? For us, we've been doing all kinds of stuff right now. Like, we haven't focused on one particular area because that's maybe also another thing. We work a lot with agencies, and those agencies are often spread across different verticals.

So we're like offering that tool and they cross-sell us, which is for us very nice, reoccurring revenue stream and we've been working. That's efficient for that relationship, but it's inefficient for raising prices and you're offering. right? So I would, you know, I think a homework assignment might be to find an area unique to you, like a secret, and then you've got this secret weapon. You don't publicize it. You don't talk about it publicly. You don't put it on your website, but you secretly build your little consortium. We mentioned video games here, but it could be stock traders. It could be fashion. Whatever it is. You get your little collective going and say, hey, we would like you to be part of the secret collective to do this. And then you can market them. So you,

You get a little community going, you know, maybe you start a group chat with them, you know, or you just try to start those relationships. But it feels like you're on to something here. Most people want you to sell a platform fee and charge for just a software. But kickstart this and get it going, I think, maybe having little networks where you can bring them volume. Because I'm perceiving what will happen in year or two of this business, which is you're doing a bunch of one-offs. It's not profitable. You're losing money on each customer. one of the great things about this week in startups as an example is, you know, we got up to at 1.6 days a week during peak ZERP because we kept selling out and I told the ad sales team, oh, if we sell out, just add another day. Problem with that wasn't burnt me out. But we had something scalable here. I sense that I just can't do as many. Look, we could be five days a week again, no problem, but we're doing three days because I don't want to burn out. So we're leaving money on the table. But you want to get to that point where you've productized it enough that you can take orders, right? And they are profitable orders so you're sustainable. Yeah. It's a great point.

And you actually like said what we are experiencing. We have these one-of projects that show product market fit. People are willing to pay. But it's about like really scaling it and making it like profitable in every transaction. Yeah. All right. You'll get there. Keep grinding.

And we'll see you tomorrow in Austin for our Tuesday founder jam session. It's the jam session where we saw here in office hours. Alex is like the light version of a jam session. imagine, you know, 11, 12, 15 companies in a room each going through their product and then helping each other and what they're struggling with becomes really dynamic. You can have a great time tomorrow and we'll see you 10 a.m. tomorrow in person at our offices at the Capital Factory. Shout out. Thank you so much. Okay. Thanks, Kevin. Jason, I want to throw in. Streamfog.com. I forgot to say that in my intro. I just want to make sure I gave them that shout out. What do you think about

affiliate links? I feel like he could do a pretty deal. decent test with those, like a regular ad where you just read. Well, that's what you're saying with those powders. Right. Like, those are affiliate. Yeah, a little guy holding up a sign telling you the website and then you just compare, contrast. There's a little guy get us more than just a person saying it out loud because I really do feel like that's what area seeing the link, reading it might have a bigger impact than just hearing a person say it out loud. Absolutely. Yeah. I want to throw in just one tiny thing. Perplexity, the AI search company, the latest bit of news that dropped just before we went to air today, Jason, is that they are raising another $500 million at a valuation that could be

$14 billion, up $5 billion from $9 billion last November. That's quite a lot of capital. I just wanted to throw a question. There are a revenue number, by the way, associated with the firm. So the perplexities CEO, Arvind, Srinivayas. I think, yeah, we should have him back on the program. I should have practice that. Sorry, Arvin. 100 million ARR. That was announced about a month ago. So the company is theoretically at 140x ARR multiple.

It's a hot company. Ridiculous, but it's, there was just a talk of Apple, maybe talking to them. Eddie Q said, like you think search is moving to maybe, and I think he name checked

in his thing, perplexity that he had met with him. So that is a little bit of catnip for investors. Oh, there's an Apple purchase, perhaps. The question that I have is just,

you know, why do you think they need another $500 million dollars? They've raised a billion now in a couple quarters, if this deal lands where we think it will. Well, straight up, just not.

Yeah, I mean, if you can raise and everybody's raising, you want to be opportunistic. They probably also want to invest in not their own infrastructure, because there should be plenty of that available to them, but perhaps they want to do some infrastructure. That would be a great way to raise money because investors love investing in infrastructure because they consider that a, like, a defensible, even if it's not, but they do consider it defensible. And like, you can ask for a big number and a big valuation if you were going to buy, let's say the 500 million was going to be 300 million in Data Center and H-100s.

But, hey, listen, we want to get those because we think it's a competitive advantage. The other one is maybe they have new products or services they want to invest in it or explore. Why not build a cash position of AI is this hot? Also dissuades other people. Capital as a weapon dissuades a competitor from emerging. All right. Well, I appreciate that. I was just curious because I'm like, wait, half a billion again?

I was thinking acquisitions. The other possibility somebody came to them, a sovereign wealth fund, they met at an event and they're like, we really would love to be involved. and you say, okay, yeah, well, you know, do you have a ticket size? And they said, yeah, you know, we like to put in $500 million and start ticket size. Okay, would you like to join the board as an observer? And it could have been opportunistic that way. Could it be that opportunistic in that they think the market's hot and their revenue growth is good. So why not? Marvin did say 6.3x growth year over year. So like, clearly this thing is scaling. 15 million to $100 million. It's pretty good time to raise is when you have performance.

I am curious about if they're going to have their sort of breakthrough moment because even even now with me spending all day in this world and thinking about and using all of these. Like, you see the one that we went to just now to do our consumer reports. It was, I used grok, I used Claude, I used Open AI. Google Gem and I would have been fourth. So perplexity, they've got ground to make up. As good as the product is, people just, it's not top of mind, even for me. And there's a Google Labs. I forgot to put it on the docket, but I was playing with this week. And there's a Google Labs for like a new LLM first chat thing, which we'll talk about on Monday.

I know what you're talking about, yeah. So I think the big question for that company would be is how defensible is it? And I remember they were using other people's LLMs and then, you know, Sam Waltman said they wanted to do a search engine. They had done a search engine at some point. I don't know whatever happened

to the chat GPT search engine. You can still use it. I use it all the time. Oh, okay. Yeah. So I guess there's a search engine from chat GPT. and it's, you know, when you're doing a format, like a design, like Nava's comprehensive search design or the design we did from a hollow, the design can take you only so far, but there are people who are

addicted to perplexity. I do hear some individuals who just love the perplexity response, but they don't have distribution, so they have to fight to build that distribution now. Meta and Grock have this incredible built-in, you know, in the language model, and I don't know why Reddit it doesn't have that yet. The fact that Reddit doesn't have the Grock-like feature where you can press on a thread and have it summarized the thread is like, what are they doing with there? That is a really good thing that they do now on X.

I see people pinging GROC all the time. I wonder what percentage... Oh, all the time. Every thread. It's such a coup. So I wonder what percentage of GROC queries come from people on X asking it, because on one hand, hella distribution, native usage.

Hell yeah. Also, not cheap, probably to run all those queries. Oh, can't be. They have a certain amount of, of infrastructure, so they might as well use them. True, true, true. But even like, I posted the perplexity. It's in twist taping if you want to take a look. Like, even the front page when you first go there, it looks exactly like chat GPT. And chat GPT's already a name brand. If you think about like the kids are like, oh yeah, I'm on chat GPT all day. Like, how do you compete if you're basically

doing a similar thing? And it looks to change consumer behavior. Yeah. I would want to take on chat different. I think they were, you know, using a much more rich result on mobile specifically to do it. But, you know, it's, it's, this happens every time we have a new vertical. There's an Instagram and then there's the 20 other sharing apps that nobody remembers. There's the Pinterest. And then there was this next and 20 other social shopping sites that nobody remember. So it is who can find a unique, sticky way to acquire customers and keep them. So like, those become the two things. How do I acquire customers? And then how do I keep? engaging them.

Saudi Arabia announced Humane, which is owned by the PIF, the, sorry, public investment fund. They're going to, quote, operate and invest across the artificial intelligence value chain as a unified operating company. So what do we actually know about Humane? They're going to offer services, products, and tools powered by AI, including data centers and infrastructure, AI models, including a high-powered Arabic LLM that's in the works. and it's going to bring a lot of government help to make Saudi Arabia a more of a center for AI. Here's the quote, Humane will also streamline various data center initiatives, procure hardware, and accelerate the adoption of AI technologies. All right, Jason, this is just a contra G42 Emirate strategy, right?

What it is is if you believe that controlling the LLM in your native language and in your geographical region, region is important, you would best be served as a nation state to control it and to invest in it. So that's, I think, what we're seeing here is, do you want Sam Altman, Microsoft, Google coming into the region and saying we're putting up data centers, we're going to control the language model, as we just talked about in the previous perplexity segment. okay, people are doing their searches, who controls it? You know? Okay, well, he who controls the result controls society, right? Like, this is, the results could have dramatic impact on the society, and that you probably do not want to leave up to another nation state. If you look at the impact of Google or Facebook globally, Facebook would be the better one, because Facebook, you know, was used in a bunch of

revolutions. It was used politically. It was used subversively. It's used culturally. TikTok would be another example. So if you draw that parallel, yeah, you're going to want to probably not have TikTok controlling what people think about, I don't know, what's the number one political issue they had impact on. Gaza. Probably Gaza, sure. So if you, if you're in the United States, do you really want the Chinese impacting how you're a popular? especially young people feel about geopolitical issues. I'm putting aside how you feel about Gaza or Israel or the whole conflict. Just do you want them doing that?

The answer is no. All right. Google lost a monopoly case last year, about its search market share. There is now the remedies part of the case, Jason, when we figure out what the government's going to tell Google to do to fix this problem. Amicus briefs, friend of the court briefing, essentially you send in a letter expressing your views with a little bit more context.

It's a way to weigh in. The Fycombinator, the famous startup accelerator, weighed in on the Google antitrust case. So what did they say? Well, generally speaking, my favorite quote was, YSC supports plaintiff's proposed remedy package as a whole. Essentially, Reddit, sorry, Y Combinator made my argument, which is that startups should love antitrust because it prevents major companies from crushing huge parts of the market. Then Gary Tan did go on Twitter X later on and did say that they're not directly calling for Google to get broken up,

maybe as a later on penalty, but he's like, look, why see that's companies? These companies are taking up all the market and they're being unfair about it. I thought it was a surprising position for a tech leader to take, given that there's often a anti-antitrust vibe, Jason from folks with love like yourself. And why isn't Gary owning it? I mean, this takes substantial work to create this document and substantial cost. This was done at a cost of millions of dollars, a million dollars. Some legal group was.

engaged by Y Combinator to explicitly say that Google should be broken. And now Gary's back, walking it back. That makes no sense to me. This is a premeditated expense. This took 12 months, six months at a minimum, more likely 12 months to create this in my mind. And I can't see a law firm doing this for less than seven figures. So Y Combinator took their management fees, a million dollars in management fees in six to 12 months of time to create a, how many pages is this report, this brief? It was hundreds of pages, I think. The amicus brief itself is, and I'm scrolling through it now, everyone by everything, only 14 pages. Oh, it was only 14. Okay. So maybe that's, maybe that changes it. Maybe it was a quarter million dollars, 500.

Maybe they did it in three to six months. But this is an explicit act that requires engaging a law firm. And to make a very thoughtful argument, they must have had hundreds of hours of meetings. It's not My point is this isn't a tweet. This is a legal paper. Yes. Yes. I mean, my own,

you know, take on it would be like, my guess would just be that it's political for him and that he doesn't want to be seen as somebody who's publicly attacking Google. He's the CEO. Even if the organization,

I mean, it's a fine line to walk for certain. He made the decision. Right. He's the CEO. So why would you walk it back? There was probably, probably somebody from Google.

like, hey, why did you do this? Right. Yeah, I mean, that is what I'm thinking. I'll say another thing. It's political for him personally to sort of be like, hey, this is what, as a organization, we sort of aligned this way, but it's not me being an enemy of Google. I don't think this is a good position for an incubator to take and just put it out there, and he probably regrets doing it.

You think that's why he's walking it back a little bit? Probably negative reaction. And probably people were like, I'm trying to have a partner. with Google. I'm trying to collaborate with Waymo. We're trying to, you know, get investment from Google Venture. I don't know what, but, you know, it just, it feels like too sharp elbowed. I would say maybe damage control for VC companies that are working on Google deals right now. It could be, yeah. Maybe they're like, now maybe Google's like F by comedy. Right, yeah. And now it's going to have blowback on their portfolio company. That's exactly what I was thinking.

How hard is it to be pro antitrust as a startup investor when you're trying to sell your companies to the big companies you're antitrusting against. Like, that's a really thin. That's not very wide. This maybe feels like, you know, like your go, what this is is the equivalent of like, you go in the prison yard, and there's like, you know, five big guys.

And you're like, I'm going to walk up to one and that, you know, just recently got jump. Google got jumped by the DOJ. And like, the person's on the ground and you're like, yeah, F this guy and you can pick him in the teeth. But like, the person's already on the, ground, they're getting beat up, and you just pile on. This is like a pile on move. Yeah, my commentator wants to join the Latin things. It's literally like,

it's not like you do this. If you did, I'll tell you what I would respect it. If you did it, and there wasn't an antitrustcation, you said, I believe that these are antitrust, these are behaviors, I think, are anti-competitive, which I did. I said I thought it was anti-competitive to put Google local above Yelp. And, you know, I was very clear about that. Like, this is my belief. You don't have to like it. But I don't think Google should be able to put the one box. I complained about the one box as well back in the day. I said, I don't think they should be able to put the one box at the top and take the number one coffee maker off wire cutter and put in the one box. I think they should ask for permission for that, you know, or that's what the

answer for. And I don't know whatever happened to the one box experiment. I think it's gone and now it's the LLM. But the point is, this feels like a pile on. It feels like there's some weird agenda here that maybe wasn't well thought through and just own it or don't. Like maybe withdraw it. So you know what? We put it in. But the whole thing was saying they should be broken up, that they support the breakup. And now we're saying they don't support the breakup. I want to be super clear that they support the overall remedies package as a whole. And they do note later on, page 12, an effective remedy order should, in our view, also include the governments, proposed contingent spinoff requirement for Google's Android platform.

So what they're saying here is, maybe you don't pull that trigger first, but that should be on the list. And then Gary is saying, let's not break up Google. So you could thread the needle and say that- There's a two different statement. There's no threading of the needles. They said they support it. The judgment said to spin out Chrome, and then they're saying spin out the store. That's the breakup. Either you are for the breakup, Gary, or you're not for the breakup. You file an amicus brief. That's a serious thing to do. You ask for a breakup. Now you're saying you don't want the breakup. I'll be honest. Breakup is good for startups. Breakup is good for startups.

Obviously it is. Unless, you know, you spin it out and then that new boss is even more cutthroat. Maybe they'll have sharper elbow. So there is the risk of that, too. Like, if you were to spin out Android, maybe Android would be more cutthroat with startups. If you were to spin out Chrome, or maybe Chrome comes up with a, you know, their own paid ad system and they're going to charge more for it. You know, so everything, you don't be careful what you wish for. You spin out YouTube, maybe YouTube becomes a really powerful presence in the world, or Android becomes a really powerful presence that says, you know what, we're going to just make our own apps.

That's actually the perfect example, Alex. Android spins out. The new CEO of Android, she says, you know what? You see, I put the word she in there to get virtual signaling points along. she says I thought you I thought you said for the YouTube

CEO previously was a woman Yeah very much Aladdin doesn't have to be a new CEO of chat chadip-d

You spin it out and she says You know what All these like apps you have out there Oh there's a fitness app Oh there's this You know what

We're going to build a better version and put it free on your desktop We are going to sweep through We're going to make our own game studio We're going to make When you buy an Android phone

It's going to come With so much free stuff You never have to buy an app again That's our new value prop And yeah, we're going to lower the fees in the app store to 10%. So it would be a better deal for you. But we are going to compete with what's in the app store.

Like, what if that happens? That's a distinct possibility. What if Google made their own maps functionality? Or maybe Google made their own email functionality. That would be tricky. Well, they did it very slowly. And, you know, Apple was very, very clear about this at some point. They said, you know, we have Notepad and we still promote Evernote.

We have them at our keynotes. we very slowly add features to the Notepad app. It's considered like a basic app. If you're a power user, you're not going to use Notepad. And then they're like, but we added, they added, do you notice they added collaborations to Notepad like last year in 2020? Or when did they add collaborations to Notepad? I think it was 23. Like, really?

15 years after like collaborate and Word and Google Docs and Evernote, you know, collaborative document sharing, they added it 10 years. at least 10 years after Google Doc, which was bought, by the way. That was how Google got into the sharing space. Okay. Apple will boil your life slowly. Anyways, I can't find that directly, Jason, but we should wrap anyways. We're back on Wednesday. We're back on Wednesday.

See you next time. Bye, bye-bye. Bye, everybody.