This Week in Startups - Coreweave IPO, AVRide & Digg is Back! | E2093

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

This Week in Startups is brought to you by…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 today!Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twistHoratio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up.Today’s show: Jason and Alex cover CoreWeave’s filing for a $35 billion IPO after explosive revenue growth. But with 77% of its revenue coming from just two customers, is it built to last? Meanwhile, AVRide is bringing autonomous Hyundai robotaxis to Uber in Dallas, pushing the self-driving revolution forward as Waymo scales to 200,000 weekly rides. And finally, Digg is back! Kevin Rose and Alexis Ohanian are reviving the iconic social news platform, using AI-powered moderation to tackle Reddit’s biggest challenge. Tune in as Jason and Alex break it all down!Timestamps:(0:00) Episode teaser(1:34) Jason's South by Southwest appearances & All In fan meetups(4:17) Digg relaunch, history, and Kevin Rose's AI strategy(10:05) 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 today!(11:43) Jason’s involvement with Digg’s revival and lessons learned(15:02) Using Reddit for startup communities(20:00) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(22:07) Kevin Rose's journey and ketamine therapy(24:18) CoreWeave's public filing, clients, and revenue growth(29:52) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up.(34:22) CoreWeave's potential acquisition and investor IRR(40:45) Using LLMs for financial analysis and political funding discussion(46:19) CoreWeave data centers and AV Ride partnership with Uber(50:18) Challenges in electric bikes and healthcare startups(53:10) Novo Nordisk's direct-to-consumer strategy with Wegovy(57:28) Future of healthcare and Brian Johnson's health regimen(1:05:52) Challenges and excitement in the autonomous vehicle industryLinks from episode:Check out digg: https://digg.com/Check out AVRide: https://www.avride.ai/robotCheck out the Mozi app: https://www.mozi.app/Check out Nerd Crawler: https://www.nerdcrawler.com/Check out article about Novo Nordisk and Wegovy: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/05/novo-nordisk-goes-direct-to-consumer-with-wegovy-what-it-means-for-obesity-rival-eli-lilly.htmlSubscribe 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/v19fcpFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:05) 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 today!(20:00) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(29:52) Horatio. Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up.Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank SlootmanCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I want to talk just for a minute about CoreWeave filing to go public. Jason, we've been talking about NeoClouds, these GPU hyperscalers that are buying up, you know, billions of dollars worth of gear. It's a pretty interesting company. You ever open an S1 and not know what you're going to see? Because that's how this one's felt to me. Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. Yeah. Well, let's talk about it.

So this, for those folks who are on the audio version, I'm going to pull up the income statement. Jason, you and I love an income statement. But I just want to say that CoreWeeds revenue grew from a little bit under 16 million in 2022 to nearly 230 million in 2023 to more than, yeah, exactly, yeah, more than 1.9 billion last year. This weekend startups is brought to you by 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. 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. Lemon.io. Get access to LemonHire, a platform with more than 80,000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours. Get $2,000 off your first hire at lemon.io slash hire today. And Horatio. Customer experience can make or break your business. Horatio provides top-tier outsourcing solutions to support and delight your customers

so you can focus on growth. Visit hireherratio.com slash twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's Wednesday. It's March 5th. He's Alex Wilhelm. I'm Jason Callaghanis.

The docket is so full that we should really just get started, but I wanted to let people know that I will be doing a bunch of different things at South by Southwest. I'm going to make a couple of appearances tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. I am going to do a. a Founder X Fireside. And you guys can pull up the pages for this. We'll put all these notes somewhere.

Where do these exist publicly? These are going to be in, we'll tweet them. We'll tweet them. And they're also going to be in the Twist 500 newsletter today in case people will need to see it. Okay. So go to our Twitter handle, or our Xhandle, X.com slash TWI startups. And we'll just post all this information there. But tomorrow, my friend Addaio from the Founders Institute is doing a founder X Firesite, 10 a.m.

And that's at the McComb's School of Business at UT. It's limited. but if you really wanted to go, maybe you email Maddie at launch.com and she'll get you in. Bill Gurley's going to interview me at South by Southwest at 4 p.m. on Friday, you have to have a ticket. And that was a really great thing. Bill called me and he said,

hey, I'm doing a fireside chat on Friday at South by Southwest at 4 p.m. And I was like, oh, do you want me to interview you? I was calling for me to be the interviewer. He said, I want to interview you. So I was like, oh, well, that's a great honor. So I'm going to talk about you. Talk about venture capital, startup trends, moving to Austin, All In, launch, podcasts.

On Saturday night, March 8th, 7 p.m., I will be doing Dignation live, plus the Tim Ferriss show is happening, plus Mixmaster Mike from the Beastie Boys, their DJ. All In is doing an event. It's sold out on March 13th, 2025, but I will tweet one free ticket to my followers. look for that. We'll do it from the This Week in Startups account. So follow the This Week in Startups account. Maddie, give away one free ticket. I'm going to do a Q&A with the All-In fan meetup and the This Week and Startups fan meetup on March 12 at Cosmic Pickle in Austin. You've got to sign up for that. We'll put the RSVP link. It's on River.io. If you go to getriver.io, you'll find it. So this will be a Q&A with me. It'll be on our Twitter account. It's a Cosmic Pickle, which is kind of a fun food truck location,

4 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. on March 12. March 12th is what day of the week? Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday. And that's it. All right. So what do we have on the docket? Let's figure out what we could choose from here. There's always so many great things on the docket. And you can follow along this week in startups.com slash docket to see the docket in real time? Well, the question just Jason is, do you want to start with the main meal or do you want to have some fun and do some more light, fun, like poppy topics? Because we actually have a mix today. of like serious financial news and also dig is back let's start with dig i have inside information

okay uh we have a cut down of the dig video jason announcing the return of the platform and it's two uh people so why don't you play that first and then i'll hand you the baton we can talk over it a little bit sure i watched it this morning it's quite nostalgic it is if you were a web 2.0 baby this means a lot to you there's kevin rose now a gray beard makes sense that you would be relaunching dig.com and they peer behind it and you see Alex from Reddit is now partnering with Kevin on. I disliked you for a long time. And yeah. So Dig's going to be back. For people who don't know what Dig is, it was similar to Reddit. I think one of them watched a couple of months before

the other. I think it might have been Dig then Reddit. And they were social aggregators, who was the category. Social aggregators were, hey, you put it in a link. The community talks about the link. And then people click on it and they voted up, like, i.e. you dig it. Zuckerberg stole the dig concept and then made the like button from it. And then this made everybody put on their websites a little snippet for the like button or the dig button. What that did was it gave Facebook all the data of who was visiting your website.

So it was actually a data play for advertising. but then the idea would be if you liked it on, you know, this TechCrunch article and Gadget article, you could automatically share it to Facebook, et cetera. It created a bit of chaos. Dig went out of business. It got sold in a fire sale. A company called Buy Sell ads bought the remnants of it. Dig.com. They kept it alive for a little bit. Somehow Kevin was able to buy it out. And as many people know, for some reason the owners of Reddit have beef with Alexis and they didn't include him in the S-1. Yes. So Alexis Sahanian, best known Jason Still, I would say, as one of the Reddit boys, since then has done quite a lot of things in the venture community, most recently 776. And it's, to me, this reads as a, I have been removed from the Reddit legacy. I'm now going to go team up with my arch rival and take another shot at this.

but I also feel like it's the right time for something that is a bit more community driven. This is why I love subredits because they're small niche and lovely. But if a dig come back out and do what dig used to do, which was create really like a tech meme for the web with all the top stuff you need to go see,

I think we could use that. It's not based on an algorithm. It's not based on an ever-deen scrolling feed, I don't think. So I'm, I mean, I was stoked. I think is the word here. I was a big dig, guy back in the day.

So I love dig. For people who don't know the history, when I had a gadget, I was, you know, let's just say I was on a heater, had raised the money from Mark Cuban, and I saw this dig thing. Kevin had just used an outside developer spent like $5,000 on it, but I saw it was sending like, I don't know, a thousand people a day to engage it and auto blog and joystick and our other blogs and then it was, you know, 2,000 a day, and 5,000 a day. And so I said, hey, let's get sushi kid. And I took him for sushi in Santa Monica. He was working at Tech TV or G4 TV or whatever. And he's a couple years younger than me. And I said, hey, I'll buy this off you for a million

bucks in cash. And I had talked to Mark Cuban. And I said, Mark, if you give me the million bucks in cash, can we buy this and put it as part of Weblogs Inc? Because it's sending such traffic, it would be like a great, like another blog or part of it. And Jason, let me pause you. A million dollars back then was money. Well, yeah, I was going to give him a million straight up for it for basically a website that he had spent $5,000 building. So he had to think about it. He smartly declined and raised money from a couple of folks.

It was super interesting. And then when buy, sell ads bought it, I talked to the guy over there who was selling some ads for Insights newsletters, back when I had a newsletter business. And he would sell into some of the inventory. And I asked him if he would sell it to me. then I was going to give it back to Kevin. So I was like, going to try to buy it and then try to, and I had pitched Kevin on like, hey, maybe you want to start this up again.

I think there could be something for it. There's another interesting app out. I don't know if it's publicly available. It's called Mozy M-O-Z-I. It's by Evan Williams, a friend of mine. Ah, I saw this. And it's basically a new take on mobile local social. So I have it open here.

And I see everybody in my address book. And I see that my friend Ev Williams, the founder of Twitter and Amanda from the League and other people from my phone book are going to be at South by Southwest next week. And I can also see the other events that Evan Williams has put in. I won't say where he's planning to travel to, but my friend Dave Samuel, a VC, put in his trip. Now, I didn't know he was going to this foreign country, but he's going to be in a similar foreign country to me, so I should trade notes with him on that foreign country. I say this because I think there's an to build smaller social networks now that Twitter, Facebook, meta, threads, blue sky. I mean, the whole thing has been just shaken up and it's basically been ripped apart and balkanized. And I think people are looking for more authenticity, less politics. So it's a sort of interesting moment. All right, founders. Okay, digital nomads and my remote entrepreneurs, I need you to listen to me right now. I know you want to build that next great company. Well, you're going to need two things, right? You're going to need a great idea. And you're going to need to properly set up your

business. And that's where Northwest registered agent comes in. For just $39 plus state fees, here's what you're going to get. Privacy by default. Keep your personal info off public records with a business address, phone number, and mail forwarding. And unlike other guys, they're never going to sell your data. And you're going to need to look super legit. That's important to customers, employees that you might hire, team members you're looking to hire, and of course, investors. So you want to have a professional online presence and you can get your domain, website, and 10 business emails right at the start, so you're building the right way. And if you ever have questions, you won't be stuck talking to some chatbot. Nope. Northwest registered agent has expert corporate guides, not bots, so you're not going

get run around, just real people who know every single state's rules and will walk you through the process. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, boom, your business is live. So join thousands of founders who trust Northwest. For just $39 plus state fees, you can launch your business fast, hassle-free, and with total privacy. So go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist to start your business today. Full disclosure, I am an advice. and shareholder in the new dig. Oh. Just tiny, but I offered it to Kevin and said,

hey, I would love to, you know, help in some way. And he said, oh, would you be an advisor? I said, sure. I don't know exactly what that means I'll do, but I agree to it. Okay. I will be emceeing. I will be emceeing the Dig Nation revival

on Saturday night at Mohawk in Austin. So I will be introducing Kevin and Alex, and then a bunch of our friends who will, from the old Web 2.0. will be coming on stage to say a few words. So he's like, hey, would you come on stage and say a few words? I said, I'll do better. I'll be your hype man.

Would you like me to emce the event? Because, you know, it's always awkward when you introduce yourself, right? But to have somebody else introduce you is cool. And the cool of the person who introduces you, like, the cooler it is. So I told Kevin, like, and, you know, hey, I'd love to introduce you guys. I want to throw in some notes about why now, though, because I think this is the question. You said, you talked to Kevin about this. Why don't me to bring it back in a post?

I think it was on the Times. Kevin said, quote, just recently we've hit an inflection point where AI can become a helpful co-pilot to users and moderators, not replacing human conversation, but rather augmenting it, allowing users to dig deeper while at the same time removing a lot of the repetitive burden for moderators. And what Kevin did was interesting. He took thousands of dollars and ran surveys on Reddit asking subreddit moderators what their pain points were and then tried to build against that. So to me, that is brilliant research. And the time is now because of AI advances. So, I mean, I'm never going to stop being a Reddit user, but I would love to also have another place where I can have fun and honestly, upvode cool stuff. So my little nerd is singing, Jason. Yeah, it's super cool. Congratulations to the team for Alexis. Little revenge startup never hurts. For Kay Row, like, fantastic to be back in the game with a brand that meant a lot to people.

I think he's got unfinished business there because people don't remember. Dig 4, version 4. Kevin was under a lot of pressure from venture capitalists, and this is where the founder lesson comes in. The VC community was like, you have to compete with Facebook. So they redid dig, and it was going to use machine learning

and make everybody's homepage unique, which is an interesting idea. So they were trying to copy like that feed as opposed to having one canonical feed, and they spent months and months and years doing it millions of dollars. And you know what? Reddit never changed its design.

You go to Reddit today. I think they've had one design refresh in almost whatever it is, 15, 20 years. That was just very modest, like just a little bit of polish. It feels kind of the same in UX, you know, left-hand column, right-hand column, main column.

And, you know, they didn't even have an app for many years. There was like some many third-party apps that would, you know, do Reddit. And now they've done one. But what Reddit did focus on was the quality of conversations, getting revenue figured out,

figuring out mod tools. So of course there's work to be done on the mod tools. There always is, but they really did a great job of not getting off track and knowing what they were. Sometimes the best thing to do

in a startup is knowing you have product market fit and make the main feature, make the main feature two or three percent better every month. And then, if you make a 3% better every month,

every three years, it'll be twice as good. What was the main feature of dig? high-quality conversations and surfacing the best conversations and making the largest footprint of subreddits. In other words, topics. And so I recently fired up the all-in official subreddit. You can show it. It's chaotic, but it's better than like some of the rogue ones where they just like are podcast haters. So that's kind of a genre, is hating, hate listening to podcasts and trashing them. So we created an official one. It's a little bit messy, but it's in the top 10%. We have it this

week in Startups one, TWA startups. And the TWA startups one is the one you should show. I think it's now in the top 50%. So go ahead and search for this week and startups with TWA startups and join our subreddit. We're starting to post there and have conversations with the fans. I also started a J-trading one, et cetera. Which one are you showing? This is the this weekend startups Reddit. Perfect. So we're in the top 48%. We were top 52% last week. So it's growing. I'd like to get it into the top 10%, and then you can follow me. I think I'm Jason Calacanis or maybe Jason M. Calacanis. I think Reddit's a great place for startups to hang out. And so there's the entrepreneur community, which I'll go into sometimes and answer questions. People don't believe

it's me. And there's the startups community. So those three, I think four are worth checking out. The two podcasts, all in official, this week in startups, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and startups. And the actual, there's an there's another. one like Wallin Podcasts or some weird one that they blocked me from because I would write comments and correct the hate sometimes when I, because you know, I subscribe to it. So it comes up on my feet and they would say like, Jake Al owns Salana. But I actually don't own salana. I said it on the pot. You know, just like little cleanups here and there of things that were factually incorrect, but they blocked me. I think, so I was shown the unofficial all-in subreddit via the Reddit algorithm

I like technology and podcasts and such. And I was like, this is... It's dark. This is a, this is, but it's not, it's not always Jason dark. It's actually, I mean, I think Chamoth gets most of the stick. Well, whenever you get like micro famous, which is like what I call my level of fame, it's like micro fame. I think podcast fame comes after like reality TV on the Bravo network fame.

So like, we're like just under real housewives of, I don't know pick well that shows coming to Rhode Island so watch out world real house rise

of Rhode Island then podcasters but yeah it's a little more informative it's a little it's a little more clever

horribly podcast but yes they they pick something to go after you for so for Chumath it's always SPACs for SACs it's always Ukraine

for me it's having TDS Trump derangement syndrome which is like I mean if you call balls and strikes, they'll say you have TDS, but putting it all aside, Reddit is a great place for founders to hang out. Why? I think you can build a great community over there. So I am

working with the startups in our accelerator, and I'm doing it personally, and we have a Slack channel. So I created for my founders a Reddit channel in our Slack, and I said, hey, why don't we all just talk about Reddit here and best practices? I wonder if every startup should start their own Reddit about either the topic they're in, like if you're, we have a really cool comic book company that takes that prints

from comic books, artists, and it turns out, yeah, nerdcrawler. Yeah, you can pull it up. This is the coolest startup. I'm so excited to be an investor in it. So nerdcrawler, and let's have them on the pod,

really cool guy. It turns out, you know, if you draw a Wolverine for a Marvel comic, you get to keep the original artwork because they pay you so little. You get that original piece of artwork you print it. And you can do whatever you want with it. You can gift it to somebody you could sell it.

Now you can't like make your own Wolverine comic, obviously. That's their IP. But you can go there and bid on like the original sketches. And so, and you can even commission ones. It's a really cool website. And so imagine Nerdcrawler created a Reddit called Nerdcrawler or they did one just based on comic book art, right? So I think you can do both. So we have this week. in startups, but there's also startups and entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship or entrepreneurs. And I participate in those, but we didn't start them. But if those weren't created, I would have created startups, right?

Yeah. I think having your own subreddit makes a lot of sense. I think every brand needs to have its own pizzazz and its own fan base that goes out and kind of fights for it. I think that's the arrow of capitalism we're in. So if you don't own your subreddit, as the all in pod learned accidentally, other people will make it for you and then you'll have no control. and then it can become a cesspit.

Founders, let's be real. Let's keep it a buck. Finding great developers is hard. It's like one of the hardest things you have to do in our industry, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup. But here's the good news. I got a tip that's going to save you time, money, and a ton of headaches. You need to check out lemon.io.

Lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers who can help you. They have done all the work to find and vet great developers who are experience, who are results-oriented, and who charge competitive rate. Great developers, we know, are hard to find and integrate in your team, so lemon.io will handle all of that for you. They're only going to offer you handpicked developers with at least three years of experience. And if something goes wrong, lemon.io will find you a replacement developer, ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io, and they have told me they've had a great experience.

So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.com. and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. So stop burning money, hire developer smarter. Visit lemon.com slash twist. And then they'll even ban you. So they're slandering and banning you. So you can't even reply.

Blandering. Yes, that's lovely. So it's all good. I mean, it's part of being micro-famous. I'm just jealous. You're going to go and do Dignation because, and this is a slight confession, but I was like a Dignation super fan back in the day. Well, you like to have a beverage back in the day?

Yes, I did. It was a beverage-based thing, and it was so funny. I remember they had the last episode and actually, Lon Harris was there. I was there. It was in Los Angeles. They had this final episode, and I remember Kevin Pollock went Lawn went, I was there, a bunch of our friends from L.A. I remember talking to Kevin about it and he's

like, yeah, I just don't know if I want to be 40 or 50 years old drinking beer, you know, and doing this, like, it was kind of like a brotastic pod with Alex. Um, Albrecht, who was a really cool actor from L.A. And, um, yeah, anyway, long story short, he was kind of limiting that. Then they started Dignation up again. They've done like maybe five or 10 episodes. And, uh, I just had this funny moment. they're not drinking beer. They're drinking really expensive wine because they've both done so well for themselves. Oh, that's really funny actually. It's kind of funny. Yeah. But Kevin is a really, you know, he's watching having grown up with Kevin, I might be a couple years older than him. Yeah. But watching, you know, his journey as an entrepreneur investor,

he's done a lot of really, I think, important work in the world. He did an interesting thing on his Kevin Rose podcast where he's been dealing with anxiety. He's been public about it. So that's where I'm talking about it. And I think he had been dealing with some anxiety. or something, and he did ketamine therapy, like, you know, recreational, you know, out of club, you know, in London in the 90s, ketamine. That's a very specific reference.

Just like, you know, I remember when I was a kid, they would talk about, you know, in New York, they would talk about people going into K-holes and not my bag, but London. And I was like, that sounds like a really scary thing to do. It's a horse triangleizer.

Anyway, he did a ketamine injection. and went, you know, this is in like clinic, had to deal with the anxiety had. And he said he had a profound impact. So he literally recorded himself going under. He didn't record the whole trip, the journey, I think was what they would call it. And then he came out of it and he talked about

and he edited it down a little bit and just talked about how it had an impact from, which I thought was very brave. And so I just want to give him a shout out for that as well. Also, he was at GV for a while and now he's at True Ventures. Is that right? Yeah. I think that was the journey.

I don't know if he's like a full-time partner at True or like what you would call a venture partner. Yes. So a venture partner like might do a deal a year or maybe every two or three years. So you're kind of affiliated. You might get a small salary, token salary or no salary, but then you would get carry on your specific deals or maybe a little bit of the overall calorie. It's a way to have people who are like Kevin, you know, busy, but they still want to, you

know, dip a toe and they might have a great network. So congratulations to those guys. What else is in the news? I want to talk just for a minute about course. Weave filing to go public. Jason, we've been talking about neoclouds, these GPU hyperscalers that are buying up, you know, billions of dollars worth of gear. And Corweave reporting kind of came out over the weekend that the listing was coming. I think Bloomberg reported they're looking at like a 35 possible billion dollar valuation might raise for Billy.

And it's a pretty interesting company. You ever open an S1 and not know what you're going to see? Because that's how this one's thought to me. A box of chocolates, so you never know what you're going to get. Yeah. Well, let's talk about it. So this, for those folks who are on the audio version, I'm going to pull up the income statement.

Jason, you and I love an income statement. But I just want to say that CoreWeeds revenue grew from a little bit under $16 million in 2022 to nearly $230 million in 2023. Oh, my God. More than, yeah, exactly. Yeah, more than $1.9 billion last year. Okay, we got to pause for here. This is like 15x year over year and then almost whatever, 8x. And, you know, these are big, these are big consequential numbers. Yes. And they,

they lost almost a billion dollars in 2024 making that two billion, right? If I'm reading that net loss from continuing operations. So I'm sure that includes the depreciation of these giant, you know, investments. But what you're seeing here is my understanding. understanding is they got in early. You can correct me if I'm wrong. Sure. Into the Neo cloud space. Neo cloud, new cloud, Neo being new, is just a fancy way of saying a GPU cloud. So let's just call it what it is. It's a GPU cloud. We won't use the fancy name. So they, I think they ordered a lot of GPUs early. Then think about the timing. Chat GPT 3.5 comes out what date? And that's kind of like the Starters pistol for,

we all got to get as many GPUs going. I think that was probably in 2020, was it the September of 2022 that it came out? And we're now. And they're around there, yeah. Yeah. Look at it up so we can put a pin in it. Because I consider like a lot of the modern day LLM craze.

It comes not from the two, 2.5. It was really, I think, the 3.5 that people were like, wait a second, this thing's pretty darn tooting good. So chatGBT.com came out in November of 22, and ChadGPT 3.5 came out also, yeah, so that was November of 22. So I think that's when they put it on the web, right, and let the public use it because it wasn't super embarrassing. You know, it still was embarrassing, and people would screenshot it making mistakes, everything, and you can still do that to this day. I saw somebody tweeted that Grok thinks that it's an 85% chance that Trump is a Russian agent, which,

You know, just so you know how these things work, they pull in a bunch of data. Yes. And then they spit it back out. It's not actual intelligence. It is like moments of thoughtfulness or moments of impressiveness, but it is not fact-checked or factually correct all the time. And if there's something disputed or unknown, you know, something like GROC or ChatGAPT could pick up, you know, a blog post about allegations. and then spit that back out to you as an allegation or somebody notable might have said,

I think it's an 85% chance on like a CNN transcript somewhere that got ingested. And maybe that's the only date it's got so it spits it back out. Okay, but isn't, is Polly Market really any different than that just done with humans instead of an LLM? Well, yes.

Okay. It's interesting you say that, because they are both making claims or trying to predict things. Sure. They're both capable of predicaments, but in one case people have skin in the game. In one case, they just have GPUs in the game.

The point being, Corrieve had a bunch of GPUs when everybody needed to catch up. They had pre-ordered them. And I think then it would be like having an ice cream stand, you know, in Dubai, in a prime location. And you got this great, amazing ice cream stand. And then Dubai is built around you and you own a water park with an incredible ice cream stand.

It's like, yeah, We're very popular now. And it's like, yeah, you used to be 10 people a day and now it's 10,000. Well, timing can be, timing, you know, is everything, as they say in life. And I think CoreWeaf's timing's great. They had to get out, though, right? Because they had so many loans. Weren't they the ones doing these crazy loans against the GPUs?

Yes. So that's. I have a chart here of their indebtedness, which I'll pull up. And then I'm going to tell you why they're going public now. So this is just the balance sheet showing their cash. And then there are various types of debt. They have two delayed draw term loan facilities, Jason, a term loan facility. And then they have some OEM deals and a revolver that's currently not being used.

What matters here is that this term loan facility, which is about a billion dollars worth of debt, matures at the end of this year calendar. So the company was looking at essentially a billion dollar outflow of cash. And they don't want to raise more debt. So what do you do? Well, you fund raise. And an IPO is a fundraising mechanism. And they say specifically in their S-1 that apart from, you know, general corporate uses and so forth,

they're paying that loan off entirely. So that's going to take care of that and reduce their leverage a little bit. In today's market, your business is judged by its customer service, right? We all know that. One bad experience, that's it. Caput. Customers gone for life. And you know what?

They may start saying negative things about you online and they have the power to do that. So stop thinking about customer experience as just a. department. It's actually your entire business, right? That makes sense. And Horatio is the trusted outsourcing partner for hundreds of startups and fast-growing companies looking to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Horatio provides dedicated teams who act as an extension of your brand, delivering world-class support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Whether it's chat, whether it's email, or even on the phone, Horatio will make sure your customers are happy, loyal, and coming back for more, right? You want those customers you've already got. Those are the best.

ones to continue to buy your product or service. And when you have Horatio on your team, that's going to give you the ability to focus on running your business and scaling it. See why fast-growing brands like Built Rewards, Bark, and Dr. Squatch rely on Horatio to provide exceptional customer service. So here's your call to action. Her ratio isn't just outsourcing. It's seamless integration with your team. And the best part, their solutions are cost-effective and completely tailored to your business needs, visit higher horatio.com slash twist to learn more and get $2,000 off your initial setup.

That's higherhoratio.com slash twist. I think a lot of what we're probably seeing here is there, when you see that kind of revenue growth, it's probably not, you know, a large number of clients. It's probably a large client or two. So my guess is there's a well or two in that revenue jump or maybe three. Yes, dead on. Oh, really?

Yeah. So I thought you were team me up just to read off my notes. No, no, I'm not team up. I didn't read all the notes today. I'll be totally honest. Oh, no. Well, you know what that means detention? No, I'm kidding.

You're dead on, Jason. So in 2022, the company's top three customers were 41% of revenue. In 2023, that scaled to 73%. In 2024, two customers were 77% of the company's business, of which Microsoft was 62% last year alone. Oh, so that's actually probably something they would put in risks. That's a major client dependency. And you know your friends over at the BG2 pod?

Yes. Brad Gersner and Bill Gurley Bill Gurley, thank you was interviewing me Friday at 4 p.m. at South by Southwest on March 7th in two days, 48 hours from now.

Teamwork. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, went on that podcast and talked about things, and he said that the core weave deal was a one-time thing. So, right. So you begin to,

on one hand, the company's gross margins have improved to the mid-70s. Fantastic. It's adjusted to operating income, pretty solid. It's adjusted EBITDA, pretty solid. The company puts all of its depreciation costs in its technology and an infarline item very clearly so you can know exactly where all the costs are going. The growth out of this world, but it's spent like $7 to $8 billion last year

on gear and its chief customer wants to leave. And so on one hand, Jason, I'm so impressed at this company. And on the other hand, I'm kind of thinking, is this just a temporary blip based on Microsoft not having enough GPUs at the moment you mentioned, which was chat GPD. I don't know. Wow. So fascinating, I would say. I'm guessing the issue is that they needed more capacity because of the chat GPT deal. Yes. And Azure. I wonder if those GPUs are part of the Azure cloud, you know, and they're just abstracting them. So when you buy from Azure, it's using the CoreWeave Cloud? Do you think that's what's happening? That's my guess. Or they're offloading some of Open AIs, compute that committed to Open AI off under CoreWee would be another

guess of mine. Sure. Fantastic. I think this company will get bought. I'll be totally honest. You have AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle in a race. I don't know if those companies are investors, but sometimes you will see strategics come in.

So I don't know if any of them had the presence of mine or the CEO of Core. we've had the presence of mind to pitch them on investment. But, you know, that would be a very smart acquisition to take this customer base off there. And here we have Cori Weaves, Class A shares, Nvidia owns 6%. That's around tripping type craziness, right? Fidelity, which does private markets and publics. And by the way, they just came out with a cap table competitor. That's quite good.

and yeah, I know this because they're going to be doing a little advertising on this podcast as cap table software companies sometimes do. But they're kind of undercutting the market and you're like, why is Fidelity dipping down into cap tables of year one startups? And it's like, oh, those startups grow up. And then Fidelity has active investor bases like family offices and high net worth individuals like myself. and sometimes they will offer someone like myself or a family office, you know, shares in something like Corweave, right? You know, three years ago, two years ago. So there's this whole thing that's happening with the stay private longer movement we talked

about over and over again where they will, this new group of individuals wants access to privates, high networks, family offices, not just other folks. And then you have here Magnetar Financial. Is that a hedge fund based out of Illinois? Well, that's crazy. So, you know, sometimes a unknown or a little known firm will make early stage investments. Know they have a winner and keep investing. My guess is Magnitar Financial, which I've never heard of.

Doesn't mean it's not like a well-known firm, but I'm not in the private equity world. I bet you they were early investors and often investors. So one of the strategies is correct both ways, yes. It is? Yep. Okay. So after 2000. I kind of can, I know what I'm talking about.

So what happens in these situations is you invest in something. Like, I didn't do this with Uber or Robin Hood because they didn't have a chip stack back then. I was a one and done investor. But I watched Bill Gurley do the Series A, Mayfield, Shervin do the Series B, etc. Any of those other investments would have been fantastic investments. Then they would have been 5 or 6,000 X. They would have been 500X or 200X, which, by the way, most venture capital is,

the best investment they ever make in their career is 100 or 200 X. A 200 bagger is one for the personal achievement board, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that would be. And for me, I have those like 500X, 200X and things like a Robin Hood or a Com, etc. But what you want to be able to do is place that second and third bet. And so we corrected that. With Calm, I only did one bet as well, but we owned five and a half percent of the company. But then with a company like Grin, a company that went through our accelerator, I think we made five

bets over time. Company became worth a billion. We were actually able to sell, I think, $18 million in secondary when it hit a billion. And, you know, that was peak Zerp. We timed it perfectly. But we made multiple bets because we just saw the revenue tripling or doubling every year. When you see revenue doubling or tripling every year, probably not happening by accident. And so that's when you would place a second or third bet. This becomes a challenge for me when you have a portfolio of 400 companies, everybody thinks that we should follow on with every investment. And we tell them, well, we only have like five, one in 20 companies gets a follow on investment.

It's a bit of a competition for that very scarce resource and a small seed fund for the reserve dollars. And, you know, right now, unless you have two and a half, three, four times year over year revenue, you probably wouldn't hit that benchmark that we've explained to our LPs is why we would do that. The most famous version of this was WhatsApp and Sequoia. Oh, yes. Sequoia offered WhatsApp preemptive funding, I think three or four times. And I think that fund that Sequoia did might be a 30, 20 or 30 X fund.

I know this because I'm in it. I happen to be an LP in that fund. And so this is one of the great things that can happen in a venture fund. If you know you have a winner, keep betting on the win. because they're so rare. And so there's just a little behind the scenes of what you can interpret when somebody owns 30%. And you don't see other investors now. That was the other notable thing.

Where are the other investors? So that's an interesting question, Jason. And I was trying to chase that down. But there's been so many secondary transactions, debt rounds, and so forth. It seems that everyone else kind of got diluted quite a lot that it came on later. It did have some money from Goldman and such people that are kind of like IPO hunting. But just for everyone knows, Corweave is. again,

tipped for a $35 billion evaluation and a $4 billion raise. That's their goal. We'll see what they get to. I'm watching this like a hawk because I'm so excited by it. What was the last round of funding? If it's going to be a $35 billion IPO, you said?

Yeah. Let me just pull that up to be so I don't talk out of turn here. I'm curious what the last round was. So just so people understand, these late stage investors, they might invest at $20 billion, $25, $30 billion, even $32 billion. You're like, well, why are they, or even $35?

So why are they, investing at, you know, just below the IPO amount. Well, they might be long-term betters and they're just securing their position for the next five years. Or they might be, in fact, doing something interesting, which is they just see this as a one or two-year investment. So if they got it at 25 or 15, 20, 20, 25 in the last couple of years, they're only planning on holding it for one to three years, as opposed to a venture capitalist with our winners now. You tend to hold your winners 10 to 15 years before they had you. So, to answer your question, the final data point in the crunch base database of a

material round into the company was actually a secondary transaction. It was in November of $2024, $650 million at a $23 billion post. So I nailed it. So that was 2023, right? 23 billion? No, 24. So that was last November. Oh, okay. So here's a thing I want you to do. Just for fun, pull up your favorite LLM, doesn't matter which one it is, and just type, what's the IR on investing 650 million at a $23 billion

evaluation and exiting two years later at $35 billion? And we will get a very interesting explanation of that. Just to be sure, what is the IRS of investing at a $23 billion

evaluation and exiting at 35 billion two years later. And you just have to put the amount that you invested. Okay, I'm investing. I'm going to say 100 million. Sure. And I'm using GPT 4.5 for this against anyone's curious. And what it will do is it should explain to you the formula.

There's like a really crazy formula. Most people, IR, it's actually a formula in most modern spreadsheet. So you don't actually have to do this crazy, extensive formula. But it will give you the percentage you made each year. So in this case, going from 23 to 35 is obviously a $10, $12 billion increase, which is a 50% increase from when you invested. So that's not 25% each year because that would be more. It's 23.4%. Got it.

So there you go. And actually, this is totally off topic. But I didn't get the big breakdown out of a formula. Maybe I should have used 01, 03, or one. You can say show your work and explain to me how you calculated it, and it will show it to you. So if you wanted to be a venture capitalist, these were very hard things to do, is understand how all this works.

Now I'm training new people. I'm like, what's the IR? And they're like, I don't know how to do that. I'm like, chat chippy tit. Use any, use Gemini, whatever you prefer, GROC. But this is what it did instead. And I think this is very interesting. So I'm going to pull this up.

I just pull the screenshot into Chrome here. But if you click on this little blue button, it brings up an analysis window, which is entirely distinct. And then it just kind of broke down the math that it did. And it wrote out the formulas. how you would do it if you're writing code versus doing math on a chalkboard.

Amazing. But that's very cool. I hadn't seen that before. Welcome to Twist, where we do it live. We'll do it live. The reason I'm doing this with you is because you can do some of this sort of higher-end analysis. And I was doing it the other day on an investment that's going to pay 42% IRR each year of three years. So it was basically like, hey, it's clear Americans don't have the desire to fund a war in Europe,

even as economically checked notes, very profitable. And then I put there, like, we spent, or we leased loaned. I don't know if people remember these arguments I had with Sacks, you know, over, hey, we lease loan these weapons. We're going to get the money back. Like, that's the intent. If it was just a gift, we wouldn't have gone through the paperwork of a lease loan. And Biden said that over and over, but you know how politics are and political people. I'm an independent. I'm not on either side. I call Boston strikes, just a friendly reminder. Sachs obviously is a diehard Republican. He's the definition of partisan because he's actually in the party and he's in the administration. So he used to tell me, oh, we're never going to get that

money back. Well, here we are. Trump is demanding not the $175 billion back. He says he wants $500 billion back. So it turns out Trump is the best investor. He beat Nancy Pelosi and myself over the last couple of years in terms of IRA. Well, Jason, not to get political because I know we're trying to keep the show focused on startups. But this mineral deal has not been a fully signed yet. So we're going to have to wait and see what it. I'm obviously making the joke that he's going to get it done. Yeah. You know, even if he gets it done at half the amount, the IRR drops down to 20%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The U.S. is, you know, what's the interest rate right now on treasuries that we would have gotten on the money? Four? It turns out,

weapons, selling weapons on loans and leases, you might be able to make a pretty penny. You might be able to make a pretty penny. And then somebody DM to me, and they're like, How dare you, whatever? And I'm like, do you not understand the concept of like satire or, you know, any of this? Like, obviously, I'm not making an equivalency that we try to make 42% and start wars based on it. I'm just talking about the cynical nature of folks being like, oh, we gave somebody a loan and a lease on weapons. We're never going to get it back. And then the very next president who they are supporting is insisting, not that.

only do we get it back, but we get it back not with interest, but with interest that would make a mobster blush and say, pump the brakes. Like, that's, that's too much. You don't want to, you don't want to, you know, slowly bleed them out. You don't want to kill them. Like, 42% interest is nuts. We got to work on your, uh, your bloodletting analogies when it comes to nations under attack. But, okay, sure. I hear you. And I do think that absolutely what we need is a sarcasm font for the internet. That would solve all these problems. And I'm being sarcastic when I say that, but at TechRunch, we had a piece of software we

used called Convo, Jason. It was kind of like yammer internally. And we had a rule, which was no jokes on Convo because consistently people would make a joke and everyone would get it wrong or miss it. And so we just had to. Sometimes just, it's tough. I did not read those tweets as I read them as tongue and cheat versus a satirical for what it's worth.

But here we are. Here we are. Last thing on Cori, we've, we're moving on. But this is a chart, Jason, a map, sorry, of where their data centers are, Europe, North America. I think that Oracle is the buyer here of the, the clouds you mentioned. That's my guess. If they don't go public at their valuation they want, I think it's Oracle because I think they're hungry for a place at the table and they're tired of being the database company

with more lawyers than customers. They are very big. on cloud computing right now, and they are being very aggressive in their approach. So if you are looking to move clouds, I can tell you they are, like, looking to beat everybody in terms of how much they're willing to spend to get you as a customer and discounts.

Actually, I wrote some of our ads back in the day for Oracle, and now I'm remembering all their little sales points. Anyways, this is a tweet from someone that I know rather well. his name's Jason, and he's talking to someone from a company called AV Ride about their upcoming partnership with Uber, and I think this is a pretty big news story. For folks who don't know, AV Ride is the spin-out Jason of Yandex, which had to deal with Uber back in the day, and then they got sanctioned, and then da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Anyways, AV-Rides doing autonomous vehicles and sidewalk robots, and they announced a deal with Hyundai that's going to bring them into

the Uber app in Dallas, I believe, and I think this is fantastic. Wow. Yeah. It's, I don't remember AV Ride. There are so many AV players doing this, but there it is, AV Ride. You can pull up their website, beautiful looking cars. And that's a Honda, yeah. So is AV Ride a Hyundai company or owned by Hyundai or partially owned or they're just using Hondays as their base vehicle? I think there's an Hyundai as their base vehicle.

And I'm pretty sure Hyundai wants a play here to avoid being relegated to the Dusty of history. I don't know if they are a direct investor. Would not shock me if they were. But they're going to be working with the Ionic 5, which is their, it's an electronic mini SUV, I want to say. And I've seen a bunch of these around Providence. They're popular amongst the yuppies.

And they also have the robot delivery service that goes on the sidewalk I see on their website. I don't know if you're pulling up the website. Oh, I pulled it up and took it down, but I'll put it back up again. Yeah, no problem. So here is the cute little robot that they They have partnerships. If you click on that robot page, it's kind of cool if you scroll down.

If you click from the navigation on the robot page, you know, it looks like a little mini R2D2, four wheels. You put a package in it. It's really lighter on the top. But they have this like really interesting thing where it's showing you what it sees.

Ah. And I think these things, I'm trying to think at what speed, if you got hit by one of these things, you would, you know, obviously at 30 miles an hour, that's no Bueno. I wonder what the speed,

these max speed of something on the sidewalk. So if somebody was running at top speed, that would be a five-minute mile. They'd be going 12 miles per hour. So 12 miles per hour, if somebody ran into you at that speed,

that would not be pleasant. So it's probably these things that can only go up to five miles an hour. They need to have some cushions on them or an airbag, I guess, if they went faster. So they're not going to do that. Five miles an hour means

it probably can go 10 blocks, which is half a mile. you know, in 10 minutes or something. So that's kind of a, or five or 10 minutes. They're probably good for five or 10 minutes, you know, deliveries, which is probably a 10, if you do a block a minute, three miles an hour, yeah, sure. I don't know the AV ride top speed,

but I just found some information reporting about robots from serve, a company we've talked to here on the show. And a new drivetrain allowed them to up their speed from 7 miles per hour to 11, which is quite a lot of 60% gain. I don't know if I'm in favor of 11 miles per hour on the sidewalks, but that gives another data point to your thought experiment. It will depend on how often they crash into people.

And you know what? If you're in New York, if you haven't experienced the electric bikes in New York, people don't know this, but a lot of the bike rides are done with electric bikes. I have these electric bikes. If you type in any of the electric bikes, like if you type in rad power bike, which I have one of, really cool bike, and you say unlock speed, you can unlock the speed. I think it's typically fixed

at 20 miles an hour. You could unlock it to go to about 30. There are other kits. You know, listen, you can go 30, you can go 50 miles an hour on a bike.

I love the rad power bikes, but not an advertiser. I didn't get a free bike. I paid for them, but they're very cool, especially like off terrain. You see those thick, chunky tires.

Oh, yeah. But they're a pretty penny. I had the one that let me take my daughters on it and they loved it. Oh. Pull up the version for the family wagon.

You would like this. It's got like a little cage you can put it on the back and your kids can sit in the cage. My daughter's went crazy for this when they were younger and I would drive it around. I would drive it from Hillsborough down to San Mateo. It's got this like little box in the back. Oh, I found it.

Okay, I was looking for something different. So you're talking about the rad wagon, which I believe. I had the rad wagon in addition to a rad power bag. I had two of them. I liked them so much. But I bought these. So you see that one's got the little seat in the back. You can sit there and then they have a cage option

and the accessories. You can put a cage on it. and they can kind of sit in a little cage where they can hold on to bars and it kind of protects them a little bit. You know, it's super nice. And a very cool product. I highly recommend it.

But there are other ones you can buy that can go 40, 50 miles an hour. And in New York, there are people definitely doing this. And then they pop onto the street. It's completely unregulated. It's chaos. It is what it is.

But I do think they'll compare the number of times those things crash into people and knock them out and you can get seriously hurt. Like getting hit by a bike at speed is, that's dangerous. That's really dangerous. But higher center of gravity. So my hope is that these things end up just barking your shins.

Yeah, they just tear your ACL up and they just rip out your meniscus. You get hit from the side and the knees. I hope that doesn't happen. I mean, here's my... What are the chances of these things hitting you? they must have a collision alert. Yeah.

They must know. So it would have to be like somebody jumps out into the middle of the sidewalk, you know, from between two cars or something. But I think it would see it before you. Anyway, I think these robots are going to be a big win. I don't know why these haven't taken over a city yet. But man, how crazy would this be if it was only a dollar to deliver your food as opposed to 10?

Big game changer, I think. I'd weigh 30 pounds more. And I would be two-thirds. burrito. I mean, just send you some Monjarno. You know what I saw in related

startup news? Yeah, breaking story. I heard it on CNBC when I was getting out of the shower. You can look it up. Over Nordis

is going to do direct-to-consumer D2C Ozempic Monjorno, Wagovi, whatever, at half the price. This is nuts.

So I think there's a lot of websites. I just joined one, which does your blood work and puts it into a, I just joined this service. I wouldn't say which one it is, because there's two founders of these two competing services, and they both offered me free products. And I was just, it was like one of these situations where I asked on Twitter, like, which is better, this or this? And I just signed up for whichever, I just signed up

for one that my friend had told me about the other one was like, oh my God, we want you to use ours. Anyway, what it does is these, there are these new services where you do your own directed health care. I did a blood draw last week. They put my data online. I have a concierge. And this is like better service than I was getting from a concierge doctor in San Francisco. I was paying for my entire family, I think, $30,000 a year. It seems like a big number.

But again, imagine you're rich. It's not a big number to be able to have a doctor visit your house when your kids are sick. So that's what you get a concierge doctor. The dentist between my family and your family, apart from him. one or two zeros is that my spouse is a doctor and a pediatrician. So like, got one at home, for free. What you're, and your spouse, I'm assuming, I never asked you this if you're comfortable, they work at a hospital or at a clinic or?

They work at a clinic that's part of a hospital. Yeah. Got it. Now, imagine, you know, she gets 10 years under her belt and there's 10 families who would give her $30,000 a year. That's $300,000 out of the gate to come to their house, you know, to give them, personalized medicine, you can actually probably do 200 as one practitioner. Because if 10 families call you a week, that's 20 a week. That means you're doing four calls a day, basically, five days a week.

So that's how these things wind up immersing themselves. Long story short, they had in their, they have an RX section where you can get, you know, the compounding pharmacy version of Wagovis, you know, all that stuff, plus peptides, plus, plus, plus. So what you're going to start to see is they're going to take that concierge doctor. And by the way, if you use somebody like Peter Atia or those really high-end people, I think that's like well into the six figures is what I was told. I don't know if it's true or not. I'm not speaking specifically about Peter Atia, but other ones, you know, there are billionaires or sent to millionaires who, you know, spent a quarter million a year, $100,000 a year on these kind of services, those are being abstracted down

into, I think, maybe $3,000 per family, so 90% less than I was paying. If I put five people on it for $700, five people for $1,000 each, you know, with all the tests that you can do, boom. And then they track all your data in a beautiful interface over time. This is where health care is going to move. if you're spending 1020K on these kind of services, what we saw in the pandemic where people could do therapy, other things through remote telemedicine or get, you know, a ZPAC,

that's going to be productized. And it is being productized right now. And I think it's going to change the world. Because what it will do is high-end people will just say, you know what, I'll just pay cash. I'll just pay cash. It's easier. Give me the, and I think I might have this myself,

personally, my partner takes care of most of it, but I think I took the highest deductible, maybe $5,000 a year or $10,000 a year. So we basically have, I guess, catastrophic. Yeah, which is what you want. Which is fine with me, because I think I'd rather direct it myself and whatever. So Novernardis, maybe you could just read a little bit, the opening graph or two of what this means. Because a lot of startups, right, Hymns, Roman are doing the, and the direct to consumer. Yeah. And I even have a friend who uses a confounding pharmacy, or at least dead before.

But here's from CNBC. Novo Nordisco on Wednesday said it will offer its weight loss drug Wegovi for less than half of its usual price per month through a new DTC option. The cash pay offering is available to millions of patients without insurance coverage for the blockbuster injection. So a couple of things. One, it's 500 bucks a month, which is apparently less than half of what it currently costs. So savings is good.

still not cheap enough for the average middle class family, I'd say. But if you're one step above that, this is now in your in your remit. And also insurance coverage of GLP1s is straining budgets for like Medicaid and such. My father-in-law does Medicaid policy, so I hear drips and drabs. But lower cost offering direct to consumer, you get around the insurance companies. This makes great sense to me. And here's the funny thing, Jason, don't people stay on GLP ones? So is Novo Nordisk about to have a $600, $500 a month set of consumers in the U.S.

just shipping them money? I think this, you know, if you were to compare it to struggling with obesity, which I did for, you know, 15 years. Yeah. And shout out to Kevin Rose. I found out about OZMPIC because Kevin Rose was experimenting with it four years ago, like during the pandemic, and I wouldn't have lost the weight if I hadn't heard him talk about. He didn't exactly endorse it, but he just talked about his experience with it.

think these things are going to change the world. Talk to your doctor. Don't take medical advice from a podcaster slash venture capitalist slash blogger from Brooklyn. But I do think they will get down to 100 bucks a month and there'll be a 90% margin for them. And I do think a lot of people will be on them for life or a low dose of them. I just saw Brian Johnson started, who was on the program when he had his finance company back in the day. You can pull up what episode that was. But what was Brian Johnson's company. But he's the guy who has the Do Not Die Blueprint Service. Now, he started a regimen. He talked about publicly of it. He doesn't have any weight to lose, but he did it for all the other things that it helps with. And so there's going to, there's a lot of research. You know, I made my

own decision based on there were so many, here it is. What was his company? Braintree. Braintree, right. He sold this for a bunch of money. Just find like a stale of him somewhere in there. Scrub to Estelle. This is one we see on. Back in 2015, there's me. I'm a little chubby. And look at how different

Brian Johnson looks now. Yeah. Compared to that. He's probably, his face is so much thinner now and he's in such better shape, but he's still like, it was a really nice guy.

I got to go back and listen to this episode. What episode number is it from 2015? That is? We used to number them. We still number them, but I don't know if we have the number in the title. But just search for Brian Johnson.

It's from September 18th, 2015. We don't have an episode number on this and I can't count that fast. But I just googled Brian Johnson This Began Startups and it came right up. So if you're listening, you can find it. There you go. All right. So we have any founder? So this is amazing, by the way. I just want to say Avi Ride. I also saw today and I tweeted today about my belief system when it comes to Avi Rides and Uber's role in all of this. So I am talking my book. I'm long Uber since you know, being the third investor. Yeah, but here's your tweet, Jason.

Do you want to run this through it? Yeah, I mean, I said to Bology, a different Bology who works at Uber, excited to see Uber partner with so many amazing FSD players to deploy this technology widely. They were announcing, they were announcing Austin Waymo,

which is going to be a huge hit at launch yesterday. If you want to use it, you have to go to your settings and in your settings, there is autonomous rides and join. And so you can just look that up or Google it, but you'll find it in settings and you have to opt in to get those rides and then they will start showing you them more often. If you think about how hard this rollout is going to be for autonomous and how long it's going to take and what's important here?

For me, this goes beyond my personal net worth, you know, and my shares in Uber. And I have exposure. I won't say which companies, but you can be sure I have exposure to every one of the companies. So no matter who wins, I'm going to win. Yeah. It doesn't matter if Uber's first, second, or third place. If they win gold, silver, or bronze, it's going to be a spectacular win for me. I don't think anybody would argue they're not going to be one of the top three. And if Tesla wins, and if Google wins, I have exposure to everything.

So don't worry about Jake. Here's what I think is important. This is going to save a lot of lives. And trust is going to be important. my best advice to the market is to be thoughtful in the rollout and only do what is extremely, extremely safe. We cannot have another Uber crash like they had in Arizona with a safety driver playing candy crutch where tragically a woman was killed. It was a homeless woman walking across an eight-lane freeway with a bicycle at night. The goddamn safety driver who was getting paid a pretty penny, and I'm very angry about this, because,

the loss of life, not just that one woman's loss of life. But you have to look at the actuary tables, Alex, I think, and say, how many lives were not saved because that set back autonomy? And how much further along would autonomy be if Cruz didn't drag that person and then cover it up? So goddamn Cruz, whoever did that cover up, not only did you drag that poor woman, not only did this safety driver kill this woman. Think about all the lives and people who could have been hit by cars that would have been saved. I'm coming to this from the purest place possible, which is saving lives and then enabling more people to be able to take safe rides and have more transportation options, which is, you know, virtuous and great for everybody. You know, if you're a nanny or a teacher and, you know, you want to be able to, you know, teach.

somewhere and you can lower the price, that helps, right? Because then that nanny or teacher can send their kids to school and make a little bit more money or whatever it is or get to their school with less pain and suffering because they had to take three buses, you know, and they could have gone direct and instead of taking some crazy route. So I just want to clarify here, because of the safety driver playing Candy Crush, you killed the woman, my nanny is more expensive. I see. Now I'm mad, too. I joke. All of this is like, you've got to think in systems, right? I've been around long enough to know that, you know, one mistake can have repercussions. They close the butterfly effect, the ripple effect, you know, you throw a ripple in a pond. So this can work for positive and work

for negative. The positive here is if everybody in the industry joins forces and works together to roll it out safely, I know everybody's in competition, but there's no rush here. And if the rush means another person dies and we set it back. Like, let's not go 10 step backwards to make two step forward and get, you know, whatever. So be thoughtful, be cautious. Yeah, go as fast as we can without killing people. And that will save the maximum number of lives. I'm actually, all jokes aside, in complete agreement here.

And I think the actuarial table point, which shows that self-driving cars have fewer engagements of emergency braking, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Faster, please, but safely. And what Uber's doing, I think, is the greatest thing ever. Uber doesn't need to open their platform up. They could just buy one of these companies. Because these companies are worth, you know, with $3 to $50 billion.

They can buy one. They could open source everything and, you know, start their own project. They obviously have, but they've decided to say to 10 players, 15 players come on the platform. And of the 15 players they invited, I think 10 or 12 have said yes. Uber will do great taking 20% of each ride and giving 80% to that other company.

Great business for everybody. So I'm very excited about that possibility. I wish Zooks and Tesla would consider running pilots with Uber or both. I don't care. Do pilots with both and let's get the maximum number

on the road and the maximum utilization this can't work if these things are only utilized for a small percentage of time. And it's not going to work for, you know, if Tesla and Zooks want to build their own app in these markets and they don't have critical mass, then they don't have human drivers to fall back on during peak times. Then those apps are worthless because the times you need it,

it'll be a 30-minute wait time. What we learned at Uber was it has to be under five minutes or people are just not going to use it, or they're not going to regularly use it. They will not rely on something. when the wait times are, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 minutes. It's got to be five minutes or less. It's not going to be five minutes or less in Waymo, as we've seen, or Uber, you know,

unless they do it in a very dense area. And it's certainly not going to be that way during rush hour or when you need it most. Okay, that's it. I'm very excited about all these different players joining together. Yeah. One lesson on this, we didn't get to it. I forget when this data point came out Monday last week. But Waymo is now over 200,000 paid rides per week, which is up 50,000.

per week from before. Incrementally, we're still moving, but I can't wait until we get an update, and it's another zero versus a smaller addition. But everything seems to be accelerating self-driving, Jason, from Tesla to everyone else. And so I'm just so bullish, so excited. And this is one of those great things right now in the world

that isn't political, that's just doing well. We can all enjoy it. Everyone has a big old hug for self-driving. Oh, thank God. I can't wait. It's totally awesome. I'm trying to get my follower count up. I have 475 followers right now.

It's, I'm user slash Jason Calacanis, just my first name, last name, Reddit.com slash user slash Jason Calacanis, or you just type in Reddit Jason Calacanis, and you should get to my profile page. And then you'll see everything I'm talking about on Reddit, and you can join the discussions I'm in. So you see my comments and then follow me.

I'm a 475 followers. So let's get me up to 1,000. That would be super helpful, thanks to my fan. Can I just say that Jason, his Reddit account was born on June 6th, 2013, making it 12 years old nearly. Very impressive. There's this other one, Alex Wilhelm. I have another one, Jason M. Calacanis.

Or I have another one that's like, oh, no, I have another one that's like my secret one with my old alias, which I won't give here. But what's yours, Alex? Alex Wilhelm. And mine was born June 19, 2008. A solid half decade before Mr. Calacanis. So I'm going to take two nerd points. Well, that's because I created a second one, Alex Wilhelm.

If we can't compete and throw popcorn at each other, Jason, what's the point of a podcast? Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Do we put the link in for Alex? We didn't put the link in, but we'll put the link in the show notes. Better to follow us over there. We'll see you all next time on this weekend starvice.

Bye-bye.