This Week in Startups - Cursor’s $300M ARR, Uber’s FTC Battle, and Office Hours with GoShare | E2116

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Today’s show: Jason, Alex and Lon unpack the FTC’s lawsuit against Uber and what it could mean for subscription UX, break down how AI startup Cursor is growing faster than almost any SaaS company in history, and discuss how dark patterns, consumer trust, and regulatory scrutiny are reshaping product design. They also touch on the future of big tech breakups, share insights from founder Office Hours with GoShare CEO Shaun Savage, highlighting the power of focus, capital, and customer obsession for startups navigating turbulent markets.Timestamps:(0:00) Episode Tease(1:21) Jason talks about personal interests, frugality, and TWIST live tour(7:29) Nick Huber's tweet on tariffs and business impact(9:58) NetSuite - Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(11:22) Market uncertainty and paused deals(13:57) Trump's market feedback and tariffs(16:29) Cursor's rapid revenue growth(19:44) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(21:16) Valuation discussion continuation and FTC sues Uber(29:58) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(31:26) FTC dark patterns and consumer protection(33:23) Founder Friday bracket competition: LifeStack vs MedSimple(43:50) Introduction to GoShare and founder Shaun Savage(45:57) Regulatory challenges in the gig economy and supply chain resilience(57:37) Diversification strategies for GoShare's delivery professionals(1:00:23) Benefits of office hours and brainstorming with portfolio companies(1:01:26) Founder University and Launch Accelerator updatesSubscribe 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/v19fcpLinks from episode:GoShare: https://goshare.co/Founder University: https://www.founder.university/Follow Shaun:X: https://x.com/ShaunSavage19LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaunsavage/Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow 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:(9:58) NetSuite - Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(19:44) Gusto - Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(29:58) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twistGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck 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

But the FTC, the Trump FTC is suing Uber. Now, the allegation I'm going to quote is that Uber charged consumers for its Uber one subscription service without their consent, failed to deliver promise savings, and made it difficult for users to cancel the service. I want you to walk us through why you think the FTC might be a little bit aggressive in this case. I like what the FTC is doing with cracking down on tactics that are against consumer ranch. So obviously I'm long Uber. You know, I don't have to state that. But when I see like Wall

Street Journal and it's impossible to unsubscribe, I've talked about it here countless times, I hate this stuff. It's infuriating. This weekend startups is brought to you by NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform, giving you one source of truth. Download CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at NetSuite.com slash twist. Gusto. Gistow has easy online payroll benefits in HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com slash twist. And Vanta.

Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for limited time at vanta.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startup. I'm in my hometown, New York, New York. The city's so nice. They named it twice. Got to see my Knicks lose last night.

and heading to, I guess, the worst city in America or top three worst cities in America. We love the Motor City here. It's like Philly, Detroit, Chicago. Oh, wow. How dare you? These are the worst cities. Boston, of course, leading the back. No, I'm just doing this based on the sports teams that the Knicks are up against.

How dare you? But every year, just so you boys know, my friend Tony Shade, I talk about it a lot here on the program because he meant so much to me when he died four years ago. really gave some thought to, like, is there anything I like to do other than work? You know, and I'm not like a big work-life balance guy. I, you know, I like to just really grind. And there were two things that came up. Going to the Knicks games in the playoffs specifically, which doesn't happen that often for my team. You know, we've had like six, seven-year droughts and then, like, you know, play four games and get swept. And then ski. And specifically, you know, scheme of my daughters. I'm putting aside, like, just completely selfishly, putting aside what I do

professionally, putting aside what I do at my family, you know, those are obviously top priorities. But then, like, you know, in third, like, is there anything that, like, nurtures my soul in some way or fills my bucket? And I never thought that way, you know, Irish Catholic, I got the guilt about doing anything. So those are my two things. And I just treat myself to, if the Knicks are in the playoffs, I just go see a couple of games, two or three games. And, you know, I, you know, I did okay in this life. I made a little bit of money. And I don't spend any money on anything.

Like, I don't fly private or anything. I fly coach a lot. I drive a model Y that I've had for five years, four or five years. You know, I'm very frugal. You guys know that. Except when I go to dinner, which long. I've also noticed that. Yeah.

I do allow myself that. So maybe there's three things on my list. But, you know, I decided I've only got a certain number. If my team only goes to the playoffs, like 30% of the time, I could be gone in 10 years, five. three, you know, 20, who knows? I've got like, I don't know, maybe like 10 playoff series that I can probably go to maybe 20 in my life. So I got to get a couple in every year if they go. And I got courtside seats in Detroit. No, really? Well, here's the thing. In New York City,

getting courtside seats impossible. And because they're all owned by corporates and, you know, finance guys. And it's just hard to get. I can usually get like third, fourth, fifth bro. I got a a pair of free tickets, which was very nice. Autopilot, like this stock trading app. They reached out when they saw it. And they're like, oh, our lawyer has tickets. Come with us. And I was like, all right, right.

They dropped two free tickets on me, so I went. And it was like really good seats. 12-4-0 center, you know, I usually said in better seats, but really good seats. And the price was dynamite. Anyway, the show must go on. We got a lot going on. Yes, go warriors. And also, I was in the big easy, NARLINS for a birthday party this past weekend was wonderful.

Although, like, you know, I'm a foodie. I, like, have to go to the top three restaurants, but I was, like, kind of on somebody else's agenda. So we had food, but it wasn't, like, the best, but I got to go to Café Dumont. Right. I was going to say, you got the Benets. You got the Benignets and the Chickory Coffee. I realized we do need to do the Twist Live tour.

So announcing it now, Twist Live Tour is coming. We're going to do five cities in five days or something of the lunacy like that. We're all going to go live. Heck yeah. One week, five cities, five days. We'll do the East Coast once, and then maybe in another thing. So we're going to set that up for you all. Come.

It'll be four fans. by the fans. But when I was there, I went to one of these old auction houses over 100 years. And I don't know if you have it there, but I saw two items that were very inspiring to me. One is the Enigma Machine. If you've never seen the movie with Cumberbatch, am I pronouncing that? The imitation game. You are pronouncing it correctly. The imitation game is the movie. It's a great, great movie. I don't know if it's a great movie. I enjoyed the movie. It's a pretty good movie. Yeah, it's a solid movie. It's like a seven or something. It's all seven. You know, it's not like a five, you know, 10 out of 10, I think you would agree on.

But, you know, we cracked the Enigma code and then we got to know what the Germans, the Nazis, we're going to do next. Because, I don't want to ruin it for people, but, you know, at the end of every time, I think this is how the story goes, at the end of every time they would send a message with this enigma machine, which was a code breaking machine, they would end it with hell Hitler. and then these code breakers knew, okay, we can work backwards. We know two words in the puzzle, and maybe we can figure out the rest of the words. Anyway, they figured it out, the movie's great. This is one of the giant enigma machines.

There's small enigma machines. They go for like a quarter million dollars, whatever. They come up once in a while. People collect them. It's like a piece of history. And then this is the giant one with like more wheels and more complex made by CMS. And I almost bought it.

I was going to buy it. I'd be honest. I was going to buy it and put it in the back. And then I was like, ah, I don't think I can buy a Nazi object. Lant, help me out here. Is this in my head? Because I just had this flashback or I just had this moment that somebody was going to write a headline.

Jason Calcanus collects Nazi memorabilia. Nazi memorabilia. I don't think, I think this is allied memorabilia personally. Like, this was how we brought them down. And I think that's acceptable. like collecting World War II memorabilia from the good guys, from the Brits or the Americans or the Australians, or the Canadians, we're all on very solid ground. I think, you know, like French resistance stuff would be cool. I think it's just, you don't want, it's like when people have like the knives

that the German soldiers carried or like those plates with the swastick on them that like in cabaret they would have been eating off of. That's not cool. You don't want to own that stuff. I think an enigma machine without Nazi Iron Cross is draped over it is indicative of us kicking their butts. Therefore, it's war spoils. Okay. Just don't turn it into a fan club. Let's get to the news.

I know there's a lot of news, and then we have an office hours at the end, and in between we got to do our brackets for our March madness. First up on the docket today is something from Nick Huber that Jason flagged for the show today. I'm going to go ahead and pull up the tweet here and then read it for everybody. Nick Huber, if you don't know,

he's at sweaty startup on Twitter. I would call him Jason a highly caffeinated entrepreneur business technology guy. And he wrote that he was, quote, pro tariffs until about 30 of our clients at somewhere.com cancels surges over the past three weeks. Hyrene freezes all over the place. Hit me in the pocketbook already. And then in all caps, remove tariffs.

Amen. The all caps is my thing. And Ari from Manhattan, another Knicks fan who just only tweets in all caps. But if somebody is taking the R.E. JCal all caps, you know, it's important. That's like, you know, all hands on deck. alert and code red. I did a tweet also just last week. I started, GROC is amazing in Twitter, by the way. I asked Grock to analyze my own tweet, like that layoffs are coming. And they're like, yeah, Jason Caligana is absolutely correct. Here are all the layoffs. And you found other tweets

with the layoffs. So like, you know how I asked you guys or the researcher today? Find me the other like examples of this? Like, Grock just doesn't know. But there's a little Grock button to hit it. And I found like maybe eight or nine examples of layoffs that I wasn't aware of. And these things are slowly trickling out. The good news is, as of the taping, today, Wednesday, April 23rd, 11 a.m. New York time, it seems like, as I predicted, Trump would stand down. Why is Trump standing down? It's really two or three reasons here. Number one, the market has told him, if you're going to do this, we will push back by lowering stocks. The bond market. Boom. Now entrepreneurs, I'm going to stop hiring. you could only overplay your hand so much and the world reacts to it.

This is very important for entrepreneurs to understand is that they have power. And the power is in the hiring freeze, the layoffs, the stock prices, etc. They all give feedback. And I think Besant, who was on the All-in interview, did a great interview. He is very thoughtful. This guy is very thoughtful, Democrat, like Clinton-like-era Democrat, who really knows what he's doing based on what I can tell. From what I understand, he's got Trump's ear right now.

He's driving the train on this. They're going to do what they should have done from the start, which is a very slow roll out of tariffs with more certainty. Doing business and making deals would be a lot simpler if you had a crystal ball. Obviously, hey, if you've got a future prediction startup, contact me, I'm going to write you a check. You're coming to my accelerator.

But until then, one way to future-proof your business is with our amazing partner, NetSuite. by Oracle. It's the number one ERP tool on the market today, and it's trusted by over 40,000 businesses for a reason. But you might be asking, what does NetSuite do? Okay, you're at a startup. Maybe you wonder, who is this NetSuite I keep hearing about? Well, it's going to take all your accounting, inventory, financial management, and HR and put it into one easy-to-use platform, one source of truth, one resource to check for anything you need to know about your business. That's going to give you real-time insights and allow you to forecast with the visibility

and control you need to make great decisions. It's like being a fighter pilot. You've got all those important instruments right at your fingertips so you can go fast, beat the competition, and grow your business. So NetSuite is going to help you have all that reliable information when you need it. Founders, you're going to need to know about it. And a great first step is to get the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. So speaking of opportunities, go ahead and download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at net suite.com slash twist. The guide is free for you at net suite.com slash twist. That's net suite.com slash twist. If you have uncertainty, everybody freezes. Imagine you hear a loud noise on the street. You hear firecrackers going off. Is it firecrackers?

Is it a gun? You hear some, you know, these things happen. Everybody just pauses. And the next piece was, Sheel, who's got a great Twitter handle, and he's just really good at summer. like the important news stories, highly recommend following Shield. We should come on the pod soon. What is this Twitter handle? It's at Pitt Desi. P-I-D-E-S-I. Dezzi, yes. And so he's a really nice guy. I like him a lot. Very thoughtful. Yeah. Anyway, read his tweet because this is also important. Yes. Shield writes, heard from an investment banker that had 12 M&A deals in flight a month ago. All 12 are paused too much uncertainty, liquidity on hold. So just Jason backing you up here. VCs are saying the same thing that uncertainty really is right now an absolute killer.

The question that I have, though, is your encapsulation of what Trump's going to do. I agree. It's a U-turn. I would call it a retreat. But the latest that I saw from the Wall Street Journal is that the White House is considering lowering tariffs on China to about 50 to 65 percent. That is so much better than 145 percent. I think it was 145 or something plus some amount.

I mean, that was one of the things about even the execution of this. It wasn't like there was a website that explained it and what the carveouts were. Like, if you're going to do something like destabilize the entire global economy and, you know, damage the American brand as a trustworthy, predictable partner, like, you're going to get feedback. And the way to avoid this kind of critical feedback, market feedback, especially, I mean, it's one thing for talking heads like us to be talking about this. It's another thing for people who are in commerce, Lon, to be taking action.

And I started to get wind of this in week two. And I started talking about here on the show all in and tweeting it. I'm hearing from everybody like, I got to do some layoffs here because there's too much uncertainty. So I'll cut 10%, 5%, 15%, what should I cut? And this was small companies, medium-sized companies, companies like cuts when we had Stephen on, right, Stephen? Yeah, Stephen from cuts. That's what I was going to say is Stephen from cuts. That was his perspective.

It's like it wasn't even the tariffs themselves. He was like he could have dealt with that with fine, you know, suppliers at different places. I'll work around it. It was the lack of communication about like, well, where can I find another supplier? And is that going to get me into a tariff problem next week? Like, I can't go to Vietnam. I can't go to, you know, all these other markets that maybe I could have started supplying from.

So I think, yeah, I think that's a key point that if this was rolled out in a way that was clearer, it might not have been such a epic, immediate disaster for everybody. Trump says stuff. And remember my, like, number four rule of Trump? Like, number one is Trump says stuff. Trump says a lot of stuff is like rule number one. I went right to rule number four, wait 72 hours before responding. And then like life's in negotiation is like number six or something.

I haven't filled in all the other ones. I'm calling it like seven rules of, and I'm open to suggestions if you have them to tweet on me. But I do think what we're seeing here is the Trump two step, as you called it, which is he just says a lot of stuff. The team's got to figure it out. He gets market feedback. And then he sort of adjust like a comedian does working out a bit.

Exactly. The problem is working out a bit with the global economy. Terrible idea. Yeah, it's not good. And so I think we're on the other side of it. I'll be totally honest. Because if this were to continue for two or three more weeks, the whole concept of doing this for Main Street would get taken off the table.

That would be like, well, if you're doing it for Main Street and everybody's losing their jobs and prices are going up. Yeah. How is that for Main Street? So it seems like you took out Wall Street and then you dropped a second bomb three days later on Main Street. The guys who work for Mack trucks are on Main Street. Those are not Wall Street guys. Yeah.

Now, their stock may trade also in Volvo's some stock and, you know, whatever. There might be some rich group of people who own those shares. And yes, they get hit first and then wait for the aftershock, which is, oh, rich people lose their money. You know what they do? They stopped holding businesses to go on vacation. You know what I would do if it was like a cataclysmic thing? I'll just retire. I'm like, you know what, I could just go forward to retire. I'll just do a podcast twice a week, three times a week, and call it a day. So here we are. I think we can move on from this

and get more to tech news. The big lesson for founders is to stay focused on your customers, your product, and your team. A startup is three things, a team that builds a product that delights customers. Over these three or four weeks, you could have been doom scrolling, it could be hand-wringing, you could be looking at stock prices, you know, and I get it, you want to stay informed. But if you had just three weeks ago on April 1st, you know, and this happened on April 2nd, Independence Day, whatever it was, we could have just, you could have just focused on your product and customers. You could have done 20 product customer interviews. You could have shipped two more features.

You could have added a team member, all that wasted energy on the new cycle. So stay focused, folks. A story that I'm so incredibly happy to bring up is that cursor, which is the product from the company, Inysphere. It's a series of AI tools that help develop. developers, write code, do agentic stuff. It's in that bucket of lovable and so forth. Fastest to 100 million in revenue of all time, I think.

It was the fastest to 100 million. It's either the fastest, like, top two. It's a little hard to gauge. But yeah, Jason, one of the fastest growing companies of all time. We covered it recently on the show because after reaching 100 million AAR at the end of 2024, it grew to 200 million ARR in March. And we were like, wow, that's crazy. Well, turns out we should have been more impressed because now TechMont reports from two

sources that is 300 million ARR, which means it grew 50% in like roughly a month or something along those lines. I don't really recall seeing their product grow in terms of revenue this fast since like OpenAI turned on paid subscriptions to chat GPT. It's just such an insane business to me, Jason. Have you seen a company go as fast ever? I mean, sure, we've, not this fast, but this is growing like a consumer startup that went viral, but it's a SaaS product.

So that's what you're seeing here. If you can get consumer growth of a paid SaaS product, that creates just a wild experience. Examples of this would be when Disney Plus launched. It's a consumer product, but it's got a subscription model. And it was like, whoa, they're at $10 million. Whoa, they're at $30 million. I think they went blue past $100 million. It was like a great offering.

Another example in the consumer space of a paid product that's also consumer that mixed both, or a business to business product that did this. Slack. This thing started spreading like wildfire. If you're not on Slack, like, what are you doing? Like, get off Hipchat, get off IRC. And that one had an incredible ramp up when you look at that. And before that, David Sachs company, my bestie, Yammer, was his. So that's what you got to look at is, you know, when you can have the virality of a consumer product matched with the low-churn enterprise subscriptions. Let's pause for a second here and think about total addressable market. Let's refer to as Tam in our industry.

And I'm going to need you two guys at your keyboard. It's ready to go. Alex, how much does the product cost? Lon, how many developers are there in the world? I think it's $20 a month for Cursor. I believe it's 15 million developers in the world. Like people who have it as a full-time job, go take a look, and then we'll times those numbers.

I mean, Statista is telling me 28.7 million software developers worldwide in 2024. We'll put that $25 million. 25 million. $25 million you're paying If all $25 million use this And then how much is it per month 20 a month? Am I right? 20 bucks a month for the pro plan

Or $40 a month for a business plan Both are discounted on a yearly basis Great. So let's just go with $30. $30, $25 million. Okay, three times 25 is $750 out of zero. Is that $700? Yeah, three times...

It works out to $9 billion on a yearly basis. So $25,030 times 12 months. Got it. So $25 million. Yeah. If it was $3 a month, that would be $75 million, $750 million a month. All right. You didn't start your company to run payroll.

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Try Gusto and get three months free. Gusto.com slash twist. That's g-U-S-T-O-com slash twist. In Tam, and then if you times it by 10, 7.5 million, then you have $1.5, yeah, $9 billion in revenue. currently in TAM for this one product, and this is like a very affordable product of 30 bucks a month, $9 billion in TAM with a gross margin of 75%, it's got to be 80% gross margin, I would guess, something crazy. You start thinking about the EBITA potential of this product. If this company threw

off $5 billion in EBITO, 5 billion times 20, which is, you know, a pretty conservative, I think you would say, 25 would be high, 15 would be low. So let's put it at 20. Five billion dollars in profits times 20, 100 billion dollar company. This is a hundred billion billion dollar company if they get the entire market. If it's a winner take-all market, it's not going to be a winner-take-all market. But if they have half that market, it's a 50 billion dollar company if they get half the market. If they get a third of the market, it's 30 billion, you get the idea. Yeah. I think the market is actually larger than we're estimating. I'm not quite sure why, but I'm just thinking that $9 billion feels small to me.

So I would actually, if I just, if like, you know, blindfolded guessing, I would have said 20. That's current TAM. Current TAM. Yeah, the TAM will expand. I agree. More people become developers and so forth. Two ways it's going to expand. More people become developers.

And then the second one is they add adjacencies and more expensive products, right? So this is not the only product they're ever going to have. So you're absolutely right. Tam can expand two ways, horizontally, vertically. You get more users. You get more features. Boom. Just for fun for folks.

out there who are paying attention. Currently, Cursor is reported to be working on a $10 billion valuation in its next round. 300 million ARR, Jason, 33X ARR. TechBron also reported that WinSurf, who we had on the program. That was December 20th, 2004, episode 20, 24. If anyone must go back and take a look at that. That company grew from 42, I think, 100 million ARR and is raising at about a $3 billion valuation. So again, about 30x. So we're seeing, I think, some price sorting out in the market about how to value these high growth AI companies. And it's about 30x ARR if you're growing at a simply insane clip. But I think I'd be happy to invest in either windsurf or cursor because why not?

Welcome to the power. Welcome to the power law. You know, if you hit, man, these things can become very big, very fast. We do have the issue we talked about in a previous episode of people sampling products in this category where they'll buy a bunch of subscriptions like Paramount Plus or Disney plus and then, you know, they take their 10 subscriptions down to five. Their five phrases that they can't live without. That will happen in this space.

And so, you know, we'll wait and see who the winners and losers are, consolidation. But this is the thing. When you have a company like this, the most important thing to do is not sell it. The most important thing to do is to build a war chest and to obsess on making the product sticky so you don't have any churn. If you do those two things when it's growing like that, no churn and war chest. Warchest, war chest, war chest, war chest. having the capital as a weapon is what we saw with Uber beating Lyft.

We saw it with Airbnb beating a bunch of copycats. You know, Capital as a weapon with DoorDash raised a bunch of money for their category. They outraised everybody in food. Capital as a weapon is the key thing. They should raise as much money as possible. I know it sounds crazy, but I think that this category is very easy to put a product out in this category. There's so many people doing it that you really, want to use that capital as a weapon, be able to lower prices and then drown out competitors,

right? If you were a cursor, Jason, and you're looking at the ability to raise the $10 billion valuation, so you can raise with very, very little dilution, would you go out and buy smaller regional competitors? Like, if there was the EU cursor and the APAC cursor. Yes, 100%. Yeah, you would buy them. You would invest in them.

You would create the cursor venture arm of the company. Like, there's all kinds of creative things you can do to. just solidify your position. Cursor labs where you do like weird hackathons and you invest in companies. All of these things can really work. You see Nvidia doing that, right? That's part of the playbook there. Google did its own corporate venture arm.

So if it's me, it's not. I've never built a company. That's $300 million in revenue. I think I got the best I ever did. Yeah, I got to $12 million in revenue for Silicon Island Reporter. I sold Weblogs thing very early, but it also got to $25 million. Like within two years, I'd be selling it to AOL. the fourth year and then Mahalo at its peak had 11 million in revenue run rate. So I, you know,

I have gotten to eight digits and typically sold the company. So I would raise two billion. I would raise two billion. I would have a war chest. I would delete 20 percent. I would have a sick war chest. And then I would go do what you're saying. Buy other companies, invest in other companies. Look at what Nvidia did. Like very hard to meet with Nvidia when, you know, they're investing in core weave or whatever and, you know, kind of locking up distribution. What else is in the news? Well, you mentioned Uber, so I think we'd be remiss to not talk about the fact that the FTC, the Trump FTC, is suing Uber. Now, the allegation I'm going to quote is that Uber charged consumers for its Uber one subscription service without their consent, failed to deliver promise savings and made it difficult for users to cancel the service, despite its quote, cancel anytime promises. Now, Jason, you had some notes about this and we've pulled up a kind of amalgamation of your notes here about everything.

I want you to walk us through why you think the FTC might be a little bit aggressive in this case. I like what the FTC is doing with cracking down on tactics that are against consumer so obviously I'm long Uber, you know, I don't have to state that. But when I see like Wall Street Journal and it's impossible to unsubscribe, I've talked about it countless times, I hate this stuff. It's infuriating. Like, however easy it is to sign up, it should be easy. equally easy to unsubscribe. The best practice should be you get an invoice every month. In the

invoice, there's a clear unsubscribe button. And two weeks before a yearly comes out, you should get your invoice. And you should say, hey, in two weeks, your yearly is coming up and do that. Consumers are smart. They use like ramp cards or Mercury Bank or whatever to have like burner cards. And then we turn them off every year. All our SaaS subscriptions fail or all new subscriptions fail. And then we decide if we want to do them. I also have a new thing. Like I wanted to try the financial times and economist app, apps, because I wanted to have the app experience, I signed up for a year,

then I went immediately into my settings and canceled the subscriptions. Yeah. So I have it for the year, but I don't even have to worry about that moment, because I know I can always re-sign up. It's no big deal. So in this dark pattern,

I went and looked for myself. And I looked in the online help in the app because I want to know, because I have interest in this company, and I'm an Uber one subscriber. And I, you know, Dar is known for being like up on the up and up kind of guy, right? Like he's the one who got Uber back into London.

He's always working on these hygiene issues. He's really considered about this. So I was kind of shocked that they brought this, but I'm okay with them bringing it. Like anything that's, you know, if somebody does a dark pattern or gets close to it, this is what I think the FTC should be doing, not blocking M&A,

but making sure that anti-competitive practices like dumping product for below what it's worth, you know, dark pattern. bundling, you know, all that kind of stuff. So in 10 seconds to 20 seconds and three or four clicks, I had found the help. I had found the unsubscribe button. And I found the Uber One area where it showed I'd save $1,600 on 87 Uber Eats orders

and 154 rides. Now, that's what my savings were. So it looks like I'm saving five bucks on every ride and 10 bucks on every delivery. And those numbers are real. I know this because when they show you the invoice, they wave a bunch of fees and then they give you a greater deal.

So I think Uber One is a great product. Perhaps I think they maybe, without knowing the fullness of the case, maybe when they first launched it, it was a little bit buried. You know, sometimes these things are more sloppiness than intent. Sometimes it's explicitly intent.

So I'm going to give them the benefit of doubt, because I found it really quick. Darra's got an exemplary record here. And they should, my feeling on the FTC when they do these things is they should give a correction period so that these things can be resolved. They should just say, hey, we found this. You have 30 days to correct. Then we're going to take an action.

That would make it like less drama. And I think because the stock went up over these two or three days, which probably has, you know, a lot to do with the overall market rally this week when Trump backed down from tariffs. This is like a, not even a speeding ticket. But good on the FTC for being vigilant about these things. I mean, I know that sounds counter. And great on Dara for addressing it quickly, if there even was an issue.

Nailing product market fit. That's your top priority if you're a founder. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, letting the world know that, hey, I've got a great product that's going to solve problems and delight you. And, of course, if you're a startup, you really want to. Look at the big customers. We call them lighthouse customers. They send a signal across these vast customer bases that you can trust my product to land those deals. However, your security compliance has to be rock solid. And there are a bunch of certifications. You may have heard of them.

SOC2, ISO-27-001. Those are the key to building trust and unlocking these opportunities. But they take time. They take energy. They take money and pulling away from building and shipping your product and doing sales, it's hard to do. And that's where VANT, V-A-N-T-A, comes in. Vanta is the all-in-one compliance solution for helping startups like yours get ready for your audits. And it's going to build a beautiful, strong security foundation quickly and painlessly because Vanta automates the manual security tasks that are going to slow you down, helping streamline your audit. Whether you're closing your first deal or gearing up for growth, Vanta makes compliance easy. Join over 8,000 companies, including many from Y Combinator tech stars and our own launch accelerator and Found

University who just trust and love Vantam. Simplify compliance. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. I'm an investor in the company. Full disclosure. I love the company. V-A-N-T-A dot com slash T-W-I-S-T. I think that they can keep capitalism in the lane and protect consumers by simply writing a

letter of correction, just like, you know, if you, had garbage outside your building and you're responsible for your sidewalk, they give you like a ticket. And if you clean it up and take a picture, you know, you're off the hook. Do you feel like the dark pattern is a little bit of a, of a slippery slope or sort of a gray area? I mean, we were talking just last week in our tips from the trenches about how you want to de-emphasize elements of your U.X that you don't want users to click on and you want to emphasize the parts that you do. So like, cancel.

Great point. Right. So you sort of make the cancel button gray it a little bit and make the keep going. button, like bright, colorful. So I feel like that's just a principle of good design. And it's, if you lean too heavily into it now, maybe you're violating a fairness principle. Yeah. The execution is what matters. You'll know it's a dark pattern when you use the product. The FTC could very easily have a website, FTC.com, dot gov slash dark patterns. So here's my suggestion to the FTC. FTC.gov slash dark patterns.

Anybody at any time can submit a little screen, capture a movie, and say, hey, I think that this kind of sucks. And you can put it in a category. And then if you, if that results in a change or whatever, the FTC should give you a $1,000 amount. This is my best idea. So that would be zero to it. Now your competitors can rat on you if you're doing something bad, which is who will do

it, right? Because I've been in this situation where somebody's doing something nefarious, your competitor, and then the founder's like, well, I've got to keep up with that. And you get in this escalation of, you know, who's going to, you know, bend the rules too much. So FTC.gov slash rat. I think we should do another round of our founder Friday bracket competitions and keep that going. We should. So we have an elite eight.

There are, we are down. We got past the sweet six. Our elite aid are Osprey from Houston, Texas, Whisper from Austin, Texas, Lifestack from New York, Med Simple from Florianopolis, Brazil, pitchfire from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, tactoon from Yerevan, Armenia, mom sub from Chicago, and Kippy from Sydney, Australia. So today, we're going to start the process of winnowing down these elite eight into a final four. We've got two matchups for today that are going to be two of our four finalists. Let's get started.

Matchup number one, New York's Lifestack, versus. Florianopolis is Med Simple. Now, for this round, we ask each of the companies to send us a new video describing their two-year plan. We try to keep it to around two minutes or less, so they're pitching us on the, what are they going to do for the first two years of their company to grow these businesses? We're going to start with New York's Lifestack. They're a smart calendar app that works along with wearable devices to adjust your daily schedule based on your current energy level. Hi Jason, Alex and maybe long. Not sure if you're in this episode, but I'm now co-founder and CEO of Life Stack. And thank you so much for voting for us in the previous round. So here's a quick look at our two-year plan. Right now, our month reburn is super low, just 13K per month. And we made 1.5K last month. So so far, we've been laser focused on validating the initial market. And now that we're seeing some early traction, we're actually in the middle of raising 1 million pre-seed round. And although we've already secured 200K in hard commits, we still need to

raise the rest. So the first quarter will be about closing this round and bringing on our core team who've been working with us as part-time so far. And in Q3 and Q4 of this year, we'll focus on tightening up the product and also laying the foundation for a social media content strategy. And we'd also love to run an efficacy study to back up our claims. So, for example, being able to say users see X percent boost in productivity after using LifeStack. And starting in Q1, 2026, we plan to roll out a team plan, something that our existing users have already been asking for.

We think this could be a strong driver for growing our user base more quickly. And then once those early pieces are in place, We'd like to double down on influencer marketing and explore our partnerships with wearable companies to reach beyond early adopters. And ideally we'll be profitable by that point or at least showing enough traction to be in a strong position for a Series A. All right. That was clamin. Crisp. Jason, thoughts. I love it. I've met the company before. I have tried a couple of different modalities. You guys who know I'm focused on four things in terms of my health, sleep, diet, exercise. meditation, equanimity. And I have been really, I use something called streaks, which is like a behavioral thing to try to get you to do streaks. How many days in a row did you drink water? That one's kind of come on and off for me. The thing I'm doing right now is I just have a little

notepad, basically, a little document where I do every day and I do what vitamins I took, what I ate, breakfast, lunch, dinner, I write it down, what exercise I did. I'll take a screenshot from slopes or fitness and put it in there. And I do get my eight sleep report. And it does tell me like, hey, you got good sleep, you got deep sleep, you know, whatever. And all these metrics, putting them all together does help. I'm testing. There's foundation health and superpower are the two competitors in blood testing, I think. Foundation health is a partner over at all in, I think. They sponsor something we do. Really great product. And superpower, I think, is, or superpowers. Superpower, Superpower. That's the one I first one I've tried. They're both great power.

Superpower. Yeah, they're, I think, going to sponsor a Quist in the future. Anyway, these two products are awesome, too. People will pay for this stuff. It's going to be great. I think it's awesome. Yeah, they're superpower. They just got a big feature over in Tech Runch as well. Yesterday, actually. Yeah. So these are great products, great startups, great category. I don't know if calendar is the right thing, but I think once you have your information in there, I do like that they have a theory that the calendar is the way to do. do it. And I like that they're connecting, like, for high performers and neurodivergent. Like, they know where they're going after. If you have a whoop, you want to try this. If you have an eight sleep, you want to try this. It's great. And then when AI starts looking at your calendar and figuring things out and how to coach you, it's going to be even better. Who else we got? All right. Up next, Med Simple. This is a study app. They designed it specifically to help medical students from Brazil.

Guys, I am Vinicius. I am for Florian Alperies Brazil, one of the co-founders of Med Simple, and today I will present you our two-year business plan. So quarter-by-quarter goals of 2025. In the first quarter, we have already built a high-teach product called Medi-Simple Smart. We need to pay a leader dedicated 100% of the time in 5KUSD per month. Second quarter, we will hire a new, we will hire a new dev for the app and AI implementation. We need 2KOSD per month. Third quarter, we will build a new product called MediComp for residents. We'll need one, specialies for eight medical subject area, costing 21 KUSD per month. Fourth quarter creates a sales team dedicated to MediSimple Residence.

Five sellers, it will cost 2KK per month for all of 10. And next year, in first quarter, aggressive market investment in MediSimple Residence, 75K USD for three months. Second quarter, marketing leaders in every medical school in Brazil to influence how in the year medical school students to buy MediSipurresden's module, 30k USD per month. Third quarter, marketing investment. for the four month prep and fourth quarter two months prep investment in market in two

okay is the same course but we less content two people stood faster we will need five k usd per month for doing that how much it will cost you can see here quarter by quarter investment okay and you we will need one million usd in two years project when we growth you can see here that we already did it here the 370k usd and we projected 8-9% of growth from this quarter to this quarter, okay? Here you see that you have a little decrease, but it's because our product is seasonal. People like to buy it in the beginning of the year and the end of the year, okay? Here you can see the growth of 162 from the first quarter of 2025 to this last quarter of 2026. Here are revenue by the end of 2025. We have our products done and you can invest 100%

in marketing, focus on selling, selling. Our capital requirements, we require capital investment of 1 million for our revenue of 2.65 million in two years. We require to stop using revenue in anticipation because it makes us losing margin capital investment in our own business. Anticipation causes a percent of our revenue. And where do you imagine medicine will be in 5, 10 years? It will be the most important platform for Brazilian medical students. And maybe in the future, we're going to sell 2 to Laton and to SMLE, Medici for the world. Okay? Thank you guys. Real business, real customers.

Obviously, there's going to be some criticism lawn of like, is it just an AI rapper? And is it sustainable? And are we even going to have doctors? I think we're going to have doctors. I think we're going to have people talking to AI and their doctor at the same time or talking to a verticalized AI and then maybe at mentioning their doctor or per hour or per minute doctor or nurse practitioner. So there's a lot of opportunity.

you know, you start somewhere where there's a need, you build up a competency, you build up trust, and that other things emerge. I think you did the interview, Alex, with Thalamus and Jason over there. I did. And so that's like a perfect example of a company that started in one place, expanded, expanded, adjacencies, etc. So I see a lot of adjacencies here. Do we have to pick our winner now for these two? Those are your two choices. One of them is going forward to the final four. Who you got, Alex, and why? All right. I'm going to go with, um, Med simple because I just did a look into the number of medical students in Brazil. It's hundreds of thousands. I love their revenue attraction. I thought it was a little weird they were going with here's how much it's going to cost versus here's the fast we're going to grow. I would flip those if I was pitching a VC. But I can absolutely see that med students will pay for this because I already know their predilection to pay for study materials. So I think it's got a big tam and a lot of room to run. Love that as Latin America too. That's a really hard market to crack. It's many different countries. People look at it as a monoculture. It's the opposite. It's kind of like the EU in that way.

So if you do get something to work, you know, it becomes a little bit more defensible lawn. What do you think? I mean, I really like both of these companies. I like how zeroed in they are. They both have like, it's a, it's not a hugely broad moonshot. It's like we know exactly what we want to build. Here's the market.

Go, go, go. But I have to say, LifeStack really speaks to me. I live out of my calendar app. It's where I spend my whole day. I have ADHD. So I really appreciate what they're going for. And the idea of being able to sort of look at my day and manage my calendar with AI and with my inability to sometimes pay attention in mine, I think that's brilliant. I would use that.

Oh, wow. So now you guys got to put it on me. Yeah. It's on you. It's on you. I think, you know, I love both. This is a true jump ball. I would have both of them in the accelerator immediately.

Do not pass go. Do not stop. Let's go. do not stop. I don't know what the... Do not pass the go. Do not collect $200. That's when you go to jail a monopoly.

Okay, whatever it is. I don't know. I don't want them to go to jail. I just wanted to... I think both of these businesses have a great shot of becoming significant $10 million a year businesses in the next three, four,

five years if they execute well and they stay focused on the real problem they have. What I love about both these companies, they both go after a specific problem, but I'm going to go with the revenue traction of med. Simple. Simple. I'm going to go with the revistruction.

It's simple. Okay. Let's wrap up there. Just on those two. We'll do the other ones on Friday because we have a guest coming up right now. All right. Coming up next on the show, we have office hours with a really cool company called GoShare. The founder has one of the best names out there because his last name is Savage.

So I'm looking forward to this. Jason, we have talked ad nauseum on the show about small delivery robots, getting things from point A to point B, drones the job off packages. Well, GoShare is working on trucks, which is a little bit pedestrian, but the company is certainly rolling right along. Sean, welcome to the show. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Jason. Sean, we're investors in the company.

I know that. We did a syndicate at the syndicate.com, and you've got a nice revenue base. Maybe you can just give the one or two sentence overview of what you do. So GoShare is a tech-enabled logistics marketplace, and basically what we do is connect truck and van owners with businesses that want to offer a fast and efficient delivery option to their customers. And specifically, we focus on big and bulky goods.

So think about like furniture, appliances, automotive parts, large electronics, and things like that. Got it, because the small vings, you can just call UPS. Yeah, that's right. And you're done. A lot of people don't want to deliver the big stuff.

Right. So you found an ideal customer profile. If we were to think about the customer base, I don't know if you have clients on your website or et cetera, if you can name some of the clients, or you can name some of the categories, maybe. I mean, we know it's furniture and big things, but do you have any specific customers you can mention?

Yeah. So at the category level, you know, think about retail, building materials, automotive parts, food and beverage. So, you know, we work with like larger enterprise retailers, like a T.J. Max, for example. Got it. Oh, there is a customer list. Yeah. We work with Sherwin Williams. We delivered a lot of paint.

So, yeah, we work with businesses of all sizes, but like our bread and butter of the last couple of years has been focusing on enterprise retail. Well, the good news is we mentioned the. robots lawn, this is not going to go in the little tiny robot. You're not putting sheetrock in that and you're not delivering a battery pack or an engine in a drone. So the good news is, yeah, this is hard work. What's your challenge right now with the business? There's quite a few challenges. I mean, I think that earlier you had mentioned, you know, the FTC and Uber lawsuits, I think like dealing with all the, we're in a heavily regulated industry. So dealing with the changing regulatory landscape has been really challenging. That's probably been something that we've

been focused on for the last couple of years. There's been various rule changes, and there's been court cases that have gone both ways. So I'm just trying to navigate that. And we operate in about 39 states across the U.S. So we're not only dealing with federal regulations, but we're dealing with state and also city regulations as well. So it's a lot to manage. Sean, can you break down the regulations that are impacting your business? Is this gig economy stuff? is this hazardous materials. Just dial that in for us. It's, well, it could be both.

But yeah, gig economy stuff. So just, you know, the balance between like contractors versus employees. And we do deliver some goods that are like hazmat. So that's also applicable, such as like large quantities of paint. So, yeah, I would say like that's definitely been one of the biggest challenges that we've had overcome. So on the gig economy, the good news is DoorDash and Uber and Lyft and. and any number of people are kind of way ahead of you in bigger targets, so you can draft behind their best practices, I suppose. And because this is a B-to-B service, you know, I would think

some of your supply side, the people who are moving stuff, have LLCs, have like actual companies. So, you know, for it to trigger the gig stuff, you know, you'd have to be an individual contributor with like a social security number as opposed to a corporate ID. Am I correct in that? Yeah, yeah, that's generally correct. So all of the delivery professionals, as we call them on the platform, are theoretically running their own business. So it's either a sole prop or an LLC. So I think that does help out. It doesn't completely remove us from being a target. But it's, yeah, the fact that it's, you know, a lot of these guys do have their own business set up, especially if you have like a box truck or a cargo van in particular, those are commercial vehicles. You're

running, you're clearly running a business there. So that's actually could be a very interesting way for you to preempt this is on your website, in your training materials, in the marketing, making it explicitly clear. We help businesses that are shipping stuff find businesses, not, you know, rides, businesses that could service them. And we have a take rate, etc. And then letting people know, hey, you know, and literally having this in your FAQ or your training, if you're an Uber driver, if you're a moving company and you charge cash, you know, and you're part of the gig economy, here's the steps for you to become a business and here's the benefit and the cost. And if you built that out as a section, when they come to you, you can say,

listen, I'm acting in good faith. We are saying on our website, here's how to create an LLC. Here are some places you can go do that. Here's the cost. of it, here's some links to the specific tax pages in cities, look for this, make sure it's by the books, and you kind of create that training materials, that would be very powerful. And another reason it would be powerful is, states love to have people incorporate because they make money from that. And it takes underground money and takes it out of the cash on Craigslist market and moves it to the above ground, you know, and now you're a white, night. And when they come to you, you say, listen, we're trying to city of San Francisco,

you know, Delaware, New York. We're getting you more registrations. And here's how we're doing that. And those people are paying corporate taxes and then having to pay personal taxes again or they have a pass through, whatever. So we're taking what's on Craigslist or, you know, word of mouth and cash being given under the table to deliver stuff. And we're moving it above ground to collect taxes. That's going to be really the way to handle this. And what I always tell people is, you know, if you're bending, you're not bending the rules, but for people who do like to bend rules, like maybe Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Airbnb did in the early days where there was an interpretation of who's benefit, quibono, right? Like, who benefits? When the consumer benefits

or, you know, the city benefits, and you can point to that and say, look, It's not that we're benefiting from this. You know, when you're Airbnb and you do it in New York and you have to get a license or in Lake Tahoe, you need a license and they collect taxes on that. That consumer is benefiting. There's more availability and the state is benefiting because they're getting tax revenue and the citizens in the school and the fire department are collecting and, you know, paid for. That's awesome. Now, if you are doing it and you're benefiting, like the example I've used in the past is Parker Conrad from Zen. benefits did his little, you know, hey, let's get through insurance certifications faster. This is totally fine concept. Like, oh, yeah, I want to get people certified faster. But he was kind of bending the rules, like taking them through tests that were kind of wrote with this like toolbar extension or something that made them look like they were reading each page and they weren't. That was the allegations or that was the charge that, you know, wound up in a little sanction from the SEC, I think, and some of these insurance companies.

that felt like that was benefiting zanifits, not the consumer. So just ask yourself that, who am I benefiting? You know, and I think you have the high ground there. Anything else you're struggling with? Well, yeah, I mean, first, let me just say all really great points. And yeah, Goshaar kind of has positioned ourselves that way since the beginning as we're working with other business owners. These are guys who, you know, own a truck or van.

They want to run their own business and they're kind of using Gosher. Is that explicitly explained on your website somewhere? It's explicitly explained in the website. website, the terms of service, the marketing. And we do encourage all of the delivery professionals to start their own LLC if they can, if not a sole prop, get commercial insurance to do it the right way. Yeah. Having a landing page that was called, you know, go share, your goshare.com or co. GoShare.com slash doing it right. And how it's framed, super important. So then if you did get into, you know, a debate or a discussion with a local city or something.

And you said, oh, have you read our doing it right page? And, you know, we're doing it right. And so this is called framing in psychology, how you frame it. So you're preempting and you're also in a way creating a meme for that person in government when they go back to their meeting and saying, you know, go share, they're doing it right, which is what you want them to say. That's right. The framing is important for sure.

Would you do landing pages for each city, Jason? Because Goshaer has a lot of cities that it works in. Doing it right in Atlanta. Doing it right in San Francisco. Doing it right in this. Then you could say that page could have the title and the metadata, how to set up an LLC or how to set up a business in San Francisco for shipping. Anything else challenging in the business?

Yeah, there's a few things. But probably the second biggest one would just be, you know, over the last couple of years, there's been so many different supply chain disruptions and demand fluctuations, starting with, you know, COVID-19, pandemic. And now, you know, all these geopolitical tensions and tariffs, it's definitely causing disruptions throughout the supply chain. And we are kind of like the last mile of the supply chain. So we might be the last to feel it. But if this keeps up, it's going to trickle down to where it might impact. We literally just talked about this because we know Wall Street got hit first with the tariffs.

We saw stock prices. Then next we started to see some layoffs. And then today we talked about on the program, what were the two examples we gave on today on the program, Alex Lon? There was M&A being paused. Yes. There was one other one. Hiring.

Hiring. Hiring. Yeah. Hiring. No, but even hiring, open job positions, which is like in the same zone as layoffs, but slightly different. So that means freezing hiring and laying people off. So yeah, it's eventually going to hit you when, if restoration hardware,

picking an example here, their stock went down 70%. They can't get stuff into the country. They're on pause or cuts clothing is on pause. If you were moving some of their stuff, yeah, they're going to be like, hey, nothing to move. Here's the great news. You're a marketplace. And you are asset light. You don't own the trucks.

When all of this chaos happened during COVID, Airbnb had too many employees and their business shut down. But it didn't die. If they were a hotel chain, let's say a boutique hotel. hotel chain and they didn't have enough wherewithal or they were a cruise line, it would have had to just shut down and lay everybody off. They did do layoffs during that time because they'd overheard. Uber had the ride chairing shut down and then Uber eats sword. So I would want you to think about being anti-fragile. This is a great book. And what anti-fragile means, people think it's not being

fragile. I think actually the more proper definition of my gentleman here, my co-host will look it up exactly what Nassim Taleb means by it. But my understanding it is, in a chaotic environment, you might do even better. So it's not just resilient. It's like, no matter what happens, your product is valuable, and you are not going to have problems, you know,

in stormy weather. Go ahead, Lon. You got it? Nassim Tilev's concept of anti-fragility goes beyond resilience. Resilience involves resisting shocks and returning to the same state. Anti-fragility means throw.

arriving and gaining strength from those shocks. Okay, so let's think about that. I don't have the exact example of how you can become, have anti-fragility in your business, not just resiliency. You have resiliency as a marketplace. If you keep your cost to contractors and you keep it to a small number of full-time employees, if you have a shock to the system, like you have 50% less stuff moving to the system, you can tell your team. Really hard thing to do. We're going to furlough half the team or we're going to need everybody for 20 hours a week. We understand if you quit and have to go find another job. But you can tell you. You can't. You can't have to go find another job. you can take emergency measures like that because you haven't built up a bunch of infrastructure.

You don't own the trucks. The person who does own the trucks, they got a problem. They have to become anti-fragile as well. Like, what do you do with your trucks? If you can't ship other stuff, maybe you can, there's another use for them. So, yeah, think about that. And think about, you know, if there is a shock. Yeah.

If there was, I don't know if the gentleman with me have any thoughts on creatively, the first thing is to make sure your costs are incredibly, appropriate, that you're not a fat company, that you're, you know, if you were doing advertising as an example, you don't have like a five-person full-time advertising team. You have one person who's responsible for marketing and advertising, and they use a series of freelancers, and they go up and down. And we kind of experienced that during COVID.

I'd say that the first couple of months, like Q2 of 2020, it was extremely chaotic. A lot of retailers closed their doors. It negatively impacted us. But ultimately, we got stronger over time because it turns out, everyone needed delivery during that time. So ultimately, like, our marketplace grew a lot after taking a little bit of a dip in that first, you know, in that first April through June period of 2020. And there was a lot of demand for what we were offering.

What else could a person with the van, typically the category is man with the van? Yeah. I think is the category. I think literally that's what it was called on Craigslist at some point. That's right. That's right. A little sexist, but in the man with the van category, what else could man with the van do? Man with the van can also do waste removal, garbage removal, right?

They could also do if they had gardening equipment, landscaping or gardening. I'm just picking out like two or three categories of what they could do. Moving is probably the other really big one. Moving, sure. So I think maybe in your FAQ or your training of doing it right and doing right by city, here are two or three other businesses you can add to your man with a van business or, you know, dudes with a truck or whatever it is, you know. two persons in a truck.

I don't know. We'll get gender neutral on this. Two individuals. I think with alliteration, we can always go with man and vans. This is a great thing for Gemini. Have truck will travel. Have truck will travel.

What else can a truck do? Right. Well, what else can people with a truck do? Well, they can certainly do groundskeeping and you sometimes have to remove a bunch of stuff from the ground.

So then here's another idea. What if they're businesses, you had a page, builder on your business where they can have a landing page or you could build them a landing page using your software. Now you provide a tool for them to build a page to SEO. You give them a domain name or it's, you know, go share slash or Lon and JCal dot go share. So you know, they have their own kind of domain space. And then they pay you a hundred bucks a year for that page or 25 bucks a month. Now you got a second revenue stream. It's sticky. They take orders through you. You help

them process it because they don't have the ability to build a landing page and you could actually train them. Hey, here are six services you could offer when they click on that they were doing moving, you know, apartment moving and whatever. You could actually have the pricing and the landing page that defines it and get a quote and all that could be done and abstracted for them because I'm guessing man with the van does not have a website team on their, you know, on their team. Very unlikely. They may have a website at best, but no, it's probably like a great Squarespace site, a great Wixite, something like that. Great job, Sean. Great to be in business with you. Where can people find out more? Visit our website, goshare.com. We also have mobile apps for iPhone and Android. And you can, if you want to reach me directly, LinkedIn or Twitter is great. Okay. Or they could just email, I suppose, Sean and goshare.com.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, thanks for having you guys. Pleasure to be here. Awesome. Continuous success and really great to be in business. Yeah, great time. Yeah. Great job. Yeah. Great job.

Thank you. I love doing the office hours here for two reasons, Lon and Alex. Number one, the brainstorming is awesome, right? I get so much out of the brainstorm. It gets me creatively going. And number two, it gives me an excuse to catch up with one of our portfolio companies in an efficient way so that y'all who are listening who are entrepreneurs can hear a VC, you know, an investor and their founder just trying to figure some stuff out, right?

Yeah. And tease it out. We've had this great program founder. University, if you're thinking of starting a company, get two or three of your friends who like to build and then apply to founder. University. And we did this new thing last week. Instead of all 300 companies getting together, we get together in groups of 20 or 30.

And so we're really learning in the front lines in 2025 what the acute problems are. Then we take those problems. Also, the wins. And we have a really good dialogue with 20 founders at once. Everybody gives their wins. Everybody gives their fails or blocks. and then we try to work through the blockers. And it's kind of like a mastermind group.

It's kind of like Founder Fridays, except at Founder University. And we did it last week. We're doing it again this week. It was really powerful. And the amount of energy coming out of it and knowledge sharing is just crazy. Yeah. I was a little nervous before running my first session because, you know, I'm not a founder. I'm just some guy.

But they've got so much to talk about like they barely needed me. It was a really great group and they had a lot to say. I did want to say before we wrap up, launch accelerator, Cohort 34 kicks off today. Awesome. So we did want to give them a shout out. Congrats to all the participating companies. 11 startups, yeah.

Yeah, I have the list here. And applications for LA35, now open launchaccelerator. God, if you want to see all the companies in Launch 34, we are going to have them today in the Twist Ticker, which you can find it at This Beacon Startups.com. And make sure to sign up for that. It's our daily newsletter, mostly focused on the Twist 500, but we always make room for internal news. So the names will be there.

Awesome. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye. Bye.