This Week in Startups - Figma IPO, IMAX AI Festival, the Tea app spill, that one Sydney Sweeney jeans ad, and more! | E2157

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

Today’s show:SYDNEY SWEENEY’S AMERICAN EAGLE AD DIVIDES OUR PANEL!PLUS WHAT STARTUPS CAN LEARN FROM THE VIRAL ASTRONOMER RESPONSEJason, Alex, and Lon are looking at some of the biggest media stories of the day before returning to their favorite topic, tech. Tune in for deep dives on IMAX’s new AI film festival, Figma’s big IPO and much more!*Timestamps:(0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show!(3:45) Lon’s joining Alex and Lon to discuss the controversial Sydney Sweeney genes/jeans ad(7:20) A look at the polarizing takes on this jeans ad.(10:10) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠(11:46) Hear the verdict from Jason, self—proclaimed Chairman of the Interwebs(16:42) Alex points out the economic impact of the controversy(20:26) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(21:25) Back to the show!(26:35) Paltrow’s Astronomer ad, meme-processing and the ideal way to change the conversation(30:04) Vouched - Trust for agents that’s built for builders like you. Check it out at http://vouched.id/twist(31:28) Back to the show!(36:48) Netflix and the growing controversy around AI’s role in filmmaking(42:53) IMAX/Runway collaboration and Hollywood’s shifting attitude toward AI(47:34) Everything that went wrong with the Tea App(54:27) Why Jason thinks app stores should ban “anonymous” forms and message boards(1:04:19) Figma upped its IPO price… what does it mean for the return of liquidity? And is this too high or fairly priced?(1:07:53) Paul Graham says you shouldn’t drop out of college to work on a startup… Why Thiel Fellows disagree*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(10:10) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist⁠(20:26) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(30:04) Vouched - Trust for agents that’s built for builders like you. Check it out at http://vouched.id/twist*Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

This is just terrible. I mean, the people who built this app are going to have massive liability, massive liability, because, gosh, I hate to even say this, but if this app succeeded in what it was doing, then people would have written reviews about the people they thought were the most dangerous,

and now those most dangerous people, if there are, are a fact, are dangerous people in the world, know who wrote the review of them and had previously dated them or gone on a date with them. Holy cow, that seems to me to be a recipe for real pain and suffering in the future. Such a colossal catastrophe. Now, the venture capital side of this is, as far as I can tell, T has not raised any external funding.

So I don't think there's anyone that we can hang this on inside the industry, Jason. But there's 4.6 million people who were using this application before. And here's the crazy thing. I thought it was going to fall off the ratings or rankings because clearly it's not a well-run company. It was still ranked number two this morning right behind Chad CTPT. on the American iOS App Store. Wow. This week in startups is brought to you by OpenFone.

Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. 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. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist.

And vouched. Turn your AI infrastructure into production grade software with know your agent from vouched. Check it out yourself at vouched. Dotting. Trust for agents that's built for builders like you. All right, everybody, welcome back to this weekend startups. I'm your host, Jason Calcannis. We have with us, Lon Harris and Alex Wilhelm.

How you doing, Channelman? You have a good weekend? Yeah, really good weekend. All right. It's Monday. There's a lot to do. I'm in the Austin headquarters back from Washington, D.C., New York, Singapore, San Francisco. A whirlwind trip. It's just been crazy. And now I'm going to Park City for the KPMG annual retreat. I give my yearly predictions. Alex, I think, did you work with me on it last year? I helped make that presentation for you. Yeah. Thank you. Yes. So we're doing it again. It seems like it's going to become a yearly tradition.

A lot of stuff going on in entertainment. So I asked Lon to come today to talk about that. If you're listening to us live, we're going to have the launch accelerator. Some of you know I run an accelerator where we put $125,000 into 10, 12 companies. We work with them for 14 weeks on their pitch. We introduced them to hundreds of investors. And then we work with them on product, market fit, building their team, and really understanding their customers deeper.

We've done 34 cohorts of this accelerator. over the past, I would say decade or so. We've had a unicorn come out of it. We've had many companies worth hundreds of millions, and we are currently getting over 20,000 applications for funding. You can always apply for funding from launch, my investment company at launch.co slash applied. If you want to watch this demo day,

it'll be live on the This Week in Startups YouTube channel, and you can go to launch.com slash live to watch it live. And maybe we'll release it as a special episode of This Week in Startups as well. Lots to get to today. We got that T app. Sports leagues are investing. Yeah, we're going to spill the tea on the T app. The sports leagues are investing.

Ramp is looking to raise the 21. Anthropic $150 billion. Of course, we have to talk about Astronomer and Gwyneth Paltrow and Tesla launched their new diner. Just a lot going on. So much. But let's start with the media stuff, Lon. I guess this Sydney-Sweeney thing,

you and I, Lauren, as Gen Xers have been hanging out on TikTok. TikTok. So now we DM each other. Yeah, yeah. We had a little streak. TikTok keeps track of how often you talk to your friends. And we were on, you and I have a pretty strong backdoor TikTok streak. Yeah.

Yes. And one of the things I saw was last week, Sydney Sweeney started doing an ad campaign for American Eagle jeans. Now, this is important, Alex, because it's a publicly traded company. So you'll give us the publicly traded angle. Lon, as our culture and media representative, sure. Nothing happens in this world without it being, this is my core theory,

nothing happens in the world without it going back to the horseshoe theory of either maga lunatics, loving it, hating it, or the libs going crazy. The blue sky is falling contingent, yeah. Yes. So we have that as a backdrop here, but I think it's important to talk about this

because this one feels like a borderline situation where you and I both flipped our opinions on this. Yeah. Let's tee it up for the audience and we have to show some graphics here because this is dependent on a script and graphics. Right. So Sidney Sweeney is doing a big new campaign for American Eagle jeans. And the tagline is Sidney Sweeney has great jeans. Obviously a play on, we're talking about denim. But jeans also as in her genetics are great because she's such a beautiful lady. And I think on that level, it's just a dad joke. It's just a pun.

Having good jeans, jeans. I think everybody appreciates that. But if you take a look at this one ad in particular, which was one of the first ads under the campaign to come out, it sort of struck people in the wrong way. Let's take a look and then we'll talk about the context. Okay. Jeans are pressed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality. Sure. And even I color.

And I cute. My jeans are blue. Sidney Sweeney has very jeans. Okay. So here's the thing. I think Sidney has great jeans, not a controversial statement. I think most people would agree a beautiful lady.

But it's the tying it to the hair color and the eye color specifically, having her, my jeans are blue. And she's this sort of, you know, the kind of what we would think of is the Aryan ideal. A blonde hair, blue-eyed young woman, white woman. white woman. And so I think that's the part that has sort of rubbed some people the wrong way.

It's very overt in its praising of not just that she has good genetics, but Sidney's specific genetics. And I think that you do have to consider it in terms of the larger cultural moment that we're in. There's a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment. There's a lot of pushback against wokeness.

There's all of this stuff about race. I think if you did, you know, Kiki Palmer has great. genes, I don't think anybody would have found that offensive. I think it's the blonde-haired, blue-eyed specific thing. So it has set off a lot of reactions on social media, many of them very vitriolic and negative. Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a great place for us to show the reaction. Yeah. And then I'll give my commentary. And Alex will come in with what's happened to the stock. So here's a woman named Ashley. Her account is called Ashley Luna and Novi. Those are her pets,

Luna and Novi. She has 115,000 followers, right? So this lady's killing it at TikTok. Okay, here we go. This is literal eugenics slapping everyone in the face. And the reason why I say this so bluntly is because the only people that I've seen actually call this eugenics and say what needs to be said about this advertisement or disabled people and women of color, the two demographics of people who are literally the most impacted by eugenics. So she's saying this is outright, we're saying white is right. we should only be breeding Sydney Sweenies and if your genetics aren't like hers

you're wrong. We got one more example. Here's dew drops. She's got 54.8,000 followers. Again, much better at TikTok than me. Just to put that out there. She's killing. These were the ones that were trending.

Yeah, she's killing it. Here's her thoughts on the Sydney Sweetie ad. You guys are complaining about that Sydney, Sweeney and Jeans ad, so I went and saw it. that's not the propaganda. Wow.

I thought it was going to be like, kind of. That's going to be in history, but... Wow. All right. So much to process you. I mean, number one, pretty classic, depending on the Overton window,

to use very attractive individuals in advertising. Sure, sure. We went through Mark Wahlberg in his underwear, and in fact, the guy from the bear, Jeremy All right, he's doing an ad campaign in his underwear. I know this as well because I'm on the TikTok with you. Sure. Observing culture.

An interesting tie-in recently, Carl's Jr., if you remember in the aughts, they were very famous for, it was always a really sexy lady eating a burger like Paris Hilton did one, where she was like washing a car in like her underwear, eating a burger. Yeah, right. And then in the sort of woke era, they stopped doing those and they changed the entire Carl's Jr. ad campaign to something more conservative. But then just recently, they've been. gone back and reintroduce the sexy car wash girl Carl's Jr. campaign. So it is like the pendulum

has swung in the other way again. So there is a long history of this. The Overton window opens and closes for sexy ads and how risque. I don't think it's the sexiness though. Okay. It's the idea that good genes are tied to blonde hair, blue eyes looking specifically like Sidney-Sweeney. I think that's the uncomfortable connection. Got it. To be honest, like, do I think that this is a little bit of an overreaction, of course. But I do think there's the nugget of something there. I do think it's a little weird. And I feel like there probably weren't a lot of people of color in the room when they were devising this campaign. And it may be inadvertent, but I do think there isn't. Well, that's where I was going to go. I do think there is something

there. Whether it's inadvertent or not, I do think there's something there. Incoming phone calls are the lifeblood of your business. Every call is a new opportunity, even if they come after business hours. Maybe you're out. You're watching the new Superman flick, or I'm going to go see the new Fantastic Four of my daughters. Some phone calls are going to come in. It's going to be a founder.

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I'm going to provide full contacts and I'm going to draw this out before I give my verdict as chairman of the interwebs. Alex. Yes. There is a meme, stong connection here. What is it? So American Eagle stock rose about 10% in the wake of this news, bringing the value of American Eagle up to about $2 billion, Jason. I'm not going to bore you with a price sales ratio here, but it turns out clothing, not a great business. So the company's worth $2 billion. Based on what you've told me, back of envelope,

they added roughly $200 million in market cap by hiring Sidney Sweeney. I wonder how much of that Sidney-Sweeney got. It can't have been more than. Not enough. Probably like a $10, $15 million deal or something. I will tell you, the meme stock companies, I know this firsthand, are very interested in giving RSUs, restricted stock units. I know this personally.

because now, as you guys know, I am podcast famous because of All In, not just this week in startups where I do my duty to follow my passion for technology and startups. I have now become memeable and on the margins, you know,

famous in the same way, a reality TV star is famous. Having known you for 20 years now, I have seen, it is notably markedly different. People used to recognize you, but now people recognize you all over. Yeah, it's a little different.

So I can uniquely comment on this. I bet you they gave her $10 million in RSUs for this and $10 million in cash, $5 million in cash. I need to know the exact details of our deal. Yeah, I'd love to know the Sydney-Sweeney American Eagle deal for sure. Because Sidney-Sweeney should have launched her own gene company. She has been doing these co-lap. She did a soap that was a little bit risque as well.

Was it Dr. Squintje? those like premium soap companies where yeah they were selling bath a soap made with bath water that Sydney sweet sweet sweet had used okay so I've got to give a lot of verdicts here a lot of yeah I just want to point out Sydney Sweeney has taken a different route than my friend gwyneth paltrow oh great tie yeah yeah who uh started a company goo and then just alba started the honest company. So there's two ways to monetize your fame. One is to be a spokesperson, two is to create your own brand a la skims by Kim Kardashian. And so what happens is celebrities can sometimes make more money from these pursuits. Yeah. And they do from

their main career. Rihanna's a billionaire now. I'm good to say. Yeah. And Kim Kardashian, honest company, and Goop, I would venture to say each of those enterprises and Bella Thorne with her, I think she has a jewelry line. I met her through my friend, Nick Durackey, the film director who have had on the program here. It's just called Thorne. Jewelry and smoking accessories.

So she also makes like vape, vape accessories. She also is in the cannabis game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's five incredible, that happened to be women. It's interesting, just off the top of my head, the five that came to mind were all women.

I suppose some men have gotten in on this as well. The Deadpool actor. Yeah, Ryan Reynolds, right. He's got aviation gin, and he's got his own. marketing company. And George Clooney had his tequila. Right. And so does the rock has Tehrama? Casano. Yeah. The Rock has his own tequila. And Olin has his own tequila. Okay. So there's something here to be said about

Sidney Sweeney needs to start her own company. It's great that she did these two pilots, but she needs to go all in on something that's unique to her. And if she's going for the classic American girl, rock and roll, jeans, throwback to the 70s or 80s, That has unlimited upside. She should probably start a car company for a sports car, like they compete with Carvette or her own gene company or some kind of clothing company. She does have this cultural cachet that like almost no one else of her generation has, like very specifically her and that like Americana vibe.

But the reason is because she leans into it. She's actually made a determined effort to lean in to being this generation's Farrah Fawcett or whatever it is. or Mark Wahlberg. It doesn't have to do with gender, by the way, which didn't come up in all this. Okay. So there's your backdrop. She's an incredible force.

I'm wondering if there's a SaaS software company or an app we can pair her with in our portfolio. That's what I'm thinking is. I mean, call your buddies at the call map. Who's promoting the company? Well, I mean, I think Athena, you know, like I was able to double their MRR, their number of people using. And if you go to Athenawow.com, you can get like a free month, free couple weeks.

They were out of assistance for a long time. But I literally, they told me I doubled their yearly ARR when I came on as their first investor and a spokesperson. There is definitely something here with her. Yeah. Okay. I just want to point out one thing. We're going to be able to see the impact of all of this.

I think we talk a lot about it's in the abstract of what were they trying to do? What's the impact on? Sydney, Sweeney. So for next quarter, if you take a look at this is from the American Eagle earnings from the first quarter came out in May 29th, they were expecting revenue to fall 5 percent, comparable sales down 3%, erosion in gross margin, for example. So what I'm curious about is when the numbers come, when the chips fall, what impact is Sydney Spinney have?

Because clearly, this is the first time I believe we've discussed consumer apparel brands on the show. So it's got people talking. I mean, we, maybe for you and I and Lon, but we have talked about all birds in the past. So once in a while, there'll be a startup that comes in. It's very rare. You're correct. It's like once every cut clothing as well.

Cut clothing came on. Actually, that was a good one because that came on because that came on. because of the tariff stuff. Yeah, yeah. So now we are left with blue-eyed, blonde hair commentary, which I am uniquely qualified to give. I have blue eyes. I have dirty blonde hair.

I had very blonde hair when I was younger. It's gotten dirty blonde now in my older years. The ad campaigns I saw with the play on word of jeans is her leaning into, hey, I have this incredible aesthetic, therefore no harm, no foul, it's playful, it's funny. there are genes, genes. Now, what happened is in a brainstorming room, there were a group of people who were young and who have not read the bell curve, because they didn't add to this that IQ is inherited as well. Very controversial subject. It's true, folks. I hate to break it to you,

but IQ is also included in this, body types included in it as sure. Don't blame me, but you can blame Darwin, you can read the IQ. It turns out IQ and the bell curve and all that is so de minimis, it doesn't matter. It's like less than 1% of IQ is determined by genes, according to countless discussions between Sam Harris and the author of the bell curve and however people want to weaponize that data. So what happened here is one of two things. Charles Murray. There's a secret, Charles Murray, thank you. One of two things. There is a secret Aryan Brotherhood or Aryan eugenics gene with a J, Kabul. that we are unaware of, that is using Sidney Sweeney to perpetuate and to, in fact, reverse

the trend in the world, which is multiculturalism and, you know, and bring back whites. That's the possibility. There could be the CEO of America, was it called American Eagle? American Eagle, yeah. Is a Nazi. That is what people are claiming online, that he could be, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer who wants to spread this. Or, to your point, Lon, some dopey people,

we're playing with metaphors and got too close to the fire. Yes. And didn't realize it. I think Bucket 2 is way more like. And it's definitely Bucket 2. There's no instance in which this is part of a giant. I would just say the one counter I would say would be like steak and shake. Like steak and shake, the fast food brand has clearly made a very specific effort.

We want to be in with the Trump administration. We want MAGA to like us. So they've made a lot of overtures to RFK. They're doing the beef tallow thing. They did that ad where RFK was in the steak. They want to be that. Right. There's no need. To be clear, they're not eugenics.

No, no, no, no. I'm saying they're making as a company, they've made a specific, like, we want to align with Maha and the Trump administration. Yeah, okay, fine. Yeah, you just want to be on the winning team. And you want to get rid of seed oils, love all that. Is it theoretically possible that somebody did American Eagle was like, you know, we would also like to align with MAGA? No. All right, founders, I know you're building something amazing and you're going to change the world.

And now, hey, the big logos, they're taking your calls, right? But here's the catch. If you're not SOC2 or ISO-27-001 compliant, these deals won't close. Now, some of you're saying, I've never heard of those terms. Some of you're saying, I've heard of them, but I don't know what they are. And that's where Vanta comes in. They're going to be your partner. And they are the all-in-one compliance solution that helps startups get audit ready.

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Join over 8,000 companies, simplify your compliance, and get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash T-W-I-S-T. I mean, they're already going. for Americana. They're already going for people probably in red states. I think she's kind of a red state icon. Very much. I think she's an icon everywhere. She is. She is an icon across lines, because Euphoria is as left as you get. She is an icon for everybody, but the right has tried to claim her. There's a lot of online... I've seen that. There's a lot of online discourse that

it's like, this versus, and then they'll pick a woman of color actors or whatever. Large and in charge. Right. Yeah, all that kind of. She's what we should be returning to. That is beautiful. Okay. None of it matters. This is just a dopey marketing campaign on the margins. A brilliant marketing campaign. And then some dopey kids, I don't think they intentionally dog whistled. I think they maybe were playing with it. And they're just not sophisticated enough to know how it would be interpreted. I think that is the most likely one. You think that's, too? And Alex, what's your take? I think this was people being silly and not realizing the current context. So yeah, I'm with you guys on this.

But I do want to point out there's the impact of it. So, for example, I joke that we're talking about it. So they won. But here's Google trends for American Eagle. And they're about to set at least a multi-year high in total search interest. So this is huge. Yeah. I'm always a little skeptical.

Like, is that going to really pay off and like they're going to sell a lot more jeans? Like, maybe. I pulled the numbers. Let's get a polymarket going here. Will, how much? will revenue go up? I want this polymark. Sydney Sweeney impact on Q3 revenue. That's what I'd like to know. And Q4 revenue. I'm going to say she increases the revenue by 20% or more.

Wow. That would be big. Top line goes up 20%. That's big. You take the over the under, gentlemen. I think it's the under. Because I think you're going to have a lot of people that are going to be, I'm not going to buy American Eagle jeans because I'm offended. You're going to get some of that too. The offended is like 3%. They probably weren't going to buy these anyway. I'll take the over on that. You're taking the over. Over under. I'm the over. Great. I set the line. We need polymarket to create an American Eagle index. So I'll have one. You can email them. We'll talk to Mike. We'll talk to Mike. How much will there, I think the way to do it is five choices, is how they typically do these. Like they do for the, how much will the Fed cut rates?

Right. You pull up the how the Fed cuts rates for September please. Yeah, you would do 5%, 10%, 20% over 20% or something like that. You book five buckets is probably the way to do it. And let's reach out to Shane. It's going to be legal to place these bets. So going forward, gentlemen, I know how much you both make. Five percent of your income because I paid or pay some of it. You guys have some other things you're working on. I'm going to say you each have to put 5 percent into your gambling pool.

Oh, wow. But it's going to be on, folks. Where when this. Strait the poker budget. Yeah, your poker budget is going right in here because I'm going to have skin in the game. I'm going to make you guys put in 500. bucks on these bets going forward, and I'm going to put in 5,000. Here we go. So here you go.

Chances of a Fed decision in September, as you can see, 58% think 25 or 50 plus rate cut, and then 42% believe no change. Okay, so they have it. So I'll be the final word on this as the token, blonde hair, blue-eyed person. Go have

fun with your marketing. But have somebody review it at the end. And like, I would say, if you're on the woke side, find some like Tucker Carlson fans to review your shit. And then if you're on the other side, go ask Rachel Maddo fans or Cat Ladies,

TikTokers on the left to review your stuff. And look for the lesson is, and this is how I mentor founders. So I can bring this back to startups. The way to do this is say, what's the worst possible interpretation of what we just did? What would be the way people would spin it

who are absolutely of bad faith? So when you ask yourself those two questions, what would a bad faith actor do to weaponize this against me? So let's say I bought a bunch of Tucker Carlson's outs and I expensed them against my venture fund. And I said, no, no, I did that because it was only $25 and it was a stunt as part of our investment day. And we're considering investing in the category. And it was just a prop. It was a prop for the show. Now, another person would say, oh, no, Jason's addicted to nicotine.

and he's trying to funnel money to subvert, whatever. So always think about that. What is the worst possible interpretation by a reasonable person? And then you can go even further. How would an enemy of mine weaponize this against me? And I see founders do this. They will put their rent for their apartment on their expenses and say, well, I work from home. And it's like, yeah, but here's all the reasons why that doesn't jive.

That's the way to get to do marketing campaigns, any of your behavior. what's the worst possible interpretation, and then go from there. It's a classic creatives or writer's room. Like they always say when you're putting a writer's room together, you don't want all white guys in the writer's room. And that's not just because, you know, it's wrong to only hire one kind of person, but it's because you don't get that person speaking up

to be like, um, if you only have one perspective in the room. So I think that's probably what happened here. I think the other thing that's interesting to talk about, since we're in the celebrity area and you're here along, is the sort of meme processing window not only has closed, but it's been slam shot and it has been locked by Gweth Paltrow. We talked last week about Astronomer. They are, of course, the cloud security startup that became overnight, very famous when their

CEO and their head of HR were caught, let's say canoodling at the Coldplay concert by Coldplay Frontman Chris Martin. Footage went super viral. They obviously got caught with each other and were embarrassed that it became a whole thing. There's a new CEO. They're relaunching astronomer. They're trying to sort of move past this. moment, and they had this viral ad with temporary spokeswoman, Gwyneth Paltrow, who, of course,

Chris Martin's ex very famously, they were married and then. The lead singer of Cole play. Right. So this in some way is adjacent. She is... They hired his ex-wife, Gwyneth Paltrow, as their temporary spokesman to do this, like, ad where it's like, we're trying to change the conversation back. Here's a little taste of the ad.

Thank you for your interest in astronomer. Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300-plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days, and they wanted me to answer the most common ones. Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data, ML, and AI pipelines at scale. We've been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation.

As for the other questions we received, yes, there is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September. We will now be returning to what we do best, delivering game-changing results for our customers. All right. Thank you for your interest in astronomer. Shout out to my pal Gipo on just an absolute brilliant ad. I mean, she is a tremendous actress because she delivered that perfectly. It's a great.

What you're missing here is, said like, oh, m.g, what the F? And she just answers a different question. Yeah. Which is, whoever wrote this, I also want to give a shout out to the agency or the writers, whoever did this because they understood the moment perfectly.

And the comedic timing here, Gwen Ocantra is a very, you know, serious actress, but also can do action. And she can do comedy. And this just shows how great she is at it. If they paid her a million dollars for this, it was worth it. Because the lifetime value of a customer

of astronomers' products. Gotta be, you know, like a major customer is $100,000 a year. I'm going to guess. $250,000 a year. So you get one incremental customer out of this.

It pays for Gwendo de Paltrow doing this. And this took her based on her professionalism showing up at a studio and doing no more than a half day's work. An hour in makeup,

an hour of rehearsal and talking about it. And then an hour, she can bang this out at half an hour. She knocked this out quick, yeah. This is a half day's work. And if she got less than a million dollars, I need to talk to her agent.

Has to be a minimum of a million. I would have gone for a million in cash, million RSUs. Genius. Everybody wins here. We move on. All right, everybody, it is the summer of 2025 and AI is everywhere. And I promise you, AI agents are already crawling around your websites and your products. And I am using, hey, Perplexity's comment browser all the time with Claude.

Love it. And I can't be the only one. These tools are going to change online transactions on every single level. There's a problem. How do you tell if this is a real authentic, helpful agent that represents a real person coming to your website? Or is this a spam bot? Is this fraud? Is this a bad actor using AI agents? You're going to book a trip with a sketchy travel agent? You're not. You're going to trust some new employee without a social security number? Oh, no, you're not. Trust me. Compliance will not let you. So why would you trust an AI agent that you just met with your personal info and your credit cards? You're not. That's why our friends had vouched created Know Your Agent. K-YA. With K-YA from Vouch, you're going to have identity service that verify humans behind each and every agent.

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It's trust for agents that's built for builders and founders like me and you. And this came out, what day did this come out? Because that's the other thing. I think this may have come out Friday. It was July 25th,

which was Friday. And I think it was a week earlier, Thursday is when this broke because we talked about it on Friday. We did talk about an all-in, so I think it happened Wednesday the night before. So we're talking,

this all was occurred in. Yes. This goes back to my meme processing concept. In our society, these moments, when they do hit, we process them so quickly that not only did we get to the memes happening same day, same hour, people had memes up in the same hour. Yeah, it was July 16th was the concert. Okay, so the total, we're here on the 28th. Nine days after the concert, this astronomer ad with Gwyneth Paltrow was posted. Which means they recorded it two days earlier on the seven days out. They recorded it within a week of the original incident. Which means they came up with the idea four days after.

Fifth day, they pitched her. Six day, they got her at a degree. Seven day, they taped it. Ninth day, they released it. Yeah, something like that. And here we are 12 days later. I just want to give it just complete utter shout out to the board of astronomer. Obviously, the management was a disaster for doing what they did,

just total entitlement, ridiculousness, the HR person. but we can have some grace, we can all move on, let them, you know, their biggest mistake or one of their biggest mistakes in their lives in all likelihood was captured and seen by hundreds of millions of people, but we're done with it. We move on everybody. That is an interesting point that I think this ad more than almost anything I can remember from recent sort of viral history really did succeed at shifting the entire conversation. There was a story over this weekend that sort of started to break out, and I don't want to cast dispersion. We don't have to dig into it. There were more stories about the astronomer CEO and possibly other women,

other allegations that maybe this was not an isolated incident, but those did not break out. Those did not go viral because everybody was talking about the Gwyneth Paltrow ad. And so, like, that's true success. They shut down the other viral angles and made themselves the center of the story, which is not easy to do. They understood the meme cycle. this is all meme processing folks. Alex, your thoughts? Yeah, so two things. One, 36 million views on X. That's just simply insane number that we should underscore.

So if they paid a million dollars, they're paying, you know, three cents of view, whatever. It's cheap. Also, I got to ask, who hired this CEO guy? Doesn't seem to be a very good leader. I'm looking at their cap table here. I'm like, was it Bain? Was it insight? Someone should have had better personnel choices.

Well, I mean, here's what you'll learn in business. I've learned this certainly over years. some of these individuals, these hired gun CEOs. I don't know this one, so I'm not talking about him. I'm just talking in general. You build a career. You basically don't have people around you who can tell you the truth. Like, you know, the Mad King kind of syndrome, the King has no clothes.

Yeah. And so that is something that happens. People become entitled. And then they become risk takers. And risk takers in business succeed. Therefore, they get these jobs. and then you would expect that they would do risk-taking and other aspects of their lives,

including they'll go heliskeying. They'll do scuba diving. Richard Branson's whole career with this like, I'm going to balloon across the Atlantic. Look it up. He was like involved in all these kind of crazy pursuits. Stunts, yeah. Stunts, but, you know, they're just thrill seekers.

So it's thrilling to, you know, be an entrepreneur, be a CEO. It's thrilling to do action sports. And Mark Zuckerberg, And fighting sports, for example. MMA. That one feels premeditated PR constructed. Is there a way? Anyway, if we were to think outside the box here for that CEO or that HR person to do what astronomer did.

So let's just let that sink in. The HR person who had an affair with her CEO, apparently allegedly, I could put some things on there because who knows what was going on there. Could have just been a Heinlech maneuver misinterpreted. Could have been choking on a chicken wing. It's very unlikely. But it's a chance that could have happened. I mean, I'm just trying to give the people the better with the doubt. Is there a company she could go work for, like, Delete Me?

There's a company called Delete Me. I hear their hands. That's my best one. You know, you need to, sometimes you make a mistake, and it ranks high on your search results. That's why I use Delete Me to delete my name from databases. I think there's always, a wit, you know, like you can always come back. If you're clever enough, if you give it enough time, if you're smart enough about how you do it. I think there's always a second. People love that.

They love a redemption story. They love a comeback. You got to give me a specific. I got such a great one for this guy. I have the next CEO role for this guy. Okay. There you go. I was thinking, what's that Ashley Madison? Perfect. Dingo, you got it. Yeah, that's the obvious layup. He becomes CEO of Ashley Madison and says, listen. Don't be like me. Yeah, you don't need to go to a Coldplay concert. Go to Ashley Madison. I don't know. All right, before we let you go, Lon, what's going on with this IMAX AI thing?

Oh, yeah, I thought this was really interesting. There's also, I noticed Netflix admitted they're going to start using AI as well. They already have. Netflix actually, during their previous earnings report, Ted Serando said, we didn't say it at the time, but there is an Argentine sci-fi show called the Eternaut, El Eternat. And in one episode, they used AI to help create this visual effect of a building. It's like a parking structure collapsing. That was made with the help of runway AI software at the time.

They put it in the show. Nobody noticed or said anything. And now they've gone back and said, okay, we've already done it. But it's now part of the Netflix production pipeline. What does that mean to you as a creative and fan of cinema? I mean, I think it's important to draw some distinctions. I think when people think that. about using AI to make a movie, they're picturing me going to chat GPT and saying, make a

movie about minions, and then it goes bloop, bloop, and it makes one. That's not what this is. This is people who are already using a lot of different computer animation, computer design, modeling technology to make all of these visual effects. And then they found an AI app that works well in that workflow to help make things faster and quicker and cheaper. So whereas you might have needed an animator to spend days creating the the wire frame for this parking structure and then animating it collapsing, a program can do that much quicker and easier out. Lon, do you want me to play the clip we had pulled you?

Oh, yeah. Oh, I'd love that. Yeah. Here's the clip from the Eternot that I believe is, they didn't specify, this is my best guess, but I'm 99% sure I found the right clip. Oh, there's no sound. I'm sorry. It's okay.

We're seeing a person, there's a building. And it's the parking structure collapses, some cars fall off. That appears to have been the show. that they're talking about. It looks fake. I mean, it's not great. It's not good. It's not look practical.

The motion looks fake. It's either computer animated or AI. I think it's a mix of AI. It looks like incredibly bad CGI. But, you know, I think for some of these schlocky movies they put out, I'm not saying this one is a schlocky movie, but I never heard of it. Sounds like a schlocky movie. It's a series.

It's from Argentina. But it actually stars Ricardo Darin, who's one of the big Argentine film stars. So it's a notable show from Argentina. Anyway, it looks schlocking. Here's the good news. It does look a little shlocky folks. So did the Irishman and the de-aging in the Irishman.

That looked schlucky and they cost of $30 million. So did Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian. All that looked schlocky too. And that was done with CGI, not A. Yeah, that was human artists.

Yeah. So, but using CGI, I think practical effects are so good in some movies that when you see a series like Andor doing a lot of practical effects and sets,

I think, you know, for now, people who are fans of cinema can tell the difference. Yeah. The majority people can't, and this is going to get better. Ted Serando said recently, the amount of money they spent on that de-aging was like 30 million in the Irishman. Yeah. And they weren't sure if, like, the technology would be ready in time, yada, yada. And they should just go back and redo it with AI and it would be better now, which somebody did.

Somebody did that to Luke Skywalker. there was a kid who redid the de-aging, and I believe Lucasfilm hired this person to go work for them. Yeah, that's true. I do think there's another issue with the motion cap, but the de-aging specifically,

this has been brought up a few times. They can't de-age the way an old person moves. It's still 70-something De Niro and they're animating over him, but a 70-year-old man doesn't walk like a 25-year-old man. And so your eye is picking up on all of these details. And even though, you know, the face looks 20, you're like, that's not a 20-year-old.

It's the same thing people were saying, this also happened in Captain Marvel, where they d-h Samuel L. Jackson's face to make him look like a younger man. And it looks okay, but he still runs down a hallway like 70-year-old Jackson. So it doesn't look right. So I think they keep running into that problem. Like there's a scene in the Irishman where he's like stomping a guy on the ground. He's like kicking his ass. And a 75-year-old man can't believably do that physically.

You need a young actor to stand in for him. So it looks silly. But just going back to the person who got hired by Lucas Films, it was the YouTuber Shemuk. Yeah. Who stopped posting on YouTube and was asked why. And he was like, well, I got a gig doing this now for money versus as a fan. Well, this shows you spec work can equal opportunity.

Now, if you're in year 30 or 40 of your career, you might find spec work doing work for free as like beneath you. But if you're up and coming, doing a little spec work, I can tell you, we'll get people's attention. It might get your foot in the door. So, you know, it's not equally created. In the 90s, they used to tell people not to do that. But in the 2020s, if you put your stuff out there online for people to see, that is the best

resume you could possibly have. The woman from Insecure, wasn't she, she did a YouTube channel. It's a right. Yeah, she was just a huge. She used to do, she had her own YouTube channel for years. diary of an insecure black lady or something like that. Something like that, yeah, yeah. It was kind of like the rough version.

It was, yeah, it was an early version of insecure. And then I was going to say, Dan Tractonberg, he was a YouTuber. He used to host geeky shows and then he made a short film based on those video games portal. He's the guy that's now running the Predator franchise. He just made that animated. He just made the Predator animated show for Hulu. He's making the movie now with El Fanning. So he just, they found him on YouTube.

Well, and what's interesting about that one is they've decided to, join the world's officially of Predator. An alien, yeah, yeah. And Alien. She's a Waylon Utani synthetic in the new one. Yeah, Whalen is the company that went out to look for the aliens and owns all the spaceships and does all the terraforming or whatever. So now they specific, I saw the Wayland logo.

Yeah, I feel like Tractor is getting us back to Alien versus Predator. That's where this is. We're going to do a new Alien versus Predator, friendship. Love it. Speaking of Runway AI, that same company that helped Netflix make the Eternaut scene that we just watch, they are teaming with IMAX to host commercial screenings of some of these short films from their AI film festival. Every year, they host a film festival.

They bring in real people from the film industry to judge. So this year, the 10 finalists from the festival are going to screen at 10 different IMAX theaters across the country from August 17th to the 20th in New York, L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle. So these films are much like that scene from the Eternot. They're not necessarily entirely AI generated. It wasn't just like a guy wrote a prompt and then the AI made this. They're AI assisted.

So these animators are using AI as part of their workflow. But we do have a clip of the highlight reel from some of these films. I wonder how people in the industry feel about this. My lord. We can talk about it. There's just some mixed reactions. Wasn't that the space was wrong. Our way of seeing it had never been wrong.

But I can assure you that she's still in one place. At first we thought it was a glitch. There you go. I mean, it looks like back in the day, there was a computer graphics conference that used to do these kind of short things. I forgot the name of the very famous computer graphics

confab every year. It was like Comdex or CES, but only for computer graphics. Cigraph. Cigraph, thank you. So Cigraph used to do this whole time. People were up in arms about Cigraph in Hollywood because

hey, the people doing Star Wars or Blade Runner, they were building those sets. So all those set designers were like, we're going to be out of a job. And yeah, probably they are. A lot of them are. But there was a whole group of people at Industrial Light Magic

who were building CGI to replace the people at Lucas Arts who had made the miniatures. And it was like this, I think the prequels were the moment in which, you know, Lucas said, yeah, we're done here. We're not going to make miniatures of the Millennium Falcon. It's all going to be CGI for better or worse, I think, for worse in many cases.

What's the reaction in Hollywood? There's a real divide. You've got a lot of people now that have started coming around and embracing it more. Like Natasha Leone, the actors from poker phase, and she's doing it. She's directing an AI project now, and a lot of people were up in arms and upset with her. And she explained that for her, it was a question. of the ethics of the AI itself. So she connected with a company

where their AI model is not trained on any copywritten material. And so it's like, here's an ethical way to do it. So for her, that satisfied her sort of objections. And so now she's on board it. Justine Bateman, I think, had a similar one where it's like, you know, AI's got to check these boxes before we can use it. Okay.

But there is another side, too, that is just anti, it's anti-human. it's anti-creative, it's anti-art, and we should just reject AI entirely. Did this same reaction happen in Hollywood? Maybe it's a question for producer Claude. When Disney started doing animated films, was there a similar reaction from actors then

of, oh, you're going to just make animated films and people are going to stop going to... I mean, yes. I think the better comparison would be sound. Like when the sound era was new in movies you first started. It really did put a lot of people, either they didn't sound right,

they couldn't sing, they had accents. Like, a lot of those people did lose their acting jobs in favor of people who had better voices and could make talkies better.

So we did lose a lot of silent actors when the talk ear came around. And this is a constant thing that happens every generation in Hollywood. Like the technology changes, the process changes, and we need different kinds of people and different kinds of artists.

And so I do think there is some of that going on. Yes. I think that the objections make sense when you're talking about the AI doing the creative roles. I don't think AI is going to write a screenplay. I don't think AI is going to direct a film, but can AI like make this one segment that we're working on look better or make this animated effect slicker or sleeker or do it faster and cheaper and have it look the same? Absolutely. All right. Let's get back to our tech docket here. We'll drop Lon off. Everybody follow X.com slash lawns, L-O-N-S. I'll see you guys later. What are we got going on here with, I guess, the T app? I think that's the biggest news, yeah. So the T app, Jason, is an application that hit the top of the iOS app store, which is a big accomplishment. It dethroned J.GPD for a couple days.

And the T app was designed to let women run background checks, share notes, essentially kind of like the talk you might have in your living room about people you've been dating, but in a centralized location. And they had a data breach. Jason is probably the right word. left some information unsecured, and so people could just access it. So it wasn't a hack per se,

but a breach, I think is fair. They didn't encrypt the driver's licenses, pictures, and reviews of former dates or boyfriends that women were leaving in this app. So this is incredibly damaging on like multiple vectors. Number one, a person's driver's license

and their photo being released in a hack opens them up to subsequent hacks. Yep. And if that person had posted about somebody they dated who they felt was dangerous, let's say, in the worst circumstance, if that's true and that person was dangerous, well, then you've just let a dangerous person know that you wrote a review of them that you thought was anonymous. Yes. Now, additionally, just before we go into the more detail, please. if you wrote that in a vindictive way because your ex-boyfriend dumped you or your ex-partner, I think this was specifically women talking about men.

I don't think this was gender neutral, right? Am I correct? This was women talking about men. It was quote for the FBI girlies who like to do their research. Got it. Is that literally the tagline for the FBI girlies who wanted to do the research? It was either FBI or CIA girlies. I was on the site earlier.

So it was literally women warning other women about guys who they dated or review it. guys they dated. I guess I heard on another podcast or another news report that you gave a red flag or a green flag to people. Very good. But yes, it was FBI Gurley's with an emoji according to the T forwomen.com website. Okay. So these type of apps have always been super, super polarizing. We had one called Secret in Silicon Valley, if you remember that one back in the day. Vividly. There was one that was doing this, was it Form Spring for high school kids? We're they would anonymously post about each other, but you knew that they were within a certain geography.

So all of these basically take the responsibility away from the person writing the review. They give them anonymity. That is the promise. So this company promised these individuals they could write about other men, these women, that they could write about men. So this has got like a major gender angle on it.

And those men would not know they were written about, there would be seemingly no repercussion to writing a false review about somebody inherent in the way this app was designed. So there is first principle, should these apps even exist?

And in the industry, most people think these apps should not exist because the abuse level is too high and in fact, FormSpring had kids, there was a long, if I'm correct, you can ask Producer Cloud for the details on Form Spring because I know people who invested in it. I'm just making sure I got the name correct.

there were a number of teen suicides because people were trashing other people, oh, this person's promiscuous, oh, this person is ugly, this person is fat, and then the pile on would occur, and then people would, you know, how terrible kids can be,

especially in that high school era where people can get bullied. The bullying went crazy. There were many suicides, and it should never have existed. Secrets, same thing. People were getting trashed. And then it would use your phone book

as the vector, Alex. So look in your phone book and say, okay, here's 10 people, here's their phone books. They each had each other in them in some permutation, right? So let's say we take 100 people, and those 100 people all share a couple of phone numbers together. It would make a social graph out of that group of people, knowing they were either one or two steps away from each other,

and then you would trash people, and it would go in a feed to that group. It's incredibly scary what can happen in these apps. The repercussions are all bad, even if you start with good intent. But then, is my understanding correct that this was a vibe-coded app and it was done? That is not clear to me. This is an application that's been built for several years, Jason. So the company was founded, I think, way before the vibe-coding era. So I think people wanted to say, here's an app that had a huge obvious glaring security flaw.

Ergo, it's vibe-coded, therefore. It doesn't seem to be the case. So it's just incompetent people built this. It appears to be sheer incompetence, yes. Yeah. I mean, holy cow. this is just terrible. I mean, the people who built this app

are going to have massive liability. Massive liability because, gosh, I hate to even say this, but if this app succeeded in what it was doing, you know, then people would have written reviews about the people they thought were the most dangerous. And now those most dangerous people, if there are a fact are dangerous people in the world,

know who wrote the review of them, and had previously dated them or gone on a date with them. Holy cow, that seems to me to be a recipe for real pain and suffering in the future. It's pretty bad. So there were about 13,000 selfies or selfies that featured a photo identification, like a driver's license, Jason. And one thing that really stuck in a lot of people's craw here is that the company says, when you use it now, we will delete your information.

Once we verify that you're a woman, we'll get rid of it. We don't need to have that. So what were they doing here? Well, as it turns out, this was older data that was being held on to for legal reasons. I don't know exactly what those were, but they were required to retain some data. Okay, fair enough. But they lied. Well, to the cut, apparently, allegedly, or apparently or perhaps, I'll give a bunch of

disclaimers. Perhaps they lied to the customers who thought they would have that photo deleted. I would think that as a, yes. If I was a person that I knew that the application promised today that it deletes information. I would presume that my information from 2003 or whatever was deleted. Such a colossal catastrophe. Now, the venture capital side of this is, as far as I can tell,

T has not raised any external funding. So I don't think there's anyone that we can hang this on inside the industry, Jason. But there's 4.6 million people who were using this application before. And here's the crazy thing. I thought it was going to fall off the ratings or rankings, because clearly it's not a well-run company. It was still ranked number two this morning right behind Chad CPD on the American iOS I think that's a lot of drive by people going and checking out what the excitement is all about.

I'm going to go ahead and just say this. I think the app store should ban these apps. Anonymous apps like this, I think the danger is too high. If I'm Apple, I would just say, no. Now, of course, you could go to a web browser and still run it there. But I think, you know, this company has got serious incompetence, apparently, because none of this was encrypted. none of this was tested.

And then this also, if it is an app, isn't the role of Apple in this app store to probe and test these apps, especially the top ones? So I think there should be a wake-up call for everybody. You cannot trust any of your information with anybody. I mean, when I go through this,

the new thing at security at the airports, where they, even if you're a clear member, you still go through and they take your picture and then it says they're going to delete the picture, and the picture's just taken to compare to your driver's license. So I don't know how that software works or when that got introduced. Maybe it was a year or two ago. I started to see it, and now it's every time.

Look in the camera, take a picture. And if you go overseas, many countries, not only they take your picture, they're taking your thumbprint, they're taking your fingerprints. Like, all this information is getting hacked. All this information is owned by, you know, pick a three-letter agency, Musad, CIA, MI6, whatever the Chinese

Central Intelligence Agency, all this stuff is hacked. So this is a complete disaster. I don't know why anybody would want to build an app like this. Well, I mean, it was clearly popular. I mean, so being very crass about this,

it had product market fit, Jason. I mean, the reason they built it is because the back story is, the CEO, he's a man, his mother had a really hard time dating, and he saw the problems that she went there with people that were catfishing or not

sharing criminal backgrounds and such. So he built this as a way to be like, hey, look, I'm going to help women be safer. And that did very well. It was growing incredibly quickly before they blew up. I don't doubt there's a market for it. I don't doubt there's a good business in there that will make money because you can charge for this and that people want it.

I just think the risk of trashing people who, you know, have no idea they're being trash, have no recourse, anonymity at scale. And, you know, that becomes the issue. It's one thing if people are chit-chatting at lunch or brunch about people they're dating or there's even like a signal group or whatever, a group chat and people are like, yeah, I dated that guy who was a little weird or I dated that girl, she was a little weird, or maybe you should know about this. Like, I get that that has always existed in the world.

But building something at scale makes it distinctly different. And I just wonder, should these things exist? Who's building these? I don't buy this like intent, like, oh, I'm doing this with good intent. I think people are doing these kind of apps because they want to make money. And I think if you talk to Form Spring Secret, other people who've done anonymous

apps where people get to review each other, it always ends in pain, suffering, suicides, and just really bad outcomes that you just have to learn from the past. There's no way to do this type of app without it resulting in bullying, pain,

and suffering, and then in this case, I guess, a hack of, like, epic proportions. Pretty terrible. Do you think that anonymity itself is something that we should clamp down on or just anonymity in these particular pools that are aimed at sharing information about one cohort of folks. I believe you can have anonymity in social networks. Reddit is a perfect example of large scale. Yeah. Quasi anonymity, they have pseudonyms, so you have to own your entire behavior. And by the way, they probably have your IP address, but they definitely have your IP address. So unless you're very sophisticated,

if you did something really bad on those services, they could probably find you out if, like, let's say a subpoena came in. So, it just says like a warning to people who want to do bad things with this anonymous account. You probably don't have anonymity, even though you think you do.

You don't. You'd have to be a pretty sophisticated person doing really sophisticated IP work and, you know, your Mac address and cell phone towers. I mean, there's so many ways and vectors to try to fingerprint somebody as well as fingerprinting their speech

patterns and the terms they use because people have outed anonymous accounts at scale by just looking at how they speak, right? There was a couple of famous Twitter accounts back in the day that people analyzed and they were understood names, but I think at scale, I don't like it personally. I rather people own their words. I don't like, as an example, I got into it with Kane Koa the Great on Twitter. If you know that account, it's like a MAGA type right-leaning news account. And I was like, who are you? Why do you? Why do you? you, you know, why do you keep, you know, stealing clips from all in? Why do you keep linking to me, mentioning me? Who are you? What's your motivation? Are you like a Russian bot or whatever? And then

people got like, oh, you're trying to dox the person. I was like, no, no, doxing is when you give somebody's address. And Kane Coa reached out to me and said, like, I have security concerns, you know, my parents, whatever. And I was like, okay, fine, you know, but just to be clear, I never said, doc to you. I just said, who are you? And then these accounts can get to a million people have a ton of followers and nobody knows. Is that a Russian account? Is that a compromised account? Who is the person? What is their motivation? And yeah, so I don't know how many followers Kane Coa has now, but it's a lot. And I please do not. Yeah, don't go docks him like and say you did it because I said it all. I was just wondering, who is this person? Why do they

have all this time every day? And now those people can also monetize their existence. So now you've got an anonymous account making money. Is it a North Korean farm that's doing this? And so be careful, folks. I prefer to live in a world where people own their words. I do believe that whistleblower should be able to leak stuff. But I think these permanent askal accounts or systems of providing mass anonymity and mass aggregation, I think these things are very dangerous. I don't like living in that world. That doesn't mean I don't think there should be some pocket cases of anonymity. I I just choose to interact differently in those environments. So, as you know, on X, Twitter, in my replies, 9 out of 10 or 95 out of 100, 99 of 100 tweets I do,

I have the comments limited to my paid subscribers. And I donate that money to charity. So I personally just would rather live in a world with more ownership of words. Yeah, I was just thinking about that because my online accounts are very boring. My Reddit username is Alex Wilhelm. my club WPT gold poker username is Alex Wilhelm. And my friend was making fun of me is like, why are you using your name? And I'm like, I don't know.

It's who I am. Like, that's literally how I go through the world. It's me. I mean, in a poker, poker's another interesting one. You know, I don't think anybody cares playing poker with people in a tournament online, what their idea is. But then when money's at stake, you do have verification because then you could have collusion and then you also have, is it legal in that country?

Sure. So there's an example of like. Like, there were people who would have rings of 10 accounts. They would all join a poker tournament. They would be studying every player looking for their exploits and then sharing them amongst the 10 people. Then as you get down to, let's say, five of those 10 people make it to the final three tables, that means statistically there's two at each table in all likelihood, which means they could tell each other their cards, which means they have a massive advantage.

And they could then bully somebody. So you go in with Aces, I've got Jacks, the other person has 7-8. We probably wouldn't individually call your all-in, but collectively we could say, well, Jacks plus 7-8 suited. If you put those two hands together, they have a 30% chance each, therefore they're 60-40, you would go all in versus what you would assume would be Aces, the person putting their life on the line. So even more reason to really think about this question. But what a disaster.

Oh, my Lord. What a disaster. do want to point out, we asked producer Claude to pull some other examples of startups that have had data breaches. And there were just more last year, Jason, that I anticipated. So there was Mentlify in March of 2024, Anthropic in January of 24, Evolve Bank, that was May of 24, Trello, January 24. And so there's just more of these than I think is reasonable. So if you are a startup, I think the lesson here, speaking for the founders out there, make sure that as you think about your cloud infra and who's going to host your compute and storage, also pay as much

attention to your cybersecurity posture. And the code, this was an example of not just basically encrypting stuff. So it felt like according to what I read, they were able to just download like the entire folder where all this data was and it wasn't encrypted.

So this was barely a hack. I mean, it was, yeah. And then the nature of the service you're running also increases the importance of this. So I think Ashley Madison, or one of those dating apps in the early days got hacked.

And what got hacked was the email registrations. So then people were like, oh, what's my spouse's email? Let me see if they're on whatever this service is. And I remember in our industry, people were like, oh, I just put in 20 names of high profile people in our industry. And they found one or two people from our industry who were in there. And then they were like, oh, no, I was looking at that for my memory research purposes. For research purposes because I was going to invest.

or I was going to write a story about it as a journalist. So they have it, folks. You got to have an excuse. I mean, I was watching a Sidney-Sweeney ad on my work computer on repeat today, making sure the volume was correct. So you never know where you're going to end up in 2025. I guess this IPO of Figma is pretty critical for us to talk about, yeah? Absolutely enormous.

So, Jason, you've talked so much about the distribution dire straits, the lack of liquidity, venture capital is struggling to return cash to their LPs. What's going to happen to venture? Well, Figma's here to stay of the day. The good news is that Figma has raised its IPO price range, Jason, from 25 to 28 to 30 to 32, which means that this design unicorn, this amazing business that was built by Dylan and backed by companies like Kleiner Perkins and many other venture capitalists, is going to debut at, we think right now, roughly in $18.6 billion dollar valuation

at the midpoint of its raised range. A big day for Figma, a big day for venture capitalists. This is bullish as hell. I love it, Jason. The new valuation, 18.6, the price that was going to be paid by Adobe was 20. And that was two years ago, I believe, two and a half years ago. So they've grown a lot in two years, and they still aren't. They're going to get the same price.

So another way to look at that is if you owned, you know, a million dollars worth of Adobe, you could have gotten that money out two years ago, put it into the index funds, and been up 10% a year for two years. and you would have 1.2 and change. It's great that they're almost back to that peak valuation. When big companies buy a private company, they do have to pay a premium on the valuation. So if Adobe did want to go back and try to buy Figma in the public markets

and make them an offer, it would have to be 20 or 30% more than their public market valuation. So, you know, they would have to pay probably $25 billion. Quarter million dollars in revenue means a billion dollars a year. And so, yeah, this is 20 times or 18.6 times yearly price to sales ratio. That's very juicy. Very juicy. Very juicy.

So not sure if this is expensive or not. Still growing at 40%, you said? Yeah, I think it was about 40, 41% in the second quarter. They have preliminary numbers, Jason, because they haven't quite finished their books. But I got to say, the first range seemed cheap. I wrote that down. I said, guys, I think this is light, it's going to go up. It did.

I think right now it's kind of fairly priced based on fundamentals. But how much have we spent talking about the meme stock era, Jason? So I think retail is going to retail. I don't know, though, if we should say, oh, Figma had a 30% day one pop because the GameStop folks got a hold of it. Therefore, it should have been invited at a higher point in its IPO. But that's a long-waring discussion in VCs about leaving money on the table when it comes to public offerings.

Yeah. But it's a great day. The good news is I know there's a lot of VCs and LPs. who are going to benefit from this. Last year, when I gave that KPMG talk, I talked about the distribution dire straits and what would happen and that this was all because of LenaCon

or largely because of LenaCon. And sure enough, here we are. IPOs, we had Circle, Coro Weave, E Toro, Figma. When is Figma going to go out? I don't know if we have a date yet, but I just want to underscore your point just in really quickly. This is a math that I ran. This was at $28 per share,

but just taking a look at the share counts from indexed. Great luck, Kleiner, and Sequoia. It was between a billion and $1.8 billion in essentially money they're going to earn from this IPO. Now, take these numbers, amp them up, you know, to $30 to $32 to share. And they're even higher. Huge, huge amounts of money. I mean, you've got four firms that are going to distribute one to two billion dollars to their LPs.

That is unbelievable and great for the industry. Yes. All right. I want to talk about something that Paul Graham said, because I think this is important for students who are thinking about getting into the entrepreneurship game. And Paul Gunn had a very interesting and counterintuitive point, Jason. He said, don't drop out of college to start or work for a startup. There will be other and probably better startup opportunities,

but you can't get your college years back. Now, in the industry, I would say, in technology, there's a fascination with people who drop out of Stanford and Harvard and go out to found companies and such. But this struck me as almost counter-narrative. So I just was kind of curious for you, talking to the youngest founders who might be thinking about founder university or the launch accelerator.

What would you say to them about college dropping out or just finishing up your years? Well, it's a, it's a good question. As a parent and a softie, which Paul Graham is, I think, this is like a softy, like, you know, oh, you know, you only live once and you know, college could be so much fun and et cetera. So I get it. You know, he's not wrong about that. You can't get your college years back. But then there's also people who college is like kind of a waste of time for.

They are serious, driven individuals, and those are four of your prime, let's call it, 30 years of being able to have unlimited energy to pursue something. I'd say from 18 to 50 or you're like, I have unlimited energy. Now, when you're 50, you know, maybe you get tired, your health could go. You just might not be as sharp. You could be in cognitive decline. You could be in physical decline. You could be an emotional decline.

you just may not have, and I'm speaking very broadly here, but it does match my experience that, you know, you gain a bunch of wisdom. And one of the pieces of wisdom you might gain when you get older is, oh, yeah, it's not that important. What matters is your family and your experiences. So you lose that maniacal energy of youth where you see your startup, your project, your movie, your book, your art, whatever it is, your restaurant as the most important thing. and you get obsessed about it. So those are your obsessive years, your 20s into 30s and 40s. If you feel obsessed by something

and you have to go do it, I have no problem with you dropping out of college. If you don't have something you feel particularly obsessed with, dropping out of college to join a startup, is what he's saying here is the key part of it. But actually, you know,

he does say to start or work for startups. I would say to start a startup, I have no problem with you dropping out. I think it's a great idea. You'll learn more from starting a company than from, working on a startup. To work at a startup, I probably wouldn't unless it was something incredibly unique in the world that was breaking out, i.e. You're Zuckerberg's roommate. He's dropping out.

He got 500K from Peter Thiel and you're going to go with him to pursue that. Yeah, go do that. So, yeah, that's how I feel about it. I see Keith Rabeis is like, Tiel fellows would probably disagree. Paul makes a good point. Well, the Tiel Fellowship gives you that money to pursue a project, but they don't take equity and, you know, it's not like you don't have to do a startup. You just do a project, right? Yeah, the Teal Fellowship is just a different way to approach, I think, the college era of your life, which is, here's some time to go explore intellectual curiosities, broaden your horizons, try some stuff.

It's not go raise venture capital and try to build the next Palantair. Yeah. I mean, I have to say that Teal Fellows is looking like one of these crazy ideas that I think really paid off for Peter Thiel with a huge chip stack giving, I don't know how many people have gone through the Teal Fellowship. Good question for producer Claude, but he's been doing that for 15 years, I think.

And if he's been doing it for 15 years and 100 people went through it every year and 100,000 each and he did 10 million a year for 15 years, that's 150 million. I think there's an investment in there or two that he made subsequent with those individuals. And I don't know if it was 100 people each year or 25,

but whatever the numbers is, I think the math actually math's out. So producer Claude says there's 313 total teal fellows and at your math for the cost, Jason, added in the time value of money. All he has to do is get one early shot at a unicorn and the math works out. It's actually not that expensive from that perspective. Not at all. I mean, which is Paul Graham's business as well and mine to a certain extent, you know, with Founder University and Launch Accelerators. So if it's an extraordinary idea and you feel like you need to pursue it, drop out. If it's an

extraordinary company with an extraordinary founder and you feel the need to join it, okay, to drop out. if you don't have a great idea, why drop out? You might as well just keep gaining your skills. And to Paul's point, yeah, you can enjoy college. There's nothing more with enjoying college. People are different, though. You know, founders are mutants. And so the way you have to say this is, if you're a mutant, should you join the X-Men?

Yes. If you're not a mutant, should you join the X-Men? Well, you're not qualified to. So, yes, stay in college. The people who are actual mutants, they basically start building companies in college. I went to college at night because I wanted to build things during the day. I was building my magazines during the day, working and going to college. So mutants are mutants.

They're going to use their mutant powers. You can't hold them back. For civilians, humans, mortals. Yeah, stay in college. Sure. I think that makes a lot of good sense. I think don't drop out to go work for your friend's company. That's going to fail.

But as you said, if Mark Zuckerberg wants to join his brand new social network, yeah, say yes to that. I just appreciated that it was slightly outside of the, the, of Twitter commentary. Yeah. All right, everybody. It's been another amazing episode. This week in startups.com slash docket to read the docket. And we'll see you all tomorrow.

Bye-bye.