This Week in Startups - If you’re not working 9-9-6, are you working hard enough? | E2198

Episode Date: October 25, 2025

Today’s show:*Working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, might seem like TOO INTENSE a commitment for some, but Jason argues that elite performance — and the mega-compensation that goes along with it — sometimes requires personal sacrifice. While 72-hour weeks might lead to burnout for some, it really comes down to individual choice.PLUS Jason and Alex deep dive the NBA gambling scandal and the sketchy reality behind high-stakes home games of poker. PLUS Presh Kumar takes us behind the scenes, to see how AI apps helped him develop and workshop the video for his new wellness startup, Tempo, and what’s with Anthropic buying chips from their AI rivals, Google? It’s a can’t miss This Week in Startups.Timestamps:(00:06:49) Jason and Alex are poker fans… what do they think about this insane NBA gambling scandal?(10:00) LinkedIn Ads - Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://LinkedIn.com/ThisWeekinStartups to claim your credit.(20:00) Nexos.ai - Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at https://nexos.ai/twist.(00:25:09) Is working “9-9-6” a reasonable goal? A guarantee of success? Why Jason compares it to being an Olympian.(30:00) Every.io - Running a startup is hard enough. Every takes care of incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes and more so that you focus on building, not back-office admin. Visit every.io.(00:38:00) Our old buddy Presh walks us through the process of making his Tempo launch video(00:42:28) Jason and Alex check out some of Ridley Scott’s famous storyboards(00:48:03) Anthropic is buying TPUs from Google… Are these companies in LIKE with each other?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/v19fcpFollow 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:LinkedIn Ads - Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://LinkedIn.com/ThisWeekinStartups to claim your credit.Nexos.ai - Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at https://nexos.ai/twist.**Every.io -** Running a startup is hard enough. Every takes care of incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes and more so that you focus on building, not back-office admin. Visit every.io.Great 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

Let's go to the gray area. Sure. You're, and I think there's an allegation around LeBron James here. Not that LeBron James did anything, but LeBron James was going to be out of a game where he was potentially injured. And these injury reports come out early in the day and they get updated as you go. People take them into account when they're betting on games, obviously, the handicappers and the people who do it professionally.

So what happened in one of these cases, allegedly, is somebody told their friends, oh, I don't think LeBron's going to play tonight. He's tweaked his ankle. They tell their friends, they put action on the games, having that information an hour before the lines change. Now, if they say, hey, LeBron's not playing tonight, and he's LeBron and his prime, the odds in the game would change dramatically.

But if you get your bet in, you've got your bet locked in at that other bet. So is that illegal? Well, in this case, the injury status, Jason, was sold by, allegedly. His friend and former L.A. Lakers coach, Damon, Joe, Jones was also an ex-cleveland Cavs player. And yeah, he essentially sold the information ahead of time.

That's just so. If he did, in fact, sell it. Now, what if you were just talking to your boys and you're like, yeah, you know, don't bother coming to the game. LeBron's not playing. Right. And then your friend does something stupid. Just like I might say to somebody, you know, oh, hey, yeah, I was, you know, I was at a party

and somebody told me this company is going to buy this company. And but, you know, and then they told their friends. and then that friend traded on it, or that friend's friend traded on it. So this gets people pinched all the time in insider trading. So there's a lot of gray area here now that people have to get used to,

which is, you know, if you're the trainer or you're a security guard at one of these arenas and the security guard finds out and they, you know, are at a poker game and yeah, I know, LeBron's not going to play tonight.

And then somebody gets their fantasy sports out and puts $100 or $1,000 or $1,000 on. It's probably not going to get picked up. So Brave Nevin's, world, there's a chance that none of this is cataclysmic. So anyway, it's a brave new world, but I think all of this being regulated and being on the up and up is going to actually take fraud that was going on that we were unaware of and make it above board.

So I'm actually confident that the referees aren't doing any of the shenanigans like Tim Donahy was doing back in the day, where he was giving the injury reports to the mob allegedly. I think you got convicted of that, so I don't know if you used the word allegedly anymore. But anyway, very interesting story. Lots of technology opportunities there. So if you're a startup and you see these kind of problems, you can build a company and then sell it to those people to solve that problem. The NBA is going to need one of these as well, which is educating their players and trainers and everybody around it as to how easy it is. And so there's so many startup opportunities here.

I'm glad that these things are all getting regulated and that they're above, board now. So I actually take the opposite approach to I think things are fixed. I think things are being fixed. This week in startups is brought to you by Every. Running a startup is hard enough. Every takes care of incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, and more so that you focus on building not back office admin. Visit every.io. Nexos. Stop Shadow AI in its tracks with the unified platform for secure AI adoption and and productivity. Try it with a free 14-day trial at nexos.a.ai slash twist and LinkedIn ads. Start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today.

Launch your first campaign and get $250 free when you spend at least 250. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Callicanus. slash jason instagram. Instagram.com slash Jason. He's Alex Wilhelm. You know him from TechCrunch, a bunch of other stuff. He's X.com slash Alex.

And cautious, optimism is his newsletter. Yes, sir. Hey, Joe. Hey, Joe. I'm saying hello. You know, people don't know. We're doing live now. We get thousands of people tuning in live.

And it really does make the show great. If you want to join us on the live team, X.com slash Jason. follow me and you get the live, YouTube, look for this week in startups, or actually even better, go to this week and startups.com slash YouTube. And when you go to that URL, boom, it automatically subscribes you if you're not. But then you got to hit the bell. We have so much to go over. It has been an absolutely crazy week. There's a lot of law and disorder going on. Did you notice that? Have you noticed this trend? I have noticed this trend. There seems to be an uptick

and fraudulent activity that we're now hearing about Jason, especially involving one of your favorite things in the entire world, which is poker. Yes. There's the pot call in the kettle black. You also love to play some cards. Well, let's get started. You're talking, of course, about Cash Patel came out after an amazing season opener for the Knicks and for the Spurs. Wemby had that crazy performance. Did you see the highlights of Wemby in San Antonio? I have not, I have not even caught up of my warriors yet. So that's how far behind I am. Wemby is like this seven foot five. He's in his third year, you know, to call him a unicorn like Porzingis or Kevin Durant would be an understatement. He's kind of like an alicorn, Pegasus and Unicorn, and he's doing things in the NBA. Nobody could

imagine. And then, of course, we get this drop of a crazy, yeah, there's Wembe, that's Wembe, and the highlights from this are just bonkers. Just look at Wemby Highlights Game 1. He had a performance that literally had Bill Simmons and Stephen A. Smith. and some of my NBA friends in my group chat, like we've never seen this before, seven-foot-five guy doing crazy things on the court, putting all that aside. After this incredible launch of the NBA season,

Cash Patel came out and dropped the hammer. Some people saying this was political, you know, Stephen A. Smith took the position this was political. Trump trying to get back at BLM or the NBA and it was a race issue. I don't know anything about that. everything is so political these days. But I do know about poker and I do know about sports betting.

So maybe you could tee up for the audience, Alex, what exactly got dropped on Thursday morning we're taping here on Friday. You'll get a Friday night. Yeah. So on the poker side of things, there were a series of games that were set up in a fraudulent manager Jason and they involved what were called face cards, which in this case were high-profile people from the NBA. That's the sports connection for folks who were curious.

And this included Chauncey Billups, who I believe is the coach for the Portland Trailblazers, along with some other names. These games were essentially marketed by using whales. And Jason, for folks who don't know, a whale is a player with a lot of money and perhaps maybe more money than skill. So if someone invites you to a game and says, hey, we're going to have a couple of billionaires and they're going to be drunk, you want to go because the whales will be splashing around with their money. Now, these games cheated a variety of ways, Jason, manipulated, shuffling machines, an x-ray table.

They had poker chip trays that were scanning cards. They had cell phone set up and they were moving data all around, which was a whole lot of work to make $7 million over a long period of time. The last thing I'll say about this is the four of the five families, famous for crime in the New York City area,

were involved as enforcement. Allegedly, you've got to say allegedly, 17 times. All this is alleged. 100%. I have no inside knowledge. I was not invited as a whale or a sharp. And this is all from the FBI.

and Mr. Cash Patel. But I will say, Jason, it seems like a hell of a lot of work and a lot of illegality to make $7 million when in the technology world, $7 million is absolute pocket change in the AI game. So it's just, it almost feels like small potatoes. Yeah, there is a small potatoes aspect to this if you've got a $20 or $30 million NBA contract. But these rigged games have been around forever. If you read any of the poker law, lore, I should say, there were people who were going. I heard about this one. They would go to games in Texas, you know.

And on the way to the games, they would have decks. These are marked decks. So if you look at the back of a deck of cards, somebody can pull up a marked deck image from just Google images and we'll show it. What they would do is they would have on the back of the cards this fancy, intricate patterns. Now, what you would do is you would either cut the deck with an imperfection or you would put some sort of hidden thing on the cards. So if I was across from you, I would know you have an ace or a king. And you don't really need to know all the cards.

If you just knew who has aces, who has kings, this is a tremendous advantage of when to fold and when to go in. This is the most simple version of it. And so what they did was there was a tradition of like picking up a deck of cards at a gas station on the way to a game that was wrapped and sealed. This is really crazy poker law. At these games, so here you go. If you're looking, you're watching the screen here, what you'll see is in the top left corner, you have these crazy patterns,

but they would just be slightly different. For example, curly cues that are missing, but just small things that would tell you if you looked at them, this is an ace, this is a club, this is a heart, giving you a huge edge, Jason Franklin. Correct. And so these slight imperfections. Another way to do this is people with their nail

could indent or bend a card in a game. And then when the bent card comes around, and this is why when you're playing a game, if you ever see a bent card or a card with an indentation, you stop the game, you say there's a bent card, you hand it to the deal. Founders, listen, if you've got a B2B company and you're marketing your product or service to other businesses,

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and they will put what they call a new setup. A new setup, rich guys in big poker games can say, I want a new setup, just because they're running bad, superstition, or for this reason, when they do that, they take the deck, they put it away, they crack open a fresh deck. I heard these stories that they would go to the gas stations, the two or three gas stations,

from the airport to the big game, they would pay off the guy at the gas station to put in a series of decks that were marked but were sealed in plastic. The whale comes, they buy three decks of cards, they go to the game, they hand, hey, I got three new decks. The guy, the Confederate from the gas station would say, yeah, dopey picked up the decks here, they're marked. So even if you thought you were bringing your own deck, it would be marked. So let's put that aside for a second. There are new high-tech ways to do this. One of them is eyeglasses or contact lenses, And then some dyes that you can only see if you're wearing those. Another way to do this is what's called being a mechanic.

You saw this famously in the movie Rounders. That's where people who shuffle the deck can put the aces on the bottom two slots, let's say. So they see the aces as they're shuffling. And as they shuffle, they just put them on the bottom. Then when they throw the cards, they're throwing from the top of the deck to everybody. Then they get to Alex. And the dealer who's a confederate would send a card from the bottom of the deck. Now, I've been in games where I think I've seen this.

Oh, really? Yeah. And I've been games that I think were dirty. Like, just a small number of times, like two or three times. And I never go to those games. If you're going to a game where there's celebrities, like I got invited to Molly's game over and over and over again, Molly would text me and call me when I lived in Los Angeles 20 years ago and say, hey, Leo, or, you know, Toby or this celebrity, that celebrity is going

to be at the game. They want to see you. And I always have the same joke to her, which is they want to see you. me lose 50 grand. Right. And at that time, the games, a big game would be

10K buy and 25K buy. Now, these games have gotten significantly higher. There are people backing people, staking people. Eventually,

Molly's game allegedly, you know, got taken over by, I don't know if it was the Russian mob or the Armenian

mob, some mob group. So what happens in these games is they can use also what's called the deckmate two. There are different

card shufflers. A card shuffler means it just automatically shuffles the card. it fits into the thing. I actually own a card shuffler. I've had it for over 15 years.

Technically, people were not allowed to have these. There's like two brands, but I had one of the ones that are used in casinos. These are like really on the up and up. But the more recent ones from China, the deckmate two specifically, they know the value of each card. So if you were to take a card out of the deck

and put a card from another deck in there and you had, say, five aces, it would, it always checks the cards are correct, and then it tells you, hey, there's something wrong here. You have 51 cards in the stack instead of 52. Oh, you left in the Jokers. We're not playing with Jokers. So this is the DeckMate 2.

I have the DeckMate 1. These things were never available to individuals. They were like an off-market purchase, you know, falling off trucks kind of situation. Ah, got it. Let's leave it at that. So there's all kinds of ways to cheat people. You could also have three people playing from the same chip sack.

So me, you, and Lon have, you know, $50,000 were all bought in and then, you know, well, one and well two, you know, they get aces, but they're playing against three other players. Putting this all aside, uh, if you're in a game with celebrities and they're taking a rake, which is illegal in most states, if you're playing a home game in most states, it's legal if you're not taking a rake. In other words, making a profit, because then you're in, uh, competition with the casinos and they don't like that. They do not. You can do a bunch of searches online where things are illegal, where they're illegal, and what the lines are.

It's different in New York. Like even running, I think games in New York is technically not legal, even if you're not taking a rake, but they kind of let people do it. I think D.C. has rules. It was always very famous. Rumors of Obama or Clinton having a poker game,

friendly one. Anyway, when it becomes high stakes, when you don't know the players in the game, you shouldn't be in the game. If you're in the game and you're with high-profile business people who have a lot to lose and the amount of money they're playing,

let's say me playing for 25, or some famous CEO playing for 100K and they're worth X amount of money, they're not going to cheat because their reputation is more than the cost of that. Put that aside. So Chauncey Billups, who's currently the coach of an NBA team. I believe he's the coach. I'm going to double check that now, but I believe it's the Portland Trailblazers.

My theoretical home NBA team. So, you know, if you look at this, like, and this is something that's been going on for five or six years, allegedly, there's also all these sports guys play, Budugie and other games when they're in the planes because they have a lot of downtime. And it's a nice bonding thing. But if you remember the Gilbert Arenas bringing guns to the locker room, that whole case, when he got suspended for a year, was over poker debt.

So poker debts can get spicy, dicey, et cetera. There's a million ways to cheat now. There were, you know, a half million ways to cheat before technology. Let's put that aside. there's a second thing going on here. These two cases are not related anyway, but fantasy sports has made it very easy to do what's called a prop bet.

Not betting on the score of the game. Very hard to influence that, right? Without it being very obvious. Now, in this other case, you could let people know, hey, my over-under. The over-under is I get seven rebounds. So on average, I get seven.

They think versus this team, which has an incredible, incredible rebounder. I'm against Dennis Rodman. I'm going to get, you know, only six. Sure. Well, if the person, you know, halfway through the game says, oh, I sprained my ankle and they come out of the game with four rebounds, you know, the under is pretty good, right? You could bet under a certain number of rebounds. And these idiots, these incredibly stupid people, allegedly, if any of this is true, it would be the height of stupidity to do this kind of stuff. But there are some gray areas here. And some of this is new. Some of it is as old as time. Yeah, just I would say the startup angle here is as we talk a lot more about prediction markets, and we talk more about options trading, and we talk about crypto and ICOs and token treasury companies, Jason and SPACs are back. Just know what you're getting into, wage or money you can afford to lose, and try not to get caught up with the Gambino family collecting your debts,

because that's not going to be a fun way to live. Now, on the over unders, very specifically, because all of this is legal and not run through bookies anymore, you know, your local bookie at the bar, there are software companies. Somebody can look it up. There's a software company that looks across all of the prediction markets, or really the fantasies, the, you know, the prize picks, the draft kings. So there is a literal company that looks at the action being placed. Now, when this, I'll call, you know, when an incredibly.

stupid person, I won't say these people are because it's all alleged and this, you know, you never know, this may not be as bad as it looks. But if a stupid person were to say, I'm going to do this thing where I get under a certain number of rebounds and their friends put $200,000 on them and they're the fifth player or a sixth player on the team, they're not LeBron James, they're not Steph Curry, where all the action tends to be. And they normally have $20,000 in action on them across all of the different, you know, sites, this company, which I don't know the name of, but if you find one lawn, you can just check that. It's exactly that. And pull up the website and just verify that for us, please. They will alert the different places, hey, there's odd action going across

these sites. And then they kill that prop bet and they send it to the feds. So we found one, Jason, it's called polyrouter.io. This is specifically for the prediction markets, I'll just pull it up here. Yeah, this just shows essentially how to get all of that in one place. Now, on the thin betting volume spiking, didn't some players specifically, in a different case, get busted for making really large prop bets on their relatively small, normal trading amount? And it was, in fact, the volume differential that got them busted? Because I remember seeing headlines about that. Yes, there are so many amazing AI tools out there that can make your team faster and more effective. Any founder would be a fool not to embrace these

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If you make these stupid bets, and yeah, it looks like there's a lot of them. I just asked producer Claude, and it looks like Cion offers AI-driven fraud protection tools for gaming platforms, geo-compli, widely used across US sport books to verify player location and print VPN fraud, sports trader focused on protecting sports integrity

by detecting max fixing an irregular betting behavior. That's the one. be sports trader. And somewhere in these documents about all of this, that was one of the companies, I think, that alerted them. So they just turned the bed off and then they give it to the feds and these people get busted. Let's go to the gray area. Sure. You're, and I think there's an allegation around LeBron James here. Not that LeBron James did anything, but LeBron James was going to be out of a game where he was potentially injured. And these injury reports come out early in the day

and they get updated as you go. People take them into account when they're betting on games, obviously, the handicappers and the people who do it professionally. So what happened in one of these cases, allegedly, is somebody told their friends, oh, I don't think LeBron's going to play tonight. He's tweaked his ankle.

They tell their friends, they put action on the games, having that information an hour before the lines change. Now, if they say, hey, LeBron's not playing tonight, and he's LeBron and his prime, the odds in the game would change dramatic. But if you get your bet in, you've got your bet locked in at that other bet. So is that illegal? Well, in this case, the injury status, Jason was sold by allegedly.

His friend and former L.A. Lakers coach, Damon Jones. Jones was also an ex-Cleveland Cavs player. And, yeah, he essentially sold the information ahead of time. That's just so. If he did, in fact, sell it. Now, what if you were just talking to your boys and you're like, yeah, you know, don't bother coming to the game? LeBron's not playing. Right.

And then your friend does something stupid. Just like I might say to somebody, you know, oh, hey, yeah, I was, you know, I was at a party and somebody told me this company is going to buy this company. And, but, you know, and then they told their friends and then that friend traded on it or that friend's friend traded on it. So this gets people pinched all the time in insider trading. So there's a lot of gray area here now that people have to get used to, which is, you know, if you're the trainer or you're a security guard at one of these arenas in the security. guard finds out and they, you know, are at a poker game. And yeah, no, LeBron's not going to play tonight. And then somebody gets their fantasy sports out and puts $100 or $1,000 on. It's probably not going to get picked up. So Brave New World, there's a chance that none of this is cataclysmic.

So anyway, it's a Brave New World, but I think all of this being regulated and being on the up and up is going to actually take fraud that was going on that we were unnerable. aware of and make it above board. So I'm actually confident that the referees aren't doing any of the shenanigans like Tim Donahy was doing back in the day where he was giving the injury reports to the mob allegedly. I think he got convicted of that, so I don't know if you used the word allegedly anymore. But anyway, very interesting story. Lots of technology opportunities there. So if you're a startup and you see these kind of problems, you can build a company and then sell it to those people to solve that problem. The NBA is going to need one of these as well, which is educating their players and trainers

and everybody around it as to how easy it is. And so there's so many startup opportunities here. I'm glad that these things are all getting regulated and that they're above board now. So I actually take the opposite approach to, I think things are fixed. I think things are being fixed. Which is much better because you're using that in an ironic way. All right, Jason, first up on the docket today, everyone's talking about 996. This is the famous model from China in which workers work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.

6 days a week for a total of 72 hours at a minimum. Interesting enough, you know, we've talked about this since 2019. But currently in the American AI era, we are seeing headlines from the journal, Fast Company, Washington Post. Everyone's talking about the insane pace of work required today by leading startups. And I actually, I pull the tweet from you from back from In 2019, this is a man named Jason Calcanus saying founders were up against Jack Ma enforcing a 72 hour work week, 996, 6 days a week, 9 to 9 p.m. The exact same work ethic that built America. You can get on your Twitter pedestal and attack Jack Ma, or you can make a plan to win.

Now, that was six, seven years ago, Jason, so quite a while. Yeah, I mean, I just had heard about this. When venture capital is used to invest in startups, their big trick was to come on a Saturday to visit the startup and see how many cars were in the parking lot or they would come at night. Then we got into this life work balance nonsense, unions, people, you know, wanting to see their families, all this craziness. And, you know, when you get in a dogfight on a business level and you've got a ship product like there's a huge prize here, you know, we talked about the Tam of this market is going to be huge. Yes. Then people can opt into.

we're going to work 72 hours a week. We're going to work six days a week, which, by the way, the entire world did for thousands of years. It worked six days a week. It was only Ford and the Model T and the concept of getting Americans the ability to take a weekend road trip

that created the five-day work week, the 40-hour work week, in order to sell more cars. You can look all that stuff up. So it's not super controversial to bring this back. And if you're being compensated wildly, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, you know, stock options that could be worth millions to tens of millions of dollars,

it's not unreasonable for this to happen. And it's, in fact, not illegal if you're a salaried employee in making beyond the minimum wage and what minimum wage plus overtime would pay. My understanding is this is legal in the United States. People can make that decision and trade-off. So you're going to see this. points very interesting, though, Jason, because after, well, basically, go back in time, 2019, Michael Moritz, formerly of Sequoia, now kind of a venture emeritus for the world,

wrote an article for the Financial Times, discussing how much Chinese tech companies were working and also how frugal they were. And it was a bit of a shake-the-cage moment for American startups at that time. Yes, I remember that. That was the Financial Times, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then some things happened. So over in China, Penn, I'm going to ruin this, everybody, I'm sorry, but Penn Duab-Duo had an employee die on her way and from work. another one jumped off a bridge and another set themselves on fire. And that led to a conversation inside of China in which there was a mini revolt amongst tech workers kind of complaining about the insane pace of work that was required of them.

And that led to China in 2021 saying that 996 was actually illegal. Now, they haven't stamped it out. Coverage since then has made it clear that it's still in effect. But even inside of China where this model kind of came from, there was pushback against it. I just wonder if people are doing good work or how much of this is performative versus versus actually being effective, Jason. Can you tell me more about that? I mean, there are moments in time

where you can burn out and it works against you. But putting it a 10-hour-day, 12-hour-a-day, you can still be productive. And it's a personal choice if you want to do it. It's not a big deal. And then a lot of times, law of big numbers, if you've got 100 million people in China who are working 996, let's say,

because they want to become rich and they want to take their family out of, you know, poverty to the middle class or middle class to upper middle class. And they make that decision, you know, a certain number of people tragically commit suicide. It's one in 100,000 or one in 250,000, depending on the society, the age group, etc. So would that person have committed suicide anyways, what you have to ask now? This comes across as incredibly cold and callous, but in business and in life, they call this the law of big numbers. So at burning man, there's a hundred thousand, what, 75,000 people there. And so if one person were to commit suicide at Burning Man by, you know, every 10 years by running into the Burning Man fire, right. Doesn't they not have that? You know, killed this person. It means this person was going to kill themselves in all likelihood anyway. So I think, I think I'm pretty much on board with your take on. It's fine if you're compensated fairly for it. I'm a big enough deal now that I can afford to hire my own admin team. Look at me. They handle all the details of running my company. But if you're a startup, you need to spend your time obsessing about your product, not filling out paperwork and doing all

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That's eV-E-R-Y. And I think that equity upside is the critical thing there because if you own what you're working on, you're less of a salaried worker, more of a owner in the company. So what's the minimum equity expectation you think is reasonable for an employee to have to sign on for, let's say, a decade of 996 at a company? company. Yeah, I mean, again, it would be up to the person. If the person is, you know, from an immigrant family and they grew up with five people in a one bedroom and $150,000 or $100,000 to them, you know, pays down this debt, you know, buys a house, whatever, okay, that's the personal

choice. For some people, if they're already a millionaire, they might be like, I'm not doing this unless I'm getting $10 million in stock options. So there's no one answer. There is just the reality that you're in a competitive space. If you're in the NBA, LeBron James is, or Steph Curry, or Michael Jordan is prime, or Kobe Bryant, certainly.

We're definitely doing more than 72 hours of basketball per week. They were working more than 72 hours a week. Navy SEALs, Olympians. They're all doing, they'd be like 72 hours of work in a week to be an Olympian or Kobe Bryant. They'd be like, oh, that's like a vacation week for me.

So it is what it is, folks. You don't need to be precious about it. it's not causing people to die. It's light work when compared to what humanity was doing, you know, a thousand years ago or a hundred years ago where people literally worked in fields seven days a week and maybe they took Sunday off for like the Lord's Day.

But do much worse than that. I mean, go look at the history of mining. Yes. Thank you. But here's the thing, though. People are going to say, but guys, aren't we trying to get away from that? Isn't technology supposed to free us up? And I'll just say,

Because right now we are at a hinge point in technology, there's a new paradigm that everyone wants to apply and there's the geopolitical element. This is going to be the way it goes when the markets are competitive. So last thing, Jason, before we scoot on here, I went and I did some searching around the web. And I found some companies that have job postings that explicitly note hire hourly requirements. So Corgi says that new hires and people pursuing the account executive route are required to be in the office six days a week. Mercor, who we've had on the show, six days a week with Monday through Friday in prison. So one remote day. Latch, bio says six days a week, Monday through SAT, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So you can see companies being upfront. And I think upfront expectations, reasonable equity splits, go for it. If you don't have those things, you're kind of being a jerk. Yeah. And Europe is, you know, even Europe is having this discussion. And in China, I think there was a podcast, 996. I think either Sequoia or Google Ventures had like literally named their podcast 996. So, it is what it is.

Name their protest site, 996. I see you, because working 996 sends developers to the intensive care unit. If you think you can compete in a company working 40 hours a week and hiring, you know, whatever it is, you know, twice as many. If you think you can compete with 72 hour a week, work weeks where people are getting massive compensation by working 35 hours a week, go do it. Spend twice as much money, have twice as many people and see if you compete. You might actually be able to. Maybe you all track more people. Maybe better people will come work for you.

You know, we might be sitting here in 10 years and have a standard in the United States for a lot of different workers, let's say lawyers and accountants of four days a week or teachers or nurses. We may go down to like a four day, 35 hour a week, you know, nine hour a day, 10 hour a day, work week. And in fact, there were some companies that were pitching this during the peak, woke era of Silicon Valley. And this stuff ebbs and flows. Like during that peak, woke, DEI, you know, kind of life work balance, nonsense. There were literally companies that were saying, come work for us. You can have unlimited vacation and work four days a week. And that was their sales pitch.

And those companies, I can't even remember their names because they lost to the companies working 996. And speaking of getting fit, look how Schfeld I am. I was on the scale the last week, 169 to 169 to. 172. I'm really in my perfect zone. I'm trying to get down to 166 for ski season and increase the muscle mass on my body. How did I do it? I spent the last four years testing different GLP-1s. You know what I'm talking about. Ozempic, Wagovi, Monjorno, and changed my life. I don't want to get emotional, but I lost 40 pounds. I feel great. I don't look at myself in the mirror and go, why can't I lose this weight? I had whatever. My genetics work.

against me, my lifestyle working against me, the food supply working against me, I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I used a tool, GLP-1s, having a better diet, exercising, rucking, fasting. I tried everything, and it worked for me. It might work for you. And it might, if you want to try, I suggest, road.co, RO.com. I'm an official spokesperson, me, Charles Barkley, and Serena Williams. three incredible, notable athletes in their field, where I should say two notable people and me. Those are the three spokespersons for row.co, two incredibly famous people and me.

So go to row.com and hopefully it works for you. I got the food noise out of my head. I believe the phrase is podcaster waistlines matter too. Yes, absolutely. Let's keep going. All right. Next up in the docket. Let's talk about pres.

Prech is a former launcher. We all love Prech, fantastic guy. We lost him because he went off to go build his own company. How selfish. Unbelievable, Prech. How dare you? But he made a very interesting video clip, Jason, that he shared on Twitter back in September that you asked him about in which he was doing some storyboarding, if he will, for a promo

for his company, Tempo. And you asked him to do a demo for us. And we also have the final version of that. So I thought I would show the 19-second clip. that got you interested and then show you the final version of you talk about it. Okay, great. Yeah, Prech is building a company called Tempo to extend your health span. And he made a great promo video and he shared it.

So here we're seeing it. Great voiceover. Thank you. And an old man sitting on a bench. Writing in his journal. For stepping into the morning sun. Getting the sunlight. It felt easier to stay inside.

So here's the simple word. workflow. So yeah, I asked Prash to do a how-to because people are making these incredible videos and some people are spending 50 or 150 or 250,000 or 250,000 dollars doing them. Other people are doing them with AI. And I think Prash is in that group. So let's hear from Prash how he did it. Oh, right. Here is our dear friend explaining the nuts and bolts of how to do this yourself if you want to. The simple workflow started with the concept. We narrowed down to this a letter to my younger self concept, which is basically 100-year-old grandpa writes a letter to his younger self. As his pen touches the notebook, there's a bunch of shots of me doing a number of healthy activities.

The reason I chose my grandpa was I just recently hired him. Welcome to the team. Pardon? Welcome to the team. Congratulations. So he became the first chief centenarian officer. I wanted to find a fun way to include him in this weightless video. Then I wanted to script it out and storyboard.

This is where I used chat GPT. I basically prompted it with this and got it. a whole structure out of it. So now we have the concept. We have the script. Now we want to create a storyboard. The storyboard now comes after creating the script. So we basically have this script and structure. So we're going to pop that into GPT, ask it to start creating stills. You can refine this further. What that ends up looking like is something like this. While I make the storyboard and some stills, sketches. And so what he's showing is the prompt he wrote. So he comes up with the concept, 100 year old writing a letter to himself.

says, let's make this into a script, gets basically a scene by scene of what should be in this ad, this promo video. And then it generated sketches in storyboards for him. Then he took the storyboards and then he made them reality. And this is just wild when you think about it. Keep going. Drawn by hand for the scene, for example, a sketch of a grandpa sitting outside on a bench. And again, I'm just doing like a rough draft here just because I want to. to see how the story lays out before we make the actual thing. You could use VO SORA if you

wanted like actual videos and now I have about 20 stills that create the whole story. So we got the concept, we got the script and storyboard. So for the voiceover, we use 11 labs. We're going to go to text the speech and put the script that I want create. And for voice, I'm either going to search their library or create a voice if you go to the voices section and create our clone of voice. And so I use a combination of different voices to create this old man. speaking anyways you get the idea I'll go here and I'll just download that into an mp3 voiceover is done now we want to go to music what I did was I basically took that into chat and said give me a that being his description of the advertisement and I went over to this other tool called SORA

using chat I output of this prompt as well he means sooner give to SORA to then create make sure it's an instrumental track and it'll create different versions in SORA so I can go through pick a track that makes sense that I like. Now we have the concept, we have the script, we have the storyboard, we have the music, we have the voiceover, and now we just need to edit it together. And simple editing tool, I'm going to bring in Capcut. And so I took all the stills and just place them out here. So we have almost just over 20 stills here. I'm going to drop the audio track from 11 labs. I'm going to drop the audio track from Suno. And then it turns out to sound and look like this. To the younger man I once was. So the idea here,

again, we're not even going to ship this, really. It's just for our own creative process, seeing if we like the concept enough to make it real. And that's it. That's the process of how to make a quick concept video. I thought it was fantastic. I love the fact that he went through every single tool in order, show them how to do it. Because I could do that now, Jason, in a couple hours. I love it.

Yeah. I mean, eventually, you'll be able to do this in one LLM or in a browser with agents that will do the entire process for you. right now you have to use the best of breed tools to make each piece and then stitch them together. And the interesting thing is he could have just released it as the sketches and I think it would be really effective. I think they went and took this concept and you refine the concept. You refine the concept. The other person who did this quite famously, I believe, and our executive director, Lon, air director, Alon will correct me if I'm wrong, but perhaps my favorite director of all time, Ridley Scott,

definitely in my top two, three, Ridley Scott was known for doing storyboards constantly. And I think he learned to do them himself. And he would storyboard all these ideas and sets and everything, whether it was aliens or Gladiator. And he could just do them himself. What that does is it lets you kind of get a feel for the story. before you do something expensive like higher actors. And you can kind of see if the tone works and if everything works.

So this is genius. We have a company saga, which does this that we incubated in our accelerator. And we'll pull up saga in a moment. Yeah, and here's the picture. Thank you, producer, Lon, of Ridley Scott doing the alien. Pull this up. This is incredible. Check this out.

It's in the twist taping room. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Here is the images, which shows a number of different screens. Would these be individual scenes that I'm looking at here? Yeah, so I guess what we're looking at, and let me pull it up on mine. Yeah, these are each individual scene. And then I guess there's a title and then notes underneath it. But he would draw these himself.

And if you look on the top right, you're seeing the side view of a human with the facehugger on it, the iconic facehugger. And what's great about that. And then you can see the engineer. and the second one on the right is, I think, the engineer in its ship, or, you know, somebody going ready to be in a cryovac, etc. Acid dripping, you know, as when you kill these aliens, there are acid drips on the left, and it's just some blood drops. All of this is to say he doesn't have to tell people what he wants. He can show what he wants.

And then here, if you pull up the Napoleon ones. So here you see Napoleon, and I think those are the scene numbers on the left. 53, 61, and he was just great at drawing these in real time. Just think about how much time this saves when you're trying to explain something to somebody. And this is really indicative of how AI is going to make everybody, you know, Ridley Scott level. Presh is not Ridley Scott. He has not made 10 films, but he's doing what Ridley Scott did. So the gap between the orator and the amateur is closing.

Yeah. You know, so from amateur to O-Tor, I think the distance between those things was a lifetime. It was decades. Now the distance is going to be, you know, instead of 10,000 or 20,000 hours, I think it goes down to 100 or 1,000 hours. If pressure were to do that process every day, a different storyboard, a different 30-second scene, and he did it for 100 days. So you put it in a hundred, ten-hour days or twelve-hour days, and speaking of nine-nine-six.

So imagine if you did a hundred, twelve-hour days. You know, now your 1,200 hours into your career, what would the hundredth day look like versus his first day of doing that? This should be inspiring to young people who can't get jobs. All these young people who can't get jobs, we've talked about static team size, we talk about AI displacing jobs. Here's the opposite of it. You could become Ridley Scott level, I believe,

in a hundred days, you could do things that really Scott does. You might not do them with as much panache. You might not have the instincts he has. But you would get damn close. Lon, if somebody did this 100 days in a row with these tools, how good would they be at making visual scenes in your mind? I think an amazing thing. Yeah, like filmmakers, a lot of them really do just spend obsessive amounts of time

thinking about how things would look, how they would block them out. I once, not to toot my own horn, but I once chatted with John Wu. I interviewed him for Mission Impossible, too, and he could still years later tell you every setup for the killer. Well, we put the camera here. We were behind this corner. We had to move it around here. He just committed all that to memory. The whole scene was in his head so that on the day, when he was directing people, he just like, you, you need to be right here.

The light needs to be here. He just had the movie already playing out in his head before he ever set foot on the set. incredible so um everybody go follow preshy poo my presci poo he came to work for me quit school came to work from 18 we backed his startup he's doing great um and he's uh twitter x dot com slash presh d kumar and if you want to check out tempo the company he's working on join tempo dot app we love this guy thank you pres for making us that video and we'll put the links in the docket if you want to read the docket you go to this week in startups dot com slash docket and then we'll put it in the show notes as well.

We'll put the links to all this great stuff. So if you listen to This Week in Startups and we give you some tips here and tactical stuff from the founders in our portfolio, we're going to link to it all the time. You can go to This Weekend Startups.com slash docket and see previous episodes, dockets, get in there and get all those links.

So if you watch this week in startups, three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, sometimes we throw in a Tuesday show because we're sold out of ads and they talk me into adding a show. You're going to just become a better fact. founder. And that's why we do the show. We're passionate about founders and technology and inspiring people to start companies. And here you are. You're listening to the show and you are going to

get better and better at starting companies and learning these tactical techniques if you're hanging out with us. The big news this week on the Anthropic front, Jason, is that the company has tapped Google for an enormous compute purchase. They're going to get up to one million of Google's TPUs in a deal worth up to tens of billions of dollars and it's going to bring on more than a gigawatt of capacity to the company in 2026. Now, reading this news, I know a lot of folks out there might not know what a TPU is. So I went ahead and did a little prep work and asked producer Claude, what is that? Well, it's an ASIC or an application-specific integrated circuit that is essentially designed just for these machine learning workloads. Basically, they're

designed to do a lot of mathematical operations very, very quickly. And that's what powers the neural nuts that we all love and know. And just for a little background here, they've been working on the TPU since I think 2013, something around there. So they've been in the game for a long time. If you want to use Claude like we do, you can go to clod.a.ai slash twist. It could start. We have a 50% discount for three months. But Jason, essentially, Google TPUs are better. They're more efficient. They have lower costs. And they're tailored for this kind of work. But more to the point, I'm shocked that Anthropic is kind of putting aside its long-term deal with Amazon.

It's a preferred partner for both training and inference to go rack up with Google. I was curious what you thought about why they made this choice. I think any any compute advantage these large language models can get, they're going to take.

What's fascinating about this one is that Gemini, Google, the Gemini large language model, Anthropic, and Claude, they're direct competitors. So this is perplexing, interesting, confounding, strange bedfellows? Yeah. If you're anthropic and you're giving money and doing this partnership with Google and you're both competing for customers, users, businesses, developers, developers, and APIs, it's kind of interesting. And as we say in our industry, no conflict, no interest. What this signals to me is the Anthropic team and the Google team are collaborating.

They're in like with each other. They're not be in love, but they're in like with each other. Who else is in like with each other? Satya Nadell and Open AI were in like, we're in love with each other. I think they've dropped down to in like with each other. And I noticed Satia, Nadella and Elon are in like with each other. So, and NVIDIA is in love with everybody. Jensen loves everybody equally. But this is the place we are. The other thing I think is super interesting is amongst the LLM companies,

some have money printing machines. So if you were to look at the foundation models, you've got GROC, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral. Yeah, Mistral. Mistral. I guess I'm including them. And then you have Gemini.

Mm-hmm. And you have Lama, what Zuck is working on. I think that's probably your big six. Am I missing anybody there? I mean, we could bring up the Amazon and Microsoft models, but given that you and I always forget the names of those families of models, I think we don't see them coming up yet. So if we just take those six, look at those six.

of those six, which ones have money printing machines? Which ones have money printing machines? Profitable machines, earnings machines. Well, Gemini. Google, correct. And meta. Okay. This puts them at a significant long-term advantage.

Meta and Google can build infrastructure at a pace that the other four have to go raise money for. Yes. So let's pause on this for a second. Now, one would argue Gemini is probably in third or fourth place typically. And I think Lama is typically in sixth place or fifth or sixth place. Yeah. So the companies at the top are obviously Open AI. And then I would say Claude and Grock. That's probably your one, two, and three. And then you're four or five and six, Mishol might probably Lama's six, Mishrel five. And yeah. So you can start to. look at this and I wonder if Google and meta have a huge advantage in that they could start deploying hardware out of scale that the others cannot. Now, the others are the bells of the ball right now because they have the best product and people want to be on their cap table. And then this makes me wonder, why is Apple with their war chest and Microsoft with their Warchest, not participating in this lunacy of building out huge data centers, huge infrastructure. I guess Google is.

I wonder if Med is going to. Microsoft, too, but it's less speculative for them, Jason, because they talked about it in earnings and they've said, we just have the inference demand and we're just building against kind of like proven bookings. So with them, I'm not that concerned. But I think that the economy between the money printers and the money needers is very important because when you think about XAI and Open AI, They are spending tens of billions of dollars on Infra.

Anthropic isn't. They're raising money from the major cloud companies. Amazon, I think $8 billion, Google, about $3 billion, and they're getting access to compute. So I kind of wonder, and I don't want to sound too nice to anyone here, but like, is Anthropic kind of nailing this because they're not taking on the infra side quest? Yeah, partnerships, I think, are a way to win here.

if you want to go far, you go together. If you want to go fast, you go alone. So going alone, I think will give you a massive speed advantage in the short term. And I think building up partnerships could make you go further. Of course, you might be inspiring the value to be accreting to your partner, not you. And this is the OpenAI Microsoft relationship. Yes. Personified.

Who's getting the value? OpenAI has the branch at GPT that has. has the largest number of users, but their percentage of market share has been going down consistently. Now, they're still growing because the pie is getting bigger. But if you look at, they were 98% of the market three years ago. I don't know where they are now. But I think they're probably 80% of the market now in terms of consumers and developers using the stuff. They're going to keep going down on a percentage basis.

Just like Amazon Web Services had the game to themselves before Azure. Yeah, literally. And before Azure and Google Cloud, Oracle came on strong. So now you have four people competing for that, three major and Oracle coming on strong. Oracle's really not going to take this lying down. They see cloud computing as a big, a big accelerant of their business, obviously. So really interesting.

I do think these kind of partnerships mean more stability. And, you know, if they, like you're saying, if inference is, taken off the table for them and it's solved by somebody else. That's sort of like when Dropbox, this is a history lesson for folks. Dropbox launched at the conference I created with TechCrunch, TechCrunch 40, TechCrunch 50. You remember back in the day, I created this conference with an old friend of mine. We're no longer friends, but an old friend of mine begged me to do this conference with him and I did it with him. And Dropbox launched there. I remember meeting the guys. Dropbox didn't work. They were running it out of Sequoia's offices and they were just having a heck of it.

time getting the software to work. I remember their pitch, which I think was at the first TechCrunch 40. We can look up TechCrunch 40 pitch for this. And I think actually I own the TechCrunch 40 YouTube site. I got to go find it. But they did a great job. They also went back and forth. Do they have their own infrastructure? Is that cheaper? Do they use AWS when that was the only game in town? Would they be giving it all over? And this going back and forth as to, is it an advantage to have your own infrastructure or is it a disadvantage, was just personified by 37 signals. And one of our crack researchers will pull up this video that was just shared on Twitter, now X.com, of David Hanmeyer Hansen, DHH, which is his Twitter handle as well,

X.com slash DHH, really smart cat, friend of the pod. We got to have them back on soon. DHH just did an analysis and he open sourced it and told everybody of how much money they're saving by getting off of other clouds i don't know if they're azure a ws but play this video and show the chart when we have it this is extraordinary i think this is like main character energy some of my producers i think we we miss this main character energy but d h i think i had the right clip right here jason let me get this set up for us yes by the way a great six-hour conversation between lex friedman and david back in oh this is the clip that i have is him standing not talking do you know that's the one i'm talking about i was just also giving a promo to my friend lex

friedman all right here is dh h talking about a ws spend we were paying a w s 3.4 million dollars we've taken that money invested it into our own gear and we own it ourselves and we're not down today it was not a major crisis when a ws was uh was down and now we can nuke it so let's do it ready let's push the lead they literally are deleting their AWS instance. That is such good TV. He shared the table of how much he spent year after year on cloud computing, and he estimated that they are probably saving, like he said, a million or two million

a year. Who knows? Let's just say if they're saving a million dollars a year over 10 years, 10 million dollars to the bottom line. It does add complexity. So there is a back and forth that all founders go through. Should we stand up infrastructure? Should we use other people's infrastructure?

You can go faster when you use other people's infrastructure because you don't have to take on that responsibility and build out the team. When you do have unlimited resources and, you know, the great example of this would be Elon with X AI. And Elon knows more about factories and physical production of items than anybody on the planet with the possible exception or, you know, co-leader of Flexport maybe, right? Or not Flexport. Is it, yeah, Flexport produces. Ryan Peterson? No, no, that's flexport. Flexronics, are they the ones who the iPhone goes, they subcontract to?

Anyway, there's China. Singaporean American multinational manufacturing company that does end-to-end advanced manufacturing? Yes, flexronics. So flexronics are the people who build the iPhones. They're based in Singapore, like some companies like TikTok are based in Singapore, but they're Chinese companies. But if you look at this chart, they have their AWS and Google Bill and the total. And, you know, at their peak, they're spending $3.4 million in 2019.

The total they spent between AWS and Google from 2017 to $2025, $21 million. And so they have it, folks. You could potentially save a lot of money doing this, but you will be slowed down. So you've got to be thoughtful about it. That extra million dollars they spent a year, let's say, probably well worth it if you're building, you know, I think they probably have $30, $40, $50 million. in revenue, 37 signals. So if they got 50 billion in revenue, you don't sweat the million dollars in expense.

If you're trying to go fast and you've got competitors. However, at some point you may want to look at it and optimize. This is why Oracle is being so aggressive. Oracle is going to people saying, give us your cloud bill. Whatever your cloud bill is, we're going to cut it in half. And so I just, I know some of the people at Oracle and they are aggressively, like Google Cloud and Azure, we're very aggressive the last couple of years, trying to increase their growth rate and compare it to AWS. All of them are growing. They're all incredible businesses.

Well, that's because the cloud is just doing insanely awesome things. I mean, dear God, can you imagine? And what happened when AWS region went down? The entire world ground to a halt. That's how much we depend on these guys. And that's when you can be multi-cloud. You know, you can just go multi-cloud at some point and distributed cloud and you can move from one to the other. You can use your own internal infrastructure for some things that are cheaper. And you can have hybrid cloud, right? So there's a lot of options here. Very important for founders, I think, to not take this on early. I don't think it's an advantage in the first three or four years at all. I think it's a huge advantage to use cloud providers, obviously. Another amazing episode of

this week in startups is in the can. We'll see you all on Monday. Bye-bye.