This Week in Startups - IPO Mania hits the TWiST 500! Three companies are ready to go public | E2206

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

👉 Register here for Founder University Japan’s Kickoff! https://luma.com/cm0x90mkToday’s show:*Three of our favorite TWiST 500 startups — Ledger, 1Password, AND Mercury — are circling IPOs. Find out why the cybersecurity space remains so hot… AND why Jason says you really need to have multiple banks.PLUS Marc Andreessen called The Pope an AI Doomer on X, then thought better of it. We’re tracking the entire viral controversy…SPEAKING OF viral feuds, allegations are FLYING around about recently-funded AI agent makers Giga. Does the startup pose some genuine red flags, or was it just a questionable launch video?AND why Alex and Jason remain optimistic the AI vibes could turn around, presentation maker Gamma is growing FAST, plus an update on Jason and Alex’s Polymarket IPO wager…Timestamps:(02:17) Jason is hosting the big show from Tokyo today (tonight for him)… Where is Founder U headed next?(04:03) Jason’s eating his way across Japan… what are his top “bang bangs” so far?(07:47) Is The Pope a Doomer? Why Andreessen called out His Holiness (then deleted it)(9:22) Quo - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get started free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months, at http://quo.com/TWiST(12:08)Why Jason still thinks mass AI job displacement is coming(17:48) Will AI-related job loss lead to an explosion in startups and small businesses?(19:24) Coda - Empower your startup with Coda’s Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www.Coda.io/twist(20:39) Have lots of Americans suddenly turned on AI Why?(25:30) Why Alex and Jason remain optimistic that the AI vibes could turn around(29:44) Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at Gusto.com/twist.(31:01) Alex’s new favorite definition of Product Market Fit, or “Market Pull,” as Jason clarifies(33:31) Delving into the Giga controversy… “ugly” talk, wild X allegations, etc.(46:11) THREE TWiST 500 are readying IPOs… Catching up with Ledger, 1Password, and Mercury(53:42) Why Jason and Alex think you need multiple banks(57:40) Why presentation maker Gamma is growing even faster than we thought!(1:00:37) Checking in with Jason and Alex’s Polymarket IPO bet…(1:03:44) Could startups become so richly valued that they become “uninvestable” without an IPO?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:(9:22) Quo - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get started free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months, at http://quo.com/TWiST(19:24) Coda - Empower your startup with Coda’s Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www.Coda.io/twist(29:44) Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at Gusto.com/twist.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

If you can't get a job and you can make half the amount of money or double the amount of money or any of those numbers in between working for yourself and having a small mom and pop business, you're going to do it. People used to do it. They're going to be doing it again, not out of a function of wanting to necessarily, but as a function of needing to. I think it's going to be a situation where we're already seeing with college graduates, they don't have jobs. So what are they going to do? They're going to start companies. They're going try to find a product or service. They can provide to other companies to consumers and put out a shingle and try to get money for a product or a service from individuals. And it's going to be

every person for themselves. It's going to take a lot of self-reliance and rugged individualists. I predict when this transition occurs and the transition is occurring. And it's creating a low anxiety in the country. It's creating a low anxiety in households where people are like, I kind of feel like my job's going away. I kind of feel like my cousin's job is going away. I wonder how long I'll even have this job. And the managers are saying, I wonder how long I'm going to have my job. I wonder how long you're going to have your job. I'm also wondering that because if I don't have 10 people to manage, then why am I here? Why do they need me? If you're not here, why do they need me? I'm a middle manager.

This week in startups is brought to you by Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small business and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months free at gusto.com slash twist. Coda. Coda empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize, plan, and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.io slash twist to get started. for free and get six free months of the team plan.

And Quo. Formerly open phone, Quo is the number one business phone system that streamlines your customary communications. Get started free, plus get 20% off your first six months at Quo.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Kelloggannis.

With me again, Alex Wilhelm, my co-host. I am reporting from Tokyo. Last time I was in Dubai and before that Riyadh, the world tour continues. I'm here to make a quick announcement on Friday that we're going to be doing the Founder University program here in Tokyo, just like we started in Riyadh. Had a great time in Riyadh. 60 great founders building great companies and founder. Dot University, if you want more information about that, we'll be opening up applications for Tokyo in a month or so. 30 companies, 50 companies, 60 companies.

Are you going to get arm twisted to 75 this time? What's the idea? We really want to be able to spend time with each company. And so if you're going to meet with each company every week, you've got to keep it to probably 50 or less. Too many companies, it's just not possible, right? And so you want it to be bespoke enough that the founders can ask a question and meet with the investment team and, you know, just get a nice experience.

So we don't want to push it too hard, not too many companies. Well, I was thinking about you this morning. because I saw this story over on CNBC, and it just essentially discusses a report, Jason, that shows that a lot of Japanese investors are putting money into Europe. But what a great time then, if there's capital available locally to Japan,

to build more companies in Japan. Why not? This is still the third largest economy in the world, the Japanese economy. So it's a major player. Punches well about its weight with 100 million citizens. And they used to often build products and services. for the rest of the world.

A lot of the entrepreneurs now, there's such a big market here. We'll just focus on the market here. So it's going to be really interesting to see how many of the founders are building just for Japanese customers and how many are building also for U.S. customers. So I'm excited to get started on that.

And I have been eating my way through Japan. Yeah. Here is a tweet from you that has more exclamation points than a middle school group text. what what what what what is this here what is a six banger what is pst psa what are you doing over there well uh pst pst psts seems to be a great uh pizza place so the pizza here is like best in the world some people might say better than italy or or new york and it wouldn't be wrong um it's pretty great so uh when you are foodie and you go have dinner twice called a bang bang i thought that's what you're referring to yeah and so we

We started early this morning here with a couple of friends, and we did two breakfast. And then we went to a really great breakfast by Center Bakery to have this incredible French toast. And then it just the whole day went on and all of a sudden we had been to, you know, six and a half places in the course of a day. And it was crazy but awesome and delicious. Now you don't eat a full meal when you do this bang, bang. thing. Right. Maybe two lunches, two dinners, two breakfast, and then we went to a vinyl bar.

Big tradition here. It's really kind of interesting when you think about people wanting to spend more time together. We went to this great vinyl bar. Yeah, you can see there are a picture of it. Yeah, there's a Yamazaki. But you see that speaker and that beautiful McIntosh there? And I think it's a talent, I think they called those speakers.

Anyway, those speakers are from like the 60s or 70s. and they spin vinyl and you go it's a very interesting experience you're not supposed to talk too loud in the listening situation they play vinyl you can pick marbles from like little jars on the bar the different colors are different decades another type of color is a type of music so if you want soul music from the 70s or jazz from the 80s you can pick like different marbles so you put them down. And then the DJ will go pick from their thousands of records, which records they have. But the sound systems and the sound stage is just so amazing. And it's like a new experience for going out. You go out, you have a nice cocktail or something, and you listen to these incredible speakers.

And I've been talking about that a lot, that I got into high fidelity stuff. Yes, co-buzz and so forth. Yeah. Yeah, listen to that French service co-buzz, which has the high fidelity of things. and just the Japanese do everything as perfectly as possible. So I got to really enjoy that tonight. It was wonderful. Really, really quickly, Jason, best thing you ate today. And why has Japan,

how has Japan managed to make single malts that actually really do, I think, challenge Scottish dominance? I don't know exactly how they got there, but yeah, the scouches are just pretty amazing, the whiskeys. And gosh, today I would say, the pizza was pretty amazing, but in the morning we had this French toast that is kind of the

greatest French toast in the world as a dish. That might be my favorite. Best French toast in the world. Oh, man. Center of the bakery in Ginza, Ginza's like the Beverly Hills, and they make this really crispy, toasty one. In the inside, it's almost like it's pudding. It's so soft and delicious on the inside. It's great juxtaposition. I know it's 11 p.m. where you are, but it's 908 in the morning for me, so you're killing me. All right. Killing you with the French test.

Let's get started. What's in the news? What's happening since I've been on the road? So somehow we have to talk about Catholicism on the show today because Mark Andriesen, a famous investor, co-founder of A16Z, the story of venture capital firm. They really changed the fun size game, you might say, Jason, in the last 10, 15 years, has been a fan of memes. Now, I'm blocked by Mark on Twitter.

So we had Marcus pulls some screens for us. The Pope, Pope Leo, the 14th, did a post. discussing technology and innovation and the fact that it carries a ethical and spiritual weight, to which Mark Anderson responded with this. This is a recent meme that came out of a Sydney-Sweeney interview. We don't have to get into that. I'm aware of it, yeah. He's being dismissive, Jason, right?

Mocking, almost of this. And this led to growing Daniel, an early Apple employee. And I would say a well-known Twitter wag, if you're into that kind of phrasing, responded, quote, don't mock the Pope. And this then devolved into a bit of a controversy. What is the controversy here? Is, was he literally mocking the Pope in some way? You know, it's hard to tell here.

So he was using the interviewer-lady meme as a way to, I think, dismiss moral scolds. The context is that the interviewer asked Sidney's meaning, I believe, you know, I wanted to give you a chance to condemn white supremacy or something. And Sidney was kind of like, I'm not going to do that. So Mark is saying, I'm going to ask you to explain yourself. And yeah, it just sounds like it just didn't land. At my company launched, we have a rule about returning phone calls on the same day, if not faster. It's just core to any business to be responsive to your customers.

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That's QUO.com slash twist. You can even keep your existing number for free at QUO.com slash twist. Well, one, he's been criticized for using the meme incorrectly. But everyone thinks that he's being dismissive. The Pope said that the church's, calls on builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life. The context, I think that maybe I should have added, Jason, is that Markins Reeson's

technology optimism manifesto discussed how any efforts to slow the progress of AI is tantamount to murder because it could harm people in the future that could have benefited from, let's say, better drug discovery. Oh, okay. And so I think he's viewing the Pope here essentially as similar to the lady interviewer. a moral scold and essentially a woke entity. Now, normally that kind of criticism in technology land doesn't generate controversy. But in this case, it turns out there is a pretty strong group of Catholics who are serious

about this and don't like it when people mock the Pope, which fair enough. The Pope has also been discussing the need for common good in business and so forth. So I think he's essentially saying capitalism is not everything. And some American hypercapitalists got into a bit of a mix about this. This led to Daniel, the early Apple employee and so forth, saying that, quote, Mark primarily funds gambling apps, cheating apps, and bought farms. He does not want you to build things that are good for society. So here we see a moment in which there is an intra-technology split over theological differences

and really kind of bringing to bear what do VCs and investors have in terms of moral requirements. We talked about vice clauses back in the day. I actually published it this morning on, hey, like we need to really think about, job displacement and nobody wants to talk about it, but let me just, you know, reiterate why I keep talking about it because a company like Amazon is moving at quite a clip to get rid of employees, even if they say that they're not doing it for AI, which, you know, I don't know, Alex, if you've ever seen this before, but I hate to break this to you as a lifelong journalist, but there have been instances where VCs or even CEOs, dare I say, might say something

that doesn't exactly correlate with how they actually feel. It might not be exactly in line. All those job cuts, Jason, are not just to drive efficiency and reduce layers of management. They're to cut costs? No. Or that they might be AI related, I think, is the point here. Like, sometimes when you don't. hire people or you get rid of people, it might not just be because AI today is like did their

whole job. It just might be it did a third of their job or it's obvious the writings on the wall that people using AI at the company are going to be able to do 20% more every quarter. So therefore, we're on the trajectory to definitely not needing those people anymore. So we might as well get rid of them now. And we might as well not hire people because as I've said many times, if you're going to invest in something, when I'm invested in AI, solution. to the problem, a technological solution to the problem, rather than investing in, you know, more headcount, which then you have to be, you know, theoretically, you need to be a bit loyal to and keep them around. And you spend a lot of time, recruiters, hiring desks. If you can avoid all

that and just use software, you're going to. Yeah. That's it. I just pulled it up on the screen. You can find it over on Jason's Twitter or calcanus.com. It's called the Terror of the Great AI displacement. Just to walk people quickly through your argument, essentially you say that for a long time, people in tech have been saying, hey, we're going to automate these unnecessary jobs. A lot of them were too early, but it does seem now that the technology has reached the point to which it's possible. And your evidence is, quote, the industry knows this time will be different or we wouldn't

be spending a trillion dollars on data centers in five years to capture this opportunity. Essentially, trust when people put their checks, not their mouth. And then where will this hit? you discuss factory and warehouse and delivery work, which you say is about 15% of the domestic workforce. 15% by the way is nearly one in six jobs in the country. And Uber, Walmart and Amazon have about 4 million people in roles that are applicable there.

Further evidence, Amazon is cutting both white-collar staff and investing robotics to get rid of future workers and warehouses. So what does the future look like? I think you've said this before on this show, Jason. But, quote, no human will touch your package between the time you one-click and you or your humanoid, unbox it. Essentially, what we're seeing here is, yes, automation is cutting jobs or impacting them.

I just don't get why people are being so coy about this. You know, that was why I took the time to write it was because I think people are pretending it's not happening or want to say, like, we don't really have any evidence of it. But then if you talk to anybody working in corporate America, and certainly in startups, they're like, wow, we're getting so much leverage from this. we probably don't need that extra position or we can probably just script this with AI and get it done. Now, you'll point to obvious instances where AI is not perfect, but I've given this example many times.

If you're going to write a job description as a paradoxical example, it's going to do a better job than an HR person. And you're going to sort resumes, it's going to do a better job than an HR person. And people are doing those kind of things. So it's happening, folks. And I just thought I'd write it down on paper here to remind people, look at what these companies and leaders do, rather, what they're saying or what to other technologists or other politicians are saying. The fact is, you're not investing a trillion dollars in data centers and H-100s and paying people $10 million a year. If this isn't going to displace all those jobs, if self-driving's not going to work, people are not going to invest. and build a hundred million self-driving cars,

but they are building that many self-driving cars. That's the plan. You can just talk to all the OEMs, talk to Uber, talk to Tesla, talk to Waymo, you know, Baidu. They all have plans to build millions of cars, collectively tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions. So it's happening. We are going to need to talk about it.

I don't know if it's going to be a displacement, Alex. That's going to be so fast that, we can't keep up with it or we can. I suspect it's going to be somewhere in the middle and I'm going to write a second and third piece. So if you have a calicata slash subsect.com to sign up. I'm going to write a second and third piece just to talk about what you can do as an individual to not be one of the laid off people or displaced people,

which is a combination of obviously learning how to use these tools and be one of the survivors or starting your own product service, being a founder. Those are, I think, the two cleanest peys. for young people. And then also what society can do. And there's a lot of things society can do if we have big job displacement. Going back to our panel from last Wednesday, we were discussing, I think, you know, how many people are there to found companies and how many great companies are built each

year. Your statement there about getting people to go out there and kind of start their own, you know, service or business, do you think we're going to see an explosion in one, two, three person firms that are not venture backable, Jason, per se, but are just like good SMBs as people become less attached to Amazon or big tech style employment. If you can't get a job and you can make half the amount of money or double the amount of money or any of those numbers in between working for yourself and having a small mom and pop business, you're going to do it. People used to do it. They're going to be doing it again,

not out of the function of wanting to necessarily, but as a function of needing to. I think it's going to be a situation where we're already seeing with college graduates, they don't have jobs. So what are they going to do? They're going to start companies. They're going to try to find a product or service. They can provide to other companies to consumers and put out a shingle and try to get money for a product or a service from individuals. And it's going to be every person for themselves. It's going to take a lot of self-reliance and rugged individualists. I predict when this transition occurs and the transition is occurring. Yeah. And it's creating a low anxiety. anxiety in the country. It's creating a low anxiety in households where people are like,

I kind of feel like my job's going away. I kind of feel like my cousin's job is going away. I wonder how long I'll even have this job. And the managers are saying, I wonder how long I'm going to have my job. I wonder how long you're going to have your job. I'm also wondering that because if I don't have 10 people to manage, then why am I good for? Then why am I here? Why do they need me? If you're not here, why do they need me? I'm a middle manager. You folks have any idea how many documents and spreadsheets I got to look at every day, every week, every month. I'm reading this ad off for a document right now. I'm going to need my own personal data center soon.

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but it also crunches the numbers and provides you deep research and insights just based on simple prompts. And because it's powered by Grammally, you know you're going to get clean, clear, crisp responses that are easy for you to understand. So go right now to coda.io slash twist and get six months of the team plan for startups free. That's C-O-D-A.io-slash twist for six months free. This actually is a great thing to bring up right now because I've been trying to figure out

what's changed in the last two weeks, but it feels like, it feels like someone turned the lights on and we're all still at the party, you know, and everyone's kind of looking around going, uh-oh, now what? I don't know if it's, you know, concerns about AI investment that's making everyone freak out or just geopolitical tensions, but it does seem to me that the vibes have kind of turned bad ever since you've left the country. Now, I'm not saying you leaving did that, but like you left. And so I think you've missed it, maybe, maybe, because you've been in, you know. No, no, no. I, I made this joke. Like, what happened? The AI bubble popped. Sam Allman went on. Brad Gersoner lost Bill Gurley as his co-host and he popped the AI bubble all in the

same week. But there was something to be said for that. People were wondering this whole time, like, wait, where, where's the $1.4 trillion is going to come from? And for the last two, for the last year, we've been talking about round-tripping, right? The first, this shows you how savvy, the finance, the tech space is. When we see people start self-dealing, hey, I'm going to sell you a bunch of these chips and you're going to pay me a bunch of money and I'm going to invest in your company. People are like, wait a second. How does that work? Exactly. You're round-tripping the money. And so once people saw that chart of how intertwined everything was, that was, that was, The first reason to think, wait a second, what's going on here?

The second thing people saw was one of the companies, opening I, doing all this weird shenanigans, public benefit corporation, private company, credible valuations. And then they did a flurry of deals all in the same couple of weeks. Remember, there was like the Nvidia deal, then the AMD deal, then a Amazon deal, then the Microsoft renegotiative deal. And you start to see like all that renegotiation Oracle deal came. in at the same time for $1.4 trillion. And those, we talked about it here, are those guaranteed?

Yeah, we did. Where does the money come from? How does $300,400 billion show up in Oracle's bank account to pay for this stuff? Well, when Sam gave that answer, which, you know, maybe he was tired like I am right now, maybe he's on the road, he's exhausted, I feel you. I can happen. And he gave a, you know, a little bit of a cheeky answer. Maybe he was trying to be funny and be a cheeky monkey, you know, and so.

say, hey, I'll buy your shares back. But that moment, I think made people think, huh, I wonder if he really actually can pay that $1.4 trillion bill. And if he doesn't, and Oracle went up, remember that day, Oracle went up 15% or something crazy? Oh, yeah, it was a $150 billion in free market cap. Yeah. And you're like, wait a second, does that make sense? And so now people are saying, hey, maybe this isn't all it's cracked up to be. So two things can be true at the same time. Yeah. There is a bubble. This is getting too big. there's a lot of open questions about can this actually, this buildout actually be funded. Is the electricity going to show up? Are people going to protest the self-driving cars in the

street? Are they going to protest? Electricity tripling or doubling for residential when, you know, some great data center starts sucking down all the power. This is what happens during a massive paradigm shift. I remember during the dot-com boom, these similar questions happens. Would there be a movie industry, a book industry, what would happen to newspapers? All of these things happened. Now, what happened to newspapers and magazines? They got walloped. There was a lot of destruction. People talk about, you know, like, oh, people were overselling it. But honestly, magazines have been reduced to a couple of iterations, even in airports. It's hard to find the economists sometimes, Jason. They were in back to see. It just took a while. Yeah, it was like another 15-20 years.

It was a very quick 10, 15-year deflation of newspapers. If you look at the news, newspaper and magazine revenue chart. It's like this giant bell curve. It just fell off a cliff at some point. And people stopped using advertising, classifieds, and subscribing to newspapers and buying them on newsstands every day. It's in the magazines. All that went online.

And you see the online advertising chart. It's just the two cross each other at a certain point in the 2000s. And you're like, yep, that's what happened. Here's a version of the chart you're talking about, Jason. It's not the absolute. the absolute best one, but this is from, I think, some Google information. This just shows the rise of Google's revenue from 2003, 2013 compared to a decline in newspaper revenue, not exactly correlated, Craigslist, et cetera, but there's what Jason's

talking about. Newspapers and Google itself, and you don't have Facebook in there either. And, yeah, as the newspapers go down, Google goes up. Why? People used to, you know, advertise their cars, their classes. suffice, you know, local car dealership. Here's the outside of this. So I was thinking about the good and the bad.

The bad is people thought the economy probably shed jobs in October and stock market sold off three or four percent last week, et cetera. The good news, Jason, is that GDP growth for Q4 looks pretty hot. We're at about 67% chance of another rate cut in December. It's only a month away. Hyper-scarler earnings for Q3. Pretty good overall. Open AI does expect to reach 20 billion in ARR this year.

And the shutdown might be coming to a close. So I would say that, yes, the vibes have gotten kind of crappy, but a lot of the stuff hasn't actually changed and it looks okay. So I'm not as worried as I think a lot of people are. There's a wall of worry that's growing for people. Consumer debt is high. Interest rates have not come down as fast as people have wanted them to. That will probably happen. The inflation rate has gone back up to 3%.

It was supposed to go down to 2. So that hasn't happened. And it had flirted with 2.3, 2.4, we talked about it here. Young people can't get jobs. There was a flurry of layoffs. So yeah, whenever you have these transitionary markets, one side's going to win the argument. It's either going to be a recession.

We'll break out and we'll have two quarters of negative growth in a row. And, you know, the stock market will correct a bit. Or we're going to have this choppiness until people get comfort. in it again. If people don't have jobs in the, the unemployment rate is the one to watch. When the unemployment rate is low, which it is still, it's 4.x or something, 4.4. When you have an under 5% unemployment, you have plenty of people out there with money to spend. We live in a consumer-driven economy. So things will be fine. If that gets up to 6% or 7%, that's when you start to say, huh, something's going on here. And people are not spending money. And then people stop

buying on Amazon. They start taking trips and, you know, Carnival Cruises, you know, United Airlines, the gap. Everything starts to show. Visa, et cetera. Yeah. Here's a chart of unemployment in the U.S. This is via Fred. As you can see, unemployment kind of bottomed out here, Jason, at about, oh, I don't know, 3.4% in early 200023 and has risen all the way up to 4.3% as of August in this dataset. Again, the government shut down. Data is a bit delayed, but an upward trend there. Very modest. Let's say you're a startup and you have less than 12 months of run way with the current vibes being what they are, Jason, would you recommend that that startup go out and try to raise a top up or just get their runway over 12 months? Or be cool, be calm,

and just fundraise on your current timeline that you had before? You know, most capital allocators I talk to think we've got another year, year and a half of boom market. Doesn't mean it's going to crash, but, you know, could be a recession, could be a pullback. So most people are thinking, hey, we got a year or two of good times left. What that means is probably pretty safe if you've got a year of runway and you're getting some reasonable traction, but it never hurts to fill up the gas tank. And you got to play the game on the field. If you've got competitors and they're deploying capital and there's a big opportunity

to get customers, you're going to keep trying to grow your company. If you're a nascent company, all that matters is getting product market fit. So it's not one size fits all. If you're under, if you don't have product market. fit. In other words, customers are not delighted by your product or service and they're not spending money on it. Just focus on that. Don't worry about raising money. Don't worry about anything, but finishing your product and making sure it connects with customers because that's when the actual startup game really starts, you know, where the second half of it starts. There's pre-product market

fit, post-product market fit. Just a fancy way of saying consumers are willing to pay or use your product and get value from it. And if they're not, you've got to stay in the lab. Now, if you've got a growing business, you know, and it was Uber or Airbnb or Coinbase or Robin Hood, and you're paying a lot of money to acquire new customers, yeah, you can still do that today. There'll probably be money for you in 2026 to keep raising if you're growing.

But no business with money in the bank goes out of business. I very rarely see a company with money in the bank. It has happened. They'll just be like, hey, you know, we don't have a business here. we're going to be mature and return what's left to the investors generally doesn't happen. Launch is a fast-growing organization. We've got more than a dozen employees working with me here in Austin and another dozen spread out all over the world.

But there's so many moving parts when it comes to hiring and managing employees. There's the onboarding. Of course, payroll. You've got to pay them. And listen, I've got all these podcasts to do. I don't have time for payroll benefits, HR taxes, answering questions. Nor do I want to hire a full-time person and then have them do five hours. hours of work a week. No, I have the perfect partner, Gusto. They're the all in one payroll and

benefit product that's built just for your small business. Easy to use. It's incredibly fast to get started and it's designed specifically with remote offices in mind. And Gusto is not just giving you helpful tools. They're going that extra mile to keep your workers happy and keep everything running smoothly. And they're now offering level funded health plans to keep your insurance costs down and on-demand pay to help workers get access to their cash faster. Without the paying extra interest or hidden fees. So here's your call to action. We want you to try Gusto today. So we're giving you three months free when you run your first payroll. That's right. Three months free. F-R-E. That's my favorite price, folks. Go to gusto.com slash twist. That's

Gusto. G-U-S-T-O.com slash twist. What an amazing service and a partner. Great partner. Did I show you the best definition of product and market fit I've ever seen? I know. This came out a couple days ago. This guy, Iman, he was the former CEO of App Sumo. He grew them, he says, from three to like 80 million ARR. He was doing a thread of his observations about being in business. And this just maybe absolutely die. He writes over on Twitter, uh, or X, you don't have true product market fit until it feels like you're wearing a meat suit in a dog park. Keep iterating who you serve and what you offer until that's true. That's a great definition, Jason. And I think it puts a pretty high bar on PMF. I like it. That's essentially talking about market pull,

uh, which is the final stage of product market fit. if people are calling you and they're telling you how many they want to buy, you go from like calling people and they don't return your call. Then you call people. They take the meeting, but they don't buy the product. Then you call. They take the meeting. They buy the product. They stop using the product. Then they, you know, call. Most of them buy the product. Most of them get value from and use it. Very few churn. Okay, now you got a real business. And then there's a point in time where people like, I need some of that and they just call you and throw money at you. And that happened to Uber DoorDash is a good example of it.

PayPal back in today. When PayPal launched its service on eBay, its servers were just immediately destroyed because everyone wanted it so badly. Amazing. It's an amazing feeling when you're just selling hotcakes. But it's very rare. And most founders are just stuck in that, trying to get people to even care, get them to even try it. And that's why startups are not for everybody. It's a, it's a really hard slog.

The macro stuff I always try to get founders to not worry too much about. It's good to know about them, especially when you're going to go public later. That's when it becomes into play, because you do have to time, when you're a later stage, you have to time deploying large amounts of capital with the eventual goal of going public. So the first five years, you might be getting that product market fit. All of a sudden, you're the guy in the dog park with meat on them, getting surrounded and attacked for their product, then the countdown clock begins. Okay, you got 20 million, 50 million, 100 million, 200 million in revenue. Okay, when does this thing look good enough and is predictable, has predictable enough revenue

to go public so people can get an exit? And that's like kind of the second half or the last third of the journey to becoming a public company. Let's keep moving on. Stay on the startup train here, Jason. There's a company called Gigga that recently raised $61 million in a series. A, there was some relatively mean comments about their announcement video. They did a little clip of the founders talking about their round.

People were mean about that. I don't think we should spend a lot of time talking about people ugly. They call people ugly. I mean, it's just explaining it so people understand what happened. Two Indian guys did a launch video. They look like developers. They're not like Tom Selleck and Brad Pitt. Neither are you and I.

No, you and I are not getting called by Hollywood. But here's the mean tweet. So what did he say in the tweet? Well, red flags everywhere. Quote, when we hit 10 million error, we're going to spend 100K on illegal stuff. We're doing X. What does that mean?

Like drugs or Vegas trip? They just like blank there. Okay. Next thing he says is we're doing, quote, something in MRR monthly recurring revenue. Well, the dashboards in HQ show 6x less. Baiton switch on titles, start day, comp, et cetera. He also had two international weddings that he needed them to pre-approved to take time off.

They said yes. quote after I signed contract. They said, well, you need to pick who you're better friends with because you can't do both weddings now. One of the founders also said, I chopped off a goats head in India because it brings good luck. And then seven days a week in the office, 12 hours a day, no time to. That was a crazy one, like that they were requesting people be in the office seven days a week, 12 hours a day?

That's bonkers. 997. 996. Yeah, okay. Sure. Yeah, now it's 997. The lying about ARR is securities fraud if it was true. If you were raising money and you were lying about it or exaggerating it, sometimes founders do that.

This is all legit. I don't know if this guy's, if any of this is true, but he did put the offer letter in there. So seems pretty real. Has any other news source confirmed this or talk to this guy? No, not that I'm aware of. We haven't confirmed that. But he did put an offer letter in there. so this is kind of a serious out these are very serious allegations like oh to be clear this is yeah these

are allegedly it's all over the place but it's very serious allegations to make against the company the last part of it's kind of what i thought was some of the most interesting this guy drove like 24 hours moved himself to go there now when you do that and then he met the founder and the founder was like very dismissive of him or didn't shake his hand or something that i think like really apparently pissed him off enough that he decided to essentially become a whistleblower here. And who knows if this is actually true or not, but it does feel like it is. And the reason I brought it up was because it's, or, you know, I brought it up when we were talking in our production chat room, you have to treat people well.

And if you treat them this poorly and they do something. like this and if any of this is true these investors could take their money back this could have like a cataclysmic series of events all it takes is for somebody to just send this to the SEC

as an example if you raised money if you raised money and then sent it to and then said oh somebody came in and you were making the wrong amount

and the dashboard had a different amount of revenue. Somebody's going to want to take a look at that. The SEC might be interested in seeing that. The people who just invested might be interested in seeing that. $61 million is a lot of money, just straight up. To raise. Yeah, for a single round. Two things, Jason.

One, the Hindustan Times did cover this. The founders are IIT graduates. I have never heard of that. Hindustan Times. Is that a legit pub? Do you know, have you heard of them before? Yes. Yes.

Yes. They've reached out. I haven't heard back. Also else were in the comments. Jared Steele, the man who shared the alleged quips and quotes from the company, says that other employees have reached out to him, so we may hear from other staff in the coming place. This is just super spicy.

This speaks to the current moment in technology, that this is indicative of how founders are acting, as if there is not holier than that per se, but like just maybe a strain of arrogance to some degree in treating people like Legos versus humans. This is entitlement, I guess. Or sometimes people, when they raise a lot of money, I've seen it happen. Or they make a lot of money.

Sometimes people's character can change a bit or the true colors come out and they act unprofessional or they act obnoxious, whatever it is. All this is alleged right now. And it could be subject to interpretation. But the lesson here for found, this is like a really important one for founders. If any of this is true and they treated the guy really poorly, they wanted him to work like absurd hours. Like it's what, I mean, if you're in a startup, obviously you expect to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week. That's obvious.

It's why you get in stock options. And you have that opportunity. And you don't have to work that you can work for another company that requires 20, 30, 40 hours a week. You'd be a consultant. There's many opportunities out there for talented people. Making fun of people's accents is just unnecessary. And I think it really is. Who is making fun of whose accents?

Jared. Well, the guy who's complaining about the job in question also posted this. Oh, I see. He said duelers, as if that's an Indian way of saying it. Don't be rude about people's appearance or accents. And then your arguments and complaints hold a lot more weight. But this is how you generate sympathy for the people you claimed treated you poorly. Yeah.

So anyway, the thing has obviously gotten ugly, as I say in the business. It's a technical term. The lesson is for the founders here. The employees are going to do things employees do. Did you see this like crazy video from Condé Ness where a bunch of people confronted who was in the rap? Somebody pull it up when the producers is kind of related. Not only can founders get ahead of their skis, employees can get ahead of their skis. So as you're saying here, like, you know, saying something that could be perceived as racist.

I don't know if that was his goal with it, when he said dollars. I don't know if that's like making fun of an idiotic. I don't even know if these guys have Indian accents. They could just be Americans who are of, you know, they could be second generation Americans. I don't know if they have Indian accents either. Condonass video, Jason. Yeah, so this Condé Nass video is kind of like related.

Condon S workers surrounded the HR guy's office to give him a hard time. It's like 10 people outside his office like confronting him. And then he's like, yeah, you got to go back to your desks at work. And they're like, well, we want to talk to you. And these guys are all part of a union. They could just have the union do it. You know, like, one of the guys is like chasing him down the hallway. And they're videotaping it.

This doesn't seem that confrontational to me, because I saw the commentary. Are you crazy? Just standing, I mean, I don't know. They're not in his grill. They're kind of standing down the, I don't know. There's 10 people who went to the HR office as a group. It's easy to fire everybody instantly for doing something like that.

If you want to have a meeting, 100%. 100%. It's like doing a sit-in or something like that. If you have a union and you have complaints, you go to the, union, your union represents you. That's why you pay the union to represent you. You don't intimidate the person by sending 10 people up to their office who don't have a meeting and demand a meeting. I think the difference here is I'm just familiar with journalists and a group of journalists in a hallways, the least intimidating thing. They're not a violent type. Okay, I got you

there. Yeah, I'm not saying like these guys are going to like storm the Bastille here. They're not going to take the castle. Yeah, I got you. We're not going to hold the little signs that say like, you know, respect us. Yeah. And if you wanted to go on strike and do a walkout, that's fine too. You go walk out of the building, but you don't go surround the HR guy's office with 10 people. It's just an easy, quick way to get fired. Everybody there gets fired. And I think over them did and rightfully so. Like, what are we doing here? You're at work. Just work. And then if you need to have a complaint, there's a way to do that. You go to the HR department. You say, hey, I'd like to file something. I've got a complaint about this or you write an

email or you talk to your union. Like literally, these writers that kind of have a union for that explicit purpose. So a lot of this has to do with employee relationships with management. That's what the two stories have in common here. In one, the employees are acting completely inappropriately, you know, intimidating the HR guy who's like, yeah, if you want to do a meeting, this is not the way to do it, 10 on one with your cameras out like we're at a concert or something. In this case, also, you're hiring people, you're asking them to move across the country with like, two or three days notice they have to start now and you don't even shake the guy's hand or you don't have any spree to corpse here and you don't have like a treat them like a human what are

they going to do like if you put people in that position they're going to take whatever power they have the power he has here this jerry kid uh jerry gentleman his power is to say i think the numbers are bogus now this guy if he's wrong if jared's wrong he damaged this company severely he's got a lawsuit against him. Oh, if he made that stuff up, he's in big trouble. Yes, slanderous. Oh, yeah.

Oh, God, yes. Oh, yeah. Oh, man. This is just messy. $61 million is multiple of venture capital funds chipping and money, each of which has their own legal farm on retainer. So, you know, feel free to slap the bear.

Just make sure you have the receipts or whatever the quote from the wire about coming at the king is. They would not, in that situation, VCs would just let the company handle. They wouldn't use their attorneys, but they could definitely refer you to one. Sure. The company here, I think what this all points to, which is a big what you were kind of trying to get me to say, is we are at a peak level of entitlement and bubblishness in the industry.

Yes. When you have a bubble and there's one guy at Google getting paid millions of dollars a year and then he's writing spicy stuff on the internal chat. You saw that happening last week or the important. employees at Condi Annas are doing what they're doing. This situation, Sam Altman's saying he's going to buy $1.4 trillion in servers and data centers, but he's got $20 billion in revenue and they're losing $20 billion a year or $10 billion a year. This is peak bubble behavior. We are in a weird, bubbly time now. And what people happen, the reason they call it a bubble is,

like, it doesn't make a lot of sense. That's all that's happening right now. But for your business, everybody else's business. If you have real customers paying you money for a product or service, that's delighting them. We're getting shit done. You're going to be fine. And also this might be a company being underfunded. Like,

what does this company need $61 million for exactly? It's a seed stage company. It's a series A company. It seems like it's a new company. And that means they have to hire people and have this unrealistic expectation and do unnatural acts. It does feel like maybe they even have too much money. It seems like they have too much money.

It seems like everyone. Every AI company with a pulse has too much money. I don't know what they're going to do with it. Well, no, no. If you had a company that had product market fit and you said, hey, we're going to expand to five cities. Yeah, yeah. Put it in five languages.

We're going to hire a sales team in each. That would actually make a lot of sense. But I got the sense this was like a series A. This was a series A led by Redpoint, smart folks over there. Just to give giga, shout out here at giga.ai if you want to take a look at it. And, you know, they claim that they're handling quite a lot of calls. So in theory, they have a product that works. We don't know that.

I mean, at this point, like, we don't know anything about the company, but, you know, that's where I'm kind of looking at this saying, I wonder if this company just has too much money and not enough product market fit. I'm just purely speculating here as to what's going on. $61 million Series A is are abnormal historically. And Series A is you should have a certain size for a reason. The Series A was the point in which you took your sales motion and made it repeatable, built out your go-to-market team, et cetera.

And you raised $10 million back in the day, not $61. I just don't know why you need that much money. But hey, maybe I'm old-fashioned. I guess there's a story here. Gigas plans use some of the capital fund and expansion into more regulated industry, is healthcare and finance. Company deploys its entire system on the clients on cloud infrastructure using open-source models. Okay, yeah.

Maybe they have to buy some on-prem. Maybe it's an expensive service to deploy. But there are a couple companies out of Jason that do have product market fit. are killing the game. I want to highlight three from the Twist 500. I'm thinking about next year. I'm thinking about the IPO market, trying to think about who might be going out in 2026, early 2007.

The first name that I want to bring up is Ledger. They make those little crypto-cold wallets, which is very interesting to me. And I thought this was a cool company, but not a venture-scale business. It turns out that I'm wrong. So Ledger told the Financial Times that it reached hundreds of millions of revenue.

this year. They've sold 7 million of their little ledger devices that are physical. They claim to secure more than 20% of the world's crypto. And they last raised at a $1.4 billion valuation, which means that they have a maximum revenue to valuation multiple of 14x. If it was just 100 million, exactly. So I think this is a very impressive company and could do very well for Molten Ventures, Samsung Ventures, N50T. And they're expanding. I looked into this because I'm curious, you know, how's a hardware business, venture rackable. They're expanding into their own wallets, apps, and cards.

But I think it just goes to show the maturity in the crypto space and that there are some really big companies built in it that are not only doing stable coins. Yay. So Ledger, are a unicorn that's going to, I don't know, could list whenever it wants. I love that. If it's doing hundreds of millions of dollars,

it is in the bottom end of capable of going public. I wonder if this $60, or $150 stick, and I guess some of them could be even $250,000, if they've sold $7 million of them at $100 each or $150 each, yeah, they could have sold over the last couple of years, $500 million, $750 million of these worth of these. I don't know what the margin on that is, 20%, 10% on hardware. There must be some other businesses here, like a subscription that comes. comes with it, or maybe they get transaction fees. I'm guessing there's some sort of marketplace

business here behind it. So that's why I brought out there two cards they have with MasterCard, because that brings people that hold their crypto on their ledger devices and their ledger wallet and ability to spend it in the real world. And as you and I both know, interchange revenues can add up rather quickly. They're a key driver of mini fintech companies, your chimes, your ramps, etc. So there's a business there. And also I think that because their crypto wallet allows people to stake and I think even lend their crypto while keeping it secure. There's another fintech business there. But I just think they have a great foundation in hardware and if they can convert that

into a recurring software business as well, Jason, then they're going to be playing on both sides of the bits, bytes divide and great. Yeah, they've been out for his 2013. So this company's been around a while. Super cool company. Next up, one password sticking to the security theme. They told, I think it was Fortune or Forbes that they've crossed the 400 million ARR. Mark, and that caught my eye because they were at 250 million ARR, I think was at the end,

no, September, 2023. So they've grown 150 million error in the last roughly two years, give or take. They did that Jason while being cash flow positive. So they've grown pretty effectively. They're now at IPO scale. 400 million error. That's enough in 2025, right? Yeah.

I mean, most people are saying like a billion is the bogey now. So the low end is, you know, like three, four, five hundred million. million. And this one is not high growth. It's medium growth, right? So if they added 150 and 250, they added, you know, whatever, 75 million a year. It's not like doubling. It's growing 40% a year or something. Still a decent business. I do think there's headwinds against these businesses because I seem to have every single device and browser and operating system competing to store my passwords Yeah. But it's a business to business business. These tools are being used by small, medium-sized businesses a lot. Yeah. Whether it's one pass or last pass, other ones. So it's like a business

SaaS. If these two companies, both of them on the, you know, more modest size when compared to the Coinbase's, Airbnb's, you know, even the Reddits, these are smaller than those. These don't have a billion plus in revenue. So I think Reddit actually had under a billion two at the start. So these are on the smaller side. It would be great to see these be able to go out and have a chance in the market and maybe they figure something out and they can become super high growth. The business to business points very good, Jason. One password said that they had over 50% of their revenue in 2023 came from B to B and now it's over 75%. So they're increasingly focused on the upmarket versus consumer, if you will. And they said that they have a 70% compound annual

growth rate amongst customers spending over 100K. How do you do that? Well, they're working on securing AI agents and giving them identities. So I think that's their growth business. And they're competing with startups like asteris and intro security that are also working on AI agent identification and permissions. The real reason you have that business to business growth is if your customers are adding employees or not every employee is on one password yet, you're landing and expanding, right? So most people who do a B2C and a B2B business, they'll start out with the B2C, they'll perfect the product. The person brings it to work with them. They tell their friends. Now there's four people out of 100 people that's this business using it. And somebody says,

I've got to get control of this. And then you make a dashboard that allows some IT manager to see everybody who's using it, make sure they have everything backed up. That it's got stock two compliance. Shout out to Vanta and all that dialed in, right? All right. One more from the Twist 500 that is looking like IPO prepared for 2026, Mercury. Now, I'm actually, I should disclose a Mercury customer in my little business. But they're a technology friendly, NeoBank, Jason.

And what's really cool is they reached $650 million worth of annualized recurring revenue month times 12, not AARCs. They're not a software subscription business at the end of Q3. And they were at about 500 million annual run rate at the end of 2024. That means they've added about 50 million in annual revenue a quarter, not hypergrowth, not open AI, not cursor, but very solid. And I did some fun math. So 50 million in annualized revenue a quarter is adding 16.7 million a month.

or for fun, they're adding about $555,000 worth of annual revenue per day. Quite impressive. The company was only valued at $3.5 billion post money earlier this year, Jason, by Sequoia. Feels cheap, but then again, fintech companies, bank things don't tend to trade us off or multiples. I'm just kind of curious. Would you buy into Mercury right now at a $3.5 billion post? It feels like they really have a great product. Everybody I talk to who uses a Mercury bank loves it.

It reminds me in some ways of Robin Hood or Uber. Like if you get really good at building apps and you keep adding features and you got that product velocity, you keep delighting the customers as I always talk about. And it's very sticky. People don't change banks unless the bank pisses them off. I fire banks every couple of years. And it happens. It's always the same thing. I'm trying to do a wire and I can't get the wire done.

or I'm trying to wire money to the cage in Vegas because I'm playing at a poker tournament. I can't get it. Or I'm trying to get $10,000 in cash for something. I can't get it. And I just say to one of my people, okay, and I'm like literally on the CC chain with some bank. And I'm like, close all of our accounts immediately today.

Because I keep three banks. Like I literally always have three banks, sometimes four when I have every corporate entity. And I'll just put whatever the minimum is in three of them. And then we use one as the primary and have those three as a backup. keeping them warm. Well, yes, because if you have another situation like Silicon Valley Bank and it's FDIC insured with a certain amount in each, or if a bank goes down, you get locked out

of your account, let's say you happen to have a couple of million dollars in a business. Sure. You probably would be a good idea to keep some in the primary and keep some others in the other. Then also if the banks aren't giving you what you need, i.e., like wires aren't going through or they just are not giving you the customer support, you know somebody at each bank. Now, this takes a little while for an operations person at your company to do,

but it's well worth it. So if you have but one bank account at your business, Alex, I'm assuming you have one. For my little company, yes. Yes. And what would it cost you to have a second? Like two hours of your time. So if it takes two hours of your time

and you're in year two or three of your business, not a bad idea. Not a bad idea. To have a second one. Now that's for a solo on, entrepreneur. You know, like, now if you've got a business with 50 people, you have one bank. Does that make any sense? Heck no. What's the old thing about digital copies? If you have one copy, you have no copies of a file. If you have one bank, you may have no bank. Right, exactly. So something

happens to your bank, you got problems. And then it's also just delightful. Because when I send that email, you know what happens? I get what I want. Immediately. All of a sudden, it's escalated. Because I just say, please transfer all of the money out of this account to our other bank and close our accounts today. Please confirm when this is done. I literally had this app and I was, I went to, I went to a bank to get money to go play in the World Series of poker. You know, I got some cash in the bank. I need 10,000. Oh, you only take five out. That's the limit. Nothing I can do. Sorry, that's our policy. I said, okay, are you the manager? Uh, does it know. I said, okay, can you get the manager over there? Okay, manager comes over, two of them. I said, okay,

I'd like to close this account. Give me a cashier's check for the entire amount. Because I said, what? It's like, yeah, I need $10,000. Right now. I'm going to play in the world series of poker. I'm late. I got a flight. Close my account right now. Give me a check. The guy was like, one moment, came back, handed me the money. I mean, because there's rules. I don't, in typical, I'm not mad at the guy who's just following policy. I'm just saying that banks are not designed for human happiness. I'll be honest. The guy could have said, like, let me just talk to my manager. Let me see what I can do for you. I mean, if you're in a custom service position and you're, yeah. I think it's actually a really good

point to bring up because Mercury, when they talk to Fortune about this new revenue milestone, They said a lot about trust because they said they had several costers that had more than $100 million with them. What? Yeah. Mercury? I thought Mercury was like for small mid-sized businesses. That's a large business. We were just talking about going up market.

They're doing that, Jason. And so they said like, look, we need to be very, very, very stable. And that's why they're running the business on a profitable basis. They're both gap profitable and EBITA positive for the last three years. And they're just approaching this, I think, with a different mind. than many high-growth startups because they need to be more in the trust gain than the growth game. I think Mercury is really a smart company. I wish I could give them all of my money. Sadly, I'm not a VC and I wasn't around five years ago to do that, but a great company

won to watch and another Twist 500, 2006 IPO candidate. All right, just in real quick before we go, Gamma just raised $68 million, now valued at $2.1 billion. And Dresen led the round. This is, of course, for the AI presentation maker. There are 100 million in revenue. revenue 70 million users and 600,000 of which pay for subscriptions. If you do the math, 100 million AOR, 600,000 subscribers, about $14 per user per month. Your thoughts? Wow, I didn't realize that business was so big. I know, me either. I should know this business is so big because I do see a lot of founders using it as their presentation software now. And founders usually use whatever the best, most innovative product is, or they usually get the best deal, whatever

combination of offering. And so, yeah, that's impressive. And it looks like they have a lot of room to grow. They have 70 million users and they've converted but 600,000 of them to date 1%. They should be able to get that number to 5% just from the existing user base by, and they may not have been super aggressive in converting them. Sure. So it sounds to me like they could have 3 million paying subscribers soon and that would be, gosh, five times as much. They could be doing $500 million. This could be another IPO candidate. I was just think I should have merged this into the IPO section because this is a

company that could be, I mean, let's be honest, late 2007, probably. But on that path, and I think it just goes to show that the AI boom is not just open AI, not just data centers. There's a lot of application later companies too. In gamma, I mean, dear God, dude, 100 million ARR, again, 10 years ago, this. would have been the breakout company of its generation. We'd be talking about its IPO and revered terms. Now it's just kind of another great success, but I love seeing nine-figure startups. It makes me very happy. Yeah, people are getting to nine figures faster than ever. And I think

a really important lesson here to think about is taking on PowerPoint or, you know, Google presentations or slides, I guess it's called, you know, in 2023, 2020, you know, whenever they started doing this, you might think, oh, that's crazy, like making an AI one. But, okay, make an AI version of Microsoft Excel. Make an AI version of Microsoft Word. Every single thing with an AI first approach could make something that is just super delightful. And this is just with 50 employees, like 52 employees it says here. So that means they're making $2 million per employee.

Well, that's how they're profitable, Jason, because they have an insane ARR per headcount. But this is the new model. I mean, you know, we've talked so much about the ability of AI to make individual workers more productive and you get more done with fewer people. Well, how about 100 million ARR with 52 staff? I mean, that is an efficiency that I think we never saw before. All right. My question for you, polymarket users betting on open AI's IPO. Okay.

And their valuation. It's got a little bit of valuation. They got a little bit of volume going on this one. Yeah. So what do you think? What are they going to go public at? $500, $500, $750, $750 billion. Did we do a bet on this already?

Jason and I, yeah, you and I did this. We set the over under at $1.25 trillion. I took the under. You took the under. I took the over. But what blew my mind was that the rising category of popularity is wages between $500,750 billion, which is essentially flat. from where they are now.

This polymarket is set up in such a wage-distance that you can also bet that they won't go public by the end of next year. But that's going down as a wager while other valuations for a pre-2026 IPO are going up. So people are betting more that it will list and less that it won't.

And you could say, hey, isn't that a bullish, don't people then therefore think that openly I will be IPO ready? I think it's bearish because if people are betting that it's going to go public next year at a valuation that isn't impressive, to me, that implies distress and a need for more capital. It's also saying that it's not going to have an IPO by December 31st, 2026. That's the likely case, 67%, which that's problematic if they need to raise more money for

data centers and they need liquidity. You can say that as positive or negative, depending on how you think about it. Are they going public because they're so strong? Or are they going public because they're so weak and need the catch? You can kind of see it either way. Yeah, I think it's they need to go public because they're going to need to raise that money. They were going to raise $60 billion in their IPO was the whisper number, which is a lot of money to raise all at once. And they're going to need that $60 billion. And maybe they raise $100 billion.

So not raising means they don't have $60 billion next year, which means they'd have to raise money from the private market again. Which, who's going to put money in and at what valuation? thrive capital at any valuation, I think is the answer to that. So far, at least. I don't think so. I think at $500 billion, I don't know if they come back to the trough again. And they were buying secondaries from employees at that valuation. I don't know that they come back at the trough again. I think people are going to say, yeah, you know, maybe at under $500 billion or at $500 billion they do. But I don't know who doesn't own shares in. Open AI, besides the public, right? Public definitely will want to buy it because it's such an incredible franchise. But I wonder if like private market investors, how many more are left, how many more sovereign wealth funds that want to put 10 billion into this, a billion into

this, how many invidias are left that want to put 10 billion into it or 5 billion into it or certainly venture firms? This does make me a bit concerned. Yeah. Can I draw an analogy? You know, we talk about startups raising at a valuation that's so high, they become unacquirable, maybe in the one to five billion dollar range. Is it possible to become so richly valued in the private markets that you're essentially uninvestable unless you go public? Yeah, that could happen where the private market investors, the last ones in have, you know,

placed their bet. And the only thing left is retail and, you know, the folks who, like to own public stocks, right? It could be hedge funds. It could be endowments, whatever, that want public market stocks that they can come in and out of. Perfect example would be Uber. You know, Masayoshi comes in, pays a really high price. I sold some shares to him when it was a private company at that price. And then it goes public after that. And that was like a really interesting kind of dynamic because who's left after Masayoshi San, the public, right? Well, and who's investing in Open AI in 2025, Masayoshi Son, and Sons?

bank. Correct. Maybe that's an indication. Then Thrive is like the last investor before you go public, it seems like now. So I think this all to me says they're going public. Okay. Well, and they're going public in 2026, which makes it weird that 67% of people don't think they're going public in 2026. Well, you and I have our bet. If they're over $1.25 trillion, I think it was into first days trading, then I think you owe me $100. Otherwise, I owe you a hundred. All right. That's another this weekend startups in the camp. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.