This Week in Startups - IPO Shakeups, NVIDIA’s Big Bets & Must-Know Founder Hacks | E2085

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

Today’s show: IPO shakeups, big AI moves, and essential founder hacks—this episode covers it all. Jason breaks down Robinhood’s 6X stock surge and his strategy for $HOOD, plus the latest on tech IPOs as Turo pulls out and SailPoint surges. We dive into AI’s open-source battle, with X.ai chasing a $10B raise and DeepSeek challenging Hugging Face. And for founders, Jason shares the startup golden rule you should break for success—plus, a brand-new startup idea he’s willing to fund right now.*Timestamps:(0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show.(1:51) The ‘new’ news cycle(2:17) Calming down during chaotic times(4:29) IPO updates: Turo and SailPoint, private equity, public markets, and M&A(9:37) Rental car business & sharing economy job creation(9:53) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(12:21) Robinhood's financial performance & fintech resurgence(18:08) NVIDIA's investment in WeRide & self-driving technology(20:02) Paddle. Go to https://www.paddle.com/twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee-free period.(21:28) Cooking, convenience, DoorDash, Uber, CloudKitchens & startup opportunities(25:45) Smart IoT devices & revisiting the mobile convenience stores idea(29:59) Lemon.io . Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(33:12) XAI's potential funding & AI's impact on consumer behavior(40:49) Revisiting failed startup ideas & founder hacks(47:18) Customer advisory councils: size, incentives, and roles(52:09) Humanoid robots & market competition in the next decade(58:51) OpenAI model selection & user experience(1:00:56) Founder University pitches compilation(1:13:56) Audience question: Addressing criticism on Trump and Elon Musk(1:17:26) Discussion on Palantir, bias, state of journalism, and investigative reporting*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(9:53) Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(20:02) Paddle. Go to https://www.paddle.com/twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee-free period.(29:59) Lemon.io . Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist*Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara,Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta,Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

Well, what are the most frequently used staples? What if we put them into a truck? What if you park those trucks and the trucks can move? Yes. So you can have a truck with a dude and it or a gal or a person. Here we go. Gals, guys, everybody in between, don't cancel me. But what if this truck existed and was optimized?

You open up an app. And I've got to tell Dara about this idea. Imagine you open the Uber app and the convenience stores. were not convenience stores, they were convenience trucks. Had a refrigerator, tech, and got everything else. And now I don't know if this is feasible. Somebody should definitely do it. If somebody wanted to make this as a business,

I would be interested in a crazy logistics and tech person duo who want to do this. I put you in the incubator, give you a hundred, 25K, let's model it. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Paddle. Self-serve software is global by default, but selling to every country is complicated. Paddle's merchant of record manages payments, sales tax, chargebacks, and refunds so you don't have to.

Wherever you want to take your business, go there with Paddle. Go to paddle.com slash twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee-free period. And, lemon.com. Get access to Lemonhire, a platform with more than 80,000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours. Get $2,000 off your first hire at lemon.io slash hire today. All right, everybody, welcome back to this weekend startups. I've been doing this for 14 years, Ed, I'm more excited to do it today than I've ever been with me, my loyal co-host Alex, Alex, I'm X.com slash Jason, and our editorial director, Lon Harris, is X.com slash Lonz. Follow us, interact with us on X, so we know what you want us to talk about. We have a full docket today. How you doing, brother? It's Friday, Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's. day? Yeah, happy Valentine's Day. Um, you know, Jason, I think I finally reached the point when I'm now

accustomed to the new news cycle. You know, you call Trump Captain Chaos. And, uh, I think it's like, individual news stories no longer land like a grenade on my head. I'm like, oh, things are happening still. So I'm feeling pretty good. I'm hanging in there. Okay. Surviving. You know, here's my advice. I've been giving this advice. A lot of people are losing their minds because, you know, the world can seem like it's on fire at times. This is independent of Trump, but Trump is particularly good at, you know, maybe blowing a little oxygen on the fire that is planet Earth and making things seem even more chaotic. There's been a lot of talk about certain other podcasts losing their minds and going viral and oh my God, Karen is going crazy and this professor is going crazy. Listen,

I got a lot of people in my life who are super lefty. They're freaking the F out right now. I get it. Let me calm everybody. Everybody take a deep breath and release and understand. The country got through four years of Trump, got through four years of Biden. The Trump people were losing their mind during Biden. The Biden left people are losing their mind during Trump.

We got through those eight years. And the only thing that happened was COVID, a conflict in Gaza, Israel, the Russian-Ukraine war, and we went 16 trillion in debt. In other words, it was a complete utter disaster in the last eight years. The world's always going to be disaster. The Middle East will be on fire every year or two in different conflicts. The United States is going to swing left, right, up, and down. It's always been this way. It'll always be that way.

Why? Because we care so deeply in a democracy. It's true. And we have freedom of speech, and we can debate these things. So, remember, your family, your work, art, nature, it's all there for you, your kids, other people's kids, your nieces, your nephews, enjoy all of that. Politics will always be there. It'll always be on fire, Alex. It's always going to make people

anxious. And just focus on your family and your work. And we got great work to do here, startups and founders changing the world and so much great stuff going on in capitalism that we both love. So let's focus on that. Whatever's going on in the world, it's going to be fine everybody. It's going to be fine. Take a deep breath. If it's not fine, you can sue Jason for your $5 rebate and the check will be in the mail. But I'm glad you brought up the tech news cycle, Jason, because we have, okay, today's been busy. I have a couple of quickets. We have to get through. Yes. Before we get into a couple of fun things. Let's get to work. So first of all, on the IPO front, Turro, a company that filed originally back in 2002 and was dropping

regular S1A filings has given up. They've withdrawn. Yes, today. They've withdrawn. Yes, today. They They have pulled their IPO. It is over. They have walked away from the public markets. That's interesting. Didn't see that coming. This is Toro, T-U-R-O, the car company that you rent from. You rent other people's car, Airbnb of cars. Yes. I just used it. It's a good business. Oh, you did. What did? What did you get? I rented a model three for 50 bucks a day when I went to Tahoe for three weeks. It was a pretty good experience, I have to say. There was some like ski business that I guess rents cars as part of their side hustle. So I gave them, I don't know, for 20 days, like a thousand bucks and change, $1,100,

bucks. Yeah. And I got a Model 3. I barely used it. But if I had had to take Uber's when I did, it would have been, I think, slightly more. It didn't have snow tires on it. And there were some instances of snow. So I was a little bummed about that.

But the owner was delightful to me. They were solid. I lost one of the card keys, whatever. You know, and I like the service because on Toro, you deal. directly with the owner. Yes. And I think people are pretty reasonable. They didn't like hit me up for extra money except for the card that we lost. Anyway, Toro is a great company. They make a decent amount of money, right? They make a billion or more a year, right? Or they wouldn't have filed to go public. So they grew from Q1 to Q3 of 2023, the last data we have. They had 66 million in revenue.

That grew to 720 in the first three quarters of 2024. Small growth. Eight and a half percent. So profitable. slow growth. Slow growth. And I think right now the market just probably wasn't as excited about the company as they hoped.

It's still worth, I mean, even if it's worth 1.5x trillion revenue, Jason, it's a billion dollar company. So shout out. But a disappointment there.

And I would say a little bit of a negative signal for near-term IPOs. But on the other side of that coin, Sale point is now again a public company. We talked about it before

on the show, raised his IPO price range from 19 to 21 to 21 to 23. And then Jason and priced at the top of that, $23 a share, raised over a billion dollars. And as of the time you started to record, it was up to 2432 a share. So I successfully well-priced IPO, just not a startup. This is a take private that's going back out again. So it's interesting, but not the thing that you and I talk about so much as the need for liquidity of still private companies.

So data points there, one down, one up, maybe neutral overall. Yeah. I mean, listen, sell point is an established company with a solid revenue base. It was public when private, and then public again. We see this sometimes. Something is undervalued in the public markets. What are the CEOs? What does the board do? They buy back shares or they go private like Zendes did or like self-thead did. Clean it up. Get it growing again. Nice and private without having to ticker cards or deal with lawyers and the expense of being public and all the scrutiny that comes from being public. And so here they are, you know, they're back going out public. All the private equity guys get to cash in. And like you said, if they went public at $23 a share and it went to $24, they price to perfection.

was only was within, you know, low single digit points of being properly priced. I do think Toro, there could be another piece to this. Sometimes people filed to go public to initiate M&A. So what does that mean? Hey, you are considering buying my company and, you know, you haven't given me the right price. What do I do?

I filed to go public. I get priced by the public markets. I get a bunch of offers. And then people swoop in shortly before an IPL and buy something. So don't be surprised if Toro gets bought by Airbnb or Uber in the next 10 seconds. Airbnb would make so much sense to me. Just frankly, from a personal use perspective, if I was flying to a city and I rented a room and they said, also here's your car. I mean, that just makes sense to me. I think a lot of the people who run an Airbnb also run Toros or

getarounds, because if you think about it, this was the shared economy. And if you have a, you know, a guest house and you got your old car. I was even thinking about this. I have the model Y, and I've put 40,000 miles on it. And I'm going to get the new one. There's a new one. They refreshed it finally. It's called the juniper or something.

So I'm definitely going to get that. And I'm going to upgrade. And I was like, do I upgrade or do I keep the old one? Because the resale value, the trading value might only be 20K on this car. So do I keep it? And I was like, wow, you know, if this thing rented for $75 a day and I rented it out 100 days a year, 200 days a year, I mean, it would be, I would basically have a free car. Now, I'm not going to do that because that would take work, but if you're at home and you want to become part of the fire movement, financial independence, retire early, this seems like a great light fire technique, which is keep your old cars, acquire old cars, bring them to cities like Austin or whatever during South by Southwest or have them in Tahoe during ski season.

I think this is a good way to make a living. Squarespace makes stunning professional websites ridiculously easy. It doesn't matter if you're just selling a product or a service. Maybe you're just sharing your ideas. Maybe you're an artist. Maybe you're a consultant. Squarespace is going to give you all the tools to make this happen. And as you know, Squarespace is always adding cutting edge features.

This is why I've been using it for over a decade. And Squarespace is actually the longest running partner here on This Week in service because every time I need a new feature, Squarespace adds it. And the new AI tools are unbelievable. They have one called Design Intelligence. It's like having a world-class designer sitting next to you in your office and you just answer a couple of questions. And their AI builds you a fully customized site that's perfect for your brand.

That's unique to you. And it does it in just minutes. Personalized layouts, on-brand visuals, premium content. It's all ready to go. So start your year off strong at Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. and when you're ready to launch, go to Squarespace.com slash Twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. Squarespace.com slash twist. Thank you to Squarespace for making such a great product that we used year after year at an affordable price. And we really appreciate your partnership. This is a great way to make a living, as is, running an Airbnb because you could work for a couple of hours a day running these things. You could have 10 of these cars. I think it actually, the math makes sense.

and as we see jobs go away, job displacement, you know, if you're somebody who is an Uber driver and self-driving starts taking off, some number of people are going to want to rent a car. You can't take Uber's everywhere. That gets quite expensive, as I mentioned. And it's not, you know, sometimes you have to wait. So this is actually pretty good idea, I think, for new jobs.

Being a shepherd and having a herd of cars that you rent out through Toro and get-around, That's not a bad business. So I like the economy, the sharing economy. I do think it should be a feature of Airbnb or Uber or Dordash. Still, though, I mean, growing to three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue in three quarters, I mean, that's incredibly hard. So hats off to them.

Now, Jason, you love Robin Hood. And we've talked about the company here on the show. I want to just show a chart of Robin Hood's results because I think it underscores the boom we're seen in fintech today. We're not going to spend a lot of time on earnings, but we did want to touch just briefly on a couple of things. So if you're watching the YouTube version, I'm about to blow your mind. Observe this chart, Mr. Calacanis. Check that out. Let's take a looky-poo here. Oh, my lord, you know, I haven't sold a share of my Robin Hood. I was a pre-launch investor. We distributed

to our LP, so there's like a real lesson here for me. I could have held that money. When did they IPO? Was it three years ago? I like to distribute the shares in the IPO to our LPs immediately. What that does is I distributed them. I think in the teen, high teens, I think we distributed at $15 to $20, somewhere in that range. And I was like, this stock is undervalued. I should hold the shares, which you can do as a fund manager and then distribute them when it goes higher. But I consulted people in my orbit, consulted some LPs. And they're like, just let us make that decision. Well, now on paper, you know, that fund, I think, is at 1.4x DPI. distributed and then it's at like 4.9 on paper. And I'm not sure how much we distributed,

but it was a decent portion of that 1.5 that we've achieved. If I had held it, if it was out at 15 and it's at 60 now, I would have 4xed it. Yep. Oh my Lord, now that phone would be like a 6, 7, 8x fund. So now I have to go to the LPs just to think practically and say, hey, when you're considering being an LP in the future, just know, if you had held your shares, you would have been at, you know, I guess that fund now on paper might be a four or five 5x DPI in reality distributed. It might be on paper like an 8, 9 or 10. Yeah.

Oh, it would have been like, so I mean, I am like happy. I personally didn't sell any shares and I opened up my Morgan Stanley account the other day or whatever it can. I don't know where I have those shares custodian. And I was like, oh my God, I have millions of dollars worth of Robin Hood for my carry from that investment. And I tweeted. And I tweeted, I'd never sell a share.

And when I started doing J trading, which I'm going to bring back, I'm going to bring back J trading. And I'm going to bring it. back aggressively, because I think I should just consolidate down to like five bets like Bill Ackman does. I went and I was like, you know what I think the stock is under value? What do you do when a stock's under value? Pull up my tweet. I bought another 5,000 shares. I was like, you know, I have to buy 5,000 shares at $10 a pop. It's 50 grand. You know what's happened? It's gone up.

Gone up 6x. I made another quarter of Millie. Here it is. Yeah. It's a lot of emojis. Never sold the share of Robin Hood app and I was a pre-launch angel investor. J-traded an additional $5,000 when they hit 10. Now it's $6.000. in that tweet 64 today. So I take it that when I hit you up for a raise in a few weeks. The answer is going to be Alex. We're going to give you five times as much. I'm going to tell you what you should do.

Take the money I'm already paying you and put it in Robin Hood. That's exactly what's going to happen. Just wait until it hits the S&P 500. Then it'll go into the index funds. Anyway, it's very important, I think, for people to really understand when the mark, you should have cash around. You should have some cash around for when markets bottom out so that you can do things like, you know, I guess, you know, nibble.

or buy when the market's down. I think keeping a cash position right now and not an investment advice is wise. If you could have some cash around and things hit the floor and you think that they're undervalued, which I did in 2022, and I put like $1.6 million into the market

here live on the show. That $1.6 million I put in that I had just in a little retirement account or something, it's not worth like $3.5. I mean, like 2.5x did in two years. I don't think I'm good at it as a public market investor. And Robin Hood was my 6x, And I think I have a six or seven X in Facebook.

Now, I don't know if that's the case now. I think these stocks are fully valued right now. It's hard to find a bargain. But the revenue went up massively is the point here. Absolutely massively. And driving that was an absolutely insane increase in the amount of money they derived from crypto trading. The company did well across a lot of different metrics, but that's the thing that really stood out to me. And also, Coinbase had another killer quarter.

if Robin Hood does well on crypto, Coinbase does well on crypto as well. All this, I think, fits under the rubric of FinTech is back. People have been talking about that. And I really think these earnings underscore that point, Jason, it's probably about time. I mean, if you look at the stacked bar chart, equity in green, options in light green or lime, crypto and light gray, other in dark gray. And what you see here is they have a number of people buying equities. The equities from Q3 to Q4 doubled almost from 37 million to 61 million. And then the options went up 10%. Options and equities is kind of the same things. Options in more aggressive way. But oh my lord, you know, crypto went from 61 in Q3 and 81 million in Q2, the revenue derived from that to 358 in Q4. What I think this is,

is the value of crypto went up and the number of people participating, right? Because this is transaction-based revenue. So they get a percentage of the transaction. So if Bitcoin is trading at $100,000 a coin versus $33,000, it's three times more valuable to Robin Hood in terms of their fee structure. I'm guessing. So I don't know how these transactions actually work here, if it's on holding or whatever.

But people obviously, the crypto business now inside of Robin Hood is bigger than the equity business? But there's more transaction-based revenue from... Holy cow. Crypto compared to equities and options. But Robin Hood does

have other businesses. They hold retirement accounts and they have a subscription business as well. But to me, this chart shows the power of patience.

I mean, if you believed in crypto back in Q422, when it was a, what, a sixth or a fifth of revenue on the transaction basis,

you might have to wait another eight quarters for it to pay off. But here it is. And I believe Vlad and Co. are laughing all the way to the bank.

So good for them. They're doing great. We'd love to have Vlad on. Well, we will get Vlad on. Elsewhere in the realm of technology news of note that people need to know today, Jason, Nvidia updated its filings telling people what it owns shares in, no longer owns shares in serve robotics or sound hound AI, but it disclosed an equity position in a company called Wii Ride. And we've talked about Weiride here on the show. It is a Chinese self-driving company. And here was the market's response, Jason. Oh my, that's a little spiky poo.

So we ride went up to $31 a share from, looked like, 17 overnight. And this is based on Nvidia, putting some shine on it, yeah? Oh, absolutely. So essentially, investors are betting that because Nvidia is now investing in this company, that maybe they'll be a deal, maybe there'll be an acquisition, anything. Invidia right now has public market pixie dust. Anything that it puts a little capital in, gets the pixie dust on it, people get really excited. I think this is good for self-driving because I think it boosts the value of Weirai,

makes the whole sector look more interesting, hazah. But it's kind of rare to see a 94% gain in a stock in one day. That's not a meme stock. You know, it's really interesting what's happening in self-driving. You have the realization, I think, across the board that moving people from point A to point B, and moving things, your lunch, your Valentine's flowers, et cetera, and everything in between, you know, Amazon, et cetera, is a huge, huge part of the economy. Transportation is very big. Logistics, very big. And I think we're also recognizing that

car ownership's going to change and habits are changing. And the habit that's changing is people want their food made in a cloud kitchen and brought to them. They don't want to cook. They don't want to deal with it. Did you know you're required to pay digital sales tax wherever your customers are? Well, no one likes dealing with this type of administration, whether it's taxes or accounting, especially when you're in a busy startup. And that's why Patta has stepped in to put your billing and your taxes on autopilot. Whether you're launching a SaaS product or maybe you've got an app, perhaps a game, you now can reach billions of people globally. That's the magic of the internet. It's the magic of the app store. And it's awesome.

and it's one of the things, hey, as an investor we love too. But this scaling brings tons of challenges. It's like taking payments and local currencies and navigating all those regional tax laws. They're complicated. Plus, you've got to manage fraud. You got to manage refunds, right? And that's different in every market.

And that's a massive headache that's going to slow you down from doing, you know, important work with product market fit, hiring, and raising money. So let me tell you, a messy payment stack is going to eat up all your time, all of your energy and money. These are big company problems that you're going to face, even as a small company and they compound every time you enter a new market. Well, Paddle was built to handle this for you. Hey, listen, maybe this is unsexy, but this is what building and scaling a startup is all about.

Sometimes you've got to do your chores and you need a partner. Paddle's going to be your merchant of record, your M-O-R, and they're going to handle payment localization, fraud prevention, tax compliance, customer billing support so that you can grow faster. Hey, man, if you need to launch in a new country, you're done. You want to add a payment method, easy. and you want to set local pricing and you want to do it intelligently, one click. So here's your call to action. Wherever you want to take your business, go there with paddle.

paddle.com slash twist to get started with your exclusive fee free period. That's paddle.com slash twist to unlock your no-fee startup period. You might like to cook. And I think as Travis said, I think when he was on all-in, cooking might look like horseback riding. You used to have to do cooking. You used to have to ride a horse to get four point one. But now you could choose something more convenient than riding a horse from point A to point B. Yeah.

And I think people are, you know, this is why I think DoorDash, which I have equity in and have shares in. And so I'm talking my own book here. I think DoorDash is a very important company. I think Uber is a very important company. So I own all three of those. And I don't think I'm ever going to sell my equity in these companies because they're so amazing at making people's lives more convenient and giving them more options and give, really, if you're thinking about building a startup, think about something that sucks.

Tell me something you did in the last 30 days that sucked that you didn't enjoy. And then pause for a second and think, well, what were the parts of it that really sucked? Yeah. So last night, when I was making our two-year-old, her last bottle of the day, we ran out of milk. And it was late and very cold. And I did not want to go to the grocery store at 8 p.m. So this morning, I had to Trace my way to Trader Joe's at 802 a.m. where I went it opened, and I got my ears frozen off, and I wanted to scream and punchball.

Great. So we'll sit here and meditate for about 10 seconds on this. This is a staple. Yes. This is something you need on a regular basis. So everybody's minds are already flowing. If you have a baby, you need milk, some people consider milk a staple, some people consider oat milk a staple, eggs, butter, cheese, bread, whatever it is.

You know how people used to get their milk? there was a milk delivery. And they would bring your bottles, they put it on your doorstep, but come straight from the count. I just ordered 10 pounds of meat from a local ranch. I paid $185 for grass-fed beef.

If you guys know the prices, and grass-fed beef is expensive. $18. $18 and $50 a pound, pretty good to have it delivered to your doorstep. I got Osabuco. I got pecania slash buffet steak.

I got a rib-eye in there. I got some ground beef. It was a really nice pack. And I thought, huh, what a convenient thing. I should put this on subscription. So I'm going to have a subscription every month at the start of the month. And I think I trust these guys. I'll see how the meat is.

So there you go. Really what you need is you need a subscription to milk. So we have one. And that's the funniest thing because you're dead on. So there's a thing called Monroe Dairy here in the Northeast. And it's a little box that goes out of your house and you put an order on Thursday nights. And they bring you all sorts of local, you know, know, like the cows get petted and it's great.

But we just burn through all of our milk early because my family apparently can consume infinite amounts. But you're right that I could use a better burden. Well, and then here's another idea. You have identified another problem. The other problem is, okay, you have the subscription, but managing the consumption and the subscription is a, you know, a problem down this problem stack. And he solved that problem.

Somebody created and pitched me on this, a smart egg container. In your refrigerator, it was it, this is during the IOT error. You put the eggs in this. It knows how many eggs you have. It reorders the eggs. We could do this for milk as well. You could have milk. You could have a camera inside your refrigerator that has where the staples go.

You keep them in there. If it doesn't exist, you order it. Now that's complicated. I know. but it is the eventuality that these things will be abstracted away from you. There was another product

that Amazon made. It was a little IoT device and it had the logo of Tide on it. So if you were a Tide person, I forgot what they were called, but you would put the Tide logo on your washing machine and you would press the button

when you ran out of Tide and would automatically put it in. Now, AI is going to do this for you. Google's AI is extraordinary. Amazon is extraordinary. You can put things on subscribe and save. That's another interesting product. And you could also order from these things. The idea I've always wanted to do, Alex. I had an idea for something called Mercury Club.

I never did it. But if somebody wants to do Mercury Club as a concept, I'm down. It was kind of like Go-Proff. It was kind of like Cosmo, Urban Fetched during the day, which was I was thinking about, well, what are the most frequently used staples? What if we put them into a truck? What if you park those trucks and the trucks can move. Yes. So you can have a truck with a dude in it or a gal or a person. There we go. I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. There was a, there was an executive order. What are we supposed to do? I think guys. I think guys is still sufficient gender neutral.

Yeah, yeah. I think guys is pretty broad. Okay. Okay. Gals, guys, everybody in between, don't cancel me. But what if this truck existed and it was optimized and it just, you open up an app. And I, you know, I've got to tell Dara about this idea. Imagine you open the Uber app and the convenience stores were not convenience stores. They were convenience trucks. They had a refrigerator section, got everything else. And instead of being 45 minutes away from you, because you had that option, right? You could have gone on Uber Eats and ordered it in your town or Dordash. Oh, yeah. I could have, but I have, Uber Eats has gone to the point when it's so much more expensive than me schlopping myself that I, that I can afford it. But I get angry about.

The fees. Yeah, it's a bit much dark. So this, I think, would lower fees because the truck would be out there. Now, I don't know if this is feasible. Somebody should definitely do it. If somebody wanted to make this as a business, I would be interested in a crazy logistics and tech person duo who want to do this. I put you in the incubator, give you a hundred twenty five K, let's model it.

Okay, but also, do you recall Spoon Rocket from 2013? This was a great idea. It was. We invested in a company called Bento, somebody who had worked for me, did Bento version of it. Explain this constant. And I think Chimauk was in Spoonrocket. This was so brilliant.

Before Uber Reets. So you're at the office and you're hungry. And let's say it's 4 p.m. and you're going to be working a little bit late. What you don't want to do is pull up Uber Eats, pick up restaurant, go through the whole song and dance and then have it arrive between, you know, 45, an hour and a half later because traffic if you're at the office is bad. Spoon Rocket had a set number of meals they made each day.

And then they put them into cars. And then they had the cars out and about. So if you wanted food now, you could pull up Spoonrocket. and Rocket app, and you can see the three or four options. You could click, bring me that one. And then they would just pull the car around, and there it was. So at the TechRunch office back in the day, we used this all the time. The economics didn't work out, but it was great for me.

The economics were so close. Bento also did this. And I remember the founder was so great. And he figured out, you know, at about 9 o'clock, there would be some left. And what they did was at 9 p.m. They told everybody in the app, it's 2 for 1 at 9 p.m. And in the app, you would have these cars. They would have the salads in a cool bag or in a cooler.

Then they figured out that there were warm bags. So they would make the food. They figured out how to make the food in a proper kitchen. You know, like in San Francisco, there's a lot of regulations. We're talking about regulations. A lot of regulations in San Francisco. Worst place you can launch any business. I mean, literally, I think the most regulation ever is San Francisco.

But they figured it out. They tested everything. And then what they did was for the hot meals. You know, because hot meals, I think, could last two hours on a hot tray at a certain temperature, was the law. So the truck, you know, the car leaves in the trunk. They would have 20 hot meals in a hot bag. Then they wanted to make sure it was temperature close. They put a temperature IOT device in it.

And they put a heating pack in it. So there were heating packs that you could connect to a mobile battery and you could keep the thing warm. And then they eventually learned how to plug it in to the cigarette lighter, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, this idea was really good, but it turns out getting one of four meals in 10 minutes, not as good as getting one of 400 restaurants in 40 minutes. Founders, let's be real. Let's keep it a buck. Finding great developers is hard. It's like one of the hardest things you have to do in our industry, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup. But here's the good news. I got a tip that's going to save you. time, money, and a ton of headaches, you need to check out Lemon.io. Lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers who can help you. They have done all the work to find and vet great developers who are experience,

who are results-oriented, and who charge competitive rate. Great developers, we know, are hard to find and integrate in your team, so Lemon.io will handle all of that for you. They're only going to offer you handpicked developers with at least three years. of experience. And if something goes wrong, lemon.io will find you a replacement developer, ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have worked with lemon.io, and they have told me they've had a great experience. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.com. I. Slice.com and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners

get 15% off the first four weeks. So stop burning money, hire developer smarter. Visit lemon.io slash twist. So people would rather, and that was the discovery they learned. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was also a pizza company. The pizza company had a mobile truck. It was called Zuma. And Zuma pizza was the robotic pizza.

I think SoftBank dumped a ton of money on them. The thing crashed and burned. And I looked at investing and it was only 60% effective. But all of these ideas are available to you as an entrepreneur, just by looking at your own life and saying, there's got to be a better way. and then of course you've got to figure out union economics, etc.

And there's always new technology that could give you a second chance at making it work. So, anyway, keep grinding. People who weren't around for the dash button thing, this is what they looked like. There was little buttons you could put them on

essentially under. This is 2019. Okay, so not too long ago. Well, I mean, that's now five, six years ago, Jason. I hate to break it to you. But, like, COVID. Yeah, time's moving quick. If you were curious,

this is what the Zuma Pizza trucks looked like. I think, you know, SoftBank got a lot of stick for the amount of money they put into this company. But, I mean, if you think about fast delivery, people love that and people of pizza literally the whole world around, I can kind of see the effort there. That piece of truck, by the way, was a dominoes on wheels. The problem is there's a dominoes every mile or two in America. So they were up against dominoes. If there's a dominoes every, you know, literally every five miles and, you know, any American suburb, which there seemed to be. And they're in like the dankest office space, you know, commercial space. They didn't have as big of an advantage as they

needed to have. No, no, because the overhead for that dank office space is pretty low. And maintaining cars is not that cheap, especially at their commercial. I want to get back to the idea of finding ideas, Jason, in our founder hacks section. But quickly, before we get to that, Right before we jumped on the show, there was some breaking news. I haven't had a chance to get into this much. But the news is that XAI is working on a potential $10 billion funding round that would value the company at about $75 billion. Now, details to come.

We'll find out more. We'll figure out if it's Sequoia or Andreessen or Valor that will lead this round. But I think it goes to show that after all the deep sea hype, hysteria, enthusiasm, excitement, people that are building these systems are still looking to raise a lot of capital to put a lot of capital to work on building the infra and the investment and the personnel they need to kind of stay on top of the market. So I view this as more of an endorsement of the AI market writ large

than perhaps any individual company. But it is, of course, a big deal for XAI and its ambitions to take on Anthropic, OpenAI, and other domestic and foreign AI companies. There's a big prize at the end of the AI rainbow. And if you were going to place a bet on who might do, well here. Elon's not the person to bet

against. He's kind of the person you want to bet with. He gets it. He was early. He funded OpenAI. And he's got a unique data set inside of Twitter. That's real time and powerful in the same way Reddit is and the same way. And I saw Reddit actually took a dive.

I think they had some search engine problems. I'm not sure if it recovered. And that lawsuit we talked about the other day, those lawsuits are going to keep happening. Content's going to do great. it could mean that these models are going to need more capital, not just for service, but also for content licensing. And I think there's a big prize. Right now, search, I've moved half my searches to chat GPT, Gemini, etc.

And doing research, you know, here on the show, other things, I've moved 100% of mine there. I used to ask people to do research for me. Now I just do it myself and I use deep research, et cetera. 20 bucks, 100 bucks a month, personal or corporate is a no-brainer. Every single person is going to spend between $200 and $1,000 a year on their AI language model. That's every human being. Yes. Do you know how I benchmark it?

What do I currently pay for my cell phone service? Sure. That's kind of my benchmark for what I think the max for consumers will be. because I am still blown away with the fact that deep seek shot to the top of the app stores. And I know we have caveated that with you can game it and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think it goes to show that what consumers want is the fastest, cheapest, best AI model, period. And I bet you that in time, that will cost something around 200 to 500 bucks a year. Maybe it's a family plan, but it's still going to be a lot of compute, but people just love it.

Last note on AI models, Jason, before founder hacks, take a look at this chart. And I was impressed. So this is from Define Folks over at Hugging Face. We've talked about them, talk to them. They host a lot of the AI models out there. Great service. Love it. They have a chart here that shows how Deep Seeks R1 model

begin, quote, the most liked model ever on Hugging Face just a few weeks after release. It's been downloaded over 10 million times across this different variants. And if you're watching the YouTube version of this, you can see the curve. What's the number two one? The blue one that catches up to it.

The yellow one goes straight up. I see that. Black Forest Lab. Flux 1-Def. So that was a image-making model that I think Grock used, if memory serves. Likes and downloads, you know, on things like GitHub, people joining programs,

is an indicator of their future success or at least interest in it today. What we're learning, I think, from Deepseek is open source, I believe, is going to win the day. respectfully to everybody who's doing closed source, I think open source models are going to have such a distinct advantage that we could see a handful of winners,

handful being less than five, in the closed source, and they'll have some advantages as well. And then we're going to see 200 open source projects being contributed to every day in every single niche possible. And it's going to be wild. It's going to be wild. how effective these are.

And open source is going to win, I believe. 60, 40, yeah. That tracks me. I do think that Open AI, Anthropic, et cetera, will have value down the road. But I think this is why when we see $157 or $300 billion attached to Open AI, a little scared. But there's been an interesting shift out there when it comes to startups in AI,

because if you go back a year, people were talking about, you know, GPT wrappers, and that's just a skin around a model. And that's not going to have long-term viability. long-term strength. But now it seems that people are talking about how all the value and the AI game is going to accrue to the application layer, which means building on top of

models. So it seems that the thinking has gone an entire 180 here. Not for me. I said from the beginning, applications and brand are defensible. We just talked about Airbnb, Toro, Uber, these verbs, when you have a brand and a

network effect, you know, and you're on people's phones, that is defensible. that does, whether it's Instagram with network effects and already being installed and people having their history in it, it's very hard to displace Instagram, very hard to displace DoorDash,

Uber and Airbnb in people's lives. I've always felt that AI is going to give every single category of consumer behavior. All those incumbents are going to have to adopt AI and when they do,

give startups the chance to get in there and maybe displace them, compete with them, or replace them. Any of those are possibilities when a new technology comes out. There was an Uber before Uber. There was a taxi magic app where you could text and get a cab to show up. It never worked. There was no GPS. It was over text.

It sucked. But it was the same concept, taxi magic. When GPS and the gorgeous iPhone came out, you actually had it work. So this is from 2008. Observe this iPhone 3G style thing. Look at that. Yeah. Booking successful, use refresh button.

He had to manually refresh, but this is in the age of like Ajax happening. Yes. Pick up location, live updates, taxi dispatch, the driver's name, taxi point one three model it was like literally giving you line item updates on where your car was now GPS didn't exist i don't think at that time so you couldn't put it on a map yet gps came somewhere or google maps and apple maps i think it came on the second or third iteration of the ipvine maybe iphone three or four in other words just because something's been tried and failed multiple times does not mean it's going to succeed as we just mentioned with spoon rocket

and those other Zoom, etc. Yeah, on demand. Skype was, you know, supposed to do what we're doing right here and now Zoom, you know, figured it out. So an IRC people use before Slack. So there's a long list of inspirational gravestones for you to look up.

You get to that. This is a founder tip. Our strategy. You go to the graveyard. You dig up a body. You reanimate it. That is the best segue possible to the, the founder hack that I'm most excited to share on the show.

Okay. So one thing we're going to be doing over the next while is pulling out great tips for founders, things we find from people we know, we do find from awesome posts from venture capitalists, pick your poison. We have our ears and eyes open. Jason, what I found today that I wanted to bring to the show is actually from the startups community over on Reddit. And it's from a thread entitled, we built the wrong startup, broke a startup, golden rule,

and pivoted into success. Essentially, this founder ended up building something for which they were not the ICP or ideal customer profile. Now, people often say build for what you know, so they broke that rule. I thought the post was very interesting, but here's the bit that really stood out to me that I wanted to pass along to everyone listening. From this post, and we'll have a link to it in the show notes and on the YouTube. Quote, don't look for what's cool now.

Look for what you would have wanted two years ago in your career. This will help you find better, less competitive opportunities that will probably be less sexy. But I feel like this is what you're saying. Find the pain point. But in this case, just look back a little bit because I'm might be fewer eyes looking at it, but probably still a pertinent place to play software. I participate once in a while in the startups community of physique.

I think I'm Jason M. Calacanis on Reddit. And I load Reddit a couple times a week. And so here's the thread in the startups community. Okay. So to summarize, they pivoted, but they didn't work on the ideal customer profile being them. They found another customer. Maybe highlight the section here and let's read it.

So essentially, they had, quote, to ignore the dogma of needing to be your own ICB, because right now we don't have the complex pricing models, global compliance headaches, or enterprise building workflows that are ideal customers do. So they couldn't dog food their product as much. But the idea of building for yourself doesn't always, always apply, was the gist here. Got it. So there is great startup advice. Build something that you need, dog food it yourself, force yourself to use it. So if you were DoorDash, you'd say, I'm only going to eat what DoorDash can deliver. And you're like, okay, when we've got a text mex place and we got a Greek place.

I really feel like sushi or ramen. Well, now the team's got to go out and find a ramen place to add to DoorDash. Okay, fine, fair enough. But if you are trying to build something for CFOs who have compliance issues on a global basis, well, you're going to need to go find those folks, interview them, do customer interviews, listen to them, maybe even bear hug them. So this is a great point they're making. and a lot of times not having experience is an advantage

because you can come to a problem and say, I don't work in the hotel business so I don't feel the need to provide a concierge and a front desk and I don't think every room has to have a Bible and needs to be cleaned every day. Now, if you're in the hotel business,

you're like, oh my God, how many times do we have? have people calling for room service and the front desk and the concierge you have to have. Those are must-haves in the eyes of a hotel executive. Those are must-haves. You know, when Joe Jebbya and, you know, Brian are doing Airbnb, they're like, I need a place to stay that's cheap that I can afford and that's in this location where hotels don't exist. So they could build Airbnb and anybody who was in the hotel business,

would never have done it because they'd say, okay, it's got to be 500 a night. They need to have a 24-hour concierge. We need to have room service available, stock the fridge, whatever it is. Fresh eyes can also help. You do not need to dog food your product. You just need to have empathy for a customer base. You need to be in contact with a customer base, and I'll make this even more specific. The way to get this done is to take five or six of your customers and build a customer advisory Council, a customer advisory council, and you put them in WhatsApp, and you put three or four of your co-founders in there, and you say, hey, we made a new feature, what do you think? And they debate it. Now, they might send you on a custom software boondoggle, where you're building

something for one customer. But if you have five or ten of them, they might say, this was good for me, and six of them say it's great. Four of them say they don't need it. Okay, move that up the priority list. Ten of ten, let's say you had ten customers. They're 10 of 10 want it. Okay, you know, you got to build it. Most times, you know, the customers want you to take the top one, two, or three features and just make them better, faster, cheaper, increase in network effects. What are the features everybody uses every day on their iPhone?

Well, they make phone calls. They surf the web and they use messages. when you are watching a keynote and it's, you know, Apple's doing a keynote or Google's doing a keynote, what do you see them talk about all the time? Here's the new features of iMessage. We have new AirPods that do noise cancellation

that automatically pick up the phone when you nond your head. We do transcripts. We do FaceTime. We do filters in FaceTime. And, oh, our new browser is faster. The battery lasts longer because the browser doesn't do it, and our browser does X, Y, and C. They start with the most. most frequent use cases and making them better with every iteration of the phone, that's another technique. Take the core feature, make it 10% better. Why? Because 100% of your customer base uses that core feature. On the case of Zoom, it would be the quality of the Zoom. Every time Zoom

became easier to use and higher quality video, better audio, that's actually why Skype never work. Well, Jason, they didn't even have to have high quality. They just had to have video calls that worked. Right. Like that, the bar was on the ground in that case. And there was billions of dollars sitting there, but everyone thought that WebEx had it locked up. And, you know, WebEx was complicated. It didn't work.

The software to install was cluzy. There was just so many blockers. And when you did a video call, it didn't work as smoothly. So taking out friction, really understanding your... I like this as a first foray into... What do we call in this segment? Founder Hacks for now until we come with a better name. We have a question from Gary with two R's.

Jason, why wouldn't you want all customers suggesting and voting on direction instead of five to ten? Okay, great question. I'm talking about startups in year one or two, and you want to have a certain type of customer on your customer advisory council. You want the one who is spending money, is demanding, uses the product, and you can't possibly take advice from a hundred. people, a thousand people, it's too many, and you won't build a relationship with them. What you could do is you could have 10 people in one WhatsApp chat, getting to know each other, getting to your team, then you launch a second one. She'd say, hey, once you'd be on our customer advisory council, you put them into a second one.

How do I know this? Well, I started doing dinners, because I wanted to understand our LP base a little bit better, and I wanted to understand the members of the syndicate. What did I do? I had a dinner in New York at Marksoff Madison, great Italian place. my friend Mark Straussman over by Madison Park. I think a dozen people showed up. I put them into this group and signal,

and I talked to them regularly. Then I started Founder Fridays. And you can go to FounderF Fridays. Tech, get a great.com, tell them we sent you. Founder Fridays is eight founders in Los Angeles. I think the Los Angeles was actually up to like 30. And so they have four tables of six or eight.

And then we have like 30 cities, but they're all in groups that are smaller. So you can actually have a conversation. The proper size of a dinner conversation is six people at a round table. When you get to eight, you have two conversations of four or three conversations of two or three. So you just have to be thoughtful about how many people are in the conversation because it will lead to chaos if you don't. If you go above 10 in my expectation in a WhatsApp, I think once a WhatsApp group goes above 10, too chaotic. I have a personal question to follow up on this point about customer councils.

And this is a really tiki-tucky one, Jason. But do you give discounts to their customers that are on your customer advisory council? Do you incent them to do this? You don't have to. It turns out the people who actually really need the product enjoy having access to the founders. And the access and being able to have a say

in the direction of the company is what is truly valuable to them. Getting your newsletter for free, that actually, if you were to do it for cautious optimism, that substack.com, it would actually not work because then you'd have freeloaders giving you advice. Taking advice from people who aren't paying for your product is the worst idea ever. Now, you're saying a discount, but even still, users are called users for a reason. They use you. Customers are sacred. They've given you their credit card You're in a deep, meaningful relationship with you.

You're making a transaction. And they, the beauty of subscriptions is, will cancel if you're not providing value. Yeah. So people over-index on advice from venture capitalists, users, social media. But they should be indexing on a smaller number of people who are customers and who use the product. Because there's really two types of customers you could have. Engaged customers and customers. You want to find the most engaged customers.

and, you know, really index off of their feedback. The person who's bought their third or fourth Tesla, that's a very important customer for Elon to listen to and for the team over there to listen to. My feedback, as somebody who has, you know, is on their fourth Tesla and is getting their fifth, super important for them. Why am I going to buy the Model Y, not the Cyber Truck?

I've been going back and forth. Why would my wife want the Model X, not the Model S, or the Model Y? that's a really interesting piece of information for people to have. That's why being able to segment customers into buckets. So loyal customers who you've had already, who have been on your newsletter for over a year, and who open it up all the time, they're going to have one piece of advice for you.

The people who are in month one might have a different piece of advice. So this is where segmenting cohorts, so you'll hear cohorts come up. Very important. the people who lease their Teslas and who, you know, have the Model 3 and buy the most basic model and use it for driving Uber or their commuters and or the college kids, that's one piece of advice. The people who buy the Model X and spend 100 dimes on it, that's a super user. And that is critically important. And you know what?

This is a hit. This segment's a hit. I'm hearing people say this is super useful and commenting on it. Why don't we grab another question from the audience? How big of a role do you think humanoid robots will play in the next to 10 years? Do you really think it's worth all the hype? In the next five years, I don't think you're going to own one if you're listening to my voice right now in all likelihood. I think five of us, out of a hundred, will own one.

I will be one. And that would just be like the same person who buys like the Newton personal digital assistant. It's going to be that sort of level or people who bought PCs in the 80s. In other words, there's a bell curve, the technology adoption bell curve. And there's the masses. They're the middle of the bell curve. And then you have the laggers. They're the last to use the technology.

And then there are the people who like to sample new technology, the avant-garde. And people call them different things. But you see the innovators, early-adopters, early-majority, late-majority of laggers. And this is the adoption curve. And if you haven't seen this before, it's super important for you to know where you are. If we were talking about electric vehicles right now, we are in the early majority,

and we're going into the late majority. I was an invader. I bought the Roadster. Early adopters bought the Model S. The early majority bought the Model 3 and Y. The late majority is going to buy, you know, whatever comes after that. And the laggards are the ones who get dressed,

dragged along. If you had Uber on your phone in year one or two, you know, you were part of that, you know, Vanguard. You know, Vanguard, they'll buy stuff, not use it. They'll try it. Yeah. You know, they're, they're odd people. They're coveted people, but it's me, you, Robert Scoble, and people who can't shut up about it, who buy the Vision Pro and wear it and annoy people and bring it to Thanksgiving. It's that guy. Is that guy at Thanksgiving? Are you spying on my marriage?

Because that sounds a lot like me. I mean, if you brought a VR headset to Thanksgiving in the last 10 years, you're that guy. And you are. By the way, when you look at that chart, we're not even anywhere near the early or late majority. We're nowhere near that for VR. Some things get stuck. In the early adopters era.

Yeah. It's important to know where you. you are because early adopters will buy anything. They'll tell you it's incredible. They'll try it. They'll buy it. They'll try it. They'll throw it in a draw. You know, you really need to get to that majority. And it takes time to get there. If the product is a startup, startups should not be going after markets where laggards are using the product. No. Because that means there's competitors. It's tons. And there's more competitors there are, the lower the margins are, perfect competition. 101, et cetera.

Very hard to acquire customers for an Uber or an Airbnb competitor or a DoorDash competitor at this point because they got that locked up. Why would you switch? And to get people to switch requires a technological innovation or it requires being 10 times better, which most often comes from a technological innovation. So the example we gave of taxi magic, the iPhone with GPS and maps was 10 times better. and for some reason taxi magic couldn't make that jump, and SICAR, Lyft, and Uber did.

Oh, I can tell you why taxi magic didn't make that jump is because it was only 15% better and you were still talking to a taxi company who didn't control their taxi drivers and you couldn't rate both ways and people were bad and they didn't take credit cards and they blah blah, blah. It didn't solve the pain points. It just made it slightly easier

if you're still at dinner to order a taxi. And what you pointed out was somebody who sat there and said, what sucks about getting a taxi? See, that was Garrett, that was Ryan, and that was Travis. They sat there and they obsessed over every step. And one framing is, what sucks? Can we take that pain out? The other is, what's delightful?

Can we add that in? And another framing that people will often use in the startup world is friction. Friction is just, what's slowing you down? Another way to describe pain. And one of the things that always slows people down in these systems is payments and tipping. and I had major debates with Travis about tipping. I wanted to add tips early on. He did not.

He was absolutely against it. He said, well, just going to make it fast for you to get in and out. If you have to make a decision, the decision should be to get an Uber. The decision should be to rate the driver if you want to because that helps the network effects. Let's not add any other decisions. No more decisions. And there were just two decisions, ordering the Uber, you know, putting in your destination, which is the decision to use it or not,

which really isn't a decision. So what are the decisions to do after you've decided? Rate the driver. I mean, I think that's the only decision to this day in Uber. Rate the driver. You can pick Black X.

Oh, okay, you do have to do that, right. What's the, isn't there a middle option? Well, there's XL, there's teen, there's woman driver, there's dog driver. I mean, actually, because they're all below the fold, the newspaper term, below the fold, with the newspaper, less important information.

Because they're below the fold, you don't even see them. Yeah. So this is a fair point. And adding that friction, there's a good reason to do it. Because if you have a lot of luggage, you need an Excel. And if you're an executive and a CEO, you might want the black. And if you're on a budget and you're a kid, you might want the Uber X. You know how people joke that all the technology is bundling and unbundling and just kind of going back and forth?

Sure. Open AI, when announcing that they're going to, in the future, merge their reasons. and non-reasoning models together after GPD 4.5, they said, we also hate the model drop-down selector because it's kind of anti-consumer. You just want the best fastest one. You don't want to pick between 40-mini or 03-mini flash. And you used to have to pick Dolly to make an image versus

chat GPT to ask a text question. Now, I don't think Dolly's in the menu anymore. So you should ask a question, and it should determine if that question requires which model. In pro mode, you can expose those. And that's what it really should be. If you want to hit the drop down, you hit it. Logging in is throttling. So chat GPT, their monthly active users went bonkers when they took out logging in. Now, they had to have logging in because they had paid customers and they had an SLA service level agreement that, you know, they wanted to do. So there it is. So why don't we talk about your favorite Founder University pitches?

The reason we started Founder. Dot University was about half the applications for funding we get at Launch Fund. That's the name of our fund. The applications come to launch.com slash apply. About half of them were people who were thinking about starting a company. They had a couple of co-founders, but they weren't, they didn't have finished products. They hadn't even incorporated. And so they couldn't come to our accelerator.

And the way I designed the accelerator was to take seven companies. This last time we did 11. We did 11 because we had too many great companies coming out of founding university, to be honest. It's a 12-week course. You do it online. It's twice a week, Monday and Thursday nights. If you come for all 12 Monday nights, you submit your progress every week. And then we offer a 25K check as your first check at a million dollar valuation if you want it.

Rich people don't take it. That's about 20% of the people starting companies. The other 80% ask for it every week. And then we also offer the standard silicon valuation. Valley Y Combinator Techstar's launch accelerator deal of 125K. When the companies get towards graduation, the best ones who make the most progress pitch myself and Mike Savino, another general partner out of a firm, my partner. And, you know, we rank them and we pick them.

And we like to invest out of the 250 teams who come to each cohort. We just finished cohort nine. We like to invest in the top 10%, about 25 of them. So of the 100 investments we do a year, probably 50, 60 of them are founding University 25K or 125K checks. And the other 40 come from the launch accelerator or our follow-on investments for the top 5% of our portfolio. That's the portfolio strategy.

That's what we're doing here. So these are very raw, year zero startups. But I just thought I would share some of them to give them some shine and tell you why we're considering investing in them or we have invested in them or why they were our top folks. And when folks do get an investment from us and they go through the accelerate, I eventually have them come on the podcast. if they make progress.

But this is like, I just thought it as a new thing. We just run through their website, show their websites, you tell me the name, I give you my feedback. Okay, so let's pull up the first one, Ben, and it is PokerGPT, which is a combination of AI and Poker Jason,

two of our favorite things. Talk me through why this one is your jam. Okay. So there is a very interesting business out there of training people to play poker. These websites typically are subscriptions. They cost 50 to 200. $150 a month.

Some of them cost thousands a month. And what this product does is you give it your hand, and then the hand gets analyzed by chat chip ET. What they're trying to do here is just make you a better poker player. So this business could reasonably get, I would say, hundreds of thousands of subscribers for $20 a month. So it's a small community. But what I've noticed is there is a...

a hundred million dollar revenue opportunity out there for a company like chess.com. So I don't believe anybody's made the definitive poker coach. Searchette GPT, you see what's happening with poker. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that there's enough of an audience, maybe not as big as chess, to get to low millions of revenue here, perhaps even eight figures. I don't need as a year one investor or a year zero investor to figure out,

Alex, if it can get to $100 million, if it can get to low millions, I think as a team we can figure out what's the next card to tone over, turn over. Pull up tone base as an example for a second. Yeah, so to speak. You're not going to take your victory lap there? All right. So here we go. I'm just going to drop them. So here's tone base. Here's tone base. Went through our accelerator. They're doing phenomenal. They started with, I think, guitar, classical guitar. And then they added violin. Yeah, I've hit the drop down for violin right there. Thank you. guitar, piano, cello, flute, trumpet, voice, clarinet, double bass, viola. They're now up to their eighth or ninth category.

It's, Jason, it's viola. Viola, thank you. Sorry, I've been in too many symphonies to have you defame. I don't know. It's not my jam. The middle stepchild of the stringed instruments. This is masterclass for these instruments. Now, you would think when they came to us with but guitar or violin,

that it wouldn't have been a big enough opportunity, and you would be right, it wouldn't be big enough for venture. My job, as the world's greatest angel investor, is to squint and say, yeah, let's get that ideal customer profile to our point before, and then that wedge is in there.

Open the wedge. Let's open the wedge. Get it in there. How did Uber start? Lincoln Town Card. Then UberX, Uber Eats, UberPool, UberX, Uber, XL. You can rent.

cars on Uber now. You can take trains in Europe. You know, it just never ends. And so that's what I think's going to happen in the poker space. There's other poker games. And if they figure out how to coach poker, I'm a poker player who also plays chess. There are people who are poker players who also play Magic the Gathering. So I love the idea. I love poker coaching. I think there's something here. I want to see what happens on the flop or the turn. What's our next company? I played with it. Super cool. And it's got me exciting because I'm going to

New Orleans for a week, which means I'm going to be playing a lot of poker. I love it. All right. Next up is J.S. Mon. I think this is

super cool because JavaScript, if you don't know, is pretty much the most important language out there for programming. We're seeing a ton of security startups

and there's companies like Palo Alto networks that acquire great companies, put the CEOs in charge so there's a clear path to an exit here.

And these security experts created J.S.M. To help people who want to protect websites and run reports on them in security, people are constantly running attacks, what they call it, white hat attacks, and they do security audits. So automating security audits, if you have the ability to do so, is going to be a huge business. AI is going to play a part in it. So it is what it says it is.

And, you know, Enterprise 500 a month. You know, Security Bro, 50 bucks a month. You get the idea. I would get rid of the free and the starter and just go right to the enterprise or security pro. And that's always the thing. You know, our number one piece of advice to founders who have products in the market is almost always, how did you come up with the pricing and double it? That was about to say double it. Yep. Definitely. Absolutely. Double it. All right. Another one, Jason, this one surprised me a little bit that it was your jam. I'm going to do my best explain to people what wide worlds is. So its tagline is make memes, build culture, drive growth. And this is really interesting. Essentially, there's a meme inside of the crypto world, that community is everything. And that's predicated on a fundamental truth that humans like to work in groups and we are all kind of community-oriented folks.

Okay. So what they do is this company, Wide Worlds, will help you define your brand language, use AI to help you generate a lot more assets around that brand image. and then use agents to help send those assets around to energize your community. And I think it's a cool idea, but I'm curious what about it, grabbed your eye? Because to me, there's a lot of moving parts.

I'm a little curious, but I'm a little skeptical. Okay, so this is a weird idea. And when I see weird ones, I get interested. Especially weird ideas with attractions. There is a unique opportunity to create a character using generative AI. I think we can all understand that.

And you see characters all the time. Mascots is one way to say it for different products, right? So if you look at any cereal brand, fruit loops, you got the Tukin-Sam, Aunt Jemima with the pancakes, although they've changed that now, I think there's a politically correct. They actually used the, if you look that up for a second, this is interesting, my daughter was educating me because she's very up on these social issues. They actually changed the name of Anchamima,

pancakes to the literal name of the woman who inspired it because it's using an archetype, I think, for Antimima. I know we're getting down like a little political reckness here. But the Antriman is considered a mammy, quote-unquote, offensive, trope, racist kind of thing. So they came up with the actual name of the woman who was the inspiration in Pearl. and it's now Pearl Milling Company? Yes. Formerly, Aunt Jemima.

Okay. I don't know if anybody knew this, but now it's Pearl Milling, and they have the woman who's, do they still have the woman's photo or no, they got rid of that too? I don't think there's, no, it's just their brand image now,

but I'm seeing eggnog pancakes, which means that I'm hungry. I had waffles today, man, I got this great waffle maker. Anyway, I don't know how I feel about this. Pepe the Frog was a funny meme that got co-opted by the Nazi, kind of white supremacist.

Anyway, there's a whole range of characters here, putting aside racist. Tony the Tiger from Frosty Flee for getting me back on track. So, in order to make one of these and to make memes, you need to have a tool. And I

thought, well, this is interesting. If we made a twist character that went with this for our brand, we could then have the twist tiger. I don't know. It was just an idea. No, no, I love it.

And that we could make memes all day with them. It seems silly, but characters in IP are what drive the mouse house, Disney. It's what everybody's aspiring to in advertising. So, maybe there is a business here. Again, odd with traction. This is an interesting factor. Something strange you don't understand with traction, get curious. I'm curious.

This reminds me of the fact that most scientific discoveries don't kind of commence with eureka, but instead, huh, that's weird. Yeah. Thinking about the Twist mascot, we want to have alliteration, so we want T, T, T, animals that begin with T, include the taper, the tarantula, Tasmanian Devil, Termin, Detra, Tiger, Tiger, Shark, Toad, Taurus, etc. If you have a idea for us, Alex W. Launch.com, let me know what you think we should do. is pretty dope. I mean, it kind of rolls off the tongue. Twist tiger. Twist tiger shark.

It's interesting, too. Twist turtle. I'm kidding. Okay. We have one more to do, which is, oh, okay. This one I struggle with, but you like this and we're going to talk about it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Lumix advertising. Lomix advertising.

Here, what they've done is on a VESPA, you know, when you're delivering food, there's a box on the back. Yeah. And in this box, which they created, it's got three signs of it, have an LED display. And I thought to myself, low margin outdoor advertising business, probably not ventures. When I see an idea that's working, I get curious. So it's working. They've got prototypes out there.

They're doing it in South Beach. And I thought, you know, Uber and DoorDash have a wonderful ad-based business. Right? And so does Instacart, Amazon, right? You're at the shopping cart. So I started thinking about that. And I started thinking about food delivery. and I just thought, hmm, what else is there here?

Again, open up the aperture, keep your eyes there. The advice I gave to the founder was to look at the leasing business. Uber had a leasing business. I forgot the name of it. You can look it up, Alex. It doesn't have the name Uber in it. But there was a leasing business associated with Uber at some point. I think Lyft had it too.

They might have spun it out. And there are finance companies. Like if you look at car companies today, with the exception of Tesla, you know, Ford's leasing business or whatever. So here it is. Introducing exchange leasing, lease options built for Uber driver partners. So one of the things people don't know is if you want to be an Uber driver, you may not have a car or you may have one car for your household that you can use for four hours, but you know, mom or dad have to go pick up the kids or they need it this weekend, and then whoever's driving in the household for Uber needs a car. So you can actually go rent a car.

That's how taxis and medallions work in New York. You rent a car and the medallion for $130 bucks. The taxi driver drives like a lunatic until they hit $130 which on a Sunday

might take them five or six hours. You understand why they're under some pressure because they got a 12-hour shift. They get to hour six.

Now you know why they're peeing in a cup is because they're like, oh my God, I might lose money or I might make $200 today and I spent $135.

So I just thought to myself, you know, I wonder if they provided and rented the scooter and the advertising box on the back, what would happen?

Then I thought to myself, man, Uber or DoorDash, or I was like a local restaurant in partnership with them. I don't know if you know, like, I think DoorDash and Uber, they might have had exclusives with McDonald's or Starbucks at different times. Yeah. I might very much want to buy that fleet out for the year and not have Duncan have it versus. Oh, this is just like in search when you have to, if you search for Jason Calacanis and

you're a brand, you have to buy your first ads. Thank you. Thank you. everybody's buying caliccanus.com, yeah. Yeah, if you do that, that'd be a great troll. If you buy calicanus.com right now, I'm going to send an army of people. I'm going to find one of these Manila army black hats, gray hats, to click your ad 10,000 times from US IP addresses and cost you a lot of money.

Don't do it. Oh, no, you own calicanus.com. I own calicatis.com. I'm just saying if you bought the ads on there. So anyway, I usually don't like these hardware things, but I do think I encourage the founder since they have traction to keep pulling the string and see what's happening here

because maybe, you know, we had invested in this one other company that I felt like I got screwed on pretty badly and they had some traction but it was constantly having problems. I do think maybe another entrepreneur or another team

specifically taking a swing at this part of the puzzle without having to wrap a car could be interesting. So I agree with all of that. And I think actually if you think about bringing this technology to, I don't know, markets in Asia that have high density and high scooter

user, for example, could be great. My only beef with this is that it's just very visually loud. And, you know, I still see Uber's go by with the, the light bar on top that has ads. And I'm always like, ah, okay, I guess everything ends up kind of being what it was before. Kind of like how, you know, YouTube TV was cheap and awesome and now it's getting more and more like cable. I'll take one more question from the audience. There was somebody here actually, you know, I hate to delve into politics too much, But somebody asked something about like, why don't I ever call out Trump or Elon? And I wanted to address that, actually. If you look on my Twitter feed, I literally talked about process journalism today and how

an investigative journalism and how I felt like, I believe the next step for Doge is to hire a team of investigative journalists to take the stuff that's spilling out of Doge, right? And I think the Doge philosophy is radical transparency, just put stuff out there. That was called process journalism. In fact, your alma mater, TechCrunch, believed in processed journalism. I did not. Okay.

The reason I didn't like process journalism is because that's what Gawker did to a more extreme level. They would release something that came into the tip line and then they would use that as a cudgel, as a leverage to kind of get the story

and get more information. The problem is, you know, you could spread something that's false. Yes. And that's why process journalism, sometimes it's good to slow down. Now, it's the people's money, the mandate is let the information out there.

But as we've seen, the information could come out, hey, Reuters has got this much money, political got this much money. And then we find out, okay, that wasn't Reuters, the journalist, that was Reuters, the data service, or that was political, the reason it seems like a lot of money is, anyway, my advice to them is, yeah, sure, you want to dump everything, do a data dump.

That's totally fine. That's what WikiLeaks did. As a journalist, former journalist, I like a little more thoroughness, but I understand many people believe that they should be able to see the CIA documents for WikiLeaks or this or the JFK files. I like a little vetting, but I understand people disagree with me. Why not have five investigative journalists in a room every day talking about these contracts? Yes, the condoms in Gaza might be a different Gaza, whatever. Okay, how much are we spending on condoms?

How much are other countries spending on condoms in other countries? Why are we doing that? Is that to prevent disease, to change birth rates? What's the CIA's goal here? You know, the USAID stuff was driven by foreign influence. A lot of times that's like a CIA thing or hearts and minds. Let's have an investigative journalist call people on the ground and say, hey, did this money actually buy 50 million condoms? Or did we get charged $100 per condom? Like, that's the work of investigative journalists. The problem is investigative journalism is expensive. And slow. And slow.

So, to your point, do I ever agree with, do I disagree with Trump? I told everybody. I gave him a B and I, the meme coin I don't like, I don't like the lawfare, whatever's going on with the mayor of New York. New York is a- And doing that like leverage. I don't like that either. I didn't like the lawfare when they did it against Trump, when they up those charges. I said that very publicly.

I thought the upscale of the charges was ridiculous, like just give them the speeding ticket, whatever. so it's going to be chaotic. I can't even keep up with all this stuff. My job is to talk about startups. Yeah. That's what we're going to do here. When it overlaps with technology, yes, I'm going to talk about it.

But I cannot be responsible for everything David Sacks, Elon, and everybody else is doing in the world. I have countless friends in and around the administration. I'm going to stick to my lane largely, startups and technology. No vicarious guilt. I mean, I'm questioning things all day long. Are people not paying attention? They're not. Okay.

So, I mean, just to give you an example of this, we touched on Palantir the other day. And honestly, we talked about how Palantir is a great company with a visionary founder and products that are resonating in the market. And then we said, you know what, though? Maybe this valuation is not entirely moored to fundamentals. And I saw a lot of responses to threads talking about our conversation. Oh. And people were just claiming that we're like on the take shorting the stock. Like one, who would pay us to ramble about Pounder?

I don't want to use the R word on the program, but that is Ray. We are not stupid, y'all. So anyways, it's people need to relax. The thing that I'll say is, and I know we're going to get to this on Monday, but just my little point is, right now, there's a lot of people who are posting pro-dose things to engender favor with the people on it. that are the most influential. This is not just Elon. This is venture capital community and so forth. And I think that what they're doing is often getting ahead of their facts and their ability

to understand the data. And so we're having wasted news cycles of BS that could have been precluded with traditional reporting standards. I love citizen journalism. I love having more voices. I've been on Twitter since 2007. But if you're going to make an explosive claim about criminality, you know, somewhere between a data dump and, you know, biased journalism on the margin, whether it's MSNBCNPR,

the Daily Wire, you know, opinion journalism, there's investigative journalism, there's thoughtful center, middle-of-the-road journalist, just pursuing truth. It's not that many anymore. Everybody seems to have picked a signing journalism. There's a lot of sensationalism. I just wish they were, like, more centered journalistic organizations. I'm really dismayed that that model doesn't work anymore. So what we should do, and I know we're going to sit mostly for Monday, but what if we founded the Center for Boring Journalism? Yes, unprofitable journalism.

We are going to talk to you about these things, and you are going to be slightly bored, but they are what matters. The Center for Boring and Unprofitable Journalism, as opposed to tribal journalism. That would be pretty great. All right, everybody. There's a lot of show. week is president's day so we'll be back on tuesday i think yep we'll see you all next time he's x.com slash alex i'm x.com slash jason we'll have long come on on the news on tuesday and we'll see you all then