This Week in Startups - Is Project Europe a YC Riff? Nick Denton is Back! And more! | E2096

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Today’s show: Europe wants to keep its founders from fleeing, AI is growing at breakneck speed, and Nick Denton is back with a spicy Twitter storm—so we had to talk about it. Jason, Alex, and Lon break down Project Europe, a new $10M fund aimed at stopping the European startup brain drain. Plus, Anthropic’s revenue just jumped 40% in a single quarter, and we debate what that means for AI’s future. Meanwhile, China’s EV makers are coming for Tesla, Saudi Arabia is building a gaming empire with a $3.5B Pokémon GO buyout, and we ask the big question: Should X and XAI just merge? Since XAI gets real-time data from X, it’s got a major advantage—so what’s stopping them from becoming one?*Timestamps:(0:00) Alex, Jason and Lon kick off the show!(1:29) Recap of Jason's appearance on Glenn Beck's show and advice to MBA students(4:21) The value of an MBA vs. starting a company(8:14) Nick Denton on Musk, Trump, and investment thesis(9:47 Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(15:16) The rise of Chinese EV manufacturers and Tesla's challenges(19:09) Jason's stance on vandalism, protests, and political affiliations(20:35) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit http://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(23:13) Tesla's brand challenges and future prospects(25:03) Jason's audience and political neutrality(26:35) Inflation data and its implications for startups(28:07) Project Europe and entrepreneurship in the EU and Middle East(29:45) AdQuick. Easily plan, deploy and measure out-of-home campaigns as easily as digital ads. Visit www.AdQuick.com/twist to learn more(38:09) Jason's personal health and productivity protocol(41:18) Anthropic's revenue growth, API credits, and AI developments(45:09) AI competition and consumer trust(46:41) Mainstream adoption of ChatGPT and AI challengers(48:02) Grok AI's integration with X(51:12) Sale of Niantic's games business and global market shifts(58:06) India's economic rise and TSMC's potential deal with Intel*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/alexwilhelmFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/LonsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharrisFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(9:47 Squarespace. Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(20:35) Northwest Registered Agent. Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit http://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(29:45) AdQuick. Easily plan, deploy and measure out-of-home campaigns as easily as digital ads. Visit www.AdQuick.com/twist to learn more*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

How long until X and XAI are the same company? Because we know there's like financial ties, there's product integrations, and it really feels a little arbitrary. I think the X shareholders got ownership in XAI. XAI needs to be, I don't, I'm not an investor in either, but I know the guy who's running it and a lot of my friends are. XAI is doing something interesting, which is I think they get X's corpus, which is a huge advantage. So the huge advantage is what I was talking about on Glenn Beck today. The huge advantage is if you have a real-time data source giving you information. And so whoever's got real-time data, whether it's Reddit or X or Facebook, they're going to have such a huge, huge LLM advantage.

Yeah, well, they have a couple hundred thousand of my tweets, Elon. Where's my check? Anyways, everyone on the XAI investment team, you're welcome for all my tweets. 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. Northwest Registered Agent.

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All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. We come to you live on the YouTube, on the X, on the LinkedIn from my personal LinkedIn. We got a big docket here. Sorry, I'm running a little bit behind, but I was on Glenn Beck's show, the Glenn Beck. The Glenn Beck, yeah. Who's still on the radio. I did not know that. So I guess, Jason, how did it go?

It was great. You know, he listens to All In. as some people are wont to do. And he heard me talk about AI and what an impact it's going to have. And you guys help me with my little essay that I'm writing for my substacky and just Jason Calacanis on startups on substack,

you'll find me. But I'm just writing this little piece on the static team size and how having spoke at UT a couple of times in the past month, these students actually think they're going to like get job offers. And I'm like, yeah,

I don't think this is like five years ago where like Uber Airbnb Coinbase, the sort of upstarts are going to give you an offer, and then you're going to like work that offer against the classics, McKinsey and Goldman consulting firms. This is for MBAs I'm talking about. They used to, MBAs had a lot, a lot of places to go work. And I don't think they're hiring in these places all that much anymore. So be resilient, start a company's my best advice. Yes, here's a headline from Forbes from January 15th. When Harvard MBAs can't find jobs, how the job market has changed.

This is going to be a permanent state of affairs. We see it inside of our tiny little 21 personnel post here launch, where we're getting more done. Every month, we do a little bit more, we get a little bit more done, but we use the same number of people, because if you embrace the tools, you get 10% better. So I kind of went through the upside in these tools,

which is if you use them every day and your boss asks you to do something and you haven't asked three, four, five LLMs, hey, my boss is a jerk. He wants me to get this done. He's totally unreasonable. How do I get this done and make him happy or her happy? And what questions will they ask me? What are the follow-up questions? You can literally give that prompt. And it's going to give you a really great way to address complex research projects or complex projects your boss might give you. And it could even anticipate what their follow-up questions are. If you don't do that, it would be kind of like, I don't know, being a handyman. and you don't type into YouTube, what does Code 17 mean on a dishwasher that's not working? Like, you've got to know what Code 17 is. You figure out, oh, that's like this receptacle or this fuse, and you flip it.

That's not extreme enough. I think instead it's more like a handyman not using power tools. Like, can you imagine roll it up with like a hand saw, you know? Or no tools. Just showing up with no tools. And I'm going to use my hands. No manual, no internet. Like, yes, yeah.

Oh, it's not working. Yeah, let me kick it from the side. Just one thing you said, so you don't need an NBA to start a company. Like a lot of the founders that we have on this show, they didn't go to business school. They just graduated high school or college and started a company. So do you think, is there any use case for an MBA at this point? Like if I was graduating as an undergrad, is there anyone you would be like, well, you should maybe consider business school? I'm biased because I work with entrepreneurs.

There are things you're going to learn at an MBA program. I would consider it kind of like going to a yoga retreat or a meditation retreat that's incredibly expensive like on the White Lotus. Right. If you can afford it and you can go to the White Lotus and do yoga or meditation and it cost to $10,000 a week, great. You could save the $9,900 and go on YouTube and learn meditation for $100 or for $0. And if you're a self-starter, you know, I would take the money. your parents were going to give you for an MBA program, let's say it was a quarter million dollars to go to Stanford or Harvard or like a really elite school. You take that quarter million

and you do three 75K businesses or so, you know, projects, you would go further. You would go further. So there's that. But, you know, some people have kids who don't have the hootspah, the resiliency, the self-reliance, the executive function. So you're kind of sending them there to build that muscle. Right. Yes. It's finishing. school for trust fund kids. Here's a thing. UT is wonderful because it's 9K a year. When you talk about the value proposition,

there's like two costs, opportunity cost, your time, and then money, actual hard cost. Right. You know, spending 50K on a degree

and then graduating to a 50K a year job, that's fine. That's my one-X rule. Whatever you spent on the education, let's assume kids have more time than money, so no big deal. They spend four years growing up, maturation,

you know, getting through the maturation process, of developing the frontal lobes. Yeah, 50K. You come out of school, you make 50K. You got to pay down 10% of your loans every year. You can do it quite effectively. And in 10 years, you'll be done with your 50K in loans.

Or if your parents can afford it, maybe have zero in loans or maybe halfway, 25. That's a big difference than graduating with five times your starting salary or 10 times your starting salary in debt, which means you'll never own a home. And you'll never be able to get married and have kids because you're going to have a thousand, $2,000 a month mortgage payment that you're paying to Harvard or Columbia. So anyway, I think that's sort of where I come at it with,

I come at it from. But we have Founder University, which you pay $500 to go to with two of your friends, build a prototype, and if you come to all 12 weeks, you give you the $500 bucks back. So I'm kind of thinking

I've got a better model here that we've developed. I might even take it to the point at which I charge $10,000 to go. And then if you finish, we invest the $10,000, back into your company. Like, literally round-trip it.

Yeah. Like, I was thinking like creative models like that, but I don't want to exclude people who, you know, maybe, you know, like myself, who wouldn't be able to afford the 10-K. You can have scholarships or something for people who couldn't pay the 10-K up front, maybe. We have people ask that for the $500. And what I say to them, I say, oh, you can't find $500.

And they're like, well, I mean, I could. And I'm like, okay, yeah, we don't have a scholarship program. You can't, you don't have any way to find $500 and get it back in 12 weeks. what you typically get is the whiners and the entitled will come up with why they can. And then the other people are like, yeah, no big deal. I'll just, you know, I'll work

Uber for 10 hours or I'll work Uber for 20 hours or DoorDash, make 20 bucks an hour and I'll get it back. Your body's going to replace that plasma. Okay, we got a lot on the docket. Let's get to work, gentlemen. I think we should start with Nick Denton. And then Jason, after that, I want to dig into Project Europe, which is all about founders.

but you wanted to talk about, one, Nick's back, and two, he had a bit of a thesis about kind of the Trump Musk thing that you wanted to dig into this. Yeah, sure. You know, I'm always reticent to get into too much Elon territory because people will assume that I have some inside information. You know, I haven't been talking to Elon all that much since he's been busy. At Doge, I'm kind of, you know, even when my friends are cooking, so I'm kind of letting them do their thing, so I don't have any information on this.

But Nick Denton, for people who don't know, I was a journalist. he's like a witty, bitter, interesting, intelligent journalist from the UK. He's old like me now, but in the heyday, he created Gawker, which was absolutely disastrous and fabulous at the same time. It did incredible moments of real investigative journalism. It did incredibly loathsome things, as he would tell you, and got shut down spectacularly by Peter Thiel when he sued it because they were trafficking. Gawker, that is, in stolen sex tapes.

And he wound up, yeah, paying a ginormous settlement to the Hulkster. But he wants to be a journalist again, apparently, and he wrote a really interesting thread, I think, which touched on a lot of things in the news around BYD and some of the cars we've been talking about here. So we'll pull up his tweet storm here and then just what the major points are and how we think about them. All right, founders, let's talk about your website. Yes, I know it's embarrassing. Yes, I know you're too busy to upgrade it. Well, if you're going to launch something new or you need to give your brand a refresh,

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running partner for this weekend startups because they were a startup and they still build their product with the enthusiasm and the cutting edge technology of a startup founder. We love square space. Yeah, so we went through all of Nick's Twitter storm, and frankly, it was like 25 tweets. So we pulled out the four most important ones. I'm going to walk everyone through these really quickly. So the headline from Nick, I'm going to quote here, the merger is complete. Elon Musk and Donald Trump, collaborators in the rationalization of the federal government, are now full business partners, trust industries, I call it, with Trump as car salesman in chief and Musk as the genius founder. Jason, this is in reference to, I think, the Tesla showoff event they

held in front of the White House in which the president endorsed Musk and his vehicles. Trask Industries is from Marvel Comics. This is Trusk Industries. What you can take from this is Nick Denton is a fan of what's happening in Doge and apparently a Trump fan because he's saying the rationalization of the federal government, which I think is kind of where I stand on it, whatever you think of Doge, going too fast, moving fast, and breaking things. I think we all agree waste, fraud, too much is common ground for everybody, independent of political aisles. We might obviously disagree with the process of doing it. So let's just make that note about Nick Denton's position here. It is true that yesterday Trump had Elon's cars at the White House. This is, in my

interpretation, again, I don't have any inside information, a make-good in some ways, a make-good for Biden not inviting Trump to the White House and Joe Biden driving like a Corvette and basically stumping for the great American car company GM. And I'm getting a Corvette, I think. I'm going to test drive one. The folks at GM are going to let me borrow an E-ray. Really? Yeah.

Well, you know, I'm a Corvette guy in my whole life. I had a C-6. And now that I'm here in Austin, I'm going to get a barn, like a Man Cave Barn type thing. Wow. I decided I'm going to collect one of each generation, C-1 through C-8. I'm going to have one of each.

I think when I first met you, you had a Corvette, like before the rooster. Yeah, yeah. Before that was like, free roadster. Yeah, so I just, you know, I just have an affinity for them as a collector. So the C-Aid is the greatest sports car ever made in America. I'm sure Elon will one up it with the Roadster, too, which I'll also get. But yeah, I think that's my interpretation of it. And he goes on in his thread there, Nick Denton, and he's using X as the way to get the story

out there because doing a thread of 30 or 40 tweets like this is going to get him more views than doing it for the financial time. So smart move for Nick Denton. to do that here. And I think Trump said yesterday, he had a funny meme. It's all computer. Is that what he said? He said, everything's computer. Everything's computer, which I think kind of sums up the last 30 or 40 years of my life. Everything is computer. Everything's computer. The context there. Is that the new Radiohead album that just came out? Oh, that's OK computer with the radio head. Okay, computer. Yeah.

That's the most Gen X joke I've ever heard in my life. Nick goes on on his X thread to say, quote, I'm also a technology investor. Unlike most journalists, I have skin in the game. Lots of thoughts about that. I'll get to that in a second. But quote,

my portfolio is long, Xiaomi and B. And he's also betting against Tesla. Quote, I put my money where my mouth is and I'm now highly motivated. And then he goes on to kind of point out that as Elon works more with the presidency and links his cars to the administration, the two are increasing.

inseparable. And Jason, I think the gist there is that their fortunes will rise and fall somehow together in a kind of conjoined entity way, if that's fair. Why not? Okay. But I think the more interesting part of this is, if we go down, is his warning about just how amazing the Xiaomi cars are. So I think maybe jumping to that part is the most interesting part. Innovation in EVs is on a tear. And that was always Elon's big vision. He wanted to make EVs cool. Mission accomplished. Everybody's making them now. And these B-Y-D and the Xiaomi ones are dirt cheap.

And man, are they good-looking? Yeah. Here's the Xiaomi SU7, which is on the screen if you're watching the video version of this. It's one of the cheaper cars out there. And they've just made a sporty version of it. It's also not that expensive. And I really got to say, China has gone from being a laggard in EVs to being essentially now the global low-cost leader.

And in some ways, a technology innovator. I didn't think they were going to get up to parity with the Tesla as quickly as they did, Jason. I know there's state support, but it's still an impressive growth, especially from Xiaomi, a company that we think of as a phone OEM. I mean, that's quite the jump to cars. It is a trend that we're going to track here. 20K cars. 20K cars. Let's put it on our theme list along with static team size, but 20K cars that are sexy, that are self-driving. Elon's going to do that with the cyber taxi, which we're going to do. production next year, I think, around this time, he said. And, you know, the Chinese have no respect

for IP. They just steal everything. And if you look at those cars, they've stolen, you know, all the innovations from Tesla and other places. And Xiaomi, you know, made smartphones. What is a car? There it is Donald Trump's mugshot. Wow, everything is computer. There's actually kind of a conversation going on right now. I don't know if you saw the Volkswagen CEO the other day was talking about He thinks we're going to move away from the everything is computer version of cars. He was like, they're putting buttons back. He's like, it's too much screens. It's not.

I believe the quote was, it's not a phone. It's a car. Yes, indeed. Here's the full quote from the Volkswagen exec. Basically, they're going back to physical buttons, which I'm not going to lie, suits me because they're easier to navigate when you're actually driving a car. I got to say, I'm sort of, I agree, like I have a preacee. By the way, only, I believe MSRP,

is only like 22-5 on that. So close to a $20,000 car, I think it's pretty sexy. But when I rent a car and it's got all the like screens like the Tesla-esque sort of interface, I'm not a huge fan. I kind of, I'm old,

but I do kind of like the button, the analog kind of driving a little better. The way they save money is by reducing the number of parts. As you reduce parts, you save money. You have the Prius C, is that right? Yes. It's like a small,

it's like their Honda fit competitor, but I also had a Honda fit before the Prius C. I like the Prius D a lot better. Well, congratulations, Lon, your car. According to Car and Driver. Oh, boy, here we go. You want to guess the rating of your car on a scale of 1 to 10?

My new Corvette will be a 10. My Model Y is a 10. 7, 6, 4? Keep going. Oh, come on. Dear, let's a great car. That's because Car and Drive. driver likes cars that are for drivers of cars.

The Prius C is a car for people who just want to get somewhere. It's a city car. It's like boop, boop, like it fits in any little spot. Like, I'm not drag racing in this thing. Here's the dislikes. I'm not doing vanishing point. Reluctant to accelerate. Harsh ride quality, not especially nimble.

Congratulations, Lon. Wait, what do they say about the Model Y? I'm looking this up. Car and driver, model Y. Cabin is cramped for tall folks. Few available features. I'm not a tall folk. cubby storage. I mean, they hate this car. It is safe. I'll give you that.

It's safe. It's great for a big city because it can fit anywhere and it's very easy to navigate. Two of ten. They did give the Model Y just for comparison to a 7.5, which is pretty solid grade. Actually, no, Jason, 7.5 is not bad from Car and Driver. I trust Car and Driver. That's my brand. And Doug DeMiro, I like, too. What is the ranking? I wonder on Car and Drive for the Model I. Model 3 isn't eight. Okay. I think it's because the price of these is a little bit high as part of it. Anything else in his thread there? I just want to talk a little bit about the vandalism.

I really don't like the vandalism as a form of protest. If you want to sit in the Capitol building, if you want to do peaceful Black Live Matters protests, if you want to, you know, do peaceful protests on Columbia's campus, all good. When you start burning stuff, you start chasing people around, when you start, you know, breaking things or shutting down a bridge when people are trying to get to work,

that's where I'm kind of like, yeah, no, no, buono. So I just don't like the violence in a lot of these protests that are going on. I think we're kind of conflating two things in the discourse today around Tesla, which is, it's always a little bit, like, troubling when that happens. Like, there are the people in front of a Tesla dealership with signs, which is very, I think, legitimate public protests.

Like, they don't like Eli, They don't like the company. You know, if you're on the sidewalk in front of a business and you're like, unfair, that's allowed. Everybody knows that's allowed. Sure. If you're spray painting somebody's car, if you're burning or damaging somebody's car, obviously that crosses a line. Now you're destroying someone's property.

Legally, it's a totally different issue. So it troubles me to see those two things conflated into like any protest against Tesla is wrong. Like, no, no, standing in front of a dealership with a fine is fine. That's not domestic terrorism. It's damaging somebody's car. Correct. Hey, founders, you want to build the next great billion dollar business, right? Well, you're going to need two things, a killer idea and a properly set up company.

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have the support you need. So here's your call to action. Don't let paperwork hold you back from your entrepreneurial dreams. Get started today at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist. That's Northwest registered agent.com slash twist for just $39 plus state fees. Your business can be up and running in no time at all. Get more value, more convenience, and more peace of mind only with Northwest registered agent. With this arson, what people have to understand is when you do that, you know, I come from a firefighter family. Arson as a former protest seems like nonviolent in some ways. Like, I'm burning something down. This is what happens with arson. The building next door gets lit on fire and the security guard or, you know, the building next door, some mom and her baby gets smoked, you know, in their apartment and they

die. It's not a wise idea. No. Just don't burn stuff down. Don't start fires, people. Why have to come on our show and tell you not to start fire? But I mean, I think the startup takeaways here are If you, and this is the one that I think is important for people to get for founders listening to the program because I always try to bring it back to founders. If you pick a political side, you can lose half of your customer base. In a media enterprise, MSNBC losing the Republicans and Fox losing the Dems, that's great. There's enough left. The question is when you lose half the people for a consumer product like Bub Light did, right? or like Elon's doing right now,

you know, Bud Light lost the Republicans, Elon's losing the Libs and the Democrats in some percentage. That's kind of hard for consumer products. So I think this is really challenging, I think, for the Tesla brand. Molly Wood, who was on this program, was a co-host for a long time. She traded in her Tesla for a poll star because she didn't like Elon in the direction he was taking the brand.

So I think Tesla's really got to think, and Elon's got to think long and hard about, you know, after he finishes the Doge thing, you know, building bridges and selling to all customers. And I think cyber taxi is going to be, you know,

a huge hit two years from now. And I think that's the future of the company. And so he's skating to where the puck is going. The Model Y refresh, by the way, is absolutely gorgeous. And, but it's going to be a tough year

for carmakers with all these tariffs and everything. Is there anything else in his piece that is notable, the dented piece that you thought, Lon or... He's saying, you know, unlike other in general,

I have skin in the game. That sounds like other journalists are being lazy and cautious, but in fact, they're following traditional journalistic rules. Now, Nick and the Gawker crew clearly blazed our own trail, and here he is doing that again. But just don't take that as there.

And to be clear about that, he has investments in B, he bought BID stock, is what he said. And Xiaomi, I believe, yes. And Xiaomi. Okay, yeah, the Chinese stocks have been undervalued.

Skin in the game. That's the whole team. Yeah, he plays the bet. You know, I think he's kind of following the all-in playbook, which is, hey, it's all capital allocators talking about their bet.

that's in a way that random act of journalism as biased as it is gives you one piece of information. Traditional journalism where you don't have a financial interest should give you the other side of the coin, which is calling balls and strikes. Of course, we all know the problem is humans are fallible and sometimes they do journalism based on their voting patterns or which party they're part of. And man, it's so hard to do a journalistic product these days that calls balls and strikes because you lose your audience and you're hated by both. I am hated, hated by MAGA, as you've all seen. He replies. The only group that hates me equally or more than MAGA are the people on the left who believe that I'm part of MAGA. So MAGA hates me because I'm not

part of MAGA and I criticize Trump. And the left hates me because they think that I'm too pro-Dose or pro-Trump. So you basically lose everybody. I've lost 60% of the audience, I won't pick aside, probably. Well, hi everyone who's still here. Welcome to... Well, I mean, you're here to listen to startups, but I would say on the all-in, you know... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Craziness, literally people are like, I hate J-Cal because he criticized Trump coin. Yeah. And he doesn't get it. And on the other side, they're like, I hate J-Cow because he's supporting Doge. Whether or not, like, whatever you believe, if this is fascism, if this is autocracy,

or if people are just, you know, getting beyond themselves or that's embellishment or exaggeration, whichever you believe, once the discourse gets there where that's being thrown around every day, you guys are fascists, how can you, it becomes very hard, like, what's in the middle of fascism and not fascism? Like, those are kind of binary things. So I do think it's just going to get harder and harder to be like, I don't pick a side when those are the sides. I mean, you were, you were a, I think a double hitter as well, Lon. Me? You were a double hater, weren't you?

Oh, yeah, I definitely get it from both sides all the time. Of course. You hated both kinds. All right. So other stuff in the news, we got inflation data. Yeah, so running people through the headlines here. So, CBI, the consumer price index, was up 2.8% year over year in February. Below a 3% rate in January.

That's what you want to see. You want to see that number go down. Better than expected. on the core front, which strips out a couple of things to give you a less volatile number. It was plus 3.1% year over year. Again, better than January. Stocks, Jason, pretty happy with this. The expectation that is if inflation comes down, there's room to cut rates.

So tech stocks are up today. Tesla rebounding from its prior declines. Invidia rebounding from its prior declines. So a couple of stocks, we've seen trade pretty hot lately are regaining some territory today. And I'm sure that's popular with investors around the world. I don't look at the stock market day to day. all that much. Certainly, I'm not day trading.

Great companies are going to grow through these, the most important things for founders in the game and startups listening. Just focus on your customers and all this meta stuff that you see, like inflation, etc. It's fine to understand it. It's fine to geek out on it, but probably not going to change your day to day. You have a certain amount of runway. Raising money could be affected on the margins by it, but great companies that are growing,

let's call it in the early seed stage 10% month over a month, which is a pretty easy bogey to hit. If you're growing 10% month over a month, you're doubling every seven, eight months. You're going to be just fine. So eyes on the prize. Focus on your growth. Focus on your team. It's a big news today. And we're going to bring Harry Stebbings on to talk about this.

Couldn't quite get them on for today's show. We tried like hell, but didn't quite work out. The point is Project Europe. Now, we've talked a lot on this show about American dynamism, Jason, how American companies have the leading market caps in the world. America's leading the AI race, blah, blah, blah, big deal. So the thing is, in Europe, there's a new effort called Project Europe, and it's about 120 European technology folks like the leaders over at Shopify, Klarna, Mistral, and they're teaming up to invest and mentor younger European founders.

They're putting together a 10 million euro fund that'll put 200,000 euro into individuals who are building stuff. And critically, they're going to assign a founder who's already been successful to that young founder to provide mentorship. So it's kind of like a hybrid venture capital, Teal Fellowship model to build more startups in Europe. And I think this is brilliant. Sounds like Founder University a bit. I like the mentorship model. That's always good. When they do this project Europe thing, are they taking equity in that person's company? Or is it a grant is the question. Are they giving people 200K like a grant, which is what

Teal Fellows does with 100K, I believe? 90% sure this is equity. This came out literally this morning, so we're still chasing down every single details of the terms. But given that 20VC, 0.9 and adjacent to are all putting their capital into it,

I don't think they're going to be giving away. And it's just a Y combinator knockoff with a different spin. So not impressed. If it was 100K or 200K that you just gave as a grant to the person, that would be disruptive.

Doing this, not impressed. It's just a Ycombinator knockoff. Founders. Let's talk about building your brand here in the real world. We know digital ads are amazing, but if you want to stand out in 2025, maybe you need to think a little bit bigger. And a great way to do that is out-of-home advertising. Yes, you know, those really impressive billboards you see everywhere,

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Then they're going to use their data and technology to ensure your ads reach the right audience every single time. Plus, they're going to give you real-time insights to measure performance and optimize your spend. So whether you're building brand awareness or looking to drive customer action, right? you want to acquire customers, you can see why AdQuick is trusted by everyone from the fastest growing startups to the S&P 500. Take your brand to the next level with AdQuick, the smarter way to do O-O-O-H. And just for Twist listeners, AdQuick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. That's an amazing offer. Get started today. Adquick.com slash twist. That's ADQU-I-C-K dot com slash twist. So, Harry, after dropping the news, the Financial Times cover it and stuff to cover it, said that in the

first couple hours, he had another four dozen founders paying wanting to join. His argument is that Europe can build. I'm much more bullish on this than you are, Jason, because I think what they need to do is reverse the brain drain and stop having people leave Europe, go build in Silicon Valley. And with more capital, more mentorship, and frankly, better vibes, like optimistic feeling, I think you could keep a lot of folks in Europe. And I think also the rearment of Europe, the removal of the German debt break. And I would say rising EU, like nationalism are all going to be things that consolidate and kind of help founders stay in building Europe, which is going to be good, I think, for American tech companies, more competition,

and also I think it's going to have another poll apart from the China-Russia axis. So I'm surprised you're not excited about this. I thought you were going to be all like, woo. No, I'm just thinking about it pragmatically in terms of innovation. The reason I'm not impressed is it's not innovative. It's a copycat kind of thing. And it's self-serving. So in order for it to be a movement and be disruptive. The reason Peter Teales was so disruptive is it was a grant. And what he did that was really interesting about it was those people became loyal to him because it was a grant. And he was still able to invest in them. But you still had then wildcards like pirate wires, I think, came out of it or other things that weren't necessarily financial.

So it just feels derivative, not particularly innovative. And if you're a founder, first time founder, and you stay in Europe, that's a bad decision. It's just a terrible decision. Coming to America, coming to California, coming to Texas, coming to New York will be much more creative to your business. Terrible idea to stay there. If you're a serial founder, fine.

If you're in the Nordics, perhaps. If you've got an investor there who's a lead investor who committed to you, great. But for every Klarna, for every Spotify, it's de minimis, the impact those European companies have had. Even like London?

You don't think like London you could start a... The problem is they're all anti-entrepreneurship there. The reason why this is notable in Europe is because they're so anti. The reason this is needed in Europe is because they're so anti-entrepreneur. When you're in London and you say you're running a startup or you're an entrepreneur, people look at you like you're a charlatan, like you're a conman, like you're a grifter. Entrepreneur equals grifter in a lot of these markets. the Nordics out of it because they have a special sensibility for design and a special

sensibility for a building product that I think is very unique to them. But, you know, they just, they don't have big winners coming out of Europe for a reason. It's because they treat entrepreneurs terrible there. Harry and the Spotify people are the opposite. But it's just, it's too many headwinds. And I think when you're an entrepreneur, what you want to do is remove as many of the headwinds and things that can flip the car and you want to increase the number of things that could be tailwinds. If you're running a company in Europe, you're going against the jet tree. You're going to burn twice as much fuel. It's going to be slow and dogged.

It might be, to your point, Alex, that there's some great change that's going to occur and Europe's going to get their act together and be more entrepreneurial. I doubt it. Europe is Epcot Center right now, as far as I'm concerned. It's a place for tourists to go and get to see, like, this old world charm, and you can bounce from country to country, and it's quite charming. but they treat their entrepreneurs terrible. Okay.

So I'm not going to try to go through that, but I think the idea here is there's a lot of people who want to change that. And so here's hoping that that works out. But I do want to say, Jason, if we lost 60% of our audience because you're not picking a left or right side here in the States,

I think the other 40% were the Europeans who are also now gone. No, hello to nobody. I think they are exactly agreeing with me. I think anybody who's a European entrepreneur or a VC's probably, He's probably nodding because Jesus, like, they want to regulate every company. They want to make it harder to build platforms.

They don't have Section 230 like we have here. You can't fire people. It's not as fluid as an environment. Regulations are crazy. You can't do M&A. It's just the worst place to do business. It's a terrible, terrible decision to do business in Europe as an entrepreneur. You got to go where the action is.

It's like if you wanted to be in hip hop in the 90s, you go to New York or L.A. If you want to be in tech, you come to Austin, New York. You know, maybe you go to, I mean, I would say Dubai or Abu Dhabi or Riyadh. If you are a European entrepreneur, you go to those three cities, they're going to throw money at you, they're going to celebrate you. They're going to give you a golden visa. And you're still going to be able to fly home and ski wherever you want or go, like, you spend your summers in Italy.

I'm glad you've given me this opening because you've mentioned Riyadh in this context a few times. And I know things are changing in the kingdom. Like, I understand, than you could imagine. I understand there are progressive people now, like, sort of looking to, well, in some ways progressive. But like, how far along would you say that process is what a Western person today going to Riyadh find a traditional kind of city where they can do all the usual things they're used to doing in a normal city? So let me work backwards. Do you buy? We'll fail just like New York to you. Right.

I mean like Dubai, we've sort of established is this kind of very like Western friendly. Like you can get a drink at a bar and like people dress, however. Is that, is that Riyadh as well now? That's what Riyadh's chasing. And I'd say they've closed 80% of the gap. And so when you look at what they've done in Dubai, Riyadh's just right on that track. And they are particularly obsessed with entrepreneurship and creating companies. And we'll have a big announcement about.

some work we're going to do in the kingdom that I've chosen to do. I'm going to make the announcement next month, but I have been spending a little bit of time over there, and I believe company formation in that region is absolutely critical for democracy in the world. That whole region has its own power base, plus they're trying to get pulled towards China, India, and Russia. On the other side, you know, in the bricks kind of situation, and on the other side, they're trying to get pulled into the West and who they align with in the future is going to determine, I think human rights, it's going to determine democracy, it's going to determine, you know, peace. And it's going to be one of the great forks in the road, I think, in our lifetimes, is where do

those countries end up affiliating themselves with? Now, they're their own entities, their monarchies, etc. But personal freedoms, economic freedoms, those things are all starting to happen in a major way. And I'm particularly excited about it

as somebody who worked at Amnesty National and cares about human rights and cares about entrepreneurship. Yeah. Yeah. But I can't bring edibles to Saudi Arabia, so I'm going to politely pass for now. I mean...

Interesting, you bring that up. I think that their view on alcohol has changed and there are, tourism is the big attraction there. So they're doing new cities like Neum and stuff like that. So in those cities, Westerners are going to be able to have alcohol.

And I think you'll can assume that cannabis or other things will come after that. I did this tweet the other day. I got a huge reaction on my Twitter where I said, hey, here is my protocol. You know, like Brian, everybody's got to have a protocol

since I'm an influencer now and a micro celebrity, I got to have a protocol. Very simple. Sleep, exercise. diet meditation. Focus on those sports. And then I gave sort of sub things that I'm working on. Everybody knows I'm on a health kick. And I'm doing it for myself, for my daughters, my family. I just want to be around and I want to be healthy in my older years here. Man, has it worked for me? I got a 99 sleep

squirt. That's off the charts. I slept with the bulldog last night. It dropped down to the 80s. What am I going to do? Max was in the hospital. He's safe now. He just, he had a pneumonia. Happens. These bulldogs are like fine-tuned machines. They're like Ferraris or something. They're always in the shop. So I felt like I needed to sleep with him. But, you know, I kind of did this protocol. And I have, and this is kind of a startup. My understanding is Brian Johnson, who's going to come to the all-ending tomorrow night here in Texas, that he is making $100 million a year on the blueprint. As I said, maybe you pull that up one more time so I can read it. I have those top four things I'm focused on. But then I'm telling people, hey, listen, see if you can add two or three of these things without

your phone. Play a game. I played Clue with my twins the other night. We had a riot. read a book. You'll see some more physical books on the shelf here. I'm just starting to get into just 15 minutes of actual physical reading as opposed to audiobooks, which I do when I'm hiking or driving, listening to music. Shout out to my friends at headphones.com, Andrew over there, who I'm going to do a partnership with because I've been so taken by, he's very generous and sent me these $5,000 headphones. And I listen to them and, man, I'm really hearing the music and I'm using co-buzz. I'm going to become an influencer in this space next. Cook some meals together. share a meal with folks you love.

I have institutionalized my Thursday night dinner with my friends here in L.A. Lon, you've come to the ATX supper club. We have a six-person dinner. We book out the best restaurants over like the next 12 weeks. One of my friends is doing that, William Barnes, who worked at Uber,

and we're good friends, and he's here. So we just go every Thursday to a different restaurant. Hang out with animals or kids. I do that hiking. Walk in nature. I do that every day on the ranch or I try to.

These are the things that are going to help you. Sleep is the new drug in the startup community. people are leaving events at 10 p.m. saying, I've got to get a good night's sleep. I'm tracking my score. You measure it and you manage it. Woop, eight sleep. They all do a great job, as does the Apple Watch in doing this. But anyway, I like Harry. I think he's got great intent here.

Can't wait to talk to him about it. Maybe he's floating a balloon. We'll see what the terms are. And then so the terms on the 200K also important. Yes, very important. Okay, moving on. I'm going to throw this in because I think it really matters. Anthropic, Jason, the AI Foundation Model Company, backed by Google, Amazon, lots of investors, et cetera, has grown its annualized revenue, according to the information from about a billion dollar run rate at the end of 2024 to 1.4 billion. As I said earlier, 40% growth from a billion dollar foundation and less than a quarter is insane. And, you know,

frankly, I think this kind of makes a point. I think their valuation now is somewhat reasonable. The question, of course, is can they keep this pace of growth up? But holy crap, that's a lot of revenue really fast. If it's true, it seems like that would be really great revenue growth. I'm assuming this is not for the consumer product. This is for the API and that they've seeded the consumer product race to Chat Chipiti and Gemini and GROC. Yeah? Yeah. So Open AI makes more of its money than, sorry, more of its money from chat ChpD subscriptions than its API, Anthropics the other way around. But keep in mind, they also dropped Claude 3.7 and then also Claude code.

And they are inside of a lot of the breakout stuff. So everyone's talked about Manus. Well, that's some Claude technology built in there. We had the CEO of Replit on the show. That's Claude, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So people are really using what they built to make products. And that's why I think it's durable and not churn at risk.

The great news for startups is you can get these API credits from Google Cloud, which we've had a partnership with. You can go to get startup credits.com. I put all the credits that we're doing at get startup credits.com. You sign up there. You get white-gloved. Just doing this as a service to our founder. So go to Get Startup credits.

You can get the Google credits there, other credits. People are giving AI credits out to startups, you know, like candy, which is great. And, you know, people are building their systems so that if, you know, one service gets too expensive, they can move to another or one is better, you know, at images. than voice, you can move it around. And so the big winner in this race is going to be startups. They're going to keep lowering the prices. They're going to keep increasing the value.

And I have always believed that the application level is where the value is going to be. I think that these companies are in a race to the bottom. And it's getting so cheap when we had Raul from Superhuman Online. He said, they're writing their summaries for your emails ahead of time. most people, like you do a Google search and it does that little real-time snippet from Gemini, so they're not wasting time

building these results ahead of time. I don't believe they're doing that like in caching them. It's getting so cheap that it's going to run on your M4. You're going to have a local version on your phone ripping through stuff. And so, you know,

let's say you wanted an analysis of every MP3 on your phone, every audio file. It might just do that in the background and have it sitting there for you. why wouldn't it do it? If it was going to do an analysis of your photos, you know, normally it would wait to you query, hey, show me all the Bulldogs, it might take the top 10 queries, top 20 queries, and run them every day and then present you with the results in a proactive way,

like a great employee might, a great team member might be proactive. So we're going to see some really interesting things happen here as this stuff plummet's in cost. And it's still trading at what, 40 times revenue, 50 times? About 40 right now. But given the their base case is about $2.2.2 billion in earned revenue this year. Their more aggressive case is like 3.7. So to me, that multiple is going to come down precipitously. And I think they're building not just a technological mode, Jason. I think they're building a brand.

Like, I think Claude's, the Claude family of models, people just trust and like because they're good and they have taste. And so I think that's really worth something. There's more competition to come. I think, you know, what we saw with Manus recently, that's got millions of people on the wait list. And it's like an, you know, agentic, which just is a fancy way of saying agents, which is a fancy way of saying does stuff.

Personas that persistently do stuff. We used to call them cron jobs back in the day, just jobs that run every hour, run every day. And so, you know, Lon, you frequently will look through, like, you know, the subreddit for entrepreneurship and startups and this week in startups. And then, you know, we have other communities. You're going to be able to write an agent. We could do it right now.

Maybe Lucas from our team, who's good at this, could write an agent that goes to, you give it all the places you like to look. It goes to those places in the morning and sends you an email or posted into our production team. Here's the interesting new discussions that I found, and then you click from there. So that first level sort it might do for you.

And that's, you know, really powerful stuff that's going to happen or is happening right now. It's an interesting thing with these, we were talking about this a little bit before the show with these AI models and branding, because some of them, just like you guys have been saying, they're kind of more discreet. It's not like everybody's going to clod.com and using it, like a lot of good products that people like are being built on top of Claude, but Claude's kind of this discreet layer. So it's interesting how some of these AI companies like ChatGPT are already becoming brand names that are very familiar, household names.

They're very visible, but others like Anthropic and Claude growing just as fast, if not faster, but kind of under the surface, like everyday mainstream people might not have heard of Anthropic or Claude yet, even if they're using a tool that was built on top of it. The number of people using ChatGPT every day is extraordinary. I think they were in the top five or ten websites in the world. It was six or seven on the chart we were looking at the other day, yeah. So they have an incredible consumer business there, you know, independent of anything else. And the chat GPT is kind of like the verb.

It's kind of like saying taking an Uber. And they also bought chat.com. So, you know, this is the innovator's dilemma that Google has. When you do a Google search now, I think it does a snippet every time, right? If you're logged in. Pretty much. Yeah. Well, no, it's worse.

It gives you a snippet, Jason. And then it gives you four ads. So, like, that's, they really do not want you to use the blue links because that's not the Google offering now. Sigh. Yeah. So, I mean, I think people, you know, chat GPTs got really. good consumer adoption. But by the way, before

Google came out, Yahoo had all that user adoption. So it's quite possible that there'll be a better product than chat GPT, and that whole thing could just collapse. We were saying GROC is niffin at their heels now. GROC, you know, inside

of X, where you press that button and it gives you the context. We talked about it on all in last week is a really killer feature that I think most people who use X haven't even realized, but there's a little GROC AI in the top right of every tweet. So take my tweet where I did, you know, hey, here's my protocol. If you pull that tweet up and you hit the grok button, I'm curious what it says there. Here is the GROC summary and response to Jason, your formula for a good light. And yeah, it is a reasonable encapsulation of who I am and it gives you a good starting point. That's not a really great one because what I'm saying is really simple. How healthy do you think that Jason is? That's funny.

Yeah, here you get a little bit of a deeper one. But if you were to pick, let's say, Zelensky talking about something, you know, and you want the background, that's where it gets really interesting. Or if you were to, you know, click on talking about Columbia losing, like, it's grants or something. That's when you could get into, like, a really good background because you might not know if you look at, I retweeted somebody from Columbia who lost their grants. Yes. He's like, oh my God, this is so shocking. And I'm like, Columbia's got a huge endowment. They could easily afford this.

And these elite universities, like, they, I don't know why the taxpayers are paying for elite universities with hundreds of billions of dollars to do their research. They should be given the grants from their endowments, which just continue to grow to a level of absurdity. I'm going to put that aside for a second, but if you were to find one of those, yeah, this is me saying, hey, F-A-F-O. and it thinks it fell fast, fell off and notes. That's a very polite,

that's a really polite edit there, Grock. Yeah, that was a pretty good way yet. That's F around, find out. But okay, if you click on the quote I was retweeting, that's the one to click on, because here with this person, you know, Professor Edward Goh, or Goa. This is where it's a money.

Look at this. A Columbia University of Biomeo Engineer professor shared an email from the NIH announcing the cancellation of his integrated musculoskelete training program. This really, explains the background in such a great way. This is like if I were to send it to Juan and say, what's going on? Or you, Alex, and said, hey, what's going on here? You would write me

back. Here's what's going on. That's really compelling for me. How long until X and XAI are the same company? Because we know there's like financial ties, there's product integrations, and it really feels a little arbitrary. X is, I think the X shareholders got ownership in XAI. And XAI needs to be, I don't, I'm not an investor in either, but I know the guy who's running it. And a lot of my friends are, XAI is doing something interesting, which is, I think they get X's corpus, which is a huge advantage. So the huge advantage is what I was talking about on Glenn Beck today. The huge advantage is if you have a real-time data source giving you information. And so whoever's got real-time data, whether it's Reddit or X or Facebook, they're going to have such a

huge, huge LLM advantage. Yeah, well, they have a couple hundred thousand of my tweets, Elon. Where's my check? Everyone on the XAI investment team, you're welcome for all my tweets. Okay, so Pokemon Go, the company behind it, selling the games to another company for $3.5 billion. Yeah. Oh, wow. That's Nianti. Niantic is selling its games business. Yeah, Sion Banister was an investor in that.

So they're selling that. Oh, Pokemon Go, for people who don't know, is the first augmented reality game to hit scale. These things were going on in Japan for a long time. Augmented reality, when you put digital assets in the real world through the camera. And you remember, people were, like, driving around trying to find these Pokemon Go characters and getting a car accidents? It had that huge pop culture moment. I mean, Hillary telling people, Pokemon, go to the polls.

It was like a big deal. I, in my mind, think of it as being like, it fell off and it's not a big deal anymore. But that's not actually true. It still has a huge fan base of people that remain obsessed with playing it and are still driving around looking for Pokemon. It's just like it stopped being a headline,

but it remains like a huge mobile. Who bought it? So scoply, which what's that? Well, it's owned by Savvy Games Group. What's that? It's the Saudi PIP. Ah, the investment fund in Saudi. This is their sovereign wealth fund, which owns everything from sports teams to doing the investments in Neum.

I think it's sort of the umbrella. It's run by a gentleman named Yasser, who I met when I was there. And they have a group, Sanobel, that does the venture stuff. So they have a dozen activities they are investing in that they believe will be the businesses of the future when maybe pulling oil out of the ground isn't necessary, right? Or, you know, it runs out, which they think is a 30-year story, 40-year story. And games would be one of those. And so, remember I said earlier, this is not dumb money. There is a perception in our industry that the money coming out of the meaner region is like dumb money.

They'll just invest in anything. You go there. you secure a bag, you leave. O contraire, more frere. These are some of the smartest people I've ever met in business.

For decades, they've been sending people from Abu Dhabi, from Saudi, from Qatar, to the, to the, you know, west to become educated

and to work in places, and then they come back. So they're boomerangs. And they have the King Abdullah scholarship. There's all these scholarships. And when I meet people over there, Oxford,

Harvard, you know, University of, you know, Hawaii, everything in between. Like literally, it's not just, you know, Ivy League schools. And then they've worked at Google, at Sequoia, wherever, you know, top venture firm. And then they've gone back. They're not just putting money into venture firms. They're on the boards of companies. They're doing company formation. They're doing roll-ups like this because of the sovereign wealth funds. They can take a 20 or 30-year view of investing. So they're not just giving money to Masayoshi, sound like they did for his, you know, giant fund. They're now making thoughtful decisions. and rolling up companies. That's what we're seeing here.

That's where we're going to see a lot more up. And for context about the roll-up part of this, so Scoply, the company that's actually buying the Niantic gaming assets, I believe is the company behind Monopoly Go, which if you're a hardcore gamer, you've never played, but that means that you're outside the mainstream.

It's, I think, the second or third, highest grossing mobile app for 2024, and to the point that Lawn made about Pokemon Go still having staying power, I think it was the 13th highest grossing game. And keep in mind, that's hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, mobile gaming is huge. And I really got to agree with Jason.

I am a bit more critical of media governments than some folks in this space. But hey, what I will say here is, this is smart. This is buying a serious company doing a serious roll-up. I have to say, if you're going to diversify off of, you know, digging stuff out of the ground, great place to do it, great use of money, no complaints. It's a brave new world, folks. we are not living in a unipolar or a bipolar world where it was like Russia and the U.S. It's multipolar now.

And that's, you know, a lot of, I think, what's informing this administration, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with or not. We all understand it's multipolar now. There are regions that have their own sovereignty. And the EU now, as you pointed out, Alex, I think very correctly, is like, you know what? The United States is not the piggy bank. they're not going to fund what we want to do. You know, we have our own world.

We'll do what we want to do. Canada's like, oh, you guys want to neg us? Great. We have a lot of hydro. We'll just turn off your electricity. We'll sell it to somebody else. Like, I think the United States sometimes believes we have a little bit more influence than we actually do

and that people, you know, will just do whatever we tell them. They will not. I think it's the people our age that remember a time when that was still kind of true. Like if you grew up in the 80s, the 70s, the 90s, America was kind of the, you know, the pivot point around which the whole world sort of was organized. And we still think of it that way, but it is not true anymore. It's not true.

And the EU can go it alone. If we don't want to back Ukraine, if we don't want to be involved in that, you know what? The EU has plenty of money. These are sovereign countries. They have a vested interest in containing Putin. they're going to do it themselves. They're going to make their own weapons. They don't need us.

But the tension that I find here is that the U.S. is saying, multipolar world, go off and do your own thing. And then we're turning around and saying, EU, stop finding our companies. Well, do you know how you have influence over those things by having soft power? And if we don't have that, then we're going to have to eat some crow along the way. I'm not taking a position in this conversation, but I'm just saying you can't have a win-win when you're not going to win. Yeah, the idea that we're going to be able to be splashy, cashing around the world and by influence, that's ending.

We're broke as a country. That's just the truth. We don't have the ability to spend like we used to. Okay. And so whether you agree with, you know, the velocity and the chaotic nature of the current administration, which, you know, if you ask anybody who's a Republican, like, they're like, yeah, this is chaotic. Putting all that aside, we're in a multipolar world right now. South America is going to make their own decisions. Canada is going to make their own decisions. Obviously, MENA, India. India is like, I think, really the most interesting one to look at. They are going to make, everybody believes like, oh, we have influence, whatever. India's like, yeah, we're the largest country in the world. We're the fastest growing economy. We have the most number of people going from poverty into the middle class, going into the upper class. We've got this great education system. We've got a different country. India is the America of the 21st century in many ways. in a way that maybe China isn't,

because it's more democratic, right? It's not a perfect democracy. You can look up the democracy ratings. China can never really compete in a sustained, long-term fashioning entrepreneurship because they keep rug-pulling the entrepreneurs. If you rug-pulled the entrepreneurs and you don't have a vibrant investment system

and it's top-down, it can't really be vibrant in the way a competitive playing field in the United States is or in Europe to a lesser extent. Or MENA, the Middle East, North Africa, or India. India really is fascinating to me. I need to spend more time in India and Singapore. I'm going to go to Singapore for the first time. And then I need to spend some time in India. I really think that's the economy I have the least knowledge of firsthand and I need to get up on. Yeah.

All right. Just before we jump, I do want to say there's news that TSM is working with other chip companies possibly put together a deal to buy a chunk of Intel's foundry business. We'll see about that, but something to keep an eye on. And then Gail Slater was confirmed to run antitrust of the DOJ. She's a little more hawkish than I think Jason's going to be excited about, but her term will kick off. Something to keep an eye on.

And then Jimma, three models from Google, apparently very good, very cheap, and very efficient. It's going to be really interesting in terms of Gail Slater. There's a lot of saber rattling. This administration's going to be very pro-M-N-A. They just like to have their, they like to have influence.

I think this is like why the tariff thing is so appealing to them, because having a tariff system means everybody's kind of got to come and bend the knee and negotiate. M&A is the same tool. Now everybody, whether it's Bezos with Amazon, you know, or Zuck with Meta, you know, the weather vein of, you know, the political weather veins known as Mark Zuckerberg. You know, he's going to want to buy TikTok. He's going to want to put a bid in. He's now going to have to go through Gal.

He's going to have to bend the knee. He's going to have to come to Marlago. and this, you know, kleptocracy approach is very real. And you're going to have to bend the knee and you're going to have to come. And this will give the president

undue influence, I think, over, you know, this corporate landscape. Net net. Trump likes influence. Trump likes money. Trump likes success. I think they're going to let it rip. They're going to let it rip.

Anyway, this has been another great episode of this week in startups. He's at Lons, L-O-N-S-on-X. he's at Alex. I'm at Jason. We're all in the four or five letter club. Four point three letters

between us on average. And you can read the docket that lawn and Alex put together at this week in startups.com slash docket. Yes, sir. All right, everybody. We will see you next time

on this week in startups. Bye-bye.