This Week in Startups - Jony Ive Joins OpenAI, Waymo Hits 10M Rides, and How to Launch a Marketplace from Scratch | E2129

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Today’s show: Jason and Alex dicsuss Jony Ive's $6.5B deal with OpenAI and what it means for the future of AI hardware, Tesla’s push into robotaxis vs. Waymo’s 10M paid rides, and Microsoft���s latest move partnering with xAI. We dive into the GENIUS Act and what it means for stablecoin regulation, explore practical, gritty tactics for launching and scaling a marketplace from scratch, and debate the ethics of AI-powered smart glasses and always-on recording. Plus, Jason reflects on the legacy of Scott Adams and the power of systems thinking.Timestamps:(0:00) Episode Teaser(2:00) A broadcaster-to-broadcaster moment for Scott Adams(5:18) OpenAI teams with Jony Ive, and why wearables are banned from the J-Ranch(10:16) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(16:11) From Partnership to Purchase: The M&A Story(20:09) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(25:42) Robotaxis EVERYWHERE, and thoughts on the continuing self-driving car rollout(30:12) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutions(34:41) Should we trust stablecoins now? And who is actually monitoring this?(42:54) Polymarkets: Checking in with some of our favorite market(49:58) REDDIT QUESTION: How do I build a marketplace?(58:53) Customer feedback's role in product iteration(58:55) Every piece of SaaS advice EVERSubscribe 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/v19fcpLinks from episode:Polymarket: https://polymarket.com/Polymarket for AI Leaderes: https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model-on-june-30LMArena: https://www.lmarena.aiReal Coffee with Scott Adams: https://www.youtube.com/RealCoffeeWithScottAdams Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:16) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist(20:09) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(30:12) Brex. Get the business account trusted by 1 in 3 US startups at ⁠https://www.brex.com/banking-solutionsGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

So instead of like the pie being static and being the ratios of who owns what being changed, the pie is going to get larger and there'll be a healthy mix of both human and autonomous drivers, that extends the longevity of human drivers for another five years. But I still see this going to an eventual point in which we're not driving. But it sounds like that'll take, ah, I just want to go faster, Jason. You're probably right. I mean, there's a group of people who will never drive in an autonomous car. It might be a third of people ultimately just do not want to be an office.

autonomous car. I think that high? Yeah, sure. I mean, how many people do you know who were like refused to get a smartphone for 20 years? How many people do you know who refused to do email or get an Instagram account? I mean, it took. Yeah. Those things took 10, 20 years to boil the laggards and finally push them into it. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. listeners can get $1,000 off for limited time at vanta.com slash twist. 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. And Brex, the financial stack founders can bank on. Unlike traditional business banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and no transaction fees. And you get 20 times a standard FDIC protection. Get the business account trusted by one and three startups at brex.com slash bank. banking dash solutions.

All right, everybody, welcome back to this week and startups. I'm your host Jason Kelloggattice with me. Alex Wilhelm, and we do this three days week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. 12 o'clock, Texas time. I'm out here in the Hill Country at Austin Tech. Big docket. There's a lot going on. So we'll do a little big tech, a little medium tech, and some tiny tech as well.

Breaking news as we're sitting here. Oh, and before we start, I just wanted to broadcast, broadcaster, everybody knows in the tech community, and may or may not agree with his positions on certain topics, Scott Adams. He is a vocal Trump supporter and podcaster. He does a daily show. And as a broadcaster, just unbelievably consistent, an Ironman, 365 days a year, Christmas, Thanksgiving. I'm in awe of the effort he puts it. Now, I was on his show. We had a little debate before the election, and he is super brilliant when it comes to specific topics. He's got great insights, and tragically, he has the same cancer that Joe Biden has,

and it's terminal. Prostate bone cancer, or prostate cancer spread to the bones, and yeah, my dad has prostate cancer. He's survived for many years, and he's still alive and thriving. Two Scott Adams, broadcaster to broadcaster, and as a guest on your show and friends, online who trade DMs once in a while. You did a great job. And what an epic life, creating Dilbert and your podcast and you inspired a lot of people with your books. And I always tell people inside my company or at startups, hey, systems over goals. And I was always a systems guy from the early

days doing Lotus Notes, Alex, and trying to make processes. But I never added that part, like, oh, people have goals, but they don't create systems. And I heard him say that over and over again. And I was like, oh, yeah, I'm a systems guy, but I never told people why the system is important. And, you know, systems are important because if you create a good system, the goals take care of themselves. And he has really helped a lot of folks without knowing it, the people who are founders or who work for me, people I touch, I always tell them, hey, listen, create a system for that. I understand your goal. Goal is pretty clear. You want to reach a million customers.

What's the system by which you'll collect those customers and get them to not turn? Have you created any systems around them? I don't know what you're talking about. And I explained it to them, yeah, he says he's going to die this summer. And it just got me thinking, my gosh, we do all this broadcasting. We touch a lot of people. And I just wanted to let him know he touched me. Yeah.

And have a great final lap. And what a great life lived. Dilbert touched so many people. You got a little bumpy there along the way. He got canceled. There was a lot of brew. Ha, ha. He had spicy opinions.

But none of that matters at the end of the day. I think the totality of the person matters. and their intent matters. And I always thought his intent was to help people. He kind of raised me in a way because I read so much Dilbert growing up. I had like a stack of like the compendiums. Yeah, sure. And I learned words like paradigm from him because I thought it was pronounced paradigm

because I'd never said it out loud. So I used that word out in the public once and got wrecked. But I used to be like the world's biggest Dilbert fan. And then I kind of grew out of my comic book's face. but like I read thousands of his of his strips. And even though I don't agree with him at all politically anymore, there's an impactful person who touched the law of the world with this art. We don't have to only judge someone in the last act of their life.

And who cares about political differences at the end of the day, right? Like it's a team sport. Everybody, it's like a blood sport. So, yeah. Anyway, broadcaster to broadcaster. What a career. What a career? All right.

What's in the news? I know there's a breaking news story. I don't know if you want to start. Yeah. Let's just get that out of the way. So as we were sitting down and literally hitting go, everybody, we saw a headline from Bloomberg, which is that Open AI is going to buy Johnny Ives company Love From for $6.5 billion. This is an all-stock transaction. And if you don't know Johnny Ive, he's the guy behind a lot of the kind of iconic, maybe even seminal Apple products, Jason, known for his design sense, understanding of aesthetics and usability. And the thought here, as far as I can tell from the last couple of minutes, is that he was working on some hardware for the AI game. What does Open AI do? Well, some of the biggest and most popular models out there, so put the two together

and you could see a very interesting hardware device from Open AI. Just given how far Apple has dropped the ball on hardware AI integration compared to, just for example, this week, Google and Android, this is actually very exciting to me. My first thought was, yuck, what a waste of money? Do you really need this? It's a lot. But then if they nail it, what's the value of the iPhone today for Apple? It's like what?

Oh, I mean, it is the company. It is the company, yeah. So I'd say it's 80% of the value of Apple is the iPhone, right? It's got to be 90% of the profits or something along those lines, you know, taking out like maybe the Google deal. Yeah, love now or love from. Is it love from? Love from, yes. Yeah.

And, you know, that was his design studio. So he was doing jobs for other people, no pun intended. So he was kind of acting like for any startup that wanted to do something. And I think everybody realizes. they'll be a pendant, a physical device that incorporates AI and maybe creates a new format. Most people think it's glasses. I just got the ray bands from Facebook and I see Google's coming out with their new glasses that will be augmented. And I'm just going to play with them over the summer on vacation, take some videos, et cetera, with the kids, thought it would be a

fun thing to experiment with. And so this is very interesting. I bet you Johnny Ive is going to make more from this than he is from his tenure at Apple. It's 2% of the company he's basically getting. and you have to ask herself, as a founder, will Johnny Ives designs make OpenAI 2% more successful? That's the bet you're making when you give him $6 billion. And I'm certain it's not $6 billion in cash. I'm sure it's five. It's all stock, according to Bloomberg. Yeah, I was about to say, I mean, I could see like $100 million or $250 million in cash or something if they got cash laying around.

But I think he believes probably correctly that it could be a trillion dollar company. So if he gets $6 billion now and it triples, this could be an $18 billion opportunity. And $18 billion is a lot of money. So congratulations to Johnny I'm and his team over there. And I think this was more of a collaborative organization. I don't know how many employees there are on LinkedIn for love from as a company or if they're even allowed to put themselves on LinkedIn. Yeah, that was my thought.

I don't know if that's going to be the right number. Well, I mean, the really interesting thing I think about this. is you're making some sort of a bet. And if you think in bets, as Andy Duke would say in the poker world, thinking in bets is her book, you know, what are the odds that Johnny Ive doesn't make the company 1% more valuable? I think it's zero. Low. Yeah. I mean, he's got to make the company 1% more valuable. Now, what are the chances he makes it 10% more valuable? That's probably not going to happen. So the truth might lie between one. and 3%

4% more valuable to have the world's greatest designer of the last 30 years or one of the top five certainly on your team focused only on the chat GPT app

or a piece of hardware I was at dinner the other night and somebody had one of those pendants and it was on and he showed it to me the app and he said do you have a problem with it on?

I'm like at dinner I said if you weren't my friend I would punch you in the face if I found out halfway through dinner you were recording me the whole time. No, when we sat down, it was on and creating summaries. And, you know, my friend Adeo from Founders Institute, you know, he also was wearing that life pin. Remember the life pin that would take a picture every second and then you would have life casting? Just a piece of advice,

man, do not wear this stuff around your friends if you want to have friends in the world. Honestly, if somebody were to record me like that, now I assume as a micro celebrity, which, which is the form of celebrity, Alex, that exists below the lowest rated reality show that just got canceled. So D-List, and then you're kind of like bringing up the pinnacle of the E-List. Okay, precisely. Precisely. I am the tip of the spear of the E-List. And the D-List would be like, yeah, Bravo or E-Network just canceled.

Real Housewives of X, yeah. Well, no, that would be a successful one. I'm talking about one that got canceled after one season. Oh, man. Yeah, that's where the podcasting tech celebrity exists. All right, founders, I know you're building something amazing and you're going to change the world. And now, hey, the big logos, they're taking your calls, right? But here's the catch.

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Yeah, don't wear these things, folks. It's absurd. You know, even in a Zoom call, you know, I now have to think that every Zoom call I have is being recorded. So now, you know, sometimes I'm out here on the ranch and I just did something, you know, I mowed the grass or, you know, I went to feed the chickens and I'm disheveled or I did a workout in the barn. I assume I'm being recorded.

So then in terms of Zooms now, sometimes I'll just say, yeah, I'm not going to be on camera today because it's enough with the on-camera stuff. And then I'm like, maybe somebody's recording this and like, I look disheveled. I don't need a recording of me on a board call or whatever. And then I see people recording their board calls. By the way, court calls are not intended to be summarized by AI or recorded. Talk to your counsel, but you're supposed to just take very top-level notes so you don't open yourself up to discovery in a lawsuit where, you know, when you have an opposing attorney with an axe to grind and they had a transcript, they could just twist somebody's words around, as you've seen when people are on this, and who have had a phone call recorded or

something. So anyway, the Oizond recording stuff, and those designs are really pernicious. And I think we are going to have laws around them, which will be similar to guns. So in Texas, people can request that you don't have a gun on their property. And you can put up a specific type of sign that they're not allowed to. And I think it can be like you get a penalty if you went on somebody's property who has that specific type of sign that they don't want you on private property, have a gun. The point is we need that analogy for recording devices. There needs to be a standard. It should be a federal standard of recording devices in public spaces. And although the assumption is you're being recorded, there needs to be a penalty for this. There needs to be new legislation. It needs to be

reasonable. But it should be a bright, blinking red light if you've taken a photo in the last 30 seconds and before you take a photo. So if photo, 15 second warning of a blinking red light before the photo is taking, 15 seconds after. If in public, maybe that's reasonable. I don't know. Or maybe it blinks three times or something. So this is what it looks like on the meta raybonds, Jason. I'm just going to show everyone this so they can get kind of a feel for it. But I really want to talk about the title of this video, which is, can you hide the blitz? light on the Ray ban meta glasses. And I believe the answer to this is yes. So let's hope that we don't have to get to the point of legislation for this and we can sort it out. Even in that

picture, that white light, see, they made it white, which is like, yeah, Zuckerberg once again. And when you look at some of these pictures, like, it really doesn't feel like a very strong light that's being lit in my personal estimation. It should be red and it should stay on when you're recording. Here's another example. This one from our dear friend Lon, who is slightly under the weather today. We love you, Lon. Feel better soon. This is a little better to me, Jason. I think this is the snap spectacles. Yeah, this is, but this is the yellow rim, and I can see that a little bit. Why not red? In your face. There's a reason. They're trying to get people away from the universal red. That means recording. There's a reason it's blaring red because people don't want to be recorded.

So I think there's going to have to be legislation because the first two people up to hell are not doing a good enough job. Bringing this back to Johnny Ive, though, and Open AI is, it's actually really fun. I was reading Hacker News, as I always do, and there was an interesting discussion about Open AI's new Codex coding agent. And I was reading the reviews and the conversation about it, because I thought we might talk about it on the show at some point in time. Love to get the developer perspective of people who are actually testing this stuff,

who know what they're doing. And what really kind of struck me was the U.X was criticized. And so I wonder if a little bit of Johnny I've magic across the OpenAI organization, might help them file off some of those kind of rough edges and just help make all their products work a little bit better because the Johnny Ive era of Apple is famous for a reason, basically. Like, it's an earned reputation from a lot of them really just great work. The way they do what they do, the secret was they would make many design ideas in a studio and then Steve Jobs would come and have a discussion with him and go have lunch with him or whatever.

So they'd be like, here's a table filled with pendants. And the pendant team is working on this. Apple never released a pendant. Here's the team working on televisions. They famously were going to release a television. I had heard that that was like a fait accompli that they were going to release it. And then they never did for whatever reason. They was released the box for Apple TV.

Long story short, 99% of what Johnny Ive did there with this incredible design team never saw the light of day. It was all an exercise and then they would just skim the cream. Most startups, you know, designs an afterthought. They make a bunch of stuff. and then they produce it. So you really basically have to produce 10 times what you need and then skim the cream of the best.

That's my best advice for design. Let's keep going through the docket here. I want to talk about Brex and Zip. So Brex, Jason, I think we all probably know, is a corporate spend startup. Famous for their corporate cards that were startup-friendly back in the day. They bought out all the bus stops in San Francisco.

Big buzz, low budget, now quite a large company. There's another firm called Zip, and I was less familiar with Zip. Turns out it's actually worth about $2 billion. And what they do is corporate procurement orchestration, which is very fancy words for helping companies buy stuff and pay for it without losing track of POs, making sure it's going into the right budget. If you're a large company that buys a lot of stuff, it's actually a pretty big deal.

So the news item here is that Brex has teamed up with Zip instead of competing with them directly. And they do have some shared customers. So there's some overlap. But it does feel kind of interesting to see Brex, a company that I think is worth more than $10 billion, partner up with Navon, previously Trip Act. which is kind of like corporate travel management, if you will. And now with Zip, who also kind of overlaps a little bit with them.

I'm still very bullish on Brex and its competitor ramp, but I'm kind of, this almost feels like politeness and kindness inside the startup world versus combativeness. I just kind of wanted to get your take on why Brex is making this choice. Yeah, some people understand they have a lane and they want to stay in that lane and be the best at that and then let other people plug in as a platform. So the example of that might be in today's market, DoorDash doesn't do cloud kitchens. Cloud kitchens, Travis's new company, provides cloud kitchens, those people who rent space in a cloud kitchen, then they go put their food on DoorDash, direct websites increasingly, and on Uber

eats, postmates, whatever. And so in each of those cases, Cloud Kitchens saying, you know what, there's enough work to do here. We don't need to compete with DoorDash and Uber Eats. Uber Eats and DoorDash are like, we don't want to be in that business. That's going to be a lot of work to stand up all these things and traffic is going to do a better job. So, you know, if you stay in your lane, you can create a lot of partnerships and get to market quicker. The best example today would be that one, or what's happening in self-driving cars with Uber, Tesla, Volkswagen, et cetera. So we almost like, we make this stuff. We have an app. But suddenly they were like, well, we have an app, but Uber's got,

you know, 20,000 cities and 150 million or 250 million customers, whatever it is, and 30 million of them are Uber 1. We don't need to recreate the wheel here. Let's have them. Let's go into their distribution system, their network. And then Uber sold famously. Big question if they should have. It still juries out. They sold their autonomous because they said, hey, there's going to be 15 providers of autonomous. It's going to be a commoditized service. It turns out it is going to be a commoditized service. Now, there is a chance. Never bet against Elon that he will create this Robotaxy, the specific two-door one, and be able to produce 10 million of those a year, and he will take the number one position. That's possible. Some people might say probable.

There's a big bet going on. Will Uber having Volkswagen, the number two car maker, Waymo, the number one leader in this, Waymo providing to Toyota, Toyota, you know, providing here, well, that whole consortium, where everybody does their best work, beat, you know, somebody who's a verticalized player. Time will tell. I think in this case, it will not be winner take all. It will be three winners take most. And those three winners will be Waymo, Tesla, and Uber. That's my belief. And then I think there'll be mergers and acquisitions in it. So that's probably what's happening here is, like, you know what, we have enough work to do here that we don't want to do the corporate back end, let them do the corporate back end. They don't want to do corporate

cards. Then they could go to everybody to say, hey, we're not in your business, but we are in this business, do you want to partner with us? When people are in your software, they can click this button to create an account with us. You'll get credit for that. When they're in our software, they can click over to you. We'll get credit for that. And they will probably monitor account creation and then say, together, we can beat other people who are trying to full stack it. That's the concept. All right, founders, let's talk about your website, huh? It might be a little bit of a sensitive subject. You might be a little embarrassed about it. Let's fix that right now. If you're launching something new, give your brand the refresh it deserves. You're working so hard on

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That's Squarespace.com slash twist. The cross-selling element of this makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. My question is kind of what comes next. So Brex was last raised at seven, valued at 7.4 billion. Sorry, everybody, not over 10. And then Zip was valued at 2.4 billion post. If this partnership goes well, Jason, is there a heightened chance that they decide to link up,

kind of like Coda and Gramerly did? Does this, is this a first step in that process or just a potential? Yeah, I don't know if Cod and Gramerly had a partnership previously, but if they did, yeah, that could be what we call a partnership to purchase. So with Weblogs Inc, I started a partnership discussion with AOL and Jim Bankoff, who was like EVP of whatever at AOL at the time. And they wanted blogs off or maybe they wanted in gadgets inventory. They were going to make a small investment. And then after like but six weeks of discussing this, Ted Leonis, call me on the phone and said my Greek brother, I'm going to make you very rich.

And your family's going to be taken care of forever. We're buying your whole company. It's going to be great for you. And I said, thank you, Mr. Leonas. And, you know, that was that. So yes, and that's why being a good partner and being professional in partnership is a better way to pursue M&A than, you know, asking to be bought. So if you solve a major problem for a major player, then they will in the partnership say, wow, a great management team. Oh, great engineering team.

Oh, product design is great. We don't have that. Which, by the way, Open AI was with Johnny I of our previous story working with him. And then bought the company. And then bought the company. So there it is. That was a, you know, consulting deal that resulted in a purchase, right? So that was partnership to purchase in the previous story. This is an awful lot of announced M&A. Two companies bought by DoorDash, two companies bought by OpenAI, right? They bought them where they're in the process of buying. We told them not to buy it that the company doing a programming co-pilot. WinSurf. Yeah, something's happening here. I think since Trump gave up on him. his or folded or slowed down his slowed his roll. Yeah, that's why I'll say. I don't trigger any of the TDS people in the audience, the Trump Dedication Syndrome sufferers. We have both in this audience. Trump derangement and Trump dedication syndrome. We're in the middle here. He stopped barrel rolling

the plane known as America, the American economy, and all of a sudden, MNA's back. So this is great. I think this is why we're starting to see the stock market come back. I think this will be amazing for venture firms who two out of three went out of business. And this is why I haven't given up on venture. I'm like, I think that this is where venture capitalists are made. When you're forced to survive four years, four years of no M&N, that's going to make you, if you get to the other side of it, that's like going to the new world, Alex. Like, you know, everybody went on these ships. People didn't bring enough lemons. They didn't have the resiliency. They went crazy, jumped off the ship, got eaten by shark, scurvy, cannibalism, whatever,

and we'll see who's left after this, you know, boom-bust cycle. It's kind of like a pond where the fish get too big. They eat all the small fish, then there's not enough fish to eat. The algae goes away. You have these boom-bust cycles in nature. That's just what happened in Venture and startup land. The startups don't have to worry about it because they can always raise money, but Venture has been, you know, this is the ice age.

that's probably the best announcement. We're lived through, who survives the ice age right now, right? And I can tell you, I'm sitting here with like a lot of saber tooth tigers, you know, coming at me and woolly mammoth pelts around our team trying to stay warm while we wait for DPI to arrive. And sure enough, the secondary markets have started to wake up. Hey, are you interested in buying more of this company? Are you interested in selling some of this company?

And the prices are anywhere from a flat to 90% discount of the peak, but transactions are occurring. So green shoots, folks are here. Understand Jason, 90% lower than the peak or 90% of the peak? 90% lower than the peak. So if somebody had, let's say, a $2 billion evaluation, they might be a $200, $300, $400, $500,000, offer for the common shares of those companies. Why? The employee is selling common are behind the preference stack.

So the preference stack might be what the company sells for if they raise too much money. That whole conversation of did you raise too much money? And is that, are you ever going to get past a preference stack and what happens to comment? That's literally what's happening now, quite literally. Okay, let's keep moving. Let's talk about Waymo reaching 10 million paid rides. I think this is very important. Waymo is a company that sits kind of in between the public and private markets,

but certainly is one of the leading kind of American AI companies. And Jason, the latest news from them is that they have reached 10 million rides. And the reason why I think that matters is not just the big round number that we all love, but because they did half of that in the last five months, which implies about a million rides a month that are paid, which to me is like real commercial viability because I have not heard a resurgence in Waymo runs over your dog or whatever. So it seems to me that as this ramps up,

the technology really must be maturing to the point to which they can take on this much volume, which frankly I think bodes well for Elon and company, because if the tech has gotten this far, maybe it's the right time to do something bigger. The real question is how different are these two technologies and how big of a part is LIDAR in Waymo's success and how big a part of Tesla's success is their generalized driving technology? Waymo started with constrained areas and really trying to solve a constrained area problem where they were, let's just say, bespoke solutions, right, in a lot of cases for how to deal with

this traffic circle. Now, large language models and reinforcement learning and just generalized AI is the route. Elon has gone without lighter. And so that's the big question. That's a lot of hand-wringing. And Elon restated yesterday, hey, we're going to have these Austin testing units out at the end of the month. Wisely, it seems there will be safety remote drivers. So that's unclear if those people will be one-to-one.

In other words, there'll be somebody sitting there with a joystick, like literally with a Nintendo joystick or a steering wheel at Tesla H2 one to one, just so there's not somebody in the car, so you get the feeling of a Waymo, but there's literally somebody in an office somewhere driving it. Now, Waymo says, we don't do that. We will, when there's a problem, tell the AI how to solve the problem. So if the AI was stuck, because it's behind an ambulance, they say, okay, is their ability to make a U-turn here? Is there an extra lane

to go around it? Is there, you know, whatever? And sometimes they will draw, from what I understand, a line of which way it should go. Oh, that's cool. In this case, I think Tesla's going with the because they're all 5G cars,

LTE, a driver, but the latency's there. So, you know, this is going to be a very consequential month. I would say July will be the consequential month. It's only opening up 10 cars to 20 cars. with in a closed beta.

This is also a very smart decision. If I was advising Elon and I am not, or Tesla writ large, which I am not, I would have put the safety driver in for the first year, just so regularly for the whole year. I would just say, listen, you're going to get in the car, there's going to be a person there, you're going to watch them use the software, they're not going to touch the wheel. But if something does happen where, you know, a little kitty or a, you know, a, you know, baseball and a football, soccer ball goes running into the street, we're, we're going to take over just out of an abundance of caution and you get to talk to the person and they'll explain

to you the virtues of the Model Y of which I just ordered my second Model Y, which will be Oh, you're going to get the updated. The Juniper update, yeah, the new one with a light beam on the back. So, uh, yeah, congratulations to Waymo. This is going to have zero impact on the drivers. Uh, now, why would I say that, right, because you already have, like, a certain number of rides in San Francisco are being done by Waymo. I have a new theory based on data. I think what we're going to see is the same number or a growing driver base of humans for years while the autonomous ones get put into the market.

And we're going to see the humans do the routes that the autonomous ones can't. So ubers and lifts will be coming to the suburbs more doing, you know, so it'll expand the area of ride sharing. What's that going to do? People in the suburbs who couldn't wait 15 minutes for a ride get it down to five, they're going to start using it. And they're going to start using it for commutes. As a founder, you can't be putting business expenses on your personal card. Oh my God, that's a disaster. You should be taking those as business expenses and paying for them with.

pre-taxed dollars. Brex has built the killer banking experience, which will take your dollars further. They're going to protect your cash while extending your startups runway. It's not just the Brex card, although people are over the moon. I'm literally looking at my new Brex card right now. Amazing. All the other great banking things you need, a checking account, treasury, and of course, FDIC insurance. Nearly 40% of startups fail because they run out of cash. A hundred percent of startups cannot afford to make financial mistakes. It's hard enough to get product. market fit. So get a great banking partner like Brex. That's the one I use. 20 times the standard FDIC protection through program banks, industry leading yield on your cash. Yeah, earn a little

cheddar what your beat. And the ability for you to send money worldwide at lightning speed. Brex is used by one in every three U.S. startups. So get the financial stack that founders trust, including me, your boy, JCal, at brex.com slash banking dash solutions. And that's going to be super powerful at the last Uber demo day, they did a week or two ago, they have a new system where you can say, this is my commute, this is the time I leave, and then it sends you active alerts, hey, if you normally leave between 730 and 745, here's the cost, the cost is going up, the cost is going down, and this is when you should leave. So they created this, like, very elegant product for daily commuters, which means Uber believes daily commutes are coming. The second thing

is many parents are sending their kids to school in Waymo's now. I think what we're going to see is autonomy takes over the city centers, 50, 60, 70% of that in the next couple years, moving the other drivers out, the other drivers move out and get more rides that move faster, that'll net net make them as much money because there'll be longer rides. So instead of like the pie being static and being the ratios of who owns what being changed, the pie is going to get larger and there'll be a healthy mix of both human and autonomous drivers. That extends the the longevity of human drivers for another five years. But I still see this going to an eventual point in which we're not driving. But it sounds like that'll take, ah, I just want to go faster,

Jason. You're probably right. I mean, there's a group of people who will never drive in an autonomous car. It might be a third of people ultimately just do not want to be an autonomous car. I think it's that high? Yeah, sure. I mean, how many people do you know who were like, refuse to get a smartphone for 20 years? How many people do you know who refuse to do email or get an Instagram account. I mean, it took... Those things took 10, 20 years to boil the laggards

and finally push them into it. Like, if you're a laggard, the only reason you got a smartphone was because there were some things you could not do. Like, you literally, like, you couldn't get an Uber on a flip phone.

So there was this, like, there were use cases that forced people into it. So eventually there will be a use case that forces people into it. All right, let's keep going. So in the same way that we like to see Waymo and Tesla

competing to grow the market and improve the products, I'm also very excited to see that Microsoft has added XAI's GROC models to their Azure AI Foundry business, which is essentially the place where you can run models on top of Azure's compute systems. The reason why this is important to me, Jason, is because I feel like OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Anthropic to a small gig in Google, which we'll get to, just control too much to the market. I want to see more players, more competition, more steel-on-steel. And so to see Microsoft say, we are going to host every major commercial model, period.

to me just speaks well for at once having lots of competitors and also to people having the option to pick and choose and tinker, you're not locked in to just one thing. This is also has to speak to the chat GPT open AI relationship. You know, if you're running Azure, you need to support everything, obviously. And if you're Satya Nadella, you probably want to have a strong relationship with Elon

in the chance that his model becomes better than chat GPDs, which is a significant chance. I'd be betting against Elon has been a fool's errand for a long time. So he's definitely going to be number one, two, or three. And, you know, that could flip. So keep your relationships open. Why would you limit yourself to having a relationship with just the top, you know, model right now? It's just topsy-turvy to me.

Like, I remember so vividly the era of Microsoft that was like anti-open source, didn't want to work with other people, wanted to crush all markets. And now Satya's like, we want to. everybody to come party with us. Come on in. Okay, let's keep moving. So the Senate just advanced the Stable Coin bill, the Genius Act. Now, this is not past yet. We'll get to that in a second. But the context for everyone here is just this. If you take a look at the chart that I have on the screen, this is from our friends over at Defi Lama. It shows the current aggregate market cap, or just value of all the stable coins out there in the world today. And it peaked in early 22 and

entered a kind of a long trough, Jason. And that was a bit disparating for folks like myself who thought the stable coins were awesome and we're going to have a big future. Things have dramatically changed since kind of early 2004 and now there's about $250 billion worth of stables out there. Really great growth over the last year and a half. Very positive. And I think that's really pushing Congress to get its act together. Now, on the compromise point, there was dissension in the ranks for both Democrats

and Republicans. The GOP lost a couple of votes. Democrats lost more, mostly over concerns about the Trump family and their crypto efforts. But what matters, but what matters. is that, and we can always debate about the fine points here, but the big picture is we're going to probably get a strong industry-friendly set of regulations for having stable coins here in the U.S. And that means that I think every single technology company is going to be able to spin up their own stable, and there'll be some sort of liquidity between them all, and so they'll be fungible.

But it's going to be kind of interesting to see every company managing payments in this way. So people didn't want to do it because they were concerned about the Trump meme coin, or Trump's family's connections to stable coins? That was the reason? Or was it because they didn't have other nuances in this legislation around tether and offshore and know your customer? What was the actual reason people dissented? Do we know? I think it's not just one answer. I think some people are anti-crypto. And I would loosely put Elizabeth Warren, Senator, in that group. Some people felt that the World Liberty Financial Staplecoin deal to fund finance from, was it the UAE, was indicative of that Stapagcoins need to have more structure and stability around how they're

regulated and that sort of transaction shouldn't be allowed. But I think also just some bad blood there between Democrats and the Trump family. The key thing here is that American companies based in America that have a big four accounting firm auditing them as opposed to tether, which has had attestations, and I guess Howard Lutnik's previous firm, Cantra Fitzgerald, is trying to work with them to clean things up. I'm interpreting maybe their involvement in it. And I think a lot of this has to do with Lutnik and Tether. That's not being spoken about here, but in my estimation, Howard Lutnik stands to have massive gains at his firm. Now, I don't know if he's sheltered from them because he's part of the administration or cabinet, I guess. So I don't know

the exact details there, but I do think there's probably Democrats as well looking at the Tether issue. And they had that congressional hearing, I believe, where Tether was sort of taken to task because of the attestations, the history of the firm, and then how people are using the stable coins. If stable coins are going to exist, I think we should not allow offshore companies to operate without an onshore entity, without a board, without insurance, without regulation. It should be an onshoreing American only. So this Genius Act, which I don't know, and I have some questions about that, maybe we can answer in the next episode or the audience can help us out with. I really want to understand offshore companies. I really want to understand,

know, your customer, and how people use these. Of course, the tethers of the world will claim, well, we can track how people use them, but, you know, typically when people burn their tethers and they've traded them 10 times, yes, there's a trail, but whoever was at the start of that trail is long gone and absconded and done human trafficking, terrorism, etc. There needs to be very tight regulations on whose trading stable coins, how they're trading them, know your customer. And that's really the offshoring I want to understand.

And that's the details that needs to be in this genius act that I don't think are. There's a little bit of a weirdness that we should talk about because when we think about the Genius Act, which by the way, if you don't know, stands for the guiding and establishing national innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act, which is the most hilarious acronym ever. There's kind of two tiers of regulation, Jason. There's stablecoins that have more than 10 billion AOMs, so 10 million like $1 units out on the market. And if you're over that level, you're privy to the federal regulations.

If you're under that state level, or you can choose that, my concern is that some states may have overly loose standards to attract smaller stable coins and that we could then run into some of the K.YC, offshore, just the stuff that we don't want to see pollute the USDA ecosystem, because most stables are USD backed and so forth. So I almost wonder a little bit about the distinction between big stables and little stables and the different regulatory regimes they go under. I'm also sympathetic to it because less regulation for smaller products makes sense. But when it comes to finance, it gets sticky. So I'm with you on this. I have been pushing for regulation over and over again for years that there should be a safe harbor for small projects and then increasing regulation as they get bigger. And who's permitted to do this? And the audits and transparency are the details we're going to need.

And, you know, I think there's some certification and people putting their names on things and outs. outside auditors putting their names on things. That has not happened with Tether. I don't want to see, like, Tether previous was like, here's an attestation from, I don't know if it was like the BVI or something like that, Virgin Islands. It was like, hey, guys, if this isn't done in New York by Ernst & Young or KPMG, I'm not interested. Like, and it, there's that whole attestation thing, as explained to me was like, by accountants and people online was like, it's like here, we took a picture of a bank statement, essentially. We know, we know. there was money in account, but we don't know all the underlying transactions at how you got there. These things need to be regulated. There needs to be feds inside your office, looking at these transactions all the time in detail. Yes. There's way too much, it's just way too dangerous to have this be the Wild West anymore. And you know what? For Tether, that's making, you know, tens of billions of dollars a year on the float, that business is going to collapse because there's also regulation. This is a little bit detail.

They want you to be able to buy stable coins and then share the interest with you on them. So an interest-bearing stable-coin account is the next piece of dialogue you'll start hearing because I was talking to some people off the record and they're like short tether. They're not literally short tether but they're short theoretically tether because instead of your tether's making five, six, seven percent, whatever it is off these treasuries and other devices they have with people's deposits. What happens when you say, I'll give you 5%, I'll keep one point. You get five points, I get one point. Well, why would you ever use Tether? Yeah. So you'll have 85% in the revenue generated here, which is what should happen. Like, what idiots are the only people

who would leave like a billion dollars in a stable coin or probably people and let Tether take five percent to make 50 million on that are probably people who have some shaky relationship in their transactions. That's my interpretation, and I'm no expert. But this industry needs to get cleaned up. And of course, when you hear people, and I'll end on this. Alex, whenever you hear people saying,

well, criminals do this. And this, I mean, you can bring a suitcase with $100 bills. Whenever you hear people talking about, like, how criminals do stuff, and that's a justification for them being marginally better than them, those people are typically criminals. Oh, yes, yes. It's a experience.

I'm not saying, there's criminals. I'm just saying in my experience, the people who are like, you know, there's criminals who have done far worse. I'm like, probably should get a magnifying glass on whoever said that. Jason, we need to talk about Polymark. We have a partnership. A bet that I want to talk about in a partnership too. So why don't you walk us into this? And then I'm going to pull up some really cool data. I love Polymark. I can't stop thinking in bets. Shane from Polymark is a friend of mine. We decided to do an exciting partnership here, which is I'm constantly talking about the odds of something happening as a poker player. That's how I see the world, right? And we just had a conversation about

this earlier in the show. So what I asked the team here to do is to integrate a market into the show. Now, I don't know which ones. I asked the team to go there and surprise me with a couple of markets. So hit me. Hit me with a market here from Polymarket. This is what I was absolutely fixated by. This is the market for which company has the best AI model on June 30th. So the midpoint of this year. And if you're watching the video version, as you can see the people that have taken the lead recently are Google. But if you go back in time just in just a little bit, you're seeing earlier this year Open AI far ahead. Now, Google has absolutely soared. And I think this is partially because the Gemini model family has improved quickly. I think Google has really managed to build

out a series of technology products in the AI realm that people are impressed with. And, you know, they just had their Google I.O event this week. And they started talking about their new, oh man, what the hell is it? Google, Gemini, Pro, Ultramax, whatever. That's supposed to be quite impressive. But the market here has essentially given OpenAI and XAI the same chance, Jason, of having the best model on June 30th, which is low, and Anthropic is basically zero. So Google, yeah. Here's a great idea. Go take a look at the rules. This market will resolve to yes, if any model owned by Google has the highest arena arena arena LLM leaderboard. So when making these markets, they resolve, how you resolve a market is critically important.

And we've been doing them on all-in. We have a partnership over there as well. So you just have to, when we look at these, or we're going to create some of our own. So I think an interesting one would be to do on self-driving and Uber, pretty interesting. And then if you start thinking about who has the most robo-taxies on the market by the end of 2026, a 20-25. If you did that, Waymo is going to win. So you maybe would say who outside of Waymo will have the most number of robotaxies or the largest number of cities, right? You can come about something. And then you'd say, how many cities will Uber have robotaxies on the ground at? And today, you know, you have the We Ride folks, Pony AI, Waymo, and then Volkswagen's coming. And then you have to define Robotaxy with a driver, with a safety driver or not. And so I would like to know just, even with safety drivers, how many different cities you have.

That's like a very interesting wager. It's a very interesting market, I should say. And as a market, what's interesting about that is, then people could say, well, yeah, I mean, maybe Waymo's going to just go very wide but not deep. Or maybe Uber's going to go really wide, not deep. You know, you kind of start to have to think about things in order to pick which outcome you think is going to happen. The reason these outcome markets are very interesting to me is if you had a large position in Uber, you could place a wager, you could pick a side that would be Uber not winning, which would then hedge you against your Uber stock. Or if you were a Tesla shareholder and you were like, okay,

Tesla has a million cars on the road next year. What are the chances of that happening? If you bet against it, but your Tesla shareholder and they don't hit it and the share goes down or Tesla's flat, you would win this bet. So you could place a wager. I don't know exactly how they phrase these, but you could pick which outcome. And when you pick which outcome, that could be a hedge against other things happening. This is what people were doing with climate and climate change. Farmers would do this.

Oh, if there's going to be a frost, there's a 5% of a frost, I will put some money in that 5% chance. So if I lose, if it's a 1 in 20 and my, you know, I have a million dollars in oranges coming and there's an orange frost, I'll put $50,000. on it if my orange is freeze, I still make the same amount of money. It's $50,000 in insurance. It's interesting how a wager on an outcome can have the same vibes as an insurance policy and also a hedge because it feels like you just went through several different ways you can kind of approach this. Now, we did talk about how the market we showed resolved.

I want to show everyone what we're talking about. So it's using the LM Arena leaderboard, which is actually really, really cool. So take a look at this, Jason. This is the new UI for the L-N-Marina leaderboard, but you can see why Google's currently leading on the market because, well, they're crushing everywhere. They're on top of the leaderboard for text, for web dev, vision, search, not copilot, but text image, et cetera.

So very, very, very strong models from Google today. And I brought up the L-N-Marina Jason, not just because it's cool as a data source, but also Bloomberg reports that the company, we talked about them spinning out, making their own kind of actual company about this, Turns out they've gotten around put together, and it's going to be $100 million. Wow.

Because, of course, it is. And Druson Horowitz, the UC system, and then also some capital from Lightspeed, Felicit, Kleiner, and others. Valueation, take a guess. I mean, $750 million. 600. But still, that's a lot of money. 15%, yeah.

I thought, well, 20% might be a lot. you know, so that'd be a billion dollars, 500, 500 be 20%, 10% would be a billion. I just picked in between those two numbers. But remember when Instagram sold for a billion and we all kind of collectively crapped our parents? Different era. Different era, man. Different number of people online, different amount of revenue per person, different amount

of heat commerce spend per person online. Everything just keeps growing 30%, 10% a year. There's big prizes here. And if you place a bet, and we don't know what the actual pitch is under, this. Okay, any startup stuff? I think there was a couple of startup items here where people ask me questions or I answer them, rapid response, maybe I'm with one or two of them. And again, when we do Reddit rapid response, I don't know ahead of time the question, but I am Jason Calacanis on, so I'm you slash Jason Calacanis on Reddit. Follow me, say hi, DM me, whatever,

and go look for me answering questions in anti-work. I love anti-work. I love, engaging with people who hate capitalism because I want to convert them in some ways. But I also want to understand their hatred of free markets, competition, and capitalism just helps me sharp in my position. Yeah. A secret vegan going to the barbecue. That's Jason in anti-work. Yes. All right. So from from lawn and the R slash startups subreddit, I absolutely love that place. I read it every single day. There's a great question that I think we should talk about. So how can I build a marketplace from scratch? Jason, people talk a lot about the chicken and the egg problem, how to get early momentum going.

They want to know what's the best way to launch a marketplace. I know you're supposed to have supplied before launching, probably do that. But I'm not sure about how to reach the first customers apart from people they know. So for the Reddit user Elon Jr. Musk, what you got? This person answered their own question. When DoorDash started, they picked one or two restaurants in Palo Alto. They put up phony websites. They bought some ads and sent people to this, I think, Indian restaurant.

if the story is correct. Then they took their personal credit card, ordered from the Indian restaurant, picked it up with their personal credit card, and then ran to the person's house and dropped it off, and the person thought, okay. They didn't even question it. They had no idea that this marketplace was glued together by literally you taking the name of a restaurant, let's call it Palo Alto Dosa, and they didn't have a website, they didn't have online ordering, you put a Palo Alto Dosa, you put the menu, you say, pick what you want, want, they, you know, vibe coded something or in that case, you know, actually coded. And then they bought ads against it and said Indian food Palo Alto delivery and then finally got somebody to order.

The order came in. They were like, what? An order came in? And then they went and just called the order in on the phone and got it to the person. So there's your example. When you get going, you could offer people some amount of a base guarantee. That's a more advanced technique when you have funding perhaps. And you really want to be in a certain geo or a certain vertical. So let's say you wanted to do all home services, painting, you know, painting cabinets, I don't know, gardening, pool cleaning. Just start with pool cleaning. Sure. Find 10 pool cleaners. Do phone calls and interviews with them and say, I'm making a marketplace for home services, pool cleanings, what we're going after. I just want to understand what you charge. And I was wondering if I could send you

the ability to get a customer and I'll text message you, the customer, what they want, and we're trying to achieve 24-hour turnaround, if not same day, and we'll pay a premium for that. Might you be interested in being part of this? And they'll be like, yeah, sure, here's my phone number. We're done. And so that's how these things all get together. They're done in ways that don't scale. And your friends and your sweat equity are part of that equation. Yes. If you DoorDash used, the four DoorDash founders as the first four DoorDashers, the end. So you are the supply. Go clean the pool yourself in this analogy.

Or if you're a banker, go drive Uber for a bit to get the deal. Elon Jr. Musk does talk about in his Reddit post the importance of marketing and so forth. And you touch on the supply side, Jason. But on the demand side, when the DoorDash guys were putting together their ads to get their first couple of orders in, what do we know about that? And what do you recommend for founders today who might be cash strap that are looking to build out that? others out of the marketplace. Yeah, I mean, it's super easy. You can, if you're in a specific geo and a specific vertical, you would be surprised how affordable Google search ads are. Yeah, you could be paying a dollar or to a click. So, you know, you might only need $100 to $500 to run this test. If you can't

get $100 to $500 to $500 together, you probably shouldn't be a founder. So there's pretty easy ways to do this. And of course, you could make a mailing list of everybody on your campus. and, you know, test it there if you were doing like the DoorDash example or delivering people or doing a laundry service. You could just find the first 50 customers amongst your friend group in a neighborhood. Or you could offer people $10 off your, you know, let's say this is the pool cleaning service. You just go on Google Maps. You find everybody's got a pool by looking at satellite photos.

Literally just see them, yes. Correct. You then print out fly. buyers. You then hang them on people's doors and slide them under their things. And if the person happens to open the door when you say, hi, I'm an entrepreneur. I started this company. Please don't kill me. And then you get that person 100% as a customer and put a laser printer from brother for like 150 bucks and paper's free. And it's like 100 bucks for a thousand pieces of paper. You just laser print the offer. And you hand sign them. Say, hey, my name's Jason. I'm and Alex. We've started a new

marketplace for pool cleaners. We want to save you money and we want it to be on demand and easy, breezy. Just text us if you need your pool service anytime and we'll put you on a weekly thing and here's the price. Boom. And you can trust us because we live in the area. I would say the door hanging, flyer thing, door to door thing, a lot of founders don't do. It works. Emailing people next door, if you were doing again in a geo, next door is a good place to do because you can find all your neighbors. Yeah. And so once you find all your neighbors, you can start messaging them or you can literally just fake it. So if your marketplace was a marketplace for Again, we'll go back to pool cleaning in a geo.

You can very easily just go in there and say, hey, I'm looking for a pool cleaner. And then Alex says, I found this great one. And you reply to yourself, this will be, you know, in the gray hat area. Yeah. You're not committing a crime, but you are doing something that some people would be like is slightly unethical. I'll say it's clever. Everything you've said thus far, though, is just doing the work the hard way. Like the DoorDash folks delivering the food themselves.

Yes. Going around the neighborhood, passing out flyers. I'm getting enough cheap brother, laser. renter, which you can keep until it runs at a bank and then you throw it away. Like, I mean, none of this is expensive. This is $1,000, $2,000. Why don't you pick a category for me? Pick a category of marketplace.

Think about your own life. I picked food and I pick pools, but you pick one that's kind of random or out there that I wouldn't think of. One that's near and dear to my heart are on home visit arborists. So we have people that come and take care of our trees. Sure. Tree Marketplace. Great.

If I went onto Facebook right now. And I typed in arborists. Or I went to the Austin subreddit. And I typed in Austin, uh, arborists. And, uh, you know, I'm going to find arborists, uh, threads. And I, the first one I found in Austin was arborists are going to be raking it in. No pun intended. From two years ago, right?

And I guess this is when they had the big freeze here and a bunch of trees died. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, if I go to Facebook and I type in Facebook, I'll just do this right now, I'm just do a search here. You can do it as well. Well, Jason does that. I did the same test for Providence,

typed in Arborist, and I immediately found best Arborist in Providence, which I guarantee you get search traffic. Yes. You could just drop a comment there and get some gorilla. Facebook Arborists, Brooklyn. And you're going to find Arborist of Brooklyn. And so there's your supply folks.

There is a Facebook, a LinkedIn, in a subreddit for every group. And there's message boards and forums. So if you append to that, you know, Brooklyn Arborist's message board, back in the day, people use these different message board software, you know, before Facebook and subreddits kind of took it over. And you'll find there's Brownstoner. This is something in Brooklyn. That's a message board in Brooklyn forum archive tree removal company, right? So because these things have ranked on Google in search or Duck Duck Go in search, that means they had some validity. So literally, that's like having an intern, go find those things for you.

You infiltrate those groups. You'll be honest about it. I was looking for ranch hands because we're going to probably get a ranch hand here eventually when we get the horses. And I had no idea what they get paid. And it turns out if you provide them a tiny home, there's like an infinite number of people in their 20s who didn't go to college, but who love horses who, if you put them up and give them three squares a day, or some food and a thing, they'll work for minimum wage to just be around horses. It's kind of crazy, right? Like, ranch hands are pretty affordable. People love horses. And it's a global thing. You got people in Germany, people in Australia who just want to be ranch hands. They just want to teach horseback riding

and, you know, the equestrian stuff. So I had no idea. I did my research just for that in 10 seconds. So, and I was going to create one for domestic staff, like estate managers and stuff like that. And I never got around to it. But marketplaces are great. You can build them with three or four people. You can hack the inventory. You can hack the supply site. And then once you get going, then you can say, I know I'm going to make a lifetime value of this amount per customer. Therefore, I know how much inventory drives, how much supply.

And you can do a little bit of math, right? And those math formulas are online. Pretty easy for you to figure out. Jason, do we have time for a funny joke about startups before we go? Sure. I mean, Alex, you're going to tell a joke. Okay, here we go. Maybe this is going to be a dad joke.

I'm not telling a joke. Lon found the best thing I've ever seen in my life, which is this. It reads every piece of SaaS advice ever all at once. Roll with me here. Advice goes as follows. Validate before you build. Build before you validate.

Launch fast, but make sure it's polished. Don't waste time, but also don't rush. Talk to users, but then don't build what they say. Ship fast, but don't break trust. Cool. So I'll just build, unbuild, relaunch, and question my life choices in a nice little loop. feels like the advice self-contradicts. You know what?

I kind of feel for this person because I've read a lot of SaaS advice and a lot of it goes in kind of contrasting directions. The reason for this is because people will look back on a successful startup and they will attribute some technique to the success of the startup when really it was just maybe there was a market need and it just, man, everybody needs Uber or Lyft

and it's just going to get sucked up. So people think, oh, it's the mustache. on the front of lift that made them popular. And I was like, well, the mustache had nothing to do with it. Oh, it's a talkative driver, having character. No, it was about utility. Uber's approach. So, you know, in a vacuum, you can get all kinds of advice

and my advice to founders is to write it all down. And then you will pick which way you want to do it. There are multiple ways to get to the new world. Some people got to the new world by, you know, going through the Bering Strait, right? When it was frozen over, they would walk across it supposedly and come down to North America. Other people risk their lives going across the Atlantic, many different ways

to, you know, get there. And some people will have their startup succeed because they build something, show it to customers. And customers like, oh, my God, I never thought about staying on renting out somebody's house and staying there. I always stay at a hotel. This Airbnb thing is incredible. Other times, you're like, look, there's all these people couch surfing on Craigslist. if we made a gorgeous website and had more inventory, so it wasn't random, that would remove friction. We could just tell everybody to go from couch surfing to Airbnb. Both of those approaches could work and have work for Airbnb.

So that's why you do get contradictory advice. So once you've got the early adopters, what's the advice for the massive middle and what's the advice for the laggers? The advice for the laggers is going to be super different, right? like then the advice for, you know, the people who are, uh, the true vanguard of using products. The vanguard is like, tell me about the features. How much RAM does it have? You know, and then the laggards are like, what colors are available? You know, when you buy an iPad today, there are people who pick their phone or their iPad based on the color. And then there are,

that's you. Okay. I mean, I kind of get it. I keep my phones like four years. So like the color. I mean, but if you, if a new color comes out, would that put you in the upgrade cycle? I'm, I'm, I'm always wondering. Oh, hell no. Also, I forget what color my phone is. Oh, it's this color. When I see that, I'm like, yes, whatever that is. When I see people buying based on the color, I'm like, what's going on here?

And it's like, I get it. You know, like, you're a mom or you're a teenager and you love red and the red came out and it gets you to visit the store. And it reminds you, maybe I should get a new phone. Yeah. For the rest of us, we're like, what are the specs? Is anything going on? It's a tool for us, right? So you have one group of people who's buying it based on aesthetic.

and forgets about it, and the other group cares about this. That's like the perfect example of like, people have different motivations to engage at different times in your startup's life. Write all this advice down, take it all in.

The most important thing is to get close to your company. As best as I can tell, this is why I narrow advice down to three things. Best team possible. Product philosophy, keep iterating on that product and bear hug and understand your customer. and delight them. Because all the advice you'll see, there'll be tactics that are on the periphery of that, but most of the advice, if you pull up that list one more time, and you put it

through my sort of startups are about three things, rubric. I think you're going to find that they fit into those three things. So validate before you build has to do with product and customers. Build before you validate. That has to do with building a product that you validate with customers. Launchfest, that has to do a product and having a team that is capable of launch vass. But make sure it's polished. That has to do with your team and your product. Don't waste time. That's on the periphery, but don't rush. That's on the periphery. Talk to users. It has to do with your customer. It has to do what they say has to do with your customer ship fast. That has to do with your product and product velocity, which is driven by your team.

But don't break trust. That has to do with your customer relationship. So if you look at all this advice, it almost comes down to those three core principles. If you're wondering what to do today, talk to a customer and ask them about the product or look at the product's metrics and look at your competitors' metrics or go look at an award-winning product that has nothing to do with yours and then think how might that influence me here? So if the car of the year is the Tesla Model I or the Corvette is the best one or the ID Buzz is the best family car, go take a test drive and then look at it and say, why aesthetically are reviewers losing their minds over these cars? And how does that apply to my product? You could open your mind up, right, and have a really interesting

moment or look at your team and say, is there anybody in this team who's not bringing it? I can do some professional development or should I replace a team member or should I add a team member or should I stop them from doing some repetitive work and give them some more interesting work to do. All right. It's been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups and happy one year anniversary. Alex, you made it to a year. Well done. I know.

It cost me all my hair and half my sanity. But ladies and gentlemen, year two, let's do it. Let's do it. Let's double down here. Let's get focused. X.com slash Alex. I am X.com slash Jason. The show is at TWA Startups.

If you love the show, hey, we have a subreddit. Go to TWA startups in Reddit. And you can find me again. I'm Jason Calacanis, one word over there. And we will see you next time on this week of startups.

Bye, everybody. Bye, bye, bye, bye, there you go.