This Week in Startups - Meta's Moderation and Nvidia's Domination | E2069

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

This Week in Startups is brought to you by…Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025Oracle. TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain:https://www.Squarespace.com/TWISTToday’s show: Jason and Alex discuss Meta’s moderation announcement, Nvidia’s seeming domination in the processor space, Anthropic’s $2B raise and some fun products coming out of CES.(0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show.(5:15) Fire in Pacific Palisades and Malibu: Insurance and Startup Opportunities(9:48) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist(17:32) Meta's New Content Moderation Strategy and Zuckerberg's Motivations(20:09) Oracle. ⁠⁠TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠(22:35) More on Zuck’s motivations and what the new president can do(30:30) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain:https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST(40:26) NVIDIA's AI Supercomputer Chip and Tech Industry Innovations(49:15) Lenovo's Rollable Laptop and Slack's iOS Integration(56:31) BYD's Supercar and Anthropic's Valuation(1:02:45) Jason's Experience with Luxury Japanese MinivansSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(9:48) Gusto. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at http://gusto.com/twist*Gusto pricing shown in ad is based on pricing prior to March 2025(20:09) Oracle. ⁠⁠TWiST listeners can try OCI and save up to 50% on your cloud bill at ⁠⁠https://w⁠⁠⁠⁠ww.oracle.com/twist⁠⁠⁠(30:30) Squarespace. TWiST listeners: use code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain:https://www.Squarespace.com/TWISTGreat 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

Look at this, folks. There's no one in the driver's seat. It's a sick-looking car with a crazy spoiler. Obviously a lot inspired by Tesla from B-Y-D. They kind of steal everything. But watch that. What? It jumps.

Also, this is a McLaren, not a Tesla. Jason, this does solve the enormous market hole for billionaires running from the cops who are on a poor road who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture. Or the spike strip. Oh, the spike strip if you're in a spy film. better. I like it. I'm punching it up. So yes, that's what this is for. If you're running from the cops and a spike show, no, this is like Batmobile level stuff. There's no functional use for

this thing except for us to talk about it. Well played, B.Y.D. This is the point of CS. Come out with the feature that we can't help but talk about. This week in startups is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is easy online payroll benefits in HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com slash twist. Oracle. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. Save up to 50% on your cloud bill at Oracle.com slash twist. And 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. Hey everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. I am in a dark hotel room on, in Naseco on Wednesday here at 10 p.m. at night. Alex is in New York. It's, I guess, 8 a.m. there. We're taping the show a little bit on an odd time for those of you who like to watch it live.

This week in Startups is on YouTube and X, and we go live to my personal LinkedIn as well. Yep. But here we go. There's a lot of news going on. I am in Naseco, which is in Hokkaido. which is the northern most part of Japan. Oh, that makes sense. For a couple of days.

Yeah. Where the greatest powder in the world exists. I left Naseco two years ago. It was covered in powder. I showed up again, Alex. Mm-hmm. It was dumping powder. Ah!

And I was out there today. And I did a couple of hours, a couple of runs. And then tomorrow I'm doing something very special. It's called cat skiing. So I'm going to be on a cat, which is that machine with the tractor wheels. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so it's very strong. strange. And it turns out in Japan, they had many, many ski resorts. Those ski resorts,

a lot of them shut down because of population decreasing and they're not being a lot of families and skiing is like, it's a family activity as well as like for individuals. So one of these ski resorts that shut down, they have just one of the lift lines open. All the other lift lines are literally down. There's no lift cable. And it's just dilapidate. So it looks like something out of the Walking Dead, like an abandoned ski village. And so what they do is they just take eight people up. There's two cats. They take you up.

You ski down. They take you back up. You ski back down. But every time you go on a trail, you're the first person to touch it. We call that in the industry and the business first tracks. Yeah. People will line up for hours before the ski mountain moments get first track. So you're basically guaranteed to get full tracks.

So I am... I've been in those cats, but I've never... never done that type of ski, but I just, we were talking literally the last show, I think, about the chaos and the crisis at Vail over there mismanagement. And then over in Japan, there's not enough people. I feel like there's a market opportunity here to take folks to there. Interesting. You say that. The majority of people who are skiing here are Chinese and Australian and American. And it turns out during this time period, during the ski season, it's gotten so popular because it literally is the best snow in the world.

The volume of the snow, Alex, is like 20 to one to the volume if it was water. In like other places, it might be 10 to 1, 15 to 1, 5 to 1. So it's fluffier. In other words, fluffier. Yeah. It's a very weird thing. You hit a foot or two of this powder and your skis disappear, but nothing else changes. You're just floating on it.

So it is like the most amazing experience I have. And I feel very privileged to be able to do it. All right. Tell me the truth. How much did the Naseco ski tourism advocacy board slip you under the table for that? Because that's a real, you're making me want to go. I mean, I don't want to endorse it because I kind of want to gatekeep it as the kids say these. But I got to be honest with the audience.

It is like one of the wonderful things I get to do every couple of years, the second time I've done it. And maybe I'll get to do it two years in a row. But yeah, it is just my passion. I really enjoyed, and it gets me through the year. I just think about going for a week to Japan and doing this, and now my daughters want to go because I've been skiing with my daughters a whole bunch in Tahoe, and I'm really excited to take them to Japan someday. So, anyway, this is all great, but, you know, I felt really bad because I was started

taking pictures of all this. Uh-huh. And then I saw Mark Suster, a friend of mine, venture capitalist, that he was, like, leaving his house, and he was scared of this fire, and I'm like, what fire? I mean, I was on a plane, obviously, and, you know, wasn't up on what's happening in the Pacific Palisades in Malibu. I used to live in Brentwood. Brentwood's the town just east of Pacific Palisades, and there is a fire raging as we speak. Yeah.

And a lot of homes have been lost, and I think there's some deaths of people and property damage is colossal and, you know, obviously animals and people's pets. So I just felt really, I don't know. Can we let's have some context here, Jason. And so here is, here's a map of Los Angeles. Sure. And here is Pacific Palisades up here. Now, for those of people who are not in the U.S., I think they think of L.A. as kind of a monolith. Can you just, for just 10 seconds, just tell us about Palisades, Santa Monica, and what this means in the L.A. context.

Yeah. So when you live in L.A., you either live on the west side or the east side. That's delineated by the 4.05 freeway. And then there's a 10 freeway north of the 10 south at 10. Okay. So you get those as like, almost. almost like a four quadrant. And in that top left quadrant is the, what I would say is the most, um, the best place to live. Let's just put it that way. Uh, Santa Monica, a beach town. Many people have

been there. And just north of that beach town is the town of Pacific Palisades. And then to the east of it, you have Bretwood. And, you know, the Getty centers up there on the hill. And when I lived in Brentwood in that area that you're just showing there. You know, and I lived in a corporate apartment in Santa Monica when I was doing Weblogs Inc. back in the day, it was like a $2,000 a month apartment. I was negative $20,000 in my bank account before we sold it. And, you know, it was a great moment in my life in the early 2000s living there. You know, they would be fires once in a while on the hills, but they never made it to Brentwood.

They never made it to Pacific Palisades, really. They were something that happened way up in the hills. or, you know, or more east inside the inland. And over time, you know, I started hearing people talk about because I had a wood shake roof. Wood pieces of wood, right? You know, wood shake. And I didn't have a lot of money at the time. It was my first home.

And I would, they would get dry and they would crack. And I would have the roof recomb and take, like, fix it. And they would just touch it up for me. Guy said, listen, you've been touching this thing up for a couple of years now. You can't. I can't work on it anymore. because there's an ordinance because of the Brentwood fire, you can't have a shake roof.

You can only repair up to 30% of it, and I've done that a number of times here. You've got to get this done with composites and fake ones. And I wound up doing that, but I was kind of bummed because I just loved the look of the wood shake roof. But I looked online at the Brentwood fire, and this is something that happened many years ago. I don't know if it was a 40s or 50s,

but it had gone down from the Santa Monica commanders and burned a bunch of houses. And gosh, you know, was this whole thing with Trump saying, like, you got to rake the leaves. You know, he says things in a pretty bumbastic way. And here we are a week or two away from him taking office again. He's not wrong. In LA. Forest management matters. My best friend's dad was a professor of forestry at Oregon State growing up, and I learned a lot about this, yeah. Yeah. So this is like one of those instances where he says something and you're like, what? Rape the forest? Like, is that going to stop a

forest fire? Actually correct. And it turns out in LA, they have this like tragedy of the commons where you know, there's a lot of land between people's homes and they don't really enforce enough people cleaning up the debris. And there's a lot of debris up in those hills. And then you have a Santa Ana winds, something lights on fire, a couple of these. And then there was the other issue. The electric cables were above ground. So the housing prices went up and up and up. These houses became worth $1,000 a square foot, then $2,000 square foot. So these are five or $10 million houses we're talking about here. But, um, You know, they were saying this was going to happen at some point.

You know, it was pretty well known that these mountains were not cleaned up all that often. And the power lines are above ground. Same thing we have in the Bay Area, or we have, you know, I've had in the Bay Area. So it's just a real tragedy. And I just hope everybody's safe and that they get this under control. But it's getting really, really bad because the winds are kicking up even more. All right. You didn't start your company to run payroll.

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So you can focus on what matters, building your startup. So here's your quick call to action. Do you want all Gusto has to offer with no hidden fees? Well, how about a discount? Try Gusto and get three months free. Gusto.com slash twist. That's G-U-S-T-O-com slash twist. I mean, it's funny how three of the major American economies, Texas, Florida, and California are suffering from climate change-related insurance issues, from different, different issues, you know, earthquakes and fires in California, hail in Texas, and then, of course, hurricanes and other sorts of wind and water in Florida. Extreme weather is a pattern, yeah.

Well, the thing that I learned about this, I forget which insurance executive I was talking to. I think this is back when I was covering a lot of the insured tech companies back. Lemonade and Metro Mile, we're kind of competing for market share. And he said the thing that's killing insurance companies in the housing market is not just the super extreme stuff that makes all the headlines. It's the less bad stuff that's now coming at a higher intensity. So a big hailstorm, for example, you don't read about a hailstorm on the news, but if it takes out, you know, 10,000 windshields and hurts, you know, 5,000 roofs, that takes a whole area of low risk insurance

and really changes the economics of it. So it's, it's an issue of, All over the place. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, thoughts and prayers, as we always say. And hopefully, you know, better systems to help these things. I did look at one time when these things were occurring in the North Bay for fire. I had seen they use these blankets to go over cars to put them out.

I don't know if you ever seen these fire blankets. And they, there's a thing called fire blankets. You can pull it up on YouTube. And basically, it's a fire resistant blanket. It has long cables on it. you and I were firefighters. There's a car on fire in the middle of Broadway. We unroll this thing.

You take one end, I take the other. We're 30 feet away from the fire and the car on fire from either side. And we drag it over the car, laid over the car, and it puts out the fire because no oxygen. It's like a weighted blanket. Got it. And these things are incredibly, incredibly effective. And I said to myself, it would be really interesting.

A blanket like this to go on top of somebody's home. Because it wouldn't make economic sense, but here we go. That looks like a rivian here. Yeah. And these electric ones are really important because those fires can take a lot of water. They don't work for water. But anyway, you see them running that blanket over the car. Brilliant, because it'll cut the oxygen flows.

Oh, and then it crimps. Ah, I love that. You crimp it at the bottom. Yeah, it really works. These are fire blankets. I started looking for a fire blanket to go over houses. But I think we could also start thinking about, just like in Florida, they're weatherproofing some of these homes by having the first floor 10 feet be like a pass-through

for water. And then you're basically live on the first floor is essentially 10 feet up. So that if there is a flood, you know, for flooding, even surviving. I'm going to have to do the thing that we do when we discuss something, but we have to anonymize it ever so slightly. I spend weekends by the coast often. And on that particular drive, there is a house that was built in the last. last 10 years. And unlike every other house in this region between Rhode Island and Massachusetts,

if you will, it's, Jason, it looks like it's designed for the zombie apocalypse. Like, it's got these huge pillars and these stairs going up. And if there was a hurricane that pushed water of 40 feet, by the time we reached that elevation and then the second floor of that house, it doesn't matter. So it's like bulletproof from a hurricane perspective. And I love it. But it does look a little dystopian in a way. It's not beautiful. It's not aesthetically pleasing. What people have done for that issue is they actually close it off and you use it for storage or whatever or like a garage or whatever. But it's made so that if the water does come up, the panels or some number of the panels can just break out and the water just flows through. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they have like a wind breaking out. In skyscrapers, they have floors that are designed just to let wind go through, right? Correct, yes. And so basically you have this whatever kind of panel there. but the panels, if pushed, you know, with their hand very hard or with water, they just pop off and then the water flows underneath. So there's a bunch of startup opportunities here, as we talk about on this way in startups. You put your mind to these, and there were, when these fires were occurring,

my house had a sprinkler system on top of this shape roof, and it wasn't working. It had been disconnected by one of the owners, but at some point they had put literally a rooftop sprinkler system because after the Brentwood fire, whenever that was, they were scared and they put sprinklers on the roofs for the shake roofs. But then it turned out they got rid of the shake roofs. You didn't need to have that. But there could be other fire retardant stuff you could put in Tahoe and in the mountain regions

where you have all these fires. So there's a big opportunity, I think, for startup founders to try thinking about composite materials, fireproofing these things, floodproofing these things. And that's a way where you maybe don't need insurance because, hey, this thing can survive the major things and maybe have a high deductible or something. It's a lot going on in the news as well.

You're not kidding, though. One last thing on this. There's that Sauron system that's coming out. That's the new like security system for people. That's a, I think it's a startup. I wonder if we're going to see similar things like that. Like, you know, here's the fire department in a box for your house type thing for a certain higher-in customers. Anyways, yes, lots to talk about on the show.

I want to start Jason with something from CES. We had a founder on the show a week or two ago, CEO of the company behind Codium. They built the windsurf ID that I tested with and built a little app. Yeah. Well, they got a shout out from someone who we all know. And I thought I would just play this because it's kind of a fun little shout out to a Twiss and Fender Company. Here's Jensen.

Here we go. Really fantastic stuff. Codium. Every software engineer in the world. This is going to be the next giant giant AI application. Next giant AI service period is software coding.

30 million software engineers around the world. Everybody is going to have... That's enough of that, but it's so fun to see. We just had them on. And, you know, no offense to us. I mean, I like to think that our words carry a little bit of weight, but Jensen on stage in front of literally every single press in the world, that's about as big of a shoutout as you can get. I think in technology today.

Congratulations to that startup. If you can, and you know, the number of developers in the world is 30 million. It's a very small number. There are cities in China that have 30 million people like many of them. And so it's but 10% or less than 10% of the population of the United States are developers globally. So, you know, being able to expand that number dramatically through soft where through AI is going to have a profound impact, like super profound impact on the world, and that's, I think, going to be a very world positive one. I agree.

Maybe being debated right now, that's world positive, I think is the announcement. Zuck put out like a five-minute video, which I guess we got to talk about here at the top of the show because everybody's talking about it. Yeah, and maybe you could just cue it up for the audience if they've been under a rock. And obviously, this is close to your art because you're a journalist.

And I've been pretty vocal about this kind of stuff too. And it hits on so many different things from, you know, media, fact-checking standards, misinformation, disinformation. And of course, something, you know, that's the number one item in our Constitution. Free speech. Free speech. Yeah. And so here we go. Zuckerberg, I guess, is gone based.

He's gone. He's gone something. I want to get to your tweet about it. But let's just break it down for people. So first of all, Facebook is moving away from third-party fact-checkers. They are moving towards the community notes model, originally called Birdwatch back at Twitter, community notes under X, and has very much become associated with the Musk X era of social media, if you will.

And what I thought was very important in Mehta's commentary, the announcement of this, they didn't say, you know, we are looking at the market and learning. They just said, X, community notes, be like that. we're going to do it. And I thought that was kind of very clear and honest of them. They are also going to be allowing more total speech. They are changing their speech rules for their platform, making them more expansive. We can talk about what they've changed in detail, Jason, if you want. But the gist here is that automation and more moderation thereof haven't worked for Facebook and meta the way they wanted them to. So they are going to essentially let people

be a bit more freewheeling, a little bit more self-policing, starting in the U.S. Other jurisdictions, of course, have different rules. But that is, I think, a fair top-level summary of the changes on the content moderation side. Yeah, it's a, it is a, let's start with community notes. It's an incredible project, predates, you know, Twitter turning into X. And it's actually an open source project. So I don't know if you were aware of that. and it's

which means anybody can use it I'll just send you the link here you can pull up the GitHub page or if you're typing GitHub Community Notes, anybody can go find it and so I believe anybody can go take a license to this and use it it's a very fascinating piece of software

and are you part of Community Notes by chance? I do not believe that I am Okay you can apply to be part of it and what's really interesting about it is when you see a you can go and look at Community Notes

yourself or when you're reading a tweet, if you see a proposed community, you can click on it and you can actually rate it. Hey, everybody. It's 2025, and AI is officially everywhere from medicine to self-driving cars. If AI hasn't hit your industry yet,

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And when you look at one, you might say, I think that this is a good correction because it's easy to understand, it's factually correct, and it's site sources. So it's kind of like inspired in some ways by what Wikipedia does. We have reputation and a community of people kind of debating stuff. And these things get kind of voted up and down to which community notes get seen. So to game it is extremely hard. Just like gaming the Wikipedia was extremely hard for a long period of time. Now, you do have an issue with Wikipedia now because there's a bunch of people who, you know, baked accounts for many years and then they do edits for pay, let's say. And, you know, maybe community notes will have that issue down the road. None of these systems are perfect, but it's, it's really does pretty well, community notes, I think. whereas fact-checking through multiple organizations, I think when they decided to do that, it was, and this is where like Zuckerberg's motivation

comes into play here. And that's a really important thing to think about. Zuckerberg really cares about business, really cares about winning. I believe his primary directive is winning. He's got, I don't know, close to 3 billion people using these platforms. he was more than happy.

And this is what I wrote here. You know, listen, Zuck kicked Trump off the largest platform in the world when that was the popular decision. This was my tweet from, you know, when I was a little jet lagged here. Now he's bending the knee and firing the sensors. He enabled because that's the popular decision. He is the definition of a frontrunner of Kamala one. He would be doubling down on censorship. I actually believe that.

I believe, you know, he is the motivation here, I think. It's not that he wants to do the right thing or he's suddenly seen. God or he's had an epiphany because the timing of all these things simply correlates with who's in office. Oh, absolutely. 2016 was when fact checking began on the platform after a wave of misinformation or disinformation or just crappy information. And then now with Trump coming back, and I'll say some pretty mean things. I mean, Trump threatened to put Zuckerberg in jail. Yeah. So back to like, you know, for the sake of that. I don't think we can say, you know, don't take him seriously literally threatening someone with life in prison, Jason's a big deal. Like, come

off course. But I will say, like, just for the sake of the next four years, like, he, I'm going to just say, like, he says bombastic stuff. He's not able to do that. But what he would be able to do is maybe break Facebook apart or pick the people in office that might have that. Just like Biden picked Lena Kahn who wanted to break things up in big tech and not do M&A. You know, he will have his chance to pick people like Brendan Carr, whatever, who match his philosophy. So it might not be the God King comes down and Biden says break up Google. It might be Biden picks Lena Con. Lena Con says we're breaking up Google. And the same thing goes for Trump, right? That's kind of how our democracy works for better or worse. I mean, can I quibble with that just a little bit? I think that having

someone come in with a particular antitrust perspective is more meritorious than going in with a particular animus against one company or an executive. And Trump agrees... Okay, yeah, that's totally fair. That's totally fair, yeah. Trump agrees that his threats were, quoting from Politico, incoming President Donald Trump said the new approach was, quote, probably due to threats he made against the technology mogul. So Trump thinks he got his pound of flesh here. And I think this sets the tone, not even making a judgment here, I think this sets the tone for the next, at least year of Trump's administration, because he'll have a grace period before presidents become less popular as the terms go on.

So he'll have a period of time when Congress is under his party. He's a new, newly elected president, not stuck with years of incumbency. And so I think during that period of time, we will see more of this. I just, that's disappointing to me as someone who likes to free market versus Kings. Now, the good news here is, um, I don't think they were actually using any of this fact checking for anything. It wasn't actually being implemented on the site in any major way. it was strictly a way for them to deflect or pretend they were doing something. What did matter was the decisions they made. And we talked about this on the program many years ago was this oversight board,

which you can go see at oversight board.com. Zuck funded this, like, $150 million. It was originally like $10 or $20 million. I saw $250. Is it the latest number that I saw? That's probably the total over time. I saw once, but like a lot of money. a lot of money to put a bunch of like, let's face it, like very elite academic people into a group and say, hey, when we make decisions for these, what is it, almost 3 billion people using our platforms, yeah, and it's well over 2 billion. You know, we're going to let you adjudicate some of them and give, you know, your decision as opposed to us making the decision. And fact checking, you know, is different than a terms of service. But let's pause for a second.

These are all companies that get to choose how they operate them. Reddit is pseudonymous. You don't have to use a real name. LinkedIn, you got to use a real name. Okay, yeah, one's a message part about video games and whatever. Or, you know, originally was a video game about like hobbies, passions. The other one was like a business network. Like, business network, you've got to have real names.

Like, what's the point? And so you can have all these different things exist. But this is big because it is the largest. And if you were to look at Zuckerberg's decision making, he also, it's super important. Oh, here we go. Oh, my God. It's over $3.3. $3.9 billion.

This is a Q3 number, and that was a 5% year over year. So we'll have to see what it is now in the end of 2024. But that's the latest from their earnings report. 3.29 billion people, Jason, is more than, well, there's about 8.5 billion people in the planet. Something like that. Yeah. If that number isn't right. I plead the fact that we are doing this nice and early.

Well, anyway, I mean, it's literally there in the document. So over 3 billion people using the platform. He kicked the president off for the safety issue. The oversight board said, hey, that was like a weird decision. Like, maybe in the short term, like, if you thought there was going to be another January 6th and, you know, maybe Trump would incite it. That was actually the common thinking, man. I know that's not something people really want to talk about now. they kind of memory hole all that moment in time. But there was a moment in time, Republicans and

Democrats were in unison like, hey, Trump might say something even crazier and cause like January 6 times 10 or 100. There was like an actual fear from Republicans, from Democrats, both sides of the aisle. And the media like, oh my God, like, what do we do here if he tweets? Like, everybody, instead of coming to the Capitol, everybody come to this location, everybody come to that location. Let's give him hell here. Let's give him hell there. It just felt like he was out of control at that time, I'm talking about Trump here, and that this could be crazy, and maybe people got, even more people would get hurt or people could get killed, right? Because he had so many followers. And then that's when Twitter banned him, YouTube banned him. It was in unison. Everybody banned him.

You know, at the same time, the oversight board then came and said, hey, we're going to overturn that, basically. Here's our advice. And then there was this whole thing where is that going to take their advice or not. I just want to put it out there. So people are super crystal clear. He's the God King. he has what's called super voting shares. He controls and rules this 3 billion person network with an iron fist. However, however, if but 10% of people were to stop posting because they disagree with his decisions, he would change his decisions. He cares about winning.

That's why the number is so big. That's why it's 3.29 billion. Yeah. Because he cares so much about that number going up. He's addicted to that stuff. I know him. I know how he thinks. And you don't need to be a genius.

You don't, you know, I don't have a personal relationship, but I don't overstate it here. But I know him since he started his career. You know, in fact, the first time I met him was when it was a private social network. He wanted to win more than anything. He wants to be accepted. He wants to be popular, all this stuff. And the reason he has three billion people is because he's willing to do whatever it takes. So as an entrepreneur listening to This Week in startups, he's like the perfect example.

of somebody who's win at all costs. And he sees now that winning at all costs meant kick Trump off the platform because that was the popular decision. To censor people, that was the popular decision. Do not let people talk about issues that they can talk about on other platforms. Which is his right. It's his business. All right, founders, let's kick off the new year by talking about your website. If you're launching something new in 2025 or you need to refresh your brand, and I bet you do, you need to use Squarespace.

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Yes. But he's in control. But, Remember, as users, at any point in time, users could opt out of using that system. Yep. If you don't want him to be so powerful, all you have to do is do what I did. I don't go on Facebook once every couple of months. In fact, I just had to reload it because they'll get into my Instagram.

I had to do it because I was authenticating so we could stream to our... I started to get restreamed to go to my Instagram and try to figure it out. It doesn't work very well. But you can just not use these products or services. And I don't. And you don't. And you know what? I think there's going to be many people who just say, you know what?

I just don't think I want to use his product or service. And then he would change his decisions if you don't like them or you can compete and make your own products. And you know what? Now we have blue sky. Now you have created threads. You have blue sky. People can create any, you have a mastodon. I mean, these things don't have insignificant number of people.

And I just read that blue sky is raising at $700 million dollar valuation. Yes. so we'll talk about that in a second but yes it's not as insurmountable compete with succorberg as you think it's true but there's a lot of things there for you to comment on I'm sure you have some thoughts I have so many thoughts but like the thing the thing that I the thing that I don't like here is that I think that we're speaking occasionally in too broad of terms like for example that Facebook is now a free speech haven it's absolutely not so for example you can't have female presenting nipples on

Instagram. Now, you might think, free the nipple was a whole movement, right? Right. And so I just, I just decided I remembered that. And so I went to the Facebook, sorry, the meta transparency center under the community standards section, subsection, adult nudity and sexual activity. And they say, we restrict that because some people in our community may be sensitive to the sort of content, particularly due to cultural background or age. Fair enough. But that is making a value judgment that limits speech based on the corporation. And so to me, watching them say, And I went through this morning the changes that Facebook made to its hate speech rules. You can now dump on trans people as much as you want.

Okay. But you can't have nipples because one is politically expedient and the other is bad for business. And to me, this is not free speech. This is just a company following the trends, trying to maximize income. I don't want to give them the moral imprimatur of free speech when they're not doing it. Absolutely. cares. The reason there will not be a nipple on there, or a female nipple, I should say, is because it's not good for advertising. Exactly. Disney, ivory soap, Apple, they don't want

to be near breasts. And so this is the reason. And other platforms, like, might have no problem with it. They get more traffic. They get less advertising. They make that decision. But I think it's super important for people to give him zero credit on a moral basis that he's making some great moral judgment has nothing to do. This is just breast tax folks. He's just going with the crowd as to what is best for shareholders in business, which means you should buy the stock, you should own the stock, I own the stock. It's going to do phenomenal. I feel guilty owning it, but it's a great trade. And it will keep growing and he'll always win because he's always going to do this. It has nothing to, if Democrats win next time and they say, you know what,

we want to have this set of topics be the ones that we censor or we, whatever they, what is it called when you depromote something? Deboost, shadow ban, deprioritize. Deprioritized. There you go. That's the word. Yeah, we're going through all the ways to move stuff down your feed. It's early and late, guys.

We're doing our best. Well, here's what I think. I think ultimately what we're going to see with social networks here is the idea that I think all the social networks are going to just start to move to. it's going to be more like Reddit, maybe 4chan, like X, where there's just a,

you're going to have to as a consumer, understand, it's the Wild West. These are, these, there's this idea that it's going to be groomed and clean like LinkedIn or like Facebook used to be

where, you know, if you said something about the COVID vaccine, you might get kicked off or deprioritized or labeled. You know, all this kind of stuff is just, it's going to lean towards free speech, which I like.

You know, that's my personal belief, but I also believe people should be able to do what they want to do. I kind of like having multiple choices. I like that LinkedIn doesn't have fake names, and I like that they don't have nudity on LinkedIn or other, you know, like spicy content or whatever on LinkedIn because I'm there to do business. I also like that Reddit has pseudonyms

because people, I feel over time can be honest about their reviews of stuff, and I can click on their profile and see what else they wrote. And yeah, I understand I might be getting duped. There might be somebody in there who's getting paid off by, I don't know, some movie to write something. But I don't take it all too seriously. It's like one little piece of information from you, Reddit. You know, LinkedIn is one piece of information.

And then I come to my own version of the truth. So you're going to have to like lower your standards as to like how valid the information is on these. I just find the, I know this is my Boy Scoutness coming out. And we've talked about this before. But I do find the posturing. annoying.

Like, adding Dana White to the, the meta board is such a sop to Trump, to try to buy favor with the incoming administration. It's just,

it strikes me as a little bit gross. Like, for example, if Dana White... Or savvy. I see this. I started and I was like, well, that's a savvy move. Now he's got like...

What happened to merit? What happened to merit? What happened to only hiring people who are good? If Dana White was a lefty... For a board, it's just about access and power. And he gets more power and more access, right? He's got a...

He had ground to make up here. Just like Tim Cook's got ground to make up here, right? So they're all giving a little donation here, inauguration, whatever it is. And in this case, you get Dana White on your board. Dana White's obviously good friends with Trump. Boom. And Trump probably prefers community notes, and he came out publicly talking about this. this is great.

Look, I, you know, Facebook is moving. They said the Republican on Fox, to Fox and Friends to pitch this to jump. It's, to,

to me, business savvy should not be predicated on kissing political rinks. And I, I think that like, it's, I wrote about this. I'm like, this is probably a good business choice.

But I do not like that our system, our system is allowing this to be the business norm. Because I don't think it's healthy. And it, it, booed. Jason. I say boo to it. But I will say Mark wins and Mark keeps winning

and Mark has all the shares. One last thing about this before we go. You said about owning meta stock. Here's an example about how we all do. So I pulled up the Fidelity total market index fund. And if you look at its holdings here,

you will see that 2% of it is in meta, only behind Amazon, Microsoft, and Vidi and Apple. So if you buy the market, you're buying a lot of Zucker And I think that's very interesting. By the way, Magnificent 7, anybody? I mean, just look at this.

It's crazy. It is crazy. Yeah, we were talking about that on All In or Chimoth was talking about it all in. It just, what an amazing, how weighted index funds are getting to the Mag 7. But these companies are getting wildly profitable. And they're going to continue your wildly profitable because of AI like we talked about here. So more to come on this decision. it is his network.

If you don't like it, create a competitor. Don't use his network. Stop complaining about it, everybody. I mean, listen, and the great part about this is like, all these people went to like threads, and they're like,

Zuckerberg's got our back. You know, it's going to be better. And I'm like, hmm, are you sure? Okay. The biggest lesson of meta throughout all its iterations and histories is do not trust it as a platform

because they will never trust you. You suck is a really good operating system. Unless, unless you are the person who's running reality labs, because then he has your back to the tune of several billion dollars a quarter. He does believe in that one. Yeah. Yeah. We don't believe in that one.

All right. Where do you want to go from here, Jason? We can talk about some invidia stuff. We can talk about some couple, some funding rounds that are coming up, Anthropic, blue sky. We got Ventured data. The Nvidia stuff was really interesting. There were, there were two pieces I thought were super interesting. One, he made a MacBank.

mini that costs $3,000. That's absurdly powerful. And then the other one is he seems to be making like real world models and simulations that I believe are open source. And this is something that could be incredibly beneficial for people building robots or self-driving cars. If there was an open source way to understand the world, then collectively more people could build things that move around the world, whether it's a drone or a train.

robot or a burrito delivery robot or a walking dog or whatever. So I think those two are the most interesting to me. I don't know if you had any other stuff that you thought was interesting. I want to talk about the project digits. If you don't know what we're talking about, here is Nvidia's latest toy that everyone's going to want. Forget the Apple Vision Pro. This is going to be awesome.

So what they've done is taking a single Blackwell chip. Their upcoming awesome AI superfutable. computer chip and stuck it in a box that you can buy for your house. So instead of having to go to AWS or Azure and rent an instance and fire it up and pay them, you can for $3,000 get a NVIDIA GB10 Grace Blackwell Super Chip, which has a petap of AI computing performance. Basically, you can run a 200 billion parameter model at home for 3K. Now, this is definitely going to be a bit of a gimmick and probably not going to change the world. But Jason, if you're a company that has developers working on AI, you're paying them 200, 250 a year, probably.

Yes. So, why would you give me 1% or fraction of a percent to have this on their desk? Exactly. I'd say the thing that's really interesting about things that start as toys or as hobbies. This feels like the Raspberry Pi. Yes. It feels like, you know, the PC in the early days, you know, these things were toys and, you know, people were tinkering with them,

and then an application comes out, and then people really want it. And then everybody has to have it. The Palm Pilot, you know, and the general magic machines were like these little digital assistants. They were PDA's personal digital assistance. They had a dictionary on them, a calendar on them.

They weren't connected to the internet. You had to plug them in with a, you know, a big fat cable into your computer to get the data to sync. It never worked. It took an hour. You know, and then all of a sudden, now we all have iPhones. in Android phones.

In fact, I got, by the way, I got the Google Pixel 9 fold. Uh-huh. Have you used one of these foldable phones yet? Uh, my father-in-law has one. I don't know if I've actually taken it out of his hands and used it. It's incredible.

Really? Oh, okay. I thought it was a gimmick. I thought it was stupid. And now I have one. Uh-huh. And the Google 9 integration with Gemini. is like everything that Alexa and Siri should have been times 100, it actually works now.

So you know when we were like doing testing previously we had Sunny on and we were like asking it to do certain tasks, it just wouldn't do it. Yes. Now I'm starting to ask tests, like, hey, open Google Play and download this app for me. And it did it. And I was like, whoa. Or it pulled up the page and I had still to click the install. That's better than Siri, which would give you, sorry.

Yeah, Siri should be three Bing results. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't know, I'm going to search the web, maybe, but. So it's actually understanding, like, the operating system and, like, jumping out and actually actually doing functional things for me. So, and then when you're using your phone and you're on the, when it's closed, you have a screen. And, you know, you can just use it like that. You answer the phone or you text.

But then, you know, you're sitting in your bed or you're in line at Starbucks or having a Starbucks or here I was having a coffee, you know, in the secco. you know, after skiing a little bit, I open it up, and I open Slack. And I start talking to you, I start talking to other people. And the keyboard splits and goes to either side and thumbing. And then I'm using speech to text, which kind of works now. And I get this screen that's kind of like, remember the iPad Mini that people kind of liked as like a big iPhone? And it's pretty great. But you couldn't carry an iPad Mini with you because it didn't fold.

And this thing folds, and it folds. and I don't feel like I'm going to break it. It feels sturdy. Now, the last one, I saw Marquez was just saying it was garbage. So this works. The reason this relates to this blackwell thing is, I think, you know, putting out this little hardware as a 1.0 kind of play with it kind of thing, you might have people start playing with this and somebody builds an application that everybody's like, I've got to have that.

I need that. Yes. And I'll buy it. I don't know what that is, but $3,000 is a lot of money, but not for the hobbyist's crap. You know, the hobby people spend a lot of money on a lot of things. Like, I ski, I spend thousands of dollars a year on skiing. Cycling,000 with traveling.

Cycling, people buy $10,000 bikes and they lob them. So I think this is kind of like reminds me of the muscle car or PC movements. If you remember, like people used to change their carburetor, they would put in better tires, They would change spark plugs. You do all this kind of fun stuff. And the PC era, people would add a hard drive. They would add memory chips to get more memory. This is all done by opening the computer up and putting in cards.

And, you know, there was always very complicated in the 80s and 90s to do this stuff. I think that's what I see with this Blackwell. What are they calling this device? Project digits, and it's going to be made by third parties. So I think it's kind of the Microsoft model like the EAR thing and then have OEMs built. Oh, that's even better. So that's kind of a shot across the bow of like the PC industry or whatever. Because what if this thing, can it run Windows?

If I recall the research I did, the answer is no. It sits next to your Mac or Windows PC. But back to your point about toys to tools, gen 1, okay, gen 2 if it runs Linux and I can, or Chrome OS or something. Or somebody puts in, you know, some other. Raspberry Pi like device and it comes as one unit. Sure. And now you got a Mac Mini that can kind of do both.

And, you know, these new Mac Mini M4s, I was talking about them on the show, how incredible they are. Yeah. Those, I saw somebody stacking those, connecting them together and then running LLMs on them. That's awesome. When you see this kind of hobby stuff going on, get curious. Get curious. Very easy to dismiss, but get curious because somebody's going to take three or four of these

things and put it in a car or do something. with it and it's going to be magical. So, you know, like, if you put that $3,000 thing on, you know, a bicycle or a motorcycle or something, what's it going to be able to do? You put it on a drone, what's it going to be able to do? You put it on a boat. You know, I'm picking things that move around the real world, the robot. This could escalate quickly, folks. I think this is, like, invidia's at the top of their game with a lot of money being, having a lot of fun and running a lot of experiments. You know what? The same thing happened at Google with Project Loon, Google Fiber, Google City. Remember they did Google City? I do. Nobody remembers any of these projects anymore

except you and I who were passionate about these projects and cover them. You know what? You know what all those projects wound up being? Waymo. Yeah. Forget every project, Google was Project X? What was the lab called? Google X, right. And so Google Glass was in there. Project Loon. Project Loon was a balloon that would spread Wi-Fi didn't work. Starlink works better. Wing, they had a drone delivery service. Hey, maybe that was too early.

That's right. Yeah. The last was too early. But these moonshots, if 19 of 20 didn't work, and we don't even know what other ones were in there, you know, well, let's assume there are 20. And WAMO works, which it is apparently working pretty well, so that work to do. All worth it. That's what I'm, that's the vibes I'm getting.

from Nvidia and Jensen right now. I cannot agree more. I was blown away by the sheer scale of things they announced. I mean, we haven't even mentioned, for example, the foundation models they put together. Their computer vision stuff,

they had autonomous driving announcements. They dropped an entire new line of PC gaming GPUs that I'm going to buy, by the way, I'm going to get one. But I do want to go back just for a second to the idea of the foldable phone, because I found something for you, Jason,

that I think you're going to love. So Lenovo had a rollable laptop concept. And this year, I see, yes, they announced that they are actually going to build it. It's going to launch this year for $3,500. And I have the video for you. And I think that you're going to love this because I'm a rollable PC concept. Wait a second. That's not standard of laptop.

Watch this. Look at that. Look at that. Oh my God. For people who are watching. Thank you. The screen of a laptop. is extending like a shade.

You just press a button. And it adds several inches to your laptop screen. Genius. So this is the type of thing that I'm sure Apple will eventually make in seven years after Android. But this does mean that eventually

my MacBook Pro will have a screen that expands. Because do you recall back when Android phones were getting bigger and everyone called them fablets as a dis? Yes. And now my iPhone is the huge. The fact that Apple doesn't have a foldable phone, to me, is crazy right now. Yes.

They would make one that would be extraordinary. It would sell like hotcakes. And I think maybe what they're doing is waiting for this to be a little more rugged. I think the issue is like, will they break or not? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. This second one feels super rugged. I've had it for a couple of weeks now, maybe two weeks.

And it feels solid. I've opened and closed it, you know, 500 times, you know, I don't feel like it's, and I open and closed it all the time, 10 times a day, no problem. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's really nice. And you know what I, it's like silly stuff, but like watching a YouTube video or an NBA game, you know, I was on the plane. Usually I would take out my laptop if I want to watch the next game or a movie, if I've downloaded something. And then I have this. I open it up.

I can watch the movie on it. It's really nice. So I, you just nailed it. If Apple makes this, we don't need iPads anymore. Not that we need iPads now, but they go away. I want to make a quick technology point, though, because you just reminded me as something, I had a moment when I was blown away by technology, and I want to give a shout out to some stuff that doesn't get a lot of love. Slack and iOS.

So I was, I think it was Monday night. I was taking care of the girls, and I was talking to Bianca on the investment side, because she's the local god king of software. and I had a question about Coda. And we were going over this. And I literally have a baby in a carrier. I'm sitting in the living room on the floor and I'm talking to Bianca on my phone. And she screen shared into Cota.

And I just, I knew it. I knew it existed. But I hadn't had it shown to me as it was so slick, so fast, so high res. We were a voice chat with video. It was just, I was like, okay, this is. Slack has Zoom built in with huddles. And huddles, you can do screen sharing. And you know what?

Slack does a really bad. This is what happens. When a startup gets bought by a company and they stop doing keynotes like Jensen's doing, you don't get this like fervor around a product anymore. And so these great product announcements, you just don't have them. This is why like independent companies can kind of thrive and they get more aggressive and releasing more innovative products. Whereas in a big company, like, if I,

I asked you, who's the CEO, who's running Slack? You wouldn't know. Nobody knows who's running Slack. I read her name. I read an interview with her. Sure. A month or two ago. Yeah.

And where's she doing a keynote where she releases 10 new features? No. Well, no, because Mark does the keynotes over there. There you go, right? And so you really, it's very hard for companies to have 10 different products and have all of them really aggressively going after different markets. But Zoom is, keeps at it. a ton of features and you do see, you know, Zoom getting credit for them, you know, to a larger extent.

They did add channels to Zoom to kind of like counter what Slack was doing and they don't work. It's a janky, bad product. The U.X is terrible. Yeah. It just doesn't work. The calendar in there worked pretty good in Zoom. I find that I find myself, I used to open my Google calendar to get to Zoom. now I go to Zoom

it's got my calendar in there and it kind of worked pretty well so sometimes I'll find myself changing my behavior and going to and that's when you know you have something that's when I'm willing to actively change my behavior by the way one last thing from the previous segment you said that you were using voice dictation

inside of Slack I'm using it generally on the operating system level I think Apple's is solid and Google's is just transcendent. Like, bulletproof. I don't, I don't think anyone should give you more tools to send

more Slock messages. I think I think that, I think that's the crisis. One last thing on the Nvidia point, though, because we have a couple of companies on the Twis 500, etched rebellions, mythic, Samba Nova, that are building AI-specific chips. And I was pretty excited about them. Because I'm thought, look, here's like, so many different ways to go about this model of trying to have faster, more efficient, better, AI, crowsy. crunching chips. And then

Nvidia came out with their series of CES announcements. I just kind of sat back and I was like, good luck to the startups because this is a company that is really firing on nine out of eight cylinders right now. And I just, I hope someone can knock a piece off of them. But well, there are going to be cases where,

you know, you can make unique silicon cheaper in a vertical and faster, cheaper, better, faster. So, you know, it's not like you're going to build a hundred thousand in one of these chips. But for inference,

you have Brock, which Sunday's working on, and they're starting to put in a lot of hardware now. You've started to see them on their account. If you follow Sundee, you see them shipping a bunch of these things to different parts of the world and building data centers.

And then in the Teslas, they have their own card with their own chips on it. So you're starting to see people say, you know what, I don't want to give 50% of my margin to Nvidia. If I build my own, which, by the way, is what Steve Jobs realized at a certain point, hey, how much are we given to Intel? How much are we given to Qualcomm?

You know, some of these things are patents. You can't get away from them. But, you know, the idea that Apple would make their own chips was kind of crazy. Yeah, there's Sundib Mandra, and he is shipping racks on racks on racks of raw inference service. So when you ask a query, this makes it go really fast. fast to have those when you're building, they're not for building a model. They're for inference. But I mean, inference is going to be much bigger than the model training market. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot going on. I did see BYD launched a Batmobile. Did you see that? It was in the

thread that you shared with me in the show. I'm going to put out for us. Yes. Shout out to Alex and the team, Maddie, everybody doing a great job. We try to get 10% better a week here, 2% better, 3% better every episode compounding three episodes a week. We can be 10% better. If each of these episodes is 3% better, let me know how you think we could be better, just add us and mention us. You know, if you want better show notes,

you want better chapters, whatever it is, better topics. We always want to make it a little better for you to learn and just get an edge when you're building your startup. But this BYT, I saw in the show notes and what is happening here? Yeah, make it full screen. Look at the story. folks.

There's no one in the driver's car with a crazy spoiler. Obviously a lot inspired by Tesla from B-Y-D. They kind of steal everything. But watch that. What? It jumps.

Also, this is a McLaren. This is a McLaren. Right. I was looking at the interior. Oh, yeah. The interior is straight rip. Straight rip to have it. So it just for those people

who aren't watching, this thing looks like a McLaren. It's got a spoiler, like an aftermarket spoiler. That's huge. So it looks kind of like a Batmobile. And I guess you press a button and it jumps up two or three inches off the ground?

But because it's going so fast, a couple of inches of altitude gives you quite a lot of horizontal distance so we can jump over potholes. Jason, this does solve the enormous market hole for billionaires running from the cops who are on a poor road who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture. Or the spike strip. Oh, the spike strip if you're in a spike film.

It's been better. I like it. I'm punching it up. So yes, that's what this is for. If you're running from the cops and a spy show, no, this is like Batmobile level stuff. There's no functional use for this thing, except for us to talk about it. Well played, BYD.

This is the point of CS. Come out with the feature that we can't help but talk about. Why do you need your car to jump two and a half inches in the ground and then land properly? It doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that? Do you press a button on the steering wheel? I'm throwing away my supero.

slicks and a machine gun. What is this? Sky Hunter? It makes no sense to me, but I love it. I absolutely love it. And if you want to know what it is, it's the BYD Supercar, um, young wing, U-9 and it can jump apparently according to our notes six meters forward. Uh, on the show notes point, though, you were talking about that when I was pulling up that video. Uh, we forgot to change the permissions on the second iteration of this so people could leave comments. And I know that because someone emailed in. So, I think that people like it. So we are going to keep doing this.

If you want to follow along at this week and startups.com slash docket. We'll have the latest docket up top. And we're going to have a historical archive of preceding dockets down below. So if you're watching an older show, want to see a fact chart, data point, it'll be there. We're going to keep doing this. It's been good fun. Can I squeeze in one tiny note about a different story before we go? Yes.

And then I want to tell you about the minivan in Japan that I'm losing my mind over. Okay, I can't wait for that. Really briefly, two things that came out from the world of AI economics that I think are worth discussing. One, Anthropic is, according to reporting from the journal, in talks to raise about $2 billion more from Lightspeed, $60 billion valuation. Company is on a roughly $875 million run rate. Why do we care? Because they raised $4 billion recently from Amazon.

Well, the thing is, they have about a 69x run rate multiple, which is very, very expensive. And I wanted to compare that to OpenAI, 3.7 billion run rate, $157 billion valuation, 42x. So then I asked Jason, why is Anthropic being valued at a higher run rate multiple than OpenAI? My thought was, Anthropic makes most of its money B2B, and Open AI makes more sustainable than out against Gemini and GROC. Precisely. And Zuckerberg, which we just mentioned, kid likes to win. Oh, look at that. Wow.

So Sam Waltman tweeted insane thing, we're currently losing money in Open Eye. Pro suspicions. People use it much more than expected. The $200.00 a month version of OpenAI that has more 0-1 access. So they're losing money, hand over fist. And I guess people think they're making $6 billion this year or something. They're going to double it. I don't doubt those numbers.

I do doubt that you're going to be able to charge for these things and make a profit off of them because I think people with existing businesses, franchises, are just going to make them bring. So Twitter will have it free. Apple will have it free. Google will have it free. Google already makes it basically free. I pay for the $20 one, but $20 is close to free.

It'll be free eventually. Microsoft will make it free. Somebody said that Sam, who's been tweeting about AGI a whole bunch, might be trying to raise that $300 billion is the word on the street. Well, that would explain a lot of the... 300 billion. Okay. So let's war game that.

if you buy into a company on the private markets at $300 billion, you're expecting at least a trillion dollar company in the end. Yeah, or check of your money for sure. Yeah, if you're putting $10 billion or $20 billion into it. Yeah. So a trilly.

Yeah. Yeah, there's about 10 companies. $3 trillion. Yeah, but I mean, if, if not open AI in the AI game, yeah, who would you put up there? Because, because XAI is worth, oh, crap, I forget, 40, 50. Yeah. Anthropics worth 60.

I mean, I just think we're losing the script a little bit on these valuations and people are withholding, you know, their disbelief and putting that on the side and saying, hey, we have preferred shares. We put a $10 million into the $10 billion into this. Things not going to be worth less than $10 billion or whatever the preference stack is now, $50 billion, maybe it's $30 billion. Things are going to be worth more than $30 billion. We'll at least get our money back. We'll take a flyer. I'd do it. I do it. All right. Yeah, you might. You might. Japanese minivan? Would you like? I just sent you the link. I haven't pulled up. Let's do it. Oh, you do. Okay.

So I've been riding in these in Japan. It's called the Alford. Like, Alford, you're a butler kind of thing. It looks like a standard mom minivan, soccer mom minivan. Soccer down minivan. I'm going to hit play on this while you talk. You don't need to have the sound on it. And it has the most comfortable seats in the back.

So when you get in this thing, and it's so easy to get in and out of, it's where do you see the cabin? Oh. You basically have these incredibly luxurious seats that in a tray table, it's basically like a first-class seat in a minivan. And you're completely inconspicuous from the outside. On the inside, it looks like a private jet. I want this so much. you lay down in these seats there's two seats

captain seats and in the back there's a regular bench there's two captain seats that have a control panel where you can with the LED you know

and you just set the heat you can lay down in it it is like the greatest first class seat on you know emirates or you know whatever

incredible international airline and it's two hours from the airport to Naseco. I slept like a baby for an hour and a half that never happens to me. I get car stick. I was playing chess and doing slack and tweeting nonsense about Zuckerberg, and I didn't get motion signals. So I'm trying to figure out how do I import one of these? This is my dream car. Why are they not selling this here? And I was looking at getting a sprinter van like an executive coach to drive around it. You know what those go for? Actually, I don't.

$250,000. Because they're all custom-made. They're not manufactured. This thing's a minivan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The totality of the geniuses, they just put two unbelievable seats in it. They go for $60,000. So I don't know who can get me one.

Well, I know who's your ally in this. It's Eric Bond from Hustle Fund because he-Oh, I like Eric. He's smart. He's also the only guy I know who's a minivan enthusiast. And he, every time you talk about how many kids you have, he's like, have you bought a minivan yet? He's insanely on point about it. And maybe he has a point. Maybe I've been wrong this whole time about minivans.

Here's the thing. Mini fans are very easy to get in and out of. The sliding doors are everything. And having a work chair slash sleeper thing is extraordinary. This would be an incredible seller here in the United States. And I like that you wouldn't know. Here's the thing. Vans are smoother than SUVs.

Oh, yeah. Vans are so smooth when you're just, They're buttery smooth on the road. I don't know about safety, but anyway, shout out to our friends over at Toyota for making something unbelievably cool that I am loving. Oh. And it's kind of like high and low. Shout out to Akira Kurosawa since I'm on my Japanese name. High low.

High end, low end. Same time. Absolutely brilliant. We'll see you next time in this weekend startups. I'll be back in a couple weeks. I'll be going to the inauguration, not the actual inauguration, but I'll be doing a bunch of podcasts. Even the inauguration, we'll probably do a This Weekend Startups from there as well. So it'll be prepared.

And we are doing the show notes if you want to see them. Thisweekendstarves.com slash docket. Go there, this week and start off. com docket and you'll see what we're going to have on the show. And we start to have six hours before. Then you can also see stuff in the show notes. You can see those show notes in the docket when you, You open up your app, if you're using a cool app, it has the notes there.

The one thing I want to try to put in the notes as we get 10% better a week, 3% better an episode, 2.5% better an episode, is putting images into those. So there's some advanced things. Like we do chapters on this week in startups, but you need to have an advanced player that has chapters. And you can also put unique album art. So I think you can do album art per episode. We've got to figure that out.

And we've got to figure out how to enhance those show notes inside of the podcast. notes. But for now, this week and startups.com slash docking. Get in on the docket. Tell us what you want us to talk about. Give us like little nukes and crannies check. Maddie and the researchers team work. Maybe we missed a citation or you have better data for us. We'll see

you all next time. Bye-bye.