This Week in Startups - Microsoft Layoffs, Immigration Blunders, & Office Hours with Jeremy Redman of Airfive | E2127

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Today’s show: Microsoft lays off 6,000 employees despite record profits, signaling a ruthless new phase in big tech. Jason, Lon, and Alex discuss what it means for the talent market, why tightening U.S. immigration could cripple startup innovation, and whether AI startup Windsurf is selling too early as OpenAI circles. Plus, Klarna’s AI customer service backfires, IPO momentum returns, and Office Hours with airfive founder Jeremy Redman pitches a bold new prepaid SaaS model.Timestamps:(0:00) Episode Teaser(2:40) Why ex-Microsoft staffers are talking smack on Blind(10:08) Atlassian - Head to https://www.atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(15:58) Checking out ElevenLabs’ wild new AI soundboard(20:28) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit ⁠https://fidelityprivateshares.com⁠! Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription.(24:02) What is Bottom Up TAM and why it isn’t dirty like it sounds(30:10) Google Gemini - It uses AI to help you write, code, and create in one interactive space. Try it at gemini.google.com/canvas.(33:52) Cohere missed revenue estimates but things aren’t THAT bleak!(37:01) Why America NEEDS highly skilled immigrants(43:12) Working the “I Have a Secret” strategy with Jeremy from AirfiveSubscribe 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:EleveLabs Sound Board: https://elevenlabs.io/sound-effects/soundboardLikable: https://likeable.co/airfive: https://airfive.com/Follow Jeremy:X: https://x.com/thejeremyredmanLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejeremyredman/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:(10:08) Atlassian - Head to https://www.atlassian.com/startups/twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months.(20:28) Fidelity Private Shares℠ - Visit ⁠https://fidelityprivateshares.com⁠! Mention our podcast and receive 20% off your first-year paid subscription.(30:10) Google Gemini - It uses AI to help you write, code, and create in one interactive space. Try it at gemini.google.com/canvas.Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

If we make it harder to get a visa to come build here and to hire here, we are literally handing the baton of technological leadership to places where those people would have come from. Like, U.S. technology companies would not be as strong if so many Europeans weren't hopping United flights over from London and Paris. Not even just Europeans. I mean, you know, Indian people and people from China, South America. All around the world. I was just thinking about a couple of the companies in particular.

But to me, this is seeding our competitors. advantage as the technology and startup capital of the world. That is a mistake. That is stupid. A huge mistake. I want more companies here. Yeah. This week in startups is brought to you by Atlassian. From MVP to IPO, Atlassian for startups provide your team the right tools to plan, track,

and collaborate on work. Head to atlassian.com slash startup slash twist to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months. Fidelity private shares. If you want the all-in-one equity management platform, Fidelity Private Shares has you covered. Visit FidelityPrivate shares.com and mention this podcast for 20% off your first year subscription. And Google Gemini. Unlock the power of AI with Google Gemini. Experience the next generation of artificial intelligence. Jimini, Google's most capable AI model, is designed to transform the way you work, create, and innovate. Try it at jimini.com.com slash canvas. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I've been doing this for 14 years. My lord, I'm exhausted. It's Friday, May 16th. With me, Lon Harris and Alex Wilhelm. We're going to go through big tech. We're going to do it at office hours. If you're passionate about tech, startups, finance, media, all that great stuff. You're in the right place. Let's get started, gentlemen. You can find us on YouTube, X Twitter, linked at all those great places. Just search for this week in startups. Alex, I had asked you to just keep track of IPOs by month.

You're keeping track of that, yeah? I have an IPO update for us today, and I will have charts for us on Monday of all the last 16 months of IPOs, I think. Perfect. So we're going to keep track of that for you, because exits are critically important. I have had now three or four discussions. Ever since Trump sort of wound down the tariff turmoil, the trade turmoil, whatever you want to call it, 4DHS, all of a sudden, M&A's back.

So here we are, people are starting to think about IPOs, etc. So we're going to get that dialed in for you as an audience because it's important when you're running a company. You're going to start having to evaluate these offers and make decisions. Lon, the war between talent, technology, and management is raging. It's a little bit of a cold war and a standoff, but it is now becoming a full-blown, at least on TikTok and the socials, X, blue sky is falling. This is going to become an outright war because something happened just yesterday or the day before. Microsoft, which has record profits. Am I correct, Alex, record profits at this moment in time?

Yes. Record profits. They've done layoffs and riffs before, decided to cut 3% of their staff, 6,000 people. This is not a small action. 3% seems like a small number, but 6,000 is a large number of highly paid in. individuals. This is a lot of software engineers. It's a lot of project managers, a lot of, you know, really interesting titles. And this comes on the heels of other layoffs and return to office by Uber, Amazon, Google, meta. There's something happening here. And I think we know what it is.

The deal between lawn management and talent. I'm going to say talent in our industry. Management and talent. Owners of the business, responsible for the bottom line, the talent that helps them execute on the vision, has been, hey, if things are good, things are good, we're making money, we're profitable, just relax, there's nothing to worry about. Because we're massively profitable, we're printing money. O contraire, mon prayer, things are going smashingly for Microsoft, and they're doing, 6,000 people just hit the bricks. I just pulled the data for you on Microsoft's profitability, to put this into context for everybody, in their most recent quarter, $25.8 billion worth of net income, Jason, up 18% year over year.

That's nearly $10 billion a month in profit and apparently not enough. So these layoffs, we don't have the data about all of them, but we do know about the layoffs in Washington State, which is where Redmond is, which is where Microsoft is based, of course. And Bloomberg put together a chart here showing what got cut. And if you look at this, Jason, the very top category is software engineering. And then there's a variety of different management roles, product management, business program management, that sort of thing.

Now, we've talked a lot on the show about how companies are trying to get flatter, trying to get more into founder mode, have the founder and CEO more in the details. From that perspective, Jason, I can understand having PMs and other roles that used to sit in between the CEO and the ICs lose some of their primacy. But I was shocked at just how many of these cuts in Washington State from Microsoft in this RIF were software engineers. Because what does Microsoft make? They make frickin software, you know?

Strike me as a very different era in tech. Gone are the days when Google was warehousing talent. Today, people don't want talent. And you tweeted a post from Blind, indicating that apparently a lot of senior people were cut because they were the most expensive. So not only did we not want SWEs, maybe we don't want senior folks in general. Yeah, Lon, maybe you could bring up and give us a little color commentary here on what was on Blind.

For people don't know, Blind is one of these anonymous social networks for people to vent. at work. They tend to be like a back channel. And I think in order to post too at Microsoft.com, you have to register with them within at Microsoft email, which seems like a very dangerous thing to do. Right. You know, on Microsoft and you're on blind and I catch you. I think that's a snap firing. But okay. Yeah, that's a little bit weird. But I, so Alex, you look up how you get how you're able to post a blind. I want to know that mechanic there. But all right. So we do have some of these tweets from Blind, they tweeted layoffs are happening at Microsoft around 3%. Here's what our users are saying. So this top tweet, can we start unionizing now or do we want to

get screwed some more? And a lot of people are sharing, you know, like DM them for referrals to other employers, DM for ByteDance TikTok, DM for Amazon referral. This one says, laid off after nine years. I was a U.X designer in Azure. Pretty wild. Still processing the news. It's been confirmed that they cut 3% of the workforce around 6,000 people. I'm not going to look for a new role right away, but I appreciate everyone offering referrals in this thread. Other people are talking about how desperately bad the job market is. So yeah, people are sharing, commiserating,

and they're not happy here. Earning $600,000 a year would result in good enough savings, do not scramble for a new job. I'm like those less fortunate. Got to boost the share price. That's the key one that I teed off of when we were in our group chat, or in Slack. This is really interesting. $600,000 total comp employees. People are wondering, who gets paid $600,000? It's not like the CFO's salary or the, you know, like a management

salary. That's total comp. So if you started with Microsoft and you had a four-year grant and Microsoft shares doubled since that time, you might have been given $250k salary and $100K a year or $200k a year in stock rents, but they could have doubled. So now you've got people making $600,000 a year, I got to think that there's some bean counter somewhere looking at this saying, hey, the company's going to function perfectly well on with 97% of the talent. Obviously, it will. And we don't care what the signals in terms of loyalty to the team. And this will have a very deep impact on the bottom line. If we can show the markets, hey, we're doing more with less. growing 10% a year or whatever they're growing, while cutting 600K salaries. I mean, it's a level

of getting fit in austerity. It is very appealing to shareholders, and it's very disturbing to rank and file. I got to think if you're at Microsoft right now and you see a 600K, nine-year vet sitting next to you get walked out the door, you could be perplexed unless the person was really the bottom 3% of performers. But if they were, Jason, wouldn't that imply that Microsoft's internal people controls were terrible, because why would you have a bottom 3% performer who was making 600? So either the company's screwed up

or they're just telling their staff that they should not expect to work at this company for more than a couple of years because they'll get too expensive. That's just brutal to institutional knowledge, keeping senior staff who are critical. To me, it feels a little self-defeating for a company that's profitable, Jason.

Am I just being too soft-hearted? Yeah, I would say the truth probably lies between the two. You know, in each of these individual cases, is when this happens, they go to each team, Alex, and they say, we want to tighten up here. You've got a 200-person team. Tell us the five people who are the lowest performers. And that person then says, oh, well, I could give you the 10% of lowest performers because there's one in 10 people in every team who are pretty annoying. I'm going to say on average to the managers

who they're, call them the troubled child, you know, the person who just is not dialed in, not getting it done. So for managers, they're always looking for an excuse to cut the bottom person. It's almost, I don't know about you, Lon, but you've been in charge of 10 or 20 person teams before. Sure. Yeah. You know, number 19 or 20 on that 20 person team, you're like, that's the person who shows up late, leaves early, is breaking my jobs. Almost never do you have a 20 out of 20 like all start. If you're shipping a product or building a company, you need to be organized and you know that at last.

has exactly what you need to streamline your work and to crush your goals. You're going to need a system and Atlassian is the system for startups. Atlassian for startups is packed with all the tools that you need. Jira that tracks every single task, every sprint, every bug you have in your startup confluence. That's for team collaboration and documentation and my favorite. Oh man, we use this all the time. Lume. Atlassian software helps companies like Canva, CloudFair, Rivian, And mine, launch, it helps us grow. It helps us innovate. And it creates a sense of common organization within your startups. I want you to check out, Atlassian for startups. Eligible startups get up to 50 seats. That's right. You heard it correct. Not five seats. Add a zero, 50 seats for a free for one year. Head to atlasian.com slash startups slash twist for complete details and eligibility. Thank you to Atlassian for making great products that I use every day. Right. I would say, yeah, it's once you get to 12, 15 or more, that a group of that size, there's always going to be a few stragglers. Like, you're aware of the parabola of I've got a few incredibly strong people here. I've got mostly pretty good people, very capable, good workers. And then I've got my two or three at the back of the bus. Yeah. Jack Welch was like just cut five percent of people a year. And most management theory kind of believe that. I believe it was Jack Welch at GE. Yeah, it was.

just 5%, and there's something to be said for that. I do think I have been on high-performing teams where, you know, if I look at my investment team at launch right now, as an example, just a bunch of people just tightened up got a little bit tight right now. Yes, I got 11 people. And I can tell you like, you know, these three or four people are very impressive to me right now. Out of those three or four people who are the most impressive, like two of them are recently impressive to me. So I kind of feel like I've got an all-star team right now. I don't feel like, maybe there's a couple people I think who could, you know, increase 10% or 20%.

But I don't feel like we got any duds on the investment team who are not working hard and not committed. Absolutely not. I'm looking right into capital. There is nobody on the investment team right now. I would cut. Yes. And so I, but the reason I'm bringing that up is you can do that to your point.

You said the number was 12 to 15. Yeah. I think it's 11 exactly. I think we're right there. Yeah. I do think if I added five more people suddenly, I would be in the same position. I did have a question here for you guys.

is now we heard just this week Klarna they had let go of a whole bunch of their customer service people and replace them with AI and now they're sort of backtracking a little they're like we maybe were a little aggressive we're having some low quality issues and do you think there's any chance that companies I think Microsoft seems to be going pretty gradually 3% is a fairly reasonable number I think do you think there's any chance that companies might get overzealous trying to replace their coders with AI and then we might see a backtrack in a a few months or a year or no? Not from what I'm seeing.

You know, when I see people applying AI to different business sectors, I, the reason the corner story became the corner story was because he was like, wholesale, we're done, 700 people out the door. Right. And everybody was like, what? Like, why wouldn't you cut 10% see how it goes, cut 20%, see how it goes? You know, you would maybe taper off and just see if you can reallocate people. But he came out with the grand pronouncement and then this one.

And so I wonder if the Klarna thing was a bit performative in some ways, Alex, where maybe that was like, I want to be the AI first CEO, you know, and I want to, I'm not saying candor, but I want to get cred for that. This sounds silly that a CEO, and I don't know the CEO of Klarna all that well, and I'm not accusing him of anything nefarious. However, you see CEO of behavior. I mean, leaders of companies can be a bit narcissistic, bombastic, it's, yeah, it's like effervescent. It's like virtual signaling instead of virtue signaling. Well, it is virtue signaling to shareholders, venture capitalists, you're bored.

And, you know, one of the great ways to virtual signal to the market is say, hey, we're going to demand performance. We're going to have people come, you know, Dara did that, and the stock's at an all-time high. Yeah. again today. The stock hit an all-time high. And you're still here. It's a miracle. I mean, maybe five.

There it goes. Oh, no, we're breaking up both cameras. I want to just add a tiny nibble to this clarder thing. I think it's pretty important. I think Jason, you make a really good point. If you're a fintech company, you probably want to have some AI pixie dust on you. So I totally get that point. But in an interview with Alex Cantorwitz from big technology that came out today, in fact,

Clarna's CEO, Seb, said essentially that they're handling more customer service work to AI, but they're hiring humans for the higher end problems. So I think we're seeing a bifurcation of how AI impacts jobs versus it's all or a retrenchment. So I think that's just a little bit of nuance there for the folks listening. Yeah, I think that makes sense. And I always go back to that Satya Nadella quote from a few months ago where he did that interview and he's talking about it's not replacing people with AI. It's AI and people working together to make something better than you could do before. And I think if you, if CEOs maintain that philosophy, we're going to be okay. AI first all the way. If you're not starting with AI and you're trying to solve a problem in your company, you're making a mistake. Every job wreck should come with. Why am I not doing this with AI? I had this conversation with Freerberg yesterday on our AI basics. Go to this week and start up such basics. All right, I want the soundboard, Lon. Let's start with a little piece of candy here. I know it's not the most important thing, but I like a little visual candy. You said you added it last minute. So that to me sounds like a good setup. Yeah, it's a, it's this really cool.

a custom soundboard that 11 Labs has going. It's a soundboard and a drum machine and an ambient noise generator all at once. And it's basically a text. Show, don't tell. You have a video. Well, I'll load it up. It's like a text to sound effects model. Here it is.

So, yeah, we got this video from 11 Labs showing off their new infinite soundboard, the SB1. Now, with the ambient preset, we have signs like light rain and heavy rain. and maybe the sound of waves as well. Okay. And these have all been generated by just describing the sound and having our model generate the sound effect. So let's say I want to add a new sound to this ambient soundboard. I am going to ask for... Wind.

The sound of rain hitting the roof of a tent. Roof of a tent. And I'm going to click generate. and the model is going to give me four sound effects that have been created completely from scratch that I can choose from and then drop into my soundboard. This is wild. I'm going to listen through these generations. And when I find one that I like, let's go for number four.

I can add it to this button here. So now I can trigger this sound effect in my soundboard. I can also loop these sound effects so I could have this sound effect. ripping round on rotation with the sound of waves as well. You can imagine this being really nice for a guided meditation or perhaps you just want to have some nice ambient signed while you're working and to help you focus. Yeah, I think that's good. Yeah.

I mean, what's interesting about this is there were people who would use sound libraries and make money making these tracks previously and work for com.com or, you know, do. a CD of meditation, et cetera. Now to be able to do it that quickly is just wild. I mean, you're talking about, you know, that might have been a week's work for a sound engineer to work on a project or an app. And now it's just done instantly.

I wonder how they train that. I think one of the things these generative music startups need to disclose or figure out because they will get in trouble is where they got these sounds from on the open web. Because sound is different. than, you know, just text. Like, you might be able to figure out where that came from.

And so there are sound libraries. I had thought about this. Like, it doesn't seem like these guys were out doing field recordings. Maybe they were. Maybe. I mean, it's possible. But it's more likely that they found archives of previously recorded sound effects and use that as their training.

I'm guessing. I don't have that data, but I'm guessing that's what they do. Or there's a sound library that you can license for. Right. 100 grand and take all and they own it and they're just like yeah feel free to train it and that would be the right way to do it. I bet you they disclosed somewhere on their website where they got these things and how to do it because you're just inviting a lawsuit if you went on the open web and you just found rain on a tent and then you could bring it back to somebody else. That's like a

very specific thing. I don't think the AI understands the difference between rain on a tin roof versus a tent unless it had a very specific object. So if I said rain on on, you know, a Tom Ford suit left, you know, on a, you know, Atterondack chair. Like, would it be able to do that and actually understand something specific, like rain on a wool coat? I'm generating that exact. Guys, I made an account. I'm generating rain on a Tom Ford suit left on Adirondack chair. So when this is done, we'll see.

We'll see. Right. This is one of those cases where it's like AI plus humans is going to be super. magical because it's like, imagine if you were making, like, I've been in this situation. Like, if you're doing production and you need the sounds of like there's a thunderstorm outside, normally you would need to go pay money, find it in a sound library somewhere, license it, to be able to do that instantly and like put it in your scene or your movie or your TV show. Like overnight, it may, it changes the game for all that. This advertisement is paid by Fidelity

private shares. All right, founders, we all know, tap tables, due diligence, and of course, managing investors is a huge headache. But there's a very simple solution for you. Today we're talking with Kristen Kraft, an old friend of mine, and she works at Fidelity Private Chairs, a new group over Fidelity. You've heard of Fidelity before. And they have a mission to help startup simplify equity management. They're going to save you money. They're going to give you better service. Welcome to the program, Kristen. Thank you so much, Jason. It's great to see you again. Yeah, great to see you as well. Maybe just from a product perspective, what are you trying to accomplish with the product. So, Jason, we are super excited about our cap table management and data room

platform. We want to make it super simple for founders and startup operators to manage all sort of ownership and equity in the company and essentially prepare to raise. We want to make sure that everybody goes into these fundraising conversations well prepared. They're ready to share their cap table and that they're ready to go through due diligence as they're trying to close their around. So from a product perspective, that is where we're laser focused. And that product is really well built, really strong attention to detail in the way that Fidelity is known and beloved for. So if you want an all-in-one equity management platform FidelityPrivate shares. They've got you covered. Visit FidelityPrivate shares.com. That's one word. No spaces, no dashes. Fidelity

privateshairs.com. And hey, mention this week in startups. They'll give you 20% off your first year subscription, once again, FidelityPrivate shares.com, and tell them that you heard about it here on this weekend startups. Do you guys want to hear it? Do you want to hear the, yeah, I do want to hear what ruining my Tom Ford suit. Yeah, that's okay, $6,000 suit. I mean, what was the line from, by the way, what was the line from arrested development? Yeah, it's like, yeah, the guy in the $6,000 suit's really going to hold the elevator. Come on. Come on. Come on. Who's that guy? He's the guy on smart list. Will Arnette. Will Arnette, yes. He would, he would, as a trust Fun nemo baby.

As Joe Bluth. As Joe Bluth. Great show. Shout out to that niche show. Okay, let's hear my Tom Ford suit. Let's see if this works.

Generation number one. It's pretty good. No, that's a Hugo boss. Let me see the next one. All right. Okay. To Jay Crewe. That's like off the rack.

Let me come next one. That's the Tom Ford. Yeah, they got it. All right. I mean, it does actually sound like, I'm going to be honest. It does sound like the pitter of rain ruining a fine suit. Yeah.

Not a fine suit, but a garment. I mean, shout out to 11 labs. I have like five more I want to do that are incredibly specific and I'm not just that I'm not going to do. I want to point out that this is why I think people are so excited about what we call voice AI generally, but probably just sound AI. I just think that we kind of forget how much we use audio in our day-to-day life as humans, as people in the workforce.

It could be enormous. And also, they made a really great consumer-facing tool here. It's easy to use. I didn't have to give them my credit card number to sign up to play with it. I'm not saying it's a chat GPT moment, but I can see this driving a lot of interest into 11 labs from a lot of new sources. So points to them. Great idea.

$3.3 billion was the last valuation for 11 labs. And I'm seeing revenue reporting somewhere between 50 and 90 million error, so doing quite well for itself. Let's go with your next story, Alex. What do you got? I'm taking windsurf. So last year we talked to the guys behind Kodium. They rebranded to WinSurf.

We talked about that relatively recently. The big news here is that. they dropped three new models. And they're called the S-W-E family, which stands for Software Engineer. And Jason, the argument that they're making is that AI models that are great for just writing code are only doing a fraction of the overall work. They say that developers do things across different services digitally, they have different work patterns.

And so the idea is building AI models that can do a bit more than just generating code and running, say, a unit test on it. And so they dropped three models, SWE, one light, the regular one, and then a mini version. And so the idea is to essentially take AI models in a more agented context and have them do a lot more for developers.

I think this pairs nicely with our Microsoft story that we started with about where they're cutting staff at the company. And I think this just goes to show that while we do discuss, humans plus AI doing quite a lot, it does feel like the balance is moving in one direction as I watch the technology advance. Thoughts?

Okay. So windsurf. helps developers write code faster. Agentic means agents. So now they have agents going out and doing things autonomously on behalf of developers and or human beings. And Open AI bought this because it's an important category, perhaps the most important category, you know, in AI

because it's the one that has a finite dataset. It's going to make the best impact. Developers are expensive and we're in a war with talent. So even the OpenAI team, if they have access to windsurf early, just the purchase of it for $3 billion, right, which is 1% of the market cap of Open AI right now, if it made all the developers, let's just say they bought it and they didn't release it and they just used it for internal use only, they would need to make Open AI 1% more valuable to pay for the cost. And this is when we get into the Yum Yum Land of M&A. We've been talking about the Rathalina Khan, and I told you there's like a little stuff brewing here. Here's where an acquirer has a thesis.

And the thesis can lead to extraordinary outcomes for founders, investors in that company. I just gave a thesis, which is you would never think of. We buy this thing. We give early access to our developers. If they're 1%. If they make the company 1% better because of it, oh my gosh. So here we go. They're making much faster progress because they are dedicated team.

They probably have a significant earnout for hitting milestones. And this is going to just make Open AI, the company, go faster. And it's going to make everybody who uses it. So this seems like, yeah, pretty interesting. So the thing that took me by surprise, though, is I thought the windsurf deal was kind of locked up with Open AI. Because everyone reported roughly $3 billion, kind of a done deal. actually I don't think it's officially closed yet. And so I'm actually kind of watching Windsor

go its own path forward here. It was, everyone's reported it that it's going to happen in the works, nearly done, $3 billion. But they're doing that. It's in talks. It's like it's not, we're not,

yeah, it's not finalized. Wait, wait, if it's not finalized, I got a piece of advice here. They made an agreement. I was a week ago to buy it for $3 billion.

But it's not an opening I had looked at cursor, we knew that. And two days ago, the New York Times reported Open AI and talks to acquire Windsor. That's a big difference. Bloomberg said a week ago that OpenAI reached an agreement to buy Windsor. Now it's OpenAI and talks. I'm going to go ahead and advise the team that Windsor to stop negotiations, leave this deal, raise a billion from us, Yoshi-San, or whoever.

UAE, Saudi, Elon, Elon's got a billion dollars. WinServe needs to go talk to three other people because I think they can add, I don't know, they might be able to add 3X. This should be a $10 billion deal. I think they're selling way too early. This is a big mistake.

I mean, listen, I'm not trying to make the check go up for Sam Altman. I'm just saying pretty clear, based on the reporting and based on what I'm seeing here, that this company could do better than $3 billion at this moment in time. This is a big category. What is Pursar making in revenue? I think the last number we heard was 200 million ARR or 300 million ARR depending on the reporting. Winsurf is at roughly 100 million plus or minus.

And for folks out there who want more on this company, episode 264 here on Quist from last December's when we had Faroon, the CEO on. Jason, can I just take a victory lap really quick here? Sure, please. I'm going to just go ahead and just pull this up. This is my blog. I said, do the deal, but not for $3 billion. How about $5?

I like the year going for a higher number. But I just feel like selling for 30x ARR right now growing this fast is just almost like a dereliction of duty. I don't know who's the investor in this company. Like who's on the board and who the investor is. But I guess sometimes getting a quick win is good. But this might be an Instagram YouTube like situation where, you know, in 10 years, this company could be worth $100 billion. Like, so what are we doing here? This is one of the biggest prizes in AI.

I would say, you know, if you were going to pick the top 10 prizes in AI, robotics and the humanoid robot is one, self-driving is one, biology, drug discovery, that whole sort of category is one. And this is one. If we're going to talk, and probably military applications is another. Yeah. This is one of the biggest prizes. I think the Perkins, General Catalyst, Green Oaks, Founders Fund. Those is, that's the investors. Somebody's got to get on the horn here and block this immediately. But if you're General Catalyst and you put the last money in last August, 3X in eight months. Yeah, but you know,

General Catalyst is like one of these mega multi-billion dollar funds. I think they are, this is a great moment to be in in our industry. So many companies are developing powerful new AI apps that are going to radically improve your productivity, but Google has been off to the races.

They got a new product. It's called Canvas. And this platform comes with Gemini 2.5 Pro model baked in. It's vibe code ready. Ideal for control freaks like me who have ideas and want to see what they look like in practice right away. So you can go from a rough concept to an image or even a functioning website in just minutes with a few prompts. You know how like you build a website for a project you're working on? You don't touch it for three years. I want you right now to go use canvas in Gemini 2.5 Pro and I want you to go say make this website better. Here's my goals. We're talking about rich, robust, fully functioning prototypes near instantly. Gemini Canvas is reinventing front-end

development. So if you got some ideas and you want to turn them into documents, code, or prototypes right now, get your vibe code on Gemini Canvas with the Gemini 2.5 Pro model. Visit jemini.com slash canvas to see for yourself when you can see very clearly the path to a $10 billion company. And when you see that, like I saw that with Uber and Robin Hood, it became pretty clear. Like, you don't see that with every company. You know, you see, okay, yeah, I could see this getting to $100 million in revenue. I can see this getting to $500 million in revenue. But if they're $16 to, I've heard the number $15 million and $30 million as a number of developers in the world. I'll pick $20 million. as just an easy boge here.

You know, these things are going to make each developer 10% more effective. And developer being 10% more effective on an average salary of 100,000 globally is $10,000, $10,000 times $2,000 would be $10,000. At $10,000 per developer is $20 billion. And if you were to double that, $40 billion. Yeah, 40 billion. And the TAM here is enormous. And also the whole future is going to run off software, right? So like it's, these trends aren't going to slow down.

40 billion in value. Even if you only claim 10% of that, that's $4 billion in revenue. Yep. So what I did hear in this back of the envelope calculation is what a lot of, is what we call bottom up TAM. We study this in our accelerators, TAM, total addressable market. You can say, you know, what's the market for, you know, a co-pilots. And you could say, okay, well, this is the number of players. Here's what they're making.

They're growing at this percentage. That's one way to make the tam. What I did was I did a bottom-up tam of using a different variable. The implied efficiency created per year per developer, how many developers average salary. So the value creation is at least a 10% lift. It might be 25% lift per year per developer. A 10% lift on their salary is a market value of, you know, $30, 40, 50 billion dollars, maybe $100 billion if it was 20% lift. So then how much of that could the cursor market capture and the windsurf market? Yeah. Deal off. Yeah. Best advice deal off. Go for the gold. And here's the thing. These founders, go ahead and sell $100 million in secondary each. Tell general catalyst, tell founders fund, they got the money called Brian Singerman. Hey, Brian, I need 50 million.

My two co-founders, they need 50 million each. We're going to go buy our net jets guards and our ski houses and we're done here. Next story. Well, let's talk about cohere. So they're an enterprise AI startup. They build AI models and tools to index corporate data for AI use and also software to help customers build their own AI agents. So they're growing quickly, but they dramatically missed some early revenue projections. It looks like it cohere. The information reported that their projected revenue, 450 million in 2024, 1.8 billion in 2025, and they projected 4.3 billion in revenue for 2026. However, the actual IRL, ARR only hit 35 million in March of 2024 and 70 million in February of 2025. A pretty big gap there showing just how hard it is to make these kinds of

projections in the frothy world of AI. So they're valued at 5.5 billion when they raised 500 million last July, and a $6 billion valuation at 70 million ARR in February. That's around an 86 times ARR multiple. Yeah, if you were to look at what the market's trading at, if you pulled up HubSpot or Palantier, these are two very hot companies that have subscription models. You know, what are they trading at. Those are the two hottest. Palantir has left reality. That's a meme stock. So we'll take that one off the table. But if you were to look at, um, HubSpot, 12.67% on a price sales basis, Jason, that's trailing. A.R is a little bit more aggressive. Um, but that's the number for that right now. So call 13 times their top line sales, four times that equals their market cap. That's called

price to sales. So that would be, yeah, one 20th of this valuation. There's 13. 13X, trade-aline revenue, Jason. Sorry, I must have to be spoken. Eventually, these private market valuations will run into a public market and a re-underwriting, as my friend Shemaw would say, you have to re-underwrite it. And when you re-underwrite it, you know, and Warren Buffett or Bill Ackman or, you know, pick your public market investor. When you get re-underrated, they're going to say, okay, yeah, this is what it's worth. And so, but that's the, you know, no crying in the casino. know, you're making a bet. We just talked about the previous company, Windsor, if they're making a bet, too. So maybe this group had the chance to sell at a crazy valuation and didn't. And, uh-oh, they should have

taken it. So they are trying to sort of paint a picture that it's not quite as bad as it seems the company told the information that while its early estimates were obviously overly optimistic, they're now seeing hockey stick-shaped revenue growth that they anticipated before they just think it was maybe happening a little later than usual. So, That's at least the smiley face they're putting on it for the moment. And I reached out to the company because we do that now. We have a lot of emails going back and forth with founders and such. They send us a link to a Reuters article and said, we can't comment further, but read this.

And that piece noted that they had crossed roughly 100 million error as of May. So plus 30 from February Jason feels very strong to me. Yeah. Yeah. So all right. Well, that's breaking news here on this week in startups. There was a great post from our friends of Rired magazine, going through some folks who work in the legal immigration profession, discussing how there is more

pushback from the administration about H1B visas. This is a story that I wanted to bring up because, one, Jason, over on your other show, you did have the president Don pushed him on high school immigration, and he said, staple those green cards to those diplomas, you and I virtually high-fived over the idea, and now we're seeing kind of the opposite. Now, this is not shocking, but I did see in that piece a tweet from your friend, Mr. Peasman, from Pair VC that I thought was particularly apropos to the current moment.

I want to just talk about this. So our friend from Pair says, too many Pair VC founders are getting their visas challenge and it's downright absurd. Entrepreneurs Build America. So let's open the doors for innovators not shut them. I am, I guess, a little surprised given how prominent we have seen technology people

be in the administration, that there hasn't been a longer grace period for high school immigration, especially for founders of startups, than we're currently seen. And I'm just curious, Jason, are you seen this show up at Founder You, at the Launch Accelerator,

or on your group chats that I'm not part of? So those are two information sources. I don't have an example of a founder not getting a green card or into the country. I have heard one or two. I want to bring a developer. I'm trying to bring somebody in from Canada. They're kind of like in the Canadian Way Station.

So there should be a little more discussion about this from our friends who are in the administration. I'm not going to say, like, I'm not going to call people out by Dene. But you all know my friends who are in the Middumistration. I think it's a delicate balance inside the Maga Party. They all know, with the exception of maybe Stephen Miller and Steve Manon, who are like, generally seem like lunatics to me, I'll be totally honest, like, when it comes to this issue.

I mean, they seem to like literally want to deport 15 or 20 million people and drag them out of the country at an expense of $20, $40,000 each and people who have kids in schools here who are cleaning bathrooms, picking cherries, and washing dishes, and just incredible human beings living the American dream. It's just abhorrent and ridiculous and impractical. And you could come up with a million ways to describe how stupid it is, to how stupid, cruel, or impractical it is to drag 15 million people that we brought into this country. And when I say we, I mean America. We have to own that fact, whether it happened under Clinton, Bush, Obama,

Trump won, with plenty of people came in under Trump one, or Biden when a lot of people came in. You can't make this a partisan issue. We're a country of immigrants. This country let people in across the last five, six, seven presidents

since the 80s. The Republicans were the biggest proponents of immigration and NAFTA. NAFTA, am I pronounced it like that? NAFTA. NAFTA. North American free trade agreement. We don't talk about it anymore.

NAFTA. Yeah. Why don't we talk about that anymore? Like, NAFTA was this whole EU before the EU. The Republicans wanted an open border in the north and the south, right? They were the proponents and the architects of it. And everybody else just executed on it. So putting it aside, fight for this skilled immigration. And there's a very simple way to frame it. If you want to get everybody on board, America has to own. If it is a mistake that we let so many people, and we have to own it. And we have to deal with it in a gracious, intelligent way and the most gracious, intelligent way, and thoughtful way to do it, an economically sound way to do it, is to say, if you're contributing to our society, here's 10 years of taxes you need to pay and a path to citizenship and, you know, behave yourself like everybody else, don't commit any crimes. And if you stay on the straight and hour and you pay some taxes, 10 years from now, you know, whatever, we'll get you. The green car, we'll get your citizenship. Just do the right thing. And then for everybody else,

hey, if you're going to come here and create jobs, go get the Trump gold and get the Trump gold card. And you get three thousand extra miles on United when you get. And none of us want to live in a society where secret police are rounding people up on the streets and forcing them into vans and shipping them off to other countries. Like, I'm not in danger of being deported. I was born and raised in America, but I don't want to live in that. I want to say that I think we're losing the little bit of the start of focus here, which is that if we make it harder to get a visa, to come build here and to hire here, we are literally handing the baton of technological leadership to places where those people would have come from. Like, U.S. technology companies would not be as

strong if so many Europeans weren't hopping United flights over from London and Paris. Not even just Europeans. I mean, you know, Indian people and people from China, South America. All around the world. I was just thinking about a couple of the companies in particular, but to me, this is seeding our competitive advantage as the technology and startup capital, of the world. That is a mistake. That is stupid. A huge mistake.

I want more companies here. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about framing. I literally was having this discussion with high profile people in and around the administration. I just said, frame this as talent recruitment and job creation and you're done. Talent recruitment is great.

Frame it as asylum, you know, and everything else. And it's just going to become bedlam. Just we want one million incredibly highly qualified people per year. year who create jobs to come to this country. The number is one million. I've decided. One million. That's it. Everybody can, I mean, a million people who create jobs and you have to create jobs. And if you don't, if you want to come here and you create 10 jobs on average, you can stay. If you create less than 10 jobs in five years, hit the road. Yeah. That's the end. Create some economic value or, you know, that's it. You can't, you can't stay. All right. Now that we've gone through the

can-use stories of the day. We are going to go to office hours. And today, Jason, we're talking all about email, customer support, and the world of AI and how they all come together at a company called Air 5. This is in the launch accelerator cohort number 34. And we're talking to Jeremy Redmond, who's doing his second round of launch accelerated work. Please welcome Jeremy to the program. All right, Jeremy, welcome to the program. What was your first company? I'm trying to remember. Yeah, it was V1. Do you remember that? The no code app builder. Yes, I do remember that.

Yes. What was your first cohort that you were in for V1? LA 18. Okay. Wow. That was when we were in person in San Francisco. Every Thursday we go get burgers and yeah. You want to know what's funny.

I was the very first. I had a visit to San Francisco where we first met the week before COVID hit. And it was like, Like, I think you actually announced as like the COVID launch or something like that as like one of the presentations, which I thought was funny. And that was the last in-person one. So like when I came, I think a couple weeks later, like maybe a month later, we were the first fully remote cohort. Wow. All over Zoom.

Crazy. And so tell us about the new company. Give a little pitch here, elevator pitch, a really simple sentence. And tell us what you're working on now. Yeah, so Air 5 is an AI assistant that automates customer support email. So small teams can focus on growth. Pretty amazing. This is an incredibly competitive space.

Why are you going to win this space in the face of so many competitors who, you know, want to attack customer support with AI? Yeah, so I didn't even want to build this. So I wanted to use some of these competitors that, of which you speak. So we were going to use Intercom. And Intercom got real expensive, really fast. I think it started, the entry price was like $150 a month.

And then you start, every response was a dollar. And you're like, this is getting beyond my control. And then every response that they generated that sent to our customers, it was from Intercom's AI Finn. So they're really. servicing enterprise-based companies, and a lot of the other competitors are doing that as well. So we kind of swoop in there and get the freelancers, the small teams, solo founders, and kind of build a suite of products to support them. Got it. And so this is a tried and true competitive

strategy. We're going to make something simpler, easier to use, more affordable for SMBs. If you were to look at a product like Salesforce, considered like the gold standard in managing a salesman. team, you could come in with a, you know, a lightweight version that's not, what does Salesforce cost for salesperson today? Is it like $2,000 a person or something? I mean, it's like $50 grand to set up, right? Like, yeah. That's the thing with Salesforce is you need a then a Salesforce engineer. The whole thing's super expensive. Yeah. And then, you know, you look at, I remember we used to set up mail servers and then MailChimp came along and it was cheap. And then Beehive came along and you could pay a flat rate fee and have your own domain name. And then substack is free, but they take 10% of your

Anyway, infinite options available. So that's a great strategy. What's the go-to market strategy for somebody trying to create something that's easy to use and super affordable? What is the pricing? And then I'm assuming the pricing is so low, you can't have a sales team out there selling it. Yeah? Yeah, that's great. And that actually dovetails into two of my office hours questions.

So our go-to market strategy is somewhat unique. When we see competitors in the market space that, like you said, small team support is somewhat inundated with a lot of solutions. I mean, you could use Airtable for a similar thing. So what we do is we see those companies with products. We will then build a simpler version of that product. Like we built a lovable clone, actually, called Likeable. And we delivered it to our. community. So what we do is we will do an air table clone, which we did. We do a cold email clone,

which we did. We do a build your landing page clone, which we did. And then we distribute those to our community, which we have about 2,800 affiliates that then go sell that. And they've brought in over half of our revenue to date. Wow. So, and then we just gather feedback and then build the next with the next competitor. And we knew that, like, building... Oh, wow. So this is a strategy of not just doing the email responses and competing with Intercom, but just going down the SaaS stack, creating simpler, cheaper versions and using this affiliate network to distribute it and get feedback on how to make the product

better. So you're basically building a SaaS killing platform. Yes. So, like, with this whole inundation of like vibe coding, you can spin up something open, source and customize it or something from scratch or vibe code something with cursor or likable, which everyone can find at likable.com. So tell me what is the question you have for me. I totally buy the strategy here. I think offering these things for free, collecting data at this stage, since you seem to be

pretty good out of it, giving some money to the affiliates is a great idea. You've got this really interesting concept around that. Maybe the affiliate network is the business for other And selling that to startups, I would be interested in that. If there was an affiliate network that sold tickets to events or, you know, got people to apply to Founder University, I mean, that sounds very interesting as a distribution platform that you built for yourself. Or just getting a bunch of up-and-coming businesses to get a suite of products for one price. I don't know.

There's something interesting. Yeah, I feel like we do, we bounce around, and a lot of it is around this business model, and this is the first question. So we give our customers an option. They can pay one low monthly fee so you can start on Air 5 for $16 a month and get going. And then we distribute it, like you said, we have the initial hundreds customers for every product right away. But you can use our prepaid usage-based model. And that starts at $25.

So what we're realizing with our customers is 80% of people will go for the, usage-based pricing. Interesting. And I think you've spoke about this before, but I think everyone's feeling a little bit of subscription fatigue. And it becomes how much can you get predictable cross-sells and upsells? But I don't know. I believe in that strategy.

Our customers believe in buying that strategy. If you can get two to four years of revenue up front, that's amazing. Usage-based. But I don't know how to sell that to investors when they all expect just an MRR figure. So what's the way you would polish that? I think you have a secret. So there's a theory in startups.

I have a secret, right? The secret I've learned is, oh, yeah, people will actually stay at another person's house, and they're not the people who stay at five-star hotels. They're young people or adventurous people who stay at Airbnb, stay at bed and breakfasts are ready, or they couch surf on Craigslist. So you kind of know this secret.

The founders of Airbnb knew this secret that there were people on the underground who would trade vacation homes or let people stay in their home. If they could stay in their home and they did, there was like a house swapping kind of thing where you would come to New York and I would go to Paris and you stayed in my apartment. I stayed in yours. We vetted each other and it was all done on Craigslist, right? So you have a secret. Now, most investors, if they're thinking, you know, like robots or like this does not pattern match, the MR, A-R-R, turn. formula that we have created. Who gives a fuck about those investors?

You don't want those investors anybody. You want the visionary investors who are like, tell me more. I'd like to consider myself in the non-consensus, you know, Peter T.L. Michael Moritz group, which is, hey, and Bill Gurley, what if it works? What if your crazy idea works? So as you've explained it to me, I'm so excited about it because I'm like, yeah, what if this works? And I was talking to another founder and they were. were in what space? They were in a space where people would buy a piece of software or a piece of

SaaS software for an event and they might use it for a year or two and then, you know, you kind of churned. And I said, well, what if you sold them this on a 50 year basis and you memorialized everything? You know, let's say I'm not going to, it's not this, but I'll make up thing. Like, let's say it was like a tribute website for a funeral, right? And instead of selling them per month, per year, you just said, pay $500. and we will keep this memorial on the internet for 50 years. 10 bucks a year for 50 years. Pay us 500.

You never have to worry going down. And you can put in the email addresses of your kids. They can put in their kids' email addresses and their phone numbers. And it's a family legacy, a tribute to Lon, who we worked with and loved dearly. He went too early. I can't believe I died. Sorry, Lon. Is that why you're so pale tonight?

Yeah, exactly. It's the lighting. It's the lighting. I work a little bit on the lighting. So anyway. a new revenue model. And I told her, you know, like, it's so much cognitive dissonance, this monthly bill and the subscription burnout that pay once. The guys over at 37 signals came up with a Slack competitor where you pay one time a thousand bucks. I'm sure you know about it and

you basically pay for yourself for one time. I think there's a lot of people who are open to this concept. You figured it out. You've got the passion for it. Let's go for it. Let's hope 19 of 20 investors don't understand it. That means you're onto something. If the people who are doing cookie cutter investing don't understand it, you don't need them. They're the people who would be like, do what has already been done. We're looking for something that has a small chance of working, but if it does work, changes the world. So I love it. I love the idea of you selling $100 in credits and use as you go. The reason I unsubscribe for a MailChimp, and I like, literally, we still had one person holding onto their Mailchimp account, and I didn't realize

it was costing $500,000 a year. I was like, get off of that immediately. It was me. It was me, Alex. God damn it. Now we know. know I killed him, and that's why he's got the memorial page. They joked them out. God damn it, Lon, that's my six times. I didn't know we were done with MailChimp. We're on Benton now. We switched over to Benton folks.

Which one? I do inside streaming through Benton now. That's what we set up. Benton, Beehive. Much cheaper. There's a bunch of free options there. So all this legacy stuff, if Milchimp just said to me, hey, pay us 500, as you use it, it'll keep working.

Great. I would have done it. But, you know, so you're on to something. I love that you're on to something new. I'm going to tell you, hold the string, and see where it leads you. Anyway, Jeremy, you got a great company. Can't wait to see in person.

Where are you based now? Los Angeles. And what's your traction like, Jeremy? Oh, dude, way to get that in. Way to get that in. We just got going in December, this last December, and we're about to hit 800K in revenue. Wow.

Wow. And we are gunning, we are gunning for a million dollars. in revenue in quarter two. Perfect. So before you graduate the accelerator, how are you doing in the, what is it, week six or seven in the accelerator right now? Week two.

It's only week two? Or three or four. No, week two, pitching investors. Oh, week two pitching investors. Oh, we have those week zero, whatever. And how's it going with the investors? Bianca doing a good job, Erica doing a good job.

Bianca and Lucas, Lucas, I guess, isn't hands, hands on with that accelerator piece is by the founder you. I don't know how you do this, but you find you find the greatest young founder friendly talent I've ever come in contact with. Shout out Bianca. She's the best. Shout out Bianca.

I don't know how she stays so positive all the time. I could tell you. I could teach you this. So I literally can teach you. I had a realization when we're trying to hire talent. And I looked at the problem we had from first. principles. We as an early stage fund have a lot of people coming at us with ideas, like upwards of 20,000 applications for funding. Second only, I think, to Y Combinator, which has 45,000 applications.

And that's because of the two podcasts, right? I say founder university, I say, hey, launch.com slash apply, 100 applications come in. We got to sort them. So I said to myself, okay, I need an army to sort and meet with folks. So I need to create a system. Remember, systems above goals. The goal is to back enough founders to find another Uber Robin Hood and have those outlier, power law investments pay for all the other ones. And, you know, on a philosophical basis, I want to be super helpful to founders and I'm passionate about innovation and all that stuff. But on a pragmatic basis, we need to hit a 200, 300, 400x company for every 100 we invest in because we want to have a three or four X fund. Okay, great. The math is the math. So we have to

sort through a lot of companies. We have to meet with a lot of companies. How do you do that? We had this concept of an introductory meeting. What's an introductory meeting? We tell people, hey, we got your application. We'd love to meet you and do a quick Zoom, which we can record and share with the rest of the team if it's a really interesting company. And I said, what's the most efficient way to do that? 20 minute, introductory call, 10 minutes of you pitching us your product, five minutes of you asking us questions, five minutes of us, ask you questions, and then we can both mutually agree on should we do another call and do is there any way we can work together? And so I said, how do we get to a hundred of those a week?

Well, you need people who can do five of them a day, some people do eight a day and still have energy on the six, seventh, eighth one. So I then just said, I want to have people when they apply for this position of researcher, then they become analysts, then they become associates. I want them to just do a couple of calls and record the calls and then just show me the video. And then instead of hiring people based on what fancy degree they had, I just look at their energy on the video because the experience of a founder is the person having that conversation with you. Now, they have to be intelligent. They have to be bright. They have to be hard working. They have to be disciplined. But they also have to be engaging on camera. Right. In that Zoom call, the actual work of a venture

capitalist at an accelerator or pre-accelerator is doing 500 calls a year, a thousand calls a year with founders and checking in with them and, you know, whatever. So I optimized for that. And you're experiencing that, which is, I tell them, hire people with enthusiasm. And if they're not fired up with enthusiasm, fire them with enthusiasm. Oh, that is, that, you know, I am so lost all the time I ask you for advice or hear your, hear your answers. Because it's, I sit there and I'm like, how does he, how does you come up with this? Like, I am actually beside myself with that answer. I've never heard that ever.

If you, I've talked with, on my Google sheet, it's 180 VCs, right? A lot of associates. And they don't think the same way. They're not trained the same way. It's really like, how do I climb the ladder and become a principal or a partner? And you kind of feel that. With launch, you really do, uh, double, click on the right things with these people.

And they are just absolutely stellar. Well, and we try to be, like, if you think about what you need as a founder, like you need a quick answer. And you need to make sure that we understand your company. And one of the things I realized early on was I started letting founders review us. So we send them an email 48 or 72 hours after we do a meeting. And then it goes automatically into our Slack with a rating for each person. and it's public to the whole company,

I got really bad ratings. You did. I did. And it was the same piece of advice over and again. Jason didn't understand our business. Jason, you know, and what it is is I processed things very quickly. So people felt like I didn't hear them out enough

and I didn't understand their vision. You got there faster than they could verbalize that. So that's like being a chess player and you're just like, yep, I win. And it's like, yeah, you made a mistake. And here's how it's going to end. He's like, that's not what they want to hear. You know, it's like a master Jedi with their Padawan or something, and they're just like, yeah, I just took off your two legs and your arm and, you know, game over.

You got to like kind of slow down to speed up. So I just slowed down. And I asked very simple questions. And I started pacing the founder. Founder had high energy. It was going fast. I go high, fast. If they're going slow, I just ask them or something.

And then I added something to the script when we meet with founders, Alex. Very simple. at the end of every call when they pitch, I wrote the script for myself and then I trained everybody. Hey, Jeremy. May I repeat back to you my understanding of what you're doing here in the business

to make sure I understand your vision. Yes, you can. Okay. So, you're building a business that makes a more affordable version of common mission-critical SaaS products and you're coming up with a new way to distribute it with these 2,800 affiliates,

and at the same time, you're using a different business model that makes it easier and frictionless for people to give you money in advance of them using the product. Do I understand your vision correctly, Jeremy? I'd walk away with how's this guy, how did you take... Do you remember that? That is so good. You know, like...

Yeah, that feeling you have is the feeling we all want to have. whether it's a friendship or a business. Alex wants me to be able to say to him, Alex, you know, it's great working with you. I know you care about your kids greatly, spending time with them. You love your wife. And you really care about journalistic integrity and fairness because you would even sacrifice your own salary when you were at TechCrunch to talk the team. And cautious optimism, you know, really does embody what your passion is, which is to write

every day and communicate this complicated topics. Like, he knows I understand what makes him tick because I listen to him, you know? And I can do Jason. Jason shows up to work every single day to make more money so we can play high-stakes poker on television. Basically, yes. I haven't been on TV for high-stakes poker TV in a while. I've got to go back. All right, listen, Jeremy, you're awesome.

Wait, J-KEL. Can I ask you one other question? Please. And it was the one thing I wanted to learn while I was here at lunch. Okay. Initially on week zero, we had a, what are your challenges? Yes. And the one thing I came away with right there on the spot was,

I can come up with good answers, right? Like, I can come up with good answers. I easily breathe the business, right? It's second nature. The thing that I would love to hear from you as the world's greatest moderator would be how do you ask great questions? How do you ask great questions? You got to listen to the answer.

You'll listen to the previous answer and then you form your next question. So it's always about pro. actively listening. Active listening is a concept, it's in Jersey to say proactive. There is a concept called active listening in therapy and in the CIA and FBI and profilers, active listening, which is you're really thinking what the person's saying, how they're saying it, why they're saying it, but when you go from there. Yeah.

I love it. Thank you. Jeremy. That was my only thing. 200% prep. That's my, Jason's dead on, but I undergird that with by doing more prep than anyone else will do. And when I talk to founders for like Twos 500 interviews and such, you can always

tell the moment they realized that I cared enough to do the prep work and then they get so much happier. They just light up. I feel like I definitely get that sense from you. The way you geek out about S-1s only wants to make me go public. You know?

Every time I hear that, you get excited about it. I'm like, oh, I'd love to feed that excitement. You know, that's the only goal for us. So it really comes across. Air5.com. And likable.co are the two websites that I have up from you, Jeremy. That's great. Shout out.

Go there. We're launching the likable. com today. And we'll see you all next time on this week's service. Bye-bye. Great job, Jeremy.