This Week in Startups - Nvidia tops Microsoft, FTC sues Adobe, weight loss startups, and more! | E1968

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report f...ast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at http://www.vanta.com/twist .Tech Domains - Don’t miss our “Jam Session with JCal” contest, coming soon! To apply and get more details go to https://jamwithjcal.tech brought to you by .tech domains. Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist * Todays show: Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to discuss Nvidia's rise as the most valuable company (2:34), the GLP-1 phenomenon (11:50), the FTC suing Adobe (34:21), new TWIST500 companies (47:09), and more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (2:34) Nvidia's rise as the most valuable company (10:58) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (11:50) Eli Lilly and the GLP-1 Phenomenon (23:42) .Tech Domains - Apply for the Jam Session with JCal contest today at https://jamwithjcal.tech (25:08) Telehealth and its future (33:00) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (34:21) FTC sues Adobe (47:09) New TWIST500 Companies (1:18:22) Would Amazon buy TikTok? * Subscribe to the TWiST newsletter: https://www.ticker.thisweekinstartups.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Mentioned on the show: https://companiesmarketcap.com https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/david-ricks-eli-lilly-ceo-a67f90d7 https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/06/ftc-takes-action-against-adobe-executives-hiding-fees-preventing-consumers-easily-cancelling https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2024/Adobes-Statement-Regarding-Federal-Trade-Commission-Complaint/default.aspx https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/united-states-files-complaint-against-adobe-and-two-adobe-executives-alleged-violations https://www.justice.gov/opa/media/1356176/dl?inline https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1997859/000119312524162032/d396527ds1a.htm https://www.color.com/blog/colors-copilot-and-partnership-with-openai https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB390 https://frame.work https://creators.wattpad.com https://www.royalroad.com/home https://www.ft.com/content/e33cb565-6d44-4f9a-9105-f3afc03aa732 * New TWIST500 companies: https://albedo.com https://www.dawnaerospace.com https://about.webtoon.com https://www.spacex.com https://www.color.com https://www.biltrewards.com https://sakana.ai * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (11:58) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (23:42) .Tech Domains - Apply for the Jam Session with JCal contest today at https://jamwithjcal.tech (33:00) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's your boy, J. Cow, Jason Kalakanish. You can follow me on Twitter at Jason. At jasonx.com slash Jason. I invested in 100 companies a year, for your first time here with the team of 20. We also have a podcast called This Week in Startups. We've done almost 2,000 episodes.
Starting point is 00:00:17 And my co-host is Alex Wilhelm. He is formerly of a little publication called TechCrunch and an amazing database called Crunchbase. And is the guy who, high school was excited about stocks and startups. He confessed this to me. He was Alex P. Keaton. And you know what? I was running all kinds of great businesses, Jason's hot date, my first business when I was making copies of the Empire Strikes Back from a guy from, I think it was a Gambino family. And I don't know, I don't want to be a rat here and eat cheese.
Starting point is 00:00:49 But anyway, we're both into it. We're both really into startups, technology, and business. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much my three favorite things to talk about. And it's what I've talked about for a long time. So it is always lovely Jason to see you. I am Alex over on X slash Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn and we stream this show live when we do it. We're doing two to three news shows a week. So make sure that you have us on YouTube. You have us on X, LinkedIn, whatever your platform of choice is. We're coming to you wherever you are. Or finance, tech, media, lifestyle, politics, like maybe way down the end. But it's really finance tech, markets, all that good stuff. And we got a full docket today, don't we?
Starting point is 00:01:28 Full pocket. We're talking about the massive market demand for GLP ones, what that can mean for startups and also new technology there. Then Adobe's problems with the FTC over their subscription business and what that means for digital product companies everywhere. New Twist 500 members. It's going to be back show. Let's dive right in. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy. for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist.
Starting point is 00:02:09 Dot Tech domains. Don't miss our jam session with JCal contest coming soon. To apply and get more details, go to jam withjCal.Tech, brought to you by dot tech domains. And lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. The biggest news of the day that I saw right before we jumped on is that Nvidia has taken over the top spot.
Starting point is 00:02:40 It is now the most valuable company in the world. And I'm so glad that didn't become not true since I put this in the docket and then we showed it. But as you can see in the video, we have a list here of all the companies by Market Cap. Invidia, Microsoft, Apple, steep drop to Alphabet, then Amazon. Saudi Aramco, meta, TSM,
Starting point is 00:03:01 Chips, Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate, and then we have Broadcom, and then Eli Lilly, Nova Nordisk, and Tesla. Top 13 in the world. Invidia's on top,
Starting point is 00:03:09 and Jason, I have to say, that feels a little weird. Great company, but I don't know if I would say that if I had to pick one, it would be Nvidia over, say,
Starting point is 00:03:18 a recurring software business. Yeah, I think this is a moment in time. It's clearly not the most important company on this list in my mind in terms of the few, of the future, if you told me I can only bet on one stock and hold it for 10 years, it would not be in video. So, you know, if you were to just do that mental exercise, a company that 10 years
Starting point is 00:03:38 from now, you would still want to own. If you went through this list, Alex, just, you know, work me through it. Who on this list, you know, you look at Microsoft Apple and Alphabet, so is there a very big basis of users, both enterprise and consumer, right, in each case? Absolutely. So Microsoft has been one of the most valuable companies off and on for my entire life. So thinking about just value preservation clearly stands the dust of time. Enterprise and consumer, huge businesses, Azure, OpenAI, that's an easy one. Apple depends on how much you think consumer hardware will do.
Starting point is 00:04:18 Alphabet, I don't think it's going to be, I just don't think they have the juice anymore. Amazon, we talked about a loss. Tell me about that. Why do you think Alphabet has lost? its mojo, it lost its way. That's a controversial, you know, position, I think. Okay. So search came out.
Starting point is 00:04:32 They made search. They made search ads. They changed the world. They had this unbelievable profit cannon that just fired money at them for a long time. But then they failed to have a major second act in the same way that Apple ended up with, you know, Mac, then iPhone, then iPad, then I, the headphones and so forth. And so what they've done is increasingly squeeze search for more and more revenue. That's why I think Google search has gotten.
Starting point is 00:04:55 worse over time. They're panicking. They're doing search generative experience, which is pretty crap. And I think fundamentally, they're not run by a technologist. They're run by a management consultant guy. And it shows in the products and decisions they make. They're good at near-term EPS. But in 10 years, I don't think we're going to be using Google for search. I don't think we're going to be using Gmail for email. I don't think we're going to be living in Google world. You got me on Notion. You broke my Google Docs addiction. Right. Yeah. So, you know, I do think they have a problem about innovating at home. If you were to look at the second act, if there was a second and third act for Alphabet,
Starting point is 00:05:32 aka Google, you'd probably say it's YouTube and Android. Both of those are purchases, not built there. So if you look at what's been built there, Gmail obviously was built there, Chrome was built there. There are great things that have been built at Google, Docs as well, although they did buy a a Docs company that started them off with the Google Docs franchise. I think they built the other pieces. You put all that together.
Starting point is 00:05:56 I think you have a very important insight here. It's not founder led. It's led in a management way. And I think Sundar has to just clean house. I think he would have to become a wartime CEO, right? And he's not a wartime CEO. And he's in a war. He is a consensus builder, manager of people, keep everybody rowing in the same direction.
Starting point is 00:06:21 But I don't get the sense. he's the guy who's going to walk in and say, you know what, you guys are doing a good job, you're fired. I need somebody to do a great job because we're up against an elite competitor. And this is a very hard thing in management. I have struggled with this my whole career. I have a rule. You ever hear of this term of PIP, a performance improvement plan?
Starting point is 00:06:38 I have been a manager in modern corporations. So, yes, I am familiar with all things PIP. It is a load of BS. Yes. If a person needs to be put on a PIP, they need to be shown the door. Now, I have had many instances in my companies, companies we've invested in, companies I run, where somebody will secretly put somebody on a PIP. They'll give them a talking to.
Starting point is 00:07:01 You know what? Business at this level is an elite sport. If somebody comes to practice and they forget their shoes, if they come to practice and they were at the club until 5 a.m. Unless you're Alan Iverson or James Hardin, like, you're some unbelievably elite talent, undeniably elite talent, you are fired. There's no performance improvement plan for the guy who shows up without his sneakers
Starting point is 00:07:26 or the person who shows up and they wear out drinking. You just fire them immediately. This is a message to all startups that I've invested in. When in doubt, there's no doubt. When you have doubts about a person, there's no doubt of what you should do. In an elite pursuit, you fire them. Now, if you're part of a union
Starting point is 00:07:44 and you're part of the Writers Guild at Business Insider or Vox and you have a bunch of rules. I get it. You negotiated that. You bought into it. Management bought into it. You went with a union thing.
Starting point is 00:07:55 You got to control salaries. Okay, that was your decision. Jim Bankoff, Lanzone, whoever is dealing with these unions. I get it. You have to do it that way. It's leaving. But in small companies or even these big companies,
Starting point is 00:08:06 you're going to have to make a decision. You're up against Zuckerberg. Yep. You're up against Elon. You're up against Satya Nadella. These people are hardcore. You're up against Sam Holt. These people are no joke.
Starting point is 00:08:20 These people are no joke. You'll get shived. Two things about that. One, Pips, I think, are a charade, more than an actual technique. The way that I've always heard them explain to me is this is how we avoid getting sued by employees that we fire, which means that they are at best smokescreen. And everyone kind of, I think, knows what they mean, even though they're not detailed that way. So I agree with you there. On the kind of like, who competes at Google?
Starting point is 00:08:48 side of things. I just think that even if you did a pretty big staff reduction, it wouldn't give the company the courage to go back on the crappification of search because that would hurt near-term results. And this reminds me a little bit of, I think it was the interview you did with the intercom guy when he said that this AI way that's coming to software, searches software of a sort, is going to let smaller companies attack market share because incumbents are going to be too busy protecting what they have than building for the future. And that's to me is the thing that Google's going to trip over and hit the deck. Moving on the list, though, just quickly here, Amazon, great company, great business.
Starting point is 00:09:25 AWS has lost its growth momentum. It's just not what it was. So I wouldn't pick as my top company, top three, probably. Saudi Aramco, I mean, I don't know. It's an asset. That's like saying here's a pile of diamonds. You know what it's going to be worth. Those diamonds are not going to magically turn into uranium or something.
Starting point is 00:09:42 So it's even weird to have it on this list, right? But then you get to meta, TSM, Berkshire, Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway is going to have a leadership problem. Obviously, you take them off the list. TSM. I think that's like a very predictable business. Meta is a wildcard. You got to put meta in your top three, I think, or it's got to be in the running.
Starting point is 00:09:58 I would say in the running, really, yeah. Broadcom did well in their last earnings report. AI chips are doing well for them. And then there's two companies that I, that I included in this chart specifically because we're about to talk about something. Yes. Eli Lilly and then Novo Nordisk. If you don't know these two companies, they are big in the GLP1 game.
Starting point is 00:10:13 And Novo Nordisk is singlehandedly boosting the Danish GD Isn't that crazy? Yes, I love that story. Didn't they have a problem with monetary supply in the country because they made so much money? Like they didn't have enough of whatever the Denmark dollar is and they have too many US dollars that just screwed up the banking system. I remember seeing that. The croner, I believe.
Starting point is 00:10:35 Yeah. I think it's at least that was the Danish currency. I'm sure the EU people are going to make, it's the euro. I don't know. But I do know that that Novo Nordas has become this giant, instead of a relatively small country, I will say I'm part Danish. so I'm not being rude here. And then Tesla's number 13 at $587, $188 billion.
Starting point is 00:10:53 So this is a list of big kids. You know, everyone on this list we're talking about is worth a half trillion or more. Listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2 startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt. And you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC2. What is SOC2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC2 compliant. If you don't have your sock too tight, your sales team can't.
Starting point is 00:11:17 close major deals. It's that simple. But thankfully, Vanta makes it really easy to get and renew your SOC2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. Without Vanta, it takes three to five months. Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85% on compliance. Vanta does more than just SOC2. They also automate up to 90% compliance for GDPR, HIPA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock, too. Jason, I do want to talk about Eli Lilly because you and I have been watching this GLP1 phenomenon for a couple of years now. And the growth of these drugs has been simply
Starting point is 00:12:00 amazing. So just start. When did you first hear about a GLP1? I don't care if it's from Eli Lilly or Nobuner. I was in Italy. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in Italy. I had commandeered Chmots beach house. I was public about this. We joked about it on all in. He was away for a week or two. I was writing my book. And I was like, can I borrow your house for 10 days?
Starting point is 00:12:23 Can I stay at your house for 10 days? I'm like, sure. So I'm in Forte de de Monomé. It's not his house yet. They rented a house. Anyway, putting all aside, I'm in there. I'm going for my bike ride. I would hit the beach.
Starting point is 00:12:32 I would ride at the beach. Then I would, you'd have my tradition of smoking a cigar. I would reward myself if I hit my 2,000 words and maybe have a little little cigar, which I never do. And then I'm riding my bike. I'm listening to my friend, Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose. And they're talking about taking an ozhenpic shot. Got it.
Starting point is 00:12:52 And I was really concerned about my weight. I was struggling with it. I had peaked at 213 or something. 185, bounced back up to 198. It just was really struggling with it in my 40s into my 50s. Or this was in my 40s, I guess, late 40s. And I said, you don't want to get back. I'm going to try this thing.
Starting point is 00:13:10 because he had talked about how he turned the pendial all the way up to a high dose, and he started vomiting. But it's crazy. Like, I stopped craving food and he had lost all this fat. So I started it, and I did three or four cycles of it from Osepec to Ogovi to Monjarno. I was covered for a while because I was, in fact, pre-diabetic and obese. My BMI was like really high. And it was very early.
Starting point is 00:13:34 So I guess doctors could get you this under a prescription or it was covered under insurance. I thought a pretty big co-pay, but it wasn't a big deal. And so anyway, that's why when you see old videos of me three or four years ago, my face looks like Ernie and now it looks like births. So I got a little Ozzympic face. And this is a big round face and now I have a slimmer face. But this was the face I had up until I was 35, 36. So I am now at 170, 174 pounds. I've been as low as 169. So anyway, it's about, yeah, 40 pounds of weight loss. I would attribute 30 pounds of it, 75% of it, to these GLP ones. I feel great on them. And I would say the defining thing here is the danger of being
Starting point is 00:14:16 obese versus, you know, whatever the side effects of these drugs are, I made the decision. Being thin and being healthy was better because I had sciatica in my leg, couldn't sleep. I was having breathing problems. I couldn't run. I had like a large list of problems. And then all of a sudden I'm skiing 40 days. I feel great. I'm running again. I mean, this has really changed my life. And so I think you have to consult with your Docker and be thoughtful, but I am currently on Mangarno, and I'm just trying to get to 164, which is my lowest adult weight.
Starting point is 00:14:47 And that's the weight I used to be when I ran the New York City Marathon. So I want to get to 164 and I want to start running 10Ks again, just as a, you know, start. Yeah. So anyway, I'm so enamored by this technology and this innovation. And I think
Starting point is 00:15:03 that if you're overweight or obese, you should just at least do a consultation about it. I was able to acquire Mangarna now from a compounding pharmacy. Got it. Um, which puts it at a price of about $200 a month, I think. It's unbelievably affordable. And there's more to come because, uh, there are significant investment being put in this. I do think this is going to solve the obesity problem in the world. And just to pause for a second, Alex, to think in, you know, first principle sitting here
Starting point is 00:15:35 10 years ago, what are the biggest problems in the world or in the United States? we could say education big problem we could say wealth disparity we would certainly say obesity right and you could sit there and debate three or four of those things technology to solve one of them
Starting point is 00:15:51 this is like I'm convinced the solution so yeah I think that the level of excitement you just showed to talk about your own journey with GLP ones is exactly why I'm so glad they're on the show because that was not in the show docket that's not a bullet point that we were going to hit That was just Jason being so excited about it.
Starting point is 00:16:10 And that's why I think they're so popular because the impact is enormous. So I think if you think that look at Eli Lilly, they did more than $5 billion in revenue last year with GLP1s. And to quote the journal, these drugs are quote on the way to becoming some of the best selling pharmaceuticals of all time. I would scratch out the sum of the and just say best selling. I think we're going to end up there. And for business heads out there, Eli Lilly's stock has risen 50% in the last year. 100% in the last 12 months. We've seen charts here for everyone to take a look at.
Starting point is 00:16:42 You made a five year on that if we have it. Because you know what? When I started taking it, I thought to myself, I should put a trade on. So where was it, like three years ago? 21, 2021, 22. You could have made a lot of money. Yeah, three or four X. So this is a really important note.
Starting point is 00:16:56 You know, when you actually experience something that dramatic, you got to place a bet, right? So it's a stupid decision I made there. But in the reason, you know, I actually, I don't think I've ever talked about my use of these at this length, But the reason I didn't talk about it for the first two years, for two reasons. One, they told me, OZempic was for people with diabetes, not just pre-diabetic. Therefore, it's going to be a shortage.
Starting point is 00:17:19 So I actually took like six months, nine months off from it. When the shortage happened, I just told my doctor, like, let me just, I don't want to be on it if there's a shortage. Right. I'm not very sure signaling. I just, I also, it was like twofold. One, I wanted to see if I would gain the weight back. I did gain like maybe 20% of the weight back.
Starting point is 00:17:33 I was gained back five pounds after I get off of it, but I don't gain back 20 pounds. Yeah. and you know, there's a shortage and I also wanted to make sure like this was safe, right? Like I could be a little experimental with my health,
Starting point is 00:17:47 but I wanted to make sure it was safe. My gut tells me if my family members came to me and said, hey, should I take it? It was a family member, I'd say, absolutely you should take it. Now, I'm not going to make your decision for you,
Starting point is 00:17:58 can't fill the doctor. This isn't financial advice on this show nor I's the type of advice. Yes. But there's a big, there's a couple of big things coming here. And one of the big things, I think,
Starting point is 00:18:06 is you're going to be able to do this without an injection. And an injection every week is a little bit, or every two weeks some people take it. I think that's a hurdle for many people. So maybe, I don't know if you have that in the notes, but there is a pill form that they've been discussing. And Eli Lilly, I believe, is all in on a new drug that's not terseptide,
Starting point is 00:18:30 not semaglutide, because terseptitide. because terseptide is terseptide is the Giorno Yes and so I think the new one is called Ozempic and then there's a new one coming Yes so it really has a drug in the pipeline called Or for Glypron
Starting point is 00:18:53 I presume they'll come up with some better name So we don't have to say that out loud It sounds like one of the enemies or the clans in Dune Well you and I were cool growing up. We immediately for Lord of the Rings and Dune in our references. But the critical thing here, as Jason pointed out, is that this could be in pill form. So right now, there is a shortage of these drugs that are injectables. It turns out it's a lot harder to actually create drugs that are injectables. To make liquids is more difficult.
Starting point is 00:19:19 To scale up the plants, takes time in the years. So they want to make it in a pill form. That's tough because they're very complex, large molecules that are hard. They tell me, do synthesize down into a pill. But Eli Lilly wants to get there first. And the article that we're looking at on screen, if you are on the, the video with us does just discuss how Eli Lilly has been very aggressive to ensure that as we get past this first generation, they're ready because after Prozac lost its patents back in the day, Eli Lee was a little bit of flat-footed. So this is their new thing and they want to make sure they have a next act afterwards going back to the Google point. So I think if we make this a pill,
Starting point is 00:19:53 Jason, it's game-imals. Triples? Triples the market for it? I think so. I would say, yeah. And I know there are millions, if not tens of millions of Americans on this drug right now. Listen, I'm praying that this is a safe drug and that there's no side effects. Again, I made a personal decision. I could not control my weight. I tried everything. Working out trainers, diets, fasting. And I kept doing 10 pounds, 15 pounds, and then I gained back five.
Starting point is 00:20:21 It was just, there's like, somebody explained it to me very interestingly, who was on an Olympic and had this similar type journey. they have lost 50 pounds this woman. And she said, there's the will, yeah, using willpower to lower your calorie intake. And then there's not being hungry. Yeah. And this is very different. When you're constantly thinking of food like I was, and then you stop thinking about food?
Starting point is 00:20:46 And food goes from being the primary driver in your life, or one of the top drivers, you're constantly thinking about food, which is I fell into that group. And then it becomes like, I haven't thought about food all day. Yeah. Maybe I should eat something. And I talk to people who are not on it, who are thin, and they're like, yeah, that's how I feel all the time. It's like, okay, this chemical, my thesis, I'm not a doctor, my theory here, my thesis is some people have more of this. Therefore, they don't have hunger pains all the time.
Starting point is 00:21:13 And that other people have less of it, and they do have cravings all the time. This is also working to help any number of long-tail their symptoms, including addiction. Yes. And to gambling, alcohol, like all kinds of addiction. they're giving this drug. So there is something going on here. And we talked yesterday. I was,
Starting point is 00:21:34 yesterday I was thinking about the show after we talked. I think one of the good things about having you support and kind of getting to like interesting areas to focus on. And one of the most thing is like, what can AI solve for us? Remember I said my definition of super intelligence was like it'll solve a problem for us
Starting point is 00:21:48 that we have not solved, a unique problem in the world? Finding aliens, for example, it'll say, hey, there they are, you idiots. You idiots. I think like it's going to figure out how these drugs work. or other compounds around them.
Starting point is 00:22:01 And like, there might be a compound that we're taking that lowers your cravings for food and sugar, lowers alcohol cravings, stops crazy behavior, gambling, whatever, violence. And it might also, like, lower your cancer. I mean, they're going to find all kinds of little compounds. There's a bunch of work on peptides going on now, too, which is adjacent to this. And the people who were part of this ozempic thing,
Starting point is 00:22:27 like the Hubermans and the Peter Atea, I think that's how they pronounce his name, all that, like, those guys who are like optimizing rich people's health for them. No, I mean, I heard. It's a big business. I heard those, I'm not Huberman, but Peter Atia type doctors. These consult with, you know, billionaires, hundreds of millionaires, whatever. And they, you know, they charge six figures to be your concierge doctor, which for somebody who's incredibly rich would be like, you know, you spending a thousand on it a year, me spending 10,000 on a year. it'd be like, okay, yeah, it's worth it. Not a big deal. Not a big deal, in other words. And they're doing peptides, and there's a whole series of peptide. Now, I haven't done this, but I have been researching it because now I'm moving into my
Starting point is 00:23:07 weightlifting phase. I want to increase the muscle mass and I pick the three, it's harder to do. There's a whole thing around this Wolverine protocol and peptides that increase the healing. So you go do some crazy workout and you heal faster like Wolverine from the X-Pen. So that's kind of the next card. I'm going to turn over. Again, not health advice here, but technological. and finance advice, these companies are rocking and they're going to continue to rock.
Starting point is 00:23:30 The fact that they're number 10 and 11 and market cap is crazy. Yes. I was blown away by that. I'm like, world's easiest segue from market cap chat to GLP ones. Thank God that everyone bought the stock. Okay, folks, we announced a jam session with JCal contest just a couple of weeks ago, and we've gotten some fantastic submissions, but the submission window is still open. You got time.
Starting point is 00:23:52 In the coming weeks, five founders will get the chance to do a jam session with me, JCal. You're besty. You'll get unfiltered feedback, visibility on my podcast, and if your pitch resonates with me, hey, you never know. Maybe I'll fund your startup. Again, you get to have a one-on-one session with me and we tape it and we put it on this weekend startups. And so the whole audience gets to learn from our conversation about your startup and you get all that great exposure. Here's the two rules. To get into this one-on-one session, you need to have less than $2 million in funding. We want really early-stage startups. And you've got to have one of those awesome.com tech domain names.
Starting point is 00:24:26 So apply and get more details at jam with jacal.com. That's jam, J-A-M with J-Cal, no spaces, no dashes, dot-tec-h. And I'm partnering with dot-tech domains because some of the most innovative startups I've seen are using that dot-tech domain, rabbit.com, aurora.com, 1x.com. And of course, we do Founder Fridays.com. Every month, founders get together at founder Fridays. Tech in their local city. If you're using a dot-tech domain name for your startup website, I want to hear about it.
Starting point is 00:24:53 Apply with the jam session with J-Cal contest today. JamwithjCal. Tech. We're going to start picking the winners this week. So go to Jamwithjagal.com. and join me for a chance to showcase your startup and potentially take it to the next level. I want to narrow this down to two startups. There are a number of companies out there in the digital health space, Jason, that are working with GLP1s, Roe, Sesame Care, him and hers, also does it, they're public now,
Starting point is 00:25:20 but you know what I mean? So, you know, what else is there for startups to do when it comes to GLP1 usage? My first thought was make foods that people will eat if they're on these to replace what they were eating before, aka my love and joy, Doritos. Like maybe there's a health food play here. There's probably some D to C plays here as people change their lifestyle and feel better. But what's like the positive case? Like, hey, people are going to be slimmer. So what does startups do with that?
Starting point is 00:25:46 So telehealth, I think, is the future. You remember during COVID, we were allowed to do our health care. It kind of just sped that up. We talked about the acceleration during COVID. We were all locked in our houses. I don't know if everybody remembers this. Like wiping off packages of Captain Crunch or, you know, milk bottles with glasses on like in hazmat suits.
Starting point is 00:26:07 I'm on my front porch. My wife is looking at the groceries going, oh, my God, we're going to die. I'm out there wiping them down with Chlorox wipes. Somehow I hit the COVID lottery and was able to like the first two weeks, I just ordered like an industrial size, not a pallet, but like literally a large. case of chlorox wipes and got them. You remember that lottery system? And so I had like plenty of chlorox wipes.
Starting point is 00:26:28 I was given to my friends. Telehealth is the big unlock here. And you can go on to various telehealth sites now and get a large amount of, um, uh, prescriptions and services. And I think that's the big win for startups. This is but one of them. And so I think this is something that the next administration, current administration, should look at is to help telehealth policy.
Starting point is 00:26:55 We, I believe, have an emergency policy during COVID, and then I think they've started to pull back those restrictions of what you can deliver, what you can't deliver. So if you wanted to get, I don't know, you have ADHD, you want to get Adderall, I don't think you can get that now. If you wanted to get, obviously, opioids, you can't get that. That's way hard to get. I was starting to a dentist who told me, like,
Starting point is 00:27:18 for them to give two pills post-oral surgery, which I just had, like they have to do like four phone calls right which for a doctor's debt four phone calls and that's such a waste of time yeah and so i do think that's the big win is delivering services over zoom and that's what we're doing right here right we're delivering our service over zoom it all works perfectly and i think that's the big unlock and they're all going to have these glps and whatever the future of these are you got to be careful though because there are rogue pharmacies, and there have been rogue startups.
Starting point is 00:27:54 We're doing, you know, things that were on the margin, probably not safe. And so some of these compounders are making compounds in China and not testing them. Some of the compounding pharmacies are doing tests. So they do each batch. They do a test. And so there's going to be a lot more regulation around this, but I do think
Starting point is 00:28:14 telehealth has unlimited upside for startups if you can crack the code. Yeah. I don't know if it's a commodity or not, but, you know, I do think these services are incredibly popular for things that are embarrassing. Yes. Drugs. SDGs, etc. So fantastic that that exists as an option for people.
Starting point is 00:28:35 But also, I think it's cheaper. We want health care cheaper. So get faster. Please. Yeah. Well, we have an OB appointment today. And I know my spouse, I usually go to this, but we're recording today. So I'm going to miss this one.
Starting point is 00:28:46 But I know she's going to sit there for 45 minutes before she gets shown into the doctor. doctor area. Yeah. And then she'll wait 45 more minutes for what is about a three minute appointment to check the baby's heart rate. You know, like it's a little insane. And you should have at home a sonogram machine that they can give you. It should be connected to the internet or an app.
Starting point is 00:29:06 And then you as Papa and Mama can check that anytime you want because you got anxiety, lowers your anxiety. And then you send it to your doctor. And what this was going to require is really taking the HIPAA. requirements. And I've asked my doctors and everything, can I just wave HIPAA? Like, you can just email and text me my shit and I can just get my stuff. And they're like, no, we're not allowed to do that.
Starting point is 00:29:30 I'm like, yeah. Let me sign some sort of a waiver that I want HIPAA light, that everything doesn't, because these doctors are so scared that you're, they're going to send you your blood report or you're whatever and it's going to get out. Or they're going to get sued. And they're going to get sued because somebody intercepted. Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
Starting point is 00:29:48 23 and me, everything's been hacked already. Well, tests are all going to be hacked. It's all going to be hacked anyway. So, I mean, well, I'm not curious cybersecurity note. I want to make the negative case, though. So that's what is going to be good here for startups. I'm thinking a lot about what happened to Chegg. Are you familiar with Chegg?
Starting point is 00:30:05 Chegg is the bookstore. Yeah, they sell books. They do textbooks for, yeah, textbooks for college kids. They ended up working a lot more into like question and answer services and tutoring help. And they became a big deal for. for cheating in college. And if you write that down in an article, they will complain vociferously to you over email.
Starting point is 00:30:23 I learned. But chat GPT took Chegg's share price from about $113 per share at the peak of COVID, mid-2020, early 2021, and crushed it to less than $3 per share. Yeah, 992%. Yeah, because they were replaced by Chad GPD. People wanted to use Chegg to cheat. They use Chad GPT to cheat now. That's what happened.
Starting point is 00:30:45 Their market cap has been absolutely decimated. And so I'm curious to see in the general. GLP1 world, who are the losers. It's not quite the nicest thing that I've ever looked forward to figuring out. But I'm curious to learn what this messes up. Weight watchers, for example, or certain diet programs or health gurus on Instagram. I don't know. But it's going to have a big impact.
Starting point is 00:31:03 And I saw a tweet saying, hey, let's just put the stuff in the water. And I was like, that's a bit much. But now, I mean, we do it fluoride. Fluoride helps. Why not? I mean, here's the thing. If you want to know who this is going to really hurt, I think it's going to be junk food. It's going to be fast food.
Starting point is 00:31:19 It's going to be junk food. And so I can tell you already, we go out to dinner, I order for my daughters, my wife order something, and I don't order anymore. I'm just like, I'll have a little bit of what you're having. Or a lot of times I go to a meal now, and because I eat two meals a day, not three, and I eat smaller meals, sometimes my friends are going to dinner, and I already had a late lunch. I'm not hungry.
Starting point is 00:31:40 And I'm fasting from, you know, 3 p.m. until whatever, 12 the next day. Not like a micro fast, you know, like an 18 and whatever, six kind of thing. 18, 6. Okay. 18. Like an 186, right? And so you saw that with fasting in a microcosm. You probably, if you were in Silicon Valley or a major city, people were doing the fasting.
Starting point is 00:31:58 Yep. And again, Kevin Rose, Tim Ferrars, shout out to my guys. And so they were probably doing that fasting and you would skip a meal. Now you have this similar thing happening. People are on Ozempic. You go to dinner and the check sizes are going way down. And you can't drink wine on this thing. I have friends who are wine drinkers.
Starting point is 00:32:18 and they would drink, you know, their whole lives were centered around, you know, going to dinner and ordering food was a canvas for the wine. Yes. Like, okay, we now have a canvas. We're out of steakhouse.
Starting point is 00:32:29 We have a canvas. We're getting sushi. We're at a seafood place. Now what can we paint on this with wine? And now they're just like, I'll have a glass. But you can't have the third or fourth glass. You get indigestion.
Starting point is 00:32:41 You get heartburn, whatever it is, depending on the person. So I think it's going to really impact the consumption of food. Well, if we get short, Alcoholics Anonymous, then that would be quite the trade. Sadly, they're not publicly traded. Or are they worth anything? It's just a manual.
Starting point is 00:32:56 Just a program, folks. Just a lot of people sitting around drinking coffee. Right now, startups have to do more with less. We all know that. And founders have to be smart with how they deploy capital. Investors are very tuned in to being capital efficient. So, if you need great tech talent, but you don't have the time to interview dozens and dozens and dozens of candidates, you need to check out, Lemon.io. They have thousands of on-demand developers to choose from, and these devs are vetted,
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Starting point is 00:33:59 A couple of launch founders have worked with Lemon.io, and they've had great experiences. So here's your call to action. Go to lemon.com. To find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And Twist listeners get 15% off their first for a weeks. Stop burning money, hire developer smarter, Visit lemon.io slash twist. Let's move on to Adobe.
Starting point is 00:34:23 You and I were both pretty, well, okay, I've got a hot take on this. I'm going to tell people the news and then let you go first. The Department of Justice and the FTC are enforcing a, quote, civil enforcement against Adobe and two executives. The allegation here is, I'm going to quote, to get the phrasing right, that Adobe fails to adequately disclose to consumers that by signing up for the annual paid monthly plan, they are agreeing to a year-long commitment. and then there are hefty termination fees,
Starting point is 00:34:50 and Adobe makes it very hard to cancel. So essentially, Adobe has been accused of being nefarious in how it signs consumers up for its subscription product, and then for being very, very hard to cancel and hitting people with fees. I've looked into this a little bit more. I have some information about it. Adobe has, shockingly enough, denied the complaint,
Starting point is 00:35:10 but I'm curious, Jason, first thoughts about this as a business guy. Yeah, so let's talk about Lena Khan and her, approach to what she's doing in fair competition, which we want to have some rules. If we don't have rules on the field for capitalism, people start doing crazy stuff, like dumping chemicals into a river because it's cheaper than processing the chemicals, right? We don't want that kind of stuff. They'll also price fix, right? Three CEOs go to a golf course.
Starting point is 00:35:40 They decide this is going to be the price. Everybody will lower their prices and do all kinds of crazy pricing for their cable modems. But at the end of the day, nobody's going less. than $799.99 for their lowest package. So that kind of price fixing, not in the best interest of consumers. And so I love when the FTC and LenaCon governments get involved in tactical things that are bad for consumers and bad for competition. I am not a fan of future competition and trying to be like the precogs in Minority Report and predict who's going to commit crime in the future and lower competition in future. Because as we can see, it seemed like Google was,
Starting point is 00:36:22 it was insurmountable that Google would ever be beaten, Intel, TM, you know, S.C, whatever, you know, like all these firms seemed AOL that they were Yahoo. They were absolutely never going to be, you know, taken on and disrupted. And they have been. And so it does take 20 years, but you can generally stay out of it. So I like tactical. I like looking at Apple and saying, you need to allow people to install whatever software they want on their iPhones because they bought their iPhone. It's their iPhone. You don't get to pick what software they put on. You could say if you put unverified software on here, we're going to remove your warranty.
Starting point is 00:37:02 You can't go to the genius bar, but just give me a switch. And I've said this for a decade. Give me a switch, Steve Jobs. I told them in an open letter that lets me go into experimental mode and sidelo whatever a lot of my phone. So I like the tactical. This is tactical. therefore I like it. There are companies like Wall Street Journal as an example who were doing this.
Starting point is 00:37:22 And the Wall Street Journal, you had to call them up. You could subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in under 10 seconds in 17 different ways. PayPal, credit card, Venmo, Apple, Android, you could get in Wall Street Journal. Then you want to cancel. And you've got to solve the rubic cues. You've got to call them on the phone, all this stuff. It was crazy. And so I kind of like that.
Starting point is 00:37:45 like these type of actions. And California has a renewal law that has addressed this. California came out with a law years ago to have like very clear disclosure and like acknowledgments of like and notices of renewal. So when you subscribe to a substack, like cautious, optimism. Dot news. Is that the URL? You nailed it.
Starting point is 00:38:12 You get 10 points. Yeah. Thank you. You send a monthly. a note. You're paying $10 a month. If you want to change it, click here. That's what we all want. So stop hiding and stop. Stop doing, I think they call these dark patterns in our industry. And these dark patterns, by the way, are from the CFO. They're from the product managers.
Starting point is 00:38:31 This is a very deliberate strategy to make it so hard to unsubscribe and to say the second you subscribe on January 1st, you can't cancel it and we won't pro-rate it. That should be against the law. If you subscribe to something and you want to it out, there should be like some max number of days or something. And so I like this. What do you think? Well, I like it too. I have a very similar perspective on this.
Starting point is 00:38:55 I also love tactical things. Lawson, when you talked about AI regulation, you and I were both being a little bit worried about the scope of essentially pre-regulation, about your point about that. So this sits very well with me. I went ahead and went to Adobe and tried to sign up with the process as it is right now. and I am a savvy online consumer. I was going into the UW website looking for this information. And what I figured out was I had to hover over certain links that were small or small
Starting point is 00:39:28 little buttons to learn that the subscription, which is listed as a dollar per month number, was actually an annual plan and that I had to find really the small print to figure out that if I cancel it, I would get charged your fee, didn't tell me what it was. if you are an average person. You are not going to be hunting for possible ways you're being screwed over. So to me,
Starting point is 00:39:49 this is pretty clearly a good bit of enforcement action, and I think that everyone who offers a subscription service should make it easy, as easy to cancel as it is to sign up. The Times got in trouble for this publicly. Amazon's prime service is being dinged by the FTC for this. To me, if you're going to have a big door in,
Starting point is 00:40:08 you've got to have a big door out. And I, it's being pro-consumer makes a sound, to your point, virtue signaling, but like, the consumer does matter. And I think having these rules makes for a better marketplace and fair competition. Because if you can leave Adobe, you can go to an Adobe competitor. If you can go to the competitor, there's more competition and more competition is more good. Now, the irony, Jason, is that Adobe shares were up 1.3% today. So the market is, is, is that just the presumption that this is going to be. A speeding ticket?
Starting point is 00:40:40 A fine. It's a speeding ticket. Yeah, they'll settle this. And, you know, this is the law. This was Assembly bill number 390 that counted.
Starting point is 00:40:52 I think Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, kind of worked on. And this bill just made it like very black and white. Like, um, this is like, just such a simple thing here.
Starting point is 00:41:05 I'm going to make it a little bit bigger. So you read it a business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer, shall provide a toll-free phone number, electronic email address, a postal address if the seller directly bills its consumers, or it shall provide other cost-effective timely and easy-to-use mechanism for cancellation that should be described in the acknowledgement specified in paragraph 3 of such a print. And so this was what we were all looking for. And I went crazy on the Wall Street Journal one time because I went to call them.
Starting point is 00:41:31 I'm like, how come I can't sign up online? I'm just asked me, how come I can sign up online, but I can't cancel online? and she said to me, well, that's because we, you know, for your security. I'm like,
Starting point is 00:41:44 well, that's the opposite of logic. Cancelling saves me money. Yes. Buying a subscription costs me money. So if you were trying to protect me, which one would you be protecting me from? Taking my money or stopping taking my money?
Starting point is 00:42:00 And she's like, that's a fair point. I don't know. I don't make the rules. I'm sorry, sir. I work in Intellicenter. I was like,
Starting point is 00:42:05 fair enough. Now I turned into the Karen, like asking to talk to the manager. I'm like, what am I doing here? I give this poor lady a break. Never shout at the person who doesn't make the decisions.
Starting point is 00:42:18 I never shout at anybody. Also a good rule. Also a good rule. But this is why I really do think that the old riff that CEOs should do at least one day a year on their customer support channels just to be there. Because I think you can get insulated or like almost separated away from the pain of the consumer, which is your customer. And then your CFO can tell you, well, it's where you know, it's plus
Starting point is 00:42:39 percent growth. So you, okay. But if you go listen to Jason, tell you that you're screwing him over, it might change your view a little bit. You know? It's, this is the kind of action I'd like to see Lena Khan take more of, you know, if somebody's doing something around privacy, you know, just Fulgazi billing, you know, that's the kind of stuff where, or, you know, blocking competition.
Starting point is 00:43:02 I love the fact that like eye messages, we talked about this, I think last week, they're starting to open up a little bit and stop the green bubble. problem and maybe allowing tap back to not do stupid things like this person did a thumbs up and it like and write that out in text. Yep. Interoperability. That seems like a noble fight. Uh, the right to repair. That seems like a good tactical thing to allow people to do. I love this framework PC. I don't know if you know about the framework. My brother-in-law is a huge fan and so I've gotten to play around with them. Fantastic. It's a modular piece, a laptop that you can essentially swap up the components
Starting point is 00:43:36 yourself willy-nilly. I had the, uh, fact, uh, founder on. And, you know, I just think like, if this thing would run Mac OS, this is what I would be using. Yeah. And because, you know, why can't I just, here's a picture of it. I had the founder on it. You can go to frame. And as you can see, you can take out the motherboard, the keyboard, the keyboard. You want a clacky keyboard. I don't know, your wife likes a regular quiet one. You decide to give her your laptop, whatever. You're switching and just change the keyboard. Swap it out. You get these like little chicklets. these little standard boxes that you can swap out. One of them could be a expansion card. So these expansion cards, I don't know if you remember PCMCIA. Was that what it was called?
Starting point is 00:44:23 The cards you would slide into your laptop? PCMC. I'm pulling that up. PC cards, yes. Yeah, PC cards. You would slide them into your laptop. One would be for a modem. One might be a storage.
Starting point is 00:44:34 Anyway, they basically brought back this concept. So here's a one terabyte expansion card, $125. It's amazing. What would that cost you at Apple? I think it would cost you five times that. Yeah. Maybe a zero or five times that.
Starting point is 00:44:46 Oh, you want to have a new, you want a second display port? You want an HDMI? $19. You're making my wallet tremble at the fact that I don't need any more computers because I had too many. But I kind of won't. Oh, they come in different colors?
Starting point is 00:45:00 Yeah. So you want it. Hey, you want to, hey, you're into the next. You want orange and blue. Here's your USBC, orange, $9. You had a USBC to your laptop, $9. And you know, you can swap these out. So, you know, you're going on a business trip.
Starting point is 00:45:13 Let's say you're going to be doing a lot of photography. You need extra storage. Now you put in your, you know, card reader and your storage. You're ready to go. You want to have like a bunch of movies with you. You have these like little cards and you're a little gear bag. Fantastic. And this is the type of stuff where I think we can put pressure on companies like they did
Starting point is 00:45:32 to get USBC on the iPhone 15 that I give Europe. a lot of credit for doing this. This is the perfect example, I believe, yes, of why are we buying lightning cables? Like, what are we doing here? Like, this is terrible for the environment. And when USBCs became the standard now, and I upgraded my wife's own,
Starting point is 00:45:55 firstly she said, what do we do with all the lightning cables? I'm like, put them all in a box. We're going to donate them. They're going to eventually wind up in a landfill. Yes. Whereas, had they just been USBC from the beginning, we'd be using them for all times. fine, there would be a use for them.
Starting point is 00:46:10 And you've got to think environment, you've got to think consumer competition, interoperability. I'm sorry, I just love, this is the type of action I like. Yeah, a couple of small moments before we move on. If you're thinking, well, there's a California rule. I'll just incorporate in Virginia and then I'll be a real jerk to all my customers. You can't because of the Restore Online Shopper Confidence Act or Rosca from 2010. And that is the law that Adobe has tripped up here at the federal level, though. Jason, I think makes the point that they could be also hate with state law.
Starting point is 00:46:38 if that happened. And Jason mentioned an idea earlier that when people get together on the golf course, they price fix. He is paraphrasing a quote from Adam Smith's wealth of nations, which I'll just share because why not what's called book to talk, but people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion. But the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices, aka if you get together, everyone wants to make more money. And that's just the way business works. And that's why we need rules. And the question is just where to put them. But we can put all that aside because now time for my favorite part of Twist, which is the Twist 500. And Jason, I have, we got a lot to do here today.
Starting point is 00:47:16 Quick reminder to everybody on the Monday show, we added Built, which is a fintech that offers rewards for rent payments and is taking Wells Farco to the cleaners as part of that deal. We added them because they're worth $3 billion and they're highly notable. So they made the list. And then we also added Sakana, which is a Japanese AI company that focuses on building Japanese language models. and, sorry, Japanese language, large language models, and also cheaper LLM training. We have a number of new names, but I want to start with yours, Jason. Color hit the list because of their new deal with Open AI. Yeah, so Color is an interesting biotech company, and, you know, this is something we all know
Starting point is 00:47:56 is coming, which is when you have a narrow dataset, proteins, DNA, cancer, whatever it is, and these are large data sets, but so they're basically going to be using AI to figure out and help doctors, figure out what's going on with your tests. This is going to be awesome for early stage cancer and that kind of stuff. So I do think color is worth keeping an eye on. It's not the color photo sharing app that raised 40 million, 15, 20 years ago. No, it wasn't that long. There's no way.
Starting point is 00:48:33 Wasn't it 15 years ago? Please tell me it's not. I thought that was like six years ago. Hold on. Color. It's quite quaint right now. For people who don't know the history, there was this Apple executive who left to do color.com in the photo sharing era
Starting point is 00:48:48 after Flickr had been sold and photos becoming the thing, Instagram was becoming a thing. And it was a super hyped and they had raised $41 million. My friend Peter Pham was involved in it. And it, you know, it wound up shutting down. in 2012, Apple acquired some of the assets, I think for their photo sharing business, but it was shocking to people
Starting point is 00:49:12 that a startup had raised pre-launched $41 million. And when I talked to the folks, I think at Sequoia and other places, they said, listen, we think it's such a big opportunity. We took the Series A and the Series B. We decided to give them both at once. They bought this incredible domain named Color.com, which eventually wound up going to this company.
Starting point is 00:49:29 So I do think it's worth us putting this one on there and to watch it. I'm very interested in the intersection of AI and biotech and health. Not as an investor myself, because we're early stage investors. I think it's kind of hard to play in that role. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, but I do think it's interesting. And so that was one I wanted to add to the list.
Starting point is 00:49:48 I'm pissed off that it was 11 years ago. That's too many years. Past. You remember covering it? Yes. I remember the whole, I've been around. I'm starting to get to the point now when I've been around for a while. And that's both amazing because every year you get older, you get less stupid.
Starting point is 00:50:05 And it's been such a blessing to not be 22 anymore. But at the same time, sometimes I look back at stretches of time and I'm like, there's no way that's, oh, it is. Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Well, which you start like, I mean, imagine you were talking about dial-up modems in the 80s. Sometimes I'll go back that far. And I'm like, oh, man, I'm literally talking about DOS and not Windows.
Starting point is 00:50:24 Yeah. My dad loves to break out things like, we didn't have laptops in my day. We had lugables. And I'm like, what's that? And he's like, well, it's a laptop. the size of a briefcase. And I'm like, what's a briefcase? And then he walks out of the room.
Starting point is 00:50:35 And yeah. Yeah, the original lugable, um, was a compact made one. And when my dad bought his restaurant, they had one in the, in the, um, he had bought a bar in Brooklyn and they had had one in the basement. Yeah, it wasn't functioning, but it was a very famous compact one. And this is what it looked like. I'm going to show you because it's really incredible where we've gotten. to and it really shows the power of compounding.
Starting point is 00:51:04 Oh, boy. So this is 1983. I remember this one because I had a PC junior at this time. And the way this worked is you had this giant box, which literally was like a small piece of luggage with a CRT and it, two floppy dish drives and a big clunky keyboard like the clacky keyboards. Yes, sir. What was interesting about this, that keyboard would fold into the top of the luggage and
Starting point is 00:51:29 then you had had a handle and you would carry it. And it probably weighed, I don't know, I'm going to guess, 15, 20 pounds. Oh, yeah. Here it is. 28 pounds. Yeah. Wow. Which was truly pretty amazing.
Starting point is 00:51:43 But the idea that you could take a computer from one location to another where there was no computer. Right. Was crazy. And then laptops came out. And then you could connect by VPN. And you could, I remember like in the late 80s, early 90s, we were on call. as local area network and PC support specialists.
Starting point is 00:52:04 When you were on call, they gave you a compact laptop and they gave you a mobile phone that costs $3 a minute and you would have people call you and you got paid like a 12-hour shift or something, even if nobody called. You just got paid a 12-hour shift
Starting point is 00:52:20 to be on call for the weekend and people would call at any hour of the day that their server was down and you had to spring to action. And so I love that. It was like my favorite thing to do not because I got paid the 12 hours for doing nothing most weekends, but because I got the laptop for the weekend.
Starting point is 00:52:34 I mean, that was back when gadgets were rare and expensive. I mean, I have related stories about early computer technology that I hold very dear, but I'm glad the loggables haven't lost all of their, their memory yet. Now, color, for people who don't know, $482 million raised thus far according to Crunchbase, last raised $100 million at a $4.6 billion post-money valuation. We have a chart on the screen if you're on video. So this is a highly valuable company, and the Open AI partnership is all about a co-pilot that will bring, I'm going to try my best here, oncology-specific information to general practice
Starting point is 00:53:09 doctors so that way they can be better at preventative medicine, Jason. Okay. So somehow they're going to interpret your results of different tests and then no, I'm guessing here, that you are possibly, you know, at risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, whatever it happens to be. And I just took a blood test last year because I asked my doctor like, what's the latest?
Starting point is 00:53:35 Just tell me everything. And Prunovo was one thing. And we had talked about that on the All In Podcasts and I went and got a Prunovo scan. And I'm going to do that every two years where they scan your entire body. Daniel Eck from Spotify invested in a company that does a 3D body scan.
Starting point is 00:53:49 That's not as good as Pranovo. It doesn't do as deep, but it does get you some information. It's much cheaper. And then I heard about this blood test you can take. it's just a blood test. I'll remember the, I'm looking at it right now,
Starting point is 00:54:02 blood test for cancer screening called. And this blood test just will tell you if you Galeri, G-A-L-L-E-R-I, Galeri is, I guess, the brand name. And it just tests for a large number of cancers, 50 different types. And you do this blood test, it's a simple kit.
Starting point is 00:54:26 I think it costs a thousand, and dollars and I was like, you know what, my mom had breast cancer, my dad has prostate cancer, they're both survivors, and screw it, I'll just get this Galleri test. Yeah, I'll do it, uh, 88% accuracy. And so if it does show you that you have a cancer, it's not bulletproof, then you go in for further testing, right? Yeah. So I think this, there's going to be a lot of this stuff happening.
Starting point is 00:54:49 And eventually, um, you know, back to the telehealth conversation, man, why can't this be done in, you know, imagine there was like, I don't know, where do people where are people stuck for a couple of hours? DMV, oil change. Sure, airport. Driving anywhere in Providence.
Starting point is 00:55:14 Dude, airport's a great place. I had nothing to do in the airport. So now imagine that Gallera has a booth in the airport and they just say, hey, you're in the airport. You've got to lay over two hours. Here's cancer screening. $300.
Starting point is 00:55:27 come in, get a blood test, and by the time you'll land, we'll send you a result. That's what we need to do with healthcare. Put a doctor with GLP's. You know, if I'm Nova Nordisk, I put a booth, Nova Nordis booth, explain all these GLP ones to individuals at the airport, wherever. Make healthcare easy. Make it easy, not hard. Your poor wife's going to spend three, four hours of her day for what should take three
Starting point is 00:55:52 minutes. This is the inefficiency that we need to change. We have to change the entire approach. It should be convenient like coffee is convenient. Let's make healthcare like coffee. You want to get a cup of coffee? They'll do it to your specification. You order it in an app.
Starting point is 00:56:07 You get it for four bucks, three bucks, six bucks, depending on what you want. Bing, in and out, nobody gets hurt. I love it. I watch my spouse, who is a physician for context, do paperwork. Well, it's actually not paperwork. It's just data entry and software. And she's expensive, man. Her time is expensive.
Starting point is 00:56:24 And she's doing the most grunty, work that is such a waste of her. And you know what those minutes are, minutes that she doesn't have to spend with her kid, so to be kids. And so to me, it's just. Or other patients having more meaningful interactions. Oh, I mean, after work when she's at home, when she's catching up on all the stuff that she didn't finish.
Starting point is 00:56:43 It's just ridiculous. We should take entire categories of this, productize them, and have competitions. Remember we used to have competitions. I'm sorry to sound like Trump. Remember we had these great competitions. Amelia Earhart. Who can fly, circumvent the globe. Beautiful.
Starting point is 00:57:00 Okay. We're going to make a circumvent the globe. Who could make cheapest blood test under $100 blood test at an airport? It's actually not a bad Trump impression, but I've managed to not hear his voice now for, well, up until now. I think I'm just going to get ready for another four to 12 years. I could be somewhere in that, somewhere in that zone. I think he's going to get it. I didn't think Biden was going to win the first time, pleasantly surprised.
Starting point is 00:57:24 Not going to lie, maybe Jason, there's another surprise waiting for me. again. I'm telling you, I'm sticking with my theory I've set on all in for four weeks running. Hot swap is coming. The hot swap is coming. I know my guy Sachs doesn't like me to say it because my God, Trump's going to run away with this as it looks right now. A hot swap is the own Democrats' only chance of winning. That's my belief. One man's belief. Yeah, no, I mean, I see the logic behind it. I'm trying to get it. Okay. Yeah. Oh yeah. Let's let's let's thank you for grabbing us by the caller employees back. I just want to mention, you know, I know you're so into S-1s and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:58:01 I did see Navor, very cool company, which is kind of the Google of Korea. I got to meet with them when I was doing Mahalo back in the day because I had seen their search engine. And I saw in their search engine, they included images and books in the search results. And I was like, whoa. And that's where I came up with the concept of comprehensive search, which is kind of what perplexity looks like today when I did Mahalo, failed startup I did. But they had this product called Webtoon. And it's incredibly popular. And it does have some revenue.
Starting point is 00:58:31 And I see that it's next up, maybe in tech IPOs. It's the next tech IPO that I think we care about. And you're kind of underselling it ever so slightly because its revenue grew 18% from 2000 to 22, 2002, 2003 from 1.0.8 billion to 1.28 billion. So it's in the large revenue bracket. And it does recently reached profitability. I took a look at the company a little bit. The only thing that's not great is that its usership has stopped growing.
Starting point is 00:59:02 And it does have a bit of an ARPU problem across the world in which different countries are worth different amounts of money. And so it used to grow in most highly valued markets, which I believe are South Korea, the U.S. and Europe maybe. But it's a really cool company. I really recommend everyone reads the S-1. We are putting it on the Twist 500 for about nine days because the IPO is supposed to land on the 27th. But there's no minimum time requirement. So we're throwing it on there. I mean, look at this.
Starting point is 00:59:30 They've paid out 2.8 billion to creators. They've got 1.3 million in revenue. They basically have, you know, people reading comics there. And you can post your own comics there. So this is kind of like YouTube where there's a creator version of it. And, you know, you can sell your comics. And, you know, these comics then become big IP sometimes. I don't know if they've had an example of IP spinning out into a movie series or, you know,
Starting point is 00:59:55 you know, a comic book series or whatever, but it's, you know, they, they do own Wattpad as well. And so I think they acquired Wattpad at some point. Wattpad for people don't know is where people write fan fiction. And so Wattpad has a big history of authors who get published based on starting there. So the way Wattpad works is, it's really interesting. You kind of write your first chapter and it grows and then you get feedback and some five people read your first chapter. Then you write your next one. You get 10 people.
Starting point is 01:00:35 And so it takes out the arduousness of doing a full book over two years and then waiting and get feedback. And it kind of makes it more fun, right? Just like having, I guess, a YouTube channel. Most famously, 50 Shades of Grey was originally Twilight fanfic. I knew that it was Twilight Fanfic. I did not know. Are you saying that it was on a web tune back in the day? It was on Wadpad, yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:57 And then the Martian, I remember Andy Weir, who I had on the program, he lived in San Jose at the time. And so I went to his house and we did an interview. It was a lot of fun. Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian, which I loved. And his follow-up was really good, too. He started as a Wapad, and he was working at one of the big tech companies, was Hewapacket or whatever. And then all of a sudden he starts having his book made tens of millions of dollars.
Starting point is 01:01:21 and I'm sure he got paid a million dollars for the rights of the movie or something. And so, you know, this is like a really cool meritocracy, I think. It's one of the things we always thought would happen. When we first saw the web, we thought, hey, this takes out gatekeepers. Yes.
Starting point is 01:01:36 And then talent will rise. And that's exactly what's happened. Yes. The Wadpad point's interesting. So I recall that Naver bought WadPat and then WebTune bought it from Navor. I presume that was some fancy corporate accounting there. But now it's part of the WebTune brand. And if you think about their market opportunity, the company does put a lot of stock in IP adaptations, as it calls them.
Starting point is 01:01:58 It says that it thinks its market opportunity is 130 billion in paid content, 680 billion in advertising, and then 900 billion in IP adaptations. Those numbers are whatever, but they show the scale of their ambition, which I quite like. And on the Wapide Point, there's another service called Royal Road, which is big in the progression fantasy subgenre. And it's exactly what you say. People post a story. They post a chapter a week or a day. and they kind of build their audience that way. I'm writing a novel right now,
Starting point is 01:02:24 and I am not, well, it's not very good, but it's making progress. There's no way in hell, Jason. I'm going to go to a legacy publisher, demand that they change my book, pay me $4 and make me wait three years. I'm just going to put it on Royal Roader, or maybe Wapadad.
Starting point is 01:02:41 So yeah, I'm totally good. I think you should do it by chapter. I would highly encourage you that, and then I'll read it. We can talk about it here on the pod. It'll be like a nice segment to Reagerbo. Alex's trash fantasy book. Yeah. Oh, it's a fantasy book. Okay. I thought it was about working with a narcissistic angel investor who has his own podcast.
Starting point is 01:02:56 No, I've already worked for AOL. That was my attempt at deflection that I realized I brought it back to you by accident. It's all good. You're actually not that big of a narcissist, actually. I just play one on the internet. No, I mean, when you be here, here's what I learned. If you become successful, you know, like, you have to just change your approach a little bit because the follower count, right, or the micro fame or people asking for selfies at an airport or whatever, that can kind of make you seem like a narcissist and you just have to learn how to combat that framing that gets imposed upon you. And so the way I do that is I tell everybody, if you see me at an airport, please say hi and tell me your favorite episode and give me a high five. Just a high five, Jake Al, and I'll give you a high five.
Starting point is 01:03:42 And if you want a selfie, please ask me. I'm more than happy to take a selfie. People come up to me, I say, if you want to take a selfie, let's do it. Let's do it for the grand. And I say, just please tag me so I get more followers. So I kind of jujits it a little bit. Like I, Oh,
Starting point is 01:03:55 I would love for you to take a selfie because then I get more followers. So, you know, I, I candidly could take or leave taking selfies, but yeah, it seems to be what the young kids like to do now. They don't want an autograph.
Starting point is 01:04:05 They don't want your email. They don't want a meeting. They literally just want the selfie for the gram. They just want the social clock. I've been recognized a couple of times in my driveway. Yeah. Oh, okay.
Starting point is 01:04:14 Ah, attack crunch. And I'm like, I'm like, I'm like taking out the trash wearing like one sock and like half tank top and looking like, you know, it's a bit much. All right. More companies for the Twist 500.
Starting point is 01:04:25 I have three more names for us. One, Albedo. They are in the space category. I put up a call for startup ideas in the Twist newsletter. And I got a couple. But this is one for me. I've been tracking this company since Y, C. I've talked to the CEO, Tofer Hadad, a couple of times.
Starting point is 01:04:44 The reason why I like it is that they are doing cool things in what's called VLEO, very low Earth orbit. So not LEO, low Earth orbit, we're really far down. And that matters because you can do higher resolution for cheaper. So what they want to do is, like essentially very high res, both images and thermal imaging for the world at a low price point at a very low orbit. And they make that work by electronic propulsion. And all of this when I met the company was, it was like three dudes, you know, and like they had a white, they had a whiteboard. They are planning on putting up their first satellite, I think in 2025, they have a shared slot
Starting point is 01:05:24 on a space X rocket. They've mocked up their satellite. They have customers. How big is that? Is that like a suitcase size or something? Refrigerator. Refrigerator size, okay. Does it burn up on entry? Is that the concept? Is it goes around the earth a couple of times, takes its photos and then
Starting point is 01:05:39 burns up? No, the electric propulsion actually will keep it aloft in V-L-E-O. And this is all predicated on the new space supply chain, what's been called Space 3.0 to me by a couple of founders. And the idea is that there's going to be in orbit, essentially gas station satellites that have either electricity or propellant, and you can push your satellite back up. They'll come down to beat you. You'll trade off fuel and then you'll go back down to lower Earth orbit. Right? Dude, space is the coolest thing.
Starting point is 01:06:07 What is going to be gas stations in space? Well, probably more like-superchargers in space? Batteries. Yeah. Superchargers in space. Batteries, yeah. And I bet you that giant battery opens up into a solar thing and just it's going to be up there forever charging these things and this is where SkyNet starts to become real. So when we start thinking about AI bring it on. I mean, it is like they have this AWS starting
Starting point is 01:06:29 to manifest. So this is Albedo albedo.com. Great looking website. And yeah, you know, and one of the great things about taking this imagery of planet Earth is obviously we have storage, obviously we have transmission,
Starting point is 01:06:47 now and now we have AI to analyze it. Whereas previously there were banks of people at three-letter agencies, you know, looking at these things, maybe they had some algorithms to point to, hey, that might be MH-370 at the bottom of the ocean. And then they would say, you know, they would queue up images and say, hey, look at these images. Do you think this could be the missing plane? These things are going to find the missing plane without any analyst looking at it. They're going to just find some scraps.
Starting point is 01:07:16 who knows how they'll figure it out, but they'll find some stuff floating in the water and say, you know what, there's too many things floating around this area and this trajectory. Plan's got to be right here. And I bet you it gets it right like two or three times in our lifetime. So I love this kind of stuff. It's going to be amazing.
Starting point is 01:07:31 Also in the space category, Don Aerospace, a reader of the Twist News letter sent this one in. It was new to me. And so I looked into it. This company has an existing business that does satellite propulsion systems. That's their bread and butter. They've raised $19 or $20 million dollars
Starting point is 01:07:46 total to date. And what they're doing is they're taking their money from their, um, their relatively stable space satellite propulsion business. And they're putting it into these ridiculously cool jet rocket planes that are going to go all the way up to a low Earth orbit in time. And they're working on the second generation now moving towards the third. If that works, much lower cost, um,
Starting point is 01:08:10 to the lowest levels of orbit, which could make, you know, space freight easier and so forth. I just, I love the company, the ambition. And then, Jason, just to cap off here, oh, there's the, the current tester plane, which they've done 50 missions with so far. So it's done MK2 Aurora. I like it.
Starting point is 01:08:27 And this is Dawn Aerospace. Yeah, I mean, incredible when you, what we did with Amazon Web Services to startups and SDK software development kits and APIs, chat GPTs, API, et cetera, is we've just made it so if you've got a problem you want to solve. there are probably 19 tools that you don't have to build anymore. They're just waiting for you there. You got to store images? Great.
Starting point is 01:08:52 You just store them at AWS. You got to process the images? Great. Here's a open source project. Oh, here's an API. You want to tag what's in those? Hey, put it to Mechanical Turk and have a human do it and then have AI do it and test the deltas. That's happening in space.
Starting point is 01:09:06 And so what you just described, like, there are going to be images. There's going to be refueling. There's obviously what SpaceX has done in terms of carrying people to space that cheaper and cheaper flights and per pound costs. It's just going to open up so many interesting opportunities. Really, really interesting. And what's really funny is there's actually a connection here between AWS and the satellite companies because Amazon has,
Starting point is 01:09:31 Amazon Web Services, ground station as a service. Essentially, they have infra to help you talk to the satellite lights, as I understand it. And I think also Google's in the same business as well. So even if you just want to talk to space, you can do that now via these cloud platforms, which I think is tremendous. And then last, last add to the list here, a little company called Space X. I hear it's still private. And I think it should probably be on the space list of the Twis 500.
Starting point is 01:09:57 I think they are absolutely on there. And then we'll put in the total amount raised for these companies, the year of incorporation and number of employees, whatever. We'll put some data into this database that we're building at Twist 500. It's not launched yet. We're just going to use Coda. I've seen the Cota, you know, start that we're doing. Coda's just great. They've sponsored the program before.
Starting point is 01:10:21 I don't know if they're current sponsors, but shout out to my friends at Cod. It's an awesome piece of software. I think they compete with Notion. Cota's a little more programmable, a little more database-y, so it's better for this application. Notion's a little more writey, text-y. And so we pick Cota for this application because of databases.
Starting point is 01:10:38 And it's going to be kind of a fun database. and in the newsletter, we're going to kind of focus, the editorial focus of the newsletter on these companies. So they'll each have a number, twist 400, twist 402.
Starting point is 01:10:51 I guess we'll give them a number at some point maybe, but we'll come up with our algorithm and sort them by the number, and the number will be most likely to go public and have the highest market account. So that's a new announcement.
Starting point is 01:11:02 It's going to be a lot of fun. I'm currently the person who's doing the database, and because we have now added, I think, six or seven names this week, that does mean that I have given myself some homework, but it's going to be a very useful list, and we will do
Starting point is 01:11:14 our very first company exit with Webtoon once it does list. Oh, but just the last data point on that, it has dropped its initial IPO price range, fully diluted valuation, Jason, at the midpoint $2.6 billion. So just about 2.2x trailing revenue, which I think is because it's not growing too fast, but we'll have to see. But they'll get it out. And then as a public company, It will be under scrutiny. Management will have the pool of their public equity to buy other assets. And then it will be forced to have discipline as opposed to private companies, which do have the ability to meander. That stock price is going to force them to hit notes or be replaced as management team.
Starting point is 01:11:54 So I like the idea of more one to five billion dollar companies getting out there. We have seen the five to ten very frequently, Reddit and Instacart. I like this cohort. I like the cohort of. one to five billion dollar valuation companies with hundreds of millions in revenue. Did you mention the revenue number for them? Yeah, 1.28 in 2003 up from 1.08 in 22. Seems like it's a heck of a deal too.
Starting point is 01:12:19 And I wonder who would want to acquire this at some point, like a Disney. That's like a no-brain or Disney acquisition. In my mind, you include this in your Disney Plus subscription and they get first look. I could see a Disney or an Amazon buying this. for that reason. Just to get the first look, you know, a Warner Brothers discovery,
Starting point is 01:12:43 a Disney, who else in that space? Amazon, you know, this could be like a really cool thing for them to own because many of those things do make it into the Hollywood system.
Starting point is 01:12:52 And let's just say, part of you putting your book on there, I don't know, you tell me, if you were to put your book on there and they said, as part of this, we want to have
Starting point is 01:13:00 the ability to have first right of refusal on any sale over a million dollars or something like would the average person bark at that probably not you know that's like telling me there's a there's a tax on income over five billion dollars per year i'm not exactly worried about that happening um but i think i'll be fine with that i mean yeah if there was if there was if if the the result of having the ladder built in was that it's easier to climb the ladder i don't
Starting point is 01:13:28 particularly mind how wide the individual rungs are so sure i'm fine with giving first one i would do it is now i'm thinking about it man i have an idea here Very simple idea. Why don't they just say, why don't they just offer to incorporate, create LLCs for the top projects? And they say to you, hey, listen, you've got a top project.
Starting point is 01:13:47 You're in the top 1%. We'd like to form an LLC for your asset, this fantasy series that you're doing, Game of Thrones. And we want to purchase 10% of it today just on the chance, and we will get 10% of the revenue going forward. And so whatever IP,
Starting point is 01:14:04 and you can do the IP through here, and, you know, I don't know, writers and publishers can go here to look at it. And they'll see we have 10% ownership on it. And we'll put in $100,000 for that 10% ownership. We'll put in $50,000. So just pick a number. And then that author can say, you know what? I could use the 50K for this project.
Starting point is 01:14:19 I can go to my spouse and then say, hey, you know, I got 50K for 10% of it. That puts the value of the whole thing at 500. I built this over the last two years. That's a pretty good payday. Should I quit my job and go do more of this? And they might say, yeah, you know, you should. Or you should at least try. At least try.
Starting point is 01:14:34 Yeah. Get it started. Like make a little. incubator out of it. Really interesting business. I love trying things. Like I'm doing my little newsletter. I'm trying to write some fiction. I'm doing some podcasting with you. I think we should all get a little bit more comfortable with dabbling and failing publicly. Like I think for me, the longest fear that I've always had is that I'll do something and then I'll fail and people will be rude about me behind me back. And then I realize that no one cares what I do.
Starting point is 01:14:58 You know? Oh, this is like one of the great things you'll learn as an entrepreneur and doing entrepreneurial things is nobody forget your failures because they're all consumed. with themselves and what they're working on and what they're dealing with in their lives. No one remembers your failures. Nobody remembers. So you're sitting there, I'll give you an example.
Starting point is 01:15:15 Let's say, you ever fall down a flat of stairs, like lose your grip and you go, but you save yourself? You know that move? Everybody's done it. Like, we all do it like maybe once every couple of years. And you have this moment of embarrassment
Starting point is 01:15:26 or, oh my God, did anybody see it? You know, it was in front of the whole conference, whatever it is. You know, the whole glass saw me do it. And then you think about it.
Starting point is 01:15:33 You ruminate on it for like a week or a month. or a day, depending on your level of anxiety or CD. By the way, all the people who saw it forgot you did that in about 17 seconds because they're consumed with their issues in their life. They don't care what happened to you on the stairs five minutes ago. That's the equivalent of startups. Like, I brought up Mahalo today. Nobody remembers Mahalo.
Starting point is 01:15:57 Like, you might remember you. I do. I covered it. And like, I look at it now and I'm like, wow, I got so many things right. I just didn't have AI to do this and it took too long to make my search pages. If I had had AI at that time as tools, man, I would have nailed it.
Starting point is 01:16:13 I had the right concept. I was 10 years too early. Why aren't you incubating Mahalo now, Jason? Because when you brought up earlier, I was actually kind of like, should that be fantastic? Because in the era of Google search, back to the top of the show,
Starting point is 01:16:25 getting as bad as it has. Yeah, that'd be funny, actually. Human curated search? I can actually see that being a business. Inside.com, stay tuned. I'm working on a project with Inside.com. I got a new CEO over there, which is the company that came out of Mahalo, and it makes a couple of million dollars a year on newsletters, but the newsletter business is so hard.
Starting point is 01:16:45 I've just wound it down because it was costing like... I remember this. Yes. Yeah, yeah, I didn't remember a newsletter play. Yeah, right. And so it was making a million dollars a year, but I realized like it's the newsletter business is now being taken over by subject matter experts and the idea of aggregating. news in the age of AI
Starting point is 01:17:04 when people are getting it so crisply from other places. I don't think there's a news aggregation business through AI, but I do think there are things with humans and AI curating that I'm working on. So I'm working with the new CEO over there. Inside.com, we'll have a sign-up form for email.
Starting point is 01:17:21 But yeah. Okay, I think we did enough show. I think we should stop. We have a lot more for next week. Let's go into our sign-out, Jason, and then we'll grab a question from the audience. Oh, great. Sign off. He's Alex. I'm Jason, the show is three days a week. Some weeks we'll do four.
Starting point is 01:17:37 We get sold out. The advertisers are like, please, one more show. And I'm like, okay, twist my arm. Okay, we'll do one more show. Twist your arm. Twist my arm, so to speak. And Alex is going to be doing some solo shows, too. So I'm excited about that when I'm on vacation.
Starting point is 01:17:53 Mark Suster just did a great run of like five or six shows with us. Thank you to him. And AI episodes with Sunny, we'll start. We'll do two a month. We're going to do it every year. other week. And Alex, I'm going to ask you to join us for a couple of those. So we get a pass the ball around, even a little more, right? A little pick and roll.
Starting point is 01:18:07 And we kick it out to you for the three, for the open three. And Twist 500 is coming. You can go to ticker. dot this week and startups.com. Yes, sir. If you don't mind, go to This Weekend Startups and hit the subscribe button and turn on the bell so you can know when we go live. Oh, wait, question from the audience?
Starting point is 01:18:23 You want to share that? Let's grab, but I love people do this. On LinkedIn, Anders Bill says, I think there's a case for Amazon to try to buy TikTok, would love your. take here. Okay. I can see this making some sense. They already have data centers.
Starting point is 01:18:37 They already are pretty deep with the U.S. government in some ways because of their rocket. I'm sorry, no, because they're that business that they do. Yeah. I just don't see Amazon wanting to get into that much moderation. Listen,
Starting point is 01:18:51 it's $20 to $100 billion in value, depending on who you talk to for that asset. Let's put it at $75 billion. It's got a shop in it, I notice, between like the subscriptions and then your 4U page as a shop. Feels like a layup.
Starting point is 01:19:07 So I think this person has a great concept here. If that shop was Amazon, pretty great, which then makes me believe that Walmart and Target are the other two great people who could own it. And why wouldn't Walmart or Target want to have that?
Starting point is 01:19:23 And then in terms of moderation, man, you put a Sopranos clip on there and there's any violence in it, they cut away. You can't shoot somebody you can't use certain words on TikTok. TikTok is the most curated, censored platform, I think other than LinkedIn, maybe.
Starting point is 01:19:42 I don't know, if you talk to, if you gave a, put a Sopranos clip, somebody can do this in the audience, put a Sopranos clip where somebody gets whack, or, you know, Goodfellas clip on each of the platforms. Tell me which one turns it off. I guarantee you TikTok will not let you post it. It will know somebody's getting shot in the video
Starting point is 01:19:59 and not that you post it. And if you're on TikTok, sometimes you scroll up and say, is this appropriate for TikTok or not? So they are doing a level of duration that is bonkers. So I think it actually is the easiest purchase in the social space. Reddit, 4chan, you know, Twitter X, those ones that allow pseudonyms, hardest for Disney to buy. That's why Bob Iger, who was going to buy Twitter at its peak, canceled the deal at the last minute because he realized like,
Starting point is 01:20:33 okay, we're going to be moderating some fake news discussion and it was during the Trump era. Like, we're going to get into some debate over, I think it was in the Trump era. Might have been suddenly before, but anyway, he didn't, he didn't want to inherit all the politics.
Starting point is 01:20:45 Whereas if you inherit TikTok, like, what's the worst you're going to get? Like some, you know, misinformed kids talking about Gaza, you know, or something.
Starting point is 01:20:55 Well, I think you could end up with, I mean, just to paint a scenario. Trump gives a speech. He uses profanity as he does at times. You put it on TikTok. It gets censored.
Starting point is 01:21:05 All of a sudden, big tech is censoring conservatives again. Amazon gets caught in that trap. That's what I'm worried about. I do agree, though, that it is highly curated. I'm not a huge TikTok user, just to be clear. I have friends that are very active on it and I watch TikToks, but I try to not give my brain extra junk food to chew on
Starting point is 01:21:22 because God knows I'm from the computer enough as it is. But Amazon would be interesting. I guess they do have a big consumer playing media so they could allow their clips to play. They already, they already plugged into all the music companies because they had deals for Amazon music. Okay. All right. Anders.
Starting point is 01:21:37 10 points to you. That's, that's thought provoking. By the way, threads did like, and this has become a big topic of discussion as we get closer to the election. This is from February 2020, 24, continuing our approach to political content on Instagram and threads. They basically opted out of doing it. So, Zach was like, you know what, juice ain't worth the squeeze. You can follow political content on. Instagram and on threads.
Starting point is 01:22:02 They will not proactively show it to you. So we're extending this is what they say in their note. So we're extending our existing approach of how we treat political content. We won't proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and threads. If you still want these posts recommended to you, you will have to control, you will have a control to see them. And so what they've done, much to the chagrin of the left, which has now moved to
Starting point is 01:22:28 threads and threads and Instagram in a large way as well as MasterDon in some other places. Blue skies. They've infuriated the journalists over there
Starting point is 01:22:39 because they're like, we could take on Twitter X if you allow us to do our journalism here about politics, but it's not worth doing because we're not getting picked up by the algorithm.
Starting point is 01:22:49 Yeah. And then on X, formerly known as Twitter, you write something about politics. If I write Biden's, you know, I've done a couple posts where I'm like, listen, I'm for neither candidate, like none of the above for me, like let them both retire
Starting point is 01:23:02 their tool, let them enjoy their grandkids. When I write something like that, man, it gets 500,000 views. I write anything about politics, 500,000 views. So the algorithm is trying to train me get more political, get more political, get more views, get more followers, yeah, pick aside and ride it home. Whereas on threads, they're like, I posted this great article, this great thread on threads where Instagram, and I did this great political content. And it gets no engagement. Why? Because that's not what they want there. And it's a private corporate.
Starting point is 01:23:34 Well, it's a public corporation, but it's privately owned. It's not a state organization. So it can do what it wants. Right. And you could even employ similar strategy over on TikTok. But to me, if I'm Amazon and I make so much money off of my e-commerce ads business and my compute business and my massive infrastructure business, TikTok feels like a distraction to me.
Starting point is 01:23:54 But then again, it would be a bold play. I can see it. Most people don't even know about this, by the way, here it is. Look. Oh, yeah. Limit political content from people you don't follow. Limit political content from people you don't follow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so, like, they're turning it off by default, but they have now the ability on threads and Instagram to know its political content.
Starting point is 01:24:16 Doesn't take a genius to figure it out. You look for Trump. You look for keywords, whatever, Biden, you know, election. Who is searching for, who's going to threads and just type it in Biden? I mean, no, no, I'm saying the algorithm knows it's a Biden post. Oh, oh, okay, okay. I was like, I don't, man, that would be it. That's like going to Google and type it in weather.
Starting point is 01:24:35 I did that for a while. Like, there was some show. I can't remember where it was, but there was a finale coming up and I knew I wasn't able to see it. So I just said, do not show me whatever the finale was of Game of Thrones or something. I just said, block any Game of Thrones, GOT content. I don't want to get back to the GOT discussion because I'll get really mad about the last season. Last thing, Josh Couts on X said, science corner topic.
Starting point is 01:24:56 This week, Solid State Battery News from a company called TDK. I will take a look at that because I love battery news. My friend Tim Deschant over at TC is all about batteries and taught me a lot about how they work. Turns out, complicated. TDK like the people who make blank cassette tapes, and that's the last time I used a TDK product. TDK Corporation is a Japanese multi. It is. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:25:19 Yes. So I don't know if Josh works there or not, but I'll take a look and see other. Oh, they tread on like the pink sheets. Yeah, you know, if you remember TDK, you and you got cassettes, they were like the most affordable cassettes you could get. You could get like a five pack of 90 minutes and make your mixed tape. Oh, man. I remember buying those spindles of blank CD-ROMs and feeling like I was a king. I got enough CDs here to make like 50 CDs.
Starting point is 01:25:45 I can make everybody my playlist of The Grateful Dead and you're going to love it. All right, everybody. See you next week. Bye, bye, bye. Bye, everybody.

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