This Week in Startups - Rippling Targets $16B, Market Chaos, TikTok Timeout, and Office Hours | E2107

Episode Date: April 5, 2025

Today’s show: Jason and Alex dive into the startup world’s latest chaos — from Nasdaq’s slide and Trump’s tariffs to Klarna’s IPO pause and Rippling’s $16B target. They break down what founders really need to know: tightening CIO budgets, longer sales cycles, but easier hiring. Plus, TikTok’s ban gets another delay (with Bezos possibly lurking?). In Office Hours, they chat with two sharp founders: Luke Belbina from PodEngine, who's building AI for podcasters and doubling revenue, and David Moscatelli from Abacus, who’s bringing secure, on-prem AI to banks and just hit $1M ARR. Don’t miss it! 👇*Timestamps:(0:00) Jason kicks off the show![3:37] Cloud stocks dip: What it means for startups[5:31] Trump's tariffs: A new startup recession?[7:01] Retail’s reaction to tariff pressure[10:16] LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups[12:35] Supply chains & startup struggles[14:53] What’s still getting funded in VC[17:21] Layoffs looming? What founders should prep for[19:10] AI, macro takes & market signals[21:32] Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist[23:21] European tech cooling off?[24:36] Hiring freezes vs. easier recruiting[27:39] Startup strategies in tough markets[29:34] Vapi - Go to https://vapi.ai/twist and get 1000 minutes free per month - for life.[31:38] How to communicate tough changes[33:33] TikTok ban delayed… again[39:38] Trump’s China playbook: Startup impact[42:12] Office Hours: Luke from PodEngine[47:31] Automating with AI & driving sales[55:53] Pricing, lead gen & scaling tips[1:06:30] Office Hours: David from Abacus[1:08:32] On-prem AI for banks + hitting $1M ARR[1:14:42] Team building & founder strategy*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Links from the show:Check out PodEngine: https://www.podengine.ai/Check out Abacus: https://www.goabacus.co/*Follow Luke:X: https://x.com/lukebelbinaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukebelbina/*Follow David:X: https://x.com/DaveMoscatelli*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:[10:16] LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups[21:32] Northwest Registered Agent - Get a 60% discount on your next LLC at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist[29:34] Vapi - Go to https://vapi.ai/twist and get 1000 minutes free per month - for life.Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

What this means is all the independence, all the moderates, let's call them Clinton Democrats, you know, business people who quickly bent the knee to kind of smooth things over with Trump. You know, those people were kind of doing that in a very pragmatic way. Mark Zuckerberg being probably the ultimate example of it, right? He bought a house in D.C. now. He banned Trump from reaching billions of people and then now he's all in on Trump. I think those folks, if this becomes cataclysmic and it's affecting their business, they could be pragmatic and say, you know what? Maybe we should have more balanced in the other arms of government. And maybe tariffs shouldn't be done by emergency edict, which I think is how they're being executed now.

And they should be done through the Congress. And of course, there are people doing that. So all this chaos for startups means fundraising is going to get harder. Selling into customers, especially like Fortune 500s, is going to be hard. There will be only one thing that's easier. Can you guess? I was going to say hiring, because there's going to be more people. Ah, yes, nailed it.

It's going to be easier to hire people. So look for the purple hiring rings on LinkedIn. It's my best advice. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com slash this weekend startups. Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple.

With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist today. And VAPI. Add real-time AI-powered voice conversations to your apps or business and minutes, not months. Go to vappy.a.i slash twist and get 1,000 minutes free per month for life. All right, everybody. Welcome back to American Independence Week here on this week in startups and globally, it's Friday, April 4th. And the stock market at the time of this recording is now down 20% since Trump's inauguration,

I believe. The NASDAX's down 20. Some of the other indices are down probably low double digits. So I don't know, 12, 15, 20%. I'm not sure if that's even from the peak of the Trump bump, but just from January 20th, I was looking at it. And this is a very unique moment in time. I think you would agree, Alex, because you and I study markets and you're not to make any of this political. But I can't find people outside of the administration who thinks that this tariff thing was either well executed

or is a good idea. And I've asked, on Twitter, I said, please, is there somebody out there? Yeah. I mean, I understand the justifications people are doing inside the administration. I saw The different interviews, my friends that Allend did when they were there. You know, that's kind of the bubble, right? Let's be honest. Let's call it what it is. If you're a major donor, if you're part of the administration, if you're in there, you know, they're locked step as they should be. The Biden administration was lockstep. Obama administration. You don't want to send from inside the house second guessing stuff. That's just not how business works or government specific politics does not work that way. These political parties really like to be locked step. But my lord, I've never seen a situation where something so important, dramatic, consequential has been done with so many different versions of what's happening and interpretations of it. I don't know. What's your read on this and any data points you want to bring to bear here? Let's start with a couple of data points and then I'll dive into some other stuff. Cloud stocks that we track via the Bessemer Cloud Index, trades under WCLD, are off 30% from

recent highs Jason. So that's, you know, 10% is a correction, 20% is a bear market. 30% I don't think we have an actual word for other than catastrophe. And for folks out there who are curious, why do we care about kind of a sub-index of the technology world? Well, a lot of startups are effectively cloud companies. And so this is an index they trade against. It's kind of a comp for them. So if it goes down, harder to exit. Each magnificent seven company fell under the $3 trillion mark that was above it.

So that's kind of just kind of makes you feel bad, Jason. Now, on the point of who is defending this, I read your tweet and I read through a good number of the responses. I did see one person who we like, and it's Anthony Pompliana. Okay. Well, I mean, he's no finance expert, but he is a crypto expert. And I think he, let me, yeah, just give us the bullet points of his justification for it, or why he thinks is brilliant. He's been saying that it's already working. I didn't actually, I have not read enough of his stuff lately to dig deep into his viewpoint,

but he has been consistently beating the drum in favor of terrorists as an American policy point for weeks, if not months now. He actually said in his response to Jason that I'm not very notable, but I really do think that this is, I'm tempted to have him on the show. He offered to come on. I'm tempted to just to bring him on next week. Yeah, he'll be able to have him come on and see what he thinks of it, especially given that it's caused so much chaos. Amongst the most elite finance people on the planet of which I'm in a number of group chats with and friendly with, the consensus is if there is a strategy here, it's been incredibly poorly communicated. Yep. And executed.

Yep. And that if the strategy is this 4D chess that I think the administration has outlined and you can just take them out their word, Trump has been planning to do this since the 80s or 90s, he's been very consistent about tariffs, that this is a grand negotiation. So chaos is the desired outcome. That is where a number of people have landed. He's trying to create market turmoil. He's trying to get the Fed to cut rates next. and then he wants to get this 10-year down below a four-handle, 4%, so they can refinance $9 trillion.

And then he will relent after they do that. And then the stock market will come roaring back in time for the midterms. But Ben Shapiro was on All In this week. And he was like, they're going to lose the midterms. This is incredibly unpopular. If you do something, this seismic to the stock market, all that people are going to remember is the result of it. Right. And nobody, and listen, the reason Biden lost, I think most people, or I should say, Kamala lost, but the, the, the, the overriding, yeah, the overriding criticism was inflation, inflation, inflation. Well, get ready, folks.

You got inflation. One point I was, you know, challenging. I mean, I don't know what happens to an iPhone or a pair of sneakers if you have to make them here. Well, the market has an opinion about that, Jason. Did you see what happened to Nike's stock. in the last couple of days? Tell me. I mean, I did see the Restoration Hardware, and I shared a clip. Basically, Restoration Hardware was on an earnings call. And when they told him how down his stock was, I think this must have occurred Wednesday night, if it was after the market. All right.

Talk was down 25%. Take a listen. In this race, and I don't know. I don't know how sports our stock now. I mean, I guess, I guess, yeah, that was stock down, you know, based on some of the numbers he reported, and then it got killed because of, Oh, really? Oh, shit. Okay.

So first of all, what's rule one when you go on television, Jason? I mean, you're not supposed to say, you know, there's a selection of words. There's a very small selection of words. So I bring that up not to be funny, but because that goes to show how Gary Friedman, clearly someone who does call into television quite often. Well, actually, I don't think that was a call. And I think that was his earnings call. Oh, that was actually on the earnings call?

That was the earnings call. Oh, that's worse. And this is the, you know, Carl, Ken. Tania, shout out to my friend over at CNBC. This is them replaying his literal earnings call. And, you know, the background here is where does restoration hardware make furniture? We really don't make furniture in the United States. I hate to break it to folks.

But there are places, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, lots of places where furniture is made at scale at incredibly high rates with low labor costs and low inputs and lumber and, you know, fabrics that are cheap made in mills there for jobs, let's face it, with 4% unemployment here in the United States. We probably don't have the scale and the number of people to work in that factory and make your sofa, your couch, your side tables. You know, it's going to the lowest cost place in the world as, you know, free markets tend to do. Comparative advantage, Jason. It turns out it's a great thing in international trade to allow us to be richer. Now, I do want to make one more point about the who's in favor.

of this. I was going back through YouTube clips of Milton Friedman and he had a funny point. He says, you know, if you get two economists together, they'll always give you three opinions. So don't ask them any questions. But he said the only thing that economists can generally speaking agree on, like the point of

consensus is that free trade is good and trade barriers are bad. And tariffs being a form of import tax are a trade barrier. So I just, it's interesting to me to see the economic thought that I grew up reading as part of the intellectual Chicago school, economics is now persona on the American right, it's, you know, longstanding intellectual home.

And that is a shift that I'm still digesting to your point about no one knows what's going on. But that threw me for a loop. Things have changed so dramatically, so quickly. Yeah. So I, you know, I don't even care about political parties. I'll be totally honest. And the fact that they keep flipping roles where, you know, the Democrats were against globalization. They wanted to keep the jobs in the factories here, the globalist, Republicans wanted to to send them over there and now they flipped where the Republicans have picked up that mantle and want to bring back these jobs, etc. The truth is, Americans like cheap goods. It has made the average Americans life so much richer to not have to buy a USBC cable for $40, but to be able

to buy one for $4. And then you get to have like an extra cable in your car and an extra cable in your side table. It's a stupid example, but it is a relative, you know, an illustrative example of abundance. Hey, founders, I want to share with you an experience I love.

It's when I get an ad that is relevant and not some nonsense. Like the other day, I got an ad for a fund management platform, and it was like a new one I'd never heard of. I clicked on the ad because, well, I managed four venture capital firms. We scheduled to call with them,

and it was amazing. How did this happen? Well, I was on LinkedIn because I'd like to share links from the podcast, this week and startups, right on LinkedIn. In fact, we live streamed to LinkedIn three days a week, and we get a great audience over there. And I happened to be presented with this fund management platform. And it was a direct hit. Like, I mean, talk about hitting the bullseye.

If you're in business and you're making a product or service, it's really hard to find customers in the business to business space. And doing B2B advertising is hard, but LinkedIn makes it so easy because, you know, their tools let you target people by, job title, industry, company size, and more. So this fund management platform obviously was looking for people in venture capital, who had a fund size and a number of people, maybe 10 people, maybe 50 people. And they found me.

They got me. They split the arrow, boom, right on target. And there's two things you really need to know about LinkedIn going into 2025. First, they broke a billion members. And 130 million of those billion are decision makers. And 10 million of the billion are C-level executives like myself. Where can you get to those people? It's really hard.

And the second thing you need to know, LinkedIn makes an impact. B2B markers report two to five times higher return on ad spend or ROAS return on the ad spend. You should know that acronym. Compared to other social platforms, 79% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is the best platform for paid media. LinkedIn's going to let you build the right relationships. It's going to drive results. And you're going to reach your customers in a super respectful business environment. It's not a place where people are dancing around saying inappropriate things or debating politics.

Nope. LinkedIn equals business. Business equals LinkedIn. start converting your B2B audience into high-quality leads today, will even give you a hundy, a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com slash this week in startups terms and conditions do apply. In this sort of abundance capacity, are we going to take away that abundance and tell people,

you know what? If you like having four pairs of sneakers, you're going to go to one. And you're going to buy it in America and it's going to cost three times as much. So, you know, Nike stock getting killed, Lulu Lemming getting killed, all of these people build this stuff overseas. And to bring this back to startups, we have many startups who build hardware in China, in Shenzhen specifically. We have ones who do it in Vietnam, who do it in India. There's, you know, many places you can send your work. This has basically created chaos in the supply chain. And

when there's not a predictable market, everything freezes. And so my word of encouragement for startups is just keep building, just keep focused on your customers and try to block this out as best you can unless on a tactical basis, you're literally making, I don't know, some hardware device and you have to then work your supply chain. You've got to figure out where to get pieces from. You've got to figure out if that piece is going to cost three times as much and if you're going to pass that onto the customer. For those folks, you're going to be in grinded out chaotic territory, what you might want to do is lower your expense basis so that you can weather the storm. This could be literally a three-day storm. Like on Monday, if the stock market goes down another 10 percent,

I think they're going to claim victory and find an off-ramp, which they probably have already have planned. It's going to be great. Vietnam and India and these countries have given us everything we want. And now we're, you know, lowered the tariffs on these people. And now we're going to focus on the next group and these tariffs, as you can see, we're going to work through them. We're going to do 10 a day for 10 days. We'll be through the whole thing in two weeks. Like literally Trump could say that right now. Stock market comes back 20%. We literally would catch up. They have that off ramp anytime. I predict they will take that off RAM at, let's say, the NASDAG being down 35%.

Something in crash territory, right? 10% drop, correction, 20% bare market. I think you start getting into crashes at some point. That's probably what's going to happen. So if I had to take a guess. I was thinking through the startup implications of this because this is not a macroeconomics show, even though today I do wish that it was that we could just talk about this. You can geek out a little bit, Macro?

Okay. I'm all loud. it's kind of like a big topic. So yeah, sure, absolutely. But I was reading a lot of commentary from folks, you know, Gavin Baker, or Jamon Ball from Alitimiter. And I kind of packaged up what I think the consensus view is for startups. So startups today are staring down probably longer sales cycles because CIOs and so forth

are going to be a little bit more conservative, probably some pricing pressure. People want to make sure they're conserving cash. A return of the venture liquidity crisis. That means their investors are going to have probably less available capital because I don't think people are going to be racing to go public right now, or racing to sell? In fact, I just saw come across our chat and the newswire that Clorna has pause, it's planned IPO.

So there you have it. That then creates the liquidity crisis for venture NLP's. They feel poorer. So that's a really important thing to point out. Your point about, who made the point about CIOs and not wanting to, I want to make sure we give credit to that, that they're going to be on pause. Yeah, Jammin Ball from his blog, Clouded Judgment. He wrote, quote, every CIO is now going to be.

going to be more cautious. Budgets won't be as loose. Everyone will, quote, batten down the hatches to some extent. That means tighter budgets and a real, quote, growth scare in the market. Got it. So this is a legit thing for startups to understand and for people who just, you know, understanding markets, business people are fine with competition, they're fine with pricing pressure, they're fine with talent wars. They're great with technological innovation and disruption. That is like the great parts of the game. The worst part of the game is when somebody says, I'm changing the rules of the game. Because you can't play the game if you don't know where the three-point line is.

Like how do you take a three-point shot if you don't know? Is there a three-point shot? Maybe there's not a three-point shot anymore. Maybe it's a four-point shot. You've got to shoot it from half-gord. People need to know the rules. They adapt to the rules. What we have right now is chaos.

And the chaos causes everybody to slow down. What happens when there's a bunch of fog on the road, unless you're a driving car with LIDAR, as we talked about two weeks ago, you slow down. Right. slow down. Sometimes you pull over. I don't know if you've ever had that happen in fog, but maybe once or twice in my life, the fog was so dense. I said, not safe.

Pulling over. Going to wait, going to wait it out. Yeah. Have you happened in a snowstorm? So this is kind of approaching that point. Jamminball, smart guy works for my bestie, Brad Gersner, had altimeter. I think that's what, you know, he's probably pointing to

and he's correct. Now the CIO say, you know what? We're not going to implement and take on that project because we don't know if we have customers or if our revenue is going down or our supply chain. So now everybody starts slowing down, cascading. You know what the next piece to that puzzle is cuts. So I haven't heard anybody talk about this yet, but I'm a business owner. I'm an investor in businesses. As I just said, if you have a supply chain issue, maybe you need to lay off 20% of your staff, furlough, which is kind of like a pause. Sure. And that's pulling off to the

side of the road. So you could see a restoration hardware, Lululemon and Nike, in the next two weeks, if this doesn't get resolved, announce a round of layoffs. So literally, Nike might cut 20% of their employees. So this is second order, and then

third order effects or consequences. Klarna is a second order consequence, but Klarna, not going public, the third order consequence is the LPs, don't get a distribution, the LPs decide, I'm not going to invest in your next fund, or I'm taking my 25 million commitment down to five or 10 just to keep the

relationship alive, which is what happens. So here we are. How many times in your life isn't have you seen kind of back-to-back 5% declines in the NASDAQ? I can think of a couple times, like 9-11, dot-com bust, great financial crisis. Those would be the four of that stick out. In 1980, in 1987, when we had Black Friday, I kind of remember that a little bit because my dad had a bar and Wall Street guys hung out there and they all lost their job shortly thereafter, couldn't pay their tabs, all that kind of stuff. You know, hot shots in Armani suits, all of a sudden couldn't pay their tabs to my dad. And the third order effect is his business wound up, his bar wound up shutting down because the whole economy crash. People couldn't

afford to buy, you know, go out on a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night and spend 50 bucks or 100 bucks on dinner or drinks or whatever. So, you know, we're in a, this could become cataclysmic. This could, you know, result in one of these massive, massive sell-offs and layoffs. And then I guess you have to ask yourself for what reason. And Brad Gersner had an interesting tweet, Vicks spiking highest fear level since COVID. Now things start to break. The danger with shock therapy approaches in complex systems, it's impossible to model the negative reflexivity. Time to make some deals and move on before we cause a recession and lose support for tax reform. So, you know, and he's like fully 100% on board with Trump and Doge.

I'm not 100% on Trump. I am 100% on Doge. I am 100% on like reciprocal, thoughtful tariffs. I don't know anybody who's not. And so this is, I think, what you're starting to see. And then, of course, Gavin, who is balls and strikes has always been. He did a really long post. And, you know, he started to, he's getting a little more focal here.

He basically saying, listen, geopolitics. geopolitically, nothing matters more than winning AI. I think we all agree on that. AI is going to define, you know, who wins, China, the U.S., somebody else. These tariffs as constructed, essentially guarantee that America will lose AI by making America the most expensive place on Earth to build AI data centers. Semiconductor exemption was irrelevant for AI. Data Center semiconductors come into America in Finnish goods from Taiwan and other Asian countries, servers, storage systems, and networking switches. By the time we have developed the capacity to domestically produce these systems, we have lost the AI race. I'll just leave it there. This is actually, now we're in a second and third order effect.

If you can't bring these in here, you can't build data centers, third order impact, no data centers, no one-no for AI. And then if other folks are forced now because they don't have the U.S. market, they find other customers. So now you have the Chinese silicon companies doing partnerships with Vietnam, India, Pakistan. Russia, pick your country. And maybe the EU wants an off-ramp for, and they want an excuse to do a deep partnership. Canada wants to do a deep partnership with Russia and China. So this is the, dare I say, foolishness of how this was executed. You could literally give a group of people who maybe had some pride in, you know, not wanting to partner with despots and dictators.

Yeah. And, you know, look at Germany. they had no problem partnering with Putin for cheap oil. India has no problem partnering with Putin for cheap oil. And they kind of like us look at China as a rival, but maybe they're like, well, if we don't have America as a partner, I guess we'll take the next best thing, which is China. Founders, if you're serious about raising money, you need to set up your business the right way. Tight is right. And it all starts with having a registered agents. Investors simply won't fund your business if it isn't structured correctly. Before a VC can wire you the first dollar,

they're going to check. Is your company incorporated? Is it in good standing? And compliant. Missing a filing or losing your status. I mean, it's just going to be a deal breaker for the VC. It's like you're not taking things seriously. And that's what happens during due diligence. That's when a VC make sure they're not making a mistake by giving you investment dollars and, hey, angels do this as well. And that's where Northwest registered agent comes in for just $39. plus state fees, they act as your registered agent. They handle all the paperwork. They keep you compliant, and they make sure investors see you as a serious business that's worth

funding. In just 10 clicks and 10 minutes, your business is officially set up an investor ready. Northwest handles filings. They protect your privacy. And they ensure that you never miss a deadline. These are the chores that you don't want to have to deal with. You need a partner. And Northwest registered agent is that partner.

thousands of founders trust Northwest because they keep businesses in good standing. And with their expert corporate guides, you get real support, you don't get bots, you get real people on the phone. So here's your call to action, very simple, easy, peasy, lemon squeasy. Don't let bad paperwork cost you your next funding. Go to Northwest registeredagent.com slash twist and get your business investor ready today. For just $39 plus state fees, you can set up your company the right way, fast, private, and compliant. Go to Northwest Registered Asian.com slash twist today. I have notes about Europe.

At the very bottom of the show, didn't think we get there, but we have talked about Project Europe. We had Harry Stebbings on the show. We've discussed how there does seem to be a movement inside of the continent to, you know, reduce regulation, bolstered technology investment, and I think Cherry Ventures wants to build the first trillion dollar European company. Shout out to them for all that. A couple interesting things to add on to what you said, Jason.

One, Macron is calling for a pause in European investment in the United States. Now, that's mostly a symbolic statement from a national leader, but I do think it goes to show the sentiment in Europe about working with the U.S. economically. This could harm the ability of some American companies to sell into Europe. And then there's also some brewing tension between European regulators and the Trump administration, Zuckerberg's lobbying for some reprieve there, you might say. But I think that it's going to be tough to get concessions out of a block, if you will, that we are kicking in the shins repeatedly. and this is going to harm immigration, it's going to harm our ability to sell, there's going to be technological restrictions.

It just feels, Jason, like an unnecessary, sharp move that could have been done smaller, more tailored, more carefully, and would have had a potentially positive impact versus trillions of dollars of wealth being deleted in two days. I think what this means is all the independence, all the moderates,

let's call them Clinton Democrats, you know, business people who, you know, either retroactively quickly bent the knee to kind of smooth things over with Trump with their donations to the inauguration to crypto to whatever, you know, however they bent the knee and, you know, kind of made amends with him. You know, those people were kind of doing that in a very pragmatic way. Those were pragmatists. I would say Bezos from Amazon is a pragmatist in that regard. Tim Cook is a pragmatist. I don't think that they're enthusiastic about working with Trump. They obviously weren't in the first term. Mark Zuckerberg being

probably the ultimate example of it, right? He bought a house in D.C. now. He banned Trump from reaching billions of people, and then now he's all in on Trump. And he went down there and sort of made amends with the UFC guy. I think those folks, if this becomes cataclysmic and it's affecting their business, they could be pragmatic and say, you know what? Maybe we should have more balanced in the other, you know, arms of government. And maybe tariffs shouldn't be done by emergency edict, which I think is how they're being executed now. And they should be done through the Congress.

And of course, there are people doing that. So all this chaos for startups means fundraising is going to get harder. Selling into customers, especially like Fortune 500s, is going to be harder. There will be only one thing that's easier. Can you guess the one thing that'll be easier? I was going to say hiring because there's going to be more people. Ah, yes, nailed it. You know, it's going to be easier to hire people.

I mean, if you get laid off from Nike and you were making, you know, some six-figure salary and you were, you know, in marketing or you were in, you know, e-commerce and you worked in their e-commerce store and their app, they might shed hundreds of people, hundreds of people who worked on the Lulu Lemon website, technology marketing. And they might be like, you know what, I don't have a job. I got some severance. Sure. I'll take a flyer on a, you know, uh, so. look for the purple hiring rings on LinkedIn. It's my best advice. And then you can tell them, listen, I know you made a fortune over there.

You made $100,000. How about you make $60,000 here? And I give you $100,000 in equity. So if it works out, you get this huge bonus and, you know, whatever. So this is going to be disastrous if it continues. I know our show is not. Alex asks Jason questions, but we went through a period of, well, I mean, I think people do want to hear from you.

So I just try to elicit things that I think people might want. 2021, 2022, grow at all costs, raise hell of money, go fast, go fast, go fast. Go fast. Go fast. Go fast. 2022, 23, slow down, get close to profitability. Yeah. Then AI acceleration, spend, grow, et cetera.

If you're a startup today who's been tracking, you know, sentiment about how to handle your burn rate, would you expect people or would you recommend that they try to pull back on burn or maybe new investment that could increase burn at least until we have some picture of what the new normal is, or is that too conservative and people should just be going for it. If you have under 18 months of runway, you should always have a plan to get back to 18 months of runway. So, let's say you're at 10 months of runway. You should have the ability. And you're like, oh my God, I got so much interest. We're going to easily raise her in. You should always have in your back pocket, okay, I'm burning 100,000. I have a million in the bank. I can cut to 50,000 a month

by doing these three things and get to 20 months in the bank. This is in case of fire, break glass. Plan B. Got it. You should always have that. And I have that. I always have it. I always keep, you know, I don't know, a year or two of runway in the bank.

And I could always backstop our operations with my own personal money, which I have some of. So, you know, but if you're a founder who doesn't have the ability to say, you know, let me just grab a million dollars over here and float the company for. you know, 10 more months of burn or whatever it is. In this example, I'm using the classic 100K a month in burn. Yeah, I would say by next Friday, I would say a week from today, you should make that decision. If it's this chaotic, you should go to your board, you know, one week from today and say, I want to extend our runway from, I'm going, and here's how you execute it.

You say, if we cannot get a deal closed to do a bridge to get to 20 months of runway, I'm going to make these cuts. So you talk to your board. You say, would you like to do an internal round? I want to put another million dollars in the bank at the same terms as the last round. Or we tripled our revenue. So I'll meet you halfway. 2x devaluation, not 3x.

I just need to put another million in the bank. Are you interested in that opportunity? Let me know by next Friday. Right. If you don't get back to me and you don't sign a term sheet because the term sheet and the convertible note are in your signature package for review with your team. If you don't sign it by next Friday, then I'm going to start making cuts. and that's just, you know, my duty as the person.

2025 is going to be the year that voice AI really breaks out. Voice AI is going to change everything. And this technology is perfect for building a chatbot or automating customer calls and basically creating these next-gen voice experiences. But building with these tools is so difficult. It's just a bear. It's going to take your developers months to build and test anything even basic. unless you use VAPI.

VAPI, this is the fastest and easiest way to integrate voice into your products. It's just the most simple API you've ever used. It helps you build, test, and deploy voice agents in just minutes. And you can create ultra-realistic AI voices and customizable personalities. I like that part, all with real-time response speeds.

You know, it'd be great. Maybe I just demo it, okay? Listen to this. Hey, Jason, it's great to be on your podcast. It seems like VAPI has figured out how to be very low latency. Maybe you could talk a little bit about why that's important. For sure, low latency is crucial for a smooth user experience, right? It makes conversations feel more natural and engaging.

People expect real-time interactions, especially with the voice assistance. At VAPI, we've optimized everything to keep that response time around one second. It's like having a chat with a friend, not waiting for a robot to catch up. Can you do other voices and personalities? Right now, I'm rocking my CEO's voice, but, with VAPI, developers can bring their own voice models. So if they want to add some Wauken Flair or any other personality,

they totally can. I mean, who wouldn't want a little drama in their AI conversations? Just think of me as your friendly AI buddy, keeping it real. If you want to give it a spin yourself, and trust me, you should. Just head over vappy.a-i-a-i-slash-Twist. And Twist listeners will get 1,000 free minutes

per month for life. That's F-R-E-E. Free, what an amazing price. Again, that's VAPI.A-I-S-T-T-Tist. What I find is the founders are wishy-washy. They don't make definitive crisp plans. Ah. And then you have to go to your team. And then you have to say to your team, here's what's happening.

We have 10 months of runway. Globally, this looks really shaky. So here's what I'm doing. There are 30 people in this company. We're laying off six people. They're getting this, you know, modest amount of severance because you're a startup. You don't give you a severance. You don't have that much cash.

Yeah. So they're getting two weeks severance, like one week for every year of duty, you know, whatever, you know. it's a hard reality, but it's better than everybody getting no severance, which I've seen happen as well. Really not good. No. So you say to everybody, here's what's going to happen. These four people for performance and because we're extending our runway, but these are the four weekest people out of the 30. Then I need six more people.

If you want to leave, you can take this two-week severance. If not, I'm going to just have to make those cuts. Let me know we're going to be 20 people. We're going to be one-third less. salaries and we're going to cut spending on marketing by 50%. So it'll be 20 people doing this. When I explain that to you, if you were at TechCrunch and the person came into, let's say it's an independent company or you're at CrunchBase, which was an independent company,

how do I sound to you as a leader? Very, very, very having had touched grass. Like, this is not a time we're going to coat things in candy. Things are bad. We're going to move quickly. There's not going to be a lot of discussion. There's going to be some offers on the table. I'm trying to be upfront and fair.

I would just pair it with and I'm reducing my personal salary by 50% for the next six months because I'm not here to profit while you suffer but I also think that's... I like that actually, yeah, shared suffering. Yeah, great, great, great, startups are inherently cash constrained.

Like, that is the game. They run at a burn. And so there's just not the same like, Google lays off a thousand people and gives them seven months severance and a pat on the head. Like, you're not going to get that. But you knew that going into the startup game. So I think treat them like adults,

be up front, be clear about why you're doing this. and then make sure you give glowing recommendations to everyone you lay off. Yeah, I mean, there's all these standard practices. So my gut tells me there's a 50% that chance that happens and a 50% chance. Trump sees another two days of this and he says, unbelievable, Vietnam gave us everything we wanted. Great people in Vietnam. You may have heard of Vietnam. Very simple.

It's the place he didn't like before, but now he likes a lot. Incredible, great leadership. they make great, great factories in Vietnam. Yes. Anyway, there we go. I'm just thinking a lot of the founders who are watching this. I guess stay tuned because we're going to be talking about every single thing that happens next week. Monday will be the telling day.

I think this weekend is going to be one of the most eventful weekends in our country's history. Yeah. Jason, before we jump in and do our first office hours with a startup, I just want to bring up a little note to everybody. Amidst of the chaos, there is some positive news to bring up. So Rippling, company, we talked about a lot in the case. of the deal spy mess. Bloomberg reports that they are in the process of working on around a couple hundred million probably at a valuation of 16 billion,

which is notably up from their $13.5 billion valuation they got to last year. And the information reports that they grew to about 570 million ARR, and they ended 23 with 350 million ARR. So 63% growth, according to my math, over a 15 month period, lower than I expected from a company adding billions in valuation, but clearly a company at scale. And you can still raise money in this market. You just have to be an outstanding market leading company that just kneecap to rival very publicly. Market leading is the key word in your recap there. If you're the market leader,

if people perceive you as the number one, you pay a premium for the number one. 28 times ARR is roughly two and a half times market rate, right? I think it's 10 times. ARR might be like what public SaaS people get on the Bessemer index you were referring to previously. So you get a premium for being high growth. If it's 63% growth on your back of the envelope math, and again, that's back of the envelope over five quarters. Maybe it's 40% year over year.

If they're growing 40% year over year, that's a high growth company in the public markets, obviously. Absolutely. But for startups, it's not, you know, triple or double. So, you know, the reality is, 20 times. If it was public today, it'd probably trade at 15 to 20 times there. I would have said 17, so right in the middle of where you're guessing. So let's just give them the benefit of the doubt, 18. And so they're trading at, you know, 50% more, a 50% premium to what the public market

valuation would be. And the way that's justified by investors is, again, market leader, Parker Conrad is a beast. Like, just it is what it is. Like, he's fierce, bold, great entrepreneur. You can say what you want about the SEC stuff, but we talked about bending rules, breaking. Sometimes you go off the rails. I think he's probably learned a lot from that. And, you know, it happens. So everybody moves on. And, you know, the deal thing is a cell phone by what I think is one of their top rivals. So yeah. No, I mean, it's a great, it's a great time to go back to your investors and say, hey, not only have we been growing while our competitor was cheating, we exposed it, and we've ruined their brand, give us more money. Because

that pitch would work on me in a heartbeat. The crazy thing is, you know, like now we, in all this chaos, and listen, it's, it's hard to even do a podcast about technology and startups without having the constant overhang of what this administration is doing. Because it's moving pretty fast. Isn't the TikTok ban today? Tomorrow? That would be the number one story of the world. We would have done three segments on it, brought on an expert. What is happening?

A lot of, yeah, I literally had to go back and look up the date on that. It's April 5th. So tomorrow, Saturday is theoretically the deadline. Keep in mind that TikTok was banned for a hot second before Trump said, we're not going to enforce that law. There's no liability. Put it back up. Eventually, TikTok returned to the markets.

The number of suitors has expanded. Amazon threw its hat into the ring a couple days ago. Love that. Lovin apparently is also. I wonder if this is just a PR tactic. I don't think anyone thinks they're going to be able to afford it. But the main consortium is... I mean, they're worth $70 billion.

So they're worth the $7 billion. same price as TikTok? What is the price going to be for TikTok? I don't think if they sell just the US version.

The current sticking point with answering that question, Jason, is that we're not sure about the fate of the algorithm. So the latest reporting that I saw is

that the Trump administration, and this is from, I think it's ABC, is working on a deal that would allow China to maintain control of the algorithm that would

be the least to the U.S. entity. However, I went back to the actual text of the bill, the law in question here,

and it says that, a qualified divestiture, which would allow to not be banned in the U.S., does not allow for cooperation with respect to the operation of a content recommendation algorithm or an agreement with respect to data sharing. So I don't think that's a legal thing. So I think the algorithm has to go with it.

Or some law changes or, yeah, they figure out some way to do it. I don't think do you need the algorithm. I'll be totally honest. Looking at the X.com for you algorithm, the Instagram algorithm, I think there's probably no difference where it's, you know, plus or minus five or ten percent from the best of breed. Okay.

Or your algorithm now. Stop, stop, stop, Jason. We got, we just got, this just happened. The team just sent this over to me. Oh, no. Breaking news from NBC, quote, President Trump is expected to extend the deadline for TikTok to find the, how can he do that?

He can't do that. There's a law. You know, as we've talked about, you can just do things and then it's up to courts to enforce that and so maybe he just does it and then it's up to somebody

in our government in another branch of government to enforce it who knows so there's a breaking news story there's a broken news story I mean I think part of this is back to the tariff issue

because again there's no way to get around this it's just impacting everything the TikTok deal and the Taiwan issues, the AI issues, the IP issues, and the tariff issues are all one giant set of issues. And so the grand reconciliation with China, all of this could be energy. And listen, you can be Democrat, Republican, never Trump or always Trump or whatever. Put it all aside. The modus operandis of Trump is to put a lot of energy into something, create what one person might call chaos. I might describe it as chaotic. You might describe it as chaotic.

Other people might call it brilliant in the art of the deal. It doesn't matter what we all frame it as. This is what he does. And maybe a lot of this tariff stuff has been designed to hit at the same time as the TikTok ban and some grand reconciliation. What if next week, Xi Jinping and Trump or in the next, what if they announce over the weekend, Xi Jinping and Trump are going to meet. Or JD and she's number two are going to meet. Sure.

And then Trump's going to China. She's coming to America or they're both going to Saudi Arabia or they're both going to Moscow. Who knows? And that the grand reconciliation is here. There's going to be reciprocal clean tariffs. There's going to be some, you know, agreement on one China, Taiwan and we go back to to strategic ambiguity. And TikTok has been divested.

and everybody's happy again. Stock market not only recovers these games, it goes 20% up from there, and here we are, he's a hero. That might be. No, it sounds crazy. No, I, look, I'm, all of my money, well, most of it's in the U.S. economy,

like this, this is very much impacting me. I'm just, I think there's a, there's a theme in people like you and I to look at things that appear to be sclerotic and crazy, and we tried to put them in such an, an order that they make a lot of sense. If you go back to the coverage of the April 2nd tariffs, keep in mind that no one knew what they were going to be

until the last possible second because they were still deciding. It's just difficult for me to believe in four, five, six and seven D chess when the principal players don't really have a plan. Because I think if you're going to be that clever, you have to be thinking not one step ahead, but six. All right. I think we have a guest. Do we have a guest?

Yes, we do. All right. So today on office hours, we are going to meet with Luke from Pod Engine, Pod Engine builds podcast research and media monitoring tools, Jason, that all use AI. You can find the company at PodEnginjin.AI. Please welcome the program, everybody. It's Luke. Hey, how's it going?

Good, good. I like the flags. Oh, thank you. Yeah, that's Texas and that's America. And, yeah, I'll put the Chinese one here after we do our big settlement with China. Awesome. So we're investors in your company. It's going well.

tell us a little bit, educate the audience on what you're building and why. And let's talk about any questions you might have. This is office hours with J-Cow. All right. Yes, I'm Luke. I run a company called Pod Engine. You guys invested in us about a year ago. Yeah. And what we do is we're an intelligence platform that helps businesses grow through podcast sponsorships, guesting, and analytics. But how's the business going? I guess we finally feels like we're coming out of the darkness a little bit, and we have some signs of early product market fit, which we're very, very excited about. Last quarter for us was great. We doubled, doubled revenue. Hey! Yeah. So, and actually this quarter, we're on track to triple it, and we actually almost

double over quarter tripling. Yeah. Which means you're growing 20% month over a month on thousands to tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, I would take it? Yeah, yeah, thousands, soon to be tens of thousands. And so pretty excited, because we're about to close our first enterprise API, which will be a five-figure deal. Amazing. Five figures a year. Yeah, five figures a year.

Yep. Great. Probably like a load of medium five figures. Okay. So you mentioned three different ways in which your database and engine can help people. So for stepping back one step,

I remember when we met, you had this really great idea. Hey, if you're an advertiser or a marketer, you could figure out which podcasts have the topics you like because you have the transcripts. you've essentially built the best database, I think, in the world of a podcast. And how do you take all that intelligence and data and make it work for consumer, make it work as a business, who needs it?

Well, if you're an advertiser and you're Oracle Cloud and you want to figure out, hey, what are some good startups where, what are some good podcasts where people are talking about startups? They could find places. Yeah, that was the first. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that gets to sort of both the challenge and the question I have for it for you, which is, there's so many use cases for this.

And so, for example, I actually prepared for this interview using our own platform. So what I did is we have a guest prep feature that we've been working on for a little bit. Basically, we looked at past transcripts, analyzed it with AI, did some deep analysis, and I got a nice three-page PDF, which is these are questions that usually come up. These are questions that sometimes come up. This is the type of stuff we prepare for. So the verdict will be out at about 20 minutes if I do. if I do a half decent job.

But if I do a decent job, it's partly thanks to Pot Engine. But that kind of gets the heart of our challenge, which is, you know, we can do amazing reports for, like you said, businesses and brands about sort of podcast strategy, what are competitors doing,

what are people saying, what are people talking about? We can do reporting analytics for individuals. We can do it on the B to C side. There's all of these different use cases, and they're pulling us in a million different directions. Some of those use cases, there's lots of long tail,

which be, you know, $100 a month kind of thing. Some of the use cases, right, for example, guest booking services and agencies, we're talking $1,000, $2,000 a month kind of size. And so we were struggling with this a lot last quarter. So what we decided to do is we took down all the pricing off the website and we really focused on just one ICP because we got a small team and that was agencies

who have a dedicated podcast function. So basically they are either finding, podcast for their CEOs or people to go guest on or finding podcasts to sponsor? How many of those have you landed? We're up to about 15. 15 is amazing. And how many are there in the United States and the English speaking world do you think? If you had to do a bottom up tam, there's a certain number of people who work in PR and PR equals

podcast. So maybe you just do the total number of public relations executives and you times it by 50% Yeah, so, I mean, that's where, like, it's interesting. When we looked at purely just, there's agencies that are just purely focused on podcasts. Yes, I know. They torture me. Yeah. So there's at least a couple hundred of those of decent size that are doing it in the U.S.

And then when you kind of look at companies who have individuals or PR agencies that are kind of doing this for them, you get into the thousands. Okay. Okay. So that's amazing. And they'll pay $10,000. a year, $1,000 a month to have five of their people inside it, asking your questions and doing prep, something in that ballpark? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And it's not just finding and asking questions. I mean, I think that's where sort of you've got like the layer one kind of features, which is, you know, your search, right, and your analytics. So we pull in 12 different data sources. We have 100 different data points for we're kind of calculating. We transcribe all of our own podcast. We do about 25,000 transcripts every single day. So it's a ton of data.

But I think what's really exciting and what really, sets us apart from all of our competitors is starting to layer actual AI automation on top of that. Because at some level, you know, if, for example, if I want to go on a podcast and talk about my business, I want to talk about, you know, podcast sponsorships, guest booking. The search part is actually fairly straightforward. And what happens is a lot of that gets outsourced to sort of low-cost workers or people doing it. You might use an Athena assistant for this, right? Yeah. That's what I do. I'll have an Athena assistant, look at a podcast, figure out who the guess where I put it into a database for me and boom,

we're done. Yeah. Or like, for example, my use case today of guest prep, either I would have an assistant to it or I just wouldn't do it. Because who has the time to listen to hours and hours of podcasts and prep. So by using sort of AI and agentic stuff, we're able to sort of unlock new use

cases, lower the cost of entry. And so that's really, I think, the real value at in starting this business a year ago versus starting it 10 years ago. So I think you have figured, you a really important thing out, which is you need to have at least one ideal customer profile. You found it and you've converted it.

So if you were to email 10 people who had a podcasting agency or a podcast agency group within their larger group, how many of them would take a meeting and do a demo with you? Of 10, if you outreach to them, you email them three or four times, you emailed three or four people at the company. Of 10 of those companies, you mentioned, there are hundreds of them, how many would take the meeting so far? Yeah, and that's an awesome question. I think that gets the heart of why I think we have some product market fit now. So we launched our very, very first embarrassing MVP beta in September last year, about six months ago. We sent out a lot of emails.

We didn't get a lot of meetings. Out of the meetings we got, we converted in three months to customers, which was horrible. Now, so like last month, I think we probably had about 30 meetings, and out of those 30, we're almost 50% conversion. What's the denominator of the 30, attempted meetings to get to 30, whether 100 outreach or a thousand outreach? It's pretty low. We're very targeted with outreach. You're talking to the low hundreds. Okay, great. We really, really focus on. This is what you, there's an art to pipeline management here. And as the founder, understanding your pipeline is critically important. So let's say it was 300 and you got meetings with 30. That's 10% conversion. Now out of those 30, if you were to get 50% percent, percent, 15, to convert to a paid trial. Oh, my Lord. What an amazing thing you've discovered here, which is there's something wrong in the top of the funnel getting 300 to 30. So we can work on

strategies for that. But there's something going tremendously right from 30 to 15 or 30 even to, let's say, six. If you were to convert 20% of demos, really robust, right, to get the credit card. So you can look at each part of that funnel and ask yourself why these things occurred and then how to enhance them. I could look at those 300 going to 30 meetings and I could tell you how to get those 272 triple the number of meetings. What is your technique to get somebody who obviously could use the product to take a demo call? What's the technique that works best so far? classic founder-led, sort of very targeted

relationship-based cold outreach, that doesn't scale. Got it. But does a really, but does a really good job of... Unpack relationship-based. One of the nice things for us right now

is most of the agencies, most of the customers are pretty small businesses. You're talking, you know, five to 30 people. So it's easy to find the person on LinkedIn. It's easy to find the person. Easy to find them on Instagram or Twitter. I don't think people really talk about this that much.

but like founder to founder, if you can kind of find another founder, they have a lot of time for you. Because they know the struggles that it is to start and run a business. And so when we get them on the phone, a lot of times they'll take the meeting just because they're like, we kind of lean on that, you know? Got it. I think an interesting thing to do here is the fact that it's got friction is totally fine. What happens, as explained to me by the co-founder of Benchmark, who created Wealthfront, Andy Rackleaf. who he is, he teaches at Stanford.

So I'm going to have my team send you the Andy Ratcliffe episodes here on this week in startups. We have a public-facing website created by podcast AI, a sister company in our portfolio. That is not trying to do what you're doing, but they do websites, right, where we have our transcripts. He explains like the phases of sales and the founder-led sales one, you're doing consultative sales. You're kind of understanding what their needs are. you're explaining your capabilities and you're kind of meeting somewhere in the middle. Then you kind of get your first two or three salespeople dialed in, which you have no salespeople now, right?

There's not a salesman. Perfect. You don't need one right now. But when you get that first salesperson, they'll do some of that consulting stuff, you'll have built a playbook. Here's the things people respond to. Here's the examples. Here's the collateral. Go do the playbook.

And then, you know, every two weeks, you look at the playbook and you iterate on it. And then you move to the third one, which is you're an industry standard. People call you up. They ask for the price and they go, that's too expensive. You have a little dance around the pricing. And then you're just taking orders. How many seats do you need? What's your budget?

Do you want a two-year deal? Do you want a one-year deal? Do you want to pay a quarterly? Do you want to pay a year up front and get a 20% discount? You're, you know, it's, we know you're on the lot. We know you're buying a new Toyota Prius. You had three Toyota Priuses before in your family. We're just going to give you the fourth one right now.

So you're in that first part, and there are techniques in that first part to ramping that up. But if you're doubling quarter over quarter, stay focus is the key. And then maybe get that salesperson on now and have them teach you the techniques. How do you balance sort of – so, you know, there's two kind of strategies, right? One is what's working is working pretty well. Let's just scale that out. Let's sell more $500,000, $2,000 a month kind of things. versus there is, because we get a lot of inbound

of people who just want, you know, give me the search, give me the data, give me an API for usage-based pricing or 100 bucks a month or 150 bucks a month, which we could do kind of self-serve on the website. But what we found is that anchors are pricing to be much lower when we have the other website. I think you could spend a year doing what you're doing

and get to a million in revenue. Once you're at a million in revenue, you have three, four, five team members, I think, if I remember correctly, you'll be wildly profitable, and then everything's possible. So profitable, everything's possible, raising money, hiring great talent. So I would really think about that. And Alex pulled up the website, and this is sort of how we've kind of addressed that, is we kind of split it up into sort of use cases up from an inbound perspective. because the business in every individual really is that sort of lower,

lower tier pricing. Yeah, and there's like all kinds of A-B testing you could do on this page, putting a video on this page with you talking and walking people through a loom, or asking them to sign up to look at the loom. So you can schedule a call. You could A-B-test looking at a loom. So you could send, you know,

a hundred people to the page that has the loom video that walks them through it. And then 100 people to this page, well, you already have the data on this page. how it converts. So this is where, you know, just slowing down to speed up sometimes works. But, you know, as an investor in your company, I would love to see you see if you doubled quarter over quarter, can we triple? It's a small number. Maybe we can triple. And I think if you're growing with this base and you're learning and then you can invest that money into the product, everything will become possible. I was going to ask you about, is there a free version,

that people can do or a self-serve version. I don't know that you need to have that. What you could do, do you have alerts set up and agents set up yet in the system? We have alerts. I mean,

basically this guest prep feature is it would be a great kind of free sort of tool, right, to sort of get people at as well. I think another thing to consider would be an agent, and an alert and an agent is the same thing. So I would take alerts

and rename them podcast agent and give it like a little spy or whatever and say, competitive, intelligence, recommended podcast listens, and recommended ones to guest star on or advertise on, whatever it is. You pick one of those three. You set the agent in, the agent sends you an alert.

If you set up that alert and as part of that funnel, hey, we set up an alert for you to look for, you know, let's say the person was in e-commerce or fashion. We set up an alert for you, Gwyneth Paltrow at Goup. We set up one for you where they mentioned Gwyneth Paltrow. They talk about GOOP. They talk about these four Goup competitors. Or they mention high-priced items that match the items in your store.

So we took your 100 items in the store. We organized them and we created an alert for things similar or actually just discussions of things in your store. because I think the things in her store are not necessarily made by her. So we took 10 of your items from your store and we made an alert for that, an agent for that, sorry.

Stop saying alert. Say agent. And if you'd like to turn this agent on, let me know. And here's what it would look like. Here's a screenshot. Screenshot, worth 100 words. Short looping video, loom,

worth 1,000 words. You know, being able to turn on this agent and be agentic, the podcast, agentic, agent, you know, blah, blah, blah. Here's what it accomplishes. and you set it up. You can actually do that

and make it automagical. Automagical is, before they get sent to the high profile person who does podcast for Gwana Thaeltra, because she has her own podcast, she's always talking about podcasts. You review it,

put a little polish on it. Yeah. And then send it, right? A little reinforcement learning before it goes out. So you, you know, oh, maybe I order this and I put this candle a little higher

and I put this, you know, beauty cream a little lower, whatever you think, the right thing to do. And then that might convert more people. Click here to see the results of it, right? So, I mean, if you send it to me and it's a vanity search, hey, every time somebody mentions this week in startups all in or your top portfolio companies, click here, I'm going to click it. And then I'm going to be like, yeah, turn it on for a couple

weeks. Boom. Oh, yeah, let let, you know, let's set up a call and I'll walk you through how to set it up and we'll tweak it together. So those are the funnel breakers that make things move through the funnel faster that you could probably do. So you think sort of, you know, at some level it's keep doing what we're doing from a, from a, the customers until we sort of saturate that, but then really start focusing on on top of funnel. Now, now we feel pretty good about our conversion. Is that? You feel great about your conversion from demo to paid.

Yep. Then maybe it's the funnel from first contact to demo that needs some tweaking. Yeah, for sure. That's where what you do as a team member is, you say to your co-founder or somebody works at you, you're going to work on demos to sell. I'm going to work on getting those leads to you. And you can look up the science of this.

There's a whole science to it where you're tracking where the leads are coming from. Those are funnels and attribution. And then you're studying, you know, where do we convert best? And then you could understand the dollars. Some people find trade shows are incredible. So when I invest in a founder and I'm like, how do you get customers? are like, oh, there's three legal trade shows in the United States. It's this one in Atlanta.

There's this one that travels. So we do it in these three cities, which are, you know, easy for us to get to and are the most popular. And then there's this virtual one that occurs in Europe. And we attend those. We can't afford to sponsor them, but we attend them. We get the attendee list. And then we try to host like little off-the-grid dinners or coffees with people while we're there. We don't go to any of the panels.

We just, I mean, it's like literally somebody explained to me their strategy. And it was brilliant because it was 25. thousand dollars to sponsor but it was five hundred dollars to go and you got the attendee list and they just tried to get coffee with people constantly and set up little you know off shoot events that they would try to get you know small numbers and then they would look at the total cost cost it's ten thousand dollars to go we got a hundred leads it's a hundred dollars a lead and boom nice this is a wonderful place to be in because getting product market fit with any set of customers is hard and here you are you've raised money you built your product you got a great

team and now you have product market fit, at least with some group of customers. The 1,000 people who pitch us, maybe 100 actually build their products. And of the 100 people who actually build their products, we invest in maybe one of them. Of the hundred that we invest in, maybe 50% of them get some level of product market fit and paying customers. So, you know, when you start looking at how far you've gone, you're like one in like 2,000 companies that get to product market fit. Here you are hand-wringing about it.

That's why you're a good entrepreneur, right? Only the paranoid survived. The fact that you're wringing your hands, am I doing the right thing here? Man, I can tell you 99% of people never get off the bench. You had the hootspah. I think I made a great founder and a terrible CEO. That's why, because I think when you're a CEO, you can't be quite as pessimistic. Listen, it's okay to be pessimistic.

Take a victory lap. Every time you get a new customer, take a victory lap, ring the gong, you know, spend 15 minutes celebrating. it and then back to the grindstone, right? And then you can be pessimistic. But do celebrate the wins. The fact that you're getting, you know, dozens of people to take these demos and you're converting like double digit percentage of them, this is all great stuff, brother. You should really just celebrate this weekend. If you got a partner or a team member, just go out and celebrate how much great stuff you did and make a good plan Sunday night of how you're going to really stay focused. When staying focused is so hard for founders, because there's so many.

distractions. It really is, you know, the startup game at the stage you're at, it's about relentless focus. If you can be relentlessly focused on that funnel, you're going to crush it. Now, you may not have the brain structure for it. I've seen people who are idea, people who get to the point you're at, and they just start speaking at conferences, they start a micro venture fund syndicate, they do a nonprofit, they do everything, but stay focused and double the revenue, you know, the next month. month. Just stay focused on that and then you'll be able to raise unlimited amounts of money. And right now the bogeys really like a million dollars a year, things really change when you're at a

million dollars or I would say 500,000 and profitable, break even. So either a million losing a little bit or 500 and clearly profitable, chef's kiss. The world is your oyster. There are a dozen seed funds who are going to take a meeting with you immediately and just want to know, what did you figure out? What did Luke figure out, right? The good thing, Jason, is I used to play poker for a living professionally. So I think probabilistically, and I said to my wife and my co-founder at the end of this quarter, that I think we're finally over 50% that we're going to get to half a million and profitable. That's it.

I mean, you're right there. And then we're off to the races. Yeah, so don't start shrinking at the poker table. You see that happen. Somebody wins three hands, and all of a sudden they're having a vodka and Red Bull, and you're like, what are you doing? It's all right. Continued success, Luke. And let me know when you're in office.

Austin and we'll get some barbecue. All right. Awesome. Thanks, Jason. Thank you. All right. More breaking news, Alex. It looks like we got a truth.

Social post coming in from El Presidente. What does it say? It says, this is an update to the breaking news earlier in the show. It says, quote, my administration has been working very hard on a deal to save TikTok, all caps. And we have made tremendous progress. The deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed. So he's going to sign an EO to keep TikTok up and for an additional 75 days, and then it goes on to discuss tariffs and the upcoming deal.

Again, Jason, my question is very, very simple. By what legal right does he get to say that the law doesn't matter? Yeah, I mean, if we're going to have a constitutional crisis, I don't think we're going to have it over this. I think this would require somebody, I think, to take legal action against him or whatever. So is this the one we're going to go to bat on, you know, to try to enforce, you know, some controls here? I think the bigger issues. going to be the tariffs and we'll see the Republicans are already starting to break ranks on the margins with these and saying maybe this should be something done by Congress. You know, so I think they're going to let this one slide because it's not, this is not a make or break issue. But we'll see. And I think the thing that's going to be interesting, I'm going to go ahead and predict that the sovereign wealth fund gets started with one third to half the shares in the TikTok entity. And I'm going to say right now, I think Bezos is going to win it. Here's the thing. Trump collects billionaire. Trump collects people.

No different than I do. I kind of like people. He's a people person. People say I'm very Trump-like at times. I like people. He likes people. He's got to spread the wealth. He also has to punish Zuckerberg.

So is the punishment to Zuckerberg by making Bezos who wouldn't give Kamala the endorsement or wouldn't even let the Washington Post do an endorsement who bought, you know, Bezos has had a place now in D.C. for a little bit. Bezos came to the inauguration. his fiance was in the room,

remember? Oh, I vividly remember that meme. That was funny as hell. It was a key word there. It was pretty interesting. I think other people's partners weren't in the room. It was a little weird.

And so, you know, here we are. So, congratulations. I'm predicting it now. Bezos and Amazon win. And it's going to be great for Amazon and for the market because really what is TikTok, you know,

at its core? I think it's like a front for people to, buy stuff. I think the shopping piece of it is so critical. And then that solves so many problems with shopping and, you know, what these tariffs and e-commerce do to the overall economy. All right. Next on the program, we're doing another office hours with J-Cal. David from Abacus is here. They build AI tools for the financial services industry. You can go find out more about the company at Go-A-B-A-C-U-S.com. Welcome to the program.

David. Hello, hello. Thanks for having me. Of course. Now, I have a tool that we use, the really simple sentence. And the really simple sentence is a way for founders to explain what their company does. I have one here. I think we wrote it.

But why don't we have you do the really simple sentence exercise about your company? So Abacus is generative AI for regulated industry. Bank, credit unions, and insurance companies. That's what we do. So the simple sentence my team has, Abacus helps financial services companies access their own information and handle customer queries with AI tools. Yes. Yes, I like that one too.

So let me talk about how we do that. So regulated industry and think a bank, a credit union or an insurance company, they need three things. They want to use LLMs, but they don't trust cloud solution, like open AI or cloud or anything like that. So they need three things.

The first is they need an on-prem model, right? So they have complete control over their data. The second thing, they need assurance on the answers that they're given, right? Make sure they're accurate. And the third thing, they need response control, the ability to control the responses. So Abacus provides all three of those things. We like to say Abacus is where AI meets Assurance. And so we provide that platform of products to those industry.

So your customers are going to be, for example, a bank, stock trading platform. who would be like the ideal customer profile here for abacus? Yeah, so think of a bank, a credit union, an insurance company, all those types of institutions are examples of folks that would advocateist. Got it. So what's your question for me? We're here in office hours, a good chance for us to maybe work through an issue or two. What are the issues you got?

So one of the things, Jason, that we deal with a lot when we talk about the company and the ecosystem is one of the questions we get a lot is competition, right? There's lots of folks in this area. And personally, I don't worry a ton about competition, right? I'm just keeping my head down moving forward. It's on my radar, but it's not keeping me up at night. What are your thoughts on that? Because there's so many players in AI, there's so many options.

What are your thoughts on the competitive landscape? At the earliest stages of a startup, you need to obsess over three things. Your team, you have the best people on your team. Do you need to fire somebody? Do you need to add somebody? Do you need to do professional development? Do you need to have a sit down with somebody and say, listen, you're doing a good job?

I need you to do a great job. Are you committed to doing a great job? Because you're putting in 40 hours a week, but we're not going to compete in this space. I need you to put in 60 hours a week. Are you up for that? So all those difficult team questions and development of talent. That's like job number one in year zero of a startup,

because that team then makes a product. So job number two, is really being able to have a product team that can quickly iterate on a product and product can solve all of your problems. When you have a really great product that solves a problem, you don't even need to market it.

You just send people a link and all of a sudden you're in business. And of course, the third thing to obsess over is customers. Nowhere in that framework that I talk about in Founder University or the Accelerator do competitors come up.

And there's a reason because you are not even at the point where you're in the NBA playing against LeBron James or Steph Carrey. You're not on the court yet. Yeah. Let's get you on the court here. Getting on the court means you have a product in market. You got five, ten customers.

And that would be like somebody who's learning how to shoot a three-pointer and has a 20% shooting average. And they need to get it up to 35, 40% to be competitive. And, you know, they're worried about Steph Curry versus LeBron James last night. You're not even on the court. let's get focused on those three things. So if I were to ask you to grade yourself on a scale of one to ten on each of those categories and you can't give yourself an eight, go ahead and grade yourself objectively. Or how would somebody who's your co-founder or a team member grade you?

Yeah, I think for team, I'm going to give my team a 10. I think we have the best team, and I love them to death, and we've worked together like crazy. Okay. I love that. You previously worked together? Yeah, we were previously working together. We had a relationship at the corporations. we worked at and then we all left and now we're working together on our startup.

I'm going to pause you there for a second. When you said 10, I was like not credible, but he's pumping up his team. Yeah. I'll say right now, actually, your 10 rating is credible. One of the things we have in our secret 13 reasons to invest in a founder or a startup is a serial team. And a serial team is one that's worked together before at another company, at another startup, or, you know, they were in the same fraternity, sorority, whatever, poker

group. Why they have that familiarity. They have trust. You know, just like the Knicks today have a bunch of Villanova guys, I guess, with, you know, Brunson and Bridges and Hart, and they did have DeVincenzo. And that's why the team jelled so well. And anybody coming on the team has like a nice solid foundation. So when you add somebody, you have a culture. Great. How about your product and product velocity? Where are you at there? So for product, I'm going to be a little bit more harsh. Because Jason, we are moving so fast. I mean, I have been in software. for a long time, but I've never seen things move this fast. And now with vibe coding, you know, it's even faster. So I'm going to give us a seven. Okay. Right? Because I think that we just

have to move faster, Jason. Got it. Okay. So you do an okay job. You do a fair job, but you don't do a good or a great job yet. So there's work to do. And you can give that to your team, since you have trust in the team and say, hey, we need to get better at this. And then in terms of customers, you're a, to delight customers, to understand customers, to spend time with them, to obsess over them, all of that customer-centricness, where do you put yourself on a scale of one to do? That's going to be pretty high, Jason. Let me tell you why I'm going to give it a nine, and you're probably going to do like, yes.

And so this is why I meet with our customers every single week, right? Okay. Not only do I meet with them, but I constantly am asking them to tell us what needs to be there so that way we can get to the next level in terms of what's going to make their life easier. One of the things I tell all of our clients and our contracts is, I don't want you to use abacus if you don't absolutely love it. I'm not here to take your money. I'm here to give you a product that you love that delivers value to you.

And I really mean that because it's an extension of the product is an extension of my reputation. It's extension of Abacus and I want people to really love using the product. Does that make sense? I think you've objectively, you may have elevated your scores a little bit. I might take a one point off of each, but you're a positive enthusiastic, so I can't take that away from you. But I think you've identified

what you need to focus on. And now if we were to add competitors there, you know, in a vibrant market where people can vibe code and previously, what did we call it the, when you can roll your own websites, you drag and drop stuff, there was another term for no code. Right, yeah. So there was like a no code revolution.

And, you know, a lot of people could start making things. Vib coding is very similar. People could start making things. I paid for, I forgot with the services that lets you build stuff. And I said, oh,

I want to make the service annotated.com because I own the domain name Atachate.com. I started it. And I just forgot that I started vibe coding. So, like, it's one thing to be like, you know,

and I could put out my little annotated. Dot com service and, you know, have a 1.0 and then distract you, somebody who's got like some perfect annotation software out there in the web. Right. And you're like,

oh my God, Jake, I was doing something. come back when you're here next year. This is what I, with podcasting, you know, like, yeah,

I always tell people, okay, you know, come back and talk to me when you hit episode 100. Right. That's when you get good at it. I'm,

you know, is episode 2000 something here of, uh, this weekend startups and I had done a podcast before that and a radio show before that and then all in just hit episode two, two, two, so, you know,

like, call me when you get to 100, 200 episodes under your belt and we can have a really thoughtful discussion about how you're doing as a podcaster. I think you're doing everything right. I'll be honest. You have revenue. These customers are starting to pay. Yes, we have a hundred and twenty-five thousand and monthly recurring revenue. Yep. I mean, I love you. Nine enterprise clients. Oh, I love you, yes. Look me in yes. I love you. I love you. You broke a million in ARR. Now you have my interest. Peek my interest. When are you going to be in Austin for barbecue? Oh, man. What are the things? Have you want? have you written a two-year plan? You know, Jason, I have to tell you, I was a big plan person, two-year, five-year.

But then this thing happened to me, and maybe it's user error. Every time I'd write a plan, everything changed so fast and in ways I couldn't expect at the end of the two years, it was nothing like I had thought. So I had to really rethink my whole two-year, five-year, writing out, this is what I want, because what I oftentimes found, everything changed by the time I got there. Okay, this is such a great observation. In a dynamic industry with a dynamic team, of course things are going to change. You haven't started doing board meetings yet, right? Not yet, but we're almost there. Okay, so you're at a really interesting crossroads.

You're going to have to make a decision about if we do have product market fit at Abacus, which it feels like we do. Is it light product market fit? Is it strong product market fit? is a reasonable product market fit. It's clearly reasonable product market fit because a million dollars is a lot of money. You can't fake it. So there's some reasonable,

perhaps even strong product market fit. So the next phase for you, I think, is to start quarterly board meetings one hour. Create a plan with your team. A very lightweight plan. Number of customers, amount of revenue,

and you really want to set a goal of tripling revenue year over year. And the reason I think you were probably correct about planning last year and might be wrong about it this year, right? The same issue, you could be right for the looking backwards

and wrong going forward. You're now flying a plane at a higher altitude, burning more fuel at a higher speed. right when pilots start they put them in the sessna 172 or something it's a very predictable plane if you put it in the sky and the pilot dies it just flies until it runs out of fuel it flies itself it's like a workhorse it's just hard to mess up and then people get into like a cirrus with a joystick and it's faster and it's a turbo prop and then they wind up in one of these light jets and like a phenom

100 and now they're going 400 500 knots it's like each time you move up the risks the inputs and what's at state kind of goes up. You have to pay attention to more things. And then my friend's Guy Dayton, who started, you know, in this 172, and then I started flying in a serious 22 or something with him. It's the parachute plane. Now he flies a falcon. You know, he's like a pilot.

And he can fly a falcon, which is like a substantial jet. And this is a, we've known it. We've been friends for 25 years. And this is like, I don't know, maybe he's 20 years into. being a pilot, I think. Wow. The point being, you're now upgrading from the Sirius 22, and now you're starting to get into a jet. You're not in a fighter jet.

You're not in the Falcon. But, you know, this is going faster. There's more at stake, et cetera. What does that mean? You got to get through the checklist. You got to make sure the fuel's in there. You've got to be thoughtful about the weather conditions, the height, traffic control, you know, just the runway, because you're going faster speeds.

And that means that planning is going to be helpful. why did, in order to triple revenue, you can't be winging it. You've got to be saying, okay, we're going to triple revenue by tripling the number of customers. Or we're going to double the number of customers and then with the subset of customers, we're going to double their spend. So we're going to add a million that gets us to two. And then some number of the customers in the two million are going to double their

spend to get us to three. That means you need to have somebody who's on the land and expand team who's expanding and doing customer success. And then you need somebody else who's putting top of the funnel in. And then you need somebody else who's closing those and onboarding them and make sure you have customer success so you don't churn. And now you've got to be really thoughtful. Because when you do this two-year plan, you're going to say, okay, we want to go from one

to three to nine. Well, what do we need in terms of sales reps? If we know a sales rep can convert this many people, okay, we're going to need this many salespeople. oh, every three salespeople, we fire one, we keep one, and one quits. That's the nature of salespeople, by the way. You know, there are salespeople who are bad, and they just bounce from, you know, startup to startup because they suck. But, you know, everybody always gives a salesperson a chance, and so maybe they're just good at getting the job, but they're shitty at doing the job.

And then one's incredible, and you can't keep them because they get a new offer, or they decide one day that they don't want to be sales. they want to be the president or chief operating officer, which does happen as well, especially with the talented ones. And then you find one who just, just right, Goldilocks, right? Too cold, too hot, just right. Which means if you need three great salespeople, you might need to hire 7, 8, 9 to get to the Goldilocks zone. These are conversations I have, you know, now that I'm kind of in my, I'm not Yoda phase yet, but I'm kind of Obi-Wan phase. I fought in the Clone Wars. And I've seen people tell me, I hire three salespeople, they're going to do $3 million each. We're going to hit nine. And I'm like, how many salespeople quit? Well, we've hired 10 people. I'm like, how many salespeople have

now? Three. I'm like, okay, so you retain 30% of your salespeople. You're telling me if we hire three more, we're going to hit the number. They're like, oh, yeah, I probably should have to hire six. I'm like, or 10. Take it 10 to get to here. And then how many can you reasonably onboard at a time? And you have a strategy for onboarding. Once I realize this, when we hire a researchers for a venture firm, I like to hire them in threes. Knowing that one's going to excel and make it to analysts, one, we're going to fire, and one, it's not going to be the right job for them, and they're going to quit. So I just tell the team, if we need three more of these, you know, essentially analysts who

become associates, just hire three researchers every three months, and in nine months, three of them will excel. If we get to, you know, the second chord of three, and it turns out we did great and we're keeping two out of three. Okay, well, then we have abundance and awesome, but I'm planning on reality. So that's where you're at. We started this discussion with competition. Yes.

You know, like, worrying about competitors is generally for suckers, and you can see what happens if you get too obsessed with it with the deal versus Rippling. Bruhaha. Did you watch that? No, but I've heard us.

That's the one where they put the spy in and... Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, the whole spying thing. Like, that's where people get, too obsessed, right, that they literally start doing illegal stuff. Here's like, generally speaking, if you want to lower your anxiety about competitors, very simple thing to do, watch their webpage, watch their social, there are AI tools you can do, take your top five competitors,

and just have it send you alerts when any webpage on their website changes. If you were to watch our fund, when you see Founder University website change, it means a change in strategies occurred and the leader has said change the website. So you'll be up to date on it. You get the founders, the top salesperson on social media,

and you have all of their LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram posts saved. You can use like a Zapier to do that and have it send it to a Slack room. So, you know, I've had situations where I needed to monitor somebody, like a stalker or like a vibrant individual. And literally I just told somebody on my security team

just take their social media, put it into a Slack room, keep an eye on them, boom. High class problem. That's smart. Yeah. So these are just ways for you as the founder, if you do have anxiety about competitors,

to just monitor them. This is not corporate espionage. It's intelligence, right? Competitive intelligence is a category. You can roll your own. Nobody on the team needs to even know you did this. You just go, you find a web page tracker, you set up a Zapier.

It might not work for Twitter anymore, but you can write a script to do it, I think. Or you can just have somebody on your team who you want to do competitive intelligence. You say, visit these places every day for 15 minutes and just write us a little report. What's this company up to? That's terrific. That's absolutely terrific. I haven't heard that before. So that's, I mean, that's a really easy way to scale. I fought in the Clone Wars.

Well, I can tell. This is terrific advice. A lot of scars. I never lost the limb. My Patalong lost one to Duku and then the other three to me. So take it. These are all Star Wars analogies that my co-host Alex doesn't get. But that's just a way for you to do it.

Now, there are some dark arts in between. When you're ready to talk about dark arts, I can do that conversation, but that's one we won't have on air. Okay. There are some dark arts. There are some things that could lead you to the dark side. Right. I'll tell you about those privately.

David, continued success. Did you go through our accelerator or do we directly invest? So, LA 33, and then I also went through Founder University as well, which I will say both are fantastic programs. When I started, before I started founding university, I didn't know anything about venture capital. I didn't know anything about the ecosystem, you know, and it was just such a great program to go through because it really prepared me. And then the accelerator is like the advanced version of that. What did you learn or accomplish in the accelerator versus Founder University? Compare and contrast that.

You know, compare Founder University experience to Accelerator experience. Just tell us like the Yelp review of each. So Founder University, you know, I spent a lot of time watching videos with you in them, right? You explaining what's a startup. What's great about Founder University is you don't assume we know anything. You talk about how to come up with a name, how to come up with the website, I got the basics. And so I didn't feel there was ever a point where I didn't know something or, you know, and I had that continuous support from, you know, we meet every week, you know, and so I got the continuous support from the team. And it just, I mean, I could tell with my friends. So I have friends who are also trying to start companies and they didn't go through Fonda University. And I could tell that I was accelerating faster than they were because I started to learn faster. I knew more. And that's because I had the shortcut, right? which was access to videos created by you,

explaining all this stuff, right? So that's Founding University, right? So then the accelerator happened, and that's where you're really taking all the stuff you learned in Founder University, and you're applying it. Okay, you learned about venture capital, you learned about a pitch deck,

you learned about how to present certain information in a certain way. Now you're going to have to go out and do it. And not just one, I'm not sure everyone realizes this about the accelerator. You're doing this every week. So you're pitching to VCs, and the accelerator brings all of the,

these VCs in their network to the accelerator that we probably wouldn't have access to otherwise. Every week, you're pitching to them. So by the end of the accelerator, you are so good at pitching. It's unbelievable. And so it's just really a fantastic program to go through. You're trying to get your startup off the ground or you're trying to learn about startups. I even thought Jason, I wish there was a program. I talked to other VCs and they say, we couldn't do what Jason does. And I said, well, and I said, Have you ever looked at his program? And they said, no, you know, we've never seen it. And I often thought, it'd be great if you had something for fellow VCs to teach them how you, how you construct this, right?

Because I think the way you do it's the challenge for what I do is that there's only so much of me to go around. And when you decide you want to scale this stuff, Paul Graham had the same issue. My friend David Cohen who runs tax stars at the same issue. Once you hit more than 10 investments a year, you know, you just can't be right. reasonably available to 100, 200, 300, or in the case of Ycombin, or they were at 450 a year. I think TechStars at Topique was doing the same or more across many programs. And so it breaks most investors' brains and to run a Jedi Academy. They could be a Jedi and have, you know, a squad of Jedi, you know, six, seven, eight, which is how venture works.

You're a GP. You have, you know, 10 boards, max you're on. and you just work with 10 founders. What I've tried to do is scale it through media. So that's why office hours exist. You and I talk. You give me your biggest problems on the air. You get a little promotion for this.

People learn about the company. And then we can take this video, clip it, and put it into the founding university archive and say, here's Jason talking about competitive intelligence. So they're host doing this. And that's why my friend, Lon Harris, is back in the fold here. He's going to take this, work with Kelly's,

and Lucas at Founding University make this a module. So the thing is, you got to hear me in a structured way talk about branding and how to pick a name. You might have been, you know, focus, they may have told you to go watch

Raoul's product market engine video and maybe two or three other versions of product market fit. Yep. Because, you know, there's different philosophies of this and, you know, that scales, but it becomes very annoying for GPs and funds

to have to maintain relationships at scale because, you know, I am an extreme extrovert is my superpower. I took the Myers-Briggs, which is astrology for men. You ever take the Myers-Briggs? Yes, I have. E-N-T-P or E-N-T-J? I think I'm E-N-T-J.

Yes, okay. That's like Steve Jobs and most founders fit in E-N-T-J. I was E-N-T-J and then E-N-T-P. I'm super excited about your success. Thank you so much for the kind words about the programs, and I would love to host you and the management team here in Austin. start doing Tuesdays, I think are going to be the day. I ask people to come in Monday.

We do a working session on Tuesday. You can, you know, bounce on Wednesday or do whatever heck you want here. But, you know, get a couple of hours with the team. And I'm going to try to put together four companies every Tuesday to come and have barbecue and then brine together where you each present under Chatham House rules where, you know, you don't share stuff. So everybody's in the portfolio. And then you'll be with people who have five.

to $500 to $2 million in revenue. So when we have this discussion about competitors and two-year plans, everybody's kind of sinking on that. And we let me be kind of open-ended. It just actually also fun because I get great joy in seeing people succeed. Great to spend some time with you David. And everybody go to, is it Go Abacus? It's Go Abacus, yep. Well, I can tell that you're in the J-Cow branding school because I always like one word.

And then I always tell people, after you get your one word, if you can't get the domain name, go abacus, get Abacus. try abacus. Fake until we can get abacus.com. And if we never get abacus.com, it's not the end of the world because people will find things on Google search. Great job, brother. Can't wait to spend some more time together.

Thank you, Jason, very much. Thank you. Cheers. Anything else we need to get to on the docket? We should just wrap. I want to just say two quick updates on news items that we've been discussing. We talked earlier about can Trump actually delay

the TikTok deal? Well, Charles Cook, a reporter over at, I think, national review, says, no flagrant violation of law. So there's one data point. And then finally, from, I think it's a Bloomberg update, a bite-dance spokesperson did say that they are in discussion with the U.S. government regarding, quote, potential solutions for TikTok U.S. agreement. So we are making progress on that front. We'll see what happens everybody, but we are watching the coming live just as you are.

Okay. And we will continue the founder Friday brackets on Monday. Apologies we couldn't get it today. We had two office hours. They were both great. And we'll see everybody on Monday. He's X.com slash Alex. I'm X.com slash jason. lonis.com slash lawns. And we will see you all on Monday from this week startups. Bye-bye.